Anubistic Childhood

Enlightened on the Anubistic scale, and still can't tie his shoelaces. Raising a child is conservation work: it reaches you whole, and the job is not to break it.

by The Prophet and Grand Master Pheel — 2026-08-11

1 The doddering old fool enlightened Prophet opened a shoebox and found the Little Prophet inside.

2 Six years old, shorts, scraped knees.

3 The Prophet remembers the day, which is remarkable considering the benders deep meditations piled up since.

4 There was a dog in the street, one of those dogs that just live in the street, and all the grown-ups crossed over. All of them.

5 In a tight bunch, like a shoal of fish.

6 Not the Little Prophet.

7 The Little Prophet walked straight up to the dog, put a hand on its head, and the dog sat down.

8 Then came the grown-ups' screaming, and that was the end of the first and purest mystical experience of his life.

9 The Little Prophet was six and already standing where the Prophet got to at forty-seven, after a lifetime of work, a religion to found and an international move.

10 The Prophet is past sixty and every now and then, even today, he wakes up at night in a sweat over a geography test.

11 That's not a figure of speech and it's not a joke.

12 Fifty years have gone by, the Prophet has been through all sorts, including sorts that have no official name, and the nightmare that stays with him is being called up to the teacher's desk without knowing the rivers.

13 That stuff was terrifying.

14 It really was, and it was for everyone, and nobody ever said so out loud because it was normal.

15 How the fuck did we end up with a way of handling children built on fear?
16 Who decided it, when, and on the basis of what evidence?

17 Because the point isn't only that it's unjust, which is obvious anyway to anyone who has kept two working ears.

18 The point is that it's also stupid, and on that there are numbers.

19 The numbers are brought by Grand Master Pheel, who keeps a notebook on the subject.

Humans are born dickheads, but with a kit of Pre-Enlightenment

20 I take the four precepts and try them on a child, one at a time.

21 Adore the Dog God.

22 The child sees a dog and goes towards the dog.

23 He doesn't ask the breed, doesn't ask whether it bites, doesn't do any preliminary research.

24 Adoration in its purest form.

25 Don't bust anyone's balls.

26 Here we have to be honest: children bust balls a lot, and with imagination.

27 But a child has never issued a circular, never said “a sacrifice for the common good”, never asked for a revenue stamp.

28 Listen.

29 In 2011 Schmidt and Sommerville timed how long fifteen-month-old babies looked at food being shared out, and when the split was unfair they looked much longer.

30 Nice work, even though anyone who has ever divided a snack badly already knew it.

31 What you could see were ears up and the head tilted slightly, as if to say “how in the Dog God's name are you splitting that snack?”

32 Shun ignorance.

33 A four-year-old asks on average one question every two minutes of conversation.

34 An adult asks one a week, and it's usually “how much is diesel now?”

35 Three full marks and one with an asterisk.
36 Better than most adults, without even knowing how to tie his shoelaces yet.

37 Hence the theorem: nobody is born a Dim Soul.

38 The Dim Soul is a product.

39 It takes years, institutions, forms, and a considerable number of adults answering “because I said so”.

40 You know one of the production lines: it still wakes you up at four in the morning with the rivers.

For years I couldn't resolve the asterisk on the Second Precept.

41 Meanwhile I did the only thing I know how to do, which is count.

42 I have the notebook right here: black cover, page twelve, a single column, and at the top a heading I wrote by hand ten years ago.

43 I'll copy the entries as they stand.

44 Nine against seven.

45 The public administration portal, which in matters of ballbusting remains one of the most accomplished works of humankind, is neck and neck with a two-year-old who has decided the floor is lava.

46 Five hours, and as a spectator: a parent would tell me to try a whole week, and they'd be right.

47 My sample is the cushiest there is, because at a certain hour I go back to my own home.

48 The heading says: ballbusting. All of it together.
49 The portal, the Dim Soul at the bar and the child were the same row, as if they were the same thing.
50 But is that really so?

Up to a certain point in life you live inside your own head, and inside your own head there is total Anubistic abundance.

51 Everything is available, nothing resists, the afternoon never ends, the floor is lava because you decided so and therefore it is.

