Welcome back to the Book of Gleanings, being a part of The Kolbrin. Well, the previous section seemed to be all about not taking things at face value; that is, about stopping and thinking about what you, yourself, are doing, about what is happening around you, and also what is happening to you. This section is all about what happens to humanity when its wickedness becomes irreversible. Once again, there are echoes of several other ancient traditions in this passage which is simply entitled The Deluge. In it, we will encounter the tradition of a Great Flood after the manner of the biblical story of Noah or the Greek myth of Deucalion along with vestiges of Plato’s Republic, but I’ll deal with those as we meet them. There’s not a hell of a lot of deep psychology going on in these paragraphs, just the bog standard dire warnings about not hacking off the Creator/Nature/Architect of the Universe/Goddess/God (delete as appropriate) to the extent that humanity gets pretty much wiped from the face of the planet. But what does make this section on The Deluge interesting is that ‘The Destroyer’ puts in another appearance, and this time the damage it inflicts is described slightly differently to earlier passages in The Kolbrin, thereby giving us a little more insight into what this regularly recurring beastie of the skies might actually be.
The passage opens with a rather grandiose reference to The Great Book of the Firehawks (whoever they may have been) in which it is told that the Earth underwent two major destructive incidents, the first – a complete wipe-out event – by fire, and the second – only a partial wipe-out event – by water. The story that follows purports to describe the second, and therefore lesser, ruination.
We start with a litany of the depravities (the ‘earthiness’ as it’s been called in previous chapters) to which humanity has sunk. A yearning for spirituality had become virtually unknown, everyone from the top to bottom of society was corrupt, and desires – or ‘passions’ as the ancient philosophies liked to call them – were absolutely rife. Men and women alike were having a rare old time eating, drinking, having sex, and generally partying up large. The land was not looked after, brawls over women broke out, and public licentiousness was the norm. And when a passage starts like that, well . . . it’s fairly easy to predict what’s coming next.
In a bit of a re-run of earlier chapters, a tribe of ‘manly’ men who inhabited the mountains to the East and North – The Sons of Nezirah, by name – noticed the widespread delinquency of the people of the plains and decided amongst themselves that there were easy pickings to be had down there. The fighting men formed a war-band for just that purpose but their chiefs got wind of the tentative expedition and forbade it, fearing that their own people would themselves be tempted by the lures of luxurious and dissolute living. Besides, they said, a society that had fallen into such soft ways would ultimately implode under its own weight of sin. For a while the chiefs had their way but, in the end, tales brought back by visitors of the ‘treasures and pleasures’ of the cities on the plain below proved too much of a temptation, and the Mountain Men’s war-band, having chosen a captain, descended to wreak havoc.
The defenceless men of the plains surrendered without a fight, the Mountain Men took over, and, sure enough, after a while – and just as their chiefs had feared and warned them against – they began to immerse themselves in all the trappings of dissolute living they had previously so despised. Now it was the Mountain men, those who had come down onto the plains in battle array, who were feasting and drinking and fornicating to excess. But back up in their original mountain home, which was now low in men-folk, the fields were going uncultivated and the crafts were being neglected. Moreover, the Mountain Men had abandoned their own women for the painted Jezebels of the lowland cities.
Cut to three chaps who suddenly turned up one day from a place called Ardis which, The Kolbrin, infers had been wrecked by a volcanic eruption. Now, these fellows were followers of the ‘One God’ and, being clean-living kind of blokes, they got pretty upset at the carryings-on they witnessed in the cities of the plain, so they called upon their God to do something about it. The God wasted no time and he began with a curse – a strange light with a smoky mist which caught at men’s throats – which seems to have been the precursor to something a whole lot worse. The miasma hung around for several days before clearing, but any woman who conceived during that time gave birth to deformed monstrosities. And that was just the start.
In a very strange aside, The Kolbrin tells us that the men of those days had knowledge of pottery, weaving, dyes, eye cosmetics (eh?), herbs, magic, enchantment, and, importantly for us, The Book of Heaven, which included the interpretation of signs and omens, the ‘secrets’ of the seasons and of the moon, and – and this is the important bit for this passage – a knowledge of ‘the coming of the waters’. In other words, this Book of Heaven, contained information that would allow its adepts to predict floods, and this is important for what happened next.
