Phoenician Myths by Zeljko Prodanovic (great reads .txt) 📕

I said, ‘which is so boring and ugly.’ But they didn’t understand me. ‘Poor Elagabalus,’ they said, ‘keep dreaming, brother, and you will get nowhere!’
‘Then I invented the wheel,’ he said and added, ‘but it would have been better if I hadn’t. As you know, they sold it to the Hyksos, and these bedouins then made chariots and harnessed their dreadful horses to them. And you saw what happened – they swept through Phoenicia like a storm!
‘And when, in the end, I invented the alphabet, they looked at me wonderingly again. ‘But Elagabalus,’ they said, ‘if life is only a flash between two deaths, and we all know it is, what do we need the alphabet for?’ And I don’t need to tell you what’s going to happen. They will also sell the alphabet to some bedouins, who will then write stories about their victories and our defeats, and in the end it will appear as though we were bedouins.’
When he realized that his role in the universe was coming to an end, Elagabalus turned into a crane, the sacred Phoenician bird, and flew out to Crete. There he turned into Aleph, the sacred Phoenician bull. More precisely, he was half man, half bull.
Tired of people and their stupidity, he wished to live in solitude. That is why he built a miraculous garden, which had only one door, one room and numerous corridors.
At the entrance he placed the inscription ‘Tan-ry-Baal’, which meant ‘the house of the sun’s shadow’. He wrote it in his own alphabet, from right to left. But the Cretans read the inscription the wrong way, from left to right, thus changing the name of Elagabalus’ garden to ‘laabyrnat’, which later became labyrinth. At that time Crete was ruled by King Minos, and the Cretans, again by mistake, gave Elagabalus the name Minotaur, that is, Minos’ bull.
And so, in the perfect silence of his house of the sun’s shadow or labyrinth, Elagabalus spent 666 years. And then, having realized that day is nothing else but the child of night, and that life and death are only the inside and the outside of the labyrinth, he drowned himself in his own solitude.

