Losing My ̶V̶i̶r̶g̶i̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ Religion
Unsophisticated though their wisdom may have been compared to our latterday ‘book smarts’ … woefully misinformed about matters scientific … the Ancients were, nevertheless, not stupid.
The best way to remember something is to do so ‘physically’ as it were — muscle memory entails the lowest cognitive load and, hence, produces the least effortful performance.
Likewise, as it calls upon us to engage in similarly rhythmic activity … indeed, to actually engage the muscles of the diaphragm, our vocal chords, etc. …. the best way to learn information and subsequently accurately recall it is to learn it in the form of song.
Should that not be an option, rhyme is the next best approach and, indeed, nursery rhymes, albeit ostensibly for children, were a method for retaining and transmitting historical, and other information through a society or culture — they were, in fact, memes.
Should that prove impossible then physical activity is the next best technique … which is why the ancient Greek orators used to learn their speeches by placing different parchments in different physical locations and learning their content by walking from one to the next to memorise the content of each — when the time came to recall the words, they visualised, in their minds, the physical location of each parchment and their prepared speeches were more readily remembered.
Absent the opportunity to do any of those things then a story … ideally with pictures too … nearly always helps, placing matters into a coherent whole — creating a network, graph or lattice of ideas and information makes recall easier and, for all its inherent fallibility and imperfections, more frequently accurate.
Over the millennia, ‘Chinese Whispers’, inattention, distraction, elaboration, obfuscation, malicious intent and all manner of other, all too human, things will have combined to turn a simple story told to act as a mnemonic aid to successful agricultural and other important activities into an elaborate web of nonsense as people added to, subtracted from, changed and manipulated it to various ends with varying degrees of separation from its original purpose.
And thus the tales of people, creatures, things and events in the skies turned from a way to remember how to recognise when the stars were correctly aligned to start planting … or when the hunt might begin … to elaborate mythologies and Astronomy begat the bastard offspring that are Astrology and Religion.
Simple though it may be, a string vest is a sophisticated mechanism of heat transference … keeping us warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer … requiring no more than the most basic of materials and tools to fabricate and no source of power beyond the ‘elbow grease’ expended in its creation and subsequent, hopefully but occasional, maintenance.
One might question, therefore, our modern understanding of the structural damage caused by the growth of ivy across a building as being indicative of poor architectural husbandry when one bears in mind that said Ancients weren’t stupid and might, therefore, never have bothered to document the benefits of a string vest for the home on the simple grounds that any idiot could see them and they didn’t need recording in word or song.
Equally, my own longstanding perplexity over the fuss concerning virginity and the obsession therewith, especially by men, might be resolved by learning of the aforementioned Ancients perhaps not having the scientific knowledge of Oxytocin, Vasopresssin, Dopamine and endorphins but, nevertheless, the understanding of them, as it were.
After all, it really doesn’t matter if she’s a virgin or not so long as she’s childless and there are going to be no pretenders to your wealth or challenges to the wellbeing of your own offspring.
Moreover, a virgin is an unknown quantity. She might be barren. She might be physically weak in some manner and miscarry … or even die during labour, childbirth or afterwards, leaving the father disadvantaged by having offspring for which he must find some way of caring whilst going about his other necessary activities. So, a woman who is known to be capable of bearing children to term and, furthermore, surviving that process is, I would posit, actually of more value as a life partner than any virgin.
And, unless ‘black magicians’ were all women-hating homosexuals … which might go some way to explaining their obsession with sacrificing virgin girls, I suppose … I can’t think of any reason to throw away a perfectly good woman before you’ve had a chance to ride her into the ground first — what a waste!
Finally, I just don’t see where the ego boost comes from in pleasing a woman who is inexperienced and doesn’t know what to expect — a woman who’s been around the block a few times, as it were, and knows the difference between a good lover and a poor one, on the other hand … now there’s a reason to pat myself on the back about a job well done, so to speak.
But, factoring in the aforementioned Oxytocin, Vasopresssin, Dopamine and endorphins, simple observation of behaviour would have taught our forebears that the first time … indeed every time … so long as it is a desirable, and desired, activity for her and not rape … will create and strengthen emotional bonds between the participants in the act of Love and thus … like the imprinting, as the parent, upon young animals of the first thing they see when born … the urge to claim a woman’s virginity may, as much as anything else, have been an unstated, perhaps even only vaguely understood, desire to ensure the stability of the subsequent union; the first time being the most psychoemotionally significant after all— either that or the men concerned knew they were lousy lovers and that it was likely to be the only time, if ever, that a woman thought their performance approached anything resembling good, so they’d better take whatever opportunities they could before word got around and they were laughed out of the playground/schoolyard.
So … in all … whilst I can appreciate that, even perhaps why, others might … I cannot say that I have ever harboured any especial hankering after virgins or their unique qualities myself ¹.
And this has never more been the case than when it comes to the offerings of Virgin Media … or indeed any other Virgin service or product.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, should I ever find myself in a desert for days, no longer trudging but crawling my way in search of water … literally dying of thirst, about to expire on the spot if I do not drink this very second … and I come across not a mirage but an actual can of Virgin Cola …
I’ll keep crawling.
Because I’d rather die than touch a Virgin product as long as I live!
Yes, this was a shaggy dog tale leading up to something as far removed from the starting premises as it is (probably) possible for anything to get whilst still retaining even a gossamer thread … the merest wisp … the most featherlight touch of tangential connection.
But I explored some halfway sensible ideas along the way and maybe amused you into the bargain … and it was, moreover, a potentially useful public information announcement regarding the possible woes awaiting those purchasing Virgin products and/or (dis)services.
So you can’t really complain, can you? 😜
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¹ And I’m particularly troubled in that regard by the prospect of the seventy-two eternal virgins promised in the Qur’an ².
² Should there be an afterlife … and the Islamic vision thereof the one true version … then I am going to be bitterly disappointed to learn that they are all still virgins the next morning, let me tell you — I would hope that at least one of them weren’t!
