Down Among the Gods Read Online Free Page B

although she occupied a seat on Olympus for quite some time, she has clearly not succeeded in her bid to overcome the rest of us.
    But her father’s reversal came too late for Jessie to be affected by it. She accepted and obeyed her Methodist teachings, even when they ran against the passions that were steadily gaining strength within her nature. Her rebellion began relatively late in life, when she left home to go to university.
    Did she change, then? Hardly.
    Human beings do not change, though they do, from time to time, change their allegiance. This can happen at any time during their lives, but there are certain critical points when everyone is, in terms of the gods, up for grabs. The most important of these is adolescence.
    With rare exceptions, children accept with little question the gods that are favoured by their parents. It is not until the teenage years that there is a monstrous reshuffle, which is agonising for them and those around them. Because now the gods close in and vie for power. The individual in the midst of it is prone to all kinds of unpredictable passions, enjoying inflations of character as one or another of the deities takes possession, then suffering desperate depressions as they are dropped again. The adolescent swings between the safe, parental gods and the inducements which the new ones are offering, while their parents find themselves lying awake at night wondering how it is that their placid and reliable child has been transformed overnight into a demon. In rare cases, this uncertainty remains with an individual, who spends his or her life in a state of unpredictability, pursuing now this interest, now that, forever on the point of finding their heart’s true path, forever failing to do so. Most people, however, come through the phase of adolescence and settle. They come to some sort of decision about their life.
    At least, that’s how it appears from their standpoint.
    Jessie’s decision to study literature was an acceptable one to her parents. What she did during her years of college would not have been, had they known about it. For as soon as she was free of their restrictive influence she entered her postponed adolescence and moved straight into the inner-city whirlwind of the seventies. Jessie was ready to join the party. Her red hair and unpretentious air of innocence ensured that she was never short of suitors. She fell in love easily, and out again, amazed by her own sense of abandonment, her readiness for anything. Those were heady times. She never knew where she was going to wake up, or with whom, or with what kind of hangover.
    The gods were having a ball. Dionysus was there, his latest campaign just beginning to pick up strength, and Apollo, the god of music, during his rock and roll phase. And wherever you find those two together, there also you will inevitably find Aphrodite, goddess of desire, and her unruly son, Eros.
    He’s popular on earth, Eros, particularly with the manufacturers of greetings cards. The Romans called him Cupid, and maybe that’s the name by which he’s better known. A cutesy little cherub with dimply buttocks and a dainty bow and arrow. Where would the world be without him?
    But what people don’t remember is that he has another side to his nature. He never got a seat up here on Mount Olympus; too irresponsible, it was decided. So he stays down below, getting into all kinds of mischief in darkened rooms across the world. It’s not Aphrodite who is responsible for rape, child abuse, prostitutes and rent boys. She had little, if any, part to play in the sudden and terrifying emergence of AIDS.
    Jessie pulled up short and returned, slightly shamefaced, to the fold. The Methodist title was rejected for ever, but the Methodist ethic remained.
    ‘You know what bothers me?’ she says to Lydia, as they settle before the fire in the untidy clutter of her flat.
    ‘No. What bothers you?’
    ‘What bothers me is that I get no acknowledgement for what I do