SOME WORDS TAKEN FROM OUTLAW OF GOR

"For the Gorean, though he seldom speaks of these things, a city is more than brick and marble, cylinders and bridges. It is not simply a place, a geographical location in which men have seen fit to build their dwellings, a collection of structures where the may most conveniently conduct their affairs.

The Gorean senses, or believes, that a city cannot be simply identified with its material elements, which undergo their transformations even as do the cells of a human body.

For them a city is almost a living thing, or more than a living thing. It is an entity with a history, as stones and rivers do not have history: it is an entity with tradition, a heritage, customs, practices, character, intentions, hopes. When a Gorean says, for example, that he is of Ar, or Ko-ro-ba, he is doing a great deal more than informing you of his place of residence.

The Goreans generally, though there are exceptions, particularly the Caste of Initiates, do not believe in immortality. Accordingly, to be of a city is, in a sense, to have been a part of something less perishable than oneself, something divine in the sense of undying. Of course, as every Gorean knows, cities too are mortal, for cities can be destroyed as well as men. And this perhaps makes them love their cities the more, for they know that their city, like themselves, is subject to mortal termination.

This love of their city tends to become invested in a stone which is known as the Home Stone, and which is normally kept in the highest cylinder in a city. In the Home Stone, sometimes little more than a crude piece of carved rock, dating back perhaps several hundred generations to when the city was only a cluster of huts by the bank of a river, sometimes a magnificent and impressively wrought, jewel-encrusted cube of marble or granite-the city finds its symbol. Yet to speak of a symbol is to fall short of the mark. It is almost as if the city itself were identified with the Home Stone, as if it were to the city what it is to a man. The myths of these matters have it, that while the Home Stone survives, so too, must the city.

But not only is it the case that each city has it's own Home Stone. The simplest and humblest village, and even the most primitive huting that village, perhaps only a cone of straw, will contain its own Home Stone, as will the fantastically appointed chambers of the Administrator of so great a city as Ar."

- OUTLAW OF GOR, Pg. 22-23
© 1967 John Lange