Notes for Pages 250-259.
< 240-249 | Notes Index | 260 – 269 >
250. For those of you who are thinking “uh…is this a cult?,” a reminder that “cult” wasn’t a pejorative term until quite recently. It comes from the Latin cultus which simply means “worship.”
The Eleusinian mysteries.
In its academic definition, “cult” just means a dedicated religious tradition, often focused on one particular deity or series of rituals. In the ancient Classical world, “mystery cults” were a big deal. Recruits became initiates through a series of trials or dedications, and then were allowed to participate in the secret rituals of worship (“mysteries”) for a deity like Isis or Apollo. Many of these mystery cults functioned so well that, despite hundreds of years of uninterrupted activity, the details of worship are now lost to history, because nobody ever spilled the beans.
The mystery cult format also had a significant influence on early Christianity – as previously mentioned in the notes, the Roman cult of the Persian deity Mithras was a direct market competitor to early Christianity.
At any rate, while everything Ariana’s mother is saying implies that these women are part of some matriarchal-mystical-monist-zoolatric-reincarnation pagan tradition, nothing they believe could possibly be that far-out compared to what Roman senators got up to on holiday weekends.
251. Ariana’s mother uses some slightly weird word/grammar constructions, like “does he know that we’re come” instead of “does he know that we’ve come” or “does he know that we’re here.” It’s not particularly important, but the other women  speak in a local Czech-inflected German dialect that is mutually intelligible but distinct from the fancy German that Ariana uses at the University. Ariana code-switches without thinking about it, so I didn’t give everybody’s dialogue brackets to indicate a language change (which would be visually distracting, anyway).
When Ariana’s mother speaks, though, it’s in a unique patchwork that makes her sound a little peculiar to everybody. More on that later.
253. Aha! A clue to that leather neck thong! Boy I’m really hurling a lot at you in this section, aren’t I.
256. I’d like to see what Norman Rockwell would have done with panel 2.
257. As with deer, “doe” is the term for a mature female rabbit; “buck” is a mature male.
258. You may remember that “Lada” was the name Ariana greeted this wolf-hide with when she was last in the den and pulled it out of the wooden trunk. It’s a Slavic female name, derived from an old pagan mother-goddess figure.