The Mirror of the Sphinx

Tribes and Origins, for a Friend

2009-02-02T03:43:00.000-08:00

I had been corresponding via IM with a young man born in 1989. I've gotten so old that it took me quite a while to realize that someone born in 1989 today would be 19 years old! The young man and I didn't chat long, as I didn't fit his idea of someone worthwhile talking to, but he did tell me something interesting about himself. He had mentioned that he had very dark hair and very light blue eyes. It would be sort of hard to track where those features might come from, as among Slovaks, the Dutch, the Greeks, and so on among people who are more dark-featured, every once in a while there is an instance of blue eyes.

Blue eyes that are very light in color are very rare anywhere, and are somewhat impractical as eyes of such a light color have a tendency of developing cataracts. In fact, people with blue eyes in general have a very tough time with cataract problems as they age. For myself as a diagnosed diabetic, I need to be very careful with my regimens and my eyes, and will likely have problems with my eyes no matter how well I handle my self.

I had met the young man at an Internet forum that I'm forbidding myself, so I can't talk to him directly. However, he mentioned that his mother had told him a story that his father's family originated in Romania. He also mentioned that he had once had a dream about a name called, "the Dragescu." I talked to him several times, and no longer speak to him, but as it turns out I turned up something with my research skills.

"Dragescu," certainly has a Romanian ring to it, as the, "sc," syllable, which is a harsh expressive, "shh," sound transliterated into English is quite common in the Romanian group of languages. However, I assumed the young man had simply turned the name up in a book of vampire fables, or in some ridiculous roleplaying game corebook. Still, I had been toying with searches, and there was an article that mentioned this small city north by northeast of Ivanovka called Maeraza and the surname, "Dragescu," on the Internet on the same page.

I had heard music performed by the Kronos Quartet by a female composer from Azerbaijan two years or so ago, and so I was not totally unfamiliar with the name. Apparently Azerbaijan is very Turkish in character, yet also has a Slovakian-European element to its character. As with the Slovakian region in general, this small locality has a fierce concept of its own identity, and is now apparently recognized as a sovereign nation amidst the now quite fragmented nations of that region. The area sits with Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and then Iran to the south.

I am not going to contact the young man again, but the information did kind of interest me, even though the information I had was so limited. Perhaps, "Dragescu," is a common surname in the region. I guess what got me thinking was that the young man had a Romanian father, and that his little tidbit about this, "dream," did in fact turn up a relationship between the surname and a region fairly close to Romania in geography. Perhaps the young man was growing nearer through these tales to finding his own tribe.

I'll be back indirectly, and then we'll have more to discuss, eh?

Lineages and Legacies: We are the New BREED

2009-01-18T18:42:00.000-08:00

I want to tell this as a story instead of just saying it like it is a fact, because this is a result of my visions, and even for me this is not just showing up at the wrong soccer stadium. However, I've had a result come up from these visions and I want to show some pride. Look - I take shame on myself for what has happened because I think that is Ma'at, not to blow air or for any other reason.

Still - I work so durned hard, and I feel I have a right to some pride. If I could just get this thing with my family worked out in some reasonable fashion. There does have to be a reasonable solution, even for the dove-poo that arose from the chlamydian sea. That isn't my blood. That kind of blood falls off like treetard from family trees. But I've got to heap the ashes of responsibility on my head because that is what is right - as far as I can see at the moment.

So this particular article deals openly with two fundamental issues. First, I want to talk about the origins I think I actually have, rather than my superman origin stories, and the neo-human. I'm just going to come out and talk about these dangerous topics.

One of the good things about being labeled psychotic is that the sub-breeds can put it off to a bad day or not enough sedatives in your pill box. I'll be open and let us see how hard I get nailed for it. Even on a closed site and a labeled half-wit, this might go foul. A gamble. I'll spin the two coins and let them fall where they may.

So here's how I'll tell the tale. A group of tribes arose in remote Nepal, and cast out of the mountains and swept southward through Asia and towards Europe. They were split tribes called the Ariannan, and they were a golden people. They also loved blood and war, and they fought within their tribes within certain limits to prove their strength.

Things ran afoul for the Ariannan - mostly they had themselves to blame - and a group split off, renaming themselves the Oraku. That name translates as "Those whose voices see." They fled across the sea, finally arriving in South America, and took their small tribe across the north of the Amazon jungle into Chile, where they were lost.

So here is me, likely an adopted foundling, a believer in his bizarre tale that he was once of the Oraku. I'll be taking a good depakote-induced power nap very soon, don't worry a bit. Best use for depakote in my opinion.

The New Breed of Evolution, and the Neo-Human

As I've told you, the Aryan has a reputation today for living in a world of myth. At some time around 6 or 7 thousand years ago, on both sides of the Himalayas, two very different sets of humans started keeping significant written records. At somewhere around 23 or 24 hundred years ago, two very different philosophical traditions are born on either side of the Himalayas.

At roughly 2000 years ago, a chaotic time in Middle Asia (the Arabic nations) forms a pivotal period in history for the whole world. Roughly 100 years ago, most of the world is connected significantly, and industrialization sweeps the world. 50 years ago, man develops unimaginable abilities to manipulate matter and the very stuff of life.

Somewhere no more than 5 years ago, the neo-human has arrived. We are all here. Now, as a descendent of a world of myth, I am not the scientist that nearly all neo-humans are. Yet, I've decided that if there is to be a tribe for myself, an official one and not a collection, that it will be called, the Invid. A story about a rootless, childless man? - or the evolution that will now sweep a globe of mostly sub-breeds?

Invid translates from my knowledge as, "venom," and I also like the translation, "the afflicted," or, "the affliction." The Invid shall make war. Again if I'm axed for making a hate site, at least a few eyes will have seen it.

There is a neo-human. The topic is final. What I and other neo-humans can do makes you look like fools. I am not a scientist, as a descendent from Ariannan --> Oraku --> Invid, I am a neo-human that lives in a world of neverending stories. I make war every day, and as the cage of the grid of the sub-breeds dissolves, the Invid will make of the new world that emerges a place of blood and war, never-ending stories, and also healing and love.

You need some skalds in the world, and as with any tribes, we will fight, but I hope that will also be arrived at by a reasonable solution. Also, a Clan in a new world needs a new name. A warrior-poet, head of Clan Invid, signs off for a nice legal power nap, and will return when he has more to say. If the material goes down, at least a few will see.

My path begins in a circle, and terminates at the end of the song of my knife. For the song of my knife is my only vision and voice, for Invid is the only weapon of the Invid.

Thelema, the Big Al, Rabelais, and the Question of Human Freedom

2009-01-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

I decided to get lazy and just re-write the article I have sort of banked in the organic-RAM module without looking for a previous article on the topic. I have far more thoughts on this topic today than when I conceived my last version of the article, and in fact, my most particular, "hard philosophy," research is in - long words - excellent words - "the ontology of human will." I've considered making a reference to Big AL Crow in the essay, since the essay will probably not be published until I meet my demise. LOL! Just to be an SOB. My tribes do that too.

So let us start with Rabelais. I keep wanting to date Rabelais as 19th century, but everything keeps pointing to late-Renaissance. Rabelais makes the Western Great Books list. His major work is called, "Gargantua and Pentagruel," is explicitly scatalogical, and also includes a long list of human perversions that don't make the Western Great Books list.

He is worthy of academic study, according to academia. Your problem is that as a scholar you get one and only specialty - and a lifetime of Rabelais does not suggest a very healthy mind. If you start with a healthy mind, a career like that is sure to cause leprosy.

Rabelais was a very defiant man, what they called a, "free-thinker," back then, and he made some people a little more than peeved, so they sent him off to a cloister. Rabelais escapes the cloister, and he sets to pen one of the best satires written in the West since Petronius' "Satyricon," before being summarily burned at the stake for being even more free-thinking and annoying than he started out.

"The Satyricon," and the "Gargantua and Pentagruel," are similar as works in character to one another, although they do not have a similar theme. What Rabelais experienced in the Cloister was that every minute of his life was planned and watched, and it drove him - insane. Yet Rabelais was no fool, and what happens in GnP shows that amply.

Rabelais creates a satiric monastery and writes a satiric monastic rule. The monastery is called the, "Abbey of Theleme," and Theleme is actually a fairly good Attic Greek declension of somewhere around, "human freedom." Typically monastic rules stretch out for page after page - the Qumran Indices is a sterling example - but in the Abbey of Theleme, there is one monastic rule - "Do what you wish."

So we begin GnP with farcical clowning. The Abbey is tons of fun, and nothing gets done because everyone sleeps well into the afternoon and - you can kind of guess! As the work proceeds however - this total anarchy leads to total degradation, and at the end, our Abbey of Theleme burns to the ground with Gargantua and Pentagruel trapped inside it.

So let us consider of the dramatization of the theme. Clear in Rabelais' mind is that having every minute and decision monitored and controlled in a cloister is not freedom. Clear from our satirical Abbey is that total anarchy is not a very rational sort of freedom.

So we are presented with a question, "What is human freedom?" Scatology and total degradation - not human freedom. Precise control of my every move - not human freedom. This is the point of this satire, and it is just an incredibly explicit satire. That is the basic problem with the work. It is also very well written and realized.

So here comes the issue with the Big Al. Al was familiar with Rabelais. Al was an aristocrat from a fairly notable aristocratic family in England. All from England can heave a sigh of relief knowing that no one can remember what notable aristocratic family that was, as he got into big trouble with the law and proceeded to be - deleted. In fact, Alex Crow was a slang term for a nasty sort of character in England, and he Latinized it to, "Aleister Crowley."

Now Big Al was genius quality material. Big Al's problem was that he had no self-discipline. He contacted the Memphis Rite of German Freemasonry, which had been ejected from German Freemasonry for its wild practices. The Memphis Rite reformed under some of Crowley's principles to form the Ordo Templi Orientiis. However, Big Al couldn't get very high in the ranks, and wandered off in a rage.

Big Al may have lived in Asian India for a while, as he was familiar with yogic practices and yogic tantra. Asian India was a British colony at the time, and it is possible. By the way - just as associating with esoteric mysticism in the West might get you forked fingers at the local Jungle Jim's and a mark to ward off evil on your door, they feel the same about tantric practices in Asia. Still - broadminded people in Asia - just as in the West - might say, "Which version of esoteric mysticism/tantra are you speaking of?" - as sometimes people who pontificate on the wrong soccer field do get a modicum of respect in both Asia and the West.

So we arrive at the kick in the pants to the establishment, just to be an SOB. Crowley had a few ideas that are interesting, and it's not so much that they are original, but that they are unique in their re-casting. The first is - remember - explanation will follow - "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," or, "There is no law but do what thou wilt."

So we see from Rabelais' satiric drama that anarchy isn't a working model. Also, Crowley recast the idea (yes, phony archaicisms, heave a different sort of sigh) using the word "will," as a pun. So we have a statement that could mean, as Rabelais satirized, "Do what you wish," but could also mean, "What you are capable of doing is what you are free to do."

Crowley discussed how this statement touched on a fundamental reality - capability to do something is the freedom to do something. That is an ontology, and not just, "flit and flout about following your whims." The idea is so fundamentally interesting, as what we see is - consider - as an existence I am capable of saving this draft and taking a nap instead of finishing this article. That is a freedom I have. I don't have the freedom to walk all the way to the store, as I'm not physically strong enough to walk all of the way there.

We're not making an ethical statement about freedom - important to think about as well (?) - but we're making an ontological statement about freedom. What can I as an existence achieve within my limitations as an existence? Sometimes we may not be aware of a freedom we have in this sense, and that is also an ontology - because we look at where our knowledge of existence meets the reality of our existence.

The other question relates to a different piece of my work and it deals with "losing lust for results." In the Eastern part of the West, this is a massive part of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity. It isn't whether you believe in being a Christian or feel it will achieve "eternal bliss," it is about practicing as a Christian. Understood that Christian salvation is also of faith, but what the Orthodox are getting at is that it is the practice of being Christian that is the faith of Christianity.

In Orthodoxy, no mortal man or woman can determine salvation, and the tradition is that the best member of a congregation - blameless and a stout practitioner of the faith - can still obtain perdition. Salvation is up to the Lord, and not the member of the congregation - or its leaders. By contrast, there are tales in Orthodoxy that Judas the Iscariot could have obtained salvation - for all we know - the worst sinner of all time - and why? - because the Lord preferred it to be that way, and for no other reason.

Obtaining a good confession before death - as in Catholicism - is considered a great blessing and a very good omen, but that is all you get for such a confession. In Catholicism this is really a core tenet as well, or it is meant to be - one is Catholic because one shows up at Church, shows up at Confession, and practices the faith - and no one knows much more than that, but the cast in Catholicism differ in some significant ways. Both true Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity are incredibly austere, and very few people practice for a long period - much less their entire lifetime.

So - my reason for the interest is this - in life we meet the Mother I call An, and in her face - we don't know so much as we would like to think. So we practice the, "art of living," whether it is what will be my, "Work of Completion," or some other art of living. We just practice being alive, and there is a great gaping wound where almost all of our knowledge just pours right out - to be poetic - pours right out into our graves!

Seen in this light, we live not to achieve results, but to practice being alive. We don't worry if someone with my talent posts at a freebie blog and doesn't get a paycheck - did I misplace that too? - and remains fundamentally alone in his surrounding world. We practice living to live - a verb - with no concept of what the results will be. Very simple, very austere, and a very simple fact about life. I never use the word, "fact" - a powerful and curious word in English - except in a certain sense, and in this case, I use it by no mistake.

This is going to lead back to the philosophy blog, where I'm going to do that article on categories I've been planning for weeks. I've held off because the work is incomplete, and my processors are still trying to form the piece a bit better. Still - I want to make a stab at it today, and the completed book on logic will get done if I don't die too quick. I don't think I will. I'm that bad of an SOB.

