Anthropologist of Gor, Book 1, The Preparations (1)

 (The Introduction to Anthropologist of Gor was posted last December and can be found here: Anthropologist of Gor Intro) For reasons of the chronology of Chapter 2, Claudia’s age is now fifty instead of forty-five.

January 1, 2017. New Years Day. Private Gor Expedition Diary of Claudia Skimmerhorn, Professor of Anthrology at Queens College, City University of New York and Head of the Anthropology Dept.

In the next few days, likely by Wednesday, I will hear if funding has been approved for an anthropological expedition to Gor, our Earth’s twin planet on the other side of the sun. Then I will have until the following Sunday, one week from today, to decide if I will proceed with this dangerous expedition. In light of the gender ferment roiling our societies for the past few years, it is imperative that a scientific examination of the structure of Gorean Society be undertaken. On one hand, we can only make a preliminary study of one City, yet it cannot be denied that many of the salient structures of Gorean Society are planet-wide. Still any such expedition constitutes extreme danger to all persons who undertake it, so I will bear a great responsibility if I decide to proceed.

So I will be writing in this private diary until either I depart for a year on another world, or the project is shut down, either by me or by lack of funding. This diary will only be seen if I fail to return or disaster overwhelms us all. Before leaving I will leave it in my Safe Deposit Box at my bank. My daughter Clara will receive instructions from legal counsel on retrieving the diary if I do not return.

Clara, dear. This diary will be extremely frank, but you are eighteen now and will be attending Yale in the fall. I wish it had been Harvard, like your grandfather, or Princeton, so you would be close to the City, but your love of the Gilmore Girls led you to chose Yale, though you made me proud by receiving acceptances from all three. I never considered the Gilmores to have a healthy family relationship, they were far too entangled in each other’s lives. Still, if I am gone, you might as well discover things about your mother, including my active sexual life.

I discovered a metal box full of materials belonging to Professor John Norman, a retired Professor of Philosophy here at Queens College. He is also the author of a notorious series of books, adjusted to be fictional pulp novels, which destroyed his academic career. In short he was persecuted for writing fiction. Or what was believed to be fiction. Dr Norman is in his mid-eighties; our time at Queens over-lapped by only two years. I arrived here in 1995, a twenty-eight-year-old nearly minted PhD in Anthrology; he was then two years from retirement. He had resisted all attempts to drive him out, but having reached retirement age, he could leave honorably. I had met Dr Norman at a faculty tea shortly after I arrived. I believe he only came to the tea because so many earnestly desired that he would not. We had a pleasant conversation about nothing; as we parted he stopped me as I rose from the table and warned be to be careful of academic politics. I thanked him, politely. I knew a lot about the pettiness of academia from your grandparents. English literature, as your grandmother may have told you is vicious; sociology is even worse in my opinion. If you want to hear a discussion as to which is worse, innocently raise the topic with your grandparents: you will not get a word in for hours!

 

It was academic politics that led me to working clearing out a dusty attic storage room in the humanities Building. I had just been elected as Head of the Anthropology Department for a three-year term. But I had not yet taken office, when the outgoing Head, Maryanne Bankhead assigned me to remove all the old trash from the attic, so it could be converted to Anthropology Department use. I was assigned because I had defeated Maryanne in her attempt to be reelected for a third term. That woman can hold a grudge. She is a vengeful bitch. Incidentally, she is why I am Head of the department rather than Chair, or Chairman, or Chairwoman, or Chairperson. Maryanne demanded a gender free term, and at first pushed through a resolution changing the title to Chairperson. But too many people still called her a Chairman, or even worse, a Chair. Of course she did not want to be man, and the problem with Chair, was that the students were distributing funny cartoons of a Chair issuing foolish political pronouncements. So she became a Head. After two terms, she lost her bid for a third because of too many documented instances of bias against male students.

As revenge, I was assigned to clear the attic personally.

“After all, Ms Skimmerhorn, it needs to be someone senior. Who knows what might be up there. We can’t have any scandal, can we?”

I hated her sickly-sweet condescending tone, and of course addressing me as Ms, was a calculated insult. Especially since my PhD comes from a more prestigious University than hers does. I did not play her game. You don’t reach fifty, and Head of Department by taking every piece of bait that is dangled.

“Surely not, Maryanne. Scandal is the last thing anyone wants. Certainly not coming after all the bias complaints.”

If Bankhead thought that I was going to labor alone in the attic though, she was stupider than I suspected. I recruited dear Oliver to give me a hand. Most of stuff in the attic was trash, mostly broken furniture and discarded files. Oliver and I went through the files, removing a few for privacy reasons, the rest were marked for shredding. Behind an old desk, we found a locked metal storage box marked Dr John Norman. It was heavy but we moved it to beside the door, along with the broken desks and tables. While we waited for the men from the maintenance dept to come and clear away the trash, Oliver and I had a little Afternoon Delight on an old mattress. Luckily we finished before maintenance arrived. Just finished, as in adjusting our clothes as they walked in! (Sorry Clara, but if I disappear on Gor, I will not get the opportunity to embarrass you later. Your father and I are nearly divorced, and anyway your Dad has known about Oliver for years. Your Dad has had his fun with others the years too.)

