Welcome back to the Book of Gleanings, being a part of The Kolbrin. In the last chapter, The Kolbrin introduced us to Yosira, a kind of olden times prophet cum evangelizer cum civilizer. Yosira claimed great knowledge, both mundane and arcane, and wasn’t backwards in coming forwards when it came to blowing his own trumpet. If we recall, he seemed to fully understand that the comparatively primitive societies he was dealing with did not have the education or vocabulary to grasp his messages about personal hygiene, safe food preparation, and the societal dangers of incest, adultery, and sexual profligacy; and so, in the time-honoured tradition of societal leaders before and after, he dressed his teachings up as a form of supernatural scaremongering, telling the people that all sorts of weird and wonderful demons would have at them if they didn’t do things his way.
This next chapter, entitled The Rule of Yosira, enlarges, in part, on what has gone before but also introduces some new – and rather strange – concepts, which we’ll have a go at interpreting as we work our way through the passage. It’s another rather long passage but it does contain some interesting (and, at times, rather grisly and disturbing material) so please bear with me.
So, like the previous chapter, this one opens with Yosira stating his credentials: ‘I am the Dawnlighter from beyond Bashiru,’ he tells his sons, ’I am the Torchbearer for the God of Gods’, and then launches into another set of standards (= laws) for how a stable society should operate.
The first is a little weird, as it is not clear exactly what circumstances Yosira is referring to. He tells his ‘sons’ (probably a term that covers all his followers) not to mutilate already dead bodies with a spear or arrow or else their hands and arms will swell up and be consumed by fever and ‘become things of evil’. Now, we might suspect this to be yet another of Yosira’s clever little verbal tricks to prevent disease being picked up, this time from a rotting corpse, but he then goes on to warn that anybody who fires those same types of weapons against anybody will be accursed. The exceptions are the men of ‘Tamuera’ (which sounds suspiciously like ‘Tamerua’, the land mentioned at the beginning of the last chapter that Yosira was attempting to convert). These chaps, apparently, were so far removed from any chance of redemption, that even the curse couldn’t affect them; so they were to die by the same weapons they unleashed. Well, what to make of that? Was Yosira advocating close-quarters fighting? Did he consider weapons of ‘remote’ destruction like spears and arrows somehow ‘unmanly’? Who knows . . . this section is rather confused in my opinion.
The next directive is a bit easier to understand. It’s to do with sensible resource – specifically, wood – management. No tree that stood over twice the height of a man could be chopped for burning or land clearance unless it was cleanly felled by an axe and the wood used by a craftsman. Yosira is quite the Greenie because he puts a value on trees and acknowledges their life-force. He sets them on the same level as sheep and oxen and warns that their lives not be taken wantonly. He also believes that trees are responsible for moving wind across the Earth and that huge forests to the North and South are responsible for generating the moving air masses in the first place – but, hey, he was writing (supposedly) a long time ago and so can’t be expected to get everything right! But it’s how Yosira ends his little lecture on looking after trees that I find quite beautiful. ‘Is it not more reasonable to dedicate a mighty tree or a grove of trees to a god,’ he asks, ‘than a mute stone or object cut from wood?’ I certainly think so – and so did a lot of other ancient cultures.
But then he goes and spoils it. Yosira’s reverence for trees meant he did not prevent the people from burying their dead within groves of trees, but he insisted that tending them was women’s work and implies that it was not a ‘manly’ pastime. And here we hit yet again on The Kolbrin’s absolute insistence that the purpose of male and female and their respective roles within society are explicit and separate. I’ve said it before in this series, and I’ll say it again: The Kolbrin and, by extension, its Good Religion, believes, contrary to much modern thinking, that men and women are totally natural opposites – like night and day, or sun and rain – and, just like those natural opposites, each serves an essential purpose totally distinct from (yet, somehow, complementary to) the other. It is very binary.
Moving on, Yosira then taught the people how to live safely by the riverside. Reading between the lines of the text, he obviously introduced some riparian management so they were no longer at danger from tides or floods, and decreed that it was unhealthy to live by still water unless it had abundant fish stocks (which, I would say, meant that the mosquito larvae were gobbled up before they could become a problem).
