Gospel & Universe 🍎 The Apple Merchant of Babylon
Eastern Gods
As if to mock him, Shesha put up a new image of a phallic god on the sidewalk in front of his shop. The young girls just stared at it. Shesha explained to them that the phallus was a pillar between Heaven and Earth, and that some of these pillars were wider than Marduk's beard. Soon there was a line-up in front of Shesha's shop, and people started disappearing behind a blue curtain at the back. Hours later they slank out of the shop, the tips of their hats touching their noses.
Shesha became downright arrogant, mocking the claims Moe made in his recent article The Boat on the Hill. Shesha scoffed at puny hills like Sinai. He pointed out that even Moe's beloved Ararat was nothing compared to Chhogori, which itself was nothing compared to the great Mother Goddess of them all, Chomolungma. He then explained (very pedantically, Moe felt) that Rudra is the Lord of the Universe and that His powers were greater than any god’s. Even greater than those of the wise Ea, his magical son Marduk, or the fiery Shamash.
And yet one week Shesha called his God Rudra and the next week he called Him Vishnu, and then the next week he said they were all called Brahman. It seemed to Moe that Shesha wanted his God to have his cake and eat it too. Not only was He transcendent and above everybody else, but He was also a fiery stud. Shesha’s new statue portrayed Him with his arm cupped around the torso of His consort, His middle finger just barely touching her nipple.
Moe’s customers crossed the street in droves. Then, adding insult to injury, Shesha put up an enormous image of a snake-god hovering over Vishnu, with his sexy consort at his side.
He then painted the breasts of the consort red, with little flecks of gold, just the colour of the apples that were right next to the statue and the sign, Two shekels a basket. Come in for a bite!
Below it Shesha carved into the grey stone several catchy verses extolling the powers of the snake. These lines had been sung to him by his grandmother over his bed from the time he was an infant to his twelfth birthday, at which time he left Jhukar to join his rich uncle in the plundered city of Mohenjodaro. It was there he met Dhargda, his Dravidian beauty. What did it matter if she was dark as Kali’s nipple, that she wasn’t high-born, and that she didn’t know how to do puja in front of Lord Vishnu?
Karshnaz, the Persian merchant next door, was not to be outdone by this brazen display of Indian mythology. He immediately imported an even larger statue of a fertility god, with a giant penis standing erect, bolting the Earth to the Sky. His brother Zardosht (or Zarathustra in his native Avestan language) found this a rather vulgar display, and decided to lend the place a dash of class by putting up a panel of dancing apsaras.
Moe shouted to the sky: Fornicating nymphs and stone idols! Is there no end to their avaricious depravity? Moe even suspected that they were lesbian apsaras, as corrupt as the wicked men he had seen fondling each other in the backstreets of Sidamu.
What had all his attempts at cross-cultural mythology come to? Thinking back to his article in The Holy Mountain, he began to see that the Mesopotamian mountains and the Indian mountains weren’t the same at all. It was all a sham, this good will and reaching out to foreigners!
The final straw came when Zardosht bought an enormous stone image which was half-man and half-woman.
Moe was beside himself with indignity: And now they’re bringing in transexual idols! What next, transexuals marrying transexuals?
Moe couldn't keep track of the strange types that went through the blue curtain after that.
Enraged, he went to the front of his shop and tore down the statue of the meditating god on the icy peaks. With his chisel he flattened the inscription on the grey stone. In its place, he chiselled in deep and angry grooves: Climb your own mountain, Zarathustra! And take your apples tarts with you!
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