This next section of The Kolbrin is still part of the scrolls of Kerobal Pakthermin. It describes the beginnings of the tribe he calls ‘The Children of God’, so it is set before the coming of ‘The Destroyer’ described in the last post. It’s an attempt (as so many of these developmental passages in other religions – such as the story of the biblical Garden of Eden – are) to infer the existence of some kind of order – or purpose – so that mankind can make at least some sense of its existence and environment.
In this account, the Moulder – for want of a better word – is someone or something called Awen. Now, Awen’s job is, if I read between the lines correctly, to see to the actualisation of what we would nowadays call ‘natural selection’, or even ‘evolution’. So, the fox longs for warm fur for its cubs and the owl desires to be able to see better in the dark, and over the course of many generations, these things come to pass. Interestingly, The Kolbrin sees the actual longing and desire as key elements in the process, almost as if they are the energy that drives it, but that would make it more akin to ‘natural’ or ‘sympathetic’ magic, the process by which humans are supposed to be able to change their immediate environment and circumstances by an effort of will and determination (some people use props like crystals and symbols in these exercises, but, in my opinion, they are just aids to focus concentration, and become unnecessary as one becomes sufficiently adept). The important thing here, though, is that all things are subject to change and it’s important, I feel, if we’re to make much sense of anything at all, that we must understand that Time, as we know it, is simply the marker indicating the latest state of change in All and Everything at a sub-atomic level. I know I keep banging on about this, but something deep within me is nagging that if we truly get that concept, the rest of it becomes easier to handle. What I mean by that is, if we stop and think of ‘time’ not as the passing of the hours on a clock, not even as ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’, but try to envisage it as everything both within ourselves – our skin, our bones, our hair, even our very thoughts – and everything around us – that person over there, the stones of that building, the leaves on that tree, the very weather and atmosphere – all changing by the millisecond, then, in my opinion, we begin to be aware of our place in All and Everything.
The Kolbrin then goes on to describe how mankind’s lot is a bit different from that of the ‘lower’ animals. We, it says, although still at the mercy of the Law of evolution (and, therefore, genetics), are hit by the extra double-whammy of Destiny and what is best described as Karma (the what-you-reap-is-what-you-sow concept). The two, destiny and karma, may seem at first sight to be a bit mutually exclusive – like, if you behave well, then surely you’re going to end up differently than if you behave badly – but The Kolbrin neatly sidesteps that issue by also introducing the concept of Fate. Your Destiny, it says, is your own personal distant city, but you have a choice of how you get there. By choosing one path, you may have a tree fall on you or be eaten by a crocodile; but on another path it’s all plain sailing. Those ‘incidents’ on your journey are Fate – or Luck – and they are unavoidable once you’ve chosen and started down a particular path. But Karma, says The Kolbrin, is the result of what YOU do along the journey. You may not be able to avoid being eaten by a crocodile if that’s the path you’ve chosen to lead in life, but you can give yourself an easy or difficult ride, depending on how big a jerk you are (or aren’t) up until the point where you cross that croc’s path.
To illustrate the difference between Fate and Karma, I suppose we could use the analogy of two people, both of whom are born in New Zealand and both of whom have a passion for the African Savannah – but for very different reasons. The first person has got a thing about killing animals. He (or she) is habitually cruel to everything; stamping on beetles for the heck of it, making ants explode by using a magnifying glass to direct and intensify the sun’s rays on a hot day, kicking kittens, starving livestock – you get the picture. This person becomes reviled by all right thinking people. They end up being lonely and miserable and bent out of shape with pent up anger; so they eventually save up and book themselves on an illegal hunting safari to kill innocent big game in Africa. During that safari they are charged and skewered by a rampaging rhino. The other person is an Earth-Friend. They are considerate about the environment, volunteer at the local animal rescue centre, and take in and nurture hurt and broken birds and beasts. She (or he) is loved and admired by everyone for their embracing nature and gentleness towards all things. They are very happy and content. Eventually they save up and head off to Africa to fulfill their life’s ambition of witnessing those majestic beasts in their natural habitat and maybe do a bit of conservation work, but during the trip they, too, are charged and skewered by a rampaging rhino. According to the Kolbrin, getting skewered by the rampaging rhino is the unavoidable Fate of both those people. But the state of personal happiness (or not) in which each one of them arrives at that point is the direct result of their Karma; that is, the emotional consequences of the way in which they’ve been conducting themselves as individuals.
