The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Three

[The following is the fourth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, and here is the third–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

At the dawn of civilization, there was a lonely island in a sea in the middle of the Earth. It was a most agreeable green hill surrounded by peaceful blue. All was well there: there was no war, troubles were few and simple, and everyone was happy. There was plentiful fruit on the boughs of the trees, delicious fish to be caught in the nets of the fishermen, and the survival of their society depended on one thing–constant procreation.

For this reason, the king of the island of Gymnos (for this was the name of the island) encouraged, and virtually commanded, his people to copulate every night. The climate was hot in the daytime, so everyone went naked everywhere with no shame. Though food was abundant, it rarely made people fat, so the young and fertile were delectable to look upon. Thus, desirable lovers were easily found by nightfall.

All were married, but absolute fidelity was not necessary. Mothers owned the children the fathers sired. A mother’s sons protected her family and their property, which she passed to her daughters when they came of age. Thus women’s responsibilities as mothers and homemakers were central to this society, and men’s responsibilities as protectors, procreators, hunters, and fishermen were of lesser importance.

King Agnos (for this was his name) obeyed his own command to procreate always, and he had a harem with thirty concubines for this purpose. His wife, Queen Vita, permitted him to have them, since she, as first mother of all living on the island, owned her sons and daughters, some of whom were not the king’s. He did not know which were his offspring by his queen, and which were not, but he did not care, for he believed that ignorance is freedom and knowledge bondage.

The people lived on this island as though there was no world anywhere outside of it. One day, however, a young, handsome prince from another land came by boat to the island. It was early in the morning when he arrived, the sun just beginning to rise, and most of the people had only slept for an hour or two after a typical night of orgies.

The prince and his men, fully clothed, were shocked to see the entire population of the island, naked and insouciantly greeting him. When they learned that promiscuity was the norm here, the prince and his crew concluded that the island’s people were savages. The prince felt that it was his duty to civilize the natives.

He soon met the drowsy king and queen; while he averted his eyes from the king’s nakedness, he was captivated by the queen’s loveliness. She returned his passion to him with her fiery eyes. None of this exchange of feelings was known to the king, nor did it concern him.

Normally the people would not rise from their beds until noontime, so most of them were permitted to go back to sleep while the prince discussed urgent matters with the king. Foreign navies were coming in the direction of this island, and would doubtless invade it and claim it as part of their empire. The king, overconfidently remembering the many years of uninterrupted peace the island had enjoyed, ignored the prince’s warning. The prince again tried to advise the king, saying that if his people followed the ways of the prince and the foreign navies (from the prince’s country, Gnosius, on the mainland not too far away), clothed and monogamous, an invasion could be averted. King Agnos scoffed at this admonition, left the prince, and returned to bed with his concubines.

Now the prince was alone with Queen Vita, who invited him to her bed. Prince Patros (for this was his name) happily accepted. They made love that night with an ecstasy that Queen Vita had not enjoyed with King Agnos for years. Until that night, the queen would never have even considered ending her allegiance to her husband; now she was in love with Prince Patros, and she was ready to help him kill King Agnos.

Furthermore, though she was flattered by the prince’s appraisals of her body, she became ashamed of her nakedness, and commanded her ladies-in-waiting to make gowns for her. They stitched beautiful gowns with patterns of silver and gold on them, made from the material of tapestries, and she left her bedroom with the prince the next morning, clothed. She commanded all the servants to make clothes for themselves, and generously gave them drapes and tapestries of her own for their fabrics.

Meanwhile, King Agnos stayed in bed with his concubines that day, feeling particularly overcome with lust. For the past several days, the king had been getting weary of mere procreation, and he started exploring particularly lewd avenues to satisfy his desires. These avenues included entering the top as well as the bottom, and entering the behind as well as the front. Sometimes he tasted instead of entering, and his concubines tasted him, too. They never complained of his excesses: they loved their king so much that they were content, even eager, to please him.

In the afternoon, as they indulged in this way, Queen Vita quietly entered her husband’s bedroom to see what he ws doing. They did not know she was there, but she was shocked to see his lewdness, and she quickly left in horror and disgust.

As the king continued in his idleness and lust, Prince Patros and Queen Vita commanded all the people of Gymnos to clothe themselves by cutting off the pelts of the animals they hunted. Admiring the beautiful attire of the prince, queen, and royal servants, and ashamed of their own nakedness, the people all over the island did as they were commanded, so by nightfall everyone except King Agnos and his concubines were clothed.

The people also attended a wedding ceremony between the prince and queen, making Patros the new king of the island, which was now renamed Vestis. This public ceremony was a declaration that Agnos was unfit to rule the island. The navies of King Patros’s nation, Gnosius, sailed by and saw a clothed, civilized people ruled by one of their own. Therefore they desisted from invading, knowing that the island had been claimed for their empire peacefully.

