Tales of a Clear, Dark Night: Literary Archeology

By H.F. Jansen Estrup

Humanity, we are taught, has always looked to the heavens for inspiration, solace, even salvation. Why? What did our ancestors see there? How was it understood? And how will we, in this enlightened, high-tech age, benefit by discovering the motives and miscalculations of ancient teachings? Jansen Estrups Tales of a Clear, Dark Night is a stunning inquiry into the essence of archaeological, mythic and cosmological lore, and their relationship to the pandemic of violence at large in todays societies. Working the night watch with unusual savvy, he balances toughness with compassion while deftly illustrating the murderous intrigues which are uncovered. An original and controversial thinker, Estrup concludes that all oppression is rooted in nothing less than the stories we tell each other and our children. Asking questions until he has answers, the author masterfully weaves together the threads of past and present into a griping read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 30, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462836390

H.F. Jansen Estrup

A retired military communications specialist and technical writer, Jansen Estrup is a lifelong student of legends, myths and storytelling. “The stories we tell ourselves determine the kind of society we create and the roles we each play within ...” He lives in the Southern Sierras with his wife of 36 years, an artist. This is his first book.

Book preview

Copyright © 2001 by H.F. lansen Estrup.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

1

Sinuhe and the Fabricated Stars

2

Indra’s First Trial—Avritra

3

HEELS AND OTHER CLONES

4

SEED AND ZOO . . . OPHIUCHUS, TOO

5

Serpents

6

Time Out . . . Intermission

7

Ballgames and Blood

8

VIOLENCE AND MEDEA

9

Observations from Earth

Dedication

For Carole

The performer, be he actor or shaman, magician or politician, knows an elemental

secret-his success depends 70% on appearance, 20% on presentation and only 10%o on

content. An audiences job is to pretend they do not know this secret. Thus it has always

been.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout this work I have used David M. Rohl’s chronology of ancient Egyptian history. His book, Pharaohs and Kings, is convincing, and at last some sense can be made of the background, substance and creation of three, perhaps all five of the world’s great religions by placing them in their proper geopolitical and cultural framework.

Also helpful was the Book of J, by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, Olive Beaupre Miller’s Story of Mankind, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, by Barbara G. Walker, a whole series of works by E. A. Wallis Budge, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and a host of the more conventional sources, including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

This book would have remained mere interesting speculation and conversational musing without the friendship of Mark McGuire and long, insightful dialogues with my wife, Carole. Her encouragement has been essential, patient and loving.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As a child before the age of television I was read many fables and myths. It was entertainment, much of it inappropriate for a three-year-old by today’s standards, but also critical for development of that wonderful synaptic faculty of visualization. Radio programs stimulated the same brain waves. Long before I attended school I knew how to concentrate, and how to let my imagination roam. Most children do, but in schools, especially in a 1945 Florida school system which ranked 47th, neither faculty was especially useful. Learning was an extension of church and state back then, indistinguishable from the virtual vassalage upon which that pseudo-feudal economy was based. Learning was little different from station keeping, from ‘knowing one’s place’.

There was little to keep a young man there, unless he fit into the quasi-KKK mentality and was able to find work in the fields, tourist traps or sheriff’s office. So I found myself in a military career, a 4.0 ‘place-keeper’, but occasionally innovative, for I had never given up being curious, studious in my own way, and imaginative.

I spent years at sea. Stationed off the DMZ (a gunfire support mission), I manned the big-eye on a destroyer’s signal bridge and watched (vainly) for a glimpse of the lunar lander as it made that first touchdown on the moon and understood instinctively why sailors (and airmen) had been chosen to set sail upon the cosmic sea.

Only much later, retired and living on an isolated mountaintop, did I make an ancient connection to those wonderful myths of my youth. It was a clear desert night, similar I suppose to thousands of summer nights over humankind’s short history.

Call it hallucination or self hypnosis (I’ve never been a drug user), I saw the outline and vacuous form of a great serpent, a hooded cobra complete with gold-red ‘eye’. With a shock I realized that I was looking at the constellation Leo. How could that be possible? And yet, night after night, the stars were still there and so, super-imposed upon Leo, was the cobra.

So I began studying the heavens, not as an astronomer, although I had followed their work over the years with interest, nor as an astrologer-priest, for I had never been interested in divining the future. I was more interested in story-telling and the roots of our world’s diverse, yet strangely convergent cultures.

It is my hope that you will enjoy these journeys, and that it will stimulate your own personal meanderings within the vast seas of human perception, that your discoveries will be scientific and mystical, emotional and icily clear, and that you will gain an appreciation for your capacity to be dazzled and deceived, manipulated and inspired. Perhaps, if you are fortunate, you will find your own way to entertain yourself, for along with food and shelter and propagation of the species, entertainment, not tool-making or language, might be our most human trait, that which singles us out from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is not that other creatures don’t play or sing or watch the world go ‘round, but none come close to our obsession with it. Nor do I propose that entertainment is always fun . . . it takes but a single step to turn comedy into tragedy or a game into warfare.

Entertainment covers the entire scope of our lives. Work is more bearable when we can make it interesting and ‘rewarding’. Religions are but intensely structured, rigorously enforced theater. Government, too. We construct our homes to make them pleasant, as much as functional, and are thankful that our love-making is also a source of ecstasy, lest it otherwise be just another chore. We make games of everything imaginable, from food gathering to eating, family role-playing to naval maneuvers.

Some things we take with a grain of salt, others we treat as if the fate of the Universe depended upon us. But neither is true. Salt is more important than we usually realize. We take it for granted. And that which we think is so vital we’d kill (or die) to achieve it is taken far too seriously virtually all of the time.