Pythagoras’ Testament

One day the purple Phoenician galleys arrived at Rhodes and the Phoenicians told the curious bedouins about their latest adventure. According to their story, some time ago they set sail with the intention to discover what lay hidden south of Egypt, but the voyage lasted much longer than they had expected.
Apparently, it took them two entire years to sail from the Egyptian port on the Red Sea to Gibraltar (gir-Baal-tar or the guardian of Baal’s tear) on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. And when, after two years of sailing, they finally reached their destination, the Phoenicians realized they had sailed around an immense and until then unknown continent. They gave it the name ‘Aleph-rik’, that is, Aleph’s horn, which later became Africa.
But, as I said, the Phoenicians also told them something very unusual. They said that at one point, when they reached the end of Africa and began to sail to the west, to their big surprise the sun remained on the right-hand side, in other words, in the north. This sounded so strange to the bedouins from Rhodes that they could only shake their heads and exclaim, ‘That’s impossible!
‘If we sail from Rhodes to Corinth,’ they continued, ‘the sun will always stay on our left, or in the south. If we then keep sailing from Corinth to Syracuse, which, as we all know, is farther to the west, the sun will again stay on our left and in the south. This is just another Phoenician lie,’ they said, ‘nothing else.’
It probably would have remained ‘just another Phoenician lie’ if the story had not reached Pythagoras, the famous philosopher with the purple eyes. When the tyrant Polycrates exiled him from his native Samos, Pythagoras took refuge in Croton, in southern Italy, where he founded a school called the Semicircle of Pythagoras, in which he, among other things, taught astronomy, geometry and music.
So, Pythagoras gathered his disciples and asked them how they would explain what the Phoenicians had told the bedouins.
‘I think that the Phoenicians didn’t lie at all,’ said one of disciples, a certain Empedocles from Sicily. ‘To me this is only a proof that the earth is much bigger than we think.’
‘It happened,’ Calisthenes the cartographer added, ‘that at one point during their voyage the Phoenicians passed under the sun, and then sailed so far to the south that the sun remained behind them. And when they then began to sail to the west, the sun – as they said – was now on their right, or in the north.’
‘But that would mean,’ Anaximander from Melos said, ‘that the earth is round!’
‘Exactly!’ Pythagoras cried. ‘And, on the other hand, this is nothing else but proof for what I am saying: that the universe is a geometrically ordered whole, or more precisely, an infinite circle ruled by the harmony of the spheres.’
When the Greek bedouins, who believed that the earth was flat, heard of Pythagoras’s discovery, they laughed and said, ‘Since the philosopher has proved that the Phoeni- cians have sailed around Africa, he could now undertake an even bigger venture. He could sail with Phoenicians around the world and so prove that the earth is round!’
However that may be, our friends from Croton continued to sail through the universe in their search for truth. But soon after they set sail, Pythagoras had a very unusual experience. One night he fell asleep under a cypress tree and awoke under a cedar.
‘Ha!’ Pythagoras exclaimed. ‘But, how is this possible?’ And while he wonderingly looked around, trying to comprehend what had happened, a flock of cranes emerged from the cedar’s crown and flew to the south.
He immediately gathered his disciples and told them what had happened.
‘There is no doubt,’ he said, ‘that observing the universe is a very exciting task but, as I said, a dangerous one as well. Let me just remind you of what happened to our friend Thales from Miletus, who watched the stars so much that he didn’t see where he was walking, and fell in a well. Therefore I would suggest,’ he added, ‘that we stay on earth for some time and try to discover the mysterious fate of the soul. So, how shall we explain what happened to me?’
‘As far as I know,’ Empedocles offered, ‘cedars grow in Phoenicia, on the slopes of Lebanon.’
‘And I heard the Phoenicians say,’ Calisthenes added, ‘that souls fly like cranes.’
‘Does that mean,’ Pythagoras said, ‘that my soul came from Phoenicia?’
‘It’s quite possible,’ said Anaximander. ‘Phoenicians say that souls fly to Baalbek, a town at the spring of two rivers – Leontes and Orontes – and at the foot of the cedar forests of Lebanon.’
‘Very interesting,’ Pythagoras mused. He then decided to go to the port of Croton and wait for Phoenician galleys. When the Phoenicians arrived, he questioned them about the soul’s mysterious journey to Baalbek.
‘Baalbek is the centre of the world,’ the Phoenicians told him. ‘And for that reason the great all-seeing eye chose Baalbek as the home of the most beautiful souls. But, as we said, we are only ordinary mortals and don’t know much about these things.
‘If you are lucky enough and your soul goes to Baalbek, there you will meet a certain Baalzebub, the famous satyr from Phoenicia. He is the lord of the shades and the only one under the sun who can talk with both the living and the dead. He will then reveal to you the mysterious fate of the soul.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Pythagoras said. ‘But how can I be sure that my soul will go to Baalbek?’
‘And how can you be sure that you will wake up tomorrow, philosopher?’ the Phoenicians retorted. ‘If you, as you say, one night fell asleep under a cypress tree and the next morning awoke under a cedar, this seems to us as quite a reliable sign that your soul is from Phoenicia.
‘And if you need yet another proof, then, as we said, you will have to wait a bit longer. It will come only once you have parted with your soul.’
‘What do you mean?’ Pythagoras asked.
‘When you die, philosopher.’
And so years passed, but Pythagoras unfortunately never managed to discover the mysterious connection between the cedar from Croton and the cedar forests from Phoenicia.
And when he realized, one day, that his time under the sun was running out, he took a piece of parchment and wrote on it:
‘On this parchment Pythagoras of Samos leaves the message for the generations to come. That he, out of his immense love for truth and wisdom, had found answers to many questions from different fields of knowledge, especially in those of astronomy, geometry and music. But that he, unfortunately, couldn’t find the answers to two questions: he couldn’t calculate the circumference of the universe and didn’t manage to discover the mysterious fate of the soul.’
When he died his disciples Empedocles, Calisthenes and Anaximander witnessed, with their own eyes, cranes with Pythagoras’ soul in their beaks fly out to Baalbek, to the spring of the two rivers and to the cedar forests of Phoenicia.
The Greeks later invented a story that Pythagoras had a golden hoof and a silver horn, and that he was able to sojourn in two places at the same time. And that he, allegedly, for 666 drachmas, sold his soul to a satyr from Phoenicia by the name of Baalzebub, who – as the story goes – roams the world as a vagabond and buys the cheap souls of unhappy rhapsodes and crazy philosophers.
And we shall later see that all this was utter nonsense.

The Conqueror of the Knot and the Tortoise

While Alexander the Great was preparing for the war against Persia, he heard some unusual news: the Phrygian king Gordius was boasting that he had tied a knot that nobody could untie. And the prophecy said that only he who loosened the knot would become the ruler of Asia.
And Alexander hurried on to Phrygia.
‘I admire your skill, Gordius,’ he said. ‘You’ve entangled it quite nicely, there is no doubt. But do we Macedonians not say that a hundred wise men cannot untie what one fool has entangled!’ – and with a lightning blow of his sword he cut the knot. ‘So Gordius!’ Alexander added. ‘Now you can tie another knot and I am going to take what the prophecy so generously gave to me – Asia.’
On the way through Phoenicia Alexander decided to pay a visit to the oracle of Baalbek and see the famous prophetess Nefertiti, the beauty with a tear in her eye. His general Seleucus tried to dissuade him from doing this, saying that, having cut Gordius’ knot, he had already opened the doors to Asia, but Alexander was persistent.