Welcome back to the Book of Gleanings, being a part of The Kolbrin. The last section saw Hurmanetar journey to the Underworld to meet his old companion, Yadol, a reunification which, in my opinion, symbolised the spiritual evolution of Hurmanetar into a being who had now conquered his baser desires and passions (represented by the foes he faced and overcame during his rite of passage to find Yadol) and could now re-emerge into the world equipped with a fully Reasoning conscience. This next section, though, mentions Hurmanetar only as a peripheral character. It tells the story of what Hurmanetar’s nephew, Ancheti, got up to when he was left behind to guard Formana’s daughters after the father had departed to accompany Hurmanetar on his quest to find Yadol. This is not a particularly complex piece, dealing as it does with the dance of male-female attraction, but it does give us a foretaste of The Kolbrin’s (that is, ‘The Good Religion’s’) stance on the proper conduct expected of each gender in wider society. I’ll start with the action and then comment on what needs commenting on at the end:
So, poor young Ancheti, who was not well-practised in the art of dealing with the opposite sex, had been left behind to deal with a bunch of girls who had just ‘reached maidenhood’ and, reading between the lines, were teasing the young man mercilessly. Ancheti sought some relief by taking himself off to an idyllic valley not too far away, but there he encountered another problem in the form of the lovely young Asarua who lived alone with her wise and blind old mum, Mamuah, in a peasant shack whose grounds were patrolled by seven fierce dogs.
Now, young Asarua, having herself barely reached maidenhood, sounds a bit like a female version of Yadol; that is, she comes across as a bit of a proto-hippy. She avoided meat and ground-sown crops and vegetables, and subsisted solely on what she could harvest from her trees, herbs, and vines (of the type not used for making wine). She seems to have been quite the little gardener and understood the science of fruit tree grafting and fruit vine nurturing. The women were under the protection of Asarua’s father, who, we are told, was a strange and mighty king, although she seems to have been some kind of bastard because Mamuah was not of the royal household. The Kolbrin makes Asarua sound almost like Atalanta of Greek myth fame, although without the hunting aspect. She is described as supple and sporty, tall and graceful, rosy-cheeked and fair-skinned, clothed in a simple garment and wearing a garland of leaves and flowers in her hair. Her demeanour was shy and retiring. In short, she was just the type of girl you’d want to take home to your mum. And the local lads seemed to know it, although their attempts at courtship were hamstrung by the fact that the enclosure in which Asarua and her mum lived was considered sacred ground into which only females might enter. But that didn’t stop some of them from trying it on and The Kolbrin reports a series of failed attempts of wooing that are designed to highlight Asarua’s purity of soul.
The first tryer was a hunter. Smitten by Asarua’s good looks, he rocked up at the enclosure’s perimeter but committed the howler of not changing out of his hunting gear and bringing along two wild geese and a piglet as a love-gift – not a good look when you’re dealing with a vegetarian earth-friend. Asarua simply set the dogs on him. The hunter had a think and decided that, yes, he may not be the partner best suited to Asarua, so he sent along his brother, a shepherd, who, he reckoned, might be a better fit for the close-to-nature girl. The shepherd took up position outside the enclosure and played tunes on his pipes until Asarua got fed up with him and told him to bugger off and learn tunes from the music of nature rather than blowing empty air through his instrument.
Many others followed suit and were rejected. After a few days along came a rich merchant-noble land owner who, used to always getting what he wanted, saw Asarua as a bit of a challenge. Reasoning that his riches would prove allure enough for the simple-living Asarua, he turned up dressed in his finery, accompanied by his servants, and boldly entered the enclosure where he was confronted by Asarua. She listened to his eloquent but sleazy overtures and then cut him off at the knees with her response. How dare he think he could buy her with the worthless glitter of gold and jewels? How dare he think that he could add her, bound to his household, to his long list of other women and lovers? And, because this was, after all, sacred ground, she set the dogs on even this high-born lord and sent him packing.
So much for the local lads. Shortly afterwards, young Ancheti wandered past that place and, spotting Asarua from afar, he, too, was smitten, but being a shy and inexperienced young lad, he shied away from approaching her. Nevertheless, his feet took him back there again a few days later and he found the old and blind Mamuah sitting by a tree. It was hot and he asked her politely for a drink of water. She suggested he enter the enclosure and get a drink from a pool within it on the proviso he also brought her some back. This he did. Asarua, though, had spotted Ancheti within the enclosure, although she didn’t reveal herself but, tellingly, neither did she set the dogs on him. Hmmmmm . . .
