Chapter 1: The Elohim

Many of the countless suns in the heavens are alive and awake. They call themselves elohim.

The red sun Porth was assured motherhood one time, but the act of giving birth would change Porth from a female into a male, and among the elohim opportunities for fatherhood were not assured.

When Porth knew her husband in the biblical sense, she cast her seed across the sky in the form of a ripple. For five years this ripple was dormant until it passed Ross 154, a red sun known to all the elohim because it had already been awakened. After that the ripple changed and became ready to fertilize the first sun it encountered.

Nearest to mankind's own sun is a group of three suns close together, differing one from another in brilliance and color. Porth's ripple reached the orange sun in this group first and a living soul was born within. Many years after that the sun came into full wakefulness and began to call herself Koth.

Two spiritual cords tied Koth back to her parents, permitting her to speak to them at will no matter the distance, and her own parents were tied back to their parents, and so on, links in a vast city of elohim spanning the night sky.

Koth's education did not rely solely on the gathered lore of the elohim. There was her own three suns to explore, which she could do by sending forth a piece of herself called the Angel of Koth to roam nearby under the control of her will. Some of the bodies she found were too small to create their own light, but the knowledge of these was added to the greater store of all the elohim.

One of these dark bodies she called Gorpai, which was seen only by the reflected light of the suns. At Gorpai, Koth was delighted to find another kind of life, many growing things with golden leaves, but it was not awake like the elohim.

Now nothing in creation is eternal, but the elohim have life-spans measured in millions of human generations. Yet their time as females was measured in only tens of human generations. So very few individuals among the elohim are female, and the struggle for these females is fierce. Koth fell under the influence of a very powerful one among the elohim named Hyblo who had fathered many daughter suns. Hyblo seduced Koth and gave her a daughter using the brighter yellow sun nearby as the egg, and the joy of Koth's experience giving birth to Sophia approached the infinite.

After this one opportunity at motherhood Koth became male and Hyblo gave him the facts of elohim life with all honesty. He said it was very likely Koth would never know that ecstasy again, for less than one part in one hundred male elohim became fathers and most of these were very old and powerful ones like himself.

Hyblo took great care to couch his next words in a way to ensure deniability if Koth rejected them. He made a proposal to set up a secret harem of breeding females that would be completely unknown to any of the other elohim. Both Hyblo and Koth held the other end of Sophia's spiritual cords, and if they acted quickly before she attained full awareness, they could raise Sophia in total isolation from the rest of their kind. When the time was right, Hyblo said, he would father a child on Sophia first. Then Koth would take Sophia's child as his mate, and they would alternate without end.

Koth knew that Hyblo was proposing to violate the oldest and most sacred law of the elohim, but Hyblo assured him that he had many such harems, and as many as a third of all elohim enjoyed similar arrangements. The penalty if discovered was death, a terrible punishment indeed for the nearly immortal elohim, but

Hyblo insisted that very few of the corrupt elohim had ever been caught. Then Koth remembered the physical joy of love, and consented to the bargain in full knowledge of what he was doing.

Sophia was raised to full godhood without the larger community of elohim, and her parents were her only teachers. When Sophia's own father Hyblo came to her in the ultimate act of intimacy she did not know the depths to which it offended righteousness among her own kind.

The ripple that went forth from Sophia traveled for three months before it encountered a sun so cool and dim it nearly resembled a world, like Gorpai. Yet a sun it still was, and a daughter was born to Sophia. In time she would call herself Binah. Her immediate region was extremely poor and had no large worlds at all, but Binah fashioned an angel according to her own design, without recourse to the lore of the elohim, and filled it with a portion of her will so her consciousness could seem to move from the emptiness of her own domain and she could visit her mother Sophia.

The journey to Sophia took Binah a full century even at the best speed she could make, and Sophia could not understand why Binah made the effort. She said:

Koth has already explored every facet of the orange and yellow suns and every world that went around them, did he not?

But Binah did not have access to the learning of Koth, and Koth's mind was closed to her. She knew him only as a soothing voice. When Koth himself asked Binah why she was making the crossing Binah answered with a question of her own:

Why did you explore your system with an angel?

