The Inca Empire, at its peak, ruled over 20 million people, but today is most renowned for human sacrifice and being destroyed by roughly 200 spanish people. What most people don’t know is that The Inca Empire Was Just About The Only Empire In History To Enact The Effective Distribution Of Material Goods And Just About Eliminate Hunger As Much As Could Be Possibly Be Hoped For When You Look At How We’re Doing These Days.
What even fewer people know, is that one day, but a few years before Pizarro’s arrival on South American shores, a few score men and women, fuelled by an ardent idealism so rarely found in that race of docile automatons, stepped beyond the easternmost border of the Incan Empire and set out into the rainforest to begin anew. They had grown tired of the indiscriminate distribution of food and wealth across the many leagues of Atahualpa’s empire, and the inability of the common citizen to rise above the milieu of mediocrity. The certainty with which they knew that they would every year continue to exist, neither richer nor poorer, neither hungry nor more satiated, ate away at the Spirit Of Levity that been planted deep within their souls. It is generally accepted that it was this umbra of whimsy that drew them to the Gods Of Chance. For when, one day as they, weary from their travels, came to rest by the banks of a glittering stream that sang with the clear, bright voice of youth, it seemed natural to them that their people would not be ruled by the certainty from which they fled, but nor would it be ruled by merit. For, when faced with the opportunity to start an entirely new people, what more dismal, bromidic, unjust way of going about it than simply letting one and all go about their business as they wish, and standing idly by as the cream rises to the top? No, to The Forefathers it seemed clear that theirs must be a people ruled over by the Gods Of Chance. In this way, they surmised (illiterate though they were), they would avoid the calcifying inertia from which they had fled, whilst still maintaining complete fairness amongst all, and avoid the crippling power imbalance to which an unregulated society would inevitably lead. The simple device which would enable a people to be entirely dependant on the inclination of good fortune took thirty days and thirty nights to craft from the resources offered by the rainforest all around them. They built it at the centre of the ring of tents that would later become huts, and once they had finished they could do nothing but stand back at stare in wonderment at their creation.
Although no pictorial records exist of it, The Disk (this is the closest one can come to a translation of what it came to be known as in their vernacular) is thought to have been a circular wooden structure, which rotated around a central strut. Around the edge of The Disk, spaced at equal intervals, were thirty large urns, large enough for a small child to sit in.
For the first few generations after The Disk’s creation, it was used only in matters of birth. The forefathers noted that it would be fair for all people, from birth, to have an equal chance in life. They also noted that some members of their society were more disposed to creating for their offspring a good future; some were richer, more caring, and more intelligent than others. From this they inferred that the children born into less fortuitous circumstances would have suffered an injustice, as it was not their fault to have been born to people not suited to parenthood. To correct this injustice, it was decided that all new members of their society should have an equal and fair chance of being raised in the best of circumstances, thus it was left to the Gods of Chance.
Thus, after a number of years, when the thirtieth child was born into their society, The Disk was used for the first time in the distribution of equal opportunity for all. The mother of each of the thirty newborns (though by the time of the First Disk some had reached several years of age) placed their child in one of the urns. The mothers then were made to hold on to a rope that stretched around the ring of the mothers, so that they now existed as one intertwined snake of motherhood. They were then made to walk, still holding on to the rope of course, in an anticlockwise direction around The Disk for the next two days and two nights, whilst thirty men stood in between The Disk’s thirty spokes and drove the groaning, heaving mass around in a clockwise direction for the same amount of time. At the end of this time the vortex would come to a halt, and child that the mother ended up standing before, would be adopted into their family, taken in as one of their own, and their birth child would go to be raised by whomever chance had declared. They were made to accept this a simply being the way things were in that society governed by Chance, as The Forefathers told them, and they pretty much did so without batting a fucking eyelid; their kid went off to live with someone else, and the relationship between mother and birth son ended up just the same as the relationship between a woman and another woman’s child. I think I am right in saying that this practice was continued upon the birth of the sixtieth, ninetieth, one hundred and twentieth, and so on, right up until the final days of that people.
