Wasps: A Parable of Global Survival

In central Sri Lanka there is a tiny village called Sigiriya. It’s claim to fame is a mammoth magma plug, Sigirya Rock, which rises to the sky. Here the palimpsest of time’s pages and contradictory history leaves scholars floundering for something that can be definitively claimed about the purposes to which the rock, its deserted gardens and city have been put throughout the millennia.

I suppose the best analogy I can find is to suggest that somehow we can know about the pre-historical purposes and meanings beneath the foundations of European Gothic Cathedrals left by Saxons, Celts, or other prehistoric pagans. Certainly hubris is a great destroyer that constantly seeks to erase or co-opt and transform previous realities into the dominant cultural ego of any age; and so we tell each other newly edited stories which, when taken too literally, detract from the impressions in our own blood, bone and sinew—in our hearts and the spirit of our intuitive nature—the simple, but not easy act of listening to the rock out of which the images are shaped; the ground beneath our feet that bore the weight of lives lived in pain, and grief, and hope, and joy, and victory and oppression.

Much of the literature foregrounds the features of the rock as primarily a Therevada Buddhist site in its function. One Buddhist scholar I met on the way up the rock suggested that it was an early Mahayana Buddhist site, which would account for some of the grandeur, in contrast to the greater austerity of early Theravada Buddhism.

Fewer opinions foreground its function as Monarchical; although the paws of a great lion one would have had to pass beneath halfway up the rock is one of the ostentatiously palatial structures favouring the notion of a great kingdom. This is supported by popular local myth that Sigirya was configured as the rock fortress of King Kassapa (477-495 AD) after the patricide of his father, the king of Anuradhapura a little to the north.

However, there is no ignoring many signs of religious accommodation; consequently the either/or debate doesn’t do a thing for me. I’d much rather read the this and that of all I saw, particularly in view of how the kingdoms of Sri Lanka have been founded on a patronage of Buddhism which, reciprocally, has been used to reinforce imperial power. On the other hand, through the ebb and flow of influence and utility, there may have been times when a largely monastic function superseded its imperial role, and vice versa

There are suggestions that the rock was inhabited in pre-historic times, something highly likely given the natural caves, crevices and overhangs that are to be found everywhere over the surface of this magma plug from an extinct volcano; for unless this land was completely uninhabited by human life, it would only be a branch of hominid headed for extinction that could not see the many benefits of dwelling here. Why the civilization fell, whatever its form was, must also remain shrouded in mystery, since the rock at several levels would have been unassailable to sheer military tactics and might.

After all of this contentious speculation, I became more intrigued by the incredibly beautiful and well preserved murals on the rock face half way up, and inaccessible without the aid of modern steel scaffolding. A stretch of steel walkway along the rock face opens onto a natural courtyard where the great lions paws mark the pathway to the final ascent to the summit. It’s in this courtyard that several signs warn visitors to remain silent to prevent wasp attacks. A large, finely meshed cage is available as a citadel should an attack occur; and they do on average about once per year.

Pressure had been mounting for several years to exterminate the wasps for the safety of the tourists. Conservationists resisted. The locals protested based on their belief that these wasps were the reincarnated army of King Kassapa and that they were here to protect the remains of the kingdom.

Business is business and the extermination lobby won; all the nests were destroyed four or five years ago. The following year a curious thing happened. One of the custodians noticed an infestation of insects beginning to eat away at the beautiful murals that had survived two-thousand years. It didn’t take long for experts to realize that the natural predators of the insects were the wasps that had become such a threat to noisy tourists. King Kassapa’s reincarnated army protecting the old kingdom? Mmmmm! The wasps have now returned and the murals are safe again, as is the peace of Sigirya; and if noisy tourists don’t respect it? Well, you can count on the wasps.

It’s a lovely little story of equilibrium as a natural principle; and it informs for me the correction of global destruction by unbridled greed—like the money grubbers at the gates of Sigirya—that needs to take place if civilizations are to survive. It seems to me that the revolutionary hordes of the Arab Spring and the Occupy protesters in the West are like the wasps of Sigirya. There has been a persistent effort at exterminating the spirit of the masses, but equilibrium will out. It seems a natural correction.

Could it be that we—the 99%—are a reincarnation of a collective-unconscious, acting as a single organism, like the wasps of Sigirya, that has at last been awakened by the noise and destruction of Capitalists behaving as if they are merely privileged tourists objectifying the globe, rather than being of it? We are now attending to the simple, but not easy act of listening to the earth out of which images are shaped; the ground beneath our feet that bore the weight of lives lived in pain, and grief, and hope, and joy, and victory and oppression. It’s an interesting thought as we all huddle and then swarm from our hives of activity.