Enoch and John Dee, Magister of the Court of Queen Elizabeth the First

2009-01-18T13:19:00.000-08:00

First, John Dee was a real historical figure, who served as a diviner and an oracle - a magister - for the court of Queen Elizabeth the First. Before we sit up and laugh, consider Nancy Reagan and her pricy astrologer! There are indeed many lies of the, "liberal media," but that particular news-segment wasn't a lie. She was spending some 10 thousand dollars a year on professional astrology. QE1 had a similar sort of system going with John Dee.

John Dee was incredibly prolific, and wrote nearly all of his texts in what is - apparently - very good ecclesiastical Latin. At one time there was a massive archive of John Dee texts on the 'Net that had been fairly well translated into four or five major languages. A google/search or a category search should turn it up fairly quickly.

He wrote mostly treatises on alchemy. He also composed a translations of Arabic grimoires, some treatises on that Book of Enoch I already mentioned, and so on and on into maybe 3 or 400 texts, some of fairly large size, but most about 20 pages or so in length. The texts regarding the system of Enochian Magic(k) do not even actually number among the texts that we are fairly sure that he wrote, and that deserves a story.

It goes like this. You have a man of lower-middle class, a scribner really, named Elias Ashmole, in England just around or just before the Industrial Revolution. The name itself is likely a pseudonym, although it is a possible name in England at that time. We've already gotten pretty sketchy and we're not even near started with the story.

The man had peculiar interests, and he purchased an antique chest, to discover these Enochian documents at the base of the chest. There are five texts to this particular set of documents, named merely by a Latin ordinal: The primus, the secundus, the tertius, the tetras, and the pentus. The texts are mathematically encoded, show some pretty heavy math knowledge, and are written in both ecclesiastical Latin and Attic Greek.

Mimeographs of the first four are available online, and we arrive at our next problem. These texts would be considered more than unimportant to the general scholar, but they would be housed at a museum - simply because of the age of the texts. So how do we arrive at a pdf of these documents? The pentus I have never seen, but it may float onto a google/search on my computer one of these days.

My knowledge of Latin and Greek is not smashing, but the texts look like whoever wrote them knew their Greek and Latin pretty durned well. I'm not sure I know enough Latin and Greek to spot a total forgery, but it looks about right. The mathematical knowledge required to encode the texts would also have been huge, psuedo-scientific documents or not. That is what I see in these mimeographed pdfs.

Contemporary origin? Well, another issue is that what is marketed today as Enochian Magic(k) has no relationship to these texts, and you'd be better off with a cotton-candy-fluff Scott Cunningham book than one of these popularized Enochian Magic(k) books. I've had people try to roll up on me like they knew history and textual study better than me - ah the wonderful swindler - I smell the naphtha this evening - and I've pointed them to these texts. Have a nice day spending years on specialized Latin lessons and auditing Attic Greek classes! You might want to try some advanced combinatorics at a good University and lessons on Hebrew gematria with a private tutor - just to polish it off!

Further, there is another figure in these documents named Edward Kelly. Kelly was a native of the lower-class in England, who made his money through seances and charms and herbs and minerals - and you might guess what else! It is well-known that John Dee got himself into some trouble for associating with Edward Kelly, as Kelly was a notorious, "demonist," at the time.

Kelly fled to Spain and pulled "alchemical hoaxes," but hadn't regarded that there was an Inquisition going full-swing in Spain. The result of his forgetfulness was that he was burned rather quickly at the stake. I think he lived in Spain for no more than a year.

So the Enochian documents set up like this. Dee has found a very good sulfur-quartz skrying crystal, and puts Kelly to work at the crystal and takes notes as to Kelly's skrying at the crystal. As each session comes to a close, a new development is introduced, to culminate in the as-yet-unearthed, "pentus," document. The skrying sessions are dated as having lasted for almost 6 years of intermittent activity.

The goal of the text is first, to understand the esoteric meanings of the Book of Enoch - the popular one. Second, the goal is to understand the mysteries of the Angels of Heaven - as the original (erm... original being a bit of a loose term in this case) Book of Enoch was intended to explicate. So there you have it.

Now, just a couple of words to close. I have a pretty unusual way of viewing the world, a real bizarre Optik - if you will - and if you want to pray or worship angels, or even try to understand the mysteries of angels - more power to you! As I stated, I believe in El, and that he'll judge me just the way he prefers - no need for you mere mortal to intercede! - and so you need to pave your own yellow brick road.

The thing is that in every case - even though there was such a court magister - just such an Edward Kelly - and even texts similar in character attributed to John Dee - we need to look for an obfuscation. In particular if you are interested in esoteric mysticism, you need to refine your BS-detector finer than any scalpel made today. It is this subject that is subject to obfuscation more than any other. Further, think of what I said of history - I see it that we've obfuscated history - from ourselves! - to the point where 50 years ago is a bin of spam treats!

Alright, well yours truly may have more to say this evening. I ate a light dinner earlier, and maybe the Big Al article, or - maybe a new inspiration might strike. A short break, another cup of coffee - where the breath mints, baby? - more cigarettes, and then we'll see where to go on the old blogger/blogspot-freebie blog. Hang in there people. The world is pretty fouled up, but it is pretty rational and sane and won't end with any great immediacy. Time enough for one more cup of joe, one more marlboro - and time enough to love.

The Book of Enoch: What Was and What Was Not

2009-01-18T12:25:00.001-08:00

"Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him."

Genesis, 5:24, NRSV

In the traditions regarding creation, we would normally say that anything that El creates, he never completely annihilates. If you have been made, he won't destroy you utterly, even if you might wish he did un-make you. Now, we look at this passage, and the first interpretation out of my mouth would be that with El there is an exception to every rule, and that Enoch was the exception to this rule of creation and was annihilated. However, then we have the next problem, "because God took him," which does not suggest divine punishment.

This little passage represents a massive riddle, and it is one of the major reasons that Enoch has been such a special focus among apocryphal literature among Western Scriptures. In the Catholic tradition that I was raised in, there is one and only one passage that a Catholic may read from any, "Book of Enoch," and it appears in the Pastoral Letter According to Jude. In fact, the Catholic Church lists the Book of Enoch as the only worse heresy than the Gnostic heresy, and by canon law - today! - you can be formally excommunicated for owning or reading the Book of Enoch.

Formal excommunications are rarely served - even less today than before - but I've seen it happen several times in my life. One of the problems is that even as an apostate - I have to admit - these particular individuals had become pretty scandalously offensive in their behavior. I myself have received no formal papers - but there is really no need.

I have less chance for an absolution in confession - living the mostly pure life I live today - than when I exited drug rehab with a host of grave sins on my soul at 20. I'm informally excommunicated - latentiae sapientum - to be specific. That would roughly translate as, "holding censured knowledge." I didn't get that part of canon law in my Catholic education, but I managed to find the appropriate legalism for my apostasy at the VIS website.

There was a particular Book of Enoch that has been extant for a very long time in Western history, and it is the one quoted in the New Testament. There are libraries full of versions of the Book of Enoch, but that version has always been the most popular version. The simple reason for that is that in the West, part of pietism - once the monotheistic absolute set in - was the worship of angels, and that particular Book of Enoch intends to explicate the mysteries of the Heavenly Hosts.

That particular form of the Book of Enoch is considered the most blasphemous book ever written by Catholic canon law, except for that passage in the Pastoral Letter of Jude, and that passage is Scripture, the Word of God Himself - Who Is God Himself - by Catholic dogma. Further, it should be noted that Jude was the name of the betrayer of Christ the Savior, and that this letter represents something a little special in Christian Scripture. That was noted all throughout Catholic history by scholars and writers within the Catholic faith, and I learned this in my Catholic education.

Let us quote the poignant passage from the Pastoral Letter of Jude:

"It was about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying 'See the Lord is coming with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict everyone of all the deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.'"

Jude, 1: 14 and 15, NRSV

Being the obedient Catholic that I am, I've skimmed over the Book of Enoch in question, and it is interesting, but not of much use to me. What we really see is that angels fill the place that pagan gods might have - bringing iron or certain crafts to the new generations of Adam, and we see that there is a judgment made as to which angels will be imprisoned by their maker and which will continue to serve him. The judgment is one dependent on their behavior regarding man, and the prophecies of this mysterious Enoch.

It might be worth noting that in the Western tradition, the real meaning of "prophecy," was "one who spoke the words of God." Today we think of, "prophecy," as an oracle or divination into the future, but whether the prophet was a Major Prophet chosen from among a very small few, or a minor prophet or prophetess chosen out of many other madmen or madwomen, the prophet was never intended to be an oracle in Western tradition. He (or more rarely, she) was one who spoke, "the true words of God."

Another aspect of the Book of Enoch is that its long lists of names and their associated crafts or auspices make it a great deal like a Dark Age grimoire. In the Dark Ages, the, "grimoire," was a certain category of text that listed familiar spirits and their uses. It is actually likely that the Book of Enoch had this aspect before the Dark Ages - and of course - there are other more ancient versions of texts similar to the Dark Age grimoire.

So now we've introduced the Book of Enoch, and we will move on to John Dee and Mr. Edward Kelly, of Enochian Magic(k) fame. The two are indeed intimately connected. Also, - it is beyond the pale how silly people are. Also - the Enochian Magic(k) is a big target for swindlers. We'll go over it. It is rather strange, even for Western history.

"What Path are You On?"

2009-01-18T10:35:00.000-08:00

I've already told you the two basic translations of this statement, and your best response will almost always be, "I need to log out, as you are a chump and you are wasting my time." However, the concept of "path," is very important to esoteric mysticism, and there is actually a fundamental and traditional way of viewing this concept of path in the tradition - oh yes! - of esoteric mysticism.

First, people on occult-related sites are always throwing around, "LHP," and "RHP." These concepts are not easy to grasp the meaning of, even if someone would bother to tell you what they thought they meant. Usually, "RHP," means either "frigid old hag," or, "grumpy old wet blanket," and LHP means, "I'm gothic and RAHR!-y." If you knew the blasphemy that represents to me and others like me - where did I leave that flight carrier with the Tornadoes and the exocets! This is my gut reaction to this kind of swindler.

Since most people don't have a background in esoteric mysticism, let us start with STAR WARS! This is the easiest lead-in for the whole problem. So - the "light side of the Force," is the Right Hand Path, and the "dark side of the Force," is the, "Left Hand Path." This is very crude and oversimplified - barbaric really - but it is an effective lead-in to the rest of the concepts.

To move on, we look first at the ma'aseh Bereshais, or the work of Creation in the Book of Genesis. El, the creator, takes and separates light from darkness. Light on one side, and Darkness on the other, becoming Day and Night.

The next place to look is the key passages (there are two accounts) regarding the building of the Temple of King Solomon for his Lord. Before the Temple stood a great pillar called, "Boaz," on the left side, and a pillar called either, "Joachin," or, "Jacinth," on the other side. In between the two pillars was the gate to the great Temple.

So, in a typical Kabbalistic interpretation, the right-hand-path is ruled by the Day, the Sun, and by the pillar of Joachin or Jacinth. In a typical Kabbalistic interpretation the left-hand-path is ruled by the Night, the Moon and the Stars, and the pillar of Boaz. So now let us look at the right and left hand paths in a more complex interpretation.

So we imagine our dark side. Unlike in Star Wars, the Night is as necessary as the day, and a Temple needs two pillars and not one. In the Kabbalistic Sepher-Yetzirah, it is at least implicit that both the left and right sides of the paths lie on the Tree of Life, and that both paths lead to life and not destruction.

However, there are two distinct traditions. The first is that the right pillar was, is and always will be superior to the left pillar. Period. The second is that whatever those on the right pillar may know in their superior virtue, purity and justice, those on the left pillar - however necessary and even blessed with life (very important, that left path is also salvific!) can never know what those on the right pillar know. It is also explicit in most primary texts regarding Kabbalistic mysticism that those on the left path can never enter the gate to the Temple - ever!

There are also some implications - most likely the Zohar, which I am most familiar with - that those on the left pillar may know things that those on the right pillar do not. However, those on the left pillar remain inferior, forever - regardless of any unique knowlwedge they may have - in the traditional Kabbalistic way of thinking. My sense from the texts I've studied is that to be on a pillar at all is a huge gift, and that next - the pillar chooses you rather than you choosing it.

In other words, it would be El's determination on which salvific path you have come to fit, and not yours. I may be pagan, but El is quite stalwart in his judgments. I know from experience that it does me no good to whine at my maker to change his mind.

Before we go back to Star Wars, let me also say that those chosen by El for a pillar at all in some sense live in two entirely different creations. That is not exact, but it is very close. Those chosen for the right pillar and those for the left do not even live in the same Multiverse - in other words - and when I've run across a true Joachin - the sense I get of that unfamiliarity of dimension is immediate and overpowering.

So now let us return to the Star Wars movies. Let me say first that all six Star Wars movies are good entertainment, and do contain a little more than mere entertainment. I don't have much interest in movies, but I would consider watching the Star Wars movies again. They are religion to some people, and I question that, but I have met some sincere people who saw their world through a lens of Star Wars. That isn't an idiot, it is just a person who thinks very differently from me.

So let us discuss what I call, "the Nightside Path," as this is the path of my own experience. First, we have to remember that the path is salvific, and not a path of degeneration. That would be more like the Sith, who are corrupt and destroy themselves in their own corruption. One thing remains the same, the left hand path is easier and progresses with more speed than the "Path of Day."

Also, many people begin on the Night Path, but its processes can be very insidious and pernicious. The result is that nearly every one who makes a beginning on the Night Path winds up as little more than a sarcoma-ridden corpse in the matter of a few short years. You may laugh - but this is truth to me, and I have seen it first-hand. The bizarre nature of the deaths alone should make people wonder if the government should start keeping actual case-files on supernatural events.