I should have mentioned that all of the sixty men and women were made to cover their eyes with shapaja leaves and stuff material in their ears during the rotations, so that there would be no possibility of hearing, for instance, the distinctive sob of your own child and influencing the speed of the rotations in order to end up adjacent to your own; it was for this reason that the rope was needed. Of course there was a possibility that the mothers would end up standing before their own children, but there is no record of this ever having happened.
I think it has been explained that forefathers were pleased with their novel method of the distribution of equality. Indeed, it seemed so fair and so popular with the forefathers, that many years later (it is surely a surprise that it took them so long to do so?) it was decided by the children of The Forefathers, that The Disk’s purpose would be expanded beyond matters of birth. It was noted that some members of the society had amassed significantly more wealth than others over the course of the society’s first generation (it had been deemed necessary by The Forefathers that a metal based currency be introduced to settle matters of dispute), and therefore, at the beginning of each cycle of the moon, members of the society were made to take whatever wealth they had amassed over the period of the last moon, and place it into one of the urns. This was highly successful in enacting a chance based distribution of wealth through the society. Over the years this process ingrained itself into the people of the society, and The Disk became so popular that it was decided that Chance must be allowed to more fully imbue the society over which it ruled.
The Forefathers’ descendants decreed the most effective method of enabling this was to introduce the practice of The Open Disk, in which people were chosen to place a highly prized item into an urn, each according to their own wealth and standing. So for those less fortunate, it may have been a recently hunted capucin, or favourite headdress, and for those more fortunate it may have been a representation of the disk crafted by the society’s goldsmith. What seems to have happened is that we’re not talking here about giving everything you have, not even, say, your favourite thing, I mean, you didn’t have to is what I’m trying to say. But they did. They gave whatever they could possibly give because it was a sign of prestige. I guess it was just a gigantic, massive, great big status symbol, if you could stroll up to that disk and fill the urn with Gold or whatever else they thought was worth a lot. Similarly, it is believed (though it very rarely happened) that people who gave an item to the urn that was not appropriate, or less than would have been expected, were shunned and ostracised, and even, I believe, in extreme cases, buried up to the knees in tightly packed earth in the space between two of The Disk’s spokes, so that when the Disk began to rotate, their legs would snap forward at the knee joints, and they would be left face down in the dirt, with their legs still anchored in the forest’s earth.
These Open Disks became were enormously popular, and the state of chaos that the Gods of Chance decreed should prevail in society, in which men could stroll richer than The Forefathers’ Descendants themselves one day, and then own nothing but a few poisoned darts the next, was deemed fair and just. The Open Discs indeed became so popular, that after some time it was decided by The Forefathers’ descendants that The Disk must never stop in its rotations (It is most likely worth mentioning that The Forefathers’ Descendants did not allow themselves to take part in The Disk, for, they argued, someone was always needed to organise the rotations and their rubrics, and the people should be grateful that they were sacrificing themselves to this unjust fate without so much as complaining, for what better to be blessed with, than to be allowed to take part in the The Disk, and to be allowed to give oneself over to the Gods of Chance fully, a fate which they, unjustly, were not allowed).
The constant Open Discs continued until it was decided that there was a higher need for rotations than there were rotations available, and that the two day rotation was not necessary, indeed an outdated and outmoded tradition, and that the rotation should be reduced to one day. Soon the crowds gathering to take part once again became too large, and this was reduced to half a day, and then a quarter day, and so on, until it was reduced to the time taken for the sun to move between two spokes stood still, a time we estimate today to have been no longer than 30 minutes.
All around the town there sprung up small scale imitations of the disk - for a while the perpetrators escaped the charges of high blasphemy by making their discs with twenty nine, or thirty one spokes, but it was soon Decreed by the Forefathers’ descendants that these discs were not true discs in the eyes of Chance, and their owners were dragged away in the night and buried up to their knees in the dirt.
It was around that time that people started to notice curious changes in The Disc. Was it not true that now one end of the disc seemed to be bulbous in nature, and that the disc had evolved four points? Gradually from these four points sprang five further points, as the original four became more pronounced from the body of the disc and the bulbous head. Naturally the representations of The Disc, which one was, naturally, allowed to worship and place at the foot of the disc in order to bring good luck, followed this pattern.
