The Natives
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 72479
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Astra shuddered as she realized that it was not for nothing that she had thought the branches
reminded her of claws. "Well," said the Colonel, "it's very curious. You would expect any natives
of an island like this to be cannibals, but these are anything but. They are skilled fighters, but
seem to fight only for recreation. They don't often fight wars because they have no interest in
conquest and the island itself takes care of most potential attackers. They have little internal
strife, which is perhaps not surprising, because they would have to stay unified to face its
dangers. What's perhaps more surprising is that practically nothing in the island ever seems to
attack them. They're even actually able to cut down trees on this island--there's a reason that
we have all our wood shipped from elsewhere. I wonder if they're adapted in some way to make
them unpalatable to this island's carnivores.
"They seem to believe that it's some of their rituals that protect them. Most of their day-to- day religious activities consist of ancestor worship, and like many other primitive tribes, they also have a vague concept of a single transcendent god who they seldom talk about. But it's not at all clear that this god of theirs can be identified with the Deity. They consider speaking about this god or even thinking about him--or it--to be dangerous, and possibly to invite attack from the predators. We've seen a few of their rituals to placate this god, and they're, shall we say, very unusual. Frankly they make my hair stand on end. But no one seems to be actually harmed by them, with one notable exception. Every twenty years or so, they sacrifice one of their own to appease their god. It's more or less equivalent to the corn-king rituals which were ubiquitous in the oldest parts of antiquity, if certain modern scholars of mythology are to be believed. But otherwise they're like nothing in any nearby islands--the closest equivalent I've ever heard of are rituals practiced by certain riffraff on the outskirts of New Orleans, which were thought to have been brought over by slaves from Africa, but resemble nothing from any tribe we've had contact with. "Anthropologists haven't been able to glean much information about this god of theirs--and most of them haven't stayed on the island very long, for obvious reasons. But we do have some interesting impressions. The first is that, as bizarre as it may seem, they seem to have a primitive concept of evolution. They sometimes speak about this god as creating life not directly from the earth but working through several stages. Secondly, they sometimes seem to identify their god with the island itself." Astra felt her head pound with frustration. There were a number of things she didn't understand at all because she lacked the context, and couldn't ask about them. Hopefully Colonel West had a reasonably good library. If he did, she could glean a few things from it. She knew from her contact with the book that had brought her here and the card she'd given them that she could read the local language. "What about the volcanos?" she asked. "You said that the natives had their own traditions about them."
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Knight Random
12/18/2007 7:22:22 PM
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