Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

The Jewel and the Dragon, and the fight against the coming darkness

My offhand reference in the open thread to continuity of devotion to the Babylonian God Tammuz to the 10th century elicited a fascinating email from a long-time reader about paganism in modern Afghanistan, which I will paraphrase below. But, before I go on, I should mention also the inhabitants of the Mani peninsula in the southeast Peloponnese were Greco-Roman pagans until the 870’s A.D. The reason for this persistence is simple: the Mani peninsula is very isolated. The premodern world was not like our world today with global media and interconnected trade networks. Presumably, these pagan villagers interacted only a few times a year with outsiders. The Christian church might send a priest (there is evidence of churches as early as the 4th century in the region), but without the force of the state, the locals could continue to practice their indigenous religion without much interference.

This is a good introduction to the story I will pass on. Apparently, my reader, who wishes to remain anonymous and so sent an email, was a translator in Afghanistan. Some of the officers he worked with told him a story about a strange Afghan militant they captured in 2001. This man was nominally a Sunni Muslim Pashtun. But, in his isolated valley, the inhabitants believed that the sun was a jewel vommitted by a dragon every morning. In the evening the dragon swallowed the jewel (which slipped under the flat earth). The militant joined the fight against the Americans, whom he thought were Germans because he believed they came to steal the jewel, and therefore usher in an age of darkness.

My informant says the Afghan officers were quite disturbed that this man had such rich and sincere pagan beliefs despite his Islamic identity. He was not Nuristani or one of the more exotic groups, but a Pashtun.

I think the existence of beliefs and people like this even in our modern globalized world, where semi-pagans know who “Germans” are, should make it more comprehensible why down to the 800s and 900s there were pockets of belief in literal Bronze age gods in the medieval world.

8 thoughts on “The Jewel and the Dragon, and the fight against the coming darkness

  1. Just check out Southern Spain. We have million-people pilgrimages to random shrines https://youtu.be/Hx-qQs7XX2w, beach fires in the summer solstice eve https://youtu.be/cAgqBzOEQ0g, healing saints to pray to, Mother Earth^H^H^H^H^HVirgin Mary images to carry around on the full moon https://youtu.be/N-EzhFOI5XU… All very Catholic, of course.

    The cathedral was built on the mosque which was built on the Roman temple which was built on the sacred grove. This is the way.

  2. A fascinating story.

    And knowing what I know, there’s a certain crystalline quality involved with my own sense of the Pashtun officers deep state of shock/puzzlement.

    Perhaps it’s a gift acquired through time spent in the region. But at the end of day, I think it’s more a matter of me being a local, in my heart and soul. And forever a local. Certain things you can’t learn; you just know.

    But for those who don’t have a familial familiarity, I think one thing needs to be understood about the Pashtun as a cultural entity:

    On the whole face of this great wide earth, you simply will not find another tribal people so utterly bereft of any mystical-mindedness; a people so lacking in any sense of supernatural “charge”.

    Aside from what myth is allowed within the confines of Sunni Islamic orthodoxy, the archetypal Pashtun is a total materialist (or as analytic philosophers now prefer, a “physicalist”), and that too one who’d enjoy and understand Machiavelli on a very deep hermeneutic level (if he were exposed to such strains of European thought).

    Among even the most isolated of the Pashtuns. Among men who’ve never seen a school, and who evince not the slightest bit of interest in a world beyond their own lonely mountain eyrie. Even among them, you’ll hear no tales of fairies haunting forest paths; or of ghosts in ruins; or of special places of miracle or divine presence. Nor are there any tales of any olden “heroes” who performed feats that pointed to anything beyond this world of dirt and blood.

    ^ In fact, if you ask an elder concerning any stories regarding “heroes” of the past (“qahraman”, literally “wrathful”, and the Pashto term for a “hero”), what you’ll inevitably get is a yarn about some tribal warrior of a hundred or so years past who was famed for the cold vengeance he unleashed against his enemies; famed for his unbounded sense of hospitality; famed for his unmitigated generosity; famed for the great number of sons he added to the count of his tribe; and famed for the fact that all his sons were just as ruthless, hospitable, and generous as he was.

    ^^ So to Pashtuns, a “hero” is just some dude who was what one may call a type of “bad muthafucka” (lol), and his many sons were chips off the old block. That’s it.

