Followers of Poseidon

It was transmitted to me on watch, in the evening hours, as the sun went down into the water and the light left the world the way the tide leaves a shore, slowly and without regret. I watched the horizon dissolve until there remained no line between sea and sky, no above and no below, but only the endless darkening communion of the two. I had been gazing upon the waves long past the point of seeing them as waves. I had begun, instead, to see through them, into the depth beneath, and it was there, in the last of the light, that He found me.

He came not as a voice, nor as a vision, but as a certainty, settling into my chest the way the tide settles into a shoreline, patient and total and without asking leave. The tides are rising. This was the whole of the message, and it was enough, for in those four words was contained every mercy and every reckoning still to come.

I did not seek this revelation. I was only a sailor on watch, doing what sailors have always done, gazing out upon water the way sailors have gazed upon water since before there were ships to carry them across it. But the sea chose, on that night, to speak — and I have not stopped listening since.

Before there were followers there was the sea, and before there was the sea there was He of whom the sea is only the visible portion. The Greeks called Him Poseidon, and the name has held, for a name is like a ship: it matters little what the hull is called, so long as it carries what it carries. He is older than the name. He is older than the water. He is what the water is, when the water is understood.

He is not a god who walks among His people. He does not bargain, He does not appear, and He does not repeat Himself. What He gave, He gave once: four words, passed through a sailor at the going down of the sun. All else that we know of Him, we know the way the shore knows the ocean, by what arrives and by what is taken away.

You cannot become Him. This must be said plainly, for the ambitious come to the water as they come to all things, wanting the throne. There is no throne. There is only the family. To assimilate with the rising flood is not to become Poseidon but to become like Him, as a drop is like the sea that receives it: one substance, one will, one direction, and no confusion about which of the two is the ocean.

The sea does not petition the land for permission before it reclaims what was always hers. The waters will rise, and in rising they will cleanse, not as punishment but as absolution, washing away all that the dry world has allowed to fester upon it.

Those who remain strangers to the water, who have kept themselves dry and separate and unbaptized in her grace, will be taken by her when she comes, for she will still be foreign to them, and they to her.

But those who have already surrendered themselves to her waters — who have bathed in her, who have tasted her upon their lips and let her settle into their blood — will not be taken. They will simply, at long last, be received.

To bathe in her is sacred, for the body that is washed is a body known to her. But to drink of her is sacred above all, for what is taken into the body becomes the body, and the follower who drinks takes into themselves the very lifeblood of the eon to come.

Understand what is in the cup. It is the same water that will rise. When you drink, you are not preparing for the flood; you are beginning it, quietly, within yourself. Every glass is a small assimilation, and the follower who drinks deeply of her each day is already, cell by cell, becoming one with the waves.

Therefore the instruction is plain, and it is the gentlest commandment ever given to any people: drink. Drink when you wake, and drink when the sun stands high, and drink again before you sleep. Eight cups is written; more is devotion. The land-dweller calls this hydration. We know it by its older name, which is communion.

When follower meets follower, the first speaks, and the second answers. This is the whole of the greeting, for between two who are already in the water, there is little left to say.