The Monster in the Heart
Night Fire: The Monster in the Heart
A French philosopher, Jean Jacque Rousseau, impressed the world for decades with his famous expression: “The human being is born good, it is the society that corrupts him.” For too long, humanity has exposed its incapability of reasoning and the obscurantist nature of its evolution in the fact that we have found a sort of intellectual and philosophical brilliance in that expression.
...As if we knew what “to be good” means. The question that, until today, is in the head of every being that is worried about the becoming of the world is, without a doubt, “Do we know how to be good? What definition do we bring to the concept of goodness? Can we give to that concept a definition that is non-partisan?” I mean to be good at all frontiers; to be good without making victims; to be good without being a partner in crime.
The truth according to the philosophical school of M’TAM is that there is no human being that is born good. There is no country of goodness. The individual struggle is the same everywhere. We all evolve toward absolute goodness. The individual feels influences of forces that we can find sympathetic and those we can find negative. Even being born in the holy city will not protect us from these influences.
Without a model of Gods that we consider perfect and a guide to reproduce it (the 77 commandments), we must recognise that we have taken on a challenge that is practically impossible to win taking into consideration our human nature. It is clear that we will not be able to recognise the evil if it is not pointed out to us, and we will only notice the evil that inhabits us if there is in our environment an individual who is honest enough to point it out to us while it is manifesting itself.
Our relationship with the good and evil of the world places us in a position of a consenting victim.
In the Gourmantche countries, we say that there is a monster in the human heart. Every time that monster manifests itself, even the devil loses his throne. The principle of life consists of the fact that each one of us should domesticate his monster. The original cosmogony has presented to the world what we call Heru-Seth. Heru-Seth is presented as a God that is represented by Heru and Seth joined together as siamese brothers. The two Gods represent the forces of destruction and life inhabiting the same body. Yes, Heru and Seth join together until the level of the neck, and then one can find two heads looking in opposite directions. The existence of a double-headed Heru-Seth has opened a door to all the philosophical speculations of the modern time concerning the notion of harmony, the Chinese yin and yang, etc.
The story I'm going to tell expresses Heru-Seth as two forces that inhabit every individual. Heru is favourable to life, resurrection, and the becoming of the world that expands, and Seth is unfavourable to life and is working actively for a becoming of the world that retracts. According to the M’TAM education, a human being must work to reduce the manifestations of Seth because he always shows up to trouble our identification with the God-child Heru.
During the invasion of the Nile Valley by the Romans, one was witnessing a shift that was difficult to understand. The world was good before; the farmer was farming, the weavers were weaving, the merchants were selling...the world was at peace. The people of the Nile Valley could not understand why a whole continent could become a land that every ambitious person would want to conquer. The worst was, without a doubt, the fact that Romans and the other inhabitants of the territories of Europe were educated to simply hate people of colour, their Gods, philosophy, etc, and at the same time, to loot their temples, pyramids, granaries, technology, etc. The barbarism of the invaders did not make sense. For the people of the South, when you hate somebody, you stay away from them, and you do not accept anything that comes from them. We are witnessing simply a world of hypocrisy. The streets of Kheraba were filled with these hypocrite soldiers that were, on one hand, calling themselves superior to the ones they colonialized and, on the other hand, were stealing obelisks, gold, diamonds, even mummified bodies and papyri, etc, as “spoils of war”. The peasants knew that these people came in because they were starving, and making war was their intelligent way of putting food on their tables.
It is said that one day a Roman soldier went to visit a temple. He found a priest sitting in front of the temple with his eyes closed, legs crossed and arms on his knees. The priest was visibly in a deep meditation. Suddenly he was pulled out of his state by a rude and authoritarian voice of the soldier: “Hey, old man, I want you to teach me what you call Heru-Seth.” The priest stayed with no movement, as if he did not hear the soldier. He did not answer, but started opening his eyes gradually. The soldier could see a faint smile on the corner of the mouth of the priest. The soldier was visibly determined, impatient, and more and more agitated. “You want to know the secret of Heru-Seth?” the priest replied finally. “You that I find worse than an animal; you with your hands and feet covered with dust and blood, you with a breath that smells like a dead rat, you with a sword that is rusted and neglected? You that everyone found ugly, you who is clothed by your mother...and you are asking me about Heru-Seth?”
After hearing all these words, the soldier entered into an anger with no equal. He pulled his sword and lifted it on the top of his head. His face became red like a tomato. The veins on his neck were swollen. He emitted a bad curse as he was preparing himself to cut the head of the priest off, and while the sword was coming down towards the neck of the priest, the priest gently said, “This is the manifestation of Seth! Now you can see Seth in yourself.”
On hearing these words, the soldier stopped his action. He was marvelled by the intelligence of the priest. He was invaded by compassion and love for this gentle priest that has risked his own life just to teach him. His eyes filled with tears of gratitude. The priest now said, with a smile, “This is the manifestation of Heru. This is Heru.”