This bit is more obscure, and I have found no primary text to support it, but I believe the pillar of Boaz to be partially split into twilight and true night paths. In the ma'aseh Bereshais, the twilight is not mentioned, and there are not three pillars. Also, it is quite clear that Boaz may never enter the Tabernacle. It is an oft-repeated part of Kabbalistic literature.

So I think it would be correct to say that my twilight path is one ruled by the Moon and the Stars of the night, and by Boaz, yet it is slightly different in character. It is, "LHP," but it is different. I have known 3 and only 3 successful left-hand practitioners of the left pillar of the great Temple. One is myself, and the other two were a strange duo I happened on at around the age of 20 on the now defunct MSN-chat servers.

The first used the handle, SorcererSupreme. SS had been a full member of the now-defunct California OTO, which was fairly large in size. He had obtained the 3rd degree that any member willing to do the grade work in the OTO has a right to, and was stuck in what are called, "the chairs," or the Zero-Four, as they are an honorary fourth degree. The OTO was a very dark organization, but was not wildly obscene as most imagined.

While he was moving through the chairs without much luck, he had encountered a group of African emigres in his area - near San Diego - who were practicing the old shamanism of Palo Mayombe. The group had initiated him to their highest level, and he had rights to a familiar spirit of the old Palo to call his own. In Palo, one chooses a familiar spirit, and it is considered to be the person himself. The person's real name is the name of that spirit.

Sorcerer Supreme got a lot of jokes. The OTO was known for its use of sexual tantra, so you can imagine how that stained his machismo. His work with the Mayombe got a lot of racial African jokes. Also, the Taco Bell jokes were inevitable with the handle "SorcererSupreme." The truth was that SS was very wealthy, quite powerful in the San Diego area, and though he never seemed to notice the insults - beneath a very Californian veneer of a light personality - you did not chase this adder to its den or poke at it with a stick.

The other was a woman who used the name, "OldCrow." Crow made no bones about being well over 60 years old, and she was the blackest witch I have ever met in my entire life. She was that other form of "traditional Satanist," I mentioned. She knew anything about any herb you might mention, and lived around Reno growing some pretty strange little potted plants.

She had also heavily studied the Seal of Brass (not for this blog people!) and I was deathly afraid of her. She was also high-larious, a ton of fun, and shepherded people around in that community almost selflessly. She took the, "hag," jokes without remark, but one time someone did something very wrong in that community - inexcusably wrong - and there were pictures on the news people - of an X-File. I knew the origin of that X-File and everybody who knew about Crow did.

Crow was no joke. She was definitely not twilight, but a total night-sider. I assume she has passed on, but I think Crow - though gothic - had the balance necessary to move on down the Night Path when her body finally gave out. I'm not so sure about SS, though he was at least 48 and had not lost his balance up until that point. I would like to meet OldCrow further down the road, and I certainly wouldn't hesitate to ask for her advice or instruction, even as fearsome as she was.

Another thing to note is that I do have enough balance on "my own path," that I do not fear falling off into an abyss every day. Still - though I may find more importance in certain of my spirits than El, El is stern in judgment, and I if he decides to throw my hide off the tightrope, I won't be arguing much about it - or not with too much effect.

I would like to finish off with something about El and the Jewish tradition. When I think of the principle of creation, he who crafted the world, I think of El, which is Jewish tradition. Yet I'm a pagan. It occurred to me once to pray a prayer that I might be "an exile among Judah."

I think that was a permissible prayer, and I made my best attempt to pray by a name used for the Jewish Lord only in prayer, which it is not even permissible to transliterate into English letters. Further, you are only supposed to write that name in certain texts. It is a very stern passage in the Mishnah, which I feel it is better not to violate.

The meaning of, "exile among Judah," is very specific in rabbinical tradition. It is a blessing, but it also deals with the prophet Daniel. Daniel was not one of the most blessed members of Israel. In fact, Daniel was one of the most cursed members of Israel. Not the most cursed, but among the most cursed by El, the craftsman of creation.

So now imagine: I go to a site on esoteric mysticism. I have chosen a very low status in even my own terms. A secondary path, a secondary tribal membership among Jewry, and the knowledge that yes - I too can fall into that abyss whenever my maker feels pleased to make me fall. Then you - a common swindler - takes these difficult, complex, and very sacred concepts - and not just sacred to me - and bowdlerizes them and tries to swindle me with them. I always wonder where I misplaced my flight-carrier and an Air-to-Surface missile to send directly to the front of your computer desk.

Still - vengeance is a prickly issue, even for one who is on the left-pillar. As a man of Boaz, I have the right to vengeance, but time and time again I hold back my hand. There are two reasons. First, I don't feel its my right to vengeance every time I am slandered. As common as the event has become, I would do nothing in my entire life but grasp at revenge.

Second, I do not tip my full power to anyone. Call that statement psychoses if you want. The few times that I have opened the hand of vengeance, I have opened it just enough and no more. I have never been forced to tip my full hand. That to me is ethical for one of Boaz, and it keeps me balanced enough to walk down the pillar towards life a bit more. In the meantime, will munificent El be done with me? I do not disregard El, but I cannot force his hand. All that I can do is simply wait to see what he judges for me.

So ends this bit, and then I think we'll do the, "Enochian," article next.

Dispelling Disastrous Delusions, Part 2

2009-01-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

Let us move on to the Neo-Pagan movements, and sort of go across some very broad problems and types and discuss the whole mess. It is a huge mess! First, Neo-Paganism could probably be broken down very broadly into two distinct types, which overlap to some degree. Those two disctinct types are "New Age," and "Reconstructionist." The goal with New Age Neo-Paganism is to develop a pagan belief that means something to you in light of New Age teaching or contemporary culture. The goal with reconstructionism is to look at significant archaelogy and re-construct old Pagan practices.

First, reconstructionism as an absolute has to fail, as we live in a different time in a different setting. Absolute reconstructionists are usually merely swindlers, looking to chump someone who wants the,"real deal." However, there are reconstructionists who spend years learning Egyptian heiroglyphs, or old Gaelic languages, or what have you - expensive and time consuming - with the belief that they can draw a more accurate depiction of these pagan beliefs into today.

Where do I stand as a Neo-Pagan. With a foot on both sides and a seat on the fencepost - to some degree. I have heavily studied heavy primary and secondary sources as part of my development of my beliefs, but my beliefs are also a personal belief meant for me alone and influenced by New Age and contemporary culture. I'll discuss a bit more on that somewhere else.

So let us start with WICCA! LOL! Alright, a first thing. The term "Wicca," was a Latin word that probably deserves to be pronounced, "Witch - ah." Still - almost no one pronounces it that way, so - whateva. The word could refer to a midwife in Latin cultures, or it could mean you'd get a mark on your door and a painful public execution.

Even pagan cultures treated witchery and sorcery as a strict taboo. These people might have gone to a witch-doctor for a special trick with a mineral or herb - or even a hex or a simple charm. Still - no matter what civilization on the planet you might name, you wound up dead if things went too far. Just as today, it was a counter-culture and you covered your hiney as best as you could to avoid persecution.

When it comes to the New Age form of Wicca, the best books are the two Solitary Guides by Scott Cunningham, and both of those are still in print on the mass-market. They are pretty fluffy books, but they encourage spirituality and independent thinking, and they also contain some other good materials. There are a few other good books on the market, but we might attack that bit of sod at another time.

In terms of reconstructionist paganism, there are no titles on the "metaphysics shelf." You have to go to either a place on the 'Net where such people congregate - good luck finding any sincerity! - or procure worthwhile primary and secondary texts. There are numerous types: Gnostic, Kemetic (Egyptian), Hellenic, Latinate, Saxon and Celtic, Welsh, and so on and so forth.

Another interesting point is that I had a fairly lengthy set of chats five or six years ago with a woman about my age at the time who was what Kemetic reconstructionists (there is a minimal community) call a Tamera or a Tamerand. This means that the person is involved in Egyptian historical study, but practices a New Age form of belief. I had a lot of admiration for this young woman, and it seems good to note that our counter-culture creates its own pidgeon-holes to disambiguate some of this huge effing mess that Neo-Paganism represents.

Another note is a bit controversial but interesting. There was a super-mod in the very late period at OF who was a halakhic Jew. The kosher laws mostly involve dietary restrictions and hygiene practices, but also include some sexual censures. To be halakhic means to go beyond being kashrut. Being kashrut - literally, "pure," - is plenty of a task enough, but living halakha requires incredible dedication. This is true even understanding that the man was not even able to practice all of halakha. However he practiced it as best as he could, and according to halakha that is all that is required to be halakha.

One of the things about Talmud is that you can find everything in there from Greek paganism to the rites of Molech to fables to kosher law - and so on and on for over 50 volumes for both sets of volumes of Talmud. The decision-maker as to what is halakha in Talmud is made by the Mishnah, and sorcery is strictly forbidden to a Jew if he or she doesn't want to stop being a Jew and gain a very harsh form of perdition.

However, there is some breathing-room as to what is halakhic and what is not in the Mishnah, and this man was very involved in studying that breathing room in the Talmud. The man had enough Aramaic to study both sets of volumes of Talmud fairly extensively. He knew both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Hebrew backwards and forwards, which differ significantly enough to cause major trouble in trying to switch back and forth. He also had a mass of knowledge of both mystical texts like the Zohar (in the original Aramaic!) and traditional Jewish texts - like the Mishnah and the Midrashim.

The thing about this man was that he was - gothic. I mean just terrifying. He lived a life of purity that most monks could not hold to, but I mean - terrifying in his visage. Still - I admired that guy, and almost no scholars in America had his kind knowledge of Judaism and its related languages. I'd pay that 100 dollars flat down for some documents from that individual as well. He was amazing!

Further, he was interested in two Egyptian concepts, and I don't know how these fall in halakha, though these are not negative concepts. The first is called, "Ma'at," and it would have translated from Egyptian as "right justice." As hard and cruel as the Egyptians' lives were, they believed that a right justice governed their world.

The other is called, "Xeper," probably pronounced "Skeh - peir," although the diphthongs are a bit tough to manage. It literally meant, "rolling," and was an Egyptian concept something like, "growth," or "building," or, "evolution," or "process," or "progress." Just as "evolution," would have made no sense to an Egyptian, "Xeper," can't really translate well to us. Still - one of the reasons for their reverence of the scarab was that it, "rolled," its little balls of dung along, and this was associated with "Xeper."

That pretty much finishes up a broad look at the Neo-Pagan dung-heap. There are sincere people out there who are interested in Neo-Paganism now, but they mostly do like I am doing here. They stay away from online communities, run closed websites and stick to themselves. This is because the Golden Age was mostly a scam, and now all sincerity seems to have entirely evaporated.

I'm going to check the articles at the sites for a previous Big Al article. Then we shall attack, "Thelema," in the way that I understand it for myself today. One of the best things about Thelema as a principle is that whether Crowley stuck to it or not in his own life, the whole principle behind Thelema is independence of thought and action, and so we shall see.

I also want to do a disambiguation on talking about, "our path," in the occult underground, This is a very hackneyed and overused term among us - usually for, "I will now feed you chump so that you will send me an un-secured platinum card number," or sometimes, "you will now sit and listen to my psychotic delusions for a long period of time." I will see how I want to do this, because both articles are more than worth doing.

I also want to dispel some delusions about John Dee, Edward Kelly, and the Enochian Magic(k) System. Plenty of time, we'll see where I decide to head with this.

The Occult Underground: Dispelling Disastrous Delusions

2009-01-18T08:38:00.000-08:00

It is natural for people to have some superstition. We have our favorite-gig-t-shirt, or a lucky pen, or we're sure we were in a house that was haunted at least once. We might have an attraction to vampires - we might find ourselves very firmly rooted in an old religious tradition - whatever it might be. So no matter how rational the individual, a person has some problems with their understanding of causation. "I always play a good gig in that t-shirt," or whatever it is.

Another note is that while our culture is not very religious by old standards, there is still a sense of, "nominal christianity." In other words, "I'm not Christian, but only crazy people talk that way." As a culture, we still hang on certain taboos, no matter how secular and scientific our world has become.

So let us start out with - Satanism. If you mention it, your nominal Christians get the willies, or people may assume you are making a threat, like, "I have Satanist connections, and hordes of Satanists are going to get you if you try to chump me." Whatever it might be. I've met a host of nuts not often found in the mixed nuts tin, and I've met some pretty interesting Satanists over the years. So let us start by dispelling the delusions about Satanism. Believe what you want, but in the counter-culture, this is the reality.

First off, most Satanists one runs into on the 'Net are what is called, "LaVeyan Satanists." LaVey was a New Age cult leader in LA of what was called the "Church of Satan," in the chaos of the late 70's, and his ideas are the core principles for the LaVeyan Satanist. The whole LaVeyan Satanist ideal could be summed up as, "I take care of myself and my own," and a sort of bare - yet magical - form of pantheism. Pantheism is the belief that the natural order is a deity of some sort.

Your big problem with LaVeyans is three-fold. First, LaVeyan Satanism is highly connected with the Aryan nation movement. Second, a lot of LaVeyans tweak. Third, even LaVeyans who can be trusted are, "muscle" types - hackmasters - and they can be meatheads - even when they are worth your time.

I understand here - okay? - we are discussing something that a religious conservative finds appalling offensive. Further, even if you are not a religious conservative, these are not mainstream ideas or behavior and it has a tendency of throwing people off. I'm not trying to encourage Satanism, but instead lay out a sort of anecdotal record of these nuts from my lifetime of mixed nuts tins.

The second broad form of Satanist is usually called the, "Simonist," Satanist. There was a book released maybe 10 years ago that took some ideas from Sumerian mythology and was published under the name of "The Necronomicon." The translation from Latin for "necronomicon," is roughly, "book of dead names," and the book was a central part of Lovecraft the H.P.'s "Cthulhu Mythos," stories, a group of his short stories where all of the short stories are staged in a very similar setting.

