Terry Taylor's Blog

As I mentioned in a previous blog, Zwane is a kind of African Parzival, but not totally. Parzival (the real one) ultimately overcomes his weaknesses and inherits the Grail Castle, without also inheriting the wound of the previous master of the castle. He has developed empathy (finally asking the old Grail king the vital Question: “What ails you?”), and he has become his own person – he no longer just follows social mores and slavishly accepts the instruction of those he supposes to be his superiors and betters. With Parzival’s accession, the wasteland flourishes again.

I find the ending of Wolfram’s Parzival a bit too sweet, too “happily ever after.” So I made my hero a more complex character. Zwane does learn empathy. When he comes down from the mountain, he climbs on a termite mound, the home of his erstwhile enemies, and takes care not to disturb even a single grain of sand. He buries what remains of his spear and weeps as he does so, for the destruction he caused with it. And he returns to the old king of the cliff community of scarabs and asks the vital Question, which he had omitted to ask on his outward-bound journey.

Yet for him, the wasteland does not pass away. And ultimately, he ends up slain by some members of the cliff community, and the same fate befalls his mate, Thandiwe. Even his daughter only just escapes, apparently sprouting wings and flying away over the gorge. But perhaps that was just a fanciful story invented by Zwane’s grieving followers.

There are two reasons why Zwane seems unable to take the wonderful revelation that he received on the Mountain of the Spiders and use it to the benefit of all living creatures. Firstly, he has a mortifying experience soon after he comes down from the mountain. He relates his experiences to the the two remaining members of the Bushwillow community, where he had committed the huge but ultimately unsuccessful massacre of the termites. He enthusiastically recounts his revelation on the mountain, proclaiming that all creatures are divine; and he urges his two friends to adopt a new way of living. But they, still hating the termites who have turned their valley into a desert, listen with mounting disbelief, and finally conclude that he must be deranged. After this shock, Zwane resolves never again to proselytise. It is as though St Paul had a bad experience on his first attempt to convert his listeners to Christianity, and decides to give up preaching, resorting instead to making small cautious comments to those who seem well-disposed to him.

Zwane henceforth refrains from pushing his ideas onto others because he concludes that everyone is different and there is no one size that fits all. Paul, in contrast, founds churches across the entire Mediterranean, structuring them all on his model. So you could say that either Zwane lacks resolve, or that he is way ahead of his time (for a scarab), being sensitive to the post-modernist strictures against claiming that one’s own belief system is the “right” one.

The second reason why Zwane turned out to be a semi-failed hero is more fundamental. It goes to the ground of his own soul, or rather, his failure to reach the ground of his own soul. After he loses his faith in his false god, Ilanga, Zwane goes on a rampage of destruction, ultimately wounding himself with his own spear. This of course has symbolic meaning. His poisoned spear which he used to destroy many creatures, finally almost destroys him. For many days he drags himself along in intense pain, until he is given guidance by the mentor who had helped him on several other occasions: the multi-coloured grasshopper. Taking the grasshopper’s advice, he ascends the sacred Spider Mountain, where he is eventually cured of his wound by the Lord of Life. And his soul is apparently also healed. He is a changed creature. But has he attained redemption?

Being a lover of classical Greek, I cannot resist using this language to make a point regarding Zwane’s supposed redemption. Don’t worry, I’ll write everything in Roman letters and explain the meaning of the words.

Greek verbs come in three voices, active, passive, and middle. English and almost all other languages don’t have a middle voice. Initially, the middle voice was supposed to indicate things that you do to or for yourself, but as time went by, many middle verbs actually indicated active or passive actions. For now, let’s keep to the original intention for middle verbs. Take the verb luein, which means to loosen or set free. If you want to say that “Zwane was set free” (by the Lord of Life), this would be: “Zwane eluthe.” If Zwane set someone else free, you would say “Zwane eluse.” And if you wanted to say that Zwane set himself free, you would say “Zwane elusato.”

The Greek word luein can also be translated as “to redeem,” but I would like to make a distinction between redemption and setting free. Setting free is “freedom from,” whereas redemption is “freedom to.” The importance of making this distinction will become clearer as this blog progresses.

The English word “Redemption” is from Latin and it means “re-buying.” If you redeem a gold watch that you pawned, you “re-buy” it by paying the amount that the pawn broker gave you for the watch when you pawned it, plus a commission. So redemption seems to imply a redeemer, and we clearly see this in the New Testament. Nevertheless we often talk about individuals “redeeming themselves.” When my editor was reading through the section of The Prize (the last book of The Baobab Tree) where Zwane goes on the rampage, she e-mailed me that she was loving the story but had fallen out of love with Zwane at that point. “I hope he redeems himself,” she said. And I replied that he would. But that was not strictly true. He didn’t redeem himself. He was not even redeemed. He was absolved from his wrongdoing, set free. In Greek, the noun is apolusis, a setting free.

Real redemption requires dedicated participation by the individual. You can’t passively be redeemed. Even in the New Testament, where we have a clearly defined redeemer in the person of Christ, Paul finds it necessary to say, “I die daily.” Like his redeemer, he has to go through the process himself, in a variety of ways. Only when you have participated in an act of personal transformation – and also found the direction you should take to fully actualise the potential in your soul – can you achieve true redemption – lutrosis in Greek. Both apolusis and lutrosis, and a number of other words, come from the rich root word, luein. (There are plenty more, like analusis, katalusis, and dialusis, all of which have found their way into English as analysis, catalysis and dialysis.)

Let’s now take a little inspiration from that most spiritual of psychologists: Karl Jung. Just as the ancient authors of the Upanishads, Jung saw a spiritual and divine component in the human soul. The Upanishads state this profound realisation in the words Tat Tvam Asi, or That Thou Art, Atman is commensurate with Brahman, the ground of the universe. But whereas Upanishadic authors understood Atman as the highest part of the soul, above the jivatman (mundane consciousness about daily matters) and above the body with its complex of physiological and sexual needs, Jung placed the most divine domain of the soul right at the bottom, only marginally above the carbon of the body. This lowest part of consciousness is where the architypes of the collective unconscious reside. We become aware of them though dreams and in other special experiences, but this is not really them, in their purest being. They are not representable as any kind of entity, for they embrace all opposites, all antinomies. They are unknowable in their deepest essence, they are completely uncontrollable and unpredictable. These are the characteristics of the divine. So God or the gods dwell in the nethermost part of the soul, a dark realm not fully separated from the body.

The reduced versions of the architypes that we encounter in dreams, ecstasies and myth dwell in the collective unconscious, below the level of normal personal consciousness, which is the jivatman of the ancient Indian sages. In order to develop a true Selfhood (as opposed to being just an ego, trying to control the things of the world and in turn being pushed around by unknown internal forces), one has to come to terms with the architypes and learn from them, even incorporate some of their qualities into a new entity that becomes the centre of the personality. This process requires a “passion of the ego,” a kind of ego-sacrifice analogous to the passion of Christ. A grain of wheat that abides alone does nothing, says Christ. But if it falls to the ground and dies, it bears much fruit. The ego that undergoes the humble and humbling journey down into the daunting, unknown regions of the unconscious, especially the dark tunnels of the unconscious that lie below the personal unconscious, reaching into who-knows-where, may perish on the way; but, given an honest and noble intention, it will overcome the terrors of the unknown and emerge enriched. The “edges” that plagued Zwane so much will have largely dissolved, and the individual will be able to relate to others with true empathy, without impenetrable divisions between self and other.

