India, Cont.

To the sun-dazzled Aryans, this might have seemed peculiar but not, certainly, particularly offensive. What shocked them was the manner in which the common folk participated in the divine assignation. The natives, as lunar representatives, believed themselves ordained to deliver a god's ravishments and saw this embassy as no small responsibility. How could puny men carry such love as this? As all lovers are, in principle at least, inclined to do, they were eager to show that no pain was too much to bear... no sacrifice was too great to make to demonstrate this proxied devotion to their paramour. To prove that they were equal to the burden, they allowed their priests, at harvest time, to select someone to be, as it were, the representative of the representatives. They fattened him and treated him like the divine consort he was to be, and then, as the planting season was about to commence and it was necessary that the moon impregnate their mother earth, they roasted the fellow alive so that his screams might prove how very much pain they were willing to bear for love of her... or else they sliced him up, alive and raw, all to the same effect. Whipped up by the priests into an orgy of passion, they reveled in their loathsome foreplay. And when the moon-man was thoroughly dead and silent and could be prodded into no further terms of endearment, the priests distributed a portion, slice or crackel, to each farmer who rushed home to complete the coitus by sticking the flesh deep into his plot of land. The sacrifice, when properly made, assured a good crop. It worked every time.

The Aryans were, of course, appalled. It wasn't so much the atrocity - they were not tidy killers - it was the organized suspension of rationality, the human descent into taurian frenzy, the evaporation of individual identity and the wild, collective residua - a mob fornicating for the stars with the blood-semen of a neighbor's tortured flesh. To the Aryans, a simple lot, it didn't seem at all right. Other things that seemed amiss were the ubiquitous depictions of the divine couple. They had goddesses of their own and knew what goddesses should look like. Was not Dawn personified as the loveliest of women? But this earth mother was the ugliest female they had ever seen. "Kali" she was... "black"... black as plowed earth... black as moonlit blood... black as night, her special time. She was horrific, adorned with human skulls, mouth open, tongue protruding and dripping with the blood of man's carnivorous existence. And everywhere the Aryans looked - in temples, homes, town squares and roadsides - they found stone bull- phalli erected to service her. The farmers could not understand the Aryan's consternation. To them the phallus was a simple "lingam", a "plow". What could be more natural?

But if all this wasn't enough to give a sun worshiper nightmares, the natives were all obsessed with insane thoughts of rebirth and reincarnation, return and renewal. Death was only a temporary condition. (Why, if a warrior lived long enough he might kill the same man half a dozen times!) This was too much for the Aryans who, in the novelty of feeling both prudish and cerebral, ceased to be racially liberal. Clearly, these little, dark and flat-nosed natives were literally lunatics... moon-mad and quite sub-human of a caste or kind that was untouchable at worst, and fit for dirty manual labor at best.

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