In the last passage we learnt how Eloma tried to preach the teachings of her god to the rapidly degenerating tribe known as the Children of God in the hope it would halt their spiritual backwards slide into an existence akin to that of the Children of Men, who were an altogether more ‘earthy’ lot, prone to giving full rein to anger, lust, and all those other so-called ‘passions’ which ancient hierarchies were not at all keen on because they generally heralded societal dissent and disobedience.
In the passage to be looked at here a much more portentous tone is adopted by the author, although the text is rather disjointed, with several sections separated by what appear to be unrelated themes. The chapter is entitled The Flood of Atuma and in it, as its name suggests, we encounter a cataclysm – a deluge or destruction by water as the ancient Greek word should correctly be interpreted – and we meet again Nanua, the Maid of the Morning, whom Eloma had been charged by her god to rescue from servility and protect. It’s an interesting passage, if only for its similarity to parallels in other accounts of the rise and fall of civilisations, and it even gives a passing mention to ‘The Destroyer’, that periodic wreaker of earthly havoc which seems to be a kind of regularly recurring celestial event – maybe a close fly-by by a large comet; or even some kind of asteroid storm.
Anyway, the author starts out by addressing us – that’s you and me – as ‘the children of days yet unborn’, and promising that if we are the generation actually reading this ancient material, then its message was intended for us. All very flattering, but somehow ominous. We are invited to hear a ‘Truth’ which, although it happened many aeons ago, is nevertheless very relevant to our own times.
The author trots out the standard warning that, although we have the potential for immortality, our time on Earth is one of testing, and not a second of that time should be frittered away on inconsequential things. Humanity, he says, originally understood the singularity of God, but over time it allowed its spiritual faculties to diminish and slide into disuse, and mistook the One God’s many aspects for a pantheon of different deities. Interestingly, the scribe here uses the term ‘higher abilities’ to describe that spiritual side of humanity that withered as time passed. I think that what is being described here is the loss of true Reason (with a capital R); that is, the ability to understand what is happening around us through passionless and informed investigation. It’s a common theme in many religions and philosophies and a common carrot and stick technique employed to make us think ‘Oh, the oldies knew how to be spiritual supermen, so we’re going to have to pull our collective fingers out so we don’t seem so inferior’. How much of this is social engineering perpetrated by controlling interests (whether religious or secular) – the ‘it’s easier to control people aspiring to noble aims than a populace running riot with unbridled passion’ approach – and how much of it is a genuine lament for humanity’s fall (or, at least, distance) from its divine destiny, well, that’s up to you to decide. The author goes on to explain that we cannot truly grasp the concept of God (however you want to interpret that term) until we achieve that spiritual flowering, that application of pure Reason.
At this point, you’d expect the scribe to at least give us a clue as to how we go about this internal development but he doesn’t – this is a chapter about dire consequences, after all – and he instead digresses off into a kind of cosmology or creation myth. There were huge monsters in the olden times, he says, ones that would dwarf an elephant, with ‘frightful gnashing teeth and long ripping claws’. There is then a rather anachronistic and jumbled statement that men were terrified of these beasts and there was some kind of revolt in Heaven and the crust of the Earth was unstable, so God ‘hardened’ the land and turned the beasts to stone. This sounds like a very mixed up version of the biblical war in heaven, an unstable terrestrial crust in a previous geological age, and the extinction of the dinosaurs; and it all happened, maintains the scribe, before the first occurrence of ‘The Destroyer’.
The text jumps again, this time purporting to be an excerpt from ‘the record of Beltshera’ (whoever or whatever or wherever that is). It’s a story we’re all very familiar with from umpteen religious and/or mythological traditions: the people were wicked and persisted in their wickedness despite dire warnings by the wise-men. The wickedness created a stench which alerted the ‘Chastening Spirit’ (a female – possibly meant to represent Mother Nature) and upset her so much that She let rip. Torrential rain caused massive floods which covered the lands. The scribe also mentions that ‘the winds could no longer discover their destinations’, a description of conflicting air masses, one of the best descriptions of which in ancient sources can be found, in my opinion, in Virgil’s Aeneid Book 1 lines 81-86 (in other words, the concept of ‘battling winds’ is not limited to The Kolbrin and, if you want to be uncharitable, the author of this section of the work, whether he was writing in ancient times or this is a modern rip-off, could have nicked it from anywhere).