But, most importantly, the individual will be able to realise his or her full potential. The following sentence will sound weird, but I’ll present it anyway. The person will achieve what some supernatural Entity “hopes” he or she will do, even though that Being does not fully know what that is, until the person achieves it.

The Father breathes with the Son with the breath of the Holy Spirit, says Jung. And Christ says “I am the vine and you are the branches.” The branches are attached to the vine. So in the logic of the New Testament, we are “in Christ.” Adding Jung’s interpretation of the Father and Son breathing together through the medium of the Holy Spirit, the conclusion follows that we have some form of access to the Ultimate, via the breath of the Holy Spirit. The removal of the edges makes this possible. We can ride on the wind of the Spirit, and catch that same wind in others. And some of the wind emanates from us. If, like a sailing boat, we set our course by its direction, we will reach the destination of our self-actualisation, our lutrosis, redemption. Lutrosis is an act of will; it takes effort, effort that will only bear fruit once the ego has completed its journey of passion, and in its place the Self has emerged. The form of the Greek verb that is relevant in this process is the middle one. You do this process of redemption to yourself. But you will get some help from a greater Being.

In The Prize, the last book of The Baobab Tree, Zwane achieves apolusis, absolution from his the sins of his deeds that led to the death of many. The Lord of Life has been very helpful, causing his path to cross several creatures who try to guide him away from his aggressive tendencies. The most important of these are the rainbow-coloured grasshopper, his companion on the journey to the Insimbi Mountains (Nomusa), and the old crone who lives in a bottle in the sandy delta at the end of the River of Life (Umprofethikazi). Only after Zwane is critically wounded does he begin to heed the advice he has been given. And ultimately the Lord of Life takes his wound away, on the mountain sacred to the spiders.

Zwane acquires some characteristics that would expect of one who has undertaken the passion of the ego. His personality changes, and he becomes the gentlest of creatures. He also develops a sense of the one-ness of life, especially when, on Spider Mountain, he gazes at the valley below him and feels his edges that had separated him from others dissolve. But the transformation isn’t complete. The Lord of Life grants him absolution because he always strove towards his goals and ultimately achieves self-honesty. But he never properly embarks on the way down into the depths of the soul: the kathodos. In his quest for the prize that turned out to be false, he had to travel though the tunnels within the Insimbi Mountains, and he was unnerved by the experience, although his more spiritually advanced companion, Nomusa, was not. Similarly, he is apprehensive of what is deep within himself. And when he is granted apolusis by the Lord of Life, he cannot understand why he has received this gift rather than Nomusa. Apolusis happens to him though the grace of the Lord of Life, but he never uses this gift to go on a voyage of lutrosis.

That is why Zwane is a semi-failed hero. He tries to be good and loving to others, but he does not have the will to go on the journey of self-realisation, lutrosis, where he would have contributed what only he could achieve in this world, fulfilling the “hopes” of the Lord of Life. When he gets back to his home under the umbrella thorns, he does nothing; he tries to remain anonymous and then simply slips away and returns to the cliff community. In the cliff community, he has only modest success in inspiring some of the residents. And then all this is swept away when he and his mate was are killed in an uprising. But, while he was at the Umbrella Thorns, he did manage to arouse strong passions in his friend Thwala. Thwala seems to show signs of becoming his St Paul, although Thwala himself apparently does not take his ego on the journey of passion to the regions below. Thwala writes down Zwane’s experiences, and, having committed them to memory, goes to the humans, to a city park, where he re-writes Zwane’s story and secretes his epistle, wrapped in a plastic supermarket bag, in the fork of a tree. That is where The Baobab Tree ends. The reader is left in ignorance as to the outcome of Thwala’s effort to bring Zwane’s experiences to the humans.

The story is not finished, even if The Baobab Tree trilogy is. Zwane’s daughter, Ithemba, survives the massacre on the cliffs, and she manages to escape, whether by flying away or by some other means. And she will attain true lutrosis. That will be the real ending of the story. That story is in my head, but I haven’t written it yet.

As Eliot says in The Four Quartets, the way up is the way down. The anodos is the kathodos. Ithemba will take both those ways, first the latter, then the former.

In the last blog, I begged your indulgence as I launched into a historical treatise on the fortunes of the concept of the Centre over a period of about 2500 years, from the Axial Age to postmodernism. Now I finally want to tie my comments in that blog to the theme of The Baobab Tree; and I also want to speculate on what a new Axial Age might be like.

Zwane, the hero of my story, starts out as a staunch believer in the Centre. This Centre is Ilanga, the god who visibly manifests himself in the disk of the sun. He and his community dream of the day when Ilanga will return to earth and establish himself in a divine Tree, just as he had done in the past, and all scarabs will dwell there in immortal bliss.

But Zwane and a number of other members of his community are slightly heretical believers. Whereas the old priests insist that all scarabs should keep all the rituals and pray for Ilanga to show grace and return, the sect Zwane belongs to think that the scarabs should mount a quest to go out and win back the Seed that will grow into the new sacred Tree. Ilanga, impressed by their bravery, will then return and live in the Tree. So Zwane and his like want to manipulate the future rather than passively waiting for a divine event to occur.

Through an act of heroic service to another scarab community, Zwane wins enough fame to be able to lead the quest to win back the Seed. Despite his somewhat heterodox views, he is a passionate believer in Ilanga, even when things start to go wrong. Some of his companions are killed; and Ilanga does nothing to prevent this. Some of his companions abandon him, but he carries on. With only one companion left, he finally gains what he thinks is the Seed. To win this trophy, he has committed many horrendous deeds. Ultimately, his final companion also abandons him.

He struggles on with his belief in Ilanga largely intact. However, two final blows finally destroy his faith. I won’t describe them here. Zwane rejects Ilanga as no god at all, just a ball of burning gas. In effect, he becomes a postmodernist. There is no Centre, there is no meaning beyond the most trivial. All one can do is strive to stay alive in a hostile world, and, if possible, to do some heroic deeds that others will admire.

And he does indeed perform many dangerous and heroic deeds. In effect, he becomes his own little god. But he ultimately finds out that he cannot substitute his flawed self for a Centre. In one of his escapades, he is wounded by his own poisoned spear. The evil he visited on others, he has now visited on himself. No longer does he strive to do great and violent deeds; he struggles just to stay alive. Even the little centre that he had made of himself is in danger of falling to dust.

Finally, he has a divine experience that totally transforms him, and he returns home a completely different creature. I won’t go into details here; for those, you should read the books. Instead, I will share my intuitions of what a new post-postmodernist era might look like: a new Axial Age.

In the West, our experience of the Centre has for a long time been based on the Judea-Christian tradition. As I said in the previous blog, St Augustine (writing in the fourth and fifth century) characterised God has possessing three “omnis”: omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence. This Centre was completely separate from humanity, and humanity was pathetically weak in comparison. No amount of effort and righteousness could guarantee salvation: that was God’s alone to grant.

This conception enraged Nietzsche and many philosophers who came after him. Nietzsche “dumped” the Centre by proclaiming God dead. He was particularly dismissive of any morality that was imposed on humans from above. By accepting the Ten Commandments and other divine edicts, man takes on a kind of slave mentality, answering to God as the overlord. Nietzsche would not have that. In his fictional work Thus spoke Zarathustra, the eponymous hero says, “Don’t follow me, follow yourself.” Thus, if there is any kind of centre, it is now in the individual.

