Among our folkloric tales there are some stories about how a young outcast or the famous third brother, the youngest smartest luckiest brother, or that famous baldheaded guy who is again the luckiest and very clever indeed, anyhow, the lucky stranger with empty pocket and empty stomach arrives at a city and at the gate finds some respectable old citizens waiting for him or any other foreigner to elect him as their king. In most versions it's the lucky clever bald guy that enters the city, especially when the king must be chosen by a falcon that comes down and sits on the future king’s head. The bald guy buys a calf stomach pulls it on his head and attract the falcon, of course these stories like most folklorics are not very sensible and logical in their original forms and we are not suppose to ask that if they want to choose the foreigner, why need the falcon? Maybe it's for the ceremonial purposes, just a formality.
Anyway, the thing I'm going to tell you is about how we always thought that the precedure was really strange, ridicolous actually and not possible. We used to ask eacother: How come they can't solve this small problem of kinglessness between themselvse? why must they send those poor elderlies to stand there for God knows how long, waiting at the gate of that godforsaken city for a lost wanderer to appear at their gate so that they can ask, beg or force him to accept the crown and rule over them, why? It's sheer nonsense we used to agree upon, at end of every conference.
But later, again as the reasult of [philo] [sophia], love of understanding things, curiosity in other words, we found out that those stories were not necessarily fictitious, were not nonsense, but made sense indeed.
In fact they were derived from eyewitness accounts, those events were really happening in some parts of the world and kept happening for centuries later too. Maybe this genre(!) of tales had been introduced by those who either had seen that kind of king electing or heard about the strange costumes in far far lands from travelers. In fact among the reports of some famous travelers like Marco Polo, and our friend Foula's compatriot, the famous tourist, Ibn Batoutah and the likes of them we find some facts that without exaggeration are much more unbelievable than most of our tales. for instance like when we read in Ibn Batoutah's itinerary, travel’s diary, that how the nice friendly guests of an African emir (by an unfortunate misunderstanding really) had eaten the servant that had gone with them to show them the way to the guest house and the next morning these guests had send a delegate to the amazed emir to thank him on their behalf and especially because the servant was really yummy as they had said, was very delicious.
And thank to those guests who answered the son of Batoutah's question sincerely, we now know that the most delicious part of the human body is the palm of the hands. Is that why children keep licking and chewing their hands, by the way?
And again the son of Batoutah tells us about the costumes in some African and Asian countries that are more strange to us and more fascinating than most of our stories. and even more interesting are the reports of anthropologists and sociologists of the 19th and 20th century. About the subject of electing a foreigners as kings. We have reports that shows beyond doubt that being a king was so hard and painful job in some societies that nobody dared to accept the honor, to the extent that those responsible for finding a king, when secretly agreed upon some unsuspecting fellow countryman, had to ambush the poor "elected king" tie him down and trow him in a cellar without food and water until he agrees to accepts the scary challenge and becomes his people's king, because the king's life was the most miserable and painful life with no fun what so ever. The king’s body and soul and all things around him and every thing he touched at once became tabu and sacred. For instance the Incas used to burn instantly what ever their king Atahualpa (the last king of Peru) touched or wore once.
A very mild example of these miserable sovereigns was a mikado, a Japanese emperor.
His feet must not touch the ground, they carried him on their back; the sunshine wasn't allowed to shine on his sacred body even mild breeze was not allowed to pass over him; no razor was allowed to cut his hair or nails, you may rightly say that he would become a very scary creature indeed, but the so-called servants, the emperor torturers, were smart Japanese and found a way. Because they couldn't leave him to rot and die of dirt and diseases, because they couldn't find a mikado every few months, so they had to wash his sacred body, but how? no one was allowed to touch the live body of a god, the son or some other relative of the Sun. So the cheeky Japanese invented a theory and find a witty way to fool the sun and wash his son, without breaking the ancient sacred laws. They decided to wash him when he was asleep! How about that? Now, does anyone like to be a king? Any body!
Just one more thing; to finish this section neatly, I give you a few sentence from Sigmund Freud's [Totem and Tabu] as exhibit number one if it pleases the court. Quoting from Fraser and other noted anthropologists, he says: "in some western African countries, in [Sierra Leone] for instance, it's become so hard and difficult to find a king, (in early 20th century,) that they have to find an unsuspecting naive stranger and somehow trick him to the throne.
They had to hide behind the city gate, we guess, and jump an unsuspicious wanderer like the big cats they got there.
I originally wanted to say a few words about the lucky bald guy and how smart he is, but I unknowingly I went astray; sorry about that, and now that it's late and the post’s become long again, as always, we better leave that for the next session.