The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [46]
“But the story clearly symbolizes the ancient conflict between nomadic herdsmen and settled agriculturalists,” Sharane objected, assertively but not aggressively. Her eyes seemed to sparkle like gemstones when she was assertive—I was to discover soon enough that they seemed to flash like lightning when she was aggressive.
“Possibly,” I admitted, “but I suspect that the conflict in question had more to do with different ways of revering the dead than any material conflict of interest. Anyway, the awareness that the act of killing requires special justification must precede the attachment of a particular justification. The idea of a fundamental social conflict between the settied tied and the unsettled must have been powerful because it was the first root cause of war, which was subsequently to be the principal occupation of that time which organized communities did not need to devote to mere survival.”
“That’s a cynical way of looking at it,” she objected, lifting her slender chin and lowering her dark eyebrows in the slightest possible gesture of censure.
“It’s not cynical, it’s realistic,” I riposted. “Anyway, the particular meaning attached to killing by the Eden myth was selected from an already available set that also included legal execution, human sacrifice, and self-defense—as can easily be seen if the linear sequence of Hebrew myths is tracked a little further. All the other meanings and justifications are there, leading inexorably to the establishment of the crucial commandment: Thou shalt do no murder”
“Isn’t it Thou shalt not kill?”
“No. That’s a much later and rather sloppy translation. The whole point of the commandment is to forbid illegitimate killing.”
“I suppose you’ve even got a better explanation for the serpent,” she said, without undue sarcasm. She meant, of course, a better explanation than the one poor Grizel had carelessly trotted out in her reference to phallocentric fools rather than the Christian reinterpretation, which had imported an evil anti-God into the older myth.
“Another immediate corollary of death awareness,” I pointed out, “is the notion oí poison. Snakebite must have been the first example to spring to mind, closely associated with bad food. That the serpent proffers fruit is probably an homage to warning coloration. Sometimes, with all due respect to the complexities of symbolism and metaphor, a serpent is just a snake, and a bad apple is just something that tastes nasty and does you no good.”
“That’s quite brilliant,” she said, with a smile like life itself. “Mortimer Gray, you’re by far the most interesting person I’ve met in ages.”
“The feeling’s mutual, Sharane Fereday,” I assured her. “My friends call me Mort, or Morty.”
She smiled broadly at that too, perhaps having seen the meaning accidentally contained within the short form of my name.
“So shall I,” she informed me.
Sharane’s love for the ancient past was even more intense than mine, but it was very different in kind. She was forty years older than I and had already passed through half a dozen pair-bond marriages. She was a moderately successful writer, but her writings were far less dispassionate than those of a true historian—even a narrative historian who took it for granted that all history is fantasy.
Sharane’s writings tended to the lyrical rather than the factual, even when she was not writing manifest fiction. Her most popular works were scripts for “dramatic reconstructions,” most of which were performed in VE by widely scattered casts of thousands. Some of them