Sayings of Gor.

 Some quotations from the Books of the Learned Professor.

This pilgrimage to the Sardar, enjoined by the Priest-Kings according to the Caste of Initiates, undoubtedly plays its role in the distribution of beauty among the hostile cities of Gor. Whereas the males who accompany a caravan are often killed in its defense or driven off, this fate, fortunate or not, is seldom that of the caravan’s women.

 It will be their sad lot to be stripped and fitted with the collars and chains of slave girls and forced to follow the wagons on foot to the fair, or if the caravan’s tharlarions have been killed or driven off, they will carry its goods on their backs. Thus one practical effect of the edict of the Priest-Kings is that each Gorean girl must, at least once in her life, leave her walls and take the very serious risk of becoming a slave girl, perhaps the prize of a pirate or outlaw. [...] This chain of reflections was occasioned in my mind by sight of some men of Port Kar, a savage, coastal city on the Tamber Gulf, who were displaying a sullen chain of twenty freshly branded girls, many of them beautiful. They were from the island city of Cos and had undoubtedly been captured at sea, their vessel burned and sunk. Their considerable charms were fully revealed to the eye of appraising buyers who passed down the line. The girls were chained throat to throat, their wrists locked behind the small of their backs with slave bracelets, and they knelt in the customary position of Pleasure Slaves. When a possible buyer would stop in front of one, one of the bearded scoundrels from Port Kar would poke her with a slave whip and she would lift her head and numbly repeat the ritual phrase of the inspected slave girl: Buy me, Master. They had thought to come to the Sardar as free women, discharging their obligation to the Priest-Kings. They would leave as slave girls.

I would allow Vika to share the great stone couch, its sleeping pelts, and silken sheets. This was unusual, however, for normally the Gorean slave girl sleeps at the foot of her master’s couch, often on a straw mat with only a thin, cottonlike blanket, woven from the soft fibers of the Rep Plant, to protect her from the cold. If she has not pleased her master of late, she may be, of course, as a disciplinary measure, simply chained nude to the slave ring in the bottom of the couch, sans both blanket and mat. The stones of the floor are hard and the Gorean nights are cold and it is a rare girl who, when unchained in the morning, does not seek more dutifully to serve her master. This harsh treatment, incidentally, when she is thought to deserve it, may even be inflicted on a Free Companion, in spite of the fact that she is free and usually much loved. According to the Gorean way of looking at things a taste of the slave ring is thought to be occasionally beneficial to all women, even the exalted Free Companions. Thus when she has been irritable or otherwise troublesome even a Free Companion may find herself at the foot of the couch looking forward to a pleasant night on the stones, stripped, with neither mat nor blanket, chained to a slave ring precisely as though she were a lowly slave girl. It is the Gorean way of reminding her, should she need to be reminded, that she, too, is a woman, and thus to be dominated, to be subject to men. Should she be tempted to forget this basic fact of Gorean life the slave ring set in the bottom of each Gorean couch is there to refresh her memory.

And yet it was not a strange thing, particularly not on Gor, where bravery is highly esteemed and to save a female’s life is in effect to win title to it, for it is the option of a Gorean male to enslave any woman whose life he has saved, a right which is seldom denied even by the citizens of the girl’s city or her family. Indeed, there have been cases in which a girl’s brothers have had her clad as a slave, bound in slave bracelets, and handed over to her rescuer, in order that the honor of the family and her city not be besmirched. There is, of course, a natural tendency in the rescued female to feel and demonstrate great gratitude to the man who has saved her life, and the Gorean custom is perhaps no more than an institutionalization of this customary response. There are cases where a free woman in the vicinity of a man she desired has deliberately placed herself in jeopardy. The man then, after having been forced to risk his life, is seldom in a mood to use the girl other than as his slave. [... An Earth girl] if rescued on Gor, would probably be dumbfounded at what would happen to her. After her kiss of gratitude, which might last a good deal longer than she had anticipated, she would find herself forced to kneel and be collared and then, stripped, her wrists confined behind her back in slave bracelets, she would find herself  led stumbling away on a slave leash from the field of her champion’s valor.

This pilgrimage to the Sardar, enjoined by the Priest-Kings according to the Caste of Initiates, undoubtedly plays its role in the distribution of beauty among the hostile cities of Gor. Whereas the males who accompany a caravan are often killed in its defense or driven off, this fate, fortunate or not, is seldom that of the caravan’s women. It will be their sad lot to be stripped and fitted with the collars and chains of slave girls and forced to follow the wagons on foot to the fair, or if the caravan’s tharlarions have been killed or driven off, they will carry its goods on their backs. Thus one practical effect of the edict of the Priest-Kings is that each Gorean girl must, at least once in her life, leave her walls and take the very serious risk of becoming a slave girl, perhaps the prize of a pirate or outlaw. [...] This chain of reflections was occasioned in my mind by sight of some men of Port Kar, a savage, coastal city on the Tamber Gulf, who were displaying a sullen chain of twenty freshly branded girls, many of them beautiful. They were from the island city of Cos and had undoubtedly been captured at sea, their vessel burned and sunk. Their considerable charms were fully revealed to the eye of appraising buyers who passed down the line. The girls were chained throat to throat, their wrists locked behind the small of their backs with slave bracelets, and they knelt in the customary position of Pleasure Slaves. When a possible buyer would stop in front of one, one of the bearded scoundrels from Port Kar would poke her with a slave whip and she would lift her head and numbly repeat the ritual phrase of the inspected slave girl: Buy me, Master. They had thought to come to the Sardar as free women, discharging their obligation to the Priest-Kings. They would leave as slave girls.

For Now: I wish you well.