And at this point the chapter begins to get interesting and a whole lot weirder. I’ll do my best to interpret what’s going on, but feel free to make up your own minds:
Now, apparently, at the time Yosira first arrived amongst them, the people were in the habit of appeasing the ‘formless ones’ we encountered in the last chapter – the ubiquitous lukim – with gifts and worship; but Yosira was having none of it. He surrounded the entire land with a protective wall (which I am choosing to take figuratively – what he actually created was a kind of area of enlightened thinking) and evicted all evil spirits that were dwelling within, whether they were inhabiting human bodies that were ‘neither male nor female’ (people who did not fit Yosira’s absolute interpretation of what was ‘manly’ or what was ‘womanly’) or had possessed the form of a beast or bird (so I am assuming anything dangerous to humans such as crocodiles, vultures and the like, or animals humans could not control, such as rabid dogs).
How does Yosira justify all this? Well, like many leaders before and after his time, he called in the cavalry of Philosophy. I had to read the next bit very carefully to wring any real sense out of it, but what I think is going on is this:
The people of the land were gathered into clans (24 of them apparently) each represented by – or exhibiting the behavioural characteristics of – a forest beast, or a bird, or a serpent. Now, Yosira was savvy enough to understand that blood-ties – kinship – run deep, and extended families have a tendency to stick together and become jealous and defensive of their ‘own’. He realised he could not forbid that very human trait, but he understood that it could be detrimental to a wider society in which several different clans were gathered together. So he didn’t deter the people from more or less socialising and operating within their own bloodlines, but he did forbid any one bloodline from gaining ascendancy and ruling over the others. Yosira believed that the seeds of destiny are sown within us as individuals and are not a collective clan effort.
Yosira’s reasons for forbidding dynastic rule were many, and included the need for a greater intermingling of the gene-pool; to which end, he also introduced outsiders – just as Romulus was alleged to have been forced to do in order that his fledgling Rome would grow and thrive.
Next comes the weird bit. Apparently, Yosira knew the secrets of something called hokew, secrets that he revealed to his followers and which were supposedly known up to the day at which the scribe was recording all this stuff. But what on earth is this hokew? The scribe says it is something that ‘sustains the Dawndwellers’ (the spirits of the dead, perhaps?), and that it is ‘thinly spread throughout the Earth’ and that in former times (prior to Yosira, that is) men could gather it and store it in stones and sacred objects. The hokew can be drawn upon by the human spirit and it bestows fertility to increase flocks and crops. And just in case that wasn’t esoteric and vague enough for you, hokew’s secrets are known by the Twice Born (a phrase used in many disciplines to refer to initiates; that is, those who were born physically and then ‘born again’ into initiated knowledge). I’ll have a crack at what this mysterious hokew is at the end of this commentary.
So, who are these Dawndwellers? The next passage gives us a bit more of a clue. Yosira reveals that he has a Father (with a capital F) who dwells in a place (or realm, or plane of existence, or dimension) called Kanogmahu, and upon whom he can call when he needs guidance. There is a bit of a hierarchy going on because Yosira forbids his own followers to call upon this ‘Father’ because Yosira, as the Father’s emissary on Earth, is supposed to perform that function for them. Hmmm, bit convenient that, I thought, especially when Yosira justifies setting himself up as the sole conduit because not only is he his followers’ ‘advocate in the Hall of Admission’ (bit Egyptiany that phrase), but this Father personage cannot be distracted from his ‘task amongst the Dawndwellers’. The image this conjures in my imagination is of some sort of arch-being of a higher order, presiding over – and directing – these Dawndwellers or slightly lesser beings of a higher order. Is the scribe trying to describe – through the mouth of Yosira – an order of advanced spiritual beings that – directly or indirectly – govern and guide the realm of humanity? To add a bit more substance to the suggestion that we are dealing with beings of an otherworldly nature here, Yosira then goes on to state that nobody is ‘justified’ in calling upon the spirits of the dead, because they are beyond the everyday cares of this Earth.