The Kolbrin calls the results of Karma Enidvadew. An interesting aside here is that our individual Destination cities can be determined (‘set’ is the word used) by the actions of a previous life. The passage doesn’t enlarge on the concept too much at this point, but it does offer a very handy piece of advice whether you believe in reincarnation or not, and that is (according to my interpretation, anyway): Don’t bite off more than you can chew. The Kolbrin infers that if you set the goal of your destination too high, it is a natural law that your burden of ‘karma’ will increase commensurate with your aims; in other words, you’re in for a bit of a struggle, because the repercussions of everything you say or do are magnified by the high idealism of your aim in life. It’s like the man in a pub who can get away with saying what he likes about the candidate for his local electorate, but the aspiring politician will have their every word scrutinised for any potential offence. Also, you never know if, or how far down the path, you might get eaten by that Crocodile of Fate. ‘The decrees of Fate are many,’ says the author of the scroll, ‘the decrees of Destiny are few’.
The Kolbrin’s version of the primal paradise – or Garden of Eden – is called Meruah, or ‘The Place of the Garden on the Plain’. The geography is quite detailed, but suffice to know here that it’s described as fertile, abundant, and well-watered, full of things like ‘The Tree of Life (Glasir)’ placed within the Sacred Enclosure, ‘The Great Tree of Wisdom’, ‘The Tree of Trespass’, ‘The Lotus of Rapture’, and, in the centre, ‘The Place of Power where God made his presence known’. Now trees are very important in The Kolbrin. Right at the end of the whole book is a very cryptic statement that ‘They who are at one with the trees understand the nature of the life within them and make much of such things. There is a mystery here to be worked by those with understanding, but to others it will be meaningless’. I might have a crack later on in these posts at hazarding a guess what that’s all about, but for now I need to think about it a hell of a lot more.
The ‘Children of God’, meanwhile, were growing and prospering somewhere else, but we get an immediate reminder that humans aren’t very good when we have too much of a good thing. We get a bit complacent and don’t water our spiritual yearnings. ‘Earth is not for pleasurable dallying,’ says the scribe, ‘it is a place of teaching, trial, and testing’. Oh dear.
The ‘Children of God’ hadn’t yet got to the stage where God elevated them to the status of ‘divinity-in-waiting’, something I described in an earlier posting, but apparently one of them, Fanvar, the son of Auma and Atem (pretty Egyptian sounding names those last two), had more or less sorted out what this karmic stuff was all about and had dealt to his own personal baggage, to the extent that he was pretty much free of the Law of Reaping What You Sow. Because he was now able to see through the veil of material existence – which made him different – he was, like all people that civilisations don’t know how to handle, ostracised from his tribe and eventually, after much wandering, rocked up in Meruah. Fanvar’s ‘reward’ from God for ‘working it all out’, was an encounter with a beautiful and ethereal woman, who accompanied him like a friendly fairy, and hovered near him while he found food and built a shelter. One day, Fanvar was attacked by a bunch of Yoslings, a breed of men not much evolved from beasts, heavily wounded and left for dead. The fairy woman ‘clothed’ herself in Fanvar’s congealed blood and became a mortal woman. She was skilled in healing, and Fanvar recovered. He made her ‘Queen of the Gardenland’ and the scribe says that his own ancestors called her Gulah. He says that Fanvar called her Aruah, or ‘Helpmate’ but, in the scribe’s own tongue, she was called ‘The Lady of Lanevid’. The Faerie Queen – Galadriel from the Lord of the Rings springs immediately to mind – is, of course, a common trope in story and folklore (and even religion – Mary?) across the world, but it’s interesting to find it here, so openly near the beginning of The Kolbrin. Or is that just me, and we could also say that the biblical Eve was the same type of creature, and that the trope of the Faerie Queen is no more and no less than the awesome mysticism of the power of womankind?
Anyway, God explains this otherwordly creature to Fanvar as the epitome of womanhood as distinct to man. She is, God says, the very distillation of feminine essence and purpose, and this is a concept The Kolbrin is very big on throughout; that is, men are manly and women are womanly; each is as important as the other, but their nature’s are very distinct and their purpose and duties should never be confused. Not very acceptable thinking in this day and age, I know, but we must remember that this stuff was (supposedly) written a very long time ago, and the authors were very big on the duality principle of Nature; that is, day/night, sun/moon, light/dark, wet/dry, helpful/harmful etc. and, to the scribes who observed this principle in Nature, man/woman was just another and equally well-defined manifestation of it.
At this point, it is told that Aruah, when she became mortal, brought a strange and mystical object with her from ‘Lanevid beyond the veil’. It is described as ‘the jewel contained in the moonchalice, the stone of inspiration fashioned by the desires of men’. Aruah gave it to Fanvar as her dowry. It’s name is the ‘Lengil’ and it may, or may not, be the same stone that is described as one of the so-called ‘Treasures of Egypt’ that eventually found their way to Britain, and is described in a relatively modern ‘letter’ published at the end of the hardback version of The Kolbrin.
