Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [152]
The yogis confronted sexuality in their “churches” or “abbeys,” where they enacted bizarre rites that Marco describes with lascivious relish. When one of their number who served their “idols” died, the candidates for successor entered the abbey and tested their steely self-control against the warm, sweet caresses of various maidens. “They [the maidens] touch them both here and there in many parts of the body,” Marco says, and “they embrace and kiss them and put them in the greatest pleasure in the world…. If his member is not moved at all except as it was before the maidens touch him, this one is counted good and pure and they keep him with them, and he serves the idols.” As for a candidate unable to resist the maidens’ touch, “if his member is moved and rises, this one they do not keep at all but drive him away immediately from the fellowship of the monks for ever and say they refuse to keep a man of self-indulgence with them.”
OBSERVING THESE outlandish customs, Marco neither judged them nor recoiled in horror. He remained objective, if baffled, always absorbed by the astonishing variety of behavior on display in the provinces through which he traveled. Beneath the welter of observations he offered his audience, he moved ever farther from the touch-stone of his youth, Christianity, into the realm of Buddhism.
He fastened on Saint Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, as the chief point of comparison between Christianity and Buddhism. In both Aramaic and Greek, the saint’s name means “twin,” and John 11:16 identifies him as “Thomas who was called the Twin.” Alone among the disciples, Thomas doubted news of the Resurrection—this is the origin of the phrase “doubting Thomas.” (Only when Thomas touched Jesus’s wounds did he become a fervent believer.) The subject of a large body of apocryphal literature, including the Acts of Thomas, he was said to have been martyred in AD 53 in Madras, India, on what later came to be known as Mount Thomas.
As Marco traveled through India, his thoughts turned occasionally to this martyr as to no other figure in Christianity. “The body of Master Saint Thomas the Apostle, who endured martyrdom for Christ in the province, is buried in…Maabar…in a little town, for there are no men at all, and few merchants, nor do merchants come there because there is no merchandise that they could well take away from it, and also because the place is much out of the way.” So Marco heard, and he could not resist going there. Years before, in Armenia, he had missed what he believed was his chance to confirm the presence of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat; now he had an opportunity to confirm the existence of an apostle, and this time he was determined to pursue it.
He made the pilgrimage in the company of both Christians and Muslims. “I tell you the Saracens of that country have great faith in him and say that he was a Saracen”—an affecting but illogical assertion, because Thomas’s life and works predated Islam by several centuries. Nevertheless, those Saracens “say that he was a very great prophet and call him aviarun in their tongue, which means ‘holy man.’” Marco’s confusion about Thomas’s identity may reflect a blending of religious traditions in the region, or it may reveal his own misunderstanding of what he had been told.
No matter who the “holy man” had been in life, his burial place was rife with mystery and miracles. Trees produced nuts—Marco calls them “Pharaoh’s Nuts”—that furnished both food and drink. “They have an outside shell on which there are as it were threads that are used in many things and avail for many purposes. Under that first shell is a food on which a man feeds sufficiently.