Welcome back to this series on The Kolbrin which now moves on from The Book of Creation to The Book of Gleanings which, as its name suggests, purports to be a collection of writings from ‘various Culdee books’ (that’s books of the Culdean Trust who published The Kolbrin) that were ‘partially destroyed in Ancient Times’.
This first section tells the story of Maya and Lila, and claims to be from a work originally called The Book of Conception because it deals with ‘man’s conception of The True God in olden times, during the struggle back to the light’. The narrative, often highly allegorical, goes something like this (in my own words, of course):
The original men had a dual nature consisting of beast and potential divinity, and women seemed to prefer the beastly aspect of that nature which really hacked God off, because woman, who alone could give birth, had to contain a spark of divinity to pass down to her offspring so that they could be born with the potential to aspire to higher spiritual things. Bit of a quandary, really.
I’ll just interrupt the narrative here for a moment, because The Book of Gleanings occasionally slips in little aphorisms – or truisms – that seem to have little or no relevance to the narrative flow but are, nevertheless, worth, stopping at and having a think about. ‘The eye that sees earthly things is deceitful, but the eye that sees spiritual things is true’, says the writer in a seeming aside, which is a very hackneyed occult/philosophical concept that traffics in the so-called ‘Veil of Isis’; that is, the ‘curtain’ that prevents our physical senses from interpreting the true Nature of things. The ancient Greek philosophers had a crack at explaining it but, as was their wont, ended up over-complicating the whole thing until it became unintelligible gobbledy-gook. In my opinion, there’s no right way of understanding this. You could say that we all see the world in different ways; that we all live in our own, discreet universe, and that your perception of the colour green, for instance, is different to mine. You could be more mechanical about it and view the concept at a sub-atomic level and say it means that we fail to see the particle dance which is the energy that keeps all things changing and at whose leading edge is Time. Or you could do what the Roman orators did when they were trying to bang home a message and, after gobbing on in wordy syllogisms, slammed home the point in hand by employing a punchy one-liner that summed up all the preceding wind-bagging in a single, easy-to-understand maxim (or sententia as they called it). Later writers understood the power of that technique because it somehow by-passed the intellectual filters and hit you straight in the emotion. As far as the ‘Veil of Isis’ is concerned, I, personally, don’t believe you can do any better than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s quote from The Little Prince: ‘It is only with the heart that you can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye’.
Anyway, back to the story of Maya and Lila. The Kolbrin tells of a race that ‘came out of the cold northlands’, led by a wise-man and headed up by The Grand Company. They were known collectively as The Children of God and, among them, women had more-or-less equal standing with men; their counsel was listened to and they understood, but did not abuse, their sexual allure to males, although their willfulness was sometimes restricted in order to remind them of their responsibility. This was in contrast to the more barbaric tribes who surrounded them, called the Children of Men, amongst the most savage and backwards of which were the so-called Men of Zumat. These tribes treated womankind as chattels – servants and sex toys – because they feared her betraying nature.
The Children of God lived in peace and plenty and were good people, but, as The Kolbrin says, peace and comfort are not conducive to progress (the Law of Threes again; that is, passive and active ingredients collide through a third medium to effect change). The tribe was governed by a wise council and operated under a code of conduct based on a moral tradition that was beneficial to all members of society. Anyone who flouted the code was banished. The Children of God seemed to apply what we’d nowadays call selective racial-engineering, in that the most law-abiding, fittest, and most manly of men got first dabs at the womenfolk and could even take on more than one wife, while ‘lesser’ men had to make do with the leftovers.
There is a lot of waffle at this point about how The Children of God had become great because the menfolk were able to control their sexual impulses and the womenfolk conformed to a strict morality. Whereas there is a message here, in that The Kolbrin is, whether it realises it or not, expressing the benefits of being able to control one’s emotions and passions and convert the raw energy engendered by something as primal as, say, unrequitable lust, into something more useful (a bit like using the energy from anger at something seen on TV to write a letter of support to an aggrieved party), it does all come across as a bit male-chauvinistic to a 21st century audience and can leave you wondering if the authors are just simply pushing a patriarchal agenda. Nevertheless, as I’ve mentioned in previous sections, if these writings are genuine, they are products of their time, and it’s our job to read the more objective message that underlies the social commentary, outdated though that social commentary may sound to the modern reader.