The Sons of Nezirah (that’s the Mountain Men) who hadn’t sloped off to a life of debauchery down in the cities of the plain, remained in the mountains around an encampment called Lamak. Now, this place was hard up against Ardis, from which area had come the three guys (funny how ‘wise-men tend to come in threes) who’d got the One God to bring down the dodgy fog, which, incidentally, seems to have had the same effect as radiation poisoning and/or biological germ warfare. In Ardis, says the scribe of this section of The Kolbrin, lived adepts and practitioners of the knowledge contained in The Book of Heaven, and they were not at all happy with the state of mankind and could see by the signs and portents that everything was coming to a head.
And then things started to get nasty (although we may have to take a bit of a best guess at what some of the terminology used to describe things, actually means). Apparently ‘The Lady of the Night’ (the Moon? A comet?) changed colour and moved faster across the sky, with a head of fire and trailing yellow and orange plumes. This, of course, terrified the inhabitants of the land, who took to a general weeping and wailing and crying out aloud.
The interpreters of the signs went to their king, Sisuda, who lived in a place called Sharepik (which the scribe informs had changed names to Sarapesh by his own time), and told him that man’s wickedness in the land was about to bring about his doom. The king knew to send for another man from Ardis – called Hanok, son of Hogaretur – who’d had some kind of premonition or vision that doom was at hand and that he had to build a great big boat to preserve himself and his family. When he’d taken his foreboding to the local city governors, they’d mocked him because, rather than building his boat by the sea, he said it had to be built up against a mountain and the sea would come to meet him. Only King Sisuda took Hanok seriously and financed the enterprise, allowing the boat to be built ‘on the lake of Namos, close by the river of gold, where it divides’. Hanok and his household were there, along with his brother (who directed the work crews) and his household, and a man called Dwyvan who oversaw the craftsmen.
The boat was 300 cubits long x 50 cubits wide and was ‘finished off above’ by 1 cubit (whatever that last measurement means). Not surprisingly, the length and breadth measurements of Hanok’s boat tally exactly with those given for the biblical Noah’s Ark, although Noah’s boat is also described as being 30 cubits high. We must also consider the ‘coincidence’ that the name Hanok is (if we detract the k) an anagram of Noah, but, hey ho, let’s be charitable and say that either version could have been copied from the other. Anyway, Hanok’s vessel was divided into three decks: the lowest for cattle, the middle for birds, fowl, and plants, and the uppermost for humans. There were separated decks and compartments for food and water, and the whole boat was made of askara wood which was supposedly impervious to both water and worms, and which, like the gopher wood used to build Noah’s Ark, is heard of nowhere else and nobody seems to know what either wood actually is (or was). Traditionally, Noah’s Ark is meant to be analogous to the Jewish Temple (from a dimensional perspective as well as other considerations) but that is not a discussion we have time for here. Also like Noah’s Ark, Hanok’s vessel carried with it the ‘seeds of all living things’.
When all was prepared, the appointed ones entered the vessel and sealed themselves inside. The passenger list is interesting. There was King Sisuda with fourteen blood relatives. The King also took with him two astronomers who knew the skies and seasons; one stonemason; one brick-maker, one weapon-maker; one musician; one baker; one potter; one gardener; one carver of wood and stone; one roofer; one carpenter; one dairyman; one botanist; one plough-maker; one weaver and dye-maker; one brewer; one lumberjack; one chariot-maker; one dancer; one scribe; one house-builder; one leather-worker; one worker of cedar and willow who was also a hunter; one who knew games and circuses who was also a watchman; one inspector of water and walls; one magistrate who was also a ‘captain of men’. In addition to that little lot there were also Hanok and his brother and their households, Dwyvan the craftsmen overseer, and (bizarrely) six strangers, all men. There are parallels in this passage with Plato’s Republic and the requirement in the ‘Ideal’ state for individuals to be masters of only the one art in which they specialise and at which they excel. The ‘passengers’ aboard the ‘Ark’ represent, in a way, the ingredients necessary for the founding of a new state or nation.
