Welcome back to the Book of Gleanings, being a part of The Kolbrin. The last section saw Hurmanetar and Yadol arrive near a place called Machur which we were told was near the forest of cedars. If you thought the last episode was a ripping yarn, just wait till you read this one. It tells how Yadol met his fate and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all, because it’s such a mish-mash of tales and legends that are familiar to us from other sources. It’s in chapters within The Kolbrin like this one, that I almost feel like dismissing the whole work as just a New Age attempt to wrest some sort of moral code and message from a cobbled together mixture of stories that have been plundered from a wide range of original philosophical, religious, folkloric, and mythic sources. That doesn’t necessarily mean that The Kolbrin is a fake, rather that its claim to be a collection of authentic original writings should be viewed as a literary technique; a bit like if I were to cobble together ideas I’d taken from a range of Greek and Roman philosophers and pass them off as a self-help book written by an ascetic monk from a monastery in early medieval Europe. My primary purpose – offering self-help – would be heart-felt and genuine, and claiming a fictitious, long dead monk as its author would be only a ploy to add a little narrative authenticity and mystery to my endeavours. Of course, The Kolbrin could be totally genuine. I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
This passage on the death of Yadol is full of echoes from other traditions. In it I discern the Anglo-Saxon epics: Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, Herodotus’ accounts of the Greeks versus Persians battles, any number of philosophical death scenes (such as Tacitus’ account of Seneca’s and Plato’s account of Socrates’), Krishna’s famous speech to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita as the pair stand between the opposing armies at the Battle of Kurukshetra – and that’s to name just a few. But let’s start with the plot (and, in order to keep it simple, I’ll limit the characters and places involved – of which there are many in this absolute belter of a story – to just the important ones):
As we begin, let’s just bring to mind my take (whether it’s right or wrong) on the Hurmanetar/Yadol relationship, which I interpreted metaphorically as that between a developing and conflicted human personality (Hurmanetar) and its steady conscience or ‘higher-self’ (Yadol). In self-help terms, the relationship is the difference between a human who has the potential to evolve but still allows emotions and passions to let them down and lead them astray, and that same human once they have mastered their impulses and urges, passed everything through a filter of Reason, and learned to react in a consistent manner to whatever life throws at them. Right, on with the story:
Hurmanetar grew rich over time. His new-found wealth drew him back into a world of meaningless materialism and he gradually forgot the teachings of his guru-like mother, Nintursu. Moreover, ‘The Great Key’ we learned he’d inherited in the last episode (whether it was a physical object or a metaphor for a stream of occult knowledge) lay hidden and unused. Hurmanetar had a farm overseer called Noaman who turned out to be an embezzler, had his fingers chopped off as a punishment, and was kicked out to eventually become the servant of Sabitur who lived on the road to Milikum outside the city of Kithim where the great queen Daydee ruled (I’ll only point out the glaring echoes from other traditions in this chapter, and this is certainly one of them, with Daydee sounding to me suspiciously like Queen Dido of Aeneid fame. Although Dido ruled over ancient Carthage, she originated from Phoenicia which is modern day Lebanon, a country synonymous with cedar trees – there’s even one on their flag – and, of course, Hurmanetar and Yadol had ended up near ‘the forest of cedars’). Kithim, apparently, was the region’s market town (or city) and our Hurmanetar went there to pay his corn tribute before a great religious festival.
Cut to another king of the region (possibly one of those Hurmanetar and Yadol had run foul of in the last episode). This king had recently succeeded his father who’d been killed ‘because of the thing hidden in an earthenware box’ (that fascinating little snippet is, sadly, not enlarged upon). The new king was prophesied to have a great and prosperous reign so long as he never quarrelled with a queen or killed a child. Hearing this, he thought it’d be a smart idea to do a bit of sucking up to the best known queen in the area, Daydee, and so set off to Kithim himself. On his way, he encountered Hurmanetar’s corrupt ex-overseer, Noaman, who told the king malicious lies about Hurmanetar. These fake rumours were reported to Daydee who had Hurmanetar arrested as he entered the city. Just like the Aeneid’s Queen Dido, though, Daydee was no fool, and a quick audience with Hurmanetar convinced her the reports were mere slander. As a result of the encounter, Hurmanetar was favoured by Daydee and, just like Aeneas with Dido in the Aeneid, he hung around the palace rather than moved on.
Hurmanetar and Daydee grew closer until they eventually had a son together. But although Kithim was peaceful, in the lands all around, unrest and civil war raged. The king we mentioned earlier had gathered his forces and was now ready to make war on Kithim. He and his men were known as the The Children of Githesad the Serpent, ‘the Cunning One, whose mother had brought defilement into the race of men’. Apparently, this lot had no concept of justice or mercy. Bad apples the lot of ’em.
While Daydee’s panicked priests and people sloped off up the holy mountain to beseech their god, Yahana, for help, Daydee herself remained practical and calm, and appointed Hurmanetar as War Captain. Hurmanetar knew he’d be massively outnumbered in the upcoming battle, so he made preparations and laid his plans accordingly. He immediately set the armourers to work, manufacturing spears from willow wood, and casting axes. In addition, he freed Turten, a man who had become a slave because of his principles, as Hurmanetar knew him to be a mighty and master bowman, and put him in charge of the archers. By crikey, it’s all getting very exciting, isn’t it?
