Welcome back to the Book of Gleanings, being a part of The Kolbrin. Well, we’re approaching the end of the Book of Gleanings and this latest chapter, entitled The Tribulations of Yosira, is the last we’re going to hear of that enigmatic gentleman for now. To sum up from the last few chapters, what we’re dealing with here is the archetypal ‘Civiliser’, a person who turns up, often out of the blue, finds a bunch of misbegotten and misbehaving savages, and proceeds to give them the tools to create a workable and stable society. The tools are generally practical ones – agriculture, hygiene, animal husbandry, forestry, even beer brewing – and the whole educational package comes with a set of rules, cloaked in the guise of religion, which must be followed if the whole thing is to be a success. Was the whole religion thing strictly necessary? Well, yes, because Civilisers had to appeal to pretty primitive mind-sets and they needed to get their teaching across in an easily understood format. The savages would have had zero understanding of the scientific reality that underpins, say, agriculture or food hygiene, so they had to have it explained to them in terms they could readily grasp. And if there’s one thing humans excel at, it’s dreaming up a load of mystical old cobblers (aka. Religion) to explain the things going on around them that they don’t quite get. So for Civilisers like Yosira, tapping into religion and the belief systems of those he was attempting to enlighten, was a very, very handy tool indeed, because it allowed him to get far more complicated concepts across by couching them in terms with which the natives were already very familiar and – and this is the clever bit – use the nasty bits of the existing belief system, for example demons and beasties that hang around in food, to scaremonger his potential converts into doing what he wanted.
OK, so Yosira was a Civiliser and, by all accounts, he was pretty damned good at it. We’ve hazarded a guess that the person we’re dealing with here – Yosira – is none other than the historical Civiliser known to Egyptians as Osiris. It’s important to note that we’re not dealing with the god Osiris here (that’s what Egyptians made the historical person into over time) but the historical man whose tradition you can find recorded in several esoteric tomes, including Frazer’s The Golden Bough; and this chapter kind of winds up what The Kolbrin has to say about him by throwing in some bits and pieces in a kind of Greatest Hits finale before moving on to something else. So, here we go . . .
The Kolbrin claims – rather grandly – that what it’s about to impart about Yosira in this chapter was originally written down in the splendidly named Book of Two Roads in which our hero’s name was spelt slightly differently as Yoshira. It says that he came from beyond a Realm called Athor and that he became the first king of the Tehamut (whoever or whatever they are). He is credited with establishing various festivals based around moon phases, animal husbandry, and religion.
When Yosira first came to the land of the Tehamut, the prevailing religious doctrine, taught by a bunch of local priests, was that every human was dual-souled, comprising a spirit of good and a spirit of evil that waged a constant inner battle for supremacy. Now, The Kolbrin is quite sweet at this point, because it doesn’t outright bag that belief system, calling it instead ‘an earthly distortion of reflected Truth’ and points out – quite rightly in my opinion – that Truth can only really be revealed when there is a commensurate degree of understanding. Lightbearers, says The Kolbrin, are needed to bring and grow that understanding; and who does it say was the greatest Lightbearer of them all? Yes, you’ve guessed it, our old mate Yosira.
Apparently, before Yosira came along, the priests of the Tehamut put it about that the ‘Great God’ reserved the gift of immortality only for his favourites. The Kolbrin does bag that bit, pointing out that playing favourites is not a hallmark of a ‘Great’ being. It then goes on to give its opinion on what a true priest should be; i.e. somebody who should only pass on to followers something that they themselves fully and truly understand. To do otherwise is the blind (mis)leading the blind. But the scribe does concede that in those far off days nobody really knew what the whole shebang was really all about, and we are informed that all men really believed in was a darkness populated by the dead who were dressed in long hair and feathers and ate only sand and dust. Lovely!
But after saying that was all men really believed in, the book goes on to claim they also believed that souls who rose ‘to glory’ actually ate the food and wore the clothes provided for that purpose; and that a soul’s continued existence after death depended entirely on regular offerings – incense and the like – made to it by those still alive.