Nietzsche was an inspiration for the structuralists and postmodernists who cast out all conceptions of a Centre. Relativism is now the order of the day. After the nightmare of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and others) it is not surprising that people in the Western world reject any massive core of power which thinks it “knows” what is right and how people should behave.

On the other hand, many people have become tired of relativism and some of its irritating offshoots, like political correctness. Postmodernism is an empty, corrosive philosophy in many ways. Philosophical standpoints are seldom actually disproved; usually they are discarded as no longer useful or rewarding. This might happen to postmodernism.

But we will probably not throw it out in its entirety. In many ways we are much freer now than ever before, even if we are rudderless. Not many people would want to return to a world dominated by an overbearing Centre, replete with the three omnis. In such a world, humans are helpless, just as St Augustine envisaged them. We need to retain the freedom postmodernism gave us, but this freedom needs to be more genuine. Ever since Marx, the self has been fading away. The self has been replaced with “culture;” we are just a pastiche of cultural influences and trends. The “individual” is like an onion; you can peel away multiple layers of conventions and modes of life, until you are left with nothing. There is no core. Freud’s vision wasn’t any more positive. After peeling away the culturally conditioned layers of super-ego and ego, you were left with raw greed, sexual desire, and aggression.

In a post-postmodern age, one hopes that the individual will return. Then our so-called freedom will become genuine. As I mentioned in the previous blog, in our current world-view, we don’t spin our life stories; our culture spins us. This is the polar opposite of how humans were seen in earlier times. The characters in Greek tragedies wore masks: that was who they were, the “typos” or imprint that the gods had used to form us. The masks never changed during the course of the drama. The mystery plays of the Middle Ages were much the same. God gave you a soul, and that was it. How he could then punish you for the flaws in this soul is a hard one to justify. Only with the birth of the novel did people start being portrayed as, in part, a product of their circumstances and experiences. Both extremes must be wrong, because both deprive us of responsibility and accountability. We must have a core, a core that is influenced by our circumstances, but which we use to drive our own becoming, irrespective of the circumstances.

This core is a centre. What kind of centre is it? Remember the Chandogya Upanishad that I quoted from in the previous blog. I requote a part of it here:

If anyone asks, “Who is he who dwells in a small flower in the centre of the centre of the castle of Brahman?” we can answer, “The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and he dwells within our heart.”

This centre in ourselves is actually the divine in its entirety; Atman is the same as Brahman. As the Upanishads say in another place: “Thou art That.”

This notion was a profound insight of the first Axial period. But how does the centre I am talking about, for the new Axial Age, compare with it?

Perhaps we should start by looking at a comment made by Paul in his purple patch in 1 Corinthians.

Now we see through a glass darkly; later face to face.

I can see how the translators of the original Greek struggled with this. “Through a glass darkly” is the following in classical Greek: “di’ esoptrou en ainigmati.” Literally, this means “Through a mirror in riddles.” How do you see “through” a mirror? The translators of the King James Bible neatly sidestepped this by saying “through a glass.” When I first heard this as a child, I thought seeing through a glass darkly was like looking through stained glass, or, less reverently, looking through the bottom of a beer bottle. But, of course, a glass can also mean a mirror. And the Greek noun “esoptron” does mean mirror (“esoptrou” in the quote means “of a mirror,” because “di’” or “dia,” requires the possessive of the following noun.)

Then Paul says that we shall later see “face to face.” And he also says “I will know even as I am known.” One is confronted with one’s own face in a mirror. It seems Paul (and everyone else) finally gets full knowledge by looking at his own face. This is a personalised vision of God. In a way, Paul is talking about seeing God in his own face. So he seems to be looking into himself and, in his now-elevated state, finding God there. This is a Gnostic idea; Paul does sometimes lapse into Gnostic thinking.

Compare this with the Chandogya Upanishad. The author says that in the centre of the soul one discovers the Lord of the Universe, Brahman. This is not a personalised vision. You don’t see your face in Brahman. Brahman is in everyone, but he remains Brahman, not inflected by his presence in a given person.

I think Paul was closer to the truth. He lived in the aftermath of the Axial Age, but we was looking forward to the new Axial Age, where the Centre becomes decentralised in a more profound sense than is found in the Upanishads. The Centre develops and learns though its presence in individuals. Thus the Centre does not possess the three omnis. These have always been problematic. If God is omnipotent, can he make a rock so big that he can’t lift it? If God is omniscient, he must then know what people will do before they do it, so how can he punish them for bad deeds if they have no independent will? If God is omnibenevolent, why do so many bad things happen, like tsunamis? Once God loses the three omnis, these problems go away.

Life on this earth, which seems to have little meaning in a postmodernist and materialist mind-set, suddenly gains immense meaning. Humans now are the vehicle for development, carrying God forward, especially to greater levels of benevolence. And not only humans do this. God learns through all forms of life. God is in the lion grasping the antelope’s neck in its jaws; and God is in the antelope, gasping out its last breath. Zwane struggles to get his head around this. But he can finally accept it, for the Lord of Life told him that his compassion grows through these experiences, even as the killing carries on. All divine mysteries are not reducible to logic. The suffering is necessary for the learning to take place, even though the leaning says, “Let’s stop this suffering.”

So, in summary, what would be the fundamental characteristics of the new Axial age, if it ever comes about? The Centre would return, but it would be a different centre. It would be decentralised into all of life, and in particular into all sentient beings. It would not be the same in each being, but would be conditioned by its experience in each being. The Centre would not have the three omnis, but would be in continuous process of becoming, a continuous process of learning in this flawed world of love and suffering and, ultimately death – at least of the corruptible body. Sentient beings would know themselves as individual centres, not as onions with no core, and not as zombies with no free will. Life would become immensely meaningful, because each life would have the potential to develop God.

In the Chandogya Upanishad, Brahman is in the shrine of the individual heart. It seems that this ultimate being is identically in each heart. But in the new Axial age, Brahman will be a little different in each heart. I think Dante intuited this in the Divine Comedy. The Paradiso portrays all the souls in heaven surrounding God, like the petals of a rose. Each person is different; they see God from a different perspective, just as each petal of a rose looks at the centre from a different angle. They are a medium through which God has developed, and God will be seen from a different angle by each person. God is personalised. This is not an overbearing Centre of previous times. When Paul says, “I will know even as I am known,” this does not mean that each person will know God as the same entity. Each will know God in a way that is conditioned by his or her life experience, and in a form that is “right” for that person.

The morality of faith would be greatly enhanced in this new Axial Age. At present, believers tend to do good to please God and get rewards. But this is hardly morality at all, it is just a kind of exchange: I’ll worship you and follow your commandments if you give me stuff in return and save me from a terrible fate in the afterlife. In the new Axial Age there will be no Hell and no rewards for obeying rules. Instead, the reward will be the knowledge that you have done something worthwhile to advance the divine.

Instead of the three omnis, we shall have telos, purpose, in the new Axial age. Instead of theology and concepts we shall have a striving after a knowing of Reality that transcends categories. While St Thomas was writing a section on the categories of penance in his massive work Summa Theologiae, he had a mystical experience. He stopped writing. When his friend brother Reginald expressed concern that he had apparently fallen into idleness, Thomas said “Mihi videtur ut palea,” or “To me it seems as straw.” He was referring to his life’s intellectual work. And he never wrote another word. Summa Theologiae remains unfinished. Despite its lack of completion and Thomas’s evaluation of it, this work remains a central pillar of theological thought.

