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Amphisbaena, or, The Legend of the Seven Unjust Women

  • amolosh
  • Jul 1
  • 2 min read

Updated: Jul 2

Amphisbaena in the Aberdeen Bestiary (ca. 1200)


The amphisbaena has a second head at its tail end, as if a single mouth did not suffice to spill its venom.

— Pliny the Elder, Natural History 8.85 (77–79 CE)

 

A legend old as Ur of the Chaldees

Informs us that thirty-six righteous men

Leaven bad humanity’s unfair dough,

But a tablet recently unearthed

Asserts that, completing this assignment,

Seven unjust women are in the know.

Justice demands its matching Other: Look!

They cried in Nippur, Lagash, and Uruk.

 

It's said those girls should number thirty-six

To equal the Lamed Vav Tzadikim

(Borges’ name for them’s “the Lamed Wufniks”),*

Or "righteous hidden men," in total tally,

But others insist that seven suffice

With facts recorded on far side of nice

To compensate for Earth’s injustice dearth,

Best of all possible this-worldly worth.

 

That role's by far the hardest to fulfill,

Too tough for ignorant unrighteous males,

Like you, like me. A Gloria Grahame

Near lookalike in Congress (R–Belial),

Sets out their iniquitous family style:

When Amphisbaena backs a specious bill,

Cute as a bug’s ear, holding, there, the floor,

Unfairness, admirably, never fails:

 

Unfair outcomes make taut those salty sails,

Justice spoils the rich cream in petit-bourgeois pails.

Think but of the risks that we once took.

And Father’s hackneyed unforgiving look.

It's fun to pair the sainted and the crook;

Justice and its Other, partners, what’s more,

Just as envisaged in Chaldean lore

And by the Harappans long before,

Sex up the sempiternal score.

 

 

*Jorge Luis Borges, Manual de zoologia fantástica / Book of Imaginary Beings (1957/1969).

 

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

 
 
 

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Photo by Peter Dreyer

 Cyclops by Christos Saccopoulos, used by kind permission of the sculptor.

Copyright © 2023 - by Peter Dreyer

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