The Lost Wizard of Oz introduces several new characters that L. Frank Baum would have loved. One of my favorites is Empedocles, the half-mad self-styled “God of Earth.” Glinda the Good Witch of the South and her body guard, Strigand Nightflyer are searching for the little humbug Wizard who has gone missing. Their search takes them to a vast network of caverns beneath the Poisonous Desert which surrounds the Land of Oz. There they meet Empedocles who introduces himself as the “God of Earth.”
At first glance, Glinda is less than impressed. He certainly didn’t look like a god. By her estimation, he didn’t even look like much of a man: short, scrawny, filthy. Completely unkempt. A disaster on two legs. Yet there he stood, puffed up and full of himself.
But looks can be deceiving. As it turns out, his power is great, maybe even greater than Glinda’s. Worse, he is obviously not in his right mind. Even worse than that, he has a massive crush on Glinda. As you can imagine, this creates more than a little tension between Strigand and Empedocles: Its a very weird little love triangle.
The Immortal Ambitions of Empedocles
Empedocles was a Greek philosopher who was born about twenty years before Socrates. He lived and taught on the Island of Sicily. As an old man, he went more than a little mad, believing he had become a god because of his great wisdom. He is said to have died when he threw himself into Mount Etna, a live volcano, to prove his deity.
As Glinda gently probes into his past, she learns that some mysterious force saved him from the fires of Mount Etna, only to trap him in the caverns beneath the desert. He has been granted the immortality he sought, only to realize it was more of a curse than a blessing. He has been alone and lonely for over twenty-five hundred years. Glinda sympathizes with the pathetic old man but can offer him no hope. Or can she?
Terror of the Gnomes
In The Lost Wizard of Oz, we learn that the filthy little philosopher is somehow connected to a monstrous rock giant who jealously guards the caverns of Empedocles. The Gnomes are terrified of him, but they have made an uneasy truce with Empedocles. He has allowed them to dig their tunnel to Oz as long as they stay close to the surface but will allow no disturbance in his dark realm.
The lesson of the God of Earth
Empedocles represents the dangers of pride and excessive ambition. He embodies the tension between human frailty and the aspiration for godhood. He is a lesson to us that we should be careful what we wish for. We just might get it.
He would have done well to remember the words of the prophet: “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