But in the new Axial age we will strive for the experience that transcends the straw of concepts and theology. Where there is knowledge, where there are concepts, they will pass away, as Paul said. But there is a chance to know even as we are known.

I have not spoken about Zwane’s divine experience here. To find out more, you should read the trilogy. His experience is one that looks forward to a new Axial Age, but, being a scarab, he did not have the advantage of all the historical and philosophical trimmings that I have presented here.

The title of this blog might puzzle you. In particular, you may be asking yourself what the concepts mentioned in it have to do with my trilogy The Baobab Tree. Bear with me. Let me talk about the Centre and the Axial Age before getting to my book.

By “Centre” I mean a core of meaning around which a person might build his or her life. Almost all people desire to find such a centre, for it gives life a focus and a purpose. Other things come and go, but the Centre endures. Often the Centre constitutes a religion or a philosophy. But over the past few centuries, especially since the Enlightenment, the Centre has taken a knock. W. B. Yeats was very aware of this:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

I want to sketch the history of the notion of the Centre over more than two millennia, to its present beleaguered state, where it has been virtually dismissed as a meaningless security blanket, especially by the postmodernists, but also by scientists of a materialist bent – which means most scientists.

Now let’s look at that other concept mentioned in the title: the Axial Age. This term was coined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Jaspers identified a period from about 800 BC to 300 BC, when humanity seemed reach a new level of spiritual insight. That was when we got the first real glimpse of the Centre.

In India, the Upanishads were composed. In the Chandogya Upanishad, we read:

In the centre of the castle of Brahman, our own body, there is a small shrine in the form of a lotus flower, and within can be found a small space. We should find who dwells there, and we should want to know him.

And if anyone asks, “Who is he who dwells in a small flower in the centre of the centre of the castle of Brahman?” we can answer, “The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and he dwells within our heart.”

This leads to the profoundest insight of the Upanishads: Tat tvam asi, Thou art that. Atman, the highest realm of the individual soul, is Brahman, the ground of the universe. According to Shankara (who lived in the classical period of Hinduism) Brahman appears in two forms, Brahman nirguna and Brahman saguna, or Brahman without qualities and Brahman with qualities. The former is like clear all-pervading water, and the latter like the foam of a breaking wave. In the ten thousand things of this world we see the latter, but underlying this is the ineffable Centre, and we are connected to it, in the highest part of our soul, even as our bodies and lower souls (jivatman) are part of the ten thousand things.

India was a spiritually fertile place during the Axial Period. Hinduism spun off a “heresy,” Buddhism, which spread widely outside India. Practitioners who followed the noble eight-fold path eventually entered the sublime Centre known as Nirvana.

In Persia, the prophet Zoroaster, after meditating in a mountain cave, came down the mountain with a new religion, Zoroastrianism, with its dual Centres, Ahura Mazda, the source of all good, and Angra Mainu, the source of all evil. We are all caught in the great battle between these two, and we should fight on the side of good.

In Israel, Moses encountered Yahweh, the ruler of the universe, on another mountain, and brought down his commandments.

And in Greece, the pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Thales and Anaximander, tried to find the source from which everything came; and then Socrates and his pupil Plato identified a realm beyond the phenomenal world, the realm of perfect Forms, which are expressed imperfectly in all the things we can see and conceive of. A generation later (in the fourth century BC) Aristotle identified four causes that account for all phenomena in the cosmos. The fourth or final cause was the “for the sake of which” cause. It gave all things their purpose, or telos, and behind it was Unmoved Mover.

But in Greece, the cracks were already beginning to show in these grand visions by the time the Axial Age was nearing its end. The sophists claimed that there was no Centre. Protagoras asserted that “Man is the measure of all things.” There is no ultimate Reality or ultimate Right. The sophist Gorgias made this amazing statement:

There is no Centre.

If it exists, it cannot be known.

If it can be known, it cannot be communicated.

Christianity, which emerged a couple of centuries later, tried to refute this. God is the Centre, it said; and Christ is the means by which God is known; and the Holy Spirit is the means by which the Divine communicates with Man.

After Constantine became emperor of the Roman Empire, the Centre was alive and well. The only dispute was to how the three parts of the divine related to one another and to humanity. During the Middle Ages, the Centre was firmly established, both in Christianity and in Islam. St Augustine, using Plato’s philosophy of perfect Forms, identified three “omnis” in the Divine: omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence. The neo-platonist Plotinus also influenced Augustine. He identified what he called The One as the ground of the universe. We are all emanations of The One. Of course, Augustine had to moderate this, to avoid falling into heresy. And in the late Middle Ages, Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, constructed a grand hierarchy, with God, replacing Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, at the top, followed by angels, then humans, then animals, and finally inanimate objects like rocks – which, as was their lot, sank to the bottom.

But then in the sixteenth century, the Reformation fractured the Centre. Now there were two “centres” and people had to choose between the two. But both were less compelling than the original Centre of Christendom.

A century later, the Enlightenment started. The project of the Enlightenment was to abolish all superstition. No longer where intangible metaphysical causes welcome. Aristotle had had four causes: material, efficient, formal, and final. Galileo, possibly the first person who could validly be called a scientist, did away with the formal and final causes and held that only the material and efficient causes had any validity.

And so the era of conceiving of the world as dully material, un-enchanted, was born. Aristotle’s telos – purpose in the world – was removed. But it is interesting that even today, scientists have difficulty accounting for form in a scientific way, and the seeming purposiveness of nature has to be endlessly explained away – oddly, by using the principles of chance and necessity. Now there was nothing in the world but matter in motion. There was no Centre except the Laws of Nature, abstract formulae. Newton carried on the work of Galileo. God was still tolerated as a principle outside nature, who set everything going, but his daily presence in nature was not needed. He was the clockmaker who set the clock in motion, but then his job was over. Rocks no longer sought the lowest place because they were so alien to the divine, but because of Newton’s principle of gravity.

Galileo and Newton were religious men, but their religion had turned into deism, the belief that God was necessary to create stuff initially and get it moving in a grand and orderly way. So the divine began to fade from our world, and the only real Centre left were the laws of nature. And as scientists became more and more proficient at finding underlying laws that explained the workings of the world, the need for any god at all seemed unnecessary. When Napoleon asked Laplace why he had not made any mention of God in his scientific system, he answered, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

In philosophy, Descartes had already put God in his place, away from nature, by distinguishing two types of stuff: res cognans and res extensa. The former (thinking stuff) contained God and human souls, and the latter (extended stuff) contained everything else, including our bodies and all other forms of life (they had no souls). All of res extensa was purely mechanical. So if a dog yelped in pain, this was just some sort of mechanical stress or malfunction.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume even questioned causality in this mechanical system, regarding it as too metaphysical. Causality was no more than a human inference. In reality, there was just “one damn thing after another.” Immanual Kant was shocked by Hume’s assertions, and feared for the future of science. In medieval times, reasoning (known as disputatio) was of the deductive kind. Starting with unquestioned premises based on the authority of scripture or some classical Greek thinker, logically water-tight conclusions were derived. No one questioned whether the authorities might be wrong. But science worked differently. It used inductive reasoning, or hypothesis formation. This reasoning, of course, was fallible, because the hypotheses might be wrong; but at least this could be checked using empirical investigation. If causality did not exist, however, then science was in serious trouble, because the future could not be relied upon to resemble the past. Tomorrow, the sun might not come up.

