Parable of the Headless Snake

"Once, a torso thrashed violently on the ground. In every respect, it was a headless snake. Venom and blood formed pools about it, and fleas drinking from them swelled with inebriation and died. The violence of its convulsions grew steadily more faint under the hateful glare of the sun, and everywhere, vultures and ants and wolves tore away its flesh. Just before the hapless creature gave in to its agony, an immense hand snatched it from the desert sands. The All Truth glowered upon it with glassy displeasure. "Why have you no head, no arms and no legs?"

"They were all severed from me. Enemies thought me a snake already and took them from me, thinking my extremities each a superfluous danger." In response, the All Truth merely smiled, and considering, gently laid it back down in its filth. Knowing it were a reflection of its own, the snake found motivation in the reviled disappointment it saw in the eyes of the All Truth. The creature writhed toward the river where it had flung its head to drown.

It found the decapitation afloat on a lily pad whose river brimmed with bloated corpses. At the sight, the snake reared aghast, for indeed the head were once its holiest and most respected article. Now, it bespoke only myriad nonsense, decrying worlds which did not exist on the basis of their purposelessness.

Staring wordless from the bank, the snake need not speak and did not, as the head already knew for what it had come, and shouted these words to itself aloud: "Head! Return to my shoulders whence you belong!"

Onlookers thought it mad. In fact, the head was skeptical. It remembered how, at length after its decapitation, arms cracked and twisted it from the neck, and legs kicked against it from the torso, rolling it across the ground despite all protests. Namely, this was how it came unto the river. It said for itself: "Snakes without fangs and without brains are less dangerous!"

The snake knew all were lost. It failed the All Truth so profoundly there could be no redemption. As it were blind and empty, the snake wondered how it could answer the head's riddle, or play any of the puzzling games which heads are prone to playing. How could it explain to the head, without limbs or words, what it had been told?

But the snake underestimated its head. "All Truth demands, and I obey."

It sighed and leapt from the lillipad, assuming its rightful position of leadership and direction at the forward-looking and highest point of the torso. Of course, it had never forgotten, and expected the snake to have come much sooner.

Now, the re-conjoined head and torso found legs and arms together - themselves writhing, against each other, in the blood-drenched fields of war. Both were strewn in pieces all around, drying to ribbons of leather in the sun. From a vantage, the head considered. It knew it must consider strategy - as the torso had not done to retrieve and conjoin them together. "We must speak, so their very bones listen."

So the torso drew its head to the crest of a mountain far above the red horror below.

"Whosoever returns to me, following my voice repeating, so I swear they will have instruments of war that shall outdo and outlast their adversaries, and none shall conquer them by entirety again."

And it was that the limbs began to stitch themselves together in order to vanquish their renewed body, but the pieces which had already conjoined sufficed to destroy them; with their eyes and their teeth and their lashing bodies, together with their unified mind. Limbs so returned, the human form stood erect and alone, in a paradise of the All Truth's creation."

With the tale's conclusion, Razi Farza, wandering dervish of Kartika, released the long sigh of a deflating zeppelin in the sky.