The Monkeys and the Man: an Anthropomorphic Fable in the Style of the Great Ethiopian Slave and Teacher Aesop (c. 620-564)

Robin Usher, Saudi Arabia

A man picked an apple from a tree. Some monkeys were in the branches. `We`re training for the mountain,` said one. `There`s no fruit there,` said the man. `But it`s a high and great endeavour,` said the monkey. `No, it`s fruitless,` the man replied. `We like you,` the monkey asserted. `No you`re not`, said the man.

After watching the monkeys for a while, `I have a teaching,` said he. `Some men murdered a man who told them to obey God. `Why?` asked a monkey climbing higher and stretching its fingers up through the leaves as if it would touch the clouds. `Obeying God is a higher and greater endeavour` said the man.

The apes seemed to think about this for a while, and then one of them said: `What have you achieved?` I`m a man`, said the man, `I shall build a spaceship and travel to the stars with my woman.`

The monkeys murdered the man. `We`ve climbed the mountain,` said one. `Fruitless,` said another. `Look!` said a third: `There`s one more of the fools coming this way. Behave like monkeys. He won`t suspect a thing.` `Ape man,` said four.

The three made a group with the fourth and began to sing, `Don`t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me ..,` a 1941 version of the song, `The Long Ago` by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1833), which was recorded by the Andrews Sisters in 1941 for its theme of deluded love:

`Tho' by your kindness my fond hopes were raised, Long, long ago, long, long ago.`

Yes,` said a fifth monkey: `He that has wisdom, let him have understanding, the number of the beast is the number of a man and his number is six hundred three score and six.` (Rev: 13. 8) `Yes,` said a sixth monkey ...

The moral of this fable is: don`t believe `others` are like you.

Delusion is manufactured by man`s `fellow feeling`. However, as in Eden, there`s only man. The deluded, and the deluders, belong to `the ape of God` who, called Satan in the Bible, is their `beast`.