Ok, so THE SOURCE has created the three spheres – source, spirit, physical – and mankind has been elevated to the status of some kind of intermediate being whose destiny it is to realise his innate divinity by actualising his spiritual potential. The point of all this is that THE SOURCE is no longer bored and frustrated but has given HIM/HER/ITSELF a purpose (presumably for its own existence) and mankind, by playing its part in all of this, gets the trade off of experiencing the warm fuzzies of pure and unconditional love, along with the buzz of spiritual bliss.
But the ride was never intended to be an easy one. The Kolbrin, along with just about every other account of civilisation, wherever and whenever it sprang up, talks of creation having a false start, being utterly wiped out, and having to be started all over again pretty much from scratch. And just like the other accounts of global destruction The Kolbrin blames the disaster on mankind’s performance as God’s work-in-progress on Earth..
The cause of all the devastation is described as some kind of celestial event. It is referred to later in the book as ‘The Destroyer’ and there are stark warnings that this was no rogue one-off visitor to Earth’s skies, but a regular and predictable astronomical event. The terminology employed for this first description of ‘The Destroyer’ is suitably allegorical. ‘God caused a dragon from out of Heaven to come and encompass [The Earth] about.’ It was ‘frightful to behold’ as it ‘lashed its tail’ and ‘breathed out fire and hot coals’. But amidst all the imagery there are also some descriptive clues as to what type of astronomical visitor this ‘dragon’ might actually have been: ‘The body of the dragon was wreathed in a cold bright light and beneath, on the belly, was a ruddy hued glow, while behind it trailed a flowing trail of smoke. It spewed out cinders and hot stones and its breath was foul and stenchful, poisoning the nostrils of men. Its passage caused great thunderings and lightnings to rend the thick darkened sky, all Heaven and Earth being made hot.’
The passage of this visitor from deep space must have been sufficiently close to cause all sorts of seismic problems. The Kolbrin says that the seas rose up and overwhelmed the land and there was an ‘awful, shrilling trumpeting’ that was louder even than the howling winds. People were driven crazy with fear; they ran about in panic as the air became unbreathable and their skin was seared by falling ash.
‘The Destroyer’ passed through but the Earth was wrecked. and what sounds like seismic and volcanic upheaval, caused by the proximity of its passing, continued to torment the planet. Thunder and lightning storms rent the boiling skies, and what sounds like rains of lava slashed the Earth’s surface. The human population was virtually wiped out. Those who weren’t asphyxiated by massive clouds of poisonous gases were choked by storms of red dust and ashes, or else swallowed up by yawning cracks in the ground, or crushed under falling rocks.
And it still wasn’t over. A second ‘sky-monster’ followed hot on the tracks of the first, eventually ‘swallowing’ its tail, but it must have been a bit of a distance behind as the two could not be seen in the same stretch of sky at once. The ruination continued until the ‘many bladed sword of God’ (whatever that might be – the multi-layered atmosphere perhaps?) cut them into pieces and their ‘falling bodies enlarged the land and the sea’.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me mighty like an extremely close encounter with a sizeable comet or meteor storm, some not inconsiderable parts of which got caught up in Earth’s orbit and eventually broke up as they entered the atmosphere causing widespread atmospheric and geological mayhem and chaos. The Kolbrin, as it progresses, infers that the orbit around the solar system of this comet/meteor storm (if that’s indeed what ‘The Destroyer’ actually is) crosses that of Earth on a regular and predictable basis.
Anyway, when the dust finally settled, the human survivors crept out from the caves and down from the mountain tops. Civilisation, along with its embellishments (law, buildings, etc.), had been completely eradicated and the survivors had regressed back to the level of savages. Interestingly, The Kolbrin, unlike other cyclic global destruction accounts, doesn’t state that mankind brought the catastrophe upon himself because he had been particularly evil, but because he wasn’t developing fast enough spiritually. Now, this all seems a bit harsh to me – it’s a bit like a child being punished because his school report says he has done OK. The Kolbrin is saying that mankind was virtually annihilated and all his works blitzed away because he ‘could have done better’. But this is a bit of a foretaste of what The Kolbrin is all about. Earth is a testing ground for humanity. Mankind’s overriding purpose is to better itself spiritually and learn from the lessons that life on Earth throws at it. That is one of the main drivers behind The Kolbrin’s Good Religion.
