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Rishyasringa had the horns of a deer and a body of
a rishi. He was born of a union between Rishi Vibhandaka and a wild doe say
the Ramayana. This was long before biotech made chimera commonplace.
Vibhandaka raised his son in a secluded forest, far from the madding crowd.
I guess you would do the same if your boy sported / sprouted antlers – real
horns, not the ersatz ones you get on Disneyland caps. But would you raise
the kid as Vibhandaka did, with no knowledge whatsoever of the female
fraternity? Rishyashringa never saw girls or women. He was never told about
them.
That would be a recipe for disaster in the age of
the HIV virus today. But this was before AIDS became known as a disease
rather than just an acronym. However, even in those days, those who tried to
ignore the other gender were often forced to engage with the fair sex
because of dictates of either biology of destiny. The same point is made by
the story of Beast-man Enkidu, from the Sumerian Myth of Gilgamesh, arguably
the world’s oldest written novel.
In one version, by the time Rishyashrina loses the
velvet on his horns, Angadesh ruled by King Romapada suffers a terrible
drought. Only a sage powered by perfect chastity can alleviate this. The
rest is history: the king sends young women, as Gilgamesh also did, to entice
the horned young man to the city. And waters from the forest catchments
follow the now-horny sage into the arid urban wasteland.
There are several morals of
the story. One is that forests are not just place where wild things are. You
need also tigers to protect the forest and the last and the most vital one
reiterates the ecological balance humankind needs to strike if it wants to
survive in the 21st century.
The Sumerian story makes the same point from
another tangent. The myth of Gilgamesh does not of course stop at the taming
of the Beast-man: both Enkidu and Gilgamesh gradually weaken and grow lazy
living in the city, so Gilgamesh proposes a great adventure: they are to
journey to the great Forest in Iran and cut down all the cedars. To do this,
they need to kill the guardian of the forest, Humbaba the Terrible. Enkidu
knows about him from his days running wild in the forest: he tries in vain
to convince Gilgamesh not to undertake this folly. But when push comes to
shove, the Breast-man eggs on the vacillating King to kill the Guardian. Who
said tribal are forests’ best friends? |