Life and death are a game. It is only entertainment. If we watch and listen closely we can hear the Great Mother murmur softly, across the ages, Play nice.

H.FJ. Estrup CA USA Sep 2000

Image407.JPG

Map of the World, c1000BCE

1

Sinuhe and the Fabricated Stars

Be on guard against subordinates. Be not alone. Trust not thy brother, know not a friend. If thou sleepest, do thy guard thine heart, for in the day of adversity a man hath no adherents.

Amenemhat I, founder, 12th Dynasty Great House,

God-king, High Priest of On, ca 1800BCE

What do we really know from two centuries of digging in Egypt, Crete, Turkey, Israel and Iraq? Quite a lot of course but is that knowledge more than superficially useful? Is it in a factual sense true? Why do we rail at the machinations and spin-doctoring of today’s public figures, yet arm ourselves to defend those who lived millenniums ago, swearing that they were honest and divinely inspired (even though scriptures warn us otherwise and one ‘truth’ freely contradicts another)?

Can we for example, really pinpoint the location of Punt or Sodom and from that accurately classify the ‘monsters’ said to live there? Likewise, how might the inhabitants of those 4000 year old cultures have viewed heroes like Utnapishtim and Sargon, Gilgamish and Sinuhe? What did they symbolize for the average citizen and how did they become models for following generations of storytellers and mystics? Seeing them clearly from our vantage point is a bit like having a far future cult of tomb-robbers evaluate us. Sure, we really did travel to the moon and build skyscrapers, but does it follow from that fact that Superman, Popeye or Luke Skywalker walked among us?

Palaeontologists have pretty much decided that our brain evolved its current configuration thirty (perhaps as much as one hundred) thousand years ago. We began playing with body decorations, representational art, more complex tools and rudimentary farming then. Over the next 20-odd millenniums we launched our conquest of the planet, invented stable communities based upon agriculture, then cities with mayors who evolved into kings. The good ones, people hoped, set a standard which could be repeated generation after generation, perhaps eternally.

Egyptologists have captivated the modern mind with one dazzling find after another. Fabulous wealth, such as Tutankhamen’s tomb, challenges our concepts. Were the ancients so rich they could discard so much without bankrupting them-selves? Great stone monuments and wonderful crafts, intricate canal systems and storied families, astronomical wizardry and dark magical knowledge have all made their imprint upon our lives in popular entertainment, tourism and hundreds of coffee-table books.

We seem dimly aware that our religions owe something to Egypt, that medicine, anthropomorphism and literature, before they were Greek or Hebrew, were a marvel of the Nile Basin. The African wild dog, over many generations, was turned into the greyhound, small cats into rat hunting saviors. Animals and humans were given wings and the divine literary where-with-all to use them. A lion (or lioness) was granted human likeness and proclaimed master of the beasts. Certainly monuments are impressive. But so are the stories which made it imperative for a nation to replicate them again and again, large and small, like theaters and cathedrals in more recent years. Not very much attention has been paid to Egyptian literature, even though 4500 years ago they crafted one of our most enduring tales-Cinderella. It has not changed much over the centuries.

Almost four thousand years ago another story was popular among Twelfth Dynasty royals and others throughout the land. Two extensive scrolls still exist so it must have been copied often and retold among the riverside villages, desert encampments and beached ships on trade routes major and minor. Along with Gilgamish, it was probably a best seller of its time and forerunner of more elaborate and familiar epics such as the Hebrew Bible’s Story of Joseph, Greek Odysseus and Heracles, and also Hindu heroes like Indra and Rama.

It is Egypt’s story of Sinuhe, whose peripheral characters are historic and lived during the first dynasty of the Middle Kingdom (Twelfth since the beginning of Egypt’s dynastic history). The Twelfth Dynasty rose up in the devastation following a massive volcanic explosion on Thera, an island in the Aegean Sea. Carbon 14 technology has dated this disaster to 1800BCE, so Amenemhat I must have begun his reign shortly afterward.

This king is credited with evicting ‘barbarians’ from Egypt, pushing them west into Lybia and east into Sinai and the Levant. He also reestablished Egypt’s traditional frontier at Kadesh, claiming that it had been so since about 3000BCE, when Egypt first began to rise out of obscurity. He was able to accomplish this because the Hittite Empire suffered greatly in the aftermath of Thera’s blast, the tsunamis which wiped out so many Anatolian seaports and ash that covered farming communities all the way south to the Nile delta. Minoan Crete, Mistress of the Sea, and proto-Greek ports, were obliterated overnight. Surviving merchants became part of ever-growing masses of starving, predatory refugees headed south.

Before Amenemhat’s elevation to kingship, the Nile had been ruled for centuries by the princes of fourteen quarreling Nomens who usually banded together in factions designed to prevent any single Minor House from attaining the strength or authority to establish a Great House (Pharaoh, perhaps meaning Ptahraoh, House of the Rising Sun).

The Thera disaster changed all that.

Amenemhat, Nomenic Prince and High Priest of On, Patriarch of

Sobek (the Crocodile Clan) became God-king under great duress from within and without. Consequently, in addition to making war upon foreigners, he had a second great purpose-to overcome the ‘democracy’ which had kept Egypt in a weakened turmoil for so long. To this end he taught his sons and daughters to ‘trust no one’-not his fellow princes who still lusted for the old ways, not the priests who thought only of their ‘rice bowls’, nor the people who, like people everywhere, believed that magic made the world go ‘round.

I Sinuhe

To aid him with these dangerous tasks Amenemhat chose as chief advisor one Sinuhe, a mysterious aide to the Queen. Throughout his