Poem: Whose Myth is True?

After hundreds

Of thousands

Of millions of years

We have evolved to Homo de spirituali dominus

– Man, master of spirituality!

We got more than one good book:

Qur’an, Vedas and Guru Granth Sahib,

Tripitaka and Torah

As well as the Bible

To spell out the will of God

In six different shades of black & white,

Save us from the scary black darkness,

Keep us in the pwetty white light.

Walk toward and into the light,

And death is guaranteed to be better

Than this Devil’s Domain called

Life.

But!

Backtrack to the days of BC – Before Clerics

Were afraid of their religions’ origins,

Before pagan was redefined from local & home-grown to

Spiritual Atavism To All Nations,

The world believed in different myths:

Before heaven & hell were spiritual destinations for the dead

One was the searing red ocean beneath the land,

The other the vast blue roof where birds flirted with clouds.

Blue was a foreign colour to most tongues, anthropologists believe

But I think people were smarter than that.

On the far East side we had guardian dragons

Raining good fortune and education on us from above,

While angels’ Assyrian ancestors hunted us like birds of prey.

The skies of Zambia, Angola & Congo are windows to prehistory

Because they still see pterodactyls!

Ala was an Igbo goddess as well as an Arab god,

At the tip of Africa’s horn the world was balanced on the horns of a bull

Tethered in front of the cow he loved –

Maybe the common ancestor of the Egyptian sky-cow,

As Somalis & Ethiopians were the common ancestors of Egyptians?

The Slavic sun is too lazy to inhabit the sky,

She lives on an island served by the 4 winds,

Long before Avraham preached fear of God

Inuktitut (Eskimos) preached fear of everything!

Kaluli women are the mothers of Mother Nature,

Men only have supremacy because

A male snake ate an Aboriginal goddess’s daughters,

But Chinese emperors were legally required

REQUIRED

To sexually satisfy 121 women in 15 nights!

Modern Indians caste their devotion toward fair skin

When they used to believe darker = holier.

Asian Indians meant their own skins,

American “Indians” meant that of Africans

But both stopped once pale-skins

Installed themselves in positions of superiority.

Complex, I know.

The disciples had never heard of Jesus,

Their messiah’s name was Ieshua,

Freedom fighter to them, to Roman powers terrorist.

Science and maths hadn’t yet tested the theory that

Virginity + pregnancy = impossibility,

But we had the Greek intelligence to know daemons could be

Good, evil or don’t give a shit

And the Judean intelligence to know Satan was just doing his God-given job

– But given by which God?

The New Testament one who so loved the world

He agreed with Caiaphas that

It’s better for one man to perish in place of the nation,

Sent his Judean heir to die for Gentiles’ royal screw-ups?

Or the Old Testament one who smote the world

Then remembered to keep Noah alive,

Knows idols can’t hurt him but admits

I am a jealous god?

Whose god is true?

Whose myth is true?

© One Tawny Stranger, July 2015

African influence on pre-modern European people & cultures (2)

This is a continuation of my post here. As I talked quite heavily about the Moors, this time I shall focus more on other Africans and their influences in European history.

 

When Christianity was first being spread in Rome, many Christians were martyred (read: massacred), with the first records of such incidents being from 180 CE. In the year 203 CE, we have the story of two African women who were also martyred for their Christianity: Felicity/ Felicitas and Perpetua. Christians may have heard of them through “The Martyrdom of (Saints) Perpetua and Felicity”. Perpetua was a 22yo noblewoman who was nursing her infant and Felicity (who was 8 months pregnant at the time) was her slave, both of whom were killed in Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia) during the reign of Septimius Severus. In that era much of north Africa was under Roman rule – the Roman Province of Africa, and the pair and their companions were killed in an amphitheatre.

 

Of course there’s disagreement over their appearance, this is just one rendition,

 

And another. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is more accurate

 

Ancient Greek myth has its fair share of African personalities, one of the most famous being Memnon, a powerful Ethiopian* warrior-king who brought a massive army to aid the Trojans during the Greek invasion of Troy. He was described by Quintus as “lord over the dark Ethiopians” whom the Trojans were delighted at seeing in their city, and Robert Graves in The Greek Myths Volume 2 called him “black as ebony, and the handsomest man alive”. According to the myth, when he died his mother Eos wept for him, and king of gods Zeus was so moved by her weeping he made Memnon immortal. Interestingly enough, the story also states that Aesop (original spelling was Aisopos) was a close friend of Memnon who got killed in the battle by Antilochos. There is debate over his actual existence, and probably even more about his ethnic origins, but there’s reason to believe Aesop was at least ‘black’ if not African. Yes I’m talking about the Aesop of Aesop’s Fables, and those have unquestionably influenced European culture.

 

* Bearing in mind that Ethiopia is a Greek name which originally referred to all the parts of Africa south of Egypt, it’s not certain which part of the continent Memnon was from. Assuming he was a real person, since an immortal man is somewhat hard to believe.

 

There’s also the history of the Colchians, the natives of Colchis/ Kolkhis (now the western part of Georgia, just south of the Caucasus mountains). Though their exact ethnic origins are still up for debate, Herodotus considered them to be Kemetians (ancient Egyptians), specifically descendants of Senusret/ Senwosret I’s army because they looked so similar to them. He described them as black-skinned and woolly-haired, but over and above that he also pointed out that they practised circumcision, something only the Egyptians and Nubians were known to do at the time. Furthermore, the manner they wove their linen was identical to the Egyptians’ way.

 

Note – Senusret I is also often known by his grecianised name Sesostris I. I don’t know if ‘grecianised’ is a real word, by it I mean that his original name was changed to a more Greek-sounding name because Europeans have had a habit of doing that for centuries.

 

Senusret I

 

There are many other examples of African influences in ancient Europe, but I’ll save them for another post.

(also available at: http://1tawnystranger.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/african-influence-on-pre-modern.html)