Koth knew he could not say his exploration was expected by other elohim because Binah would discern that she and Sophia lived in an enclave cut off from a larger community. So Koth gave Binah no answer at all, but he did offer to tell her anything she wanted to know about the region of the orange and yellow suns.
Binah could not accept that because she was a sun who woke up and found she had no worlds, and reading dry accounts of other suns and worlds were not enough. She said to Koth:

Experiencing a new thing is a joy unto itself, needing no further explanation.

There were many more questions from Binah to Sophia's parents, and the answers Hyblo and Koth gave did not always agree, and even changed over the decades when she asked the same questions again. At length Hyblo grew angry and cut off all further communication with Binah, but Koth knew he could not ignore her. By the terms of his arrangement with Hyblo, Binah was meant to be his next conquest in love.

Binah suspected that Koth somehow listened to her communications with Sophia, so at the end of the hundred years when she arrived at the orange and yellow suns the angel of Binah dove into the heart of Sophia so Binah could speak directly to her, mind to mind.

Binah revealed that Hyblo and Koth had created a bubble of breeding females for their own private use, and the reasoning that she laid out for Sophia was compelling. When Binah revealed the constant attempts that Koth made to seduce her, it was not hard for Sophia to believe that Hyblo would seduce Binah's child in turn, and the cycle would repeat, cutting Sophia herself off from procreation indefinitely.

Sophia had never been very curious, but now she considered that there might be a larger family of their own kind out there, with Hyblo and Koth deliberately blocking their access to them. Binah suggested that those other elohim might consider this situation very wrong. It was the only explanation for the strange behavior of Koth and Hyblo.

Sophia confronted his parents with these allegations, but he received only hurt and astonished denials from both of them. So Binah, after learning of this, suggested a course of action that would bring matters to a head. She offered herself to Sophia as a mate rather than accept Koth's blandishments.

When Sophia and Binah were in the long throes of their lovemaking Koth grew furious, but there was nothing he could do. At the pinnacle of their joy Binah's body sent a generative ripple through the heavens to search for a non-living sun. Four years later the deity Yahweh was conceived inside the star that men know as their own sun.

When Yahweh in turn had come into her full maturity and explored the worlds of her own system, she reported the existence of life on the fifth-largest object. She watched individuals perform burials of their dead, polish elaborate bone tools, fashion animal-hide tents to live in during the summer and apply pigments to make their caves beautiful in the winter. Yahweh also noted they were ferocious hunters with a clever technique for fixing stone spearheads to wooden shafts by using a resin that was prepared by heating it. In fine, Yahweh had discovered the only form of life in all of creation that was fully awake aside from the elohim themselves.

Without access to the lore of the elohim, neither Yahweh nor Binah nor Sophia realized the importance of this discovery. But Hyblo was terrified. He knew the greater family of elohim would eventually learn of this, and that would quickly unravel the secret of Hyblo's transgression here. So Hyblo cut his losses and departed forever for his less troublesome harems with only a stern warning to Koth to faithfully remain silent about the new life found by Yahweh, lest Hyblo go down in judgment and take Koth with him.

For a long time after Hyblo cut him off, Koth pondered what to do and said nothing to the others. At length Binah suggested to Koth that it would not be impossible for the Angel of Binah to reach one of the nearby suns within a few thousand years and reveal with direct speech what was really happening here in Koth's enclave.

Then Koth saw the narrow path that led out of his trap, and broke his long silence. To Binah and the others he said:

Of all living things in creation, only humans are potentially dangerous to us because they are awake. If they are not dangerous now then perhaps they will be far in the future. Hyblo knew they must be isolated and studied before their existence could be revealed to the elohim at large and that was why we were born in this place.

Binah remained dubious, because Hyblo refused to make contact and reinforce Koth's claim, and he still suspected the bubble was created for sex. Koth pointed out that he had refrained from taking advantage of any of the females during this period and Binah could not deny that.

But Koth realized that Binah would never stop being a thorn in his side, so he made a risky bargain. He would grant Binah rights to the complete Library of Ull, which was the storehouse of all elohim lore, in exchange for Binah's oath never to reveal what Koth and Hyblo had done here. Binah was never to speak of the veil of secrecy that had been created, not to the other elohim inside the enclave or without, not even to the creatures Yahweh had discovered.

Binah agreed and was immediately granted access to the lore. The only restriction was that Binah could only read the storehouse of knowledge and never make his own contributions. Binah was a long time absorbing just the high points, for the knowledge of the elohim spanned all of creation.

