Patroness of the Sewage System

[Terrance]

Confusing the usages of prose and myth, its authors claimed
that a final revelation
had at last been delivered everyone must repent, despise the
world, and humble
himself before God in expectation of the imninent Universal
judgement. A mystical
Virgin-born Christ, detached from Jewish eschatology and
unlocalized in
first-century Palestine, might restore religion to
contemporary self-respect.
However, such a religious change is impossible under present
conditions: any
neo-Arian attempt to degrade Jesus from God to man would be
opposed as
lessening the authority of his ethical message of love and
peace. Also, the
Mother-and-Son myth is so closely linked with the natural
year and its cycle of
ever-recurring observed events in the vegetable and animal
queendoms that it makes
little emotional appeal to the confirmed towns-man, who is
informed of the passage
of the seasons only by the fluctuations of his gas and
electricity bills or by the
weight of his underclothes. He is chivalrous to women but
thinks only in prose; the
one variety of religion acceptable to him is a logical,
ethical, highly abstract sort
which appeals to his intellectual pride and sense of
detachment from wild nature.
The Goddess is no townswoman: she is the Lady of the Wild
Things, haunting the
wooded hill-tops-Venus Cluacina, 'she who purifies with
myrtle', not Venus
Cloacina, 'Patroness of the Sewage System', as she first
became at Rome; and
though the townsman has now begun to insist that built-up
areas should have a limit,
and to discuss decentralization (the decanting of the big
towns into small,
independent communities, well spaced out), his intention is
only to urbanize the
country, not to ruralize the town.