The people of Shinara which, if we recall from the last passage, is the place Eloma was sent to find Nanua, were driven from their plains up a high mountain where they thought they’d be safe from the rising waters; but, of course, they were not, and many wicked amongst them perished. Then it all gets a bit weird. During a lull in the storms, the remaining people built what the scribe calls a ‘gateway to Heaven’ so that their chief ‘interpreter’ could contact the ‘Other World’. The narrative seems to be describing a transcendental contact between Man and Nature, possibly facilitated by the construction of a stone dream-chamber in much the same way that some of the neolithic stone chambers of Britain are thought to have been used. The ‘interpreter’ seems to have journeyed out of his body to some kind of astral plane on which he was able to communicate with the Chastening Spirit. The ensuing dialogue is definitely a matter for our time. Essentially, this spirit/Nature has had enough of man’s wickedness: If a man threw filth over the wall into your courtyard, She says, would you not consider this an act of hostility? Now, I know the ‘filth’ referred to here is metaphysical – man’s growing spiritual impurity is offensive to those responsible for directing the Universe, type of thing – but a part of me so also wants to read into this something more literal; that is, unless humanity stops polluting the Earth, Nature itself will eventually have enough and take remedial action to remove us.
The Chastening/Nature spiritbeing gives humanity another chance and sends back the interpreter to advise everyone to mend their ways. He duly returns to his physical body but, in a scene taken straight from the account of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and returning to the Children of Israel, the interpreter finds that the survivors of the people of Shinara have, in his absence and in their fear, started worshiping false and ‘baleful’ gods who demand human sacrifice. They selected a handsome young man called Anis to be their sacrificial victim but Nanua, Eloma’s ward, screamed out against it so that she also was seized. The so-called ‘false’ priests dragged the pair down to the water’s edge and started calling out prayers to their false gods. The elements joined in, with roiling black clouds, gales, and a lightning storm. Anis was clubbed and thrown in the waters but when it was Anua’s turn she (very stoically) said she’d rather go into the water of her own accord than be thrown in unconscious. Now this behaviour is absolutely text-book Stoicism (amongst other things). It’s the acceptance of one’s Fate (any Fate, not just death) willingly on the basis that, as it’s going to happen anyway, it’s easier to follow willingly than to be dragged.
Allegorical considerations aside (the text in this passage of The Kolbrin is too disjointed to get into any major meaningful philosophical diversions) the narrative adds an extra layer of complexity when a young scribe, Sheluat, up until now a silent bystander, simply walks forward, takes Nanua’s hand as she baulks at entering the water, and walks forward with her (this is possibly a demonstration of the need for extra impetus to help reinforce and then deliver waivering purpose). The effect of this was that the waters receded but the crowd seems to have mistaken it as a sign that the false gods had been appeased and were acting accordingly. This greatly upset the Chief Interpreter who sent his astral body on another trip to commune with the Chastening Spirit/Nature. This time around, Her interpretation of events is rather interesting because she says that the flood waters had already reached their limit and the human sacrifices were therefore not actually necessary for the tide to recede; but men, She says, read into events only what their limited understanding can see in them. Now, this is a great truth, and it is worth bearing in mind for so many reasons, not the least of which is: Step back and have a look at what’s going on. Don’t take your first impression as the only one. Not everything is what it seems. I could go deeper here and say that this is a reflection on a mundane level of humanity’s inability to perceive the reality of existence because our simple physical senses are not equipped to discern – let alone interpret – the particle dance of continuous change which is the Universe unfolding all around us; but, as I’ve said earlier, this section of The Kolbrin is too disjointed to see any real threads running through the narrative at this stage in the work.
The Chastening Spirit then goes on in a more philosophically conciliatory tone. Divine Powers, She says, may very occasionally stir up events to give humanity a bit of a slap for being a twat, but those occasions are rare. More often than not, however, She asserts, the Divine interventions should be interpreted not as punishments, but as tests and even challenges (and this reinforces one of the key tenets of The Kolbrin that the Earth is a testing ground and not a playground). In a placatory statement, She also points out that the ‘false’ priests are not intrinsically wicked men, but they are misguided and the path they have chosen (human sacrifice and so on) to realise their own spiritual improvement, will be a very long one and will inevitably involve a lot of extreme and unpleasant experiences. But the point is, She says, that they are ultimately headed in the right direction.
This, then, is a lesson in perspective. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Look at the bigger and/or longer term picture if you want to see the true meaning behind events. The Universe is unfolding as it must, and, often, it is very difficult to put events that are localised in time or place into context so that you can correctly identify the role they play in the overall purpose. It takes a lot of practice and work on yourself to get to the point where you can be dispassionate enough to see why everything happens how and when it does, so don’t expect to pick up the knack straight off.
