"My little sister, you have forgotten me!"

2024 07Jul 31Wed

Filed under Stories

A hand reaching for an apple on an apple tree

I found it.

http://researchenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/issues/201603/12.pdf

For more than 2 years I've been wondering where I heard this story:

Long before the lizards, before the dinosaurs, two spores set out on an incredible journey.

They came to a valley bathed in the placid glow of sunset.

"My elder sister," said the little spore to the bigger spore, "let us see what lies beyond."

"This valley is green," replied the bigger spore, "I shall journey no further."

"I want to journey," said the little spore, "I want to discover." She gazed in wonder at the path below her.

"Will you forget your sister?", asked the bigger spore.

"Never," said the little spore.

"You will, little one, for this is the loveless tale of karma; in it there is only parting and sorrow."

The little spore journeyed on. The bigger spore stayed back in the valley. Her root pierced the damp earth and sought the nutrients of death and memory. She sprouted over the earth, green and contended.

A girl with silver anklets and eyes prettied with surma came to Chetali’s valley to gather flowers. The Chempaka tree stood alone- efflorescent, serene. The flower gatherer reached out and held down a soft twig to pluck the flowers.

As the twig broke the Chempaka said, "My little sister, you have forgotten me!"

(Edited to add punctuation, emphasis, and a hyperlink)

I wrote a post paraphrasing this back in 2022: Sisters Myth.

Parts I got right:

The two goddesses are sisters. This eliminates entire swaths of creation myths that feature twin brothers or a brother-sister pair.
The elder sister is the ancestor of all plants, and the younger is the ancestor of humans.
The elder sister stays in one place, the little sister leaves to travel the earth and then comes back as a human.
"My little sister, you have forgotten me!" I got this quote exactly right. Despite that, it didn't show up in any search engine until today when I tried Kagi.

Parts I got wrong:

The girl is picking flowers, not fruits.
The characters are referred to as "spores", not as goddesses, and aren't explicitly named as the mothers of all life, although I think it's implied they are.

Importantly, it's actually a fictional creation myth (I think) from this novel The Legends of Khasak. I think it has something to do with environmentalism. I ordered a paperback copy so I can read it and try to learn a little more, since it's lived rent-free in my head for at least 2 years.

The novel was first published in 1968, so that doesn't narrow down when I may have first encountered it.

Funny enough, this is not the end of the mystery. Although I found the source of the quote, I cannot remember where I first saw it. Who was talking about this? Maybe someone on Reddit quoted it?

The biggest piece of the puzzle is done. Maybe I can be happy with that alone.

Thanks to Kagi for showing me the search results I wanted and not the search results someone else wanted.

Thanks to the Global English-Oriented Research Journal for publishing the PDF on their site.

My little sister, you have remembered me!

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