The discarded files were carried away for shredding, the broken furniture to be burned, and the sensitive files and the locked box were carried to my office. We agreed to look at the box together the following Tuesday. I locked my office before leaving for the weekend. I had had an additional lock installed; one that could not be opened by the Head’s Master Key. You can bet I heard about that! I shut that down quickly, with,

“As you said, it is necessary to keep a careful lock on anything that could be embarrassing; besides, why were your trying to get into my private office?”

I like confounding Bankhead. She is a snoop and a humorless gender warrior. Theory about how society should be has no place in Anthropology. It is our job to describe Societies and Cultures as they are and how they work; not how we think they should work. Leave that kind of nonsense to Sociology.

 

The next Tuesday, Oliver and I tackled the locked box of Prof John Norman. For the Chairman of the Classics Department, Oliver has a lot of odd and useful skills.

(Between some practices Oliver has picked up in the byways of the Classics, and some I have learned from studying many cultures, we get up to lots of fun. Your Dad has learned some stuff over the years in Abnormal Psych too.)

Once we got the box open, there were a lot of surprises. Lots of odd coins, ancient looking, struck by hand dies. Neither Oliver nor I could read the inscriptions, some were faded and worn, but some were fresh. Most were copper or bronze, but there were three of silver, and five of gold. The gold coins had a large unidentified bird on them. Much like an eagle, but different, with a crest on the top of the head. There was an out of scale man, smaller than the bird, on one of the coins.

There were some pages in a language unknown to Oliver, a mass of small artifacts, and the prize of all: A scroll of vellum parchment.

“I will take this scroll with me to examine more closely if you don’t mind. It looks modern, nineteenth century. I will give you a receipt. This seems valuable and Dr Norman may want it back.”

I nodded. I was distracted by what I found in a purpose-made wooden box. This box was not locked. I was staring at the contents as Oliver left.

Inside were twenty-eight cassette tapes. A paper label, pasted on the inside of the box lid said: Gorean Language Tapes, Beginner and Intermediate.

 

I was shocked. I had not thought of Gor for years. What a trove to discover some of Dr Norman’s original background notes and planning for his novels. This should be either returned to Dr Norman or in a literary archive! The gold coins with the large, strange birds made sense now: Tarns – the warbirds of Gor! I did not know that he had gone to the trouble of having coins made nor that he had gone as far as he had in figuring out a language for Gor. Outside of a few words and terms, very little of the Gorean languageagains was in his works. Perhaps he had worked with a philologist to create the whole language after the cruel backlash against his fiction had deprived him of the outlet of publishing?

 

I theorized that Dr Norman had been dispirited when he retired and had forgotten this trove of his preparatory writing materials when he left the University. Afterwards I guessed he had been to proud to ask for the favor of the return of his work. I drafted and wrote a letter to his last know address explaining what we had found, and offering its return, I sent it off and left for the day, feeling virtuous.

 

Nothing further occurred for the next few weeks. I assumed the Headship of the Department and occupied myself in moving to my new office and cleaning out some foolish and burdensome policies of my predecessor. A few of the old crew were chirping and they roped in their allies of the battleax brigade of frightful women but I was able to outmaneuver them. One night, Oliver came over to my apartment with the scroll. He was excited. After dinner, he laid out the scroll on a table. It was quite long.

“Is it valuable”, I asked.

“It is baffling. It was written in several languages, by several hands. This is a nineteenth-century copy, I authenticated that by carbon dating.”

I was shocked by that. I had assumed that all the items had been created by Dr Norman or for him by craftsmen employed by him.

“There is no mistake, perhaps it was only made to look old, artificially aged.”

“No mistake. The parchment and the ink are nineteenth century. Now listen Claudia, this is where it gets weird. It is in several languages and was purportedly at least, the latest copy of a document first created in pre-history. The most recent entry claims to be by Aleister Crowley, the scholar of the occult. The author, if it was Crowley, claims he found the previous scroll in a deteriorated condition in a cave when mountaineering in Cumberland during vacation from Cambridge. He copied the whole thing, tracing any old languages from the decaying copy to the new so nothing would be lost. It seems to be a religious scroll from Egypt before even the First Kingdon, before writing in ancient archaic Egyptian.”

This was unexpected. I had thought it might be something related to Dr Norman’s literary work.

“What is the original language?”

“That is the thing, Claudia, I don’t know.”