The fateful day arrived and the two hosts faced off on the battle plain. Hurmanetar sent Turten forward to have a reccy. He returned with the news that the men of Kithim were, indeed, hugely outnumbered. He gave Hurmanetar an account of the numbers and battle-array of the opposition and, in a catalogue that could have come straight out of the Iliad, the Aeneid, The Battle of Maldon, or any number of epic battle accounts, he listed the nature and arms of some mighty and famed individual warriors and captains in the enemy ranks. The list of champions in Turten and Hurmanetar’s own army was dispiritingly tiny in comparison. The narrative technique is all designed, of course, to heighten the excitement and increase the odds against the underdog so that the final outcome is all the more astounding.
Hurmanetar then delivers a belting pre-battle exhortation to his troops of the type beloved of Greek and Roman historiographers, and many others through the ages when accounts of battles didn’t allow the truth to get too much in the way of a good story. Think of your reputations as men! he cries out, you don’t want to be remembered as cowards, rally your courage! stand firm with your comrades! death before dishonour! and so on and so forth. And then Hurmanetar finishes his speech off with a thunderous war cry, accompanied by the bashing of drums and wild blowing of war trumpets.
The opening slingshot, arrow, and spear salvos commenced. Incidentally, Hurmanetar’s spear-captain was called Lugal, he ‘of the bright weapons’, which has just got to be a play on the Irish warrior god Lugh of the Tuatha Dé Danann who wielded a fiery, magical spear.
The narrative in this passage of The Kolbrin suddenly shifts to the first person. Somebody who names themselves as Ancheti (who later reveals himself to be a nephew of Hurmanetar) starts to give an eye-witness account of the battle proper. Ancheti describes himself as a youth in his first battle, jelly-limbed and terrified out of his wits, his courage hanging by a thread, and only prevented from fleeing in fear and panic by the staunch courage in the face of overwhelming odds displayed by Hurmanetar and his champions. But here’s the interesting bit, because next to Ancheti stood Yadol, whom he calls ‘the wild tender man’. Yadol gives Ancheti a mini sermon very much in the vein of Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita (in which Krishna is quite happy to be Arjuna’s charioteer but refuses to have anything to do with the killing itself). There is no benefit in victory, says Yadol, because establishing mastery over men is a futile and pointless exercise. To a man like Yadol, what pleasure is there in killing? Why do men kill each other? Their opponents, he says, (and this bit could almost be extracted verbatim from the Bhagavad Gita) have mothers, wives, and children. Many of them are good men led by evil ones. Yadol asserts he will kill nobody, ‘not even for the kingdom of the three spheres’, an allusion to the occult belief that the multiverse comprises three levels of existence that are often depicted as interlocking, or even concentric, circles. It is right, he says, that evil men die, but in the case of battle, it is they who tend to lurk safe behind shields while the good are sent forward into the fray to perish in the clash of arms. Is it right, he asks Ancheti, to kill a fellow being? There will be a karmic debt to pay. Even though some men are so drunk with material greed that they are happy to kill for it, would it not be better for all good men to refuse to fight on their behalf? Yadol decries the stupidity and absurdity of man that thousands will be slain that day; and for what? Some gemmy baubles and a short-lived earthly kingdom? He will, he states, refrain from killing and stand bare-breasted, inviting a blow so that at least it will be his own innocent blood that he ends up lying in. Wow! Powerful stuff! But, if this was Yadol’s attitude, then what on earth was he doing in the battle lines in the first place? There is a narrative reason, but we’ll come to that in a moment.
Time and again the men of Kithim, bolstered and set an example by their indefatigable leader, repulsed the waves of enemy charges. There were massive losses and the carnage was steadily thinning out the ranks on both sides. During one lull, Hurmanetar fell back a little to console poor old Yadol who, despite not being willing to enter the fray, nevertheless stood courageously amongst the men. In contrast, Ancheti, the narrator of this passage, was terrified. There is big difference on the battlefield, says Ancheti, between men of gentleness and goodwill like Yadol who, despite their beliefs, are willing to stay and, through their own courage, give heart to others, and the craven-hearted, amongst whom Ancheti numbers himself, who just stand there and quake in terror.
Sensing that the enemy was faltering, Hurmanetar gave one last rallying cry to his men to stand firm. He does not know which side’s victory would best suit the purpose of god but he exhorts his remaining men to fight now for loyalty and honour, because at least, there, they are on philosophically safe ground. What Hurmanetar is expressing here is the concept of dharma or Duty with a capital ‘D’. Again this is something that comes through strongly in the Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna is advised by Krishna that he must free himself from the constraints of compassion and guilt at killing people he knows and recognises in the enemy ranks, because his duty that day at Kurukshetra was to win the battle. Hurmanetar does the same in this battle near Kishim. He has abandoned the conundrum of who is right or wrong in the greater scheme of things, and is limiting his thinking and actions only to what he knows must be done at this particular moment in time.