The next few chapters are a bit more prosaic. Sensing that good old Yosira was a bit of a cut above your average type of bloke, the people offered him the kingship, which he declined, and instead bade them take his son instead, whose footsteps Yosira would guide.
One of the first things Yosira established through the authority of his son, the new king, was a fair and – to all intents and purposes – secular-based legal system. Judgments were no longer to be made based on arbitrary nonsense such as listening to the rustling of leaves, but were to be based on a ‘jury’ of three men, set widely apart, who were given the evidence to mull over and, if all three concurred when brought together, that judgment was passed. Where, however, judgment involved capital punishment, confiscation of property, family separation, or enslavement, only the King – or somebody standing in for him – had the authority to pass judgment.
Yosira then switches back to the enigmatic hokew. He says that sacred waters are full of the stuff and, as such, they may only be used for sanctification and purification. Apparently, those waters were also used to test a wife for adultery but that test would now be accomplished by using the ’bitter draught’ alone (Hemlock? Arsenic? Survival implies innocence type of thing? Bloody harsh, whatever it was).
Yosira’s next prohibition is the eating of pork (because it was considered an abomination) and an embargo on eating the flesh of an ass (as it was supposedly not very strengthening, although I suspect this is, again, Yosira preventing people from eating an animal that was of more use alive).
The next one’s interesting because it involves the hokew again. Yosira decreed that the bodies of the dead must not be broken or burnt. His reasoning for this is a bit counter-intuitive, because he says that any hokew within a human departs along with the soul at time of death so that nothing is to be gained from burning the flesh as it achieves nothing of sacred significance. If that’s the case, why bother making dictates about what happens to the left behind shell?
Yosira then once again shows his practical take on how to civilise a society without totally demolishing its original belief system (and thereby run the risk of cultural push-back). He allows the people to keep their old feast days and fertility rites, and allows them to make offerings to any god they choose (reasoning that all gods are but aspects of Yosira’s one God). Similarly, they are allowed to fashion idols of their gods (Yosira sees that as being of no meaningful consequence), but he forbids them to even attempt an image of his One God because He is too far beyond their comprehension for the people to even imagine. Yosira also discourages any attempt to identify his One God with Nature (and, specifically, water).
Yosira continues to display his broad-mindedness by continuing to allow other old festivals and customs: the festival to the ‘god who draws up the land’, the feast of the forefathers – and this last one is peculiar and interesting because Yosira seems to imply (in so many allegorical words) that good lineage is responsible for good control over one’s life in the shape of effective control over crops, herds, and fish stocks – oh, and it ensures healthy potency and fertility for the passing down of one’s genes, as well as creating offspring with the physical prowess to hunt well and win wars. Not silly, old Yosira.
Yosira also passes edicts to curb what we might call ‘sympathetic’ magic in its imitative form; that is making drawings or effigies of those we wish to harm and sticking sharp things into them. Here, Yosira brings in his favourite deterrent, the lukim, telling the practitioners of magic that they will be delivered up to the demons (=lukim) of disease and death.
Necromancers and others who attempt to gain control of the spirits of the living (by mixing living grain with fat, apparently) in their dayshade or nightshade form – interesting that bit; is Yosira referring to some kind of astral form that separates during sleep? – are similarly accursed and promised up to the lukim or the even more sinister sounding ‘Formless Ones’.
An exception to the prohibition of this form of imitative magic is the woman who wishes to conceive. She is allowed to fabricate an image of a suckling child but may not make an effigy of a male appendage and ‘lie’ with it – Oh, I say! – or she, too, will become prey to the lukim of sickness and pain (and here, again, Yosira is using scaremongering to a practical end; that is, so that a woman does not introduce potentially harmful germs inside her body).
It seems that Yosira applied the same civilising tactics wherever he went – leaving the majority of local traditions and customs intact to soften the introduction of his own One God – as The Kolbrin reports that he played the same game in a place called Harfanti; although he did have to prevent its people continuing what sound like some very strange carryings-on. Yosira stopped them encasing a maiden in bark and darkness for seven days before marriage, which sounds to me like a typically cruel patriarchal-biased society’s attempt to stop any other males making a try for her before the nuptials. Instead he allowed that she be kept in seclusion with other women for the same period. Similarly, women were to be ‘purified’ with water and not fire (a bit horrible this bit as it sounds as if, before Yosira’s arrival, women were ‘purified’ from perceived misdemeanor with mutilating fire. Hooray for the arrival of Yosira, is what I say!
