Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [56]
In one important way, Mongol belief differed sharply from Christianity: “They have no consciousness and care of the soul, but are only devoted to nourishing the body and getting pleasure for themselves.” Yet the Mongols did have their version of the soul. Marco writes that “they hold [it] to be immortal in this way. They think that when a man dies he enters immediately into another body, and, according as in life he had borne himself well or ill, going on from good to better or from bad to worse; that is to say, if he shall be a poor man and if he have borne himself well and modestly in life, he will be born again after death of the womb of a gentlewoman and will be a gentleman, and then of the womb of a lady and will be a lord; if he is the son of a knight and in life have borne himself well, at death he is born again of the womb of a countess…, and so always ascending until he is taken into God. On the contrary, if he shall have behaved ill, being the son of a gentleman he will be born again a son of a rustic, from a rustic he is made into a dog, always descending to lower life.” By the end of this careful, respectful, and intimate description of Mongol worship, it is easy to imagine Marco swept along in the spiritual tide.
Although alert to their religious practices, Marco remained oblivious to the larger spiritual world of the Mongols, in which the figure of Natigai intervened between hearth and home and immense cosmic forces. The Mongols viewed their deities arrayed in a floating hierarchy. Over all hovered the supreme divinity, the Eternal Blue Sky, and just below that a pantheon of ninety-nine divinities, one of which was Marco’s Natigai, the protector of women, of cattle, and of harvests.
With his description of Mongol religious beliefs, Marco set out to demolish the tenacious European image of the murderous Mongol savage. All wrong, according to Marco. Instead, he reports, “They speak prettily and ornately, they greet becomingly with cheerful and smiling face, they behave with dignity and cleanliness in eating”—if not in washing. “They bear great reverence to the father and mother. If it is found that any son does anything to displease them, or does not help them in their need, there is a public office that has no other office but to punish severely ungrateful sons whom they know have committed some act of ingratitude toward them.” With such measures, Mongol society enforced its stability. Although Marco stopped short of endorsing the concept of a designated official to discipline ungrateful offspring, he looked on approvingly.
SO MUCH for piety. In reality, nothing excited Marco’s admiration more than the Mongol warrior. Feared throughout the world, his kind specialized in horsemanship, rape, and destruction. The warriors seemed a glamorous and dangerous outlaw tribe, fiercely devoted to one another, consecrating their destiny to the pursuit of power. They lived strenuously and obeyed no one’s laws but their own defiant code. To the genteel Marco, it seemed that they were more in touch with the forces of nature than their refined Chinese subjects. No wonder he fell under their sway.
His adulation overwhelmed the formal literary veneer applied by Rustichello. “The rich men and nobles wear cloth of gold and cloth of silk and under the outer garments rich furs of sable and ermine and vair [that is, variegated fur] and of fox and of all other skins very richly; and all their