This chapter’s quite bitsy and it jumps now to telling us that an Enlightener’s job is not a cushy one and that a major drawback is being attacked by those who just don’t want to hear that they’re going to have to change their ways. One such group (presumably the priests) got all antsy because Yosira called out their hypocrisy for forbidding the slaying of men and women but allowing children to be sacrificed and even – and this is nasty – being buried beneath the pillars of newly raised temples.
We then get a rather lengthy, parable like passage, designed to show what a great and wise statesman Yosira was . . .
At one point, Yosira was in the land ‘far up the River of Life’; that is The Nile. There, his right-hand man, one Azulah, killed a man who seems to have belonged to a tribe that used the Leopard as its totem. Now leopards are native to sub-Saharan and northeast Africa (amongst other places) so Yosira must have been somewhere far upstream along The Nile. Anyway, it all kicked off and some Leopard people travelled eastwards into Azulah’s country to seek revenge. Azulah, though, had done a runner, so the Leopard men went home and had their priests ‘call down the war power’ from their gods, and, because Yosira was Azulah’s overlord, the Leopard army went marching out to do battle with Yosira himself.
The next bit’s very interesting, because it sounds like our mate Yosira was up to his old tricks of using potions and whatnot to get his way. When the Leopard host was drawn up outside Yosira’s camp, writes the scribe, their priest ‘defiled’ himself on the night before the battle. This somehow made the ‘war power’ transfer over to Yosira who supposedly used it to turn the Leopard soldiers’ knees to jelly and bowels to liquid, causing them to flee. So what was this ‘war power’? Could it have been some kind of magical force (much like that stored in the Ark of the Covenant by the Israelites and used to smite their enemies) or – more likely in my opinion – a psychological edge caused in a very prosaic way by Yosira doing something like poisoning the enemy’s water supply.
It was what Yosira did next that marks him out as a wise leader and statesman. Having pursued the Leopard people back as far as their forests on the far side of The Nile, Yosira released a prisoner to advise the Leopard priests that if they came to meet him, he would listen and ascertain whether they had a just grievance over Azulah. The priests came down to the far bank’s edge and repeated their demands for vengeance, so Yosira pulled yet another swifty and stage-managed a kind of trial by ordeal. He told the Leopard priests that Azulah would be tried by the ‘God of the Moving Waters’. He would be thrown into the river and the God would decide whether he lived or died. Now, this is fine mumbo-jumbo and high theatre, and it was right up the Leopard priests’ street because they believed in all that higher powers stuff, so they agreed. But Yosira already knew that Azulah was a strong swimmer and, furthermore, apparently had used his own hocus pocus to make the water bear Azulah up; so Azulah, of course, survived unscathed. Now that is what I call manipulating the situation to get what you want – Yosira doing what Yosira did best. You can’t help but admire the bloke.
With Azulah now safe, Yosira could take the whole thing one step further to make sure there was no repeat performance – from either side. So he convened what sounds like a multilateral conference which included the Leopard people and other communities round about and got everyone to agree upon a system that would prevent any future murder escalating into all out warfare.
The rules he came up with were as follows: (1) If a man killed another within his own society/tribe he could be either slain himself or thrown out and banished. (2) If a man killed another from a different society/tribe then he exposed himself to vengeance from either his own people or the people from the victim’s society/tribe. If the family – or society/tribe – of the murderer wanted to avoid a revenge killing, then they were to send a ‘token’ (it’s not made explicit but it sounds like some kind of Wergild – literally Man Money) to the slain man’s family along with an account of how the killing occurred. They also had to commit to punishing the murderer themselves and send evidence or having done so to the slain man’s people.
Now, because Yosira had devised this system to be fair to everyone and it had the added benefit that a single murder was not going to escalate into internecine warfare, all parties bound themselves to the new rules with a mighty oath and, because Yosira understood that you needed to spice up your practical innovations with a bit of mumbo jumbo, he had everyone agree that if any party should not stick to the new system, then the ‘night terrors and blood shades’ would be summoned to fall upon both the murderer and all his kindred. Nice one, Yosira.
Yosira was evidently on a roll, because he took the same opportunity to reinforce some of his other stipulations about living the kind of life that would benefit a society. We’ve heard all this before in previous chapters, but amongst his ‘new’ guidelines were that meat that been left lying around for a while (such as from a sacrifice or slain by other beasts or simply dropped dead of its own accord) was unclean and accursed, and not to be eaten. Again, this is basic, common-sense food hygiene.