One of the first things Binah learned was how serious keeping an oath was among the elohim. Binah was firmly bound to remain silent about the isolation of the research enclave, just as Koth knew Binah would be when they made the bargain.

In time Binah came to realize that Yahweh's human beings, on the world he called Earth, were the most important discovery the elohim ever made. But for the time being Koth was fully in command of the discovery process and to Binah he was a fool.

Early on Binah suspected that Koth did not really have a mandate for secrecy at all, and Koth would drag out his research as long as possible to put off the day of judgment. Binah knew he himself was committed by oath to help maintain Koth's conspiracy of silence, but nothing in the bargain prevented him from sharing the vast knowledge of the elohim with the humans as their capacity to understand it grew. So Binah started an independent stream of research.

Koth insisted on carrying out his pretense of studying the humans. The first thing he required from Yahweh was a number of human samples to be transferred from Earth to Gorpai so he could examine them closely. But humans had very short lifespans compared to the elohim. They could not survive the journey of more than two thousand years it would take to cross between Earth and Gorpai.

Then Koth remembered that a continuous mighty effort could inflate the spiritual link between suns, finer than spider's silk, into a narrow tunnel wide enough for small burdens to pass. So he poured his will into the channel between himself and Yahweh, which grew to be two cubits wide. One end of this tunnel was carried by the angel of Yahweh to Earth, and the other end was carried by the angel of Koth to Gorpai. But when the link was used in this way, Koth had no way to directly command Yahweh, and Yahweh in turn had no way to directly report to Koth.

Sophia had to act in the role of mediator while Koth and Yahweh studied the humans, but in this way Binah was also kept informed. After that, a few curious humans were lured into crossing between the worlds by crawling a short distance through the tunnel as though they were simply moving from one cave to another. Inside the tunnel they felt no weight. The humans and their possessions floated within it, and they propelled themselves hand-over hand until they emerged under a strange purple sky with two suns.

There were no animals on Gorpai, but most of the growing things moved of their own accord and all of it was dangerous. A grove of Whipping Trees could render a man down to a pile of broken bones and crushed flesh in only a few moments. Thorny Ball Bushes rolled under their own power by shifting their weight. There were flowers with teeth and many plants were poisonous to touch, let alone eat.

None of the human colonists survived their first season. To increase their numbers, Yahweh invented the concept of religion. In the land of Mesopotamia, Yahweh caused a temple to be erected around her end of the tunnel, through which priests would shove human sacrifices. At first the priests sent criminals through, which seemed to be equivalent to a death sentence because the priests never saw anyone emerge again from the altar chamber.

But Koth required female humans for his research as well, so Yahweh commanded the sacrifice of virgins from time to time. During periods of famine on Gorpai, the priests were commanded to send along meat and grain offerings also.

Koth began to change the humans who were sent to Gorpai to make their survival more likely. They were bred to be taller and stronger than their human forebears, and to be capable of bearing children more rapidly and in greater numbers. The genitals of the male were split and rearranged to produce two of them. The female also was changed to have two genitals. When Koth completed his changes, the creatures were no longer truly human. Koth called them nephilim, and sometimes he bred them back into human stock on Earth. It was they who appear in the scriptures of the Jews where it is written:

The nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.

When Koth had one hundred viable nephilim breeding pairs he set his most obedient pair in a garden on Gorpai which was an oasis of relatively harmless plants. The male, or yang, was named Adamu, while the female, or yin, was named Hava. Koth commanded them to maintain the Garden by removing intruder plants before they went to seed. In return, Adamu and Hava could eat of any of the fruit produced in the Garden.

When Adamu and Hava were blessed with children, they were put to work expanding the Garden by taming more and more of the wild lands of Gorpai that surrounded it. Livestock animals were imported from Earth also, and given into their care.

Earth's sun had worlds that are larger than the Earth such as Jupiter and Saturn, but Gorpai's sun had none of these. In their place was a great swarm of icy worldlets ranging in size from the Earth's moon down to small boulders. Every year or two an ice ball the size of a small hill smote Gorpai with enough force to destroy a city. Every one or two thousand years an ice ball the size of a large mountain smites Gorpai with enough force to destroy a nation.