Many people argue with the Simonists as to the veracity of the Simon 'Nomicon. The basic arguments are that Simon borrowed rather liberally from Sumerian mythology and that Lovecraft's "Necronomicon," was a fictional book invented - as far as we can discern - by Lovecraft himself. Most Simonist's simply answer that while these things may be true, they find the Simon 'Nomicon to be central to their own counter-culture meta-religious practices, and that they aren't worried if the document has any real sources in antiquity - or further - any reality at all!

The third form is Luciferianism. What I've seen is that the two Luciferians I've met were entirely different, that both were oddballs, that both were real smart, and that both were incredibly ironic and shocking personalities. One of the Luciferians I've met was a woman in her late 30's, and the other was Luciferi. There is no central text for Luciferianism, and Konstantinos' "Luciferian Witchcraft," did not get high-marks from either of the Luciferians I met. This is a population of size 2, but that much was consistent for my population study.

The only other type of Satanism I've ever run up against is called, "Traditional Satanism." The simplest way of putting this is, "Christianity is right, but I side with the dark lord!" (RAHR!?) This doesn't make sense, since if Christianity is right, you are going to pay worse than you can imagine for serving the dark lord. Among the LaVeyans, the saying goes, "Never trust a traditional," and the LaVeyans with their self-serving, "might is right," - kind of mentality despise this and other more baroque versions of counter-culture meta-religious belief.

There is also traditional Satanism that looks more towards previous pagan beliefs as other Neo-Pagans might do, but with less emphasis on the fluff and more emphasis on the barbarism. That type of Satanism is extremely uncommon, but I've met one and only one worth talking to back when I was about 20 years old and nothing but a pup. I'll get to that in the next article as we have too many delusions to dispel for one article. So we will have to do a split.

A Tribute to the Ghosts of OF Past

2009-01-18T07:50:00.000-08:00

I thought I would do an article about "Occult Forums," a site that is still just barely up, that I was involved in going back to around 21, which was almost ten years ago. I recall the site when it was on a sort of "ez-board," type of service. I had just dived into Mark Hedsel's "The Zelator," and was looking for information on what is called, "epoptic symbolism," when I happened on the site at this dependent-forum base in a google search.

The next move was to an independent ISP, when the Admin's of OF ran the "Golden Age of OF," and the NORA site - or National Occult Research Association. The NORA collected post-copyrighted or original contributions - most of those contributions being from OF members. The next era was when OF was flooded by Canadian members, which I called the "'Nadian Age of OF." After that OF barely ran, and it is still up and barely running.

Today I'm aware of forum scams, and most people are. There are a set few types of these scams and most people are aware of all of those types. If you aren't, you will have to get old and cagey and learn the hard way - as I did. However, even at the time, I knew that about 9 out of 10 people at even the Golden Age of OF were simply at OF to lie and cause trouble and were not interested in the New Age or "occult research," - at all. That much my rather poorly operating brain caught on to quite quickly.

Probably the first individual to mention was Rev. Rev was a super-mod at the OF forums, and mostly Rev deleted spam, deleted offensive posts, edited offensive posts, and banned offensive members from the rolls. In short, Rev spent most of his time doing what a super-mod of a forum ought to be doing. Rev was pretty much running OF single-handedly, simply because he put a great deal of time and effort into the forum.

The thing was, that there would be a thread, and Rev would drop a solid paragraph in. Then I would be left thinking, "I am indeed scenting a reality. This guy knows something worth knowing." Rev was very quiet, an authority figure people loved to hate, and not a guy who I would have wanted to see scuttle the Tornadoes armed with their exocets.

I would love to turn that guy up today. I've got 100 dollars worth of Christmas money, and I'd be willing to pay the entire dollar amount in hard money for a few e-mails or documents from the guy. He was an amazing man.

The second guy was Caradoc. Caradoc was an esoteric Christian and a native of Wales. Part one, people love to hate on Christians just because they are Christian, and Caradoc did not back down on his profession of faith even once. Part two, from what I understand, most of the UK's massive welfare state goes to Wales today.

Remember, the UK is pretty big, and Wales isn't much bigger than Rhode Island. Apparently somewhere around 60 or 70% of the UK's welfare rolls that goes to this teeny area of the UK. The joke is, "We don't even know how the welshers waste so much money!"

So Caradoc took a lot of heat. Caradoc was near 60, or perhaps over 60, did not lie about his age, and had metastatic cancer. He had been in a wheelchair 10 years, and had been given 6 months to live 6 years before I met him. He was a tough SOB, and he was a real grump. Also, Caradoc was all-heart. He just loved people and he just loved helping them out.

Now remember, just as Wales is a sorry problem today, on the other hand these same Welsh used to impale Roman legions by the hordes with a longbow, and that wasn't all it was with the Welsh either. Caradoc was all-heart, and consequently - people made the mistake of trying to chump him.

Caradoc might have been an old, terminally ill, Christian, Welsh grump, but he was no one's chump. People were looking for the crag where Caradoc was impaling them from when his back was finally up, and the spirits bless Caradoc! He has probably passed away today, and boy would I like to turn that old boy up as well.

Well, the Golden Age ended, and the 'Nadian Age arrived. One very noteworthy individual of that era, which was a good time, was still floating around under his old handle even a year ago, "Nuhad418." My one critique of Nuhad was that his largest influence was the Big Al, commonly known as Alleister Crowley. However, as much as I may have disagreed with Nuhad, he wrote in English, had academic training, and was willing to discuss disagreements with respect and rationality. I liked Nuhad, whatever my disagreements with him may have been - or whatever they may continue to be.

I have a full article on Crowley, and it could use revision in light of some of my latest work, but I would like to get my ducks in a row and see if I've published an earlier version at the site. To be honest, there are two or three of Crowley's principles that remain very important to me today, but I do not feel I need to make time for Crowley's actual texts in my studies. Nuhad and I rip phonebooks apart in private when we come into contact, but we've never had to get out the artillery either.

Another personality worth mentioning is Frater Luciferi. "Frater," in Latin is not "Father," it is "brother." "Pater," was the most common Latin word for "father." Frater Luciferi was one of the two people I have ever met in my life who even claimed to be a Luciferian. He was a performance-artist and used to post photos and short clips of his shows - the guy was way bizarre!

Also, Luciferi read the Bible constantly. He was a proponent of a fairly common Gnostic belief that the serpent arrived and gave the apple to Adam and Eve to give them knowledge to free them from their tyrannical creator. He also believed that Christ was one of Lucifer's "avatars," and had come to the earth for the same reason. Some of this he did just to wind Christians up and be an SOB, but I think these were some of his actual beliefs.

If I'm remembering right, Luciferi considered himself a direct descendant of Angelic blood, or in Otherkin terms, "Angelkin." The great thing about Luciferi was that he was every bit the image of a Luciferian Angel, just sneaky and mocking and cunning - also a great guy - and a very bizarre guy. I haven't seen him or any of his masks recently, but he was worth knowing - very interesting type of guy.

That about sums up what is on the top of my head about OF at the moment. I talked about superbook at the other blog, and the next article will bring up some more interesting points about what exactly the, "occult underground," is - and it does exist.

Configurations 2: Part 3, The Furry Fetish and Otherkin

2009-01-11T04:08:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to beat the gloom here, so let me talk about what has to be the most ridiculous part of my own personal beliefs, and that is that I actually dig - Otherkin. The Otherkin movement - as far as I know - is maybe 8 or 9 years old. There isn't any book on the market about the topic.

Most Otherkin-afficiandoes are what is called a, "furry," meaning that they have a fetish surrounding an animal of some sort. Usually it will be a fetish for some kind of animal suit or an animal-plushie of some kind. In general, the Otherkins I have met have not seemed to be the malignant type of fetishist. The malignant type of fetishist is definitely the most common type of fetishist. It is the 'Net and you can't know for sure. However, these people are definitely oddballs, pretty silly in many ways, but they seem to be basically okay - and that seems to be about average.

The basic idea with Otherkin is that most people, or everyone, has a deep attachment with some animal, and that as an Otherkin, you are an animal in human form. I may have written something somewhere else about this, but it may have been on a forum, and who knows? So many Otherkin might see themselves as a sort of mythical form of that animal - the Japanese kitsune for example - which was a malignant fox-spirit. The Japanese feared foxes because they were quite cunning and hard to trap, and could kill livestock or a small child, and so the kitsune figure developed.

The Otherkin movement is one of my tribes, and I'm not a fetishist really. I am pretty 'nilla about sexuality today. A nice, voluptuous curve and some 'nilla is all that eroticism is today to me in - so many ways. Sure, the Clive Barker books and so on - but really. That is real.

So if we haven't done it, let us now do our dog myth from the Hopi tradition. Part of this is that the Native Americans saw an animal as having a ruling spirit with a certain character. For dogs, that was called, "Dog."

So the Great Spirit hunts all over his creation, looking for the wisest and best animal who is in his creation. He finds Dog, humble and wise and sincere. He offers to Dog that he give him the greatest gift of his spirit. Dog tells the Great Spirit that he is too humble for the gift. "So then who should have it?", the Great Spirit asks Dog. "Why don't you give your greatest gift to the worst animal in creation, which is you know who?" the dog replies. "You know who?" - is man and woman.

So let us finish off with Gwyd the fool. My absolute favorite animal is a snake. I've been around a lot of snakes - animals in this case - and they are very interesting animals to me, and I feel a kinship with them. They are very aloof, and very sneaky, "most cunning of all the animals," is not purely religion. In general, what I've seen is that constricting snakes are more aggressive, and also that smaller snakes are more aggressive.

Also, snakes get very aggressive and stinky when they are molting, and just before, and right after - they molt. They eat next to nothing, and they are an inactive animal that mostly sleeps. They love to blissfully lie on a rock and sunbathe when they sense no predators in their territory. They live in a very large number of different geographies.

My favorite snake is called the Lachesis Melanochephala. I've gotten all the tags and things right now, and it took a lot of research to do it. They are commonly called either, the "Great Copperhead," or the "Bushmaster Copperhead." The first name is because they are the largest American copperhead snake. The second name is because they live in the Andean mountains in Chile, and they warren in the clay beneath the small amount of shrubbery in that area.

The Lachesis is also a diamond-back copperhead, one of the very few. The copperhead is a viper-species found only in the Americas. The common North American-copperhead is a plenty-dangerous snake, and they live all over the place in North America. The Lachesis is dangerous, but it is mostly large and sluggish. It would really prefer to just go back into the warren underneath its shrub - even if it is being toyed with and it is angry.

The basic lifestyle for the Lachesis is to be inactive for long periods, then to go out and eat some mountain mice or rats, eat a little brush for its gullet, sun itself some, and then go back into its warren for another inactive period. Like many reptiles, the Lachesis lives for a lengthy lifespan, but that is about all this snake ever does. It is large, but it doesn't eat very large prey. All vipers are quite territorial, and the Lachesis is no exception - but its territory is usually a couple hundred yards-square. A very humble clay-crawler of a snake.

Alright, so just to finish off, I guess the way to put it is that I see "Snake," as a spirit who rules over snake animals, to be one of my own ruling spirits, and I also feel a real deep kinship with that Lachesis Melanocephala. I imagine sometimes that my, "rutts," are from a genaeology founded by serpents. Even for me that is wild, and I imagine it sometimes, and other times - it is simply nothing but silliness. It is one of my personal myths, and it is something I love.

My two other favorite animals, just to finish up, are the Brown-Necked Raven, and the Andean Condor. Both are also homely animals. Ravens are a great deal like crows, but they are a larger and solitary bird. They mostly eat carrion. The Brown-Necked Raven has this tufted brown-mane against the usual raven-black feathers.

Vultures and condors are ugly, disease-infested carrion eaters, but they have these incredible spiked wings and they are majestic in flight. The European vulture and the American condor are nearly entirely different, but they are usually classified in the same broad family. Condors are far less aggressive, and they are far better at flying. They have a huge wing-span, and spend most of their lives in flight. They fly their territory, eating next to nothing, until they find some carrion to eat. Condors are also a very solitary bird.

Also - this is such a funny image - if a condor has won a big find, its stomach is too full for it to fly. Like any flying bird, it can't walk too well. When a human is around, Condors get scared, and they can't fly off in this state, so this majestically-flying, disease-infested carrion-eater will attempt to hobble away from the human. It is worse than that. You should hear how vultures and condors keep their feet cool in desert sun as they eat their finds. I won't go into it. Animals are great.

Alright, I need to call my Dad, and we will see what the day brings. Lay-tah.

In Nomine, The Land of Doom, and the Death of My Role-Playing Career

2009-01-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

I've talked about how I'll never play a role-playing game again, and I want to tell the whole story why. First, I was never a big video-game player, although there were a few video games that I played to death because I was interested in them, and wanted to figure them out. Only one of those games was a video-role-playing game. The reason I like playing role-playing games is that it was a kind of social-improvisational theater. You created a character, and you and your fellow players would create a drama together, with the game-master as the head.

What started happening is that no matter how light the topic of our games, or no matter how much fun we were having, you would sit down at the table and begin to enter a land of doom. It was like Pavlov's dogs. No matter how the game went, something was wrong as soon as you sat down at the table. I can't explain why that is, and it has nothing to do with my beliefs about spirits or visions. My group and I were playing professional-level games, and no-one - except you know who - in my group was a psychopath, but something was wrong.

So we start with the two tales that end my role-playing career. First, I was known in my group as a great gamemaster for Call of Cthulhu. One of the friends in my group used to run a fright-night Cthulhu game on Halloween, and those were always good nights. One of the first years, we re-enacted a Dawn of the Dead horror scenario. Lots of zombie splatter, and a good Halloween night. Another year, we did a sort of end-of-the-world scenario.

My character got killed long before the scenario ended, and I was mad, but it made good sense. I had taken a mortal wound from a tasty-weird Lovecraftian monster, the group found a first-aid kit and bandaged me up, but without better medical treatment in a Lovecraftian world, my character would die quickly, and he did. I hadn't lost a character in years, but I sat back, and it was a good remainder of the game - even as an observer.