Now the only thing that remained to be done was the disposal of the old king, who still knew nothing of his usurpation; he still preferred to know only his concubines’ sweet flesh. That night, his lust finally sated, Agnos left his bedroom and went into his garden. When his concubines went out of his bedroom, they were immediately seized by King Patros’s guards and taken to their new home, which would now be a public brothel. There they remained in shameful nakedness, never permitted to wear clothes, and always only to satisfy the lewd desires of strangers till the end of their days.

King Patros walked in the cool of the garden that night, looking for the naked old man, who still knew nothing of what had happened. Finally, the new king found him, and unsheathed his dagger. He lunged at Agnos’s groin and emasculated him. His genitals were thrown on a farmer’s field: in those days, it was believed that this would promote fertility. Agnos was left to bleed to death slowly, neither a king nor a man, still completely ignorant of the revolution that had occurred. He died alone, knowing only that he would never know his concubines, or anyone, again.

His former concubines tearfully mourned his murder when they learned of it, knowing that this was worse than suffering their lot of having to know, and be known by, any goat of a man who entered the whorehouse. The queen seemed to mourn his death, too, remembering the noble man he once was before he allowed his animal concupiscence to debase him so. Still, her grief was easily obscured by the joy of having a new, stronger lord.

The next morning was the dawn of a new day and a new age. The people learned the art of making clothes, which led to the creation of shops. These shops, and others selling many different goods, led to the Vestis people’s learning of commerce. Their once simple island life grew into a complex civilization, with a bigger contrast of rich and poor than ever before. Though this led to more crime than during Agnos’s rule, it was seen as more than compensated for by the pride one had in living in a cultivated society. The arts and sciences became more sophisticated, and men had intellectual pursuits, instead of spending their days in idleness and their nights in lecherous abandon.

One morning, Queen Vita learned from her doctor that she was pregnant. King Patros said, “This is my child: may he be a son.” Though her sons and daughters from before were allowed by their step-father to continue living in regal comfort, they were of inferior status to the new baby that was coming. The queen and her sons and daughters were irked by this vicissitude, but the king’s power was too great to be resisted.

The queen was especially discontented that her new baby was more the property of her lord than her own, but she enjoyed her regal luxury too much to risk losing it from shrewishness, which Patros would never abide. Indeed, the king had their home transformed into a huge palace, whose beauty awed the queen as much as it did the common people. It was designed in the Gnosian architectural style, towering and rising almost up to heaven, it seemed.

In accord with the king’s declaration of ownership of his new child, which was a son, he decreed that all sons and daughters were now owned by their fathers, property would be passed from father to son, and marriages would be monogamous to ensure paternity. Girls had to endure virginity until marriage and be faithful to their husbands until death.

Any man who wished to enjoy more women would have to marry more than one bride if he could support them, or seek the naked women in the brothel. Any girls or wives found guilty of lewdness or infidelity to their husbands were stripped naked and put in the brothel. This was said to preserve social order.

Men thus ascended in social and political importance. No longer did they merely use their bodies to hunt, fish, or procreate for their families: now they used their minds. Men became doctors, lawyers, senators, and warriors, trained in the Gnosian fashion. Women’s importance as mothers was now secondary in the new social order. Sometimes women felt disenfranchised and scorned: it seemed as though they had been unfairly blamed for the debauching of Agnos. Most women, however, agreed with the men that these were small sacrifices for the sake of their now more advanced, literate, and cultured society.

Since society was now monogamous, there were no more orgies at night, so everyone went to bed at sundown, and rose at daybreak.

Commentary

As has been said a number of times already in previous chapters, anyone who hopes to find history in this tale will be bitterly disappointed. It is a myth that expresses truths in allegory and metaphor.

The earliest forms of social organization were simple: men hunted and women gathered. Man was in complete harmony with nature, and all one saw around oneself was the green of plants and the blue of seas and skies.

Societies tended to be matrilineal at first, so there was little need to be sure of paternity. For this reason, the mother was the primary parent, and religion focused on her.

The early stages of society can be compared to the first years of life. Simple lifestyles lead to simple, blunt, open expression of feelings, that is, being naked and unashamed in speech, as it were. When morality becomes more advanced, we hide our faults in the clothing of hypocrisy. Early in life, we freely pursue pleasure; later, we seek it out in more circuitous paths. Ignorance is bliss.

When we are alone or among those we know well, we freely express ourselves; when strangers come into our lives, we learn the hypocrisy of good manners, the mask of politeness. When young and naïve, we are, as it were, drowsy and less aware; as we age, we grow more alert.