So, as often happens in ‘ideal’ societies – or utopias -, along comes a fellow who begins to question the whole set-up. How do I know that this way, the traditional way, is the best way, just because you council of elders says so? he asks, and is promptly banished for his impertinence. But Maya, the most desirable and upright woman in the tribe, thinks she can see beyond the arrogant strutting of the exiled male (another illustration of looking beneath the surface for the reality of something, the theme that runs like a thread through this section) and so heads out into the wilderness to persuade him, with herself as potential mate as a reward, to return to the tribe and act contrite in front of the elders so that he would be accepted back into the fold. This he did, and was taken back in, but on the proviso he prove himself by conforming to the expected and traditional code of conduct for a set period of time. The problem was that he then performed his manly duties in such an exemplary fashion that other women among The Children of God started to get the hots for him as well.
Lila was one of these women but, because she wasn’t as physically desirable as Maya, didn’t think she stood a chance. One day, however, spotting the man entering the forest alone, she seized her chance, followed him, and attempted to seduce him by playing on his previous concerns about the tribe’s traditional ways, and then offering her body in total submission, something Maya had not, up to that point, done. It was the full on, temptress vamp, yet the man (who is never named and so must be taken as representing the masculine ‘norm’), after struggling for a while with conflicting desires, managed to rebuff her. But Lila wasn’t about to give up just yet. She concocted a potion designed to incite lust and, pretending to be contrite for her previous brazenness, offered it to the man to drink. The inevitable ensued and, despite hating himself when the potion wore off for giving in and having sex with Lila, the pair met up frequently afterwards to slake their mutual lust.
The rest of the story is predictable enough. The council of elders found out about the pair and their scandalous behaviour and banished them both. The man blamed Lila, but she continued seducing away other Children of God so that her original man’s following grew. The men of the new tribe greedily swallowed Lila’s seductions that the lot of women was to provide sexual pleasure to men, and, persuaded by her that they were more manly than the menfolk of The Children of God, they eventually invaded the tilled lands of that people, slaughtered its menfolk, burned its dwellings and carried off its women into bondage. This section of The Kolbrin ends by decrying Lila as an archetypal betrayer of humanity – even accusing her of encouraging her grown up sons to eat their own father to absorb his strength and wisdom (a common justification given for cannibalism as a rite) – and points the bone at her for reducing females to servility to men because she yielded to her base desires when she should have been pursuing her sex’s potential to become guardians of the portals of life and, through that, humanity’s ultimate divinity.
So, there’s a lot going on here. Lila is, of course, the Eve of Primal Sin, all rolled up with the goddess Ishtar/Astarte, and, here in The Kolbrin carries a name chosen to resonate with the biblical seductress (De)Lila. She also brings to mind the mythical seductress Lilith, she of the astrological black moon, known to the Babylonians as a sand demoness, and to the Jews as the temptress at the beginning of time, dangerous to men and women alike. The morally upright Maya, is, again of course, the Earth Mother, Ceres, for whose proper functioning everything must run as ordered (just as it did in the symbiotic ‘utopia’ of the tilled lands of The Children of God). When the planetary boat is rocked, chaos ensues. But Maya can also mean ‘illusion’, and maybe a society that runs like clockwork is just that – an illusion of permanence – because anything that stops, stagnates and dies. Change is energy. Energy is Change. And it’s been said that Chaos is simply part of a bigger pattern (the late, wonderful Terry Pratchett, that most brilliant of satirists, explains this very well in his book Thief of Time) because, in time, out of even the biggest mess that we perceive as chaos, a new order, somewhere, sometime, shakes itself out.
Or am I reading too much into this passage of The Kolbrin, and is it simply about the dualistic nature of women – lasciviousness versus divine – as seen through the eyes of a bunch of patriarchal traditionalists?
I’d better stop this installment here as I’m in danger of rattling on and disappearing down rabbit-holes. The next section tells the story of Eloma, a fey and whimsical passage that touches on the Music of the Spheres. I hope to see you there.
