Istar of Babylon: A Phantasy — Background and Themes

Ritual and the Weight of Ceremony

The wedding of Charmides and Ramûa is described with a catalog of precise actions: morning prayer before "assembled images of the gods," a procession to the nearest temple, the signing of contracts, the public proclamation. Potter's prose lingers on the material objects of ceremony—the woollen cord, the trumpets and cymbals, the slaughtered animals carried to the bride's house. This accumulation of ritual detail does more than establish setting; it creates a world where divine and civic obligations are inseparable from daily life. The narrator notes that the feast "lasted as long as the food held out," a small, concrete observation that hints at the precariousness underlying celebration.

Voice and the Shifting Interior

Potter modulates her narrative voice to reflect character consciousness. When Charmides sits alone after his wedding, the prose moves into a free indirect style that blends his thoughts with the narrator's: "The thought of Sicily and his family there was with him still; and he tried, for a little while, to be alone by the sea with his parents and his brother." The sentence structure mimics a mind reaching backward. Later, when Baba appears, her description shifts from the earlier "elf-look" to "an expression of gentle weariness, of patience, of long-suffering"—a change registered through Charmides' perception. The narrator does not state that Baba has changed; instead, the character's altered appearance is filtered through the Greek's eyes.

The City as a Character in Diction

Babylon is evoked not through grand set-pieces but through accumulated, often oblique references: the "Â-Ibur-Sabû," the "tenement of Ut," the "Gate of God." Potter uses Akkadian and Babylonian terms sparingly, letting them function as markers of a specific, textured geography. The city's presence is felt in the names of streets and buildings, in the mention of "Êgibi & Sons" (a business house), and in the recurring phrase "the Great City," which becomes almost a proper noun. This lexical strategy gives Babylon a solidity that the more fantastical elements—the goddess Istar, the phantasy of the title—must work against or within.

Silence and the Unspoken in Dialogue

Dialogue in the excerpt is sparse and often indirect. When Baba approaches Charmides after the wedding, the narrator reports that "she had steeled herself to meet any greeting, but this was the one that came nearest to breaking down her self-control." The actual words exchanged are not given; instead, the emotional weight is carried by gesture and silence. Charmides holds out both hands "with one of his old, shining smiles." The smile is described as "old," linking present to past, while the hands replace speech. Potter trusts the reader to infer the tension between these characters—the unspoken history of Baba's "dishonorable" life, Charmides' debt to her—without explicit explanation.

Readers approaching Istar of Babylon should attend to the interplay between the mundane and the mythic. Potter's Babylon is built from contracts, tenements, and wedding feasts as much as from temples and goddesses. The novel's fantasy arises not from escape into the supernatural but from the pressure of the divine against the ordinary. The excerpts suggest a work more interested in the texture of human relationships within a specific historical imagination than in plot-driven adventure.

That editorial note on Istar of Babylon stayed with me—not for its plot, but for how carefully it lets old silences speak through ritual and dust. It reminded me of a quieter book about Scotland’s southwest, where superstition isn’t decoration but a lived heartbeat. You might feel the same tenderness there, in that ache of vanished voices. Witchcraft and superstitious record in the south-western district of Scotland — Context and Discussion holds a similar soft weight, like something remembered rather than read.