This continued in much the same vein, until many centuries later a man stumbled across that society so different from his own. He saw a circle of people, staring transfixed the rotations of a wooden man. He asked them who it was, rotating on that wooden strut. They stopped, confused for a moment, and then looked from The Disc to themselves, and from themselves to The Disc and they could not for the fucking life of them remember which one was which.
What even fewer people know, is that one day, but a few years before Pizarro’s arrival on South American shores, a few score men and women, fuelled by an ardent idealism so rarely found in that race of docile automatons, stepped beyond the easternmost border of the Incan Empire and set out into the rainforest to begin anew. They had grown tired of the indiscriminate distribution of food and wealth across the many leagues of Atahualpa’s empire, and the inability of the common citizen to rise above the milieu of mediocrity. The certainty with which they knew that they would every year continue to exist, neither richer nor poorer, neither hungry nor more satiated, ate away at the Spirit Of Levity that been planted deep within their souls. It is generally accepted that it was this umbra of whimsy that drew them to the Gods Of Chance. For when, one day as they, weary from their travels, came to rest by the banks of a glittering stream that sang with the clear, bright voice of youth, it seemed natural to them that their people would not be ruled by the certainty from which they fled, but nor would it be ruled by merit. For, when faced with the opportunity to start an entirely new people, what more dismal, bromidic, unjust way of going about it than simply letting one and all go about their business as they wish, and standing idly by as the cream rises to the top? No, to The Forefathers it seemed clear that theirs must be a people ruled over by the Gods Of Chance. In this way, they surmised (illiterate though they were), they would avoid the calcifying inertia from which they had fled, whilst still maintaining complete fairness amongst all, and avoid the crippling power imbalance to which an unregulated society would inevitably lead. The simple device which would enable a people to be entirely dependant on the inclination of good fortune took thirty days and thirty nights to craft from the resources offered by the rainforest all around them. They built it at the centre of the ring of tents that would later become huts, and once they had finished they could do nothing but stand back at stare in wonderment at their creation.
Although no pictorial records exist of it, The Disk (this is the closest one can come to a translation of what it came to be known as in their vernacular) is thought to have been a circular wooden structure, which rotated around a central strut. Around the edge of The Disk, spaced at equal intervals, were thirty large urns, large enough for a small child to sit in.
For the first few generations after The Disk’s creation, it was used only in matters of birth. The forefathers noted that it would be fair for all people, from birth, to have an equal chance in life. They also noted that some members of their society were more disposed to creating for their offspring a good future; some were richer, more caring, and more intelligent than others. From this they inferred that the children born into less fortuitous circumstances would have suffered an injustice, as it was not their fault to have been born to people not suited to parenthood. To correct this injustice, it was decided that all new members of their society should have an equal and fair chance of being raised in the best of circumstances, thus it was left to the Gods of Chance.
Thus, after a number of years, when the thirtieth child was born into their society, The Disk was used for the first time in the distribution of equal opportunity for all. The mother of each of the thirty newborns (though by the time of the First Disk some had reached several years of age) placed their child in one of the urns. The mothers then were made to hold on to a rope that stretched around the ring of the mothers, so that they now existed as one intertwined snake of motherhood. They were then made to walk, still holding on to the rope of course, in an anticlockwise direction around The Disk for the next two days and two nights, whilst thirty men stood in between The Disk’s thirty spokes and drove the groaning, heaving mass around in a clockwise direction for the same amount of time. At the end of this time the vortex would come to a halt, and child that the mother ended up standing before, would be adopted into their family, taken in as one of their own, and their birth child would go to be raised by whomever chance had declared. They were made to accept this a simply being the way things were in that society governed by Chance, as The Forefathers told them, and they pretty much did so without batting a fucking eyelid; their kid went off to live with someone else, and the relationship between mother and birth son ended up just the same as the relationship between a woman and another woman’s child. I think I am right in saying that this practice was continued upon the birth of the sixtieth, ninetieth, one hundred and twentieth, and so on, right up until the final days of that people.
I should have mentioned that all of the sixty men and women were made to cover their eyes with shapaja leaves and stuff material in their ears during the rotations, so that there would be no possibility of hearing, for instance, the distinctive sob of your own child and influencing the speed of the rotations in order to end up adjacent to your own; it was for this reason that the rope was needed. Of course there was a possibility that the mothers would end up standing before their own children, but there is no record of this ever having happened.
