The Song of the Nile (A Group Story)

[Balder]

 

 

About seven years ago, back on the Gaia website "Integral Pod" forum, a group of us engaged in a collective story-telling experiment.  It was quite a creative, volatile exercise -- not unlike a shamanic journey, body-rending and all...  Everyone I know who participated in it still feels marked by it in some way.

I had lost access to the story years ago when Gaia closed, and had given up on seeing it again, but fortunately one of the participants saved a copy, which I just received this morning.  I've attached it in PDF below.  There's some lovely writing in here.  My character, Zorokothora Melchizzedek, enters somewhat late into the story.

Enjoy.

[Balder]

Here's an excerpt from one of my contributions to the story near the end:

"The Zorokothora, Melchizzedek, had watched the dissolute behavior of the Pharaoh and the violent escalation of the challenge with distant resignation. How often had he seen this over the centuries? How often had he been instrumental in provoking such incidents himself, meddling as he did in the affairs of men in his ceaseless effort to harvest motes of light? He felt at times like the greatest of fools, attempting in his blind, divine arrogance to catalyze something so volatile and unpredictable, so beautiful and tormented and free as the human heart.

When the challenge had ended, and the Black Mother lay in a heap on the ground, and the princess had fled, and the Pharaoh stood trembling with rage in his own urine, and the Yogi stood exhausted and disappointed before him, he knew that the moment had passed – that the great forces that he had sensed at work in the magma chamber of the Pharaoh's court had spent themselves, not in birthing something new, but in the entropic dissolution that was so often the outcome in this fallen realm. He turned from the faces of the players in this drama, so beloved to him, and so confounding, and sought a quiet corner of the Osirion in which he could commune with the Most High."

[Balder]

Another little excerpt:

Zorokothora Melchizzedek paused in mid-step and grew still, closing his eyes to the sun-kissed plains, and his ears to the knocking of reeds in the Nile. The earth spoke through his feet as he stood like an elephant, listening. He had not felt such power stirring in the deep since he had prayed at the sulphurous lip of Sinai. Why is Geb shuddering so? he wondered.

He had awakened this morning knowing something was afoot. In the deep, black hours of the night, in the space between dreaming and waking, Raven had brushed its black wing down his spine and whispered nomina barbara in his ear. The night tilted with stars and a golden scarab mounted his body, dragging an offering of kamia shel ikrin which it left on his naked breast. When he woke, he immediately reached to grab the amulet bag on his chest, but it was not there.

Now, he stood listening to the groaning Earth. It was laboring, he knew, to flash forth motes of light - shards, not of matter, but of the Kingdom come. And the magma chamber stood there gleaming on the plain: the court of Pharoah, Ramsses the Great. Melchizzedek pulled his robe around himself and, stooping slightly, assumed the form of a slender horned gazelle.

He would enter the court, but he would enter it unseen.