The Chastening Spirit/Nature concludes Her meeting with the Chief Interpreter by giving him a glimpse of the after-life beyond the veil. There he sees Anis (the first sacrificial victim and a handsome youth in life) transformed into an ugly spirit-being. He also sees Nanua as a dazzlingly gorgeous spirit-being, and Sheluat (the rather plain young scribe who walked with Nanua into the flood and who, it transpires, had always secretly loved her) transformed into a glowingly handsome spirit-being. The narrative here makes the lesson that evil can be transmuted into good (true on several levels in this story) but it’s also worth noticing the Egyptian soul belief parallels here. The Egyptians believed in duality; that is, that the soul was split in two at birth, one part inhabiting the Earthly body, the other hanging around beyond the veil, as it were, waiting to be reunited with its ‘twin’. Whatever the Earth bound twin did (its karmic load, so to speak) was carried with it at death to the reunification with its other half, and it was that karmic load, good or bad, that would determine the ‘appearance’ of the reunited being (and we need to think beyond physical terminology here, although it’s adequate enough to get the message across at this point). There’s a lot more about this kind of concept later on in The Kolbrin and I’ll deal with it when we get there, but, for now, the lesson here in this chapter seems to be to reinforce the message that things are not necessarily what they seem, and that events, baffling though they may seem at the time they occur, always turn out to have some sort of purpose. And that’s a pretty good lesson to learn for people living in any age.
There’s a lovely little ending to this passage, although it’s full of images that seem, to me at least, to be a mixture from all sorts of old traditions. Apparently the people who survived the flood – which they called the Flood of Atuma, with Atuma, supposedly (it’s not actually stated), being the god the ‘false’ priests called upon for deliverance – built a temple comprised of a circle of white stones in a grove of trees, high on the mountain they had retreated to. They called themselves the ‘Children of Atuma’ now, still unaware that it wasn’t actually the god who had saved them, but a simple natural phenomenon. But it was said, that if you visited the temple, it was still possible to glimpse the shades of Nanua and Sheluat, wandering hand-in-hand through the trees or sitting in the sunlit glades. Very sweet.
The very last paragraph, though, seems to jump again to some other point that is not directly related to the Flood of Atuma and the story of Nanua and Sheluat, but feels like it could be. It’s a kind of a lament, although couched in quite strong terms, and talks of the way that humanity’s fear of the unknown can lead it astray and prevent it from seeing a path to salvation. It’s a bit jumbled, but what I think it is trying to say is this: The Divine (however you want to interpret it) is hugely powerful; so beyond the conventions of normal human life and activity, that it inspires dread. Rather than face that dread and work towards understanding it, we attempt to ‘normalise’ it by framing it in shapes which, although comprised of recognisable ‘parts’, nevertheless, when taken together, create a fantastical whole. It’s as if we construct ‘thought idols’ which are an amalgam of all the things we do not understand and therefore fear. In The Kolbrin’s own words, humanity spurns the real for the unreal. The chapter concludes with the sentiment, both optimistic yet also somehow sad for the human condition, that if we overcome our fear and open our minds and hearts to the true Divine, we will discover not something to make us cower in terror, but the strong hands and indulgent love of a beautiful guide. Lovely thought, that.
Some good bits in this passage, then, despite its somewhat disjointed narrative. If The Kolbrin has been put together from genuine manuscripts, then the fragmented nature of The Book of Gleanings, to which the authors bring our attention at its start, would account for the interpolation of seemingly incongruous paragraphs here. It’s almost as if the compilers have found impersonal passages that kind of relate to the themes in the story of The Flood of Atuma, and stuck them in where they thought they might best fit.
As far as self-help for our modern world is concerned, there are some very relevant points made. The need to acquire Reason (with a capital R) in order to be able to interpret the ever-changing cosmos around us is a common theme in just about all ancient philosophies. Some of them got a bit extreme about the whole thing and wanted us to aspire to an existence of ‘pure thought’ so that we could make our way back to The Divine. Sure, give that a crack if you want to, but, in my opinion, life becomes a lot more livable if we just stop and think before reacting (the first step on that path). Just doing that leads onto the second point that this section is keen to address and that’s to try – if you can, because at times it’s going to be impossible – to understand why things happen. Don’t take it all at face value – there’s a reason for just about everything and it’s nearly always not what it at first seems. This is really valuable advice when dealing with friends, colleagues, and family members (and just about everybody else really). If you can find in yourself the generosity of soul, even when you’ve been insulted or emotionally stung, to dig a bit deeper and find out why something has happened, you can often spare yourself a lot of hurt. And the third major point made here – don’t fear the unknown – is pretty self-explanatory. Fear is an emotion – a passion if you like – which is explored in far greater depth later on in The Kolbrin so I won’t belabour the point here; but suffice to say, so so many things in life are nowhere near as scary as they seem, and if you can overcome your initial terror and face them down, the sense of freedom and exhilaration, the sheer release you feel when you come out the other side will have you wondering why the hell you didn’t front up sooner.
Oh, and stop polluting the planet because She’ll eventually come to the end of Her patience and boot the lot of us off!
Well, that’s all for now. The next passage is yet another account of a flood, but this time around ‘The Destroyer’ pays a visit too. I’ll hopefully see you there.
