The Queen & the False King
A Parable of a Strange Kingdom
I would show you a city where there is no king and only a queen, but they have all become nothing.
In one of these cities, not long ago, there was a queen who had her king assassinated. And she did this in order to have full decision making power in all affairs of her kingdom, and to prove to herself and her people that she could rule the kingdom on her own.
And with the king displaced, the queen’s court was now empty. But in short time, the queen grew tired of the oppressive amount of responsibility she had taken on after she had her king assassinated. And so, she began receiving many strange men into her empty court.
And these strange men the queen received into her empty court would come and go, and come and go.
But one stayed. And this particular strange man wore a dress.
Eager to alleviate herself of burden and regain the complete unmitigated freedom she enjoyed in her past, the queen made this dress wearing man the new king.
And from the union between the queen and this new dress wearing king, the kingdom saw a generation of many strange policies and changes.
Children in school were all taught by women and men who wore dresses.
And the boys were encouraged to wear dresses. And the girls were encouraged to take arms.
The armorers were all ordered to make armor out of feathers.
Bows were re-designed to shoot behind the bowman, rather than at an aim ahead of her.
Men stayed home with children while women were sent to war. And all were instructed to mount their horses backwards.
Hundreds of painters were commissioned by the kingdom to create ugly paintings of dying plants, still-life paintings of stones, and portraits wherein the subject is facing away from the viewer.
And the colors that the painters were ordered to use were either greyed or otherwise a clash of all available colors on the palette — to deliberately keep the colors in the painting from arriving at any particular key or harmony.
And nobody bought these ugly paintings or even cared to look at them. But they were commissioned anyway and mounted on walls throughout the kingdom. And strangely, some of them were mounted upside down.
And a new thought style emerged in the kingdom called animalism.
A court full of strange intellectuals, who called themselves “animalists”, produced a doctrine on this animalism, then had it printed and distributed throughout the kingdom.
From this doctrine, much of society quickly came to consider animals as being superior to man in every way.
Instead of horses drawing wagons, wagons with horses in them were drawn by men.
In many areas, animals were forbidden to be eaten, and so whole regions adopted vegetarianism as a practice.
But for the sake of animalism, many farmers abandoned the use of animals and did their plow work all on their own by hand and rake. This came at the expense of producing 75% less of their typical annual yield.
And so, because many were vegetarians who refused to eat animals, and farms were producing less crops because they refused to use animals, there was soon a tremendous food shortage. And hunger soon became an issue in many areas of the kingdom. This lead to widespread poverty and a dramatic increase in violent crime.
There was also an event where a bull was elected over a seasoned military official to assume a high position in the kingdom’s court.
The queen, meaning well, demanded that the kingdom be wide open and equally receptive of all views of her people, and of wanderers also, without exception. So a great range of religions and cults emerged — some good and some strange.
Animalism reproduced increasingly stranger versions of itself. Many people began to dress as animals, wearing hats with horns made out of basket weave, or attaching rope to the back of their garments for tails.
Some adopted animal names, and demanded that all of the public address them by these names, rather than their human names.
There were even cases of women in the kingdom who married animals and lived alone with them for the rest of their lives. And they were applauded by the public and other animalists for doing so.
Many of the new cults in the city often held secret gatherings where orgies, drunken frenzies, and other reckless activities took place. There were even animal sacrifices.
Many of the townsfolk, being animalists, obviously did not agree with these sacrifices of animals. But there was a problem.
Animal sacrifices went against the views of the kingdom. But so did not accepting all views in the kingdom.
And this confusion permeated the cultic atmosphere of the kingdom — As there was not a single cult in the kingdom that was not somehow both acceptable and unacceptable.
Because there was no view that could be considered unacceptable, there was never an established understanding of what was right and what was wrong.
And because there were so many cults in the kingdom, there was no cult of the kingdom.
And so, the cult of the kingdom could, at any time, become anything.
Well, it wasn’t long before the king of a neighboring city invaded the queen’s kingdom, executed her and the king who wore dresses, slew all of the men in the city, took the women and children as slaves, and burned the city to ashes.
But such was inevitable, for in that city there was no king, and everyone did what was right in the queen’ eyes.