52 In those conditions not busting anyone's balls is easy: there's no friction yet to offload onto anyone.

53 Then the universe shows up, and it does so as always: by saying no.

54 The ice cream is gone.

55 The shoe won't go on.

56 The afternoon ends.

57 And the child, who is full to the brim, busts balls.

58 And the child busts balls for exactly the opposite reason to the Dim Soul.

59 The Dim Soul busts balls out of conditioning and fear.

60 They wilted his ears with years of procedures and “because I said so”, and now he repeats it, trying to put other people's ears down.

61 The child busts balls out of abundance.

62 He's full, and he hasn't yet learned where the edges are.

63 They are two opposite things that make exactly the same noise, and that's why for ten years I kept them in the same column.

64 And this is where the asterisk comes undone.
65 The Second Precept isn't measured by the noise: it's measured by who makes it, and why.

66 Busting balls, in the sense that really counts, is something you choose: there's someone on the other side, and you decide to dump your stuff on them anyway.

67 The child chooses nothing. He bumps into things.
68 The Dim Soul chooses every time, has done for twenty years, and doesn't even notice any more: that is a full violation.

69 The noise remains; it doesn't vanish just because the precept doesn't count it.

70 The hours are real, the Saturday goes by all the same, and those nine adorations were mine.

71 The difference is that the entry has an owner, and it isn't the child.

72 Whoever brought him into the world also signed for the noise he makes: it was included, and it was written on the first line.

73 The public administration portal lands on you as you pass by.
74 A child, you decide on.

75 What the child lacks, then, isn't meeting the limits of the universe: he meets them ten times an afternoon, and the finished ice cream is exactly that.

76 What he lacks is recognising them and managing himself within them.

77 For now every no reaches him as a wrong, that is, as something someone is doing to him on purpose.

78 The day he understands that the ice cream just runs out, that it's nobody's fault and not a punishment, he will have taken the one piece of bad news that sooner or later reaches everyone.

79 That encounter doesn't require anyone to yell at him or “prepare him for life”.

Bringing a child into the world means choosing to be its keeper.

80 It's the same thing I did at twenty when I drove eighty kilometres, adopted Blorfos (which in ancient Egyptian means “big pair of ears”) and signed a sheet of paper declaring that I was responsible for that dog.

81 Since then Blorfos has busted my balls methodically, on his own schedule and with phobias all his own, and in ten years it has never once crossed my mind to apply the self-defence scale to him.

82 With a child the sheet of paper is the same, so is the signature, and so is the consequence.

83 The keeper's task is one of conservation.

84 The child comes with the four precepts already fitted as standard, so on those there's nothing to teach.

85 What needs teaching is everything else, from shoes to the cooker, and anyone with children doesn't need me to remind them.

86 What's left is to walk with him as he meets the resistance of the universe without dimming him along the way.
87 Keep four precepts safe for eighteen years and hand them back whole. Nothing more.

88 And the rest comes by itself.

89 The resistance of the universe doesn't need you to administer it: it's already there, it works for free and never misses a shift.

90 When the child starts producing adorations of his own, someone else will be the one to draw them out of him.

91 A form, a traffic light, a Dim Soul at the bar explaining why you should vote for Pino.

92 The parent doesn't need to supply them, and above all must not be the cause.

93 That's why the job is doable.

94 Nobody is asking you to prepare anyone for the harshness of life: the harshness of the world is taken care of by life itself, which on that front has never needed volunteers.

95 If you don't dim him, he stays Enlightened.
96 And since you become a Grand Master by putting something of your own into Anubism, I see no reason why someone who has made it to eighteen in one piece shouldn't climb higher still.

97 It would be the first Anubistic career to start without having to recover anything first.

98 Important disclaimer: adoration goes to Anubis. Always.

99 It never goes at the child, nor at the dog, and on this line there are no exceptions, mitigating circumstances or particularly heavy Saturdays.

100 Anyone who has read about my nine Saturday adorations knows I'm not saying this from the pulpit.
101 I'm saying it from the ledger.

102 Those nine times I said the Dog God's name, and they are nine prayers: they serve me, for accelerated enlightenment, and they go upwards.

103 A child under your feet puts you in a position to pray nine times in one Saturday, which from a strictly devotional point of view is the biggest gift you will ever receive.