And then came The Destroyer. The Kolbrin says that it was ‘newly released from the confines of the sky vaults’ and, interestingly, refers to it as a ‘She’. She arrived with the dawn, riding on a seething black cloud, and raged around the sky. The ‘beast with her’ spewed out fire and smoke and what sound like lumps of molten rock. The sky was smothered in this celestial nightmare from horizon to horizon and, when evening finally came, the courses of the stars had altered. And then came the flood.
The description is very explicit and, in my opinion, quite telling. The Kolbrin describes the waters of the Earth as if they are almost sloshing around. It sounds as if the very planet has been jolted and the basins of the oceans spilled up over the land masses. The air masses, too, were in complete turmoil, with tornadoes, hurricanes, and whirlwinds wrecking and obliterating all trace that civilisation had ever existed. It is almost as if the very crust of the Earth itself had somehow ‘slipped’, with earthquakes and upheavals leveling hills and mountains and scouring the planet’s surface clean of virtually everything standing on it. The initial searing heat gave way to bitter cold as the water swirled around in confusion. And above everything, there was an awful sound.
The Kolbrin makes it sound as if the planet were actually rocking on its axis, almost as if had taken a glancing blow or a direct hit from some heavenly object and was trying to settle back into its original tilt. If you’ve read the recent findings of the scientific expedition which researched the asteroid impact in the Yucatan area of Central America (the one that is meant to have wiped out the dinosaurs and heralded the rise of the mammals), the seismic and climatological consequences sound suspiciously like what is being described here in The Kolbrin. The stars dashed about as if confused, says the scribe, and ‘the whole of creation was in chaos’. Hanok’s boat was swept up as the waters rose. Everyone not inside perished. In that way, says The Kolbrin, the world’s wickedness and corruption was swept clean away.
The waters continued to slosh around the Earth, filling valleys and surging up mountain ranges, until, finally, The Destroyer passed on in its course into deep space, heading out on the first stage of its next circuit which would eventually bring it back to have yet another crack at the planet it had only just now wrecked. As its baleful gravitational forces faded with distance, the battered Earth settled back into its normal rhythm. The oceans sank back into their basins, coated in scum and debris. And, after many days, Hanok’s vessel came to rest on Kardo, in the mountains of Ashtar, against Nishim in, writes the scribe, The Land of God.
Well, that was all a bit hectic and breathless, but what are we to make of it all? The moral of the story is pretty obvious – toe the line or you’ll get wiped out – and parallels exist for an inundation event in just about every civilisation that has ever been on the planet, so we don’t need to go too far down that track. The Kolbrin’s Flood story, as recounted here, is a fairly thinly veiled adaptation of the account of the biblical Noah, the Greek myth of Deucalion, or the even earlier Mesopotamian legend of Utnapishtim, but it’s the involvement of The Destroyer that makes it interesting and different.
It seems to me that the authors – or compilers – of The Kolbrin are – intentionally or unintentionally – operating on two distinct levels here. If we take the story of Hanok at face value, we get the standard flood parable mixed in with a semi-remembered – but real – natural disaster. In other words, it’s a bit like the threat of the bogey-man to a child but on a society-wide scale: Behave yourself or something terrible will happen. Mankind knows that there is a recurring cosmic nightmare out there that periodically returns to wreck the planet, and (like the bogey-man with a child) uses the threat of it to keep people in line. Obviously, The Destroyer won’t turn up on order – it’s subject to a multi-thousand year orbit, after all – but that does not mean it’s not real and can’t be used as a threat.
The other way of looking at this passage is in purely allegorical terms. Humanity (or society) must behave itself or it will self-destruct under the weight of its own lawlessness. In these terms, The Destroyer is simply a metaphor for the cyclic rise and fall of civilisations, a physical projection of mankind’s innate propensity to bring, through its own stupidity and bad behaviour, total destruction on itself and everything it has achieved and holds dear.
OK, the next installment follows the post-diluvian adventures of Hanok and his descendants. I hope to see you there.