And Yosira didn’t stop there (he was actually pretty enlightened, was Yosira). He halted the custom of sewing up a maiden’s privates to preserve her virginity, entrusting her maidenhood instead to her own will and relying on her kin to guide her morality. Female circumcision was likewise banned. Yosira preached that a maiden ought to remain a virgin until wedded, but he understood that human nature is a multi-faceted thing, and he tried to put the onus on a girl’s family to keep her on the straight and narrow.
Yosira also put a stop to the barbaric practice of another people called the Habshasti. That crowd used to bind several girls’ legs together to make it difficult for them to escape, and then allowed in the young men to have their way with them. Yosira was having none of that; he pronounced the practice evil and promised punishment to any man who forced himself into the presence of a naked woman.
Another of Yosira’s edicts was that the birthing room was to be the sole preserve of women; with no men – not even the husband/father – allowed within. He also stopped the practice of suspending a woman giving birth from something (the ceiling or a beam or something similar) something that was supposed to facilitate the process.
The rest of Yosira’s ‘laws’ concerning the behaviour of women are fairly standard patriarchal-society fodder, although it should be borne in mind that the edicts were designed as much to prevent unrest and discord within a growing society as they were to assert male dominance. For instance, Yosira made it permissible for a hunter (whose profession kept him away for long periods) to kill both an adulterous wife and the man she had slept with.
And now Yosira pivots back to his old mates, the lukim, again using them to scaremonger the people into safe health practice. This time, it’s male circumcision. Removing the foreskin is OK to prevent the lukim that cause impotency from taking up residence; however, the people would no longer be allowed to preserve the severed foreskin in fat and use it to ‘endow stones with hokew’ (eh?). Also, the practice of ‘binding foreskins’ was no longer allowed (ouch!).
Back to the mystical and magical side of things, Yosira reserved his greatest curse for anyone who attempted to enslave another’s soul (now, this can, in my opinion, be taken both esoterically and allegorically; that is, Yosira was against the practice of dark magic or/and against the psychological dominance of one human over another. Death was the punishment for this offence. Similar opprobrium was reserved for women who, in times of famine and hardship, baked their new born babies in clay and ate them. Those sad souls were cursed by Yosira, as was any chieftain who permitted the practice.
Another attempt at healthy food practice was the abolition of the law that allowed men to eat the healthy offspring of cows and sheep, whereas women were left with anything that been ejected from those creatures’ wombs prematurely.
Yosira was a leader who understood that children needed all the protection he could give. In a place called Yapu, he decreed that no child be killed with wilful intent, especially when the excuse was that it had been malnourished. Yosira opted for a course of education rather than immediate punishment for the perpetrators, so that they learnt the error of their ways, and he reserved actual punishment for their leaders who had permitted the sin.
Back to the magical stuff again. On the subject of death and burial, Yosira advised the people that there was no point in binding up the corpse or carrying out any other kind of post mortem practice, because the carcass was an empty shell once its soul had left it behind, and the body was just going to rot and had no chance of physical rebirth anyway – so what was the point? But, it was inadvisable to hang a corpse over moving water because it could become a beacon for possession by a Formless One during the darkness of night (again, here, I sense that Yosira is using supernatural scaremongering to prevent the people from hanging up rotting corpses that could decompose and rot into the water supply thereby infecting it).
Just in case I am beginning to sound a bit too level-headed about the esoteric aspects of this particular chapter, the next bit contains some genuinely mystical hocus pocus: Yosira says that, if the shade of one of your kin tries to molest you during the night, then it can be bound into a hollow log containing ‘fire-retaining substances’ by using the power of hokew (eh? What?). The log can then be burned in purifying fire and the ashes buried according to custom. That will get rid of the ghost (for want of a better word), but you have to kiss goodbye to the hokew you used to entrap it, because you won’t get that back. The Kolbrin says that the hokew from a man whose crops and trees give plentiful harvests is the strongest. My oh my; we’re going to have fun trying to work out what this hokew is at the end of the post.
