Schoolwork...Palmolive

Some crap thing I drew up for school in less than 20 minutes before I went to bed yesterday. Our class had to create a culture, and my group decided to worship palmtrees, of all things.

Mythology crap I wrote. I do not write like this all the time. I wanted to have that simple-sentence, story-telling feel that my literature textbook has whenever they tell cultural stories.

"A long time ago, there was a man. He lived a lonely life on this island surrounded by the sea, with nothing more than silent palm trees and a small, seemingly useless spider to keep him company. The man felt sad. In fact, he felt so depressed that he decided that living wasn’t worth it anymore. He had no other person to talk to, no other person to play with, no other person to love.

Well, one day, Evil Being heard Man’s thoughts (for Evil knew how to listen to thoughts), and decided to help Man along. Evil liked collecting dead things. So, Evil started to make things hot… very hot.

Tree, the wisest of the silent palm trees who were watching over Man since the beginning, did not like Evil’s plan to make Man part of its collection. Besides, Tree did not like Evil’s hot lava since it scorched her bark and made things uncomfortable. So, in order to stop Evil from making the land unbearably hot, Tree created Palmolive, a creature that looked somewhat like Man, but made of tree. Palmolive, with the help of Man and her mother, Tree, helped create more trees in order to stop Evil’s heat from completely over running the land.

But even with more trees, Palmolive and the Others could not stop the heat of Evil from coming through. She had been able to slow it down, but not stop it completely.

Then, Spider, the creature on the ground next to man, scurried up one of the palm trees since Spider disliked heat. Man saw this, and learning from Spider, he climbed up Palmolive just as Evil’s lava came to destroy him.

Evil, after eating up nothing by dirt and other palm trees, soon got tired and dried up.

Even though Man had provoked Evil to spew forth lava, Man’s accidental provocation of Evil helped make the soil fertile. After Evil’s lava had subsided, it left behind the hope of life it could not destroy. The bodies of the Others would be put back in a cycle, and again, they would some day reenter life.

Since then, Palmolive and Man’s family grew faster, and the rest of the world sprouted. "

Culture info:
-Men are leaders, but the women are his "managers." The leader is more of a figurehead of strength than anything.

-The leader is closely associated with the spider, since my group likes spiders (I don't -_-). The leader is called the "gagamba," which means "Spider" in Tagalog.

-If a woman fails the rite of passage into adulthood, her body is deemed "defective," and she is thrown into the volcano. This isn't a sad day, since now, her body is allowed to reenter the earth to fertilize the palm trees they oh-so admire. The soul continues to live on, and goes into a "waiting list" of some sort to "try again" at life. Hopefully, the next body won't be defective. Men with defects also share a similar fate.

-Bodies that aren't defective are allowed to die a natural death. Those bodies, when they die, become the dirt once more. The souls of the "good" bodies are infused into the oldest and most sacred palm trees.