The Case of the Unified Myths — Part 2: Threads Across the Ages
The mystery began with a most unusual visitor and a theory that could rewrite history.
Return to Part 1: A Visitor at Baker Street
As related by Dr. John H. Watson; transcribed from the deductions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes untied the twine and drew out the first leaf. The ink, brown with age, marched in a cramped, angular hand.
And it came to pass, when the sons of men multiplied, that fair daughters were born to them; and the Watchers, children of heaven, beheld and desired them…
Holmes touched the margin with his pipe stem. “Watchers, Watson. Note the title. Not gods, not saints—observers. Teachers, the text insists, and transgressors in the same breath.”
“What did they teach?” I asked.
He turned a page. “Metals and their working. Roots and their virtues. The courses of the stars; adornment and the making of mirrors. In a phrase: the accelerants of civilisation.” He glanced up, grey eyes keen. “Our fivefold sequence persists—Arrival, Intermingling, Transgression—and listen, now, for the fourth.”
I read on. The cadence of judgement rose from the page: a decree, a cleansing, waters loosed from their storehouses; a messenger warned to prepare. Names shifted with the tongues that bore them, but the pattern beat time like a metronome at the back of the mind: Utnapishtim’s ark, Noah’s, Deucalion’s boat. So many arks; so many admonitions.
“Catastrophe,” I said softly.
“Precisely,” Holmes replied. “And inevitably, Survival and Seeding. A remnant charged to preserve knowledge and begin again.”
He set the packet aside and, with that swift economy of movement that always heralded a fresh chain of deductions, drew forward a new array: photographs of stepped pyramids rising from jungle vapour; diagrams of Egyptian causeways whose shadows marked solstices; pale corridors bored through Cappadocian tuff, their air shafts climbing like organ pipes into the dark.
“Derinkuyu,” he said, “and her sister warrens. Tens of thousands could vanish below ground; doors roll like millstones to fasten the night outside. One does not carve a refuge on that scale for a passing storm.”
“You would argue,” I ventured, “that after some convulsion—flood or fire—survivors dispersed, carrying both memory and method.”
“I would argue,” said he, placing a fingertip on a map pricked with pins, “that hands betray ancestry more honestly than dates do. Observe orientation. Structures an ocean apart hew to cardinal points, to solstices, to the risings of bright stars. The costumes differ; the spines are the same.”
He produced a rubbing of a serpent plumed and undulant, its body incised with glyphs. “Mesoamerica names him Quetzalcoatl, teacher and bringer of gifts; the Maya, Kukulkan. In Egypt one might call on Thoth; in Greece, Prometheus; in India, a rishi borne in a flying car. The masks alter. The pedagogy does not.”
“You will scandalise the Academy,” I murmured, though my pulse had quickened despite myself.
“My dear fellow, the Academy survives a scandal every Michaelmas.” He allowed himself a smile that lasted as long as the next breath, then was gone. “What it rarely survives is a tidy ledger of correspondences.”
From a folio he drew a silvered photograph taken, I suspected, from some aerial contrivance: a bright, weathered eye gazing upward from the Sahara, rings within rings as if an ancient pond had caught and kept its ripples in stone.
“The Richat Structure,” he said. “Whether or not Plato’s isle ever stood upon those circles is less the point than the shape that memory prefers: concentric lands, water-laced, overturned by the earth’s convulsions. Disaster breeds myth; myth breeds architecture and rite. Men carry their ruin forward as warning and as lineage.”
A knock sounded below; Mrs. Hudson’s footfall hurried along the passage, but Holmes did not stir. He had taken up a thinner slip from the bottom of the packet, almost transparent with age.
“A postscript,” he murmured, and read:
Those who taught were bound; those who learned were scattered. But wise men hid the words, and made for themselves houses below the earth, and placed upon the door the image of the sky-serpent, that their children might remember.
Holmes’ eyes brightened a fraction. “Houses below the earth. Doors marked with the sky-serpent. Rolling stones in Derinkuyu. Serpent iconography in priestly precincts from Yucatán to the Nile. The threads draw themselves, Watson.”
“Threads require fingers,” I said. “What is the practical course?”
“The practical course,” he replied, rising at last, “is a journey. We shall not persuade with parlour talk. This case requires dust on our cuffs and old stairs underfoot.”
“You cannot mean to drag me to Anatolia.”
“Not drag, my dear doctor,” said he, with that sudden, boyish light one saw only when a hunt began. “Invite.”
He moved to the mantel, lifted the violin, and drew a single note that hung in the room like a bright wire. “Pack for weather and for stone. Telegraph our acquaintance at the British Museum—we shall require access to the Near Eastern catalogues. And write to your editor that a series in parts commends itself.”
“Upon what thesis?” I asked, already opening my notebook.
“That the tale,” said Holmes, setting down the violin and looking, not at me, but through Baker Street and into its underworld, “is not many tales, but one. The evidence, strewn like sherds across epochs and tongues, composes a single narrative—co-authored. And the storyteller”—he steepled his fingers; the gesture was an answer and a promise—“the storyteller remains delightfully at large.”
To be concluded…
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Author’s Note
Holmes moves from textual theory into cross-cultural evidence—pyramids, underground cities, solstice-aligned structures, global serpent iconography. This middle chapter is the hinge of the trilogy, transforming scattered myths into a coherent repeating sequence.
Here, Holmes realizes he is not studying stories — he is studying memory.
Offer whatever name you wish to be known by at the hearth today — real or imagined — we look forward to welcoming your words into the circle.