Kant tried to save science by dividing the world into the noumenal (things as they really are) and the phenomenal (things as they appear to the senses). Science was only good for the phenomenal world. Of the noumenal world (the world of “things in themselves”) we know nothing. This made room for religion and for free will. It was possible that the Centre dwelled in the noumenal world, but not certain. In Kant’s system, we see echoes of Plato’s division of the world into the place of imperfection in which we live, and the realm of Forms, which are perfect.

In a revolt against the godless materialism of science, Hegel created a philosophy of Spirit. Spirit was moving through the world, working through all its possible ramifications, and using us to do this. Through the dialectical process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, it was reaching ever-higher levels of development. Hegel’s philosophy brought the Centre back in full measure.

But by the middle of the nineteenth century, this type of thinking was in retreat. Karl Marx “turned Hegel on his head” by seeing the dialectic as a purely physical process. Marx even “de-centred” the human being by emphasising the primacy of economic and social factors rather than the individual’s own will. Darwin weighed in by seeing evolution not as a phenomenon guided not by a Centre, but by pure chance. And then, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche pronounced God “dead.” Freud, like Marx, also “de-centred” the human being and the human will. The ego was no longer in charge, but was continually trying to placate the super-ego and the id, as well as coping with reality. Plato, in contrast, saw the human psyche as analogous to a charioteer with two horses, one white and one black. The white horse was filled with virtuous spiritedness whereas the black one was driven by base desires. The white horse was a kind of super-ego and the black one a kind of id. But the point is that the charioteer (human reason, equivalent to the ego) was in charge. Freud’s ego was not in charge, and was to a large extent a dupe of unconscious forces. The Centre in the human psyche was gone.

The early twentieth century saw the emergence of structuralism, which further attenuated the notion of a distinct self. At least Nietzsche had retained the will to power, a willing self, but structuralism saw meaning and motivation residing in “culture”. We don’t create our own lives; our culture creates us. So an author should not take responsibility for his or her works; in effect these are written by the society in which this person lives. We don’t spin our tales; our tales spin us. This mentality also had its effect on science. To what extent can science be seen as producing real truths? Are its findings just a product of the cultural milieu? This was not a totally new idea. Even Paul said: “Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. But he also said, a verse or two later, “but then I will know even as I am known.”

The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics which burst on the scene in the early twentieth century had their own “decentring” effects. Nothing seemed solid and certain. No wonder Yeats wrote at about that time, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Finally, in the latter part of the twentieth century, postmodernism emerged. For postmodernists, the structuralists had erred by making culture and its web of relationships a kind of Centre, so they abolished it. Structuralism was still more-or-less part of the Enlightenment project even though the individual had to a large extent faded away. But postmodernism went a step further. It removed all certitudes. The Enlightenment had tried to throw out all traditions and superstitions: “The facts, ma’am, just the facts.” But now the postmodernists saw the enlightenment project as merely another tradition. So it was in a way no better than the old wives tales it had tried to banish. You become a postmodernists when you see the Enlightenment as just another way of interpreting the world and not a grand road to Truth.

And in a sense, the postmodernists were right. The early thinkers of the enlightenment like Galileo had fought against the Aristotelianism of the Establishment. Galileo discarded the formal and final causes of Aristotle’s system, leaving only the material and efficient. This cut-down model was good for explaining matter in motion. The world was now reduced to quantities and formulae. Qualities (like the smell and form of the rose) where secondary considerations with no real place in science. And there was no purpose in nature. Humans needed to believe in notions such as purpose and meaning and beauty; but in reality (as Jacques Monod says) we are living like gypsies in an alien world where there is only chance and necessity.

It was a judgment call on the part of the Enlightenment thinkers to banish the formal and final causes from our main vehicle of knowledge, science. Now the consequences of this decision have fully come home to roost. We are in a world of utter meaninglessness. Rorty says: there are no Truth (with a capital T), just a plethora of little truths, like the assertion that two and two is four. Derrida is even more devastating. There is nothing but the text, and this text is made up of words that carry multiple meanings, inherited over time; the writer is incapable of defining these more clearly, because he or she would have to use more terms which are just as polysemous. So all communication is little better than lying.

The seeds of this final state were in the Enlightenment project from the start. The Enlightenment was destined to destroy itself with its own logical tools. Postmodernists can deconstruct and trash anything, including their own philosophy. The serpent is eating its own tail.

What a terrible situation we are in! The sophist Gorgias has had his way. The postmodernists are the modern-day sophists. Democracy itself is a nod to sophism, for it acknowledges that no-one has direct access to the Centre, no one knows the ultimate Good or Right, because it apparently doesn’t exist. So the safest thing to do is just to vote on what course of action to take. At least that keeps the dictators at bay.

We are an eternity away from the Axial Age.

How do we get out of this nihilistic situation? Nothing has meaning, there are no standards to live up to, anything goes. So so let’s play, let’s dance! But for some of us, that is not enough. Is it time for a new Axial Age?

In this blog I shall talk about the myths that inspired my trilogy, The Baobab Tree.

Most people think of myths as trivial stories, similar to fairy-tales: Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and the like. But genuine myths can have enormous power. There is no clear dividing line between religion and myth. Both can grip one at a deep level and become the lodestar for one’s life. Joseph Campbell, who is arguably the greatest authority on myth, even wrote a book entitled Myths to Live By.

The important thing to understand about myths is that, even though they are not literally true, they have psychological and spiritual validity. The “meaning of life” cannot be understood by using the logical tools of the Enlightenment. These tools are the ones we employ particularly in science. The Enlightenment’s project was to cast superstition out and replace it with rational explanations bolstered by physical theories. If a sheep is born with two heads, this is not a sign that God is angry with us and will send a bad harvest. Events can be explained rationally and scientifically, in the case of the two-headed sheep possibly by invoking the phenomenon of genetic mutation. Events have physical causes.

But the scientific tools bequeathed us by the Enlightenment do not help us to understand or explain our inner world. The deepest human concerns cannot be analysed and accounted for rationally. It is here were myths come into their own. They do not explain things directly, but indirectly, through metaphor. That is the only route to understanding “the meaning of life.” And there will always be mystery remaining. The mystery will draw us like a magnet. We will know there is truth there, even though it will not fully give itself up.

Tennyson says in his poem In Memoriam:

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Myths afford us just a small peek behind the veil.

A heroic adventure is often the means by which a myth reveals some deep truth. That is the main theme of Campbell’s book, The hero with a Thousand Faces. According to Campbell, the adventure tends to have a standard structure, even though the details differ. The hero is initially just another person, not remarkable in any way. But he (normally the hero is a “he”) hears a call to adventure, to achieve some great feat. He goes out, leaving his compatriots behind, and experiences a number of monumental trials in a world not quite like the world back home. During his ordeal, he endures life-threatening trials; he might be wounded or even experience a symbolic death. But he wins through, sometimes with help from some friendly figure, and comes back with boons to distribute to his stay-at-home compatriots. These boons are usually new spiritual insights.

Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is the main myth on which The Baobab Tree is based. The eponymous hero Parzival is initially just another person, living with his mother in the country. His father is dead, having lost his life in a battle far away before he was born. His mother has taken him away from court because she does not want Parzival to become a knight like his father. But one day he sees four knights passing by and resolves to become a knight himself. His mother can’t dissuade him, so she dresses him like a fool in the hope that he will soon fail in his endeavours and return home. He sets out “young and dumb” and does a number of stupid things. But, somewhat by chance, he manages to defeat a knight who is richly armoured and has a great steed. Parzival takes over the armour and the horse.