Back to reality, now, and Yosira gives a quick summary of how man impregnates woman from a single seed (=sperm) perspective (evidence, if these writings are, indeed, ancient, that Yosira had access to some pretty advanced biological knowledge). Also that a woman cannot have conceived if she continues to menstruate (that, at least, is a fairly logical conclusion that anybody could draw from extended observation).
The next bit’s pretty weird and also borders on imitative magic. No man may fashion a model of a beast and ‘have sex’ with it in an attempt to increase the fertility and reproductive capacity of his herd. Nor may he ejaculate into an object of wood and stone and bury it (bizarre!). Any man caught doing either of these things would be accursed and molested by the ‘nightshades of terror’ (oh dear!).
And then there’s even more about the mysterious hokew. There’s no point, says, Yosira, in hunters putting their trust in amulets fashioned by charmers into the likeness of animals. Only the hokew ‘gathered by the kindred of his habitation’ can truly aide him. In this snippet, the scribe seems to equate hokew either as the goodness and moral rectitude of his home society, or as something that is generated from that. Interesting.
For an older barren woman and the younger man whose semen she takes to the charmers in the hope it will make her fertile, Yosira promises a particularly grisly retribution. He will be seized by the lukim who feast on human hearts, and she will be visited by the ones who tear apart the innards. That’s not very nice, is it?
Self-castration for men is an abomination according to Yosira, but he then goes a bit misogynistic on us by saying that if a man wants to castrate himself for his god then he can offer his foreskin instead (which, I was surprised to read, is perfectly acceptable to any deity); but, at the same time they offer up the severed foreskin on the altar, the men must offer up a prayer of gratitude that they were not born as women (not very acceptable in this day and age, that concept, Mr. Yosira).
The passage chops and changes and meanders all over the place, because we next come back to some more hygiene best practice complete with the – by now obligatory – scaremongering and dire threats of repercussion from supernatural entities.
Excreta must be buried out of sight and smell (because if you don’t, anyone whose nostrils your waste invades will gain power over you – or so says Yosira). And if you leave your excreta exposed, this time it’s the formless lambata that will infect it; and they cause night-time diarrhoea!
Safe food preparation is up next. Don’t eat raw meat; roast it and pound up the bones for extra collagen (or at least that’s how I interpret it). If the food has been prepared and eaten indoors, smear any leftover blood over your door posts as a charm against the ‘night haunters and the death bringers’ because they’ll be repulsed by the life force in the blood.
Then it all starts to get very weird again: A son must ‘provide sustenance’ for his dead mum or dad. As for the living, he must provide food for any dependent brother or sister, as well as for any other relatives who have no children of their own to provide for them. Because, if he doesn’t, the dead ones will come back to haunt him and start wandering around all over the place until they get what they want. And now comes a bit that will be very familiar to anyone who is into vampire movies: If any of the so-called Formless Ones, attracted by this notion of neglect, manage to somehow materialise on Earth, they will haunt the night and go around, sneaking into houses and sucking living blood which is their only way of sustaining the ghastly forms they adopt.
Any charmer who attempts to summon evil spirits within Yosira’s ‘enlightened’ borders will be cursed and seized by the ‘nightfiend’ (Yosira’s definitely not short on nasty entities with which to instil obedient terror into his people). If a charmer succeeds in summoning an evil spirit which then wanders about causing havoc, one of the Twice Born (higher knowledge initiates) will be called in (just like a latter day exorcist) to banish it back whence it came.
Yosira then lectures us all that it’s not enough in life to just avoid doing evil. In order to be welcome in the ‘Land of the Dawning’ by those who have gone before (very Egyptiany again) we have to actively clothe our souls in goodness and brightness.
Necromancers will be cursed and attacked by the lukim of insanity. Yosira reminds us that to summon the dead is futile because they have nothing of relevance to tell us. If they did, he says, they would contact initiates capable of understanding and acting upon the messages.
