A Frightening Victory March: A Cold and Vicious Hallelujah
Haunted at every moment by an urgent messaging he could not decipher, flying high over the suburb in which he was now entrapped while palace intrigues crowded his waking dreams. After work, after the battle was over, when the soldiers settled around their campfires and like all soldiers through time, made ribald jokes and lamented fallen comrades. He was there, with them, some evenings, when the divine right of kings was passed over and he desired just to be one of them. He would leave the royal tent with only a couple of guards, and join them around the fire, there in the foothills with the first wisp of autumn. He drank with them like a commoner, and the soldiers, who had never seen such behaviour before, welcomed him with elaborate courtesy and their best manners, serving up the rough produce of the local stills as if it were the finest wines rather than liquid just as likely to kill you as make you drunk.
Even before the march, even before the victory, he would ride out from the palace grounds each morning; the handsome prince on his handsome horse, a symbol of power and conquest, while the local maidens watched and giggled and all stood aside. As a youth he had kept the harem busy, those highly trained for secrets which were never shared. As an old king and retired military commander, his interests were less. There had been too many betrayals, too many losses, and he was just as happy to spend the evenings with the courtiers rather than the courtesans.
Just as he had as a child in this mortal frame, he flew over the lake and saw across the rooftops, the pale light more than enough to see their palid dreams. He didn't know that victory had been declared. He was preparing the path. He dismissed, forgave or was forgiven those he had done wrong. He sentenced one to death; but in secret had him sent to the provinces. He could not kill old friends. Truth was, he wasn't much good at killing enemies either; but in those long colonnades and extraordinary gardens; there was a time and a place. He met his first love. They twittered together, their young flesh so ripe. The guards keeping a respectful distance.
You are welcome here. You are safe here. There is no need for subterfuge. He was going to kiss them in five places, and shout it from the rooftop. While all around him, sent on an extraordinary mission, he sensed the power of his opponents ebbing away. He might have been born in a different place. But now he was on the east coast of Australia, a place previous incarnations had never even known existed, a strategic placement after so many strategic blunders; and they would welcome you from afar, the righteous rejoicing, the laying down of palms, the victory march which only fate had determined. He was on a mission. He had been sent. There was no mistaking that.
The execrable nature of the ruling elites was more than cause for alarm; an instant explanation as to why he had been sent. He, in the most pluralist of senses, was shocked that the sacred creations of the ancestors had descended to this state, infested with bad spirits and shocking mismanagement of the provinces. In his day he had been proud of the ordered nature of his empire. Now he watched as those soldiers, or more precisely the descendents of those soldiers with which he had spent many a drunken evening, on the battlefield and off, were being treated with such disrespect, humiliated, robbed and preyed upon by their own government; the ruling elites descending into the robber barons of old.
The moral collapse of the country was complete. And the house leaked from the roof.
Release the hounds, for the flights of arrows and the final daggers would ensure no survivors.
He returned victorious, but was never the same again. Now he saw through different eyes, and came not to pass blessing but to warn, not to explain the ancient mysteries against the backdrop of modern science and advanced computation, but to tell them all: beware. Not just of your own kind, but of a vast galaxy with indifferent hostages and frighteningly drunk rulers; of gods sent crazy with their own power. Worship them not.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Before the beginning of kingship in Sumer, the city-states were effectively ruled by theocratic priests and religious officials. Later, this role was supplanted by kings, but priests continued to exert great influence on Sumerian society. In early times, Sumerian temples were simple, one-room structures, sometimes built on elevated platforms. Towards the end of Sumerian civilization, these temples developed into ziggurats—tall, pyramidal structures with sanctuaries at the tops.
The Sumerians believed that the universe had come into being through a series of cosmic births. First, Nammu, the primeval waters, gave birth to Ki (the earth) and An (the sky), who mated together and produced a son named Enlil. Enlil separated heaven from earth and claimed the earth as his domain. Humans were believed to have been created by Enki, the son of Nammu and An. Heaven was reserved exclusively for deities and, upon their deaths, all mortals' spirits, regardless of their behavior while alive, were believed to go to Kur, a cold, dark cavern deep beneath the earth, which was ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal and where the only food available was dry dust. In later times, Ereshkigal was believed to rule alongside her husband Nergal, the god of death.
The major deities in the Sumerian pantheon included An, the god of the heavens, Enlil, the god of wind and storm, Enki, the god of water and human culture, Ninhursag, the goddess of fertility and the earth, Utu, the god of the sun and justice, and his father Nanna, the god of the moon. During the Akkadian Period and afterward, Inanna, the goddess of sex, beauty, and warfare, was widely venerated across Sumer and appeared in many myths, including the famous story of her descent into the Underworld.
Sumerian religion heavily influenced the religious beliefs of later Mesopotamian peoples; elements of it are retained in the mythologies and religions of the Hurrians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Middle Eastern culture groups. Scholars of comparative mythology have noticed many parallels between the stories of the ancient Sumerians and those recorded later in the early parts of the Hebrew Bible.