Shikasta has as its starting point, like many others of the genre, the Old Testament. It is our habit to dismiss the Old Testament altogether because Jehovah, or Jahve, does not think or behave like a social worker. H. G. Wells said that when man cries out his little "gimme, gimme, gimme" to God, it is as if a leveret were to snuggle up to a lion on a dark night. Or something to that effect.

The sacred literatures of all races and nations have many things in common. Almost as if they can be regarded as the products of a single mind. It is possible we make a mistake when we dismiss them as quaint fossils from a dead past.

Leaving aside the Popol Vuh, or the religious traditions of the Dogon, or the story of Gilgamesh, or any others of the now plentifully and easily available records (I sometimes wonder if the young realise how extraordinary a time this is, and one that may not last, when any book one may think of is there to be bought on a near shelf) and sticking to our local tradition and heritage, it is an exercise not without interest to read the Old Testament - which of course includes the Torah of the Jews - and the Apocrypha, together with any other works of the kind you may come on which have at various times and places been cursed or banished or pronounced non-books; and after that the New Testament, and then the Koran. There are even those who have come to believe that there has never been more than one Book in the Middle East.

Doris Lessing

7 November 1978

CANOPUS IN ARGOS:ARCHIVES. RE: COLONISED PLANET 5. SHIKASTA

Johor has been chosen as suitable to represent our emissaries to Shikasta - of whom there were many, carrying out a multiplicity of functions - in this compilation of documents selected to offer a very general picture of Shikasta for the use of first-year students of Canopean Colonial Rule.