What I like about this is that it could easily be a creation story from hyenas to explain why their sexual dimorphism goes the other way, and why they have so many stillbirths. It is the sort of thing that makes so much sense that it could be evolved story or true, and the only way to tell them apart is to look deeper.
yes! that’s exactly what I find incredible about this story. If hyenas truly had legends and religion, I’m sure a story like this one would have naturally developed, explaining all the biological characteristics that make them different from other animals. It’s kind of a biocultural anthropology of hyenas. Just brilliant.
You know that little tingling sensation, that itch of foresight or sideways realisation at the back of your brain, that feeling what the hairs on the back of your neck rise and bits of your vestigial reptilian neuron-architecture start firing mad signals at the rest of your mind… The feeling when you realise something that you are so unsure if it could be possible you slide up to the idea sideways because you are afraid if you look at the idea you have had face on it might wriggle away? You know that feeling? Of realising something that is possibly nothing but might, might just come to be true?
They went of into the dark, following that voice, the voice of Sweet grass. They went off underground and were not seen again?
I just had a flashback to a set of speech-bubbles written in typewriter font. Voices in the dark, and the lefthand names of god…
@Fixer-Wolfie
No his name was eaten. It has no name, only a memory of a name. Now it is only what was he-is. For giving any name to it would be blasphemy.
What I like about this is that it could easily be a creation story from hyenas to explain why their sexual dimorphism goes the other way, and why they have so many stillbirths. It is the sort of thing that makes so much sense that it could be evolved story or true, and the only way to tell them apart is to look deeper.
yes! that’s exactly what I find incredible about this story. If hyenas truly had legends and religion, I’m sure a story like this one would have naturally developed, explaining all the biological characteristics that make them different from other animals. It’s kind of a biocultural anthropology of hyenas. Just brilliant.
Oh dear,
You know that little tingling sensation, that itch of foresight or sideways realisation at the back of your brain, that feeling what the hairs on the back of your neck rise and bits of your vestigial reptilian neuron-architecture start firing mad signals at the rest of your mind… The feeling when you realise something that you are so unsure if it could be possible you slide up to the idea sideways because you are afraid if you look at the idea you have had face on it might wriggle away? You know that feeling? Of realising something that is possibly nothing but might, might just come to be true?
They went of into the dark, following that voice, the voice of Sweet grass. They went off underground and were not seen again?
I just had a flashback to a set of speech-bubbles written in typewriter font. Voices in the dark, and the lefthand names of god…
Very possible.
I love the artwork on this page.
This makes for an amazing read the second time through. The first time I missed that some of the tribe followed Sweetgrass Voice and what was He-is.
Perhaps a good name for him now would be ‘He-is-not’, eh?
Or maybe ‘He-Who-Was’
@Fixer-Wolfie
No his name was eaten. It has no name, only a memory of a name. Now it is only what was he-is. For giving any name to it would be blasphemy.
he he, perhaps giving an Eaten a name would make you a pervert?
The only possible god name is obviously he-who-must-not-be-named