Welcome back to the Book of Gleanings, being a part of The Kolbrin. The last chapter told the story of the Noah-like figure, Hanok, and how he escaped the global cataclysm heralded by The Destroyer by heeding divine advice to build an Ark type vessel, load it up with animals, plants and whatnot, and float away out of harm’s way while the rest of civilisation got wiped out by the flood waters. Noah escaped with his own family, his brother’s family, King Sisuda and his close kin, a representative of every trade and profession useful for founding a new state, Dwyvan the master craftsman, and six male ‘strangers’.
I’m not going to dwell overlong on the next couple of passages as they basically cover how the survivors of the flood dispersed and established themselves once the waters had subsided and the Ark had come to rest on dry land. The narrative settles down again after a while and tells the story of the birth of somebody called Hurmanetar (also called Hankadah). This is, again, a tale that rings many bells from other traditions, and its appearance here in The Kolbrin is the stock rehashing of the strange events that surround the birthing of somebody who is destined to become a Great One. You’ll find similar threads in all the good myths, religions, and even the better fairy tales, because Great Ones have to be shown to be special right from the beginning; often – as with Hurmanetar in this story – before they’ve even been squeezed from the womb.
Hurmanetar’s story is set well after the flood in a time when the cities had all been rebuilt and the mightiest king around was one Lugadur who, apparently, was a master metal-worker craftsman and teacher. It transpires that Lugadur had raped and impregnated Hurmanetar’s mother but, because he was a serial philanderer, had no real recollection of who she was. A supernatural steam that arose from what sounds like the pregnant woman piddling into a bowl of incense whilst purifying herself, caused the king to have a dream series in which he couldn’t quite make out the mother-to-be’s face. Lugadur sent for a couple of wise-men from The Temple of the Stargazers who consulted The Book of Heaven (which we’ve met in the last chapter so I suppose we are to assume that Hanok or somebody else on the Ark took a copy along for the ride) and interpreted the dream as meaning that the son of a woman the king had raped would be a king-slayer, iconoclast, and rival to the gods themselves.
Well, this was not what Lugadur wanted to hear, especially as he’d raped more women than he could remember, so he asked the wise-men to help him out and find this child of prophecy. Now, the wise-men were in a bit of a pickle because they’d worked out the mother was Nintursu, a Maiden of the very Game of Thrones– like sounding Temple of the Seven Enlightened Ones which went back to Sisuda, the king who’d accompanied Hanok in the Ark. Their problem was that, if they they killed a child of one of these Maidens, or even spilled its blood within their own country’s boundaries, it would render the whole land infertile – or so it was written in their writings. Their solution was to persuade the king to have his most trusted servants take the pregnant woman to a neighbouring country, wait for her to give birth and then kill the infant across the border.
The king chose his Chamberlain and War Captain to lead the expedition. They took the heavily pregnant Nintursu to the border with the land of Kithis. She gave birth during the full moon, in which phase, it seems, slaying was not allowed, so they waited until it waned. The Chamberlain palmed the dirty work off onto the Captain who took seven men with him across the border to do the foul deed. But, as The Kolbrin points out at this point, slaying a new-born was no task for grim fighting men, rather it was a despicable job worthy only of the cowardly half-men who paid court at the king’s palace. Besides, some of the soldiers were worshipers at Nintursu’s temple and knew the whole thing to be wrong.
To cut a long story short, the Captain could not go through with killing an infant in cold blood, so he concocted a ruse. He placed the infant in a basket on the back of an ass, which he tethered under an overhanging rock. With his men hammered on wine, he loosened a boulder which fell among them in their sleep, rousing them into a drunken wakefulness in which they managed to wound one another. In all the ensuing mayhem, the ass broke its tether and ran away, not to be caught.
While the Captain persuaded his men that it would be better for all concerned that they lied to Lugadur on their return and pretended the infant was dead, the new-born Hurmanetar was carried away into the land of Kithis on the back of an ass.
And that’s where this section ends. Not a hell of a lot to note here apart from the obvious parallels of Great Ones escaping a royally decreed birth-murder (Moses, Romulus and Remus to name but a few) and the symbolism of a lowly ass carrying a Great One somewhere or other (Jesus etc.), oh, and also the mother of a Great One being a ravaged Temple Maiden (Romulus and Remus again). This section is pretty much a scene-setter and the narrative livens up a bit more in the next passage as Hurmanetur finds his destiny and meets a companion, Yadol.
And from a self-help perspective? Well, these types of tale are tropes. Great Ones have to have an (a) unusual and (b) harrowing start in life if they are to fulfill their destinies. The stories are often full of ravaged maidens, evil tyrants, and the inflicting of pain and torture on innocent young ones. It makes the turn-around of events as these hard-done-by individuals find their purpose in life and revenge their earlier harsh treatment much more satisfying from a narrative perspective – so I can’t go on too much about the cruelty of half-men, the kindness of ‘real’ men, and all the rest of it, because they are necessary parts of the plot. The next section, however, will give us a lot more to go on, so I hope to see you there, but just before I go, keep this thought in mind, because it’s something that The Kolbrin has been trying to bring to our attention for a while now:
To actually, really know and understand something, the human senses, in themselves, are not sufficient. The only way we can truly comprehend something is by thinking about it in a Reasoned way; that is,without the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch being employed. Only when you are alone, in your head, putting two and two together, can you discern the true nature of something. Now, I know that’s very Plato describing what Socrates said type of stuff, but it’s a real Truism with a capital ‘T’. We don’t have to go down the path of Plato’s and Socrates’ ‘Forms’ that exist only on a purely intellectual or spiritual plane – because that’s not readily applicable to us having to get our hands dirty and lead our lives right here and right now. No, at this stage, all we need to take from that line of thinking is that only when you have taken the time to think about something long enough, away from what your senses are feeding you about it, only then, after processing all your sense streams through the filter of Reason, should you decide what is going on and take appropriate action (or not).
