The Nomadic Alternative – Page 266

Of death. Henri Corbin tells us that the Mazdaean elders asked their fifteen year olds the question, whether they were on the side of the angels or the demons - and each replied, "I belong to Ohrmazd, the Lord Wisdom, not to Ahriman, the Spirit of Evil and Darkness." But if the boy fails to answer this question, if his parents have mistimed the events of his boyhood, they may have set him on a course in which he will remain stuck for the rest of his life - thing-fixed, animal-fixed, mother-fixed, father-fixed, boy-fixed or at the stage where casual affairs are the rule, and what is worse, he will never know if he is on the side of the angels or demons, because he did never make the choice at the appropriate time.

His mother may have so over-mothered him that he is physically incapable of fighting. He is like the man in the shuttered room, insulated from the dangers of the visible World, but plagued by an Inferno of interior horrors. If the Internal Beast wins, we call it suicide. Others attached to things will fight like animals to get more and more things. Their first big deal supplants the initiation. Or boys deprived of their mother and unable to make proper human contacts may remain in the 'fighting stage' and egotistically enjoy fighting purely for the Hell of it.

Happily the situation is not as desperate as it might seem. The notion of equivalence, blood guilt or reciprocal revenge still inhibits a man from killing - even from exploiting - another man. Innate ideas continue to inform us what is - or is not - lawful prey. To supplement our Bestiary of undesirable or dangerous animals, we have a Menu of edible ones, as well as an innate Encyclopaedia of Medicine to protect us from disease. We hunt animals for food, protect ourselves from wild beasts, squash reptiles, insects or parasites underfoot, and recoil from epidemics. Man is on none of these lists. We have no mechanism to fight other men.

But the metaphor-making capacity of the brain does contain a sinister flaw. We have seen how it uses the power of suggestion latent in natural phenomena to create its own image of the world