Jackalopes argue about whether to celebrate the holiday of Rakjangrimko (also called Ingrimko Unwa Walks Out or Ingrimko Unwa Walks Alone) on July 13th or July 22nd. Some argue in favor of a Perayu-mun Immissimgalla (a festival five days long), beginning with Rakjangrimko on the 22nd and ending with the Passeggiata of Kalkatura Pumkta on July 26th. Regardless of which date(s) you choose to honor, the story is about a woman who chooses to walk away.
Among the Inultaru, Ingrimko Unwa is a coded name for Creusa, first wife of the Trojan War hero Aeneas. Yep, that Trojan War hero, the star of Virgil’s Aeneid, son of Aphrodite/Venus, progenitor of the Roman Empire and ancestor of Julius Caesar (by way of Creusa’s son, Ascanius). Who is whose antecedent will vary depending on what Greco-Roman myth attributed to which author you read, but today we will concern ourselves with Virgil’s version, to contrast it with the story of Creusa as jackalopes tell it, the story of how Ingrimko Unwa walked out of history.
Virgil makes short work of Creusa’s life. A daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy, she marries Aeneas and bears him a son, Ascanius. She is a detail in the legends of these men, with not much of a life of her own, and the story of her death remains untold. She dies in the sack of Troy so that her ghost can appear to Aeneas and provide him the motivation to fulfill the destiny of his epic and become the forefather of the founders of Rome. In Virgil’s story, she comes perilously close to becoming a plot device we can now call “fridging”.
According to the Greek tales, Creusa was one of nineteen children born alive from Hecuba’s pregnancies, but jackalopes are highly skeptical of ancient storytellers who brag about the effortless fecundity of human mothers. The Inultaru never forgot that childbirth, persistently throughout history, was the second (and sometimes the first) leading cause of death for humans until the twentieth century, or that half of all children died in childhood, or that a woman had a one in four chance of dying from a pregnancy. In the so-called “modern age”, despite the eventual acceptance of germ theory, doctors (who were male and not at risk of dying from childbirth) were slow to change their obstetric practices, and women continued to die when they should have survived.
Creusa as Ingrimko Unwa in the stories of the Inultaru was the daughter of Priam but not Hecuba. Priam fathered many children with slaves, and one of these children of rape was Ingrimko Unwa, whose mother was one of the Inultaru, a woman named Dinyanna (although she is also called Imikku Sa or Ullissantarra). Dinyanna was a servant, confidant and friend to Queen Hecuba. Some people like to say she was some kind of royalty captured as a war prize, a queen or a princess, and that is why she was allowed to interact with Hecuba as a peer. But most jackalopes regard that as silly snobbery, and will tell you that Hecuba was wise enough to recognize that she was the property of a man as much as any slave, despite her being a queen.
Hecuba and Dinyanna became friends as most women will do when they are thrown together in a situation ruled by men. They raised their children together in the female realm of Priam’s household, in rooms and gardens filled with women and their children. According to unspoken rules (unspoken in the sense that they were discussed by women but never spoken to men yet men obeyed them, out of indifference or caution) this was a realm where no adult man was allowed to enter, not even a eunuch. A realm where the intelligence and energy of women worked their mysteries and their magicks.
When Dinyanna died in her second childbirth, her son survived her by only a few minutes. Hecuba took Ingrimko Unwa (who was less than three years old) as her own child and Priam accepted this daughter as his child by Hecuba without knowing or caring about the identity of the actual biological mother. This moved Ingrimko Unwa’s status from the child of a slave to the daughter of a king. A thing that happened so often that it was not unusual at all.
Powerful magicks of destiny were cooked up in the female realms, unseen by men, unrecorded by history.
Ingrimko Unwa became Creusa, a daughter of Priam, a child of royalty, eligible for marriage to an aristocratic hero, which was something that had to happen, whether she wanted it or not. She was a valuable piece of royal property, and when she was old enough (somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years of age) she was awarded to Aeneas according to a contract arranged by her father with the gods. Aeneas was a real hero, we know this because Virgil told us he was a real hero, and also a son of Aphrodite/Venus. This real hero promptly fucked his wife, got her pregnant, and Ingrimko Unwa was lucky enough to survive the birth of her son. She did not survive the sack of Troy according to Virgil, but we have already realized that Virgil did not know much (or did not care) about the lives of women. As far as Virgil was concerned, the women of Troy were there to wail with grief when their sons and husbands were torn to pieces by heroes on the battlefield, or to beg for mercy for their babies, then watch in horror as their babies were hurled by heroes off the battlements. They were there to be raped by heroes, to be sold as slaves to heroes, and to have their throats slit with swords by heroes.
Ingrimko Unwa did none of those things. Troy had been defeated, the enemy was within the walls and death was near. Ingrimko Unwa’s husband was arming himself and getting ready to die gloriously in a lost battle. His father, the guy who had been seduced by the goddess Aphrodite/Venus and lived to brag about it, was laying on his bed, lame, bewailing the fate that had prevented him from dying honorably in battle. Ingrimko Unwa had been busy taking care of their household, making sure the people who depended upon them, their servants and their families, had provisions and knew how to escape the city. She tried to reason with Aeneas, reminding him of his duty to protect his son and his followers, all the people who did not want to die. He would not listen to her; even Virgil admits his hero would not hear her entreaties.
So she left. She picked up her own pack of necessities and walked out. She had already sent her son to safety in the care of trusted servants who were desperate to save their own children. She had made sure that Aeneas and her cranky father-in-law knew the avenues of escape. She walked away from the great hero without looking back, in haste, eager to leave behind the mighty epic of her husband’s life. If she had known, she would have been delighted that her actions would inconvenience future poets like Virgil, who would have to make up stuff about her fate, and invent a different son for Aeneas.
In the stories jackalopes tell, the name of Ingrimko Unwa’s son was Askeltan. He founded no empires, created no dynasties, fought in no wars, and never became a hero. He had a long life, no children, many friends, enough wealth, and was as happy as he needed to be.
Ingrimko Unwa continued to walk out and drifted into the life of a wanderer. She walked across the entire known world and back, then did the same across the unknown world. She wrote many books about her travels, and all her books were lost. She walked herself out of one kind of existence into another, and then did it again. She gained a different perspective with a new pair of eyes, and after several lifetimes, she became the demmalyun* of the long and winding road.
Yost preferred the July 13th date for Rakjangrimko.
*I have been informed that this is the proper spelling for the word “demalion”. I suppose I will go through my posts and make corrections. Eventually. Maybe.
Vraicking 