The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Four

[The following is the fifth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, and here is the fourth–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.]

Years went by, and King Patros’s son, Prixos, became a man. He would be the king’s rightful heir and successor…except other members of the royal family would have had things otherwise.

The king loved Prixos dearly, and indulged the youth to excess. When the family rode in their chariots across the island of Vestis to see their subjects, Patros and Prixos were always in the first chariot, while Queen Vita and her sons and daughters had to follow behind in their chariots. So had it been for twenty years, along with numerous other privileges that the king and his son could enjoy, all at the expense of Vita and her children.

One day, she complained of this to Invidios, her sullen first-born son. “Though I do not regret ending your father’s feckless rule, I can no longer endure the injustice of my new king’s sway. Before, I could roam about freely; now, I must be escorted everywhere either by the king or by his ten eunuch guards. Before, I could enjoy as many lovers as Agnos did with his thirty concubines; now, Patros’s eunuchs guard me against a pleasure he regularly enjoys, while Agnos’ concubines–once honoured for their love and devotion to the former king–are now disgraced as naked whores, to be enjoyed by any common man on the street for a small sum of money. Those women are never even given the money; their procurers take it all. Many of them have grown old and withered, and they are still not given the dignity of clothing. All of them would rather kill themselves than go on as they do, but none has a knife.

“As for the rest of us women–me and your sisters included–we live lives hardly less wretched than the former concubines. There is a wealth of learning in the libraries and universities, but our sex is discouraged from touching it. Though society is improved with such erudition, during Agnos’ rule the men were as ignorant as the women, and thus our sex at least had no reason to envy men. Now we do. We are disenfranchised and scorned.

“And what is the king’s reason? He asserts that it was I, and all the women of Gymnos (this island’s former name, recall), who debauched King Agnos. King Patros says that the female form, when unclothed, tempts men to lust and to look away from nobler pursuits; but it was Agnos’ decree that everyone, nude, should freely procreate. Though I never questioned the wisdom of his command, I did not inspire it, either.

“I swear to you, my son, King Patros has done us all wrong, including you and your brothers, by instituting father-kin throughout Vestis, thus denying you your natural right of succession. While I prefer the maturity of our society now to the infantile rule of your father (assuming he was your natural father), we must amend our society to embrace full equality for the sexes. The only way to ensure that will be for you to succeed Patros as king, not his son Prixos, whom I now disown for your sake. I am too old to bear the king any more sons, so if you kill Prixos, Patros will have no choice but to accept you as his heir. This will set a precedent in the law that will force all of Vestis to return to mother-kin, and women will have their rights restored. Will you kill the boy, Invidios?”

“Yes, Mother,” Invidios said. “With pleasure. I’ve always hated Prince Prixos. Not only is the treatment of Vestis’ women unjust, but also religion is practiced unfairly, and the latter is the doing of Prixos. He and his father (never mine!) have instituted the worship of a Sky-father god, to supplant our Earth-mother goddess! This god is to have animals sacrificed to him, emasculated as my wretched father was! The prince justifies this cruelty to animals by saying it signifies the death of a man’s animal nature in order to grow in the spirit. He has always scorned my cooking of vegetables as a sacrifice to please our Earth-mother goddess. When I explain how the cooking signifies the heating of the passions and instincts to inspire a man to action, the prince scoffs at me. I will no longer endure his arrogance! I will gladly kill him–for both of us, Mother.”

The next day, Invidios went with Prixos to sacrifice a goat at the top of a lonely hill. Though he told Prixos he was willing to embrace the new Sky-father god religion, Invidios found a thick branch, broken off a nearby tree, and waited for the prince to turn his back. He then beat the prince to death, and buried the body. “I killed a man to save your life,” he said to the goat before setting it free.

A farmer witnessed the murder, informed the king, and showed him where the body was. Denying her son’s guilt, Queen Vita demanded that King Patros acknowledge Invidios as his prince and successor to the throne. The king, knowing her tricks, refused this demand, and banished not only Invidios from Vestis, but his brothers and sisters as well. He even repudiated his queen, and announced his plan to marry a young princess from the land of Pudios, a neighbouring country of Gnosius, and part of its empire. She would bear him sons to succeed him.

The former queen and her sons and daughters, all disgraced, sailed on a boat away from the beloved island of their birth, never to return on pain of death. The boat eventually reached shore, and the family settled in the land of Nodos.

Over the years, King Patros, with his bashful new queen and his new sons by her, enacted new laws, even stricter than before, on women. Now they were forbidden any form of education, whereas before it had merely been discouraged. Women were warned to be silent in matters of politics, for fear of a repeat of the incident with Vita and Invidios.

Here we see the cycles of life once again: when the victims of injustice act too rashly, pushing for change without due organization and preparation, acting before the time is ripe, their own impulsiveness turns against them, and they suffer all the worse for it.

Commentary

One will note parallels between the Invidios and Prixos narrative and the Cain and Abel story. These two myths seem to have a common ancestor, one based on the foundation of a city, requiring a human sacrifice so the dead one’s spirit will be a protector of the new city. Another example of such a myth is that of Romulus and Remus, the former having killed the latter on the foundation of the city of Rome. One can also see in the Invidios and Prixos narrative, as in the Cain and Abel story, an allegory of the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers.

In any case, the story is trying to teach the moral of avoiding rashness in making changes of any revolutionary sort. If done too quickly, without sufficient planning and care, one may find one’s plans backfiring and resulting in a much worse oppression than before. Thus we see the wavelike movement from injustice to a far too sharp return to justice, then a swing right back to the original injustice, or an even worse kind.

Here’s another, admittedly awkward, translation of one of the ancient poems, again with the visual effect, preserved as best as my team of researchers could do:

Throwing

sticks

too hard

only makes them

return harder.

A soft

toss

suffices.