A Cthulhu game is supposed to run like a murder-mystery, but none of my players were really into that, so I mastered what I generally called, "uber-Cthulhu," which included a lot of combat and so forth. I drew my material from a great many sources, including Lovecraft the H.P. and today I look back and say, "I tried very hard to control my material and not go overboard with the game. It is a horror game, we played maybe 10 scenarios out of the campaign, and it was meant to frighten. Did I or didn't I go beyond the invisible boundary line?"

I still don't know, but my own GM'ing of that game was one of the first obvious signs that I needed to quit role-playing. The next was the real ender and it was In Nomine. I had read some Steve Jackson game-books when I was young, and I knew Steve Jackson was a maniac. I read through the core-book, and it was amazing. The setups for the characters were amazing, it was a streamlined system that needed few charts or extended calculations, there were some ways for characters to use their powers in concert with one another. Amazing material, but I was not sold on playing the game, and I never should have played the game.

One of the last games I ever role-played, if not the last is an interesting story. A guy I knew in High School who I hated and who hated me was friends with a guy in the group. He was not very successful in High School, but he had totally changed and had become a good man. He worked hard, and he was no fool. We had hashed out our differences, and I consider the guy a friend, though it's been years since I've seen him.

He had role-played a handful of times, and no more. He made the easiest character to play in In Nomine, and role-played it perfectly. We laughed our way through the game. It was a fun time - or so it seemed. However, at the end of that game I talked with that man and he was angry that he had been lured into the game, and he said, "never again." I agreed whole-heartedly. It isn't because of my personal religion, but this is the rational truth - there was something wrong with that game.

There are other games I could list - anything that says Palladium books on it would be worth listing. They probably still sell those core-books and it makes me pale to think about it. Go look at the cover for the Rifts corebook or the Nightgaunts corebook. This goes way beyond Lovecraft the H.P. The core-theme for the Rifts games is amazing, but not even me. Not even me.

There are two more stories and then we'll be done for a while. First, I was playing with a different group, and the guy mastering was a really great GM. He asked me about playing the Zelazny diceless-role-playing game. My response was, "Look, I'll play a diceless game if the mechanics work, but I'm not comfortable with Zelazny." I had read some Zelazny as a young man, and the answer to anything Zelazny was, "no way." No thank you.

Here are two final stories, and it makes you wonder. A buddy of mine managed to go to Gen-Con, which is one of the largest role-playing, war-gaming and comic-book conventions held in the country. The same people who made Cthulhu's corebooks had a game out called, "Nephilim." I'm not going to say much, but the game was a bit like In Nomine, as it was both amazing, and "dead wrong."

So my friend steps up to the table to try, "Nephilim," and he pays 30 dollars to get up to the table - somewhere around there. My friend told me that the man GM'ing was a retired professor of English history. The man might have been a swindler, but I think it might have been real. My friend joked in one of his typical ways - that his response to the game after about 5 minutes was, "Uhm... I feel as if I'm actually performing occult rituals, instead of playing a game about the supernatural..." He left the table and ate the thirty dollars after that five minutes.

Last story. There was a FASA game called Shadowrun, which mixed cyber-punk and fantasy elements, and the background of the game was great, but the engine was terrible. The engine was terrible because the core-engine was the Battletech engine, and that engine was no good for a role-playing game. I had mentioned to my friends - who had been Shadowrunning some - that the best Shadowrun module - and the best module ever made for an rpg - in my own opinion - was an old-skool Runner module called, "The Face of the Harlequin."

So I happened by the gaming store a few months later and was grunging through the bargain bin, and there it was - "The Face of the Harlequin," in a grungy but readable copy. The module was so good that I could have used the material in a different game, but I left that thing behind, and it cost a dollar and a half. It was right out of a horror-flick. Don't go into the basement Gwyd! Don't!

So that is the story. The improvisational-theater and the social-storytelling aspects of rpg's are wonderful. However, just sitting here and re-counting these stories I feel as if I am sitting down at the table again and entering a land of doom. I want to stay away from my personal beliefs about a visionary, mythical world in this case and tell you - there was something developing in those games that still scares me and makes the room darker - just to think of it.

We were not a black-dog roleplaying group either. I don't know, but that is how it ended for me. I love constructing worlds and GM'ing, and I even like playing characters in rpg's, but "never, never again." I've built campaign settings that beat anything but the original Gygax Greyhawk setting to bits. I could put some money in my pocket, but, "never, never again."

I've got to call my Dad here in maybe 45 minutes, but I may do another article here to finish off for this part of the day. To finish off - for a lot of intelligent young people, rpg's are a good outlet, but you need to see the signs and quit when it comes. I worry about my old group, because they didn't seem to be matching the number. It is scary, and I can't explain it. We were no black-dog group, I never LARP'ed, and we weren't a kool-aid cult. What exactly was it?

Swords that Ain't D&D

2009-01-09T03:27:00.000-08:00

LOL! I wasn't sure where to put this piece, as it deals with martial arts, but it deals with weaponry, mostly swords, and there will be no weapons training in, "the Work of Completion," not even a true martial-arts form - and after wondering if the more general "Don't Write Well," blog might be better - I'm still going to stash the piece here. A sentence in English of which Dickens might take pride! By the way - Dickens is still the best novelist in English letters.

So - let us take your run-of-the-mill, min/maxed "bastard sword, vorpal +5, soul-reaving," or whatever nonsense it is you rp'ers role out there. I will never rpg again, and there will be a further post on that, but I enjoyed the games, and there is plenty of room to be silly. However, my eyebrows will raise if you pick the min/maxed-bs as one of my players.

In actuality, the bastard sword was a slightly shorter Scottish-claymore with a haft shorter by scale by a good bit. The design was far superior to the claymore, but by the time the design came along, muskets arrived very quickly, and that was the end of the need for such swords. The function of a claymore type-sword was for the footman (AKA a slave who will wind up dead in any battle) and it was really a great big machete. To use another metaphor, it was a great big hatchet with a very long range.

Now, the Scots were mean with a claymore - I mean really - really mean, but the claymore used in combat was generally some lead or some copper formed into a rough-sword shape to be used as a battle-ax. They required very little skill to use, and that was a benefit, and they had a long range. When I was in Edinburgh, I saw many ceremonial claymores, and these were generally mostly of silver, but these beautiful blades were mostly for political rites or other ceremonies.

There were four other basic types of blades actually used in combat, and our fourth is only a possibility. The first was the rapier, (the rah-pee-ay) and it required a great deal of skill to use, but was no good against armored troops, and was therefore mostly used in duels between nobility, or to nod a wonderful woman I knew, in stage drama in a safer form.

However - think of fencing, where the safer epee (eh-pay) form of a rapier is used. They are constantly scoring double points, and the scores are so rapid you can miss the point if you blink. What this meant is that many rapier duels ended in a double-kill, and as a noble I might have sucked in my pride and avoided such a duel as, "discretion is the better part of valor."

The next was a saber, and in general a saber was a shorter-range version of this garbage-metal blade, again used as a machete. However, the saber took little skill to use, and other than ceremonial swords, some cultures spent insane funds and time forging incredibly sharp and deadly sabers. One example is in the Arab nations, and the other more famed one is among the Japanese Samurai.

In the Arab nations, a combat saber of high-quality had a deep curve, and used a bronze alloy that was sharp enough to defy our knowledge of bronze. The bronze was very deep and coppery in color, and that saber was a mean, tough SOB. It required some skill to use, and the Arabs developed a very sophisticated martial-art around the saber.

So we must dispel some delusions about the japanese katana-saber. A combat saber of high-quality in Japan was pattern-welded, and the process was so involved that not many such blades were made. Most samurai had no access to such a saber.

The pattern-welding process used in the katana was just as good as that used to make Renaissance pattern-welded longswords, which we will discuss in a later paragraph, and those Japanese sabers were so incredibly sharp that it defies the mind. That is real.

Also, like any saber, it doesn't take a great deal of skill to fight with a saber, but the Japanese Feudal era was more at war than Feudal Europe, and the sophistication of the Japanese sword-fighting of the time also defies the mind. That form of kendo is illegal in Japan today, and has most likely disappeared.

The next sword is one of my favorites - this is a bit vicious - and it was the Saxon broadsword. The Saxon broadsword was bronze and it was pattern-welded out of three cables made of wires. The cables were not so easy to make, but once they were made, this was the simplest form of pattern-welding in history. It followed that since the Saxons were a small tribe, that most Saxon warriors had such a broadsword, and even made of junk-bronze, they were real sharp.

The Saxon broadsword was no D&D mockup either. It was about two feet or so long, and maybe 8 inches wide, and the cabling made it have these tongues between the rods where the rods had been forged together. You're saying, "that dorky short-sword I saw in a book somewhere." That would be your mutilator. That is the true broadsword.

One of the great advantages of a saber is that it has a single edge. A two-edged blade can lead to a tendency to cut yourself while trying to cut your enemy, and this means that a two-edged blade requires a great deal of training to use. The Saxons were not known as a pleasant, gentle tribe of people and fought wars all the time, and you either sank or swam - in a pool of blood. People could lose limbs to these broadswords, and you could also impale an enemy on one, and the Saxons had a well-deserved reputation as a result.

Interesting historical trivia is that there is evidence of these Saxons in the Nordic and Baltic regions and the English Isles, and then evidence of the tribe evaporates. The most likely end to that tale is that they were a small tribe, and people got tired of missing limbs and impaled dead bodies and annihilated them.

I forgot a category, which was the Roman gladius. One of the funny things is that the Romans armed their basic legions with a version of the Greek phylae spear usually made of nothing but lead, a large square shield, and then a gladius usually made mostly of lead. The gladius was a sword about the length of that Saxon broadsword, and it was very simply a machete. It was a hackmaster.

However, even though the Romans used junk materials for the gladius, they carefully weighted them to fire forward. Consequently, the Romans terrorized people with far more advanced weapons for centuries with that gladius. The Romans were a very interesting people, and my own take on the classical Latins deserves an article somewhere - on some day.

Our final category was the pattern-welded Renaissance longsword. We're not sure if they were ever used in combat, although the examples in our museums are certainly plenty deadly. The pattern-welding process was long, arduous, and required highly-refined iron and high forge temperatures. We could do it today, but we have no need for such weapons. These Renaissance blades are sharper than any razor you will ever see in your life.

What makes one wonder if they were ever used in combat is their design. First, they were that sharp and they were double-edged. Second, the blades were quite flexible and the blades were nearly 4 feet long. If anyone ever used that sword in combat, they must have been trained from the age of a very young child, and there couldn't have been many of those blades made. You should do a google/image search for a Renaissance blade, as the glory of the artistry and design of these swords is breathtaking.

Still - there is no other form of longsword that would have had any advantages at a close range over a sabre or a Saxon broadsword that was ever known to be designed and forged. The Saxon broadsword was used for only a very short period of time, as the pattern-welding process - though reasonably crude - evaporated along with the Saxon tribe. The world has changed today, and it is probably good we no longer pull tasty-Saxon broadsword tricks on one another. Even the Mongols - who still love archery and their horses - hardly skirmish at all with each other anymore, and of course, the rest of us have APC's, grenades, assault rifles and tanks.

Let me just finish off with some things on archery. The Mongols who have a right to use a horse - they are those well-bred ponies I mentioned - get in the saddle very young, and the Mongols were the only people who used to fire short-bows from a galloping horse with some great accuracy. That was how they terrorized the Romans, was with their short-bow cavalry.

Another interesting piece is the longbow. Only two cultures in the world ever used the longbow, one being the Welsh - the only tribe on the English Isles that had them - and then the late Feudal Japanese. Wales is not dissimilar in some ways from parts of Japan, with these high crags interspersed by low valleys.

The longbow could wreck havoc from perhaps a half a mile away, and was not used anything like a shortbow. It was primitive artillery. The Roman legions who fought the Welsh would again and again be caught trying to find what crag the Welsh were impaling most of their legionaires with longbow artillery from.

For some reason, the Romans didn't high-jack the longbow, and neither did any other tribe of the English Isles. Some of that is geography, as it was a great weapon for such geography, and not for much anyplace else. Still, it befuddles a bit as to why some of these histories ended up as they did.

Oh and one last piece. The true ultimate short-range combat weapon is a combat knife. The advantage of the sword for times before the musket over a single-edged knife - not a dagger - was only because the sword gave one a longer reach in terms of range. The dagger was usually for post-battle clean up duty, or sometimes for duels. There was also the stilleto, which was simply a spike with a hilt, and that was a mean one as well.

Again - I remember the Ghurkas were at their stations in Edinburgh with their bali-songs when I visited. The Ghurkhas are from Burma and are very loyal to the United Kingdom, and they are one of the UK's shock troops. They fight using a version of Kali Eskrima, and bali-song means something like "the song of my knife." These are pretty scary people, and they all number at about 5 feet four inches.

Kali Eskrima is illegal to be taught in the states, even with rods for practice, and do not be fooled that you can safely train in Kali Eskrima. You will get hurt. What these Ghurkas can do with a bali-song is something I have never witnessed, but apparently it defies the mind. They of course do use modern weapons as part of their military duties, but they retain their traditional bali-songs - which are sacred to them.

The problem with a single-edged knife in combat is the same as with a rapier. Actually, it's worse, as two men with a knife usually never do anything but kill both of each other. The single-edged knife is also hard to use well. There are also combat knives superior in design to the bali-song. The reason the Ghurkas use their version is because of tradition.

The single-edged knife makes my jokes about Saxons look really pretty. The combat knife is a tool of butchery. However, the Ghurkas are noble people, and I mean no offense, but this is an ugly weapon.