So, after all that, we get a little narrative from the scribe: Yosira came into Tamuera, vanquished the nasty segments in society and then remained there in a place where the wonderfully named Temple of the Skyseer still stood when the scribe was recording all this. Yosira’s home was made of reeds, on the banks of the running water.
At that time, humans somehow had the ability to communicate with the departed ones in the ‘land of Morning Light’ by harnessing the hokew from the cracked open body of a female child. The text seems to imply that they practised some kind of cannibalism – probably as a means to absorb her hokew – because Yosira’s punishment for that evil practice was a curse to make the girl’s flesh ‘cry out’ from within the consumers’ bodies. My interpretation is that it means the girl’s flesh was diseased and infected them all because a great plague ensued and scared them all into never repeating the custom.
Now, finally, a few more clues about the nature of this enigmatic hokew. Yosira says that hokew resided not in the blood but in the bones and that each bone contained the ‘entire essence’ of the individual (Aaah . . . now we’re getting warmer – sounds a little like stem cell science!). Having learned this, the people then thought that they could communicate with the people in the ‘land of Morning Light’ through the power in bones, but Yosira didn’t mind and let them go ahead because he knew they wouldn’t be able to. The people did, however, find out how to use the bones for healing purposes (lots of collagen and/or minerals in bones) and again, Yosira didn’t mind them doing that, reasoning that whatever added to society’s overall welfare was fine. The last sentence in this section is strange in the extreme, because it sounds as if widowed women had been accustomed to carry the bones of their dead husbands around on their backs, with the result that they were being continually harassed by the departed shades (or, another way of looking at it, by the psychological pressure of such a grisly custom – I mean, it’s a bit of a passion killer isn’t it?; bit hard to strike up a new relationship with your ex’s skeleton in your backpack?). However you interpret it, Yosira put an end to it, and, to everyone’s relief, all the paranormal activity (or social stigma) disappeared.
This next bit’s also very interesting and seems to say that Yosira’s ‘enlightened’ realm was nothing other than a proto-Egypt, probably pre-dynastic. See what you think: All necromancers and charmers who tried to summon or communicate with the spirits of the dead from the ‘Land of the Dawning’ were cursed in a manner that still lingered in the day of the scribe recording these passages. Yet, says the scribe, some people still attempt to summon a shade from the ‘swathed body made eternal’ (which has just got to be a mummified corpse) but all they manage to invoke is some doom-laden messenger from the dark regions beyond the veil.
Rites of homage to your departed relatives were allowed because Yosira taught that those entities now in the ‘Place of Morning Light’ still retained a vestigial interest in the affairs of living men. It appears that Yosira only forbade things that were outright harmful to living humans. In addition, he committed the various rites and laws to writing, with the purpose that they would aid the living to help departed souls in the ‘Place of Morning Light’ through the link of hokew sacrificed back on Earth.
Yosira also seems to have been well aware of kind and safe practice where it concerns animals. He made laws which forbade cross-breeding of species (if it happened, both would be killed and incinerated and the human experimenter cursed) and also no beast was to be worked by man for its first year of life.
The scribe then recounts an episode that portrays Yosira as priest/shaman (very like the biblical Moses). At a place called Kambusis he came across a bound man who was about to be sacrificed. Yosira spoke up against what was about to happen but when nobody listened he ‘placed a staff of power upright into the ground and danced around it, singing the song for drawing forth the spirit.’ The local magicians were called in but they had no power over Yosira. When one of them approached his protective circle, Yosira produced a spout of flame which consumed the foolhardy mage – the rest, not surprisingly, fled, and Yosira released the sacrificial victim.
Once again, Yosira showed his practical side. Rather than punishing the local charmers, he put them to work cleansing the land of the evil spirits that were wandering around making a nuisance of themselves. Thus the charmers did not look like complete defeated idiots to their people, and Yosira got a big job done on his behalf. He was also careful to ensure that the charmers never tried to enslave the soul of another otherwise they were answerable to him.