“After the unknown language, the language switches to the oldest Egyptian, It claims to have traced the original onto papyrus, then added a translation. It seems to be a religious text relating to the afterlife. Listen to this:

‘The Priest-Kings, after hiding Gor behind the sun, desired to populate the new world’  So, obviously the basis of later Egyptian religion, it goes on:”

‘The Priest-Kings created the crown of power, with six tokens set with the crown, one for each of the six directions, East, West, Up, North, Down, and South.’

“Including the underworld and the heavens in the cardinal directions is clearly a religious indicator, although that is more your field than mine. Another passage references the boats through the underworld, listen:

‘The Silver Ships could not carry enough, quickly enough, so the Priest-Kings created this direct path to Gor for large numbers of men and beasts. When the task as accomplished, the crown was broken into bits, lest the others find the broad road to Gor. With the instructions on this scroll and one of the six tokens, it is still possible for the brave to traverse the road to Gor’

“Then a list of very specific instructions to finding the road and walking through a shifting maze. Very remarkable. But what is more remarkable is the number of times the scroll has been written and translated as the older copies disintergrated.”

“The first was into archaic Egyptian, with the older original being traced onto the scroll. The copy still tells us when and where it happed and who did the copying. Each time the scroll was copied, the copier did the same. Traced what was there and wrote and translated it into the current language of the copier. Whenever I have been able to compare the old to the new, the translation is very correct. They scroll is akin to a Rosetta stone!”

I was astounded. It could not possibly be, could it? The professor was not writing fiction?

“How many languages?” I asked.

The original, archaic Egyptian, three iterations of Hieroglyphs and demotic Egyptian, then it appears the scroll went travelling. The next iteration is in Akkadian, then old Aramaic, then back to Egyptian, then Chaldean. For a time, when the scroll was remade, the new section was in parallel columns of Chaldean or Biblical Aramaic, and Babylonian characters. The next was in classical Greek and Aramaic. Then a hiatus, apparently the scroll was copied onto parchment for the first time. Around the time of the First Crusade it was found again and copied into Latin, and get this, a parallel column of Norman French, and old English by none other than Roger Bacon, He relates that Richard I took it as a curiosity from the Templars. The next copyist and translator was Georgey Chaucer. I have checked the traced writings ascribed to Bacon and Chaucer against known examples of their actual writing and they are the same. And another thing: some of the distinctive markers of their writing comes from parchments discovered long after Crowley made his copy! If it is a copy of course.”

I needed more information. I was sure that the scroll was an ingenious fake, made either by Dr Norman or by Crowley.

“Are you sure that it was created in the nineteenth century?”

“As sure as current science can be.”

“Chaucer was the last creator of the scroll before Crawley?”

“No, Dr Dee, Elizabeth I’s astrologer made a copy. Isaac Newton did not recopy it, but annotated it, then Crawley made his copy. I don’t know how Dr Norman got his hands on it.”

“Either this is a very good fake,” I said, “Or an extremely precious document that must be returned to Dr. Norman.”

“In either case, it must be returned to Dr Norman,” Oliver agreed. “There is one other possibility that I don’t want to mention until I do more research.”

Our evening then turned to more physical and pleasant activities.  I wondered if Oliver was thinking of the same other possibility as I was.

 

The next day, my letter to Dr Norman came back, ‘Return to Sender’, I want no communication with female academics of Queens College’. I could not blame him for that! Still I had to find a way to contact Dr Norman about returning his valuable property.

I looked for other methods of contacting Dr Norman other than physically going to find his dwelling. Such seemed an improper invasion of privacy. I searched the database of the Law Society of New York state. I found a listing for a Harrison Smith, who Dr Norman had claimed in his books was the source of the manuscripts that he turned into his novels. I am sure that the poor man was weary by now of letters from people trying to contact Dr Norman. I wasn’t even sure if this was the correct Harrison Smith if he even existed. Still I had to return the metal box to the retired professor. I wrote an apologetic letter to Mr Smith, explaining that I had property belonging to him that was found at Queens. I described the box. Then I waited.

While I waited I amused myself by learning Beginners Gorean. I enjoyed the process as a distraction, and as an anthropologist, the language gave insight into the culture, as all linguistics does.

Two months passed. Oliver and I did not speak of the box or the scroll. From drawings on the scroll that Oliver provided, I was able to identify which item was the amulet from the Crown that activated the path to the hidden world. I was itching to try it out; yet I would not misappropriate Dr Norman’s items.

Finally, a letter arrived from Mr Smith. It was courteous and brief. Dr Norman, it stated, had no more interest in the box as ‘his manuscripts have resumed arriving by the original means’. It further stated that I could possess myself of the abandoned property but warned me against attempting to use it. He continued, it would be foolish to attempt to use the items in the box, but that Dr Norman expected that I would be unable to resist exercising my curiosity, which would result in extreme danger.

 

I was already wary of the items in the box, and decided to exercise extreme caution. For the time being I continued to study the Gorean language.