Ragged Haggis

In an earlier post, I mentioned that there were several hundreds "books" in the Third Galaxy which purportedly told the story and/or the teachings of Holy Idaho.

There is not anything unusual in this, a continent away and five centuries earlier, there was another religious founder, the Big Buddy. The amount of literature attributed to him in what are called the "Three Biscuits" are so voluminous that -- even though Big Buddy lived to be eighty -- it is hard to see how a single man could produce so much!

Apparently it is human nature in the Third Galaxy to attribute ones own thoughts as those of a famous, in particular a famous religious personage. Thankfully, things like this never happen in our own world!

One might well ask how could it be that almost all of the texts attributed to the teachings of the Buddy could survive for millenniums down to modern times in the Third Galaxy, whereas the material attributed to the Idaho is so scanty. The answer is that, a bit more than three centuries after the death of the Idaho, the Peelers became the state religion of the Roaming Empire.

As an absolute ruler, the Emperor Constipate didn't like that there were so many sects and splinter groups among the Peelers and he commanded that they sort these things out so that everybody would know what they were supposed to believe. In short, for his unified empire, he wanted a unified religion.

The upshot was that a small collection of the writings were determined to be inspired by the Holy Wind and everything else was banned, suppressed and even actively sought out and destroyed. The job was done so well that for fifteen hundred years the only thing known about these documents were screeds written by early church fathers bloviating about how wicked and evil were the teachings in these texts.

In modern times, after the "War-to-Make-the-World-Safe-for-Whatever...",
a number of scrolls that had been hidden in caves near Ragged Haggis were discovered*.

Although badly damaged, with many lacunas, these texts gave people in the Third Galaxy important insights into various ideas that were floating around during the early years of the Peeler religion -- in particular, those of the so-called Knowers, or as the Church preferred to call them, the Gnasties.

The Knowers were a far from homogenous group, but they were attacked and vilified by the Church of the Universe as if they were a conspiracy of the Devil Himself. However, when the Roaming Empire later broke up into two empires, one seated in Roam and the other in Constipated -- the church split also. Not that much later, when the Roaming empire fell, the Pooper of the Church of the Universe was able keep his organization together and for a while was perhaps the most powerful man in the Third Galaxy!

However, Humpty Dumpty finally fell off that wall and, as far as the Church of the Universe was concerned, all the torture chambers and bonfires roasting heretics could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.

The Peelers then split into several hundred larger and smaller, churches, sects and cults and things were more or less like they were before, except that now they had a canonized text which was now raised to be the Infallible Word of the Great Potato.

This was something which the Church of the Universe had never intended -- they had only meant to get rid of texts which could sow doubt regarding the teaching of the Church. This was most unfortunate because charlatans and outright nuts began reading these texts and, because the words were "From the Great Potato", that meant that everything they thought while reading these texts was also holy, sacred and the "Will of the Great Potato". Many ugly and outright evil things happened in the Third Galaxy because of this.

Well, that was lot of history, spanning almost two millenniums, so you must forgive me if it was a bit sketchy!

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will post and excerpt from the "Book of Chocolate".
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The astute reader may complain that Ragged Haggis sounds suspiciously like Nag Hammadi -- but as Third Galaxy is a parallel universe, some parallels are to be expected now and then.