The chapter winds up with Yosira basically travelling throughout the land, correcting men’s wickedness, and dishing out some more tools to create a safe and healthy civilisation such as creating and managing waterways and reading the heavens to better manage agriculture. He also built what sounds like a new capital, which he called Piseti, by draining the swamps and clearing the reeds, and there he built the first temple of brick and stone, in which he organised a body of official recorders to better run the developing society.
But as always happens when you start taking power away from others, the priests started to feel neglected and disenfranchised so they stirred up trouble and Yosira was forced to flee with his family and relatives to a place called ‘The Land of God’, leaving behind only his wife and their youngest son because they were, at that time, visiting her father in Kantoyamtu, the land, apparently, from which The Great River flowed (which would make it either the Burundi/Rwanda area or Ethiopia depending on whether we are talking about the Blue or White Nile). The priests had used the old chestnut of promised immortality to stir the people up against Yosira, saying that their true birth right was physical immortality as opposed to Yosira’s teaching that bodily death was simply a sign that the life-force – or soul – had departed elsewhere.
Normal order was resumed when Yosira’s son, Manindu, who led the so-called Mesiti (the ‘workers in brass’ apparently, but as brass, an alloy of copper and zinc wasn’t supposedly invented until around 500 BC, we’re probably talking copper here) reconquered the country – probably by employing superior weaponry – thereby allowing Yosira to return.
The Kolbrin’s recounting of Yosira rather peters out here, because all the last sentence of the chapter tells us is that after the time of Yosira’s son, Manindu, the people forgot all about the God of Gods, mainly because the priests were at it again and promoting other ‘small gods’ of their own devising, ones who promised more immediate and tangible returns on obedience to their belief system than the rather more ‘distant’ and spiritual rewards of the God of Gods. The light of truth, says The Kolbrin, faded and the real Truth became diluted until only a poor version of it stuttered and fitted in small, hidden shrines.
Well, that’s it for Yosira/Osiris, but what a character! You could accuse him of being a bit of a con-artist and, well yes, you’d be right, but we all know that being a good politician or a statesman demands some degree of con-artistry, and Yosira seems only ever to have resorted to it in order to bring greater benefit to the people. To create a new, better society, he made sure that the dice were always loaded in his favour and he certainly wasn’t above a bit of outright cheating (as with Azulah’s swimming ability in this chapter) to make sure things turned out for the best. But we’re not going to criticise him for that, are we? After all, life is 70 percent theatre.
So what about the self-help aspects of this chapter, then? Well, I think that this chapter conveys two separate messages. The first is not to believe everything we are told – even it comes from seeming ‘authorities’ (amongst whom may be included priests, academics, and various ‘experts’ who get trotted out on TV to give the ‘definitive’ opinion on something or other). Especially, don’t get suckered into believing everything you read on social media. Weigh up everything by employing your Reason, with a capital R, and make up your own mind. Your assessment is just as valid as anyone else’s and, where the subject matter is yourself, only you know yourself best, only what you think matters. This is one of the most liberating lessons a human can learn: It is what you think about yourself that really matters – what comes from elsewhere is merely opinion.
The second message is to try to see the big picture. It’s easy to knee-jerk react to a situation – as the Leopard men did in this chapter – but far harder to assess a situation, think about it, and then work out a long term solution that will benefit all parties. Taking revenge when you have the upper hand – as Yosira refused to do – is a cheap and short-lived pleasure. A far greater and longer-lasting pleasure comes from working out a way forward that will be to everyone’s advantage and prevent what caused the original crisis from ever recurring – and that is true of any dealing with family, friends, or work colleagues. Often, others don’t have the self-control to prevent themselves from petty acts of spite or revenge – but everyone’s capable of reining themselves in and working out a solution. It’s up to you to be the bigger person.
OK, that’s it for this one. The next chapter’s called The Voice of God and it’s a bit pompous and heavy going (even The Kolbrin says it’s a difficult text that has been amended somewhat over time) but I’ll do my best to make it an entertaining read. I hope to see you there.
