‘Even if there are aspects of your life you would like to remain unpondered, it ill behoves us not to draw a veil over that which remains unmayonnaised.’ Of course, nowadays there are few amongst us for whom those would not be very wise words indeed. After all, in this modern world, now mostly free of superstition and fear of the unexplained, the fact that we have not applied mayonnaise to anything left unveiled, should not frighten or shock anyone.
However, such were the religious sensibilities of those of the Uttabollux religion during its heyday, during that period of history we now call the Late Early Mid Medieval Modern Ancient past, that anyone, especially a woman not safely inside her box, to leave any part of themselves not coated in mayonnaise was to risk danger. At the very least – they risked being burnt at the stake as a witch, or in some of the less-enlightened villages of middle Europe being cooked and eaten as a steak.
Therefore, for the speaker of those lines quoted above, the High Dhaftghit of Bridlington, which was one of the most devout Uttabollux areas of Britain at the time, was indeed a great risk. Not only did the Dhaftghit, Catamhite Bhishoprick, expose himself to charges of blasphemy, idolatry, sacrilege and profanity, he also ran the far greater risk – common to all religions – of saying something that lay people could almost understand. For one of the great strengths of any religion is its incomprehensibility, for once people discover that what their religious leaders are saying makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, then that religion starts to lose its hold over its adherents.
Consequently, the rest of the Holy men of the Uttabollux saw the danger and immediately called Dhaftghit Bhishoprick to an urgent theological convention to point out his heretical failings to him in the first-ever recorded use of baseball bats in theological debate.
No comments:
Post a Comment