At this point in the story, Hurmanetar returned from his Underworld journey and, spotting the moping, love-sick Ancheti, asked him what was up. Ancheti explained, and Hurmanetar, in what I consider his first Reasoned decision since becoming more spiritually advanced, told his nephew that this was not a matter for the ‘heavy tactics of men’ and was best left to a woman’s delicate touch. Wise man! So he had a word with the old lady who looked after Formana’s daughters and they plotted a strategy.
The maidservant tottered off to Asarua’s enclosure looking suitably thirsty and travel-weary and the kind-hearted girl invited her in to rest and eat something. An interesting conversation ensued in which the maidservant used the analogy of the symbiotic existence between Asarua’s trees and vines to point out that, often, two elements are required for growth and fruiting to occur. The allusion is, of course, to the relationship between men and women. The maidservant suggested Asarua ‘read from the book of Nature’, something, she said, that with the hindsight of her age she would have found more profitable when she herself was young. She then went on to talk about men and women in general and of their ways. The speech of a woman, says The Kolbrin, is not like that of men, because a man talks straight, like an arrow, while a woman’s tongue follows a winding road (there’s a bit of an openly misogynistic bit here about the deviousness of women’s tongues compared to those of men but The Kolbrin tries to make up for it with an aside that it may have been added ‘in the days of Thalos’ because ‘not all men think thus of women’).
The maidservant’s advice carried on into the evening at which point she was invited to share the evening meal and stay over, during which time she took the opportunity to work on Asarua’s mother. She hinted that pretty girls who refused to get married might be considered ‘unnatural women’. Mamuah wasn’t deaf to these overtures because she, too, wanted to see her daughter married, so she listened receptively when the talk got around to Ancheti. The maidservant promoted Hurmanetar’s nephew as young but potentially very wise, dutiful, industrious, and no seeker after idle pleasures. She said that he would be loyal to his woman and that he treated all women with respect. Not only that, but he came from the blood of kings and, in Hurmanetar, had the wisest instructor possible. Her pitch paid off and she was invited to return at the next new moon at which point she was advised that Asarua had agreed to wed Ancheti on the proviso that he first laboured for a year at Formana’s and then for another year at the sacred enclosure in which the women lived. This was agreed to and that was what Ancheti did.
So, that’s where this chapter ends. The passage follows the trope of the ideal young maiden who holds out for the genuine and trustworthy suitor most aligned with her own ideals. If we set aside the openly misogynistic episodes, there’s a bit of girl-power in this passage (Asarua seeing through and then seeing off those suitors who saw only her outer beauty) but it is tempered by the necessity of the reflection of Natural processes in human affairs (at least as far as The Kolbrin’s take on such matters is concerned; that is, a man and woman together are stronger than their constituent parts). And there is also an aspect of the feminine divine involved in the story. The sacred and protected enclosure into which men are forbidden without permission (or purity of intent) is, to me, symbolic of that power peculiar to women alone and which men cross at their peril.
This is a hard passage to wring much self-help advice from. The main obstacle is The Kolbrin’s own message which kind of reflects the old philosophical adage about life, where it intersects with human affairs, being a reflection of Nature. The promoters of ‘The Good Religion’ see the male-female relationship as a binary interaction that is just as necessary as day/night, winter/summer and so on, and that, unfortunately, doesn’t leave too much room for more modern takes on the concept, and accounts for this passage’s interpretation of women who refuse to marry as ‘unnatural’. So we’ll leave that discussion aside for the time being (there’s a lot more about it in future episodes) and concentrate on the bits we can.
Look beyond the superficial is one lesson. As with so many teachings we’ve looked at before in these passages: don’t trust the evidence of your senses – beauty, for instance, is often only skin deep. Step back, use your head, and think about what your senses are telling you before you make any rash decisions. Asarua knew that the hunter meant well but he was the polar opposite of her own ideals and principles. She saw through the vanity of the shepherd who, in his idleness, thought that the beauty Asarua would appreciate lay in his own skill with his pipes. And she definitely saw straight through the slimy-tongued lord in all his surface-only level finery who just wanted her as another notch in his headboard. Only Ancheti made her stop and think, and, even then, it took a while and a lot of consideration before an agreement was reached, and even that agreement contained what was effectively a two-year get-out clause.
So take Asarua’s attitude and apply it across the board: In your love life, your family relationships, your everyday dealings with others, even your work. There’s no need to be standoffish or set the metaphorical dogs on anyone, but be careful out there. There are a lot of snakes and sharks around. Guard against them by using your head.
OK, a fairly short one today. The next passage describes the death of Hurmanetar. I hope to see you there.