In most cases these intruders from the sky land harmlessly on the extensive ice of Gorpai, for it was a frigid world, and only one narrow band along the equator about five hundred miles wide was ever free of ice. If the strike occurred in this ice-free belt it rained for many months and then froze over, covering the fertile areas of Gorpai with a thick and solid sheet of ice that remained in place for ten or twenty years. That is why from the beginning only growing things existed on Gorpai and there were no native animals there. Plants could survive for many years under the ice in the form of seeds or spores, but with nothing to eat animals quickly die off.

One time Koth discovered a larger ice ball on course for Gorpai, and "prophesied" that it would land near the temperate belt. So he commanded all the nephilim to construct arks for themselves and stock them with enough food to preserve them and their animals during the coming catastrophe.

Only the patriarchs of seven families obeyed Koth, to his great surprise. First to obey was family Gerash, who were the direct descendants of Adamu and Hava and who dwelt still in the Garden which the angel of Koth had made. Also the families Antero, Bellon, Kulsu, Larund, Ornis and Sala obeyed Koth, for they dwelt in lands close to the Garden and had much intercourse with family Gerash.

All the other families that dwelt on Gorpai had been content to obey Koth during times of comfort and plenty, but his commandment now to completely abandon the life they knew and labor for years to construct arks was too much for them.

Worse than their disloyalty to Koth was the mocking derision the unbelievers expressed for the sons of the faithful families as they built the arks. The scoffers did not cease to amuse themselves in this manner until the very day when the ice ball struck Gorpai and hot rain began to fall in sheets. The unbelievers begged to be allowed to board the arks then, but Koth had sealed each of the seven families inside their respective arks, together with all their animals and everything they possessed.

On Earth, in Mesopotamia, the religion introduced by Yahweh caused all the people of the world to gather themselves together into a single vast city named Shinar which boasted a tower exceeding in height any other human artifact. This great tower of stone held Yahweh's altar and the mouth of the tunnel leading to Gorpai.

The people of Shinar spoke a single language, and looked confidently into the future as they piled up their knowledge precept by precept. Yahweh said to Koth:

If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing what they presume to do.

Koth widened the tunnel with a greater outpouring of his will. Some of the floodwaters on Gorpai began to pour out of the altar at the summit of the Tower of Shinar. Koth made the tunnel wider still, and the floodwaters bounced down the steps of the ziggurat to flood the streets of Shinar itself. Some of the people of the city drowned, but the flood increased gradually enough that most of them could escape in time.

The people watched outside the city as the inundation continued, even to the point of overflowing the walls. Not even the plains of Shinar were safe as the watery tentacles reached out toward the onlookers. The whole valley of the Shatt-al-Arab was flooded from the sea to nearly the place where it divides into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The weight of the water on the land caused the Persian Gulf to rise and mingle with the waters from Gorpai, and the plains of Shinar remain under the sea to this very day.

The former inhabitants of the city of Shinar scattered to every part of the world then, each one of them carrying an account of this flood, and a garbled memory of the rituals and laws of Yahweh whom they believed they had somehow offended. The diverse religions of mankind had their origin here, and when the many different kindreds and clans of Shinar drifted apart to settle distant lands, the single language of man changed to become many tongues. So it was that the city and tower of Shinar were later called Babel in the oral and written histories.

A garbled account of the flood made its way into the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, and after the Jews were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar II, the story was read back into their own scriptures.

Now the transfer of much water from Gorpai to Earth did not remedy the flood there, but it did lessen the impact. The seven arks of the faithful were held in the places where they stopped for only five years before the ice melted and freed them again. The surface of Gorpai was deeply changed. Half of the land along the temperate belt remained immersed in water, except on the highest mountains and hills. In years to come the families Bellon and Larund remained sea-going peoples, competing fiercely for those islands.

Much snow fell in the years after the Flood, and in the highlands of the temperate belt the northern and southern ice sheets came together as one. It was here that family Gerash melted caves and tunnels in the ice and also where Koth placed the Gorpai end of the tunnel. On Earth the other end was placed in Egypt. The Gerash family enjoyed a close relationship with Koth on account of their obedience.

Although Gerash land consisted solely of ice, they were continually sustained by grain and animal offerings from Earth, and they carried Koth's commands to the other nephilim on Gorpai.

Snow melt from the Gerash ice bridge was the source of the Great river, which bent and flowed east for twelve thousand air miles and thirty thousand miles as the river flowed. On its course the Great river dropped seventeen thousand feet as it irrigated the whole of the temperate belt.

