The Charter
Some of the explanations I’ve heard for what we’re doing here, why we’re doing this, are pretty damned funny. I particularly like the one where back in the beginning we were angels....
Some of the explanations I’ve heard for what we’re doing here, why we’re doing this, are pretty damned funny. I particularly like the one where back in the beginning we were angels of the Semitic traditions set to watch over mankind and a couple hundred of us swore a mutual career-suicide-plus-probable-eternal-damnation pact because we were hot for human women. This reveals a lot more than you’d want to know about the source of the rumor than about us, especially if you know that the people spreading this story were herdsmen.
I don’t know how long you’d have to tend a flock before you’d start to think a cow or a doe or a ewe would make a good wife, but apparently the authors of the rumor thought it was inevitable. These were the ones that thought they had a pretty good idea where fauns or satyrs came from, and maybe centaurs, and would nervously check the little lambs and kids and calves and foals in springtime to see if any of them bred true, and maybe quietly take care of any of the more deformed ones before they were discovered and the unsavory speculation and jokes started.
Then there are the older stories where, back in the beginning, we created all of the animals—and people, who were basically also animals—to meet the exacting specifications of the gods but were so sad for people in particular because of how weak and undefended they were that we taught them how to make fire. Which, you’ll understand, is a metaphor for the basic arts of civilization. For which we are being eternally punished by a liver-eating vulture-eagley thing. Some sort of raptor, anyway. Which, you’ll understand, is a metaphor for all of the resulting parental worry and despair for how you’re all turning out, and how much of that must be our own fault when you get right down to it.
Some of these stories mention five previous races of humanity that were sequentially destroyed out of pique by the thunder god before we tricked him out of the civilizing arts to give to you, by which the current version of humanity could finally start surviving a few divinely inspired natural disasters, including the occasional Great Flood. The thunder god was unhappy about the loss of his ability to wipe out mankind as he saw fit and thus made agriculture a lot harder and introduced women as a source of chaos and misery. Such petulance.
That’s a story only a man would make up, am I right?
Other stories have us as being older than the gods themselves, back at the beginning, or possibly contemporary cousins from a different line who betrayed our own kin to give the Olympian strain the upper hand against the rest of the titans. And then we betrayed the Olympians because we liked humanity better.
Almost all of these stories, Semitic or Hellenic in these cases, portray our progeny (metaphorical or literal) as hugely problematic. Semitic legends cast them as literally hugely huge, and also voracious and cannibalistic and destructive and cruel to all other living things, and at least half of the reason the Great Flood happened. Hellenic giants aren’t necessarily larger than life in any way but metaphorically, but they can be hundred-handed, cyclopean, monstrous, or otherwise hugely problematic. But absolutely challengers to divine rule and not very tolerant toward anyone else, either.
You see the common theme, though: we’re perpetually in opposition to the divine order. Tricksters and mischief-makers. Oddly, also protectors, defenders, and patrons of humanity, even against the will and inviting the ire of the gods. Civilizers. Our children (literal or metaphorical) are always problem children, too powerful for their own good, too powerful for the gods themselves to handle in any wipe-the-slate-clean kind of way.
These aren’t the oldest legends. Nor are they the truest. But they reflect the attitudes of our fiercest critics, who are, of course, also our beneficiaries.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, they say.
Here are some even older stories: all of the riverrine civilizations (again, not the oldest oldest, but the ones with the reputations for being the oldest because they all developed forms of writing, creating a firm dividing line between history and pre-history) claim they were visited by sages, usually seven in number—fish-men, bird-men, beast-men—who just dropped by to hand out the secrets to writing and logistics and math and bulk agriculture and high-end ceramics and metalworking and such. The motivations for doing so weren’t very well examined, but mostly it was assumed that we were emissaries of at least one well-disposed-toward-humanity god or goddess. Nor is it clear whether there were four or more separate visitations (Sumer, Harappa, Egypt, Yangtze, Liaohe, Huanghe, etc.) or whether there was just one visit to an older place that later split into geographically separated colonies, splitting the legend as well.
Our top representatives were even on the official government rolls in Sumer.
It was good while it lasted.
I have to say it’s been a long time since we wandered about aboveground. Coincidentally, it’s also been a long time since people aboveground were tolerant and accepting of fish-men, bird-men, or beast-men, much less willing to take them on as civic advisors or inclined to let them start a local academy.