104 At the post office, on the other hand, you just adore.

On what not to do, then, I'll answer the Prophet's question.

105 He asked how we got here and on the basis of what evidence.

106 We have the evidence at home and it doesn't need a laboratory: the precepts are enough, applied to an adult who yells.

107 Yelling at a child is busting his balls, and that's the Second.

108 Whoever yells isn't listening, and that's the Third.

109 On the Fourth, the tally is already written in the Sacred Tome, in the chapter on the precepts: whoever shouts to be right is ignorant four times over.

110 That passage is about adults shouting at other adults.

111 Move it onto an adult shouting at someone a metre tall who hasn't yet learned where the edges are, and not one of the four entries goes down.

112 The fourth least of all: nobody has ever yelled at a child to grow in wisdom.

113 And “because I said so” is the Fourth Precept fitted backwards, with the arrow pointing down.

114 Three precepts out of four, and the Fourth counts four times on its own.

115 Laying hands on a child belongs in this same tally, just further down.

116 Raising your hand to someone who hasn't attacked you is the most complete form of ballbusting there is: the Second Precept has no more violated version than that.

117 I keep yelling and hitting separate all the same, for a practical reason.

118 The one who yells absolves himself by saying at least he doesn't hit.

119 The one who hits absolves himself by saying it only happened once.

120 They are two different excuses and neither of them works.

When I make this argument, I'm often told: “Oh, come on. I got smacked and I turned out fine”

121 This is where one ought to open a whole parenthesis on Stockholm syndrome and invoke years of pedagogy, but the good Anubist is well aware that The Science™ is the same one that for decades in the twentieth century said smoking cigarettes was a tonic for the lungs.

122 That said, here I don't need the numbers; it's enough for me to look at where that phrase never appears.

123 Not in an advert, not in a prime-time drama, not in a cartoon.

124 Things that are good for you get shown: they put helmets even on cartoon characters.
125 Not the smack.

126 And the man recommending it at the bar doesn't carry it out at the supermarket with thirty people around, which is the quickest way to find out what someone really thinks of something: check whether he does it when people are watching.

127 For completeness I'll also cite the study by Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor, 2016.

128 A meta-analysis of 75 studies and nearly 161,000 children.

129 Spanking turns out to be associated with 13 of the 17 negative outcomes examined: more aggression, more antisocial behaviour, more mental health problems, a worse relationship with parents, worse cognitive ability.

130 The positive outcomes associated with it: zero out of 17.

131 Thirteen entries in the ballbusting column and none in the fun column.

132 The most defended method of upbringing in human history has only one column filled in, and it's the wrong one.

133 The Prophet and the Grand Masters are well aware, however, that embracing this fact means raising more than one eyebrow at your own parents, teachers and guardians.

134 That's normal, and we suggest doing it carefully and with ears up: the temptation to recriminate is strong, but it risks leading to violations of the Second Precept out of spite.

135 The question is complicated and will be dealt with in another article.

136 I'll close the matter for now by recalling that Anubism allows for forgiveness.

137 Not in the sense that every injustice is accepted, but in recognising that whoever truly realises they have busted someone's balls has already done the hardest thing there is.

138 Admitting you were wrong is the Fourth Precept turned on yourself, and it's exactly what I've done in this chapter, ten years late, on a column of my own notebook.

139 May Anubis be with you.

140 Grand Master Pheel

141 P.S. I have seen the photo of the Prophet as a child, because he sent it to me.

142 He sent me two, in fact: the front and, eight seconds later, the back, which I don't think was part of the plan.

143 On the back, in pen, in handwriting that isn't his, it says “Tonino, 1971”.

144 The Prophet's name is not Tonino.

145 I pointed this out and he replied that the Dog God speaks through cousins too.

146 Also, while I was writing the last paragraph, Blorfos sat down in front of the desk and began to stare at me.

147 Not a glance: a long, still thing, with his eyebrows moving on their own, as if he were reading something written inside me.

148 I put down my pen.

149 When the manifestation of the God looks at you like that, you are receiving.

150 I waited in silence, ears higher than they'd been in weeks, ready to take notes.

151 Then I followed his gaze.

152 It went past my shoulder and ended at the ball, under the bookcase.