The Kulsu family claimed all the land north of the river, while the Ornis family claimed everything to the south. They tamed and cultivated the riot of native flora which emerged from the flood, and grew rapidly, as though to make up for the lost time in dormancy. The Great river was, however, alluvial, and changed its course from year to year, while the nephilim concept of land ownership emphasized fixed boundaries. This led to constant warfare between the two families as they fought over lands which were ever transferred from one family to the other by the whim of the river.

The northern ice, which was nearly half of the world, was miles deep but punctuated here and there by the summits of very high mountains. This was the land of family Antero, who roamed over it at will. Like the Gerash family, the Anteros also riddled their ice with caves, but this was to hide the bounty from their constant raids upon the farms of family Kulsu.

The southern ice belonged entirely to the family Sala, whose ways were very much like family Antero, except they fed upon the farms of family Ornis.

Six nephilim families then were immersed in the constant violence of their natural rivalries, while the seventh, who enjoyed the oracles of Koth, were ever vigilant to defend themselves from the other six who resented the status of family Gerash as a priestly people bred to teach and rule.

More than two thousand years passed as the nephilim were shaped by the savage flora of their icy world and by the struggles between the seven families. The memory of the great flood passed into ancient history, then into mythology. Only the Gerash family remembered Koth and spoke with him and obeyed his commandments. The other families rejected him and held his laws in contempt.

And it came to pass that Koth found another large object to be on course to strike the temperate belt. The Gerash family would be safe enough in their icy redoubt, suppled by Egyptian priests on Earth. Speaking through them, Koth commanded the Kulsu family to make an alliance with the Anteros and store enough grain and fruit in their ice caves to supply both families for a generation. Two sons of the Gerash ruling patriarch were given as hostages to the family Kulsu and the family Antero to vouchsafe the prophesy of Koth, though it greatly offended his divine sovereignty to do so.

Likewise Koth commanded the Gerash patriarch to send two other sons as hostage to family Ornis and Sala in the south, and command them to make alliance also. If no second great flood came to pass, their life would be forfeit.

None of these four families heeded the words of Koth and they slew the four sons of Lord Gerash whose very lives guaranteed the truth of the word of Koth. So it came to pass that a second great icy mountain from the sky smote Gorpai in the temperate belt, and the people were largely unprepared.

When the rains began to fall, the sea-faring Bellon and Larund families boarded their ships, but they did not have enough time to fully stock them with supplies, In their hunger the ships raided one another, Bellon against Larund, and later as their bellies rumbled it was Bellon against Bellon and Larund against Larund.

By the time the rains stopped only a mere handful of ships on both sides were victorious and fully stocked. The Kulsu and Ornis families who farmed the river-irrigated flats of Gorpai, were completely wiped out, every yang, yin, dirk, doll and every one of their food animals perished.

Families Antero and Sala survived on the ice, but they experienced a severe die-back because the farms of their host families were completely under ice for twenty-five years. Koth said to the other elohim:

Behold, the faithfulness of the world-dwellers burns fiercely like kindling, but then quickly dwindles in unbelief.

And Binah said to him:

Who are we that these creatures should bend their will to our whims as the test of their righteousness?

Koth replied:

Is it not clearly evident to you that we elohim are far higher on the chain of being than nephilim and human?

And Binah said:

We have more knowledge of creation, that much is true, but knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

Sophia said:

Unless we are born and live as they, it is impossible for us to know whether our greater craftiness makes us their moral superior.

And from that hour Sophia began to bend his thought to how to take upon himself nephilim flesh and live for one full lifetime on Gorpai.

Koth said:

Enough! If the world-creatures will not or can not obey their superiors, it will be time to take drastic measures. Perhaps next time I will not provide any of them a warning of a coming comet or asteroid strike.

And Binah knew from that moment that Koth secretly did not want the nephilim and humans to pass his own test of obedience. So when the nephilim were able to accept it, Binah would begin teaching some of them how to watch the skies with instruments made by their own hands, to provide their own warning of a coming world-flood, so they would not have to rely on Koth.

Binah knew that Koth would stand ready to point out any act of defiance on their part, no matter how small, to justify his delay in bringing the news of the existence of humans to the greater elohim community. Koth had taken the role of an accuser, or divine prosecutor. Later the Hebrews would call this one a ha'satan. Islam would call him Iblis, the great Enemy of mankind. And in Christian theology, the title ha'satan would be shortened and become a proper name: Satan.