The curriculum was simpler then, of course. The standard “make sure all of the neolithic technologies are suitably covered” package of Hospitality; Storytelling, Music, and Dance; Proper Evocation and Husbandry of Fire; Medicine; Stone-shaping; Basket-weaving and Wickerwork; Rope-making, Cords, Knots, and Fabric-Weaving; Pottery and Ceramics; Carpentry; Pigments, Painting, Dyes, and Inks; Arithmetic; Timekeeping; Navigation; Crop-Farming and Irrigation; Herding; Pest Control; Geometry; Building Construction and Earthworks; Fishing and Fish Husbandry; Boatcraft; Algebra; Logistics and Planning (Resource Storage and Timely Distribution); Tradecraft; Logic; Civics; Recordkeeping and Accounting; and, of course, Writing. The courses were mostly for filling in the gaps as most cultures had worked things out for themselves by then.
Proper kiln construction and charcoal manufacture and bellows-work and a few ore-identification techniques could get you all the way up to the Iron Age with a little bit of diligent practice.
You might think of it as boring, primitive stuff, but I think you’ll find it hard to point to a modern high-school graduate who has mastered more than three or four of those things. You might not need to know all of those things yourself, but you’ll have to admit that it’s important that someone does. You know. Just in case.
And it’s true that most of that stuff humans figured out on their own. Some of it we figured out at the same time as humans, working side-by-side. Some of it we worked out first, maybe, but by doing the same things a human would, propelled by the same frustrations and curiosities. Very few fields of knowledge require our unique senses or sensibilities or perspectives or innate abilities. But there are a few. We save those for the advanced students. The most promising.
—
It’s amazing how much civilization is hated, particularly by those who benefit from civilization in every way. I understand, because it’s a huge pain in the ass when it’s done wrong. Due to civilization largely being constructed and perpetually revised by a huge number of well-meaning idiots who lack the vision to see the damage that implementing a “good idea” can cause down the line, plus a few genuine monsters who are only in it to gather money and power and pussy to themselves in great quantities before they die with no regard for what happens after that…it’s usually done wrong.
I get it. I really do. And it makes me tired.
Since the early days of this project there’s been push-back. Among humans, leaving the gods out of it for now. Nomads with their herds, at first. A large herd is wealth, which is to say money and power and pussy for whoever controls it. Stationary agriculture is a challenge to that. Being told you have to take your herds elsewhere when you’ve never seen a fence (other than a temporary pen for your own convenience) or a border (that you haven’t personally negotiated with a distant cousin for grazing territory) can be galling, especially when people build their so-called permanent constructions where you grazed this time last year. Out of flammable materials.
You have knots on a brown cord for bulls or bucks or rams or stallions, knots on a red cord for cows or does or ewes or mares, knots on a white cord for the little ones that you don’t know if they’re going to be any good yet. Other cords for sons and wives and daughters and younger as-yet-undifferentiated children. This is all the writing and math you need. When there’s a disagreement and you need to handle it without blood, you just compare strings.
The campfire stories have a life of their own and tell themselves. The first thing that happens after someone writes one down is an argument, because that’s not how Old Uncle Badgerface used to tell it. And then it’s all about “Why do dead people get to keep talking through all of that written-down stuff? The best good thing about dead people is that they finally shut up and you don’t have to do what they say anymore.” You know. Except for the hauntings and terrible luck and bad weather and all the debilitating diseases their curses cause.
That tune doesn’t change until the village smith hands over the first metal knife.
Game. Changer.
Maybe the local village can stay after all, as long as you don’t actually have to live there. But, well, if the grain comes to you, you don’t have to go out and sleep in the cold and the rain, and the cows can get really fat…. Maybe you can afford to waste that spare weakling son or headstrong daughter on teaching it to read and write and do math, since you don’t need as many for the herding or trading to neighbors to cement grazing territory alliances….
So the nomads stay. And the nomading philosophy stays too, and infects and fucks up everything. Treating people like livestock. Treating family members like a livestock breeding program. Treating wives and daughters like wealth to be traded. Treating people who can’t breed or choose not to breed like they should be culled as dead weight to the herd. Treating every mouth as a liability that can only be offset by two working arms and two working legs, regardless of their heart or mind. Regardless of age or experience. Regardless of the fact that every empty belly is an indictment of everyone who hoards.
Fuck those guys. They’re right up there with the power/wealth/pussy predator/parasites on the city council. Frequently they’re the same guys, give or take a few extra generations after getting on board with the whole civilization thing.
Every civilization has its problems, but it also seems like every civilization has these problems. And for the people being ground underneath the wheels, it always makes them wonder why we bother.
I get it. I really do.