I think it has been explained that forefathers were pleased with their novel method of the distribution of equality. Indeed, it seemed so fair and so popular with the forefathers, that many years later (it is surely a surprise that it took them so long to do so?) it was decided by the children of The Forefathers, that The Disk’s purpose would be expanded beyond matters of birth. It was noted that some members of the society had amassed significantly more wealth than others over the course of the society’s first generation (it had been deemed necessary by The Forefathers that a metal based currency be introduced to settle matters of dispute), and therefore, at the beginning of each cycle of the moon, members of the society were made to take whatever wealth they had amassed over the period of the last moon, and place it into one of the urns. This was highly successful in enacting a chance based distribution of wealth through the society. Over the years this process ingrained itself into the people of the society, and The Disk became so popular that it was decided that Chance must be allowed to more fully imbue the society over which it ruled.
The Forefathers’ descendants decreed the most effective method of enabling this was to introduce the practice of The Open Disk, in which people were chosen to place a highly prized item into an urn, each according to their own wealth and standing. So for those less fortunate, it may have been a recently hunted capucin, or favourite headdress, and for those more fortunate it may have been a representation of the disk crafted by the society’s goldsmith. What seems to have happened is that we’re not talking here about giving everything you have, not even, say, your favourite thing, I mean, you didn’t have to is what I’m trying to say. But they did. They gave whatever they could possibly give because it was a sign of prestige. I guess it was just a gigantic, massive, great big status symbol, if you could stroll up to that disk and fill the urn with Gold or whatever else they thought was worth a lot. Similarly, it is believed (though it very rarely happened) that people who gave an item to the urn that was not appropriate, or less than would have been expected, were shunned and ostracised, and even, I believe, in extreme cases, buried up to the knees in tightly packed earth in the space between two of The Disk’s spokes, so that when the Disk began to rotate, their legs would snap forward at the knee joints, and they would be left face down in the dirt, with their legs still anchored in the forest’s earth.
These Open Disks became were enormously popular, and the state of chaos that the Gods of Chance decreed should prevail in society, in which men could stroll richer than The Forefathers’ Descendants themselves one day, and then own nothing but a few poisoned darts the next, was deemed fair and just. The Open Discs indeed became so popular, that after some time it was decided by The Forefathers’ descendants that The Disk must never stop in its rotations (It is most likely worth mentioning that The Forefathers’ Descendants did not allow themselves to take part in The Disk, for, they argued, someone was always needed to organise the rotations and their rubrics, and the people should be grateful that they were sacrificing themselves to this unjust fate without so much as complaining, for what better to be blessed with, than to be allowed to take part in the The Disk, and to be allowed to give oneself over to the Gods of Chance fully, a fate which they, unjustly, were not allowed).
The constant Open Discs continued until it was decided that there was a higher need for rotations than there were rotations available, and that the two day rotation was not necessary, indeed an outdated and outmoded tradition, and that the rotation should be reduced to one day. Soon the crowds gathering to take part once again became too large, and this was reduced to half a day, and then a quarter day, and so on, until it was reduced to the time taken for the sun to move between two spokes stood still, a time we estimate today to have been no longer than 30 minutes.
All around the town there sprung up small scale imitations of the disk - for a while the perpetrators escaped the charges of high blasphemy by making their discs with twenty nine, or thirty one spokes, but it was soon Decreed by the Forefathers’ descendants that these discs were not true discs in the eyes of Chance, and their owners were dragged away in the night and buried up to their knees in the dirt.
It was around that time that people started to notice curious changes in The Disc. Was it not true that now one end of the disc seemed to be bulbous in nature, and that the disc had evolved four points? Gradually from these four points sprang five further points, as the original four became more pronounced from the body of the disc and the bulbous head. Naturally the representations of The Disc, which one was, naturally, allowed to worship and place at the foot of the disc in order to bring good luck, followed this pattern.
This continued in much the same vein, until many centuries later a man stumbled across that society so different from his own. He saw a circle of people, staring transfixed the rotations of a wooden man. He asked them who it was, rotating on that wooden strut. They stopped, confused for a moment, and then looked from The Disc to themselves, and from themselves to The Disc and they could not for the fucking life of them remember which one was which.