The Nomadic Alternative – Page 249

external, if he is to live as a man. Commitment to life is impossible without foreknowledge of the natural history of death.

"The Afghauns", wrote Elphinstone in his Account of Caubul, "believe each of the numerous solitudes in the mountains and desarts of their country to be inhabited by a lonely daemon, whom they call Ghoulee Beeabaun (the GOUL or Spirit of the Waste); they represent him as a gigantic and frightening spectre (who devours any passenger whom chance may bring within his haunts)." The Morphology of the Beast will be self-evident to any attentive student of folklore, art history or even the daily newspapers. The monster is a composite horror, part animal but today part mechanical and part human; Anti-christ is a fallen angel. Its eyes transfix its victims into frozen immobility. Sometimes it has a trinity of fanged heads like Cerberus. Always it is a creature of awful frontality. The 'fearful symmetry' of Blake's Tyger is another man's vision of the t'ao t'ieh or 'glutton' masks on archaic Chinese bronzes, the tiki figures of Maori New Zealand, the animal style monsters of the North West Coast of America where the parts of lynx, owl, thunderbird, bear and wolf fuse in a variety of combinations, the gorgons of Ancient Greece, and the most petrifying of all representations of demonic energy - Francesco Traini's fresco of the Devil on the Campo Santo at Pisa - a man-eating horror, again fearfully symmetrical, with fanged hairy mouth, bovine horns, clawed hands and scaly reptilian body.

(See ill.)

But in the remote age when Evolution first illustrated the Bestiary of the Mind, fantastic illusion and nightmarish reality coincided. All the hunters were heroes who walked the road of trials, faced the fangs of death and for the most part survived. The whole future of the species was in perpetual danger of extinction, and after a young man had learned from both his parents all they could teach him, he had to go and face the prospect of a violent death as part of the biological process of growing up. This is the third initiation and it marks the end of boyhood. Boys stop fighting among themselves. All combine to fight the Beast.