Another accomplishment of Yosira was to prevent judges from using crocodile fat, horn, or skin to pass judgment. Instead he showed them a way of doing it using corn and a burning sword (whatever that means). In addition he showed the people how to brew a drink which ‘loosened . . . the tongues of men, so that truth was no longer restrained’ (which could well mean that he knew how to concoct some kind of truth serum; or he simply taught them how to make booze).
And finally in this rather long chapter, there is the tale of the tree apes that lived along the river and of which the people were very afraid because they believed the apes could snatch and eat their soul as it left the body at death. The resourceful Yosira somehow managed (reading between the lines) to poison the tree apes’ food source so that they left the area, thereby freeing departing human souls to travel onwards in peace.
Wow! That was another long one (the next few are much shorter) but I think it was worth it, even if only to really get a handle on this Yosira guy. All-in-all, Yosira seems to have been a level-headed, practical, and resourceful figurehead, content to guide rather than lead by the nose, and able to pitch his message with just the right mix of common sense and knowledge not to interfere with what doesn’t really matter. If you do what I say, he implies, you become healthier and enjoy life in a stable society. If you don’t, then the demons will come and get you. Your call.
So what, then, is this hokew that crops up over and over again in this chapter? Well, we are told that it ‘sustains the Dawndwellers’ (dwellers in a realm beyond death); that it is ‘thinly spread throughout the Earth’; that men could gather it and store it in stones and sacred objects; that it can be drawn upon by the human spirit and it bestows fertility to increase flocks and crops; that its secrets are known to the Twice Born. We know that sacred waters are full of the stuff and that hokew within a human departs along with the soul at time of death. We also know that men used to preserve a severed foreskin in fat and then use it to ‘endow stones with hokew’. You can expend it when you use it to help trap ghosts and it is strongest in a man whose crops and trees grow most abundantly. We are told that a hunter can only truly be aided by the hokew of his home community (on that topic, there are examples in Frazer’s The Golden Bough of communities that stage ‘fake’ hunts in the community while the hunters are away in the belief it will somehow help the real event taking place at a distance), and that hokew resides in bones not blood, and that humans in the past had communicated with the departed ones in the ‘land of Morning Light’ by harnessing the hokew from the cracked open body of a female child. It has so many uses, but what on Earth is it? Well, there is one word that we could use to cover everything I’ve just recounted above: Magic. But magic covers too many areas. I could spend hours discussing that concept, but, to me, hokew also sounds very much like what the Ancient Romans called numen. Some Latin dictionaries define numen simply as god or divinity, but it is so much more than that. It is affirmative power, positive power, the law of good karma made manifest and solidified so that it can be actively drawn upon. It is your electro-magnetic emanation, your projected aura, your ‘psychic’ ability, the power of your mind; and it is found at sacred places – like great cathedrals, like sacred pools – because they function like batteries that store it when humans gather there and pour it out. If you are a hunter, it is the willpower of your tribe actively willing you to bring home the food to support them all. And if you have been following the Gurdjieff thread of this Ancient Self-Help website, you may recognise in hokew the force that is converted within yourself to then ‘feed’ the universal machine and help keep the whole cosmic show on the road. That’s my take on hokew, anyway. Let me know if you’ve worked out what else it might be.
So, finally (phew!) on to the self-help aspects of this chapter. It’s been such a weird one, that there are not too many that leap out. Of course, there’s the concept of common sense – try to guide others to do what is best for them rather than stamp your own authority on their lives. Yosira found it best to not jump on people and force them to give up what they were used to, simply because he thought his way was best. He saw the big picture – what mattered and what didn’t – and used common sense to help people get there. If we all take that approach in life, we’ll find things run far more smoothly. No one likes a finger-wagging authoritarian. Let people be themselves and seek to guide them by suggestion rather than coercion.
And then there is the ecological/environmental message contained in this passage. Be kind to animals, follow the dictates of Nature, and preserve trees where you can. Remember, there is life in everything, and it is all there for a reason, even if we are unable to see it.
I’m going to sign off for now. There are another two more short chapters on dear old Yosira to go (and even if he didn’t exist, you have to concede that he’s quite a fascinating fiction) and then two more short chapters on something else before The Book of Gleanings comes to a close and The Book of Scrolls begins. I hope to see you for all of it.