    And you can tell that this person was real. Again, no Herculean flourishes or antics; just a factual telling of a tribesmen who was really good at killing people who tried to hurt his family or besmirch his name… and since he was powerful enough to attract a great number of such people, he ended up with a very high body count. And again, whenever he wasn’t killing or plotting, and even when he had nothing left for his own family, he was feeding everyone and their brother in his guest house (even his enemies!). And again, the man had a ton of sons.

    He was a “drund sarai” (literally a “heavy man”). That’s all that qualifies him as worthy of being spoken about across the generations as a “hero”.

    And even in regards to Islam, traditionally a Pashtun is only a Muslim insofar as Islam allows him to magnify his own “Pashtun-ness”.

    Which is why in the olden days “jihad” was so important to him… even though he was often uncircumcised, and couldn’t recite the Shahada.

    So, to hear a story of a man who hails from a people so absolutely poor in terms of mythical imagination, and yet who has such rich mythical imagination… it certainly is a thing of great and considerable anthropological interest.

    If I was a betting man, I’d say there’s zero chance that this tribesmen was from the south; basically no way he was a southern Pashtun of Ghilzai or Durrani extraction. I mean, perhaps there’s a chance of such a person among the southern Gharghasht… but even that’s very unlikely (almost impossible).

    The central zone is also out of the question. Many isolated peoples there (the old Brits described some Pashtuns in the central zone as being better described as “mountain bears”, rather than humans; should give an idea of the sort of folk to be found in the lonely parts)… but they are also the most “down to earth” of all the Pashtuns. I don’t think any Zadran or Khostwal could believe the things described by the tribesmen in question.

    So this man, if I was betting, must have been a man of the Pashtun north: Kunar, Laghman, or Nangarhar… but almost certainly Kunar. Kunar is truly the only place in the whole Pashtun cultural sphere where I can imagine an isolated sept of some obscure Sapai Pashtuns with richly colorful myths that they hold with deep sincerity. But even there, I myself am not aware of any such people. And truth be told, the northern Pashtuns are (by far) the most “Islamic presenting” of all Pashtuns (just as the southern Pashtuns are the most authentically Islamic of the Pashtuns). But I’m just trying to figure out where this semi-Pagan tribesmen was from. And the north, in my estimation, is the only place that a Pashtun like him is possible.

    Anyway, I apologize for writing so much; I know it’s a long one, and I seek the forgiveness of all those who bore the burden of reading till the end (and I’d also like to extend my thanks to those same people, for taking the time to read till the end).

    PS: The Germans have a long history in Afghanistan. During the first world war, they had deep faith and interest in the notion of Afghans ousting the British in India.

    And during the Nazi Era, there was the whole fascination with “Aryan peoples” in the Hindu Kush. On that note, weird (like very weird) “trivia”: the Nazis “imported” 57 Pashtun men from Afghanistan, for the purposes of impregnating German women.

  3. „“On that note, weird (like very weird) “trivia”: the Nazis “imported” 57 Pashtun men from Afghanistan, for the purposes of impregnating German women.“

    I don‘t know about the rest of your post but that claim seems extremely fake.

  4. whahae,

    “I don‘t know about the rest of your post but that claim seems extremely fake.”

    To that I can only respond with one observation:

    Their grandchildren seem to be extremely real. Or at least one of them.

    ^ Suffice it to say that this world of ours is a strange, strange, strange place. And at the risk of performing an understatement of tectonic proportions, suffice it to say that in this strange, strange, strange place the Nazis were quite, quite, quite “odd”.

    Anyway, there’s a whole strand of history here worth exploring for those who take an interest in matters unexamined.

    But I’ve already written far too much, so I’m in no position to demand any further attention from the good readers here.

    So all I’ll quickly/succinctly note is that a very creepy coziness blossomed between Nazi racial ideology and the Pashtun nationalist intelligentsia at Kabul.

    And even when the Nazi cause died, and these “intellectuals” became old and irrelevant in the face of young Communist Pashtun students (a decade before the Afghan-Soviet war), in their hearts they never did abandon the language of “Aryan superiority”.

  5. The 23rd of June is Bonfire Night in Ireland. It’s officially the eve of the Feast of St. John, but it’s pretty close to the Summer Solstice.
    A few years ago, I was on a road that turned down into a long, deep valley just at twilight. There was a line of fires lit all the way down the floor of that glen with the sky just going purple.
    I imagine it was the same 2000 years ago.
    Now, of course, Bonfire Night is frowned on because it adds to global warming. The new church.

  6. @Ezequiel

    Several christian festivities in English still can be addressed with heathen naming: Yuletide, Easter.

Comments are closed.