He continues on his bumbling way. Fortunately – or unfortunately – he happens upon an old knight, Gurnemanz, who has already lost three sons to the quest for the Grail. Gurnemanz teaches him the rudiments of knightly skills and deportment. Parzival proves quite an apt pupil. Gurnemanz wants to marry him off to his daughter, but Parzival politely declines, citing his desire to win some knightly honour before settling down. So he sets out again.

He soon gets his chance to prove himself. He comes acorss a castle where the young queen, Condwiramurs, is surrounded by a hostile army. The king of this army wants to marry her, but she is dead set against it. Parzival takes on the king in single combat and defeats him, whereupon the surrounding army departs. Parzival and Condwiramurs then become man and wife, although not in a formal sense.

After a while (in fact after two children), he begs leave of her, indicating that he wants to go and see how his mother is doing. Reluctantly she lets him go. Strangely, he rides with slack reins and lets the horse choose its way. He and the horse wander through forests and meadows, and come across a castle which happens to be the Castle of the Grail. Those who set out to find it never succeed, but he has. Alas, he is not yet spiritually ready for it. He is invited to a sumptuous banquet. Sitting next to the sorely wounded Grail King, he looks on in awe as the Gail is brought in (it is a kind of stone in this version of the Grail story). Then a page enters and rushes around the hall brandishing a lance which is dripping with blood. This lance seems to have something to do with the King’s wound. The page departs, and then the Grail stone magically supplies all the attendant knights and their ladies with whatever food they want. At no point does Parzival ask his host what ails him, because he has been taught by his mentor Gurnemanz not to ask questions of older and wiser people. So we see that Parzival has not yet attained an authentic self. He is just following instructions or social rules, and is not thinking for himself.

The next day when he awakes, he finds his armour dumped on the floor next to him. The castle seems to be deserted. He performs the difficult task of putting on his own armour, and then departs. No sooner has his horse trotted off the drawbridge when a voice shouts from a window of the castle, “You stupid goose!” Abashed, Parzival urges his steed on, and soon the castle disappears as though it were never there. He does not know it, but one day he will become the Lord of this castle, taking over from the wounded king without inheriting his wound. But now he is still too spiritually immature and has no place being there.

Parzival continues through the wilderness for many days, having many adventures. On one of these, he is confronted by a hideous women, the Loathly Damsel, Cundrie, who excoriates him for his failings. He loses his (conventional) faith, and declares that from now onwards he will put all his faith in his lady Condwiramurs. This is actually a good thing, for he is beginning to inch towards an authentic self.

Finally, he comes across an old monk, Trevizent, who does not belong to any formal order. Through him, Parzival begins to develop a genuine spiritual inner world. And in the end, he does inherit the Grail castle, and his wife and two children come to join him.

Happily ever after! As I mentioned in my first blog, this is the part of the story that fails to impress me. Here, we do seem to have descended to a fairy-tale level.

Nevertheless, Parzival is a very powerful story. In this little summary, I have left out vast swathes of it for the sake of brevity. I have also mainly concentrated on the aspects of the story that are relevant to The Baobab Tree. But even from the bit that I have told, you can probably see how psychological Parzival is. All the characters are in some way aspects of the hero himself. The forest wilderness that forms the backdrop to the story is his ignorance of parts of his own soul. And his final winning of the Grail castle is really his achievement of what Jung calls selfhood, full individuation.

All the episodes of the story that I have mentioned here have an echo in my story. Zwane is brought up by his mother, and early in his life he receives news that his father has died far away on a great adventure, a quest to win The Seed (the previous blog explains what The Seed is). Zwane resolves to take up his father’s quest. He starts out young and dumb like Parzival. He does stupid things. Through luck, he finds his Gurnemanz, an old scarab called Umaluleki, who like Parzival’s mentor, has lost four sons to the quest for The Seed. He trains Zwane in the necessary skills and mental attitudes he will need if he is to have any hope of succeeding on the quest.

Umaluleki’s tutoring both helps and hinders Zwane’s progress. As with Parzival, he becomes fighting hero. Just as Parzival defeats the king who laid siege to Condwiramurs’ castle, Zwane defeats the leader of a band of net-dropping spiders that have laid siege to a community of scarabs. The queen of this community offers herself to him in marriage (or the scarab equivalent thereof), but he politely declines, saying that he still has a great challenge ahead of him. Here you can see a slight difference between the stories. Parzival refuses the hand of his mentor’s daughter, whereas Zwane turns aside the advances of the queen of the sieged community, who is the equivalent of Condwiramurs in the Grail story. Parzival marries the queen of the sieged castle, but Zwane will find his mate later, in fact during the equivalent of the Grail Castle visit.

She is Thandiwe, the daughter of a king of a community that lives on top of a cliff above the Impilo River. Mirroring the Parzival story, this community has a wounded leader. Both heroes show the weakness in their character that was exacerbated by their respective mentors’ teaching. They have been told not to ask questions of older and wiser scarabs; hence both fail to ask the caring question: “What ails you?” They are too obsessed with gaining the prize as a “thing.” They are living at a level of social convention, and do not realise that the quest is really a spiritual, inner, journey.

Both heroes go through various ordeals, wandering through the trackless wilderness, reaching no resolution, often needlessly causing suffering, and often enduring suffering. They are lost in their own souls.

But finally both heroes begin to realise what the quest is really about. Parzival’s spiritual progress is fostered by Trevizent – the unconventional holy man who has not been ordained by the religious “system,” and Zwane suffers a near-fatal wounding by his own spear, and is then, slowly, redeemed through the intervention of a mysterious rainbow-coloured grasshopper, and then by a visit from the Lord of Life himself. (It is never made clear whether this visit is “real” or “psychological/spiritual.”)

What both heroes finally achieve is authenticity and the capacity to love and feel the pain of others, not though the interpretive and buffering medium of societal sanction, but directly. According to the psychologist Jung, authenticity is selfhood. He uses terms coloured by Christianity to describe the process of attaining it. The ego has to undergo a “passion,” a humbling, harrowing journey of sacrifice into the nether parts of the soul. There, the quester meets the representations of God, in the form of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Through an encounter with these, the ego is converted into the self and acquires some Christ-like qualities. The Grail, the godhead, is in all of us, but finding it is very challenging. Profound myths like Parzival help orientate us in our own journey towards selfhood. I hope to have done the same thing in The Baobab Tree.

Parzival ultimately asks the crucial Question of the king of the Grail Castle, and takes over as its new king. The curse of suffering is over. The wasteland flourishes. Zwane also asks the Question of his mate’s father (the wounded leader of the community that lives on the cliffs) after he has reached spiritual maturity. He too takes over as the new leader. But things do not go as smoothly for him thereafter. I won’t go into the details here.

From what I have said here, you can see that Parzival had massive influence on the storyline of The Baobab Tree. But I also drew inspiration from a few other myths. I will finish this blog by mentioning them: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, and Vergil’s Aeneid.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is by far the oldest of these. No one knows exactly how old it is, but the earliest versions of it may date back to about 3000 BC. This would make it the oldest piece of literature of which we have a record.

Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk. He has a battle with a wild man, Enkidu, and defeats him. After this, the two become fast friends. Together, they slay the guardian of the forest, a terrible monster called Humbaba. Then they slay the Bull of Heaven which the goddess Ishtar sent to earth to punish Gilgamesh for his hubris in killing Humbaba. The gods avenge the killing of the Bull by striking Enkidu to with a fatal ailment.

Gilgamesh is devastated at his friend’s death. He starts thinking about his own mortality. He takes a long and dangerous journey to find a herb that will grant him eternal life. At one point in his journey, he has to go through a mountain to reach his goal and is stopped at the entrance to the tunnel by two scorpions. Eventually they let him go through. He gets the herb of immortality, but on the way back, as he takes a short rest, a serpent grabs the herb. Immediately it sloughs its skin, so that it appears new again, and immortal. The snake disappears with the herb.

Dejected, Gilgamesh returns. He realises that there is no immortality, at least of the physical body. All he can do is be a great king and be remembered by posterity.

In my story, The Seed is analogous to the herb of immortality in the ancient tale. Both are a distraction, a false prize. In both cases this prize is supposed to bestow immortality (in my story The Seed is supposed to be capable of growing into a divine tree where all the scarabs of the world will live in eternal bliss). But such a prize is not attainable in this world of decay. In my story, as in the Gilgamesh story, a serpent steels the prize and mockingly sloughs its skin.

I also used scorpions in my story. They guard a mountain through which Zwane and his companions have to pass in order to reach The Seed.

In the Jason story, the prize is the Golden Fleece. Like Zwane pursuing The Seed, Jason is spiritually immature when he sets out to win the Golden Fleece. He just wants to be lauded as a hero. But unlike Zwane, he never grows up spiritually. He wins the Fleece with the help of the daughter of the king of Colchis, Medea, who lulls the dragon guarding the Fleece into a trance. Medea has fallen in love with Jason, and she escapes with him. They arrive back in mainland Greece, where Jason marries Medea, but he mistreats her, taking up with another woman who is also a king’s daughter. In revenge, Medea kills both children she had with Jason. Things get even worse for Jason, as his intended new wife also dies through the machinations of Medea. With nothing left to live for, Jason takes to brooding under the rotting hull of the ship that took him on his quest for the Fleece. One day, the prow breaks off and kills him. This prow had been able to talk, and had given Jason advice during his quest.

Jason is clearly a failed hero. Zwane progresses further than he does, managing ultimately to win the real prize of spiritual growth and selfhood, although he seems uncertain how to use it productively. I took the idea of a physical object that talks and gives advice from the Jason myth. Instead of a ship’s prow, Zwane has a talking induku, a knobkerrie that gives him advice during his quest. I also pinched the idea of there being a monster guarding the prize who is lulled to sleep by a female who is close to the hero. Nomuza is a wise and mysterious female who accompanies Zwane on the quest. She puts a sungazer lizard that is guarding The Seed into a trance. Zwane could then just take it, but he doesn’t; he is still spiritually dumb at this point in the story, and he kills the lizard, quite unnecessarily. Nomuza is devastated by this.

Finally, we get to the Aeneid. I didn’t take any big themes from this work, just a few snippets for visual appeal. Aeneas, the hero of the story, is a Trojan who escapes the burning ruins of Troy after the Greeks destroyed it. He is destined to found Rome. During his long journey to Italy, there is an episode where he goes the underworld to see his dead father, whom he had carried out of the flames of Troy on his back. Before he attempts this daunting trip, he visits the sibyl at Cumae for guidance. A withered old hag more than 700 years old, she lives in a bottle and is reputed to eat nothing. The sibyl advises Aeneas to go into a forest and tear off a golden bough growing on one of the trees. This will ensure that he travels safely in the underworld.

In my story, the sibyl becomes an old crone scarab who lives in a bottle (actually a Mrs Balls chutney bottle) half embedded in the mud of the Impilo delta; and she also apparently eats nothing. Like the sibyl at Cumae, she gives the hero advice. She helps in a number of ways, including instructing Zwane to go into a nearby forest and garner a sprig of tambotie leaves which have turned autumnal yellow, even though the rest of the leaves on the tree are still green. He needs to give this sprig to the scorpions that guard the tunnels through the mountain; otherwise they won’t let him and his companions in.

Well, that’s it for this blog. Now you know where some of my ideas came from.

In my first blog, I said I would talk a little about the storyline of The Baobab Tree trilogy in my next blog. So here goes.

All three books together comprise about 900 pages, so the canvas is quite big. The books are entitled Young Zwane, The Journey to the Insimbi Mountains, and The Prize. They follow on from one another in one long sweep, which tells the story of the hero, Zwane, from the moment when he “came up” to the end of his life. I say he “came up” rather than “was born” because he is a sacred scarab, an African dung beetle. Scarabs come up from their brood balls which are buried by their parents in an underground chamber which they excavate for their offspring.

The Baobab Tree is an epic adventure as well as a spiritual journey. It is a kind of grail story, where the outer quest becomes an inner one. Someone who reads Wolfram von Eschenbach’s magnificent thirteenth century rendition of the grail story, Parzival, and then reads The Baobab Tree will probably recognise that my story is loosely based on Parzival. Zwane is an African version of Parzival, the eponymous hero of Wolfram’s tale. But the story told in The Baobab Tree ends less triumphantly than Wolfram’s. I greatly admire Parzival and think everyone should read it, along with Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde – for these two late medieval works are foundational myths for the post-medieval age, just as the Iliad and Odyssey were for the classical period. But I find the ending of Parzival a bit too “and they lived happily ever after.” All problems and pains don’t just go away after the hero has won his prize.

Zwane did not live to do much with the spiritual grail that he attained, but his disciple wrote down an account of Zwane’s life (remarkably this scarab, Thwala, was literate!) and left it, wrapped in a plastic supermarket bag, in a tree growing in a park. Although the story does not say as much, I know that this park is Emmarentia Park in Johannesburg, for I was the one who found the bag. It was in the main fork of a large Monkey Thorn tree, the grandest example of the species in the park. I can point it out to you, if you like. So the profound experiences of Zwane became available to us all, for I published Thwala’s writings as e-books on Amazon. I did some editing and polishing, quite a bit. So I hope I cannot be accused of plagiarism for attaching my own name to the work. I did acknowledge Thwala’s contribution.

Like the youthful Parzival, the Zwane we meet in the first book of the trilogy is “young and dumb.” He has a long way to go before he can lead a great quest. Perhaps it is a good idea to quote here from the blurb on the back cover of the first book.

As Zwane is rolling his dung ball home, a mortally wounded bulbul crashes into the dust ahead of him. A member of his community who understands the bird’s language listens to its last gasps. Solemnly he turns to Zwane. “I am sorry to tell you your father is dead.”

Zwane’s father Mandla was killed on the shores of the Ukufa, the Lake of Death, far to the north. He had been seeking a sacred Seed that, if planted, would grow into a great Tree, similar to the one where scarabs had dwelt in the distant past, in a state of bliss with Ilanga, their deity.

Zwane is shattered at the news of his father’s death. Soon, however, resolves to fulfil his father’s mission, which is nothing less than to re-establish paradise. He knows he will need companions to help him. But how will he convince anyone accept him as the leader of this momentous? He is a mere dung roller, outranked by warriors and priests and artificers.

Zwane does manage to raise his standing in the community from mere dung roller to hero, by defeating a mob of net-dropping spiders who have laid siege to a neighbouring community of scarabs. By the end of the first book, he is about to lead a party of seven on a quest to win the Seed that was mentioned in the blurb.