In the states, a combat-knife or training with one is illegal unless you are in the military. A small buck-knife is legal to carry on your person - I mean small - and that is not a bad idea for self-defense. A can of pepper-spray is also not a bad idea - even for a man - if you have to move through parking garages or other unsafe areas. So we finish off another article, and now we will move along to the isometrics article at the other cross-blog "What is the Work?" - after another short break.

Configurations 2: Part 2

2009-01-08T23:49:00.000-08:00

So for the sake of clarity, let us cut and paste our 3 bullet points from our last article:

1. The Aryan mentality of a "world-as-myth."
2. Myself as within the tradition of Western religious dissent.
3. My own cosmos and my own work on cosmology as a marginalized point of view.

So I don't want to wander too much in this piece, and cosmologies have a wonderful tendency to wander. It may be that we end up with a third piece to this article, but we'll begin with one of my tribes, New Age, and we can all only outwardly groan at the moniker but it is a fit. Gothic and New Age, and then we'll move on to some more ancient materials. We will see how far I want to go with this early this morning, but more is yet to come.

New Age

1. The Michael Teachings.
2. Spiritualism.
3. Post-modern literature. (I'm being mischievous, but there is a further reason for this point.)
4. The Toltec Way.
5. The Otherkin Movement.

The Michael Teachings were channeled materials from the late 70's, and they were the inspiration for Gary Gygax's original Dungeons and Dragons game. The Michael Teachings' basic concept was called, "the Overleaves System," and the basic idea was that each person had a vocation that was inborn, whether warrior, or sage, or priest or king and that the person would then choose an attractive vocation to complement their inborn vocation to work on throughout their lives.

I am sort of re-working the material, and I like the material a great deal. I guess it should be said that it isn't my intent to say that life is a D&D game where we have, "classes," but this is material that I is part of my own personal beliefs. My own choices for vocations are, "warrior and sage," and the choice of Gwydion as a name is because of the fact that in Celtic and Saxon myth, Gwydion was a, "skald," - a warrior and a poet. He was not so much a deity as a demi-god or a folk hero, and his character was that of a fool, a trickster, and a demon, which is a common convergence in old mythology.

In terms of spiritualism, I am a man who lives in a world of visions and spirits. I usually use names like Hades or An to represent a concept - Death, or Annihilation, respectively. However, there is also the side to myself that sees these concepts as a spirit, and not merely the representation of some complex concept.

In my own way of looking at it, the existent-universe begins as An - total annihilation - a being that is no-being. I usually refer to An as a feminine spirit, and also as "mother An," or "the mother of abysses," or "the mother of voids." Then, and this comes from the traditional Jewish Zohar - a rather unusual traditional Kabalistic text - El both creates creation, and El creates himself. El creates his own creation and himself in the "womb of An." El as a principle is the principle of, "creation."

I divide spirits into two basic triads, which are day, night and twilight - and masculine, feminine, and transgender. To me, both An, who is feminine, and El, who is masculine, have a special precedence, although I fit An into, "feminine and night," and El into, "masculine and day." I do very little in terms of invoking spirits anymore, though that was once a big part of my life. Now I just stick to my new-agey affirmations.

Still, to me An was first and is the true omnipotent, as even El cannot overcome her void in the act of his creating, and El is the lord of what he created - which is everything existent, including his own self as the principle of creation. It is not too different from mystical Judaism, although it is different. Further, no spirit is, "unclean," though this does not mean that any spirit cannot be destructive, even if it were categorized as a, "day spirit."

The post-modern literature part is that I have taken this personal reading of these myths and inter-textualized them. Most of my poetry is "new form,"-poetry at this point in my life, meaning that there are complex forms created for each piece individually, and from time to time I use old metrical and verse patterns, though usually with a very different take on the old forms.

I have a real love of the sestina, and many of my "new forms," contain odd-numbered stanza sets contrasted with your typical four-line stanzas. I have a real love of blank-verse as well, and my latest work contrasts rhymed-lines with blank-verse lines, and uses contrasting line-meters against the iambs to create a sense of enjambment without the look of an enjambment on the page. Also, many of my rhymed lines end with the same word, an, "exact rhyme," instead of a, "perfect rhyme," and this creates both a primitivist sense, and also a sense of a shifting repetition.

I also use consistent parallelisms and avoid language that refers only to modern things like cars - or what have you - in order to create a sense of primitivism in my work. Further, each of my completed works, or as complete as I get them, will have a carefully chosen pen-name and an invented back-story for the person who penned the volume. The author of these works will be a character of my own invention.

That is called - "meta-fiction," and I do enjoy the obfuscation, but part of it is to envision the work from a point of view just outside my own - or to the degree that I am able to accomplish such a shift of my point of view. Each of the characters has their own subject for their work, and each has a different writing style that fits the aesthetic of the work. I don't have multiple personalities, but it is an aesthetic I am choosing to use for every one of my completed works.

Even in my diary work I tell a tall-tale or two about my own biography. A wart of my own is that I do enjoy the obfuscation. However - it is my own diary - and I feel I have the right to tell myself tall-tales in my diary.

I will re-tell a very favorite story of mine, and then we'll have to just split configurations 2 into a third part. Picasso was in his 50's, and was noted as a historical visual artist. Picasso was not incredibly admirable as a man, but this story is just the right statement. So - a woman approached Picasso and asked him to do a sketch of her.

Picasso spent perhaps a minute and a half doing a fantastic art-rendering of the woman. Picasso turned to leave with the sketch, and the woman asked for the sketch. Picasso wanted around 2000 dollars in francs for the sketch. "But it only took you two minutes to draw it!" Picasso then replied sagely, "No my dear, this sketch took me a life-time to draw."

I do need a bit of a break, and then who knows what happens next? Back in a minute or so.

Configurations 2: The Cosmology of a Religious Queer

2009-01-08T22:46:00.000-08:00

Let us start with a first problem. In our world today, people often ask rather superficially, "Religious or spiritual?" We would normally define religious as, "adhering to a religious tradition," and spiritual as, "someone who admires wisdom and mercy." Depending on the querent, you might be conservative-trash, or you might be liberal-trash, depending on how you answer the question. My own best answer at the present date, would be, "both."

Next in line. I recall reading somewhere - although I am not sure - that the early Aryan nomadic tribes had an interesting in next to nothing - whether food, clothes, music, dancing, writing, history, war, dates or astronomical calculations - the only thing they seemed to be interested in was their mythologies! We have very few records of the Aryan nomads, but I do recall seeing this very poignant fragment of material somewhere in an academic book. The fact is that this kind of singular-obsession with anything is not typical of early tribal-nomadic cultures.

"Aryan," is a massively loaded word in the world today, and between the current Aryan nation movements and the history of fascism, it is a word that is often best avoided in discussion at all. We generally associate Aryanism today with, "hair of blonde and eyes of blue," - I am in fact naturally both! The truth is - and this is why all points on these blogs are closed - that the early Aryan nomads probably looked a great deal like the people of Asian India do today.

Further, nearly all of the mythology in the world today seems to have derived from these Aryan-myth-obsessives, and the most true to color versions remain in the oldest records kept in the Indus-River Valley from about 7 or 8000 years ago. A few of these points are arguable, but many of these points are not arguable.

So, part one, I am a man who lives in a world of mythologies, and this makes me more Aryan than, "hair of blonde and eyes of blue." Second, I do not adhere to a mainstream religious tradition of any kind, but when I answer, "both," I feel myself to be within a certain Western religious tradition. As I discussed, there have always been people who felt that the regular sales-catalog just didn't do, whether it was Gnostic Christianity or the alchemists of the Dark Ages.

So as I see it, I am within the Western tradition of those who dissent from ordinary religion. That would be the more long-winded answer. We do need to be fair to the mainstream about Gnosticism and alchemy, and we will get to what is fair in just a moment. However, I next want to tackle the word, "wisdom." A simple definition of wisdom might be, "good-living, good morals, stability, mercy and nurturing, teaching, and broad-mindedness."

The word, "wisdom," in English is so out of common use today that you would believe that the word has been struck from every book in the world. We love our learning, but wisdom has disappeared off of our maps. I would suggest that one cannot be a human without some wisdom. Also - it is apparent from our records of old civilzations that wisdom was not considered a very common trait in a person. Still - our learning has amassed far beyond the learning of those times - yet we have not amassed too many more examples of wisdom.

Let us return to our Gnostics and alchemists. The Gnostics were cults, and their cult-mentality was about the same as any cult today - it was sadistic and pathetic. The heresiologists of the Catholic Church had an axe to grind - which was to annihilate Gnosticism - but they did not have to invent much colorful material to make the Gnostics look vile. There are some tall-tales in the heresiologies - but it is only fair to point out that they didn't make up very much in their recounting of the behavior of these cults.

Manichaenism is not true Gnosticism, as it came too late in history to be truly Gnostic. However, the Manichaen cults re-worked many Gnostic themes. Further, Manichaenism remains a historical singularity as one of the other worst cults of murder ever recorded in history, and it's fantastic morbidity is much better recorded than the cult of Marduk in Sumer.

As for the alchemists, on one hand they wished to conserve some ancient materials that were censured by the overwhelming power of the Holy Roman Empire, and also to explore both mysterious and evident science. That is the upside to the alchemists, and the downside for them was that they were hunted down and killed for disobeying the censure of the Holy Roman Empire.

There is however, a downside - and this is that the alchemists practiced some very bizarre things on guinea pigs - some of them human - who did not have the cultural power to escape their attempts to understand. That is only being fair. I consider myself in a counter-culture religious tradition, yet what is so often the reality is that the counter-culture is merely a culture of deviance. That is only being fair, and I have tried to show some of the warts on my own wart-hog. If we're going to be objective, it is only fair to mention these problems within my own religious tradition to which I adhere.

I chose the shocking title because as a religious person, I am counter-culture, and this makes me a marginal thinker, and to some - a deviant. So, we've got a beginning, and I'll sum up with an ordered list, and then we'll move to the second part of the article, which will explain some of this wart-hog's views of the cosmos, and a most queer cosmos it is. You'll see. So, the ordered list.

1. The Aryan-mentality of a "world-as-myth."
2. The Western tradition of religious dissent as my own tradition.
3. The marginalized viewpoint that my own cosmology and that portion of my work represents.

That third point is quite complex and could use more discussion, and we'll see how we get around to that at a later date - if I choose to tie up that knot in an article somewhere. So - I need another break, and then I will most likely do the second part of this article. In a bit.

The Twin of Doubt

2009-01-08T21:06:00.000-08:00

Let us imagine something we experience a great deal, to begin our article today. We have gone to bed, we have fallen deeply asleep, and we have forgotten most of what happened while we slept. We awake, and now we are - here. No matter how deep we wrestle with doubt as an opponent, we are here. We experience a here.

In the West, we have - and continue to have - an obsession with what is evident. It would seem logical that we would ask, "What does it mean for something to be evident? What is that?" The fact is, in the West we never did ask, and we only ask now because our contact with Asian concepts is far more significant today. The concern with what exactly, "evident," is, goes back to some of the earliest Vedic records, which are either a few centuries older than our oldest records, around 7000 years or so, or perhaps as many as 8000 years old. Our first Thomas to ask, "What is that?" was Kant, and he asked that somewhere around 6000 years later.

Let me explain two sort of basic principles about life, and these are not wonderful things to think about, but let us just think for a bit. First, what exists is not what we desire to exist. No one really has what they desire, in part because our desires have no limits. Second, what we are aware of that exists is almost always what we desire to exist. In other words, as a human being, part of our psychology exhibits a very strong tendency to blind ourselves to many realities that are not realities that we desire to be real.

The thing is - this does not have to be a moral judgment. Our worst examples of human beings take their blindness to an excess that is malignant, but in many ways - sometimes you would just rather not know. There isn't anything wrong with that, if you are not dysfunctional or malignant. Also, no cat could be more curious than the average example of humanity. In Genesis - on our eighth day of Creation, we get a rather stern warning - nice apple, big mistake!

There are people with some skill at turning away the forbidden fruit in life - and these are very blessed people. It is not one of my better skills, but still - example - the first collection of short stories by Clive Barker is called - "The Books of Blood." So, I bet you that this original volume contains more knowledge than that scary-leprous "Hellbound Heart." I also love the short-story form. As an adult, the short-story is by far my favorite form of fiction.

I opened that book at a bookstore at a young age, read 3 lines, was violently ill the remainder of the day, I remember nothing about those lines - and - get this! - as curious as I am about the material, I have never owned the book or read even a line more of that book. I am not even tempted to go find the book as I recount this to you now. So we can reverse the eighth day of Creation to some degree, even a man like me who peers into what most say shouldn't be peered into at all.

So let us kind of revisit the question of doubt and evidence. What can be quite terrifying in life is that when we reduce our evidence to what we have the best evidence for - we only have - here. That is about all we can prove from our own experience. We have encountered another day, and another - here. What is here exactly? What is that?

From what is evident - we can only say that we are an existence experiencing an existence. We might take Descartes' "cogito ergo sum," - "I think and therefore I am," - and we might revise it to "Something experiences something." Or - there is an experience that is experiencing a here. We have met An's void again, and we can only reply to An, "I must exist because I experience an existence." When we reduce our human life to its foundation, we have that - here. Anything else we know - we don't know.

It occurs to me today that is has taken me a great deal of strength to live my life, and that it may take just as much strength to read the catalogues I have made of my life. I know many people don't have such strength, but the world's Athenaem interests me, and I have offered some material in public that seems like it might be of interest in the dialogue in that Athenaeum. Further, my public work is not my private work, and I have tailored what I say in public quite carefully for the public audience.

My private work is mostly diary material, and most of that has been thrown away. I have one completed blank-book diary that isn't going to be thrown away, and a second one that is getting near to full. I have a sure hand at my thoughts, and the second diary in my house right now has a plan in terms of its writing. However, a completed work is drafted, edited and revised.