Driven by their Captain’s will-power, Hurmanetar’s line holds firm. The enemy breaks and withdraws, defeated, from the battlefield. But Hurmanetar’s exultation is short-lived as he spots Yadol lying mortally wounded amongst the fallen. Yadol, that gentle, nature-loving man of peace and hater of violence had, it seems, deliberately taken a spear thrust meant for the quavering Ancheti. Cradled in Hurmanetar’s arms, the dying Yadol delivers his final earthly words, and they contain both a prophecy and a moral sermon:
Hurmanetar, he says, has a great albeit difficult destiny ahead of him. He tells his long-time companion not to weep for him because – and this is a bit of a swipe at his friend – those who think that they can end an existence by slaying do not realise that the spirit of man is immortal (an idea that goes back to the dawn of time although its appearance in Christianity is attributed to nicking the concept from Socratic and Platonic thought – too big a subject to go into here). Yadol’s spirit, he says, is withdrawing to its proper abode safe from man-made perils. What is life? he asks. It is a frail thing indeed when seen against the backdrop of a blood-drenched slaughter field. The battle-dead, he says, will pass on to a new plane of existence while those left behind can revel in the earthly glory of victory. So there is no need to grieve over the fallen. Yadol can see the welcoming light beyond the veil. His last words are to promise Hurmanetar that they will meet again.
The closing words of this chapter, Yadol’s epitaph on his tomb back amongst the hills and trees and wild animals, are a bit naff considering the breathless action that precedes them: ‘He was a man of peace and died because other men were not as he’. Could have been a lot more powerful than that in my opinion.
Well, that was a humdinger of a story and no mistake, but what are we to make of it?
I suppose we’d better start with all the echoes from other traditions which, I reckon, are pretty blatant and transparent. But, in The Kolbrin’s defence, I’m going to call to the witness stand the late Terry Pratchett, who, when it came to the observation of human nature, was one of the greatest satirists of this or any other age. According to Mr. Pratchett, it is not the characters but the story that is important. The same story-line; that is, the same sequence of events, can be found in cultures widely separated by time and distance. And that’s no wonder, because the gamut of human experience – what can and can’t happen to us in life – is relatively limited. We experience the same triumphs and/or make the same mistakes over and over again throughout history. The backdrop may vary slightly, the props may become more advanced, but the story-line remains essentially the same. Whether it’s a primitive hunter-gatherer on the Eurasion Steppe, an Inca warrior in a remote Andes valley, or a millenial office worker in a modern city, there will always be situations caused by differences in human character and personality and it is those elements, and the conflicts and alliances caused by them, that are the ingredients of stories. So, all that the compiler of this section of The Kolbrin has done is insert his own characters into a scenario – or sequence of events – that is as old as human interaction itself. Shakespeare hit the nail bang on the head when he wrote that ‘all the world’s a stage’.
The other issue that needs to be dealt with is what was Yadol, a self-professed man of peace, doing on a battle-field? Well, apart from providing the stalwart counterpart to Ancheti’s cowardice and thereby demonstrating how fear and passion can be stoically overcome, I feel we have to get back to my suggestion at the beginning of this section where I hazarded that Yadol and Hurmanetar are two aspects of the same person. In the previous episode, we noted how it was often difficult for them to come together as ‘companions’. Whenever Hurmanetar started to backslide – for instance when he slipped back into banditry and meat eating after he and Yadol had initially shacked up together in a mountain cave, or when he took up with the prostitute Hesurta – Yadol would pull away and disappear for a while. They only worked in concert, as it were, when Hurmanetar was being a good boy, such as when he and Yadol came under the instruction of Hurmanetar’s mother in the Temple of the Seven Enlightened Ones. So I think we have to look at this episode in the same way. Right at the beginning we are told that Hurmanetar has veered back towards materialism and has forgotten, or hidden away, the mysterious (but obviously spiritually important) Key of Life. Accordingly, there is no mention at all of Yadol until the battle scene and, even then, he does not encounter Hurmanetar until well after the fighting has begun when Hurmanetar is well into all the blood-letting and killing.
So I guess my interpretation of what’s going on here is this: Hurmanetar has backslid spiritually. He is enjoying material wealth and he even appears to be enjoying, or at least glorying in, the battle slaughter. Yadol’s passing, at this stage of Hurmanetar’s story, is, to me, the ending of a stage. Hurmanetar has been unable to come to spiritual enlightenment through the relatively easy path of just learning from experience and making a permanent change to his behaviour and character. He has been unable to permanently crystallise within himself what being a more evolved soul actually entails. Yadol, in essence, has given up. Conscience alone (that’s Yadol) has not been sufficient to generate permanent change in Hurmanetar, so, from now on in, it’s going to be no more Mr. Nice Guy. Yadol himself hints at this when he tells Hurmanetar that he has a great destiny in front of him but it will not be easy.
Please join me in the next episode in which Hurmanetar is forced to confront his conscience, Yadol, yet again. This time by journeying to the Underworld. Oh My!
