Implications of the Last Hecatomb

Ray DiPalma

Many of the oldest priests were there, their ceremonial robes

in tatters but the knives they held appeared bright and recently honed.

Most of these men had not been seen in years, having with the passage

of time drifted away without offering any reason for their departure-

singly or in small groups of three or four—retired for good to caves or

small shelters they built themselves in the mountains or along the coastal

plain miles from the temple—worship and ritual now become for them

a private matter, or so many of us had thought. But now here they were

again standing silently in one determined row, facing the gathering crowds.

The animals had not yet been brought towards the altars. Some were

still penned, others tied to trees, and still others were leashed to their handlers.

Current high ranking members of the priestly class went about their preparations

for the sacrifices. Clearly disconcerted by the arrival of their predecessors

in so large a number, they avoided even the slightest acknowledgement

of their presence, though from time to time one of the younger priests could

be seen making furtive glances in their direction—indicative, perhaps,

of the anticipated and inevitably depraved clash between ardent support

and fervent opposition. The masses of people, many from the shantytowns

that had sprung up on the outskirts of the city, quietly pressed forward in order

to catch a better glimpse of the old priests they had not expected to see.

It was taken as no inconsequential omen when a bull broke loose from his

two handlers and charged into the crowd, badly goring one of the worshipers

before it could be subdued. As they hauled the wounded man away, a garland

of red and yellow flowers that had been draped around the bull's neck had

momentarily become entangled in the victim's legs until one of the young priests

stepped forward and hastily pulled it away. In later conflicting recorded versions

of the incident, as well as all the day's events that seemed to stem from it, it was

stated that it had been a child who had been killed by the bull, and in others that

that it had been an old man, a brother of one of the priests who had returned.

A number of years later in a friend's house I discovered an urn that had been painted

to memorialize the event. The victim rendered in the ceramicist's version of what

happened was a child. But a small fresco in the same house showed him to be an old man.

My host offered no reply when asked about these conflicting representations.