I am working on some complete works at the moment, and these are very different things than my diary material. Some of that material is on these sites, but most of it isn't. Those works are the works that motivate my life. I diary only because it is a good practice and exercise, no matter how worthwhile the material is in those diaries. When - or if - people look at my completed works, my obsession with morbidity will become incredibly more clear. I will leave it behind for those who will to discern and decide as to its value.

There are four works planned for completion, one a set of myths that I have revised to my own sensibilities and put into the form of poetry, then the work on, "The Work of Completion," then a work in scraps at this stage about fundamental logic and my own philosophical ideas, and then at least one more that I'm not going to discuss at the moment. Also - I have an intense interest in synthetic language, so I may complete a work on a synthetic language, if I'm given the time to do such a work that actually has some value.

It occurs to me as well that I'm interested in short stories, and I've been thinking about some tacks to take with the short-story form of fiction. Also, I'd like to do some writing for comic-books. The form interests me a great deal, especially since our ability to create art now intensifies the value of the work instead of diminishes its value. Also, a comic-book writer is severely limited in his possible tacks to take, and the thought of working under such severe limitations is something I find very exciting and interesting.

All in a day's work, and I've decided to blog for the time being, and see where this early morning on Friday leads next. Often when I begin public work, I do a good amount of the public work and then take a break from all of my work for a few days. It all means a great deal to me, and it may be interesting to touch on something that will require a bit of bravery for me to discuss in public, and if I decide to do so, then it will be in the next article at this blog. I will be taking a break and listening to some tunes, and then I will return.

Does the Sphinx have any Ethics?

2009-01-07T04:37:00.000-08:00

This is an article to begin. In almost every religious tradition in history, regardless of geography - if a mystery was not a mystery catalogued in the catalog of the ships - then it was not permitted to you as a mystery. If you tried to exit the ship-catalog - that would mean utter damnation. You had no right to such knowledge, and a good person forbid themselves such knowledge. Failure to stay in the catalog was often persecuted - usually to death. These are pretty hard fast rules of human social taboos across a very vast geography, and across our history and our knowledge-base of archaeology that references such taboos.

In every time there have also been dissenters who were looking for a different catalog, a guy like me. In our contemporary world, there is a lot of dissenting going around - but to talk rationally about say - race or transgendered identity or death or terminal illness or human gristle or human demonism is still a heavily-persecuted activity.

In essence, I'm another guy in history saying, "I don't prefer your catalog of the ships. It seems a bit narrow to me." However, it does take a while to read in an unabridged translation of the Iliad. I recommend an overdose of ephedra for that one too. LOL!

According to Janis Joplin, "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." I'm terminally ill, I live on my state-reward check, and I have no children or career. Thankfully enough for you - this means that I'm willing to rationally discuss issues that might have me killed - simply because I am just that kind of guy.

I would prefer if you didn't come burn down my apartment with me in it - I do have to sleep occassionally - but - life soldiers on. This center of the universe is just trying to meet in the Athenaeum to gadfly some other centers of the universe. It all means a great deal to me - loathed and damned or not!

Let us turn a bend here. This is a great story. At one time I collected occult books, as I was too brain-dead to be embarrassed to arrive at the counter with a Big Al book in hand, or whateva. You get the picture. Well - it came time - some of this remains interesting, but by occult book collection. I threw all but one - this is my life of intuitions - into the dumpster. First off, I would have gotten 75 cents a book, and what would it have mattered. Second, they belonged in the dumpster.

However, sometimes I get a glint of the devil in my eye, and I'll tell you I think that devil can be good for something sometimes. I had this book by Peter Carrol called, "Liber Kaos." "Liber Null and Psychonaut," which is actually pretty interesting went into the dumpster. The book is not going back on the shelf, but Carrol's art and the ideation were interesting. Simple enough. Liber Kaos had a little here and there of interesting ideation, but apparently Carrol was off of his own bookshelf when he wrote that one.

So what was the glint in my eye? Alright. So the book had a frontispiece of Carrol's art. The art was one of the most brutally pornographic images I have ever seen. It was a transgendered piece that revised some rather normally-sacred or at least "I'm nominally Christian, you're crazy," types of materials in a way that defies the mind. I'm laughing recalling as much of the image as I do. It was a whopper! When I opened Liber Kaos and saw the frontispiece my mind revelled in, "Whoa Mama! That ship was never invented before I saw it today! You don't do that!" Great material.

So I sold it back to the local book reseller for 75 cents. I go into that reseller when I get the chance just to browse for a cheapie-book I might look through at home, and so I walk past the "Metaphysics," section (AKA the "Mostly New Age and Conspiracy Theory, other than the books that defile anything sacred" - section of the book reseller.) Sitting at the end of the shelf - on display - is Liber Kaos for 5.98 USD. I figured they would just trash the thing. So I'm thinking - if they were wise they cut that frontispiece out. Open the cover, there is the majesty of transgendered defilement that was originally in the book.

My instant thought was - "Please after I've looked - let some frigid old woman open to that frontispiece." Oh please! Giggling with glee, I exited the book reseller, and the next time I went back, the reseller was still open and it was still standing, and the book was no longer there. Ah, life's devilishly wonderful moments!

Next - I know the "frigid old woman,"-comment might cross an invisble boundary line of political correctness. Some of you have lived sheltered lives, and good for you, but the piece would not have succeeded without that final offense. It is really - fine - you have a right to be offended by such material.

Still, between the way that piece gender-bended standard religion and the idiocy of that bookseller - where is mob-psychology today - call out the torches! Ah, what a gas. I probably should have thrown it in the dumpster. The 75 cents bought a can of soda at the psychiatric center's pop machine too! I saved it for a special place and time.

Alright, well, as it turns out, I have to go discuss medication management and maybe some other issues at the psych center this morning, and any minute now Daddy-o is going to show up and we're going to hit the Timmy Horton's and I have to be good. I'm thinking maybe just a bagel, as the breakfast sandwiches often create an upset stomach. Still, some good 'Nadian-style coffee, I'm on the right-side of bed this morning - and apparently the wrong side of perdition - LOL! - and so I may start an article and make a draft, and if I don't pass out all day, see you 'round 10 maybe. I dunnoe.

Configurations: The Puzzle Box and the Hellbound Heart

2009-01-07T03:21:00.000-08:00

"Hellbound Heart," is Clive Barker's 80 or 90 page novella, which became the inspiration for the movie "Hellraiser." Now - look down the page - and after what I just said about this Lumley guy, I do not own this book. It does not come into my house. The book is not just sick and fabulously weird and gut-wrenching, it is a vision of hell. Seriously. As in - your parish priest did not do a good enough job on Good Friday with the Crucifixion, and now you are, "down in it."

The opening prose poem of about a page and a half is available on the Internet, and is up there with the Horla as some of the best psychological terror-fiction ever written. The rest of the book is just - gross. I won't own it, and you couldn't pay me enough money to bring it into my house. For those who try the prose poem from the 'Net, it is a prose poem about a rare type of mystical experience where ecstasy and anguish become unified - it is a real state of consciousness - and the reader should beware at any age.

I'm a man of intuitions and hunches, and with Mr. Barker I have always had the hunch that this is not just horror-fiction, and that the man was on to something strange and real. I've had the same intution about certain stories by Lovecraft the H.P., and I don't own any Lovecraft the H.P. at the moment either. I would be willing to own H.P. because while H.P. talks about some themes that are a gap into something very black and real, it is also clear from his writing that people who look into these gaps usually end up going mad and dying.

We at least have a moral compass, and this particular Barker work shows no signs of any such thing. On the other side of this, there are two books by Barker that are probably - J.J. Fab that number high among my favorite horror novels and those are Imajica and Galilee. Sacrament is alright, but the end gets very confused.

Imajica and Galilee are books that most people would find very outside their limits - transgendered elements, bizarre sexual surrealism, psychological symbolisms, gender identity issues, heavy fatalism, and so on - but they aren't psychopathic books. Most people would find them distasteful, but they are very good books.

Like any surrealist fiction, they meander a bit and the excalamtion, "PLEASE OUTLINE AN EFFING CHAPTER BEFORE YOU WRITE IT!" occurs to me every time I reach for one of these and read a chapter or two. Also, "Damnation Game," by Barker is a very-short and well-plotted novel that will scare the Bar-zeus out of you, and it is sort of a quality, UK Stephen King style-novel.

So let us talk about just this prose poem that opens Hellbound Heart. The man in question has a puzzle-box, and the solution to the puzzle-box is called, "the LaMarchande Configuration." Now, the French translation in current French business-eese for "LaMarchande," would be, "the franchise," so we have a bit of a body-slam on the publisher - I think. If you aren't aware of French much, it sounds potentate, but it is a simple bowdlerism.

Still, there is a space that we are peering into, and it is not only a mystical experience that was most likely caused by drug-abuse. That is most of it, but we're peering through a liminal space here. The puzzle-box here is truly acting as a gateway to something else.

So the man seems to have solved the puzzle, and this ecstatic pain overcomes him, and the power of the poetry as least gives us an idea as to how this experience might feel. Next, there is a resounding bell, and the Cenobites show up. If we were to look in the dictionary, we would see that a cenobite is anyone who is in a monastery or a convent. An archaic english word, but ordinary enough. The Cenobites are these ghastly mutilated ghouls, and Mr. LaMarchande-solver, you ought to know how much trouble you are now in.

So here is the thing. If the man has solved the configuration correctly, then he misses the puzzle in his next total foul-up. The Cenobites ask him a question, "What do want from us?" He converses with them a bit. Doesn't answer the question. Then he answers the question, and now - you are DONE. "I want pleasure." YOU ARE SO DONE! It ought to be obvious that you do not foul-up with these Cenobites, who are also referred to as the Order of the Gash, and the rest of the book is about the man paying out of his hiney for being such a total cretin.

There is another element to the play, and it is a good theme, but you don't need to read the rest of the book. The man gets his foul pleasure, but what he gets as well is a pleasure that is the torment and destruction of his soul - a state that will last forever - apparently. In other words, our union of agony and ecstasy as described from the start is this man's eternal reward. You deserve it buddy, YOU ARE SO DONE! WHY NOT ASK FOR SOMETHING RATIONAL! 'Cause the guy ain't rational obviously, but you get the tenor of this character.

The other element is that this man's sister is aware that her brother has gotten into trouble, and goes looking for him. She finds what is left of him as the Cenobites are tormenting the man to death, which is not good for her psychology. However - we'll at least say - and it might be a J.J. Fab I'm remembering - but we'll give a happy ending - because the sister escapes the Cenobites simply because she doesn't want anything from them.

So - we have the basic outline, and it works out pretty well. A diseased psychopathic cretin gets the eternity he wants and deserves - those two very often go together - I remember his sister has to let her brother go into the hell he chose - which is satisfying. So good, a just end for a rotten book and a rotten sub-animal man. However - no matter how rational you are - there is something wrong here. Something badly wrong. Let us disregard psychoanalysis, even mysticism or demonism - we are seeing a knowledge, and for many people it is a knowledge they will forbid themselves.

I'm pretty daring, although I am not dumb enough to ask a torture-monk for an eternity of pleasure. However, what is it that we can't put our finger on? This is the way with liminal experiences, and don't buy the book! You can read the prose poem, but there are no free lunches. My own synopsis may suffice, but that is the question. What is the void we are kissing here? You see?

Another thing is, let us re-phrase the opening question of the Cenobites in a less story-driven way. "What do you want?" Simple question. No one, by the way, will ever ask you this in person, or I sincerely doubt they will. However, "What do YOU desire?" Really. Gut-reaction for many is "eternal bliss," and you see how it worked out for that dude.

The first time I ever encountered the question, my gut-response was "I want to be a God." I mentioned it at another article on "The Work," blog I think, or I may have just written about it in my diary. Now - I'm given to fantasy, and it is obvious that my first step into life-achievement is not, "Gee, let me become a God." I drink six 8 oz. cups of coffee a day and smoke at least 30 'grettes every 24 hours, and that isn't exactly "God," territory. Still, a gut-reaction to this question is worth writing down, no matter how, "pie-in-the-sky," it might be, and meditating in a diary or via recording on what the statement means to you might be worth doing as well.

One thing that drives me nuts, "What do you want? I dunnoe." You're insane. If you, "dunnoe," then you need to sit down and set some goals. Simple ones like, "5 cups of coffee tomorrow, and 25 'grettes." Something. You can't attempt to achieve what you desire if you have no idea what you desire. It's like - "duh-logic." That covers this article, and I understand - this is intense material. Actually, my head is a bit de-centralized, and I'm going to tell a funny story next, but not until my gray cells relax a bit. Hair-raising. Understood.

Horror and Leprosy: Pavlov Salivating in a Bookstore

2009-01-07T02:31:00.000-08:00

So there I am in Borders with a gift-card from my Auntie Gail, a woman my Mom knew from way back that still sends Christmas gifts after all of these years, even though she isn't a blood-relative and hasn't seen anyone's face in maybe 10 or 15 years from my family. So I'm wandering the horror-stacks, and there is Brian Lumley's, "Necroscope."

I read the book when I was 17 - please, take your kid to a licensed pastoral counselor, something AAGH! - anyway, I survived and I'm not totally mutilated - and it was in beach-market paperback for 7.99. I couldn't resist, but as I'm turning the book over, I'm blushing like a salivating-Pavlov thinking about going up to the counter and buying the book. As I recall, the really bad scene out of Lumley is in the Necroscope sequel, but if it isn't - I'm skipping the scene.

The thing that is so amazing about the Lumley-scopes is that you have a vampire-gothic horror novel that doesn't remotely resemble Anne Rice. The only other one on the shelves like that today is "Salem's Lot," by Stephen King, and that is actually one of King's best novels as well. The wonderful part about "Salem's" is that it is more like the original Van Helsing, but also has King's kind of "country," or "Super-America," feel. Also, that novel is plenty scary and has no splatter, or maybe just one scene. That would be an okay 17 or 18 year old book, and wouldn't require a licensed pastoral counselor.

