a creation myth

2022-06-15

Lauren kept trying to get me to go to the party but I kept declining. I felt anxious and afraid that I would embarrass myself, or that I wouldn’t have fun.

When the time came, I ended up going anyway, and it was a blast. A grand affair, people dressed up fancy, and in costume. It was a sprawling thing, spilling over multiple floors of an improbably large house full of grand halls and ballrooms and side rooms for smaller, more intimate gatherings.

At some point late in the evening, I grew pleasantly detached. I was in the party but no longer of the party. I watched contentedly from the outside.

I started to drift around and wander, and followed the sound of music downstairs and found Lauren and Gemi seated at two grand pianos, playing and dueling. The music was loud and fast and banging, and people were packed into this room dancing and cheering.

I stepped forward to enter, but somebody stopped me. Nobody gets into this special party within a party for free. There is a door charge.

Lauren looks up and sees me and smiles cruelly. I vaguely think that she feels justice in seeing me denied entry and turned away. I return to the mental state where I feel outside the party, and feel content again, and think, “Good for you, Lauren, you created this didn’t you?”

And I leave.

Later they crash the party and the violence is abrupt and profound. They take Gemi. I lose sight of Lauren. I can’t help anybody. I run away.

Much later still, I am far away in the mountains. I have amassed a following of the forgotten and the discarded. My own lost boys, many of them literally children. We march and I grow stronger as our numbers grow. Word precedes us: an army is marching on the adversary. Children sing songs in the street of the people’s hero.

We draw near. It is hot and I shed my clothes. I run and jump, and don’t hit the ground. I fly ahead, back to the house, the scene of the party, as large as a shopping mall.

Inhuman foot soldiers with shriveled, mummified faces rush out to meet me and we clash and they fall. I accept their sacrifice in my single-minded goal to rescue Gemi. As my strength grew with my number of followers, it grows doubly now with each soldier that falls beneath my hands.

Lauren is inside, the adversary’s general, beautiful. She dances and destruction blossoms in her wake. I imprison her in glass. She answers my questions with anger, “You chose someone else. While I’ve always been here for you.”

I leave her.

Soon I can kill with a touch, and do so. In the courtyard, a hundred humans are milling about. Prisoners? I touch their minds and find that half of them are human, and that the other half are their twins, robot soldiers of the adversary built to destroy.

I issue an order, and all the humans leave the house. All the robots huddle together in the courtyard and I instruct them to self destruct.

The ensuing explosion destroys almost all of the house, and most of the loyal followers who had gathered too close to the house outside. I thank them for their sacrifice.

I am at the core of the explosion, and bathe in the inferno. My ego is stripped from me. And in losing my self I become one with the universe and recoil at what I see, and I withdraw.

I emerge from the fire born anew. I know exactly what I must do. I descend into the dungeon maze below the house. I expand my consciousness to fill the entirety of the twisting passages, find what I am looking for, and then join my body to my consciousness, arriving at my destination in an instant.

In the chamber, a huge monstrosity stands guard over Gemi, who lies motionless on an altar, her body glowing white so brightly that her features are hidden.

The beast stands on two legs like a man, has the features of a jackal and of an ape, black twisting curling horns, and a lion’s mane of fire around its head.

It roars and threatens, but I pay it no heed, and its threats are ultimately impotent, and I go to Gemi.

In the beginning there is you. You are not alive, you are not dead. Those concepts haven’t been invented yet. You just are.

And there is the other. Your twin, your perfect double, like you in every way.

You embrace them and then you tear their flesh and spill their blood and rip out their organs.

Doing so, you have invented death. And consequently, you are now alive.

Your twin’s flesh becomes the earth. Their blood the ocean, their eyes the sun, their brains the clouds, their thoughts the moon. All of creation springs up from your other’s sacrifice.

You walk the new earth, but are painfully lonely without your other, and the knowledge of what you did wracks your brain.

You grow and multiply and become man and the pain of what you did is spread among the many until it doesn’t ache so any more.

You are a priest among men, teaching death and murder and sacrifice.

And man yearns for the perfect other but cannot have them, and so tries to find solace in each other, but wherever man comes together, the memory of the first murder resurfaces and plagues them.

The story echoes throughout mankind, and they name you Mani, who became mankind, and they name your twin Gentle.

In the same way that light is contradictorily both a wave and a particle, time is both sequential and simultaneous. It is sequential in that one thing happens after another, and there is cause and effect. But it is also simultaneous. That is, everything that has happened and will happen, it all happens all at once. In the way that causation makes sense of sequentialism, cycles of repetition make sense of simultaneity.

This has all happened before. And as it is happening now, it will happen again.

There is no adversary. The adversary, who you had come, with growing dread, to view as a vengeful father, is just you, reaching through the veil from another overlapping cycle. From the past, or the future, it doesn’t matter. It’s all happening now at once. And there is only you, Mani, killing your perfect twin over and over again throughout all of time, recreating the birth of the universe with the spilling of innocent blood.

This entire thing, all of this violence, is a situation of your own design and execution.

With sudden clarity, you become pleasantly detached, and are in the cycle, but not of it.

At the altar, you allow the roaring of the beast behind you to fade into nothingness, and you kneel before Gemi, inert and motionless, but not lifeless. Resting. Waiting. You cradle her in your arms and everything, the house, the world, the universe, falls away.

And now, in the beginning, there is you, and your perfect other.

And now you demonstrate sacrifice in action, not just in name. You divest yourself of your person and lie gently down. Your breath leaves your body and Gentle opens her eyes. In death, you have once again invented life. But not yours this time.

Your body blossoms like a flower and bursts. Your blood becomes the ocean, your flesh the earth, your bones the mountains.

Gentle takes your breath into her, and takes your name, Mani who becomes mankind. And she walks the earth.

She grows and multiplies not in pain as you once did, but to share the joy of creation, so that the sacrifice of her brother may not be in vain.

She is a priest among men, and teaches love and compassion. And when man feels lonely and comes together in communion, they remember echoes of the loving self-sacrifice of Gentle so that Man could live, and they tell their story over and over again throughout the ages.