"Claimed" (part 2)

Tell me that you saw the tail of the world serpent, Midgard,

just whisking out through the broken window, and I'll meet your

statement with tolerance and belief!"

 

He had exaggerated lightly, meaning to give the woman confidence; but

the words were sooner out than he experienced a sickening wonder. Why

had he cited that particular prodigy for his example of the hard-to-

believe? In the old Norse mythology Midgard, the serpent that girdles

the world, is none other than the sea--the green, hissing, marauding,

and claimant sea. (CH V “The Sinking Inscription)

 

The world serpent, the moon-dark sea from which this jade box has come, with the inscription that ever sinks to the bottom through its green depths, like a nameless wreck.

Then there is the white horse that curio-shop owner Jacob Lutz – who was sold the box by sailor Jim Blair – has bought for a blood sacrifice. This is where the story takes another twist, for the horse

was a blooded animal. Mirror, out

of Sunlight, by Chalmers III, and Trimble wanted a higher price than

the stranger wanted to pay. (CH VI “White Horses”)

 

By this, are we meant to suppose the name of the horse, Mirror, signifies an illusion (hallucinogen)? Perhaps, but Sunlight signifies more than illusion, it signifies high sorcery as has beennoted here for awhile.

 

They flung themselves on the land, and the land vanished beneath their

thunderous hoofs. A wailing rose in the night; earth shook and

shuddered; mountains crashed into mighty flares of flame, and by the

leaping light of those awful torches he saw the shrieking race of men

devoured, swept away, made nothing. He saw earth open yawning mouths

that swallowed whole cities, gulped and closed again. And where the

cities had been--the ten glittering, scarlet cities--there surged and

thundered the white-maned hosts of him. (Chapter IX)

 

“The white-maned hosts”. As you may have guessed, there were the ten scarlet cities of lost Atlantis. Water, like the sun, is illusory - at one moment it reflects lights, at the other it has hidden depths; it is flat, it is vastly deep.

“To the great deep. To the abyss.”

An illusory object, like the sun, has great strength and it’s worth quoting Bruce Lee (again!)

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

The flexible medium that has the strength to conquer the ten cities of timelost Atlantis - something very close to the Lee ethos. This sort of begs the question that, if sea and sun have illusory qualities, air is fairly empty while earth is just earth.. what of those counts as reality?

For answer, one has to go back to ancient Greece, which is that reality is neither one thing nor another, but expression (Lee again). Reality is neither technique nor flow, but both together. Technique by itself is a living robot, flow by itself is a primitive beast.

Sophisticated artforms have a restraint, a poise of line and style that identifies them as uniquely human. 

  Knossos fresco (Wild Horses)

You may recall Melina Mercouri’s quote (Hyborian Bridge 66)? If the Parthenon is unique, Sir Arthur Evans’ reconstruction of the palace of Knossos is savage locale brought to lithe life from ruins.

One can argue similar things at Delphi; an invocation from the ruins of lithe rituals from out of time (same goes for Chichen Itza of the Mayans in Mexico). This same sense of life and lines that one gets from Tintin in Peru – and Red Nails naturally.

What I’m getting at is the life and line is a ruinous state; out of decay comes regeneration. A crumbling ruin is a sign of strength in that it is help up by microbes and vines and clods of clay – signs of life all.

Life is more variegated than the modern establishment gives one to think. The mysteries of Samothrace or Delphi are the mysteries of a cosmic destiny. The Earth is turning, and as it turns becomes one with sun, moon, planets.

This is the destiny of Man, for we not only live, we die. This was Van der Post’s quote from Flamingo Feather

 Hyborian Bridge 62/1

The sense of nostalgia that we, humankind, are kindred to the stars has been wrenched from us by acolytes of a sorcerous establishment. Yes, that’s what I said. The British Museum may seem staid and serene but it holds the Elgin marbles (of the Parthenon) for reasons that are beyond human comprehension.

Not quite, as I’ve been trying to spell out for awhile! The physical reality of sun, moon, planets has been replaced by an illusory reality of perspective (light C5).

This is a type of living death because only a physical reality revives from decay. Things decay, in other words become dirt, and from this is cleanliness born of strength. This is an ancient cycle from Samothrace and Delphi but not from the British Museum! No, since a museum has to be a hygienic institution. I’ve nothing against relics in their place (the Acropolis Museum) but it’s the things themselves – Knossos, the Parthenon – that have ruin and grace upon them.

This is our Earth, and it’s not for institutions that might as well be from Mars to bar the way to organic fields (where things grow, die, revive). This brings us back full circle to Claimed and this quote that could very well describe all the lost cities that have ever appeared in Weird Tales

In the immediate foreground, where canal and sea were united, the land

retreated in the shape of a great bay. This bay was lined with built-

up terraces of red stone, out from which jutted many wharfs and docks.

Its waters were not empty, but thronged with shipping of a type as

anachronistic, though by no means so time-rotted, as the galley of the

dolphin figure-head. Great triremes, with the shields of their

warriors ranged glittering down the length of their bulwarks, shared

the anchorage with ships of more peaceful appearance, merchant-vessels

carved and gilded from stem to stern and of sails vari-hued as bright

banners.

The living ruins of landscapes, the places of power that revive through decay, that no establishment born of lifeless hygiene should be able to deny.

Even as the demand left Vanaman's lips a strange change overswept the

ancient trireme; a shocking change, if there be shock in witnessing a

revivification of a rotting corpse; in seeing a dead ship come to

life.

Without such rebirth of ancient lineage all is illusion. Illusion that lives in the heads of acolytes; that is not part of the physical universe where opposites meet.

Between Red Dolphin and the steamer a towering blackness roared upward

toward the clouds. The clouds themselves had already dipped to meet

it. Whirling, cyclonic, the dark upper vapors descended in a vast cone

shape. The tip joined the raging cone of black water beneath; the

powers of the air had mated in thunder with the ocean, and as one

monstrous being stalked across the groaning abyss. Deep had called to

deep, and the waterspout was born.

The tyrant hoarder Jesse Robinson might in some sense represent the illusory greed that lives in the head and not on the Earth where sun, ocean and air all meet.

"If that story you've told me is true--I believe it--then I admire Mr.

Robinson's nerve, but I can't admire his judgement. He set himself

against a power just step lower than that of the Almighty. What? Oh,

yes, I can believe that the big fellow out there"--he waved his hand

in a sweeping, significant gesture--"has a life and will of his own.

If you'd spent most of your life in his company, like Blair and me,

you wouldn't be so slow to believe it yourself, doctor. (CH XV “Claimed!”)
ALEXANDER THE MEDIUM