Otherwise, every vampire novel on the shelf now is a Vamp-ricer. The original "Interview with the Vampire," ay-may-zing, and deserves to be on the literature shelf and will probably get there someday. Many women like "Queen of the Durned," as a pillow-book because of its powerful female heroine, and the book is okay, but their is accounting for taste. At her best, Rice is somewhere between "dry and to-style," and "gothic prose poetry," and that makes me a bit of a student, as I am going for a similar type of prose style in some of my story-telling.

We have got to talk about her husband Stan Rice and his poetry in a later article, but let us go back to Lumley. In Lumley's Necroscope we have a kind of convergence. First off, the vampires, "vampyri," in his book, are a soft-science-fiction creature. There is a parasite that invades the nervous-system when the vampyri's contagion takes hold, and a young vampyri is little more than a bloodthirsty zombie, and an old vampyri is an Underworld demi-god of incredible villainy. Also, there are certain beings other than a human that the contagion can invade, and this makes for some tasty-weird blood-monsters in the book.

The main figure of the novel is, "The Necroscope," who is a young man who hears the voices of the dead speaking to him. Downside is that he is nuts because of the ability and everyone thinks he is nuts. Upside is that he has access to all of the knowledge of any dead being, and as he ages he figures out how to access that knowledge with some control. He has a more normal name, but I haven't opened the book to find what it is yet.

So as Necroscope starts, the KGB have found a Vampyri in ROMANIA! Transylvania - as it later is revealed. They have isolated the parasite, and they want to use it as a biological weapon. And then, as you might imagine, the biological weapon starts eating everything in sight in Siberia. So - once the remainder of the novel gets going, the Necroscope undertakes to eradicate the Vampyri, Van Helsing style, from the face of planet Earth. Life gets far more evil when the Necroscope finds the Vampyri's home planet, and that is when the book becomes astoundingly vicious.

It is clear that this Lumley-guy wrote the whole book. The book is organized, well-plotted, scary, and if that really sick scene isn't in the first book - not over the invisible boundary line between good horror fiction and "don't walk into my house with that in your Borders bag." Still, this Lumley guy was not a healthy psychology, and I strongly recommend avoiding any of the sequels.

I am sitting here chortling to myself thinking about the novel. I am not letting the cat out of the bag, but let us just say that when the Necroscope arrives on the Vampyri's home planet that we can no longer joke about tasty-weird blood-monsters. It is very well-realized fiction, and it is great storytelling, but this stuff is a bit exotiques! Look, setting up a novel this way is generally a good idea. You've got vampires, you've got a parasite, you've got a government taking advantage of biological devilry and the inevitable mishap that results - and one man to save the day! RAHR!

There is always room for another such novel, and sure - it is nice to try for something more exotic in your writing. However - in the end, even with this barbarian setup, exotiques doesn't quite give us the flavor! Alright, alright. Look, I'm going to be even more lame than usual. If you're 17 or 18 and you like vampires, which is per usual, go ask your parents about Salem's Lot, and see what they have to say. As far as Necroscope, maybe 30 isn't old enough, and after 21 in the states you want to watch what form of liquor you're imbibing while reading the bastard. I'm going to have to drink less coffee when I get to the second half of the book, as I might start having ether-visions.

Horror-fiction is great, but I'm laughing at myself trying to figure out how I got to the counter and bought a simple mass-market paperback. Lumley is what they used to call "black-dog," in publishing - this was before the White Wolf subsidiary - and, "man be not proud!" I can't resist though, and I'd like to re-read a very queer old friend. If that scene is in there, I'll either skip it and trash the book (oh another funny story, but Hellbound Heart first) or I'll cut the pages out and see if I want to pillow-book this one again. Next on the list, leprous-horror, part exotiques and part deux! (My french is pidgin in English!)

Addendum: (That pron tag ought to increase my hits! LOL! Still, I want the tag for a reason other than shameless self-promotion.)

And Who Paid Charon His Debts?

2009-01-05T04:20:00.000-08:00

Let us move to a theme that is the center of what horror is to any man or woman, and that is the horror of death. I believe that I am terminally ill, but no doctor has ever told me so - not even once. I believe that I probably have leukemia, and another horror is to wonder when the diagnosis was made. I could be wrong, and that doubt is also quite horrifying.

I have no love of doctors, but I submit to the reality that my culture requires me to be some of a man whom I have no love for, and I have submitted to the treatment and minded my health, and I hope to be victorious without one suicide attempt over the age of 50 solar-years. If I get there - quite doubtful - I will make a new demarcation. Hades can be seductive, but I avoid keeping company with the bastard. We all do.

As Lovecraft the H.P. again discusses, it is the unknown that we fear. In good horror writing, a writer suggests without making too much fuss about the details, and that is the scariest kind of horror. Some splatter in horror is common, but that is gross-out appeal, and a reminder of our human bodies' physical corruptions - also quite horrifying.

Still, to read, "The Horla," where a man who has imbibed raw-ether to the point of utter madness - by his own admission in the story - yet believes that a predator of human beings will prey on him - with no splatter - and no sign of the visage of his predator - just the death of a man who knows nothing and has gained nothing - this tale is one of the most fearsome stories ever written. This tale by Maupaussant, a sort of French "O'Henry," popular short-story writer is also autobiographical. It is the last intelligible thing he wrote before dying of ether-toxicity.

In other words, all the tale tells us is what the author believes - which is that he is human prey by some predator - and that he is mad, and we now have a short-story that is one of the pinnacles of terror fiction ever written. We have no need for any more information to have night-terrors over the story. The story is almost a precis, of roughly 3 pages in length.

In other words, the horror of the story is what we can't know, not the words provided by a man who then died just as he describes in the story - believing himself to be being eaten alive by a being he called - the Horla. The word was a French slang in his period for, "whore."

There is another tale I have textualized for myself, a very short few sentences. Today, the face of Hades laughs in the shadows from the corner, when I am willing to look in the corner to see him at all. I am very rarely able to look into that corner. Yet when Hades' face is revealed in cruel and hideous strength, I will not conquer death - then I will die. To see death's face with clarity is to be dead, and that is the truth the dead know.

There is another tale, and that is that when the void of mother An arrives, even Hades will die at the lips of her kiss. This is not intended as apocalypticism, but to say - what I know of death will be void when void arrives. Death is a human concept, and what is annihilation will annihilate even my human conception of death.

I have paid for living to Charon so that I may die. The river Styx is being crossed, and I will drink Lethe from An in total annihilation, one of these days or nights of my crossing. I would hope - and we all do - for some ecstatic eternity - yet if there is a world past this crossing, it lies over a river that I must pay with destruction of all I know and have made in order to enter. Everyone hopes for immortality for what they are now, and my debt to Charon is paid again today by glimpsing Hades chuckling from his corner in the shadows.

It is time for a blood-draw and a podiatrist appointment in no more than 20 or 30 minutes, and I visit doctors who do not have my courage - however wicked this way I may come. They don't even have the courage to tell me of my impending doom, as if any man or woman doesn't die. I wait rather patiently for my ride to my doctor's visits.

I will then return home and meet the abyss of sleep, and a new afternoon or evening that I know nothing of lies across that river Styx. This blog will not meditate on death for many articles, but remember - every mystery I believe to be real is a mystery of death. Something wicked this way comes, it constricts like a python, and sniffs for prey with its tongues.

Dare to Be a Fool

2009-01-05T02:56:00.000-08:00

"The truth is out there," said Fox Mulder of the original X-Files series, who was rather passively insane. He was a man trying to find a mysterious truth, but right from the get-go you also knew if you paid attention that he had no attachment to reality. His partner Scully had a rather narrow mind, but she had a kind of reality-principle. She eventually began to lose her own wits as the series progressed. "Maybe she was just spending too much time around Mulder," one of our XLNC's at the time remarked.

The show started as a scenario show, where each week was an investigation into some strange event and ended with at least a partial solution to the event. That lasted the first season, and then it became a serial where one conspiracy introduced was not good enough unless followed by the introduction of two more. There was a group I used to watch the show with, and we had a packet that explained the basic characters and some back-story, and made jokes about the discordances and the overly packed information-dumping of the show.

We would watch this sort of "scientific-gothic," and laugh and eat popcorn and throw popcorn at each other. It was a great American television series. Then the movie came out and the following televison series were no longer worth watching. Ah well, all good things come to an end.

One of the consistent interests in my life has been mysteries. I am like Mulder in that I think a Scully-like orientation to the world - a narrow rational worldview - is about as ridiculous as believing - as some schizophrenics report - that flicking your bic in a bar is what makes everyone laugh at you. "They aren't all laughing at you unless they've noticed that you are acting like a maniac. Please submit a query to reality." That is called, "reactionary therapy," and it is mostly an abuse, and illegal in the states - but since I have no license to lose I recommend it as a suggestion to our local nut-brigades.

Think about this. We all mostly know the story of Oedipus Rex, and it is a wonderful tragic work of the classical age, and very intensely analyzed. Let us try a slightly different analysis. So after Oedipus the numbnut slays his own father, he shows up at the Sphinx. Her riddle goes, "What travels on all fours, then on two, and then on three?" Oedipus answers, "A man, because he crawls as an infant, and walks as an adult, and uses a cane as an old man." The Sphinx loses her PMA and howls off like a banshee.

You've missed the point Oedipus, for what are you? You are a man. You have been riddled - who you are. I've never seen anybody make this obvious point about the tale. That is the inspiration for the title of this third cross-blog. The riddle the Sphinx asks you is a mirror - it reflects - who you are. The Sphinx represents - in this case - a fundamental mystery - and the mystery is a mirror of yourself.

So Oedipus - who answered the riddle correctly - but failed to see that he is a man himself, from what we can see in the play, enters a world that is everything a man could want. The axis of the problem of this world is that Oedipus only retains his Paradise because he is blinded to what the reality of that Paradise is. He digs for the answer - and finds - I am an incest, a cast-off, a patricide and a despot - and like any vain numbnut blinds himself again - this time physically. So are we all - in many ways - the message of any true tragedy.

I don't want to make blog after blog, but I want to dare to be a fool here. I want to talk about speculations that are removed from most people's reality principle. The blog will be to ask questions about liminal gaps, riddles, gates and keys, mirrors and twins, ciphers and configurations, and other questions that we would either rather not ask because it doesn't narrow into the focus of the rational mind, or because we don't want to query reality about what might be awful kind to remain blinded to.

Finally, "there are no free lunches," and my speculations have cost me as a person. Lovecraft the H.P., not an admirable writer or character, was however right in remarking that if you'd like to be content, then knowledge is the wrong thing to seek. That isn't the same as saying, "ignorance is bliss." Ignorance is often quite painful for everybody. Please submit a query to reality. The problem is that we enter a Labyrinth of our own crenelations, and things get a bit whoozy. People can experience psychosis from reading intense writing or seeing intense art - normal psychologies - and the art need not be horrifying in character to produce such an effect.

The limits of our minds are our defenses against insanity, I would remark in character with Lovecraft the H.P., and though broadening the limits of our minds is valuable it is not a pleasantry, particularly past some invisible line. Think of the pain of a man who writes a play like Oedipus Rex, though he collected most of the material from older sources. (All writers respond to old "shtuff," there is no "new.") What happens as we broaden the limits of our very selves is that we transgress the cultural and psychological limits of the mind, and the result can be madness and death. That is actually real.

So at the base of a wonderful fruit tree coils a serpent with intentions for you that you had better watch out for, says our Western tradition. "Knowledge is good, and ignorance evil," - quite true in my mind - but snakes bite and constrict around even the most wonderful fruit trees, and have apparently been doing so since before we found out about genetic engineering or nuclear arms. So let us close with Paracelsus the physician, "the dosage makes the poison." That snakes bite comes with the knowledge, but snake venom may not only broaden and transgress inherent boundaries, in the right doses it may heal.

This ought to be said. None of my blogs are for young people. I may have made the wrong moves in life - I have at least made a collection of wrong moves - and yet - when you get to be 30 like me, even a Jeffersonian socialist begins to develop a sense of conservatism. People have kids. Kids need guidance. The resulting adults then make their own collection of crooked or correct moves.

I am constantly surprised at what they will put right on the bookshelf at the bookstore for anyone to buy - or at the library - just as an example. Just as we are all attracted to gothic and mature themes, so are your kids, and while learning Oedipus Rex at 17 in AP Literature is not wicked, but there needs to be a sense of support there in that teaching - and our culture provides little to none of such support. The theme of incest alone, which is central to the story - is a stunner to even an adult. The theme of incest is also a universal human theme.

People must have wailed with horror when this play was first performed. It is funny, but the gut-reaction of a 17-year-old to starting the Oedipus tragedy is - this guy is a numbnut! Quite true - no one but a madman or madwoman could admire the figure from the beginning of the play. Your kids are that smart! The problem is that the catharsis of the play shows our identity with this numbnut, and this is where your kids need help with such material.

We are mirrored - no matter how ethical our lives - in an incest, a cast-off, a patricide, and a despot, and we look away from our faces in the mirror. The reflection in the mirror betrays someone who isn't what we thought we were. Those are the Sphinx's riddles, and I suggest that when she howls off like a banshee - that you are warned - and not free of the Sphinx.

So - whether your religious tradition says that I am condemned utterly, or whether you are idiotically allured to mysteries with a passive disregard for reality, or whether you find some value in this blog - the blog and all of its cross-links - even a coming one about fundamental logical and philosophical principles - are meant for adults. I can do no more.

I made my own mistakes as a youth, not just as an adult. In the end, we all grow up with a great deal of abandonment on our hands - whether outright - or emotional. No one is perfect - I have never raised children - I could not because of mental and physical illness - and, "the best parent has no children."

I wish I could be a better model, but in the mirror is the man who exists, and not the man he thought he was. At least that man comes into view for me to some degree. I submit a query to reality. I shall return.