Mirrors (12 page)

Nowadays, that curse is looked on as a virtue.

THALES

Two thousand six hundred years ago in the city of Miletus, an absentminded genius named Thales liked to go for a stroll at night to gaze at the stars, and as a result he frequently fell into the ditch.

Perhaps by asking the stars, Thales discovered that death is not an end but a transformation, and that water is the origin and meaning of all life. Not gods, water. Earthquakes happen because the sea moves and disturbs the land, not because of Poseidon’s tantrums. The eye sees not by divine grace, but by reflecting reality the way the river reflects the bushes on its banks. And eclipses occur, not because the sun hides from the wrath of Olympus, but because the moon covers the sun.

Thales, who had learned to think in Egypt, accurately predicted eclipses, measured with precision the distance to approaching ships on the high seas, and calculated the exact height of the Keops Pyramid by the shadow that it cast. One of the most famous theorems is attributed to him, as well as four more, and it is even said that he discovered electricity.

But perhaps his greatest feat was of a different kind: to live godless, naked of any religious comfort, never giving an inch.

ORIGIN OF MUSIC

When Orpheus caressed the strings of the lyre, the oak trees in the woods of Thrace danced by virtue of his melodies.

When Orpheus embarked with the Argonauts, the rocks heard his music, a language where all languages meet, and their vessel was saved from shipwreck.

When the sun rose, Orpheus’s lyre greeted it from the peak of Mount Pangaeum and the two chatted as equals, light to light, because his music also set the air on fire.

Zeus sent a bolt of lightning to punish the author of such audacities.

DIVINE MONOPOLY

The gods will not abide competition from vulgar and common earthlings.

We owe them humility and obedience. We were made by them, they claim; heavenly censors quashed the rumor that they were made by us.

When the Mayan gods realized we could see beyond the horizon, they threw dust in our eyes. And the Greek gods blinded Phineus, king of Salmydessus, when they learned he could see beyond time.

Lucifer was the favorite archangel of the god of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims. When he tried to raise his throne higher than the stars, that god turned him to ash, consuming him in the fire of his own beauty.

The same god banished Adam and Eve, the first people, the ones with no belly buttons, because they wanted to know divine glory. And he punished the builders of the Tower of Babel for committing the insolence of trying to reach up to heaven.

THANKS FOR THE PUNISHMENT

The tower that symbolized the sin of human arrogance rose in Babylon, the cursed city known in the Bible as “harlot and mother of harlots.”

Heaven’s wrath did not delay: God condemned Babylonians to speak in many tongues so no one would ever understand them, and the tower was left half-finished for all time.

According to the ancient Hebrews, the flowering of human languages was divine punishment.

Perhaps, but in his desire for rebuke, God saved us from the boredom of a single tongue.

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES

According to the ancient Mexicans, the story was different. They told of the mountain Chicomóztoc, which stood where the sea split in two, and had seven caves in its bowels.

In each of the seven caves reigned a god.

Each of the first peoples of Mexico were modeled from the dirt of one of the seven caves, kneaded with blood from that cave’s god.

Little by little, these peoples sprouted from the mountainside.

Each still speaks the language of the god of its cave.

That is why languages are sacred, and diverse are the melodies of speech.

ALL THE RAINS

The god of the Hebrews was displeased by the behavior of his children. As retribution, a flood engulfed all human flesh and the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky.

Noah, the only just man, had the privilege of building an ark of wood three stories high to save his family and a male-female couple from each of the species that populated the world.

The great flood drowned the rest.

Those expelled from the ark also merited death: abnormal couples like the horse and the mule, or the bitch in love with the wolf, and the males who ignored nature’s hierarchy and were dominated by females.

RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF RACISM

Noah got drunk celebrating the ark’s arrival at Mount Ararat.

When he came to, he was incomplete. According to one of the many versions of the Bible, his son Ham had castrated him as he slept. In that version God then cursed Ham and his sons, and the sons of his sons, condemning them to slavery for centuries upon centuries.

But none of the many versions of the Bible say Ham was black. Africa did not sell slaves when the Bible was written, and Ham’s skin did not begin to darken until much later on, perhaps in the eleventh or twelfth century, after the Arabs launched the slave trade in the southern part of the desert. By the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, once slavery had become the biggest business of Europe, Ham was utterly black.

The slave trade enjoyed divine sanction and eternal life from that point forward. Reason in the service of religion, religion in the service of oppression: since the slaves were black, Ham must have been black. And his children, also black, were born to be slaves because God is never wrong.

And Ham and his sons, and the sons of his sons, would have kinky hair, bloodshot eyes, and swollen lips. They would go about nude, exposing their scandalous penises. They would have a taste for theft, would hate their owners, would never tell the truth. And they would dedicate the time they should be sleeping to nasty things.

SCIENTIFIC ORIGIN OF RACISM

“Caucasian race” is the name of the white minority that sits at the summit of humanity’s hierarchy.

The christening occurred in 1775 at the hands of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

The zoologist believed the Caucasus was the cradle of human civilization and that all intelligence and beauty originated there. Against all evidence, the term remains in use to this day.

Blumenbach collected two hundred and forty-five skulls, which provided the justification for the European right to humiliate all others.