Well, eventually the dust settled on Earth and massive downpours of rain cleansed the atmosphere so that the natural cycle of day and night could once again be enjoyed. The distress caused to the Earth’s atmosphere by the entry of the comet(s) segments healed over, and everything gradually went back to normal. But the event had changed humanity. The skies were now a source of fear, not amazement and wonder, and, after a generation that had to live in the post-apocalyptic gloom, their children saw the clearing air and gentler Earth as if it were a brand new creation.
The next chapter in The Kolbrin covers the same events, but from a different account and perspective, that of one Kerobal Pakthermin who recorded the cataclysm in a time which must have been remotely in the past from his own. Now he places the blame for ‘The Affliction of God’ firmly in mankind’s hands, and adds an interesting little spin to it which I’ll come to in a minute. His account of the actual physical nature of ‘The Destroyer’ is also very interesting.
Kerobal Pakthermin relates the experiences of a tribe he calls ‘The Children of God’, an ‘elite’ group who adhered closely to the tenets of a righteous life and who lived in a fertile country of undulating forests. To the east and west were high mountain ranges, and to the north was a ‘vast stony plain’. Now listen to how he describes the coming of ‘The Destroyer’ and its impact on the planet:
‘Then came the day when all things became still and apprehensive, for God caused a sign to appear in the heavens, so that men should know the Earth would be afflicted, and the sign was a strange star. The star grew and waxed to a great brightness and was awesome to behold. It put forth horns and sang, being unlike any other seen’.
Again, this sounds to me like the description of an incoming comet or meteor – or even something larger. The ‘horns’ and ‘singing’ are interesting as they indicate – to me anyway – that this approaching object was huge; that is, it was large enough that it seemed to have horns when caught by the sun’s light from a certain direction – much like the moon has crescent ‘horns’ when lit from a certain angle by the sun – and its mass and speed of approach were such that it was causing a ‘singing’ effect in the atmosphere. Anyway, back to Kerobal’s account:
‘ . . . the star was not God, though it was directed by His design . . . Then God manifested himself in the Heavens. His voice was as the roll of thunders and He was clothed with smoke and fire. He carried lightnings in His hand and His breath, falling upon the Earth, brought forth brimstone and embers. His eye was a black void and His mouth an abyss containing the winds of Destruction. He encircled the whole of the Heavens, bearing upon his back a black robe adorned with stars.’
Stripped of its overtones of religious awe, this is pretty much the same account of ‘The Destroyer’s’ behaviour as that given in the previous passage. Kerobal then goes on to describe the same darkness that fell upon the Earth, the same atmospheric tumult, the same poisonous and suffocating gas clouds, the same seismic disturbances to the terrain, and the same upheaval of the seas. Civilisation collapsed and mankind regressed overnight into a state of savagery complete with rape, murder, and violence. The seas, he says, rose and fell back and swept everything away. Torrents of rain lashed the planet. A scant few survivors clung to the mountain tops.
Kerobal rounds his account off with an interesting little twist. He infers that ‘The Destroyer’ and the fear it brought along with it, had the effect of making man reject the God of the Good Religion – who is invisible to the human eye – in favour of things they were able to discern with their regular five senses. He says that mankind was too spiritually immature to recognise why God had sent this massive ‘affliction’, the purpose of which was actually to bring humans back to the realisation that ‘The Earth is not for the pleasure of man, but is a place of instruction for his Soul. A man more readily feels the stirrings of his Spirit in the face of disaster than in the lap of luxury.’ In other words, Kerobal comes to the conclusion that this wholesale destruction was wrought as a test for mankind, one that we failed miserably because all it did was prompt us to start worshiping ‘unnatural gods of our own making’. Hmmmmm . . . bit of a bloody harsh lesson in my book, but it is in keeping with The Kolbrin’s portrayal of Earth as a developmental training ground aimed at spiritual self-betterment.
OK, we’d better leave The Kolbrin for now. ‘The Destroyer’ is a recurrent theme in the book and pops up on a fairly regular basis. The next installment, however, will cover the early days of mankind from a scroll that seems to cover a period of prehistory comparable to that of pre-dynastic Egypt. Please join me for that.
