Dire Gambits
In Tim Powers's The Drawing of the Dark, the wizard Aurelianus reveals to Brian Duffy one of the ways in which the contending powers can break the deadlock between Christian and Heathen. He describes Didius' Dire Gambit Overwhelming as the darkest of sorceries, requiring the sacrifice of a thousand baptised souls upon the field of war. The consequences? The ruination of the caster's soul and intellect, and the tainting of the entire West. "A connoisseur would be able to taste the difference in the very beer," concludes the wizard, not entirely in jest.
I first read this book in 1982; it was first published in 1979 and it took a long time before I found in it in the Del Rey paperback edition. As I obtained, one by one, each of the redoubtable author's books, I realised that what Tim Powers had done was to lay bare the underlying structure of reality in a way that linked it closely to every myth. I had read Robert Graves on the White Goddess before, and Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces; the mythopoeic nature of history and human endeavour was nothing new.
But Mr Powers had opened an altogether different kettle of fish. Humanity and all its powers are such that the chaos of the hidden world must bend before the ordering effects of the human observer, he seemed to say. In The Stress of Her Regard and subsequent novels, including that espionage tour-de-force, Declare, he showed this again and again. And I believe that to be true, both in the realm of human experience and in the realm of theology.
For it was Man whom God asked to name the animals and fix the nature of their being; it was Man to whom God gave the Garden and the World. And as I sit here and think deeply on the forces each mighty human soul unleashes daily – without thinking of reasons, without counting the cost – I am appalled at the waste and fearful of the consequences. O God, teach us to number our days aright, that we might develop a heart of wisdom!
And help us to remember that it is not the sacrifice of thousands of innocents that you desire, but the worship of our souls.
I first read this book in 1982; it was first published in 1979 and it took a long time before I found in it in the Del Rey paperback edition. As I obtained, one by one, each of the redoubtable author's books, I realised that what Tim Powers had done was to lay bare the underlying structure of reality in a way that linked it closely to every myth. I had read Robert Graves on the White Goddess before, and Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces; the mythopoeic nature of history and human endeavour was nothing new.
But Mr Powers had opened an altogether different kettle of fish. Humanity and all its powers are such that the chaos of the hidden world must bend before the ordering effects of the human observer, he seemed to say. In The Stress of Her Regard and subsequent novels, including that espionage tour-de-force, Declare, he showed this again and again. And I believe that to be true, both in the realm of human experience and in the realm of theology.
For it was Man whom God asked to name the animals and fix the nature of their being; it was Man to whom God gave the Garden and the World. And as I sit here and think deeply on the forces each mighty human soul unleashes daily – without thinking of reasons, without counting the cost – I am appalled at the waste and fearful of the consequences. O God, teach us to number our days aright, that we might develop a heart of wisdom!
And help us to remember that it is not the sacrifice of thousands of innocents that you desire, but the worship of our souls.
Labels: God, Humanity, Myth, Tim Powers
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