Fanvar and Aruah seem to have become a couple and were eventually joined in Meruah by other members of ‘The Children of God’. Only Fanvar and Aruah, though, were permitted to live in Meruah’s Sacred Enclosure, in which was the ‘Chalice of Fulfillment’, some kind of magical cup that granted the desires of all who drank from it (A bit Holy-Grailish this bit). Only Fanvar and Aruah had sufficiently advanced and developed spirits to be allowed to drink from this cup. Oh, and there was also a ‘Cauldron of Immortality’ which contained a cordial distilled from Meruah’s fruits that staved off sickness and disease.
Fanvar and Aruah had children, and the next few passages of The Kolbrin describe how these offspring and their own descendants gradually spread knowledge and skills amongst the ‘Children of God’: hunting techniques, weaving, pottery, animal husbandry, and so on. Amongst these descendants were Enkidua, a male, and Estartha or ‘The Maid of the Morning’ who became the first ‘Moonmaiden’ and was later called ‘The Lady of the Morning Star’. Now, I don’t know about you, but a few of these names are beginning to ring some Mesopotamian, Babylonian, and Assyrian bells with me. It’s all getting very interesting.
The scene shifts abruptly to an area just outside the Sacred Enclosure – which is now called Gisar by the scribe – but still within Meruah, where there was a circle of stones – called Gilgal – which formed a kind of processional gateway into the Sacred Enclosure itself. Within this circle of stones was a shrine containing a sacred vessel called Gwinduiva which is described as a type of goblet set in ‘rainbow-hued’ crystal set in gold and adorned with pearls. The goblet often gave off a shimmering mist and, when the heavens were properly aligned, the Guinduiva was filled with ‘moondew and potions from the cauldron within the Sacred Enclosure’ and the resultant pale-honey liquor was drunk by the people to stave off sickness. This is all getting very magical (or highly allegorical, depending on your perspective).
Further genealogies follow. The semi-bestial Yoslings, who lived in the wastelands around Meruah, eventually produced a wily hunter who ingratiated himself with Estartha and learned the ways of ‘The Children of God’ although it was forbidden for the two races to interbreed. Estartha called him ‘Lewid’ or ‘The Light Bringer’. Now, I know what you’re thinking here: that ‘Lewid the Light Bringer’ is getting pretty close to Lucifer (literally ‘The Light Bringer’ or ‘The Light Bearer’ in Latin), but who’s to say these scrolls of The Kolbrin aren’t just another regurgitation of even earlier myth cycles? After all, we already have, amongst other parallels, examples such as the teacher Estartha sounding very like the goddess Astarte (= Astoreth = Ishtar).
To cut a long story short, Lewid eventually tricks the married woman Maeva (Eve?) into stealing substances from the Sacred Enclosure with which a potion is made that makes everybody, Yoslings and ‘Children of God’ alike, sick. Maeva fesses up to her husband (Dadam, ‘The Firstfather’ – Adam?) that she has done wrong and the whole thing turns into a version of the Primal Sin story of the biblical Eden. The symbolic sewing of an evil seed into the relationship between man and woman is followed by a manifestation of a Spirit Being, who declares that ‘The Children of God’ are now defiled and a veil is brought down between the physical and spiritual spheres. Only with great effort now, continues the messenger from the other side, will man be able to pierce the veil. The Children of God were banished from their earthly paradise and guardians were set at its gates. They were forced to wander to a new land, Amanigel. Mankind had fallen from Grace and now had to find his own way to immortality by overcoming a spiritual desolation of his own making.
This chapter of The Kolbrin concludes with the words of somebody called Thonis of Myra in Ludicia. It’s pretty much a summing up of what has preceded it, although he tries to make sense of some of the symbolism employed. Essentially. Thonis says that it was mankind’s sudden awareness of his yearning for spiritual development that set him apart from the planet’s other creatures. His take on the Paradise Garden is that while man existed in a state of bliss within the garden, he was a bit of an automaton, doing what he was told and being ‘at one’ with everything around himself. In other words, because mankind obeyed all the time, there was no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. It was only when mankind finally committed its first sin that it became ‘free’; that is, free to find its own destiny through its own actions and choices. Thonis says that only at that point did man realise his ‘place’ did not have to be anchored by earth. Sinning set mankind free. This, says Thonis, is the meaning behind the symbolism of the paradisical gardens of the world’s religions. It was under a tree (the symbol of life), in a Garden, and as the result of an interplay between earth and Spirit, that mankind was truly born.
Other scribes give their own interpretation of ‘The Fall’; some optimistic, others less so. Some view it as a separation of the male and female principles, others as a separation of mankind from his God. But the essence of this part of The Kolbrin – for me – is that it attempts to lay a foundation to explain why mankind feels a tug within himself and a yearning for psychic and spiritual self-betterment.
Wow, that was a bit of a marathon run! We’d better stop there for now. The next few chapters of The Kolbrin follow the early genealogies down the ages and start to get decidedly weird, with all sorts of accounts of what sound like Arthurian style swords and powerful objects called ‘Thunderstones’. I’ll see you there.
