The Origin of Humanity
A myth from Kasshian paganism, one of several conflicting stories of ancient times. The validity of this story is questioned by some sects. A peculiar characteristic of this story is how the gods are absent, in the most common telling. There are some retellings that add the gods, but this is the oldest and most widespread form. In modern times, it is thought by many to reflect actual historical memory, possibly distorted. It is known that humanity originated on another world, though the details of how they arrived on Galhaf is a mystery
This is the story of how humanity began.
Before yesterday’s yesterday, and even longer than that*, there was another world, far out among the stars, the First World. The First World was a world similar to ours, though its day was shorter, its year longer, and things weighed less. The First World was filled with plants and animals, very different from those of our world. One of those animals was a clever beast that looked something like a person, but with more hair.
Over time, some of these clever beasts grew more and more clever, until they became a Thinking Kind, changed form, and became humans.
And humans thrived on the First World. They explored their world, and learned to control fire and make tools. And then they learned to grow crops, raise livestock, build cities, write, and all the other skills of civilized humans.
Their knowledge grew immense, and they learned to control the very forces of nature, like infant gods. Some of their powers they learned to use for good. They could change the very nature of living things, to make crops produce twelvefold yield, to restore the ill to health, to fly through the air in special ships, and even among the stars themselves.
But not all of their powers they used for good. They also learned to make weapons that could destroy whole cities, to make new illnesses, which they used like weapons, and to create new terrifying beasts.
They grew arrogant and wasteful in their power, especially those of the greatest wealth and the rulers. While the wisest of them sought in vain to warn the powerful, they continued to squander the wealth of their world. Their powers were not without consequences and, as fire leaves ashes and smelting leaves smoke, so their immensely greater powers left greater poisons in the air, in the water, and in the land itself. Some of these poisons made the world itself warmer, changing the very weather, turning good land into desert, and melting the icy places, so that the water ran to the sea, and the sea flooded the coasts and drowned islands.
The powerful, in their arrogance, refused to see what was happening, for they could avoid the consequences, at first. They turned a blind eye to the suffering of the poor and powerless, and continued to strive towards ever greater wealth, long after they had become far too wealthy to even count their riches.
And so the First World began to die, and at last even the richest and the most powerful could see that their wealth was in vain, and that they, too, would die with their world, their vaunted power only ensuring that they would be among the last to die.
And so, they sought to escape their world, to find a new one. And one of the wisest of their astronomers found a world among the stars which they could escape to, and the wisest of their builders designed a great ship, and the wisest of their nature-manipulators found a shortcut through the stars, a great tunnel that burrowed through the space-between-space.
And so they built a great ship, and forced the poorest to do the work, and to prepare a home on the new world. But when those who were doing the work discovered what the work was for, and learned the truth which had been hidden from them, that their world was doomed to die, they rebelled, and they seized the great ship for themselves, and fled to the new world, which was this world, the world on which we live.
Among those who arrived here were some who were wise in the ways of changing living things, and they ensured that the crops they brought would survive on a new world, with a different sun and a different year. And they created new plants, like the one we call Mother’s Love**, or the Womb-Closer***.
But they only had some of the learning of the First World, and they found it hard to adapt to this world. Many died in the first generation, and many of the powerful tools that they brought with them stopped working, for they had been built by greedy men of the First World, who had designed the tools so that they would have to be replaced after a time. And all their efforts to get them to work again failed. And so, they quickly forgot the skills of civilization, and were reduced to barbarians, until the time came when they relearned those skills.
And so there is much about the First World that has been forgotten, and the secrets of nature which those of the First World learned have been long forgotten, except for small pieces, which are remembered in some other stories****. But if humans learned them before, they can learn them again.
And this fact lay heavy on the minds of those who crossed the stars, and they feared that their descendants would repeat the mistakes of the First World, and so they told this story to their children, and told them to tell it to their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children, down through the generations, so that when the time came, and those secrets were discovered again, they would remember how their ancestors had misused those secrets.
For those secrets made us like infant gods. In the hands of an adult, a knife can do many things. It can be used to prepare food, or it can be used to perform surgery, or in the making of art or tools. But an infant cannot be trusted with a knife, for in its ignorance it may hurt or even kill itself or even another person. In the same way, those god-like secrets wielded by those who were little more than infants killed their world and countless humans who were left behind as the world died. May we never forget that powerful knowledge must be used with great caution. May we never forget that our ancestors killed their world in waste and carelessness, and may we be more careful and less wasteful when we rediscover those secrets.
*”Before yesterday’s yesterday” is a stock phrase in many myths to mean “in ancient times”
**A plant which, among other things, produces a powerful anesthetic in its leaves. Its flowers also produce a powerful hallucinogen. The name references another, conflicting, myth about its origin, involving a woman who was torn between motherly love and piety when one of the gods demanded that she sacrifice her only daughter to end a drought. Instead, she chose to sacrifice herself, and the plant was said to have first sprouted where her blood struck the ground
***As the name suggests, a powerful contraceptive herb
****A number of these stories do actually seem to indicate distorted memories of advanced science, such as those in this story. Other stories make references to things like disease being caused by tiny creatures too small to see, though they often imply that those tiny creatures are controlled by malevolent spirits
