From: Amara Graps (Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2000 - 15:08:57 MST
> Is there any actual historical evidence that JC even existed?
While I don't know the answer, I have an idea for where one may learn
the answer, if one has the time and the resources: From the
singing-stories of the "ashokhs."
Ashokh was the name given in Asia and the Balkan peninsula to the
local bards, who composed, recited or sang poems, songs, legends,
folk-tales, and other stories. These people have (had? I'm not sure if
many/any exist any more) incredible memory and alert minds. They knew
by heart many very lengthy narratives and poems, and they sang those
narratives from memory. They also improvised, making up new verses
that rhymed, on the fly. When these bards travelled from village to
village, they would sometimes compete in contests that lasted weeks or
months.
In the first chapter of the book: _Meetings with Remarkable Men_,
G.I. Gurdjieff describes some of the stories that he remembers his
father, an ashokh, singing to him while Gurdjieff was a boy. One of
the singing-tales was the legend of the "Flood before the Flood",
where the words are the following:
I will tell thee, Gilgamesh,
Of a mournful mystery of the Gods:
How once, having met together,
They resolved to flood the land of Shuruppak.
Clear-eyed Ea, saying nothing to his father, Anu,
Nor to the Lord, the great Enlil,
Nor to the spreader of happiness, Nemuru,
Nor even to the underworld prince, Enua,
Called to him his son Ubara-Tut;
Said to him: "Build thyself a ship;
Take with thee thy near ones,
And what birds and beasts thou wilt;
Irrevocably have the Gods resolved
To flood the land of Shuruppak."
When Gurdjieff was a little older, he read an article in a magazine
that said that there had been found among the ruins of Babylon some
tablets with inscriptions which scholars were certain were no less
than four thousand years old. The magazine printed the inscriptions on
the tablets and the deciphered text was the legend of the hero
Gilgamesh.
Gurdjieff became excited when he read that, because he saw in the
magazine-deciphered-text, the 21st song of the legend of the "Flood
before the Flood", and realized that this tale had been handed down by
ashokhs from generation to generation for thousands of years, and had
reached Gurdjieff's day almost unchanged.
I don't know what percentage of the songs were about factual events
and people, and which were symbolic events/people that had been
formulated in myths and legends, but I think that these ashokhs are a
good place to start.
But I really don't know where one would find ashokhs today, if they
even exist. Does anyone know if this singing tradition still exists in
that part of the world?
Amara
(..now back in Germany. Many thanks to those California extropians who
showed me such warmth and generosity during my last month of travels.)
--
***************************************************************
Amara Graps | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
+49-6221-516-543 | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://galileo.mpi-hd.mpg.de/~graps
***************************************************************
"Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:26:07 MST