The geography of the story is dominated by the Impilo River (“impilo” means “life” in Zulu), which has its headwaters in mountains near Zwane’s home and which exhausts itself, far to the north, in the poisonous waters of Lake Ukufa (“ukufa” means “death” in Zulu). The Seed has apparently been secreted in a valley behind the Insimbi Mountains, which rise on the northern shore of Lake Ukufa. So Zwane and his companions have to traverse the entire length of the Impilo River.

The second book is an account of the adventures of Zwane’s party on the way to the Insimbi Mountains. Again, let’s quote from the blurb on the back of the book.

In this, the second book of The Baobab Tree trilogy, Zwane and his six companions set out on their quest to recover The Seed, which is all that remains of the Sacred Tree where their ancestors once lived in bliss with Ilanga, the scarab god.

Their intended destination is the faraway Insimbi Mountains where The Seed is purported to have been secreted by sungazer lizards. On the way they have a number of momentous adventures and also experience tragedy. In one of their exploits they help a community of scarabs rid themselves of a plague of termites, enlisting an army of Matabele ants to raid the mounds. In another they visit a botanical research laboratory and are amazed at what they see and learn there.

On several occasions the questers are visited by a rainbow-coloured grasshopper, but Zwane is not yet ready for the spiritual guidance it offers.

Finally Zwane and the remnants of his team reach Lake Ukufa, brooded over by the Insimbi Mountains on its far side. They need some way of crossing the black, poisonous waters. Fortunately they are aided by a mystical old crone who lives in a bottle, half-submerged in the mud of the Impilo River delta.

By the end of the second book, Zwane and his two surviving companions have reached the northern shore of Lake Ukufa, with the Insimbi Mountains towering over them. Now they are on the final leg of their quest to find the Seed. But this won’t be easy, as the mountains are too steep to climb. They have been told by the old crone mentioned in the blurb that they must go through one of the mountains. But the tunnels through the mountain are guarded by scorpions, who won’t let just anyone in.

The third book begins with the journey through tunnels and the search for the Seed in the valley on the other side. Zwane finds a seed which he takes to be the Seed, but then, soon after he has made his way back over the lake, loses it to a serpent. Zwane comes to the realisation that he is not on a divine mission and that he has been expending all his energies on a false quest. He has by now lost all his companions, he has needlessly wasted their lives. Alone he has to come to terms with the knowledge that there is no god Ilanga and that there will be no New Tree where the scarabs will live eternally in bliss. Immortality is unavailable to him and to all scarabs.

Zwane decides that he has only himself to rely on, and becomes his own little god. He embarks on a series of wild adventures, killing a variety of creatures just for the pleasure of it. He has a super-sharp spear that was given to him by his mentor who trained him in bush-craft and fighting – an episode that occurs in the first book – and he also has a bag of poison that he acquired in the course of his adventures. So he is able to kill animals even as large as a leopard.
On one of his exploits he is wounded and poisoned by his own weapon. His left side becomes partially paralyzed. At a critical juncture, he is visited by the multi-coloured grasshopper (mentioned above in the blurb for the second book), and this sets him on the path to healing and redemption. He struggles towards a cave halfway up a nearby mountain, and rests his wounded body there. His soul undergoes a number of torturing and then transforming experiences. One night, he encounters the Lord of Life, who I spoke about in the previous blog. Healed mentally and physically, he begins his long return journey home.

I won’t go into any more details. I have already told more than appears on the back cover of the third book, and possibly more than I should have.

The Baobab Tree is, as I said, loosely based on Wolfram’s Parzival. But it also draws inspiration from other myths, including Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, and Vergil’s Aeneid. We’ll talk about this and other related stuff in the next blog.

Well here I am, pushing 70, writing my first blog ever. I never thought I would do this.
I am Terry Taylor, a research psychologist specialising in the assessment and development of human potential. But I am not writing this blog to talk about that. I am writing it partly because I have written a trilogy called The Baobab Tree and need to get some awareness for it. “Create a buzz with your blog,” as they say. For a long time that idea put me off, but finally I broke down.
Creating a buzz for my books is not my only reason for writing this blog. I want to talk about the ideas that were swirling around in my head before I wrote the trilogy, and the ideas that are continuing to swirl around. For many years I have been reading in the areas of mythology, religion, philosophy, spirituality, evolution, classical Greek and physics, amongst others; and I think I have some interesting ideas that I can float on this blog. There are probably people out there who will find them stimulating.
The Baobab Tree is fiction deeply rooted in Africa; it is an epic adventure, but it is also a vehicle for me to present some spiritual ideas, which are woven into the story. Christians might know the quotation from Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.” (I like the original King James Version of the Bible.) Of course, these words are very important for South Africans, especially the “neither Jew nor Greek” part, for it equally means “neither black nor white”. I was preoccupied with this verse as the changes were breaking about us in 1994; I was preoccupied not just because the barriers between black and white were being broken down, but also because of what this coming together could ultimately evolve into. Unfortunately, we are still waiting for something magical to happen. This seemed a real possibility when Madiba was in charge.
In The Baobab Tree, you will find the following sentence: There is neither scarab nor flatfoot, neither termite nor grass, neither lion nor wildebeest. There are no edges; we are one in the Lord of Life. This is a thought that ran through the mind of the hero near the end of the story, after he had had his encounter with the Lord of Life. The hero, by the way, is a scarab, an eater of dung, Zwane by name. So are most of the main characters in the books. And “flatfoot” is their word for “human.” In his meeting with the Lord of Life, the Lord had said to Zwane: “Fortunate creature! Your lot on this earth requires you to kill no living thing. So easily can you be gentle and good, but you took us backwards along the paths of becoming. Now you have the opportunity to take us forward.” And the Lord had also said: “I need you Zwane.”
It is not hard to see that the spiritual ideas I am floating in the story are an expansion of the spirituality of the New Testament. I don’t regard myself as a Christian, for I am out there on the spiritual high seas, but my nearest port of call is the Christian faith. I suppose you could call me a gnostic, one who is particularly enamoured of the idea that the divine is immanent in all living things, and further, that the divine being learns through life. Hence, there isn’t a simple hierarchy of power, but an exquisite circular entanglement. The Centre is everywhere (“the Kingdom of God is within you”). A fourth century philosopher called Marius Victorinus described God as a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Many theologians and philosophers have picked up on this, including Giordiano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for his beliefs in 1600. I am glad I am not living in those times.
All sorts of implications flow from this notion, and others that are expressed in the story. I shall explore them in later blogs, as well as the philosophical ideas that they relate to. Thinking about these implications inspired me to put together the plot for a further book (or at least I envisage it at this point as a single book, but who knows? – The Baobab Tree also started out as one book). This book will have a new hero, in fact heroine, Ithemba, who is Zwane’s daughter. Zwane is a kind of semi-failed hero, but his daughter will not be. Something just made me write the ending as rather tragic, even though I thought I had exhausted all my ideas, and a triumphant ending would have rounded things off nicely. But later, more ideas came, and I was grateful I had left a gateway open to continue the story. This new part of the story will not be an actual part of the trilogy, turning it into a tetralogy. Perhaps it will become its own trilogy. Maybe I will have then run out of inspiration, but maybe not. So I will leave another opening for further developments.
In my next blog, I shall talk a little about The Baobab Tree, but not enough to spoil it for a reader. The story is an epic adventure as well as a spiritual journey.