As children, we often ignore danger, not yet knowing its pain; when we’re older, we learn its sting, and protect ourselves.

Contraries tend to be mysteriously close from the point of view of the dialectical unity of opposites, as can be symbolized by the ouroboros. The lewdness of orgiastic copulation leads to the begetting of life as one extreme, one opposite. The treasonous horror of regicide–killing the man who was to protect us all from slaughter–shows the ending of life at the other extreme, the other opposite.

These two polar opposites, birth and death, juxtaposed as they are in many famous myths in history, symbolically illustrate the truth of the proximity of all opposites. Marriages and funerals, one quickly after the other, as in this story, can also represent these neighbouring yet opposing extremes; comedies end with marriages, and tragedies end with funerals.

Another thing we see in this story is the evil of imperialism, and of settler-colonialism on aboriginal land. The people of Gymnos, projecting their goodness onto Patros and the crew on his ship, naïvely welcome the clothed visitors to their island instead of suspecting the possibility of them having bad intentions. Such naïve openness is what the natives’ nudity symbolizes.

Patros’s speaking of good intentions, of protecting the natives from a foreign invasion, all the while secretly plotting a takeover themselves, is symbolized by the foreigners’ being clothed, a hiding of their true intentions. Part of this takeover is the replacing of a matrilineal society with a patrilineal one. Patros’s name seems to be derived from the Latin pater. The renaming of the island as ‘Vestis’ seems linguistically linked with the Latin vestire, ‘to clothe.’ These two etymologies lead to another point.

Much in this story seems to be influenced by mythic and linguistic elements from ancient Middle Eastern civilization. ‘Gymnos’ seems derived from the Greek word for ‘naked,’ ‘Agnos’ seems derived from Greek roots meaning ‘not knowing,’ and ‘Gnosius’ seems derived from the Greek gnosis, ‘knowledge.’ Queen Vita’s name seems derived from the Latin for ‘life.’ These references to nakedness, unknowing, and the queen as ‘the mother of all living’ all suggest a link to the Adam and Eve story.

The following fragment is a poem that expresses the narrative and themes just discussed in the paragraphs above. As with the poem presented in the previous chapter, this one is a remarkable early example of concrete poetry, whose alternating phallic and ’emasculated’ verses visually symbolize the cyclical crests and troughs of dialectical movement.

An island, isolated from the world,

would
see
each
morning
sun
rise
in the
sky
and welcome each new day that was unfurled.

The people living there, though, stayed abed,

for
late
at
night
one
touched
one’s
lover’s
thigh
and didn’t rise at dawn, thus seeming dead.

Their idle king encouraged indolence

and
carefree
lust,
for
this
would
cause
the
birth
of many children. In their innocence

the people saw no shame in going nude

in
search
of
lovers.
Their
king
saw
no
worth
in learning, had no sense of what is lewd.

In marriages, the mothers owned the young

and
fathers
did
not
know
whose
babes
were
theirs
nor by the shame of cuckolds were they stung.

Thus, woman was the more important sex,

and
men
lived
lives
of
lesser,
trivial
cares,
in idleness, sometimes on hunting treks.

A harem, home to thirty concubines,

was
for
the
king
and
his
luxuriant
pleasure.
He cared not how the day’s so bright sun shines,

because at night to be inside for him

was
of
more
worth
than
light,
or
any
treasure.
His girls would gratify him, lights kept dim.

This sleepy people knew no other lands

until
one
morn
a boat
approached
their
shore.
A foreign prince had come upon the sands

of their so lonely beach to learn of them.

Such
shameless
lewdness
he’d
not
seen
before;
he would discover from whom it did stem.

He was enchanted by the lovely queen;

for
the
same
reason,
he
despised
the
king,
for they, nude, were content thus to be seen.

The queen, equally charmed by this young man

with
his
spear
and
strange
armour,
did
him
bring
into her bedchamber. There he began

his entry of her body and her heart.

The
king
knew
not
how
this
young
prince
imposed
himself on their realm with his subtle art

of sweet, seductive words to win his wife,

nor
did
he
care.
The
king
never
supposed
that he would be usurped and lose his life,

Abandoned and castrated, left to bleed.

Rising
in
power,
the
prince
was
the
new
king,
giving his rule only to his male seed.

The old king’s concubines, now prostitutes,

could
only
mourn
his
loss,
and
feel
the
sting
of phallic thrusts from men who were mere brutes.

The queen now also lacked much regal power,

but
was
content
to
have
a
golden
palace
for her new home, a most majestic tower.

And though women were stripped of every right,

a
wise
society,
led
by
the
phallus,
seemed better; cultured, learned–of morning light.