AN HONORABLE TALE

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

So: the mother of the first tailless child - for men formerly had tails - wept bitterly and consulted the soothsayers, elders conspicuous for their long and honorable tails, who gave out oracles from the hollow of ancient trees; and she asked what unwitting impiety she or her husband could have committed, that the just gods should condemn their innocent child to such eternal disgrace.

When, however, other tailless births began to occur, at first the legislators had the little monsters put rigorously to death; but soon, as the parents began to offer resistance, they suffered a scapegoat to be sacrificed instead; and persons without a tail were merely condemned to pass their lives in slavery, or at least without the rights of citizenship; because the philosophers, who all belonged to the elder generation with ample tails, declared that without a tail no man was really human or could be admitted after death into the company of the gods.

Yet later, when that hinder ornament had become rare, opinion was reversed, until the priests, legislators, and sages gathered in council and decreed, by a majority vote, that a tail in man was unnatural, and that the tradition that such things had existed was an invention of ignorant poets, and absurd.

When, however, by a casual reversion and sport of nature, a child with a tail was born here and there, not only was the infant instantly dispatched, but the mother was burned alive for having had commerce with a devil.

(from George Santayana - “Dialogues in Limbo”)

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