He remembers her. It reaches back to a far point, when language was very young but there were people. They were people. Homo habilis, if memory serves, probably the first time there were men.
I’ll call him Set because he was later called Set. But this was before Egypt or anything like Egypt, a story people would sometimes remember and think about in ancient Egypt in various ways and from various angles. It has virtue and vice.
They’re at the beginning of the story. Her teeth are flashing white, as she eats bright green leaves. Her eyes show white too, in the the shadows of the trees and brush. He loves to watch her eat. She is lovely to see.
They’re in love. What he wanted to do then was make her a home, a house. He’d seen people doing this lately. They’d choose a cave and they’d make things, or maybe trade for them. The things would stay there and you could come back to them. You could stay dry all day, and it was safer during the night. They’d have that. He set to work to make sure. It was a wonderful cave, set apart quite a distance from where other people were living. He fashioned a door for the place, a curtain, and made a big cooking space on one side.
You would later see this one he remembers, though you might say in a different incarnation, with a house with a door on her head, in profile, as beautiful as Isis. They had one of the first homes. They were happy.
It’s prosperous they are. There’s food everywhere, though he doesn’t love best to hunt. There are zebras, gazelles, giraffes, kine, all beautiful. He hunts anyway. He loves her. She’s like a gazelle and a zebra. She’s smooth without fur. Her smile is sweet.
A baby comes, a boy. He’s a good child, and happy enough. He invented something, to put food in. It was made of big leaves and a natural twine. They use them in and out of the cave. One day he was gone and a different person was there, seemingly, a teenager. Really it was their son, but they couldn’t tell what happened once he grew tall with a beard coming in, and they didn’t have enough language to double check and be sure about it. They hadn’t been expecting that. They were never sure it was the same person, but Set suspected it was the boy. The three of them still live together peacefully, quite pleasantly.
The boy’s beard is thick now, and he decides to go. There are no close neighbors, and he might be hankering for new friends, a mate of his own. They say goodbye with fondness and he travels over land towards a riverbank, where there’s no ford but he finds a man with a raft. The man with the raft asks him where he might find a woman, and the boy shows him the direction he came from, where his mother lives. The man doesn’t let him live. He kills the boy for no reason. They’re a different species, and the man is not good. Homo erectus. Many murderers come from this kind, and they’re roaming about at the time of the story.
There’s another new person there at their cave. Set thinks it might be their son returned, looking different yet again. He doesn’t seem the same, though. The strange man tries to spend a lot of time with Set’s wife, the mistress of the house. Set he does not seem to care for.
They’re having a conversation about food. Set confesses he feels bad about eating the animals. The man says it’s good not to eat. Set still hunts, but he gives them the food. He wants to be good.
He’s been fasting for a long time now. The strange man has convinced the woman to eat while Set can’t see them to encourage him to fast for longer. The man tells him it’s fine not to eat anything at all, meat or vegetation, in fact it’s good. Set isn’t sure.
There’s a next life after the one where he lives in the cave. He didn’t realize it would be like that. He’s not reborn as another person yet. He’s reborn as a rare black giraffe, the nicest kind. This was in recognition of his spiritual attainment.
Was he the first good man? It is quite likely true, and the value of this lifetime includes that he went to great lengths in his determination to be good, though the story ends unhappily. His invention was that he identified the pursuit of goodness as worthy, a quintessentially human trait and necessity.
Set was ready to be a person again within four more lifetimes or so, and eventually in one lifetime travelled to ancient Egypt and taught them much. That’s where he eventually found Nephthys again. Perhaps before much longer we’ll cover the Ennead, and how Set connects with Shiva.
──── by Lync Dalton ────
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