But here we are, trying to build a civilization that’s smart enough to prune its own parasites and predators and feed everybody sustainably with minimal cruelty, with the end aim of farming culture, of farming science and knowledge and foresight, so that a little later on we can concentrate on farming the fruits of those.
I can’t tell you what those fruits will be. You’ll have to work it out on your own.
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Let’s get back to those people who hate the urban phenomenon. Not just the people who get ground in the gears. Those are the people who civilization has failed, not the other way around. I’m talking about the people who simply don’t trust it. The ones who think it’s just too much to give up to have to learn how to live next door to someone who curses bad weather in a different language and eats food that smells different and prays weird. The ones who had hopes of ruling the roost, or at least some piece of it, back out on the range, but have no hope in hell of power or authority in a twelfth floor condo and a middle management position in someone else’s firm selling products or services they barely understand as opposed to a family business to make sure there’s always family to boss around.
Those are the people who see education as a crowbar for prying children away from the values and morals of their parents—and if their parents are bigoted know-nothing hicks, then they’re right. Education is all about teaching people what a civilization needs to survive and thrive, not just one person, and, to a civilization, bigotry and ignorance are poisons.
Those are the people who see schools as tools of Satan, and our school as Satan’s Own University.
They’ve given us our best legends, frankly. My very favorites.
Since the beginning, they say, the devil and his minions come up from underground and grab ten young people to carry off to Hell Itself to teach them how to be wizards and witches, to teach them how to ruin crops and brew poisons and steal the goodness from food, how to kill and cause sickness with a look, how to cause earthquakes and droughts and floods and summon storms and fly in them, how to raise and torture and interrogate the dead, how to speak all the languages of men and beasts and lie and cheat and manipulate and dominate people and animals into doing their will, and how to command demons, and also writing and oratory and mathematics and law and the secrets of alchemy and any and all of the arts and crafts and music and dancing, and theater and juggling and charlatanry.
They usually leave history off the list for some reason. Every damn time. It’s weird.
In any case, the devil and his minions hold the children as slaves and prisoners for ten years, filling them with terrible knowledge and terrible power, then unleash them back amongst mankind to cause all manner of calamity, usually at court or among the priesthood, but frequently they return to their small rural villages to cause havoc as well, trying to explain why it’s a good idea to rotate crops and leave a field fallow now and then, and maybe put the well farther way from the latrine, and maybe not let the children chew on those lead weights that hold down the corners of the drapes when there’s a draft, and also burn down churches and dine on roasted infants and hopefully get the ear of the local lord to steer them toward unholy and licentious policies and Satanic orgies and treaties with heathen, pagan lands where they do unnatural things.
I love this version of the legend because it’s unapologetically closest to the truth.
No way do we release all ten anymore. That was chaos. We stopped doing that after the first couple of times. Just the top two or three. Some of the students wash out, some remain behind in academia, same as anywhere else. And also they’re not enslaved. They’re just grad students. Under contracts. That they signed of their own free will.
The rest of it is pretty dead on, though.
Satan is a bit of a metaphor. But the whole chthonic, underworldy kind of thing is, like I said, dead on. We relocated the campus to where it is now because death doesn’t get you out of your contract, and seeing as the dead tend to drift to a particular location, it was easier to move the campus there than having to send someone to drag the students back to the surface again and again and again. We lost one of the early classes en masse (yes, to a flood), and after that it just made sense to move the school.
Due to our location we don’t get as many living students lately, which is why we send a couple graduates back out after every session to teach elsewhere as they see fit. But we’re open to anyone who feels like making the trip. (You know the stories. People march into and out of the realms of the dead pretty much at whim, frequently with loved ones in tow). It’s not necessary to sign a contract, even. The contract is for our most intensive degree program, which is invitation only. The “dilettante buffet” approach is open to everyone. For free. If you can handle the commute.
All of it is open to the dead, of course. For free. For as long as they have the capacity to hold it together and focus. It’s not like there’s much else to do.
It’s not actually Hell, though. Not in terms of the Christian tradition, anyway. The location is just one of those places that dead souls tend to wash up eventually, like that beach in Canada where disembodied feet wash up. (I’m not making this up. Look it up.) It’s a fluke of the spirit-flows and the density gradients and matter-shadows that cause them.
If you’re looking for Tartarus, that’s quite a bit lower down. And it’s full. Not exactly a tourist spot.
If they have their own university down there, trust me, you do not want to know about it.
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Anyway, we didn’t want women for our wives. We wanted them for their wombs. And their eggs. It’s a subtle difference, but important. Monstrous children made from mud just don’t hold together as well, especially once it starts raining.