The Fires of God


 * The Fires of God, or Disco Inferno
 * by President Chester A. Arthur
 * 28 December 2001


 * From Persian Mirrors

"They did not burn heretics. Not that there were many heretics in 2nd century Persia; the Kings were tolerant, and those who weren't were well aware of how much the current Golden Age depended on Mandaean sailors from Yemen and Socotra who braved the Indian Ocean for its spice trade, from Ananite and Hindu merchants who braved the dangers of the Great Pass for the Silk Road and its trade.

No, criminals were burned at the stake. There was no death more holy for the Nestorian Church than to be burned alive, and no death more cleansing for a criminal. It was a masterstroke, supplying the crowd with a spectacular death and letting them ponder the mercy of the King of Kings that gave all but the worst criminals a chance at Heaven.

The fires in those days were only holy ones; the fires of war were limited to minor rebellions near the Fertile Crescent, and to a thousand minor struggles in the great mountains of the east, unified together under the general, not particularly precise name of Bactria. In every satrapy capitol, from provincial Tehran to rising Ctesiphon, in the shadow of the old, great city, there were the High Churches, and in each one, burning forever in a polished black vessel, fed by sources from coal to wood to natural gas, was the Eternal Flame of Christ.

They lit more than a nation at prayer in the name of Christ United. Persian traders pushed up even into the Caspian Sea, inaugurating what seems to have been an early, very diffuse contact between the Spectrum Rus and Nestorian Christianity. (The primary evidence for this is physical; a cache of Persian weapons and coins outside Astrakhan, a map of the Baltic Sea dating from the late 260s found in the library of the King of Kings centuries later.) There is strong evidence, however, of Spectral influence on the various levels of Hell in the Persian masterwork of the era: Kambiz's Divine Journey.

The Divine Journey describes the narrator's journey, guided by the 1st century poet Arses, down through the various levels of Hell up through the kingdoms of the world into Heaven and reunification with his dead love. Still readable in translation today, the epic poem is notable for its tolerance. While figures like Ragnar the Prophet and several Byzantine Emperors are deep in the bowels of Hell (particularly the Emperors), Eastern Orthodox, Ananite, Submissive poets and leaders and generals noted for their piety and virtue are not punished at all, winding up in the same section as "Virtuous Pagans" like the Emperor Xerxes or the poet Ovid.

Too, the Divine Journey was published simultaneously in Persian, Turkish, and Arabic, thus making it readable for a merchant in Isfahan, a Turkish nobleman at his great ranch outside Samarkand, and even an adventurous Syrian or Egyptian traveler who'd crossed Mesopotamia.

For a book still famous today, we know relatively little of Kambiz: he himself seems to have been one of the many court scribes who accompanied and described various Persian expeditions; there are hints in his brief introduction of trips to the major Trading Company base in the Maldives and eastward to their outpost on the eastern coast of Serendip, and he himself describes the Ananite states of India and the Syrian port towns on the Levant with great accuracy. (His accounts of multi-headed giants in the "Land of Submission" suggest an unfamiliarity with the region, not to mention repeatedly conflating Brittania and Hibernia.)