It was said
that Merlin (imagination) was enchanted by the Lady of the Lake (unconscious)
and disappeared into the deep waters, never to be seen again. Like Van Gogh,
Hemingway and Nietzsche, we have seen prolific creators dissolve backward into
this watery abyss. In all cases, approaching inspiration requires that we do
not abandon life, but maintain a concrete footing in the world around us. (page 126)
The world around
us being flesh and blood – one of the main themes of chapter six, in the clash
of cultures between the Indian Medicine Men and the European conquerors and
missionaries from the 16th century.
Denials of the
flesh, Puritan hypocrisy and sin are one thing, and I guess have been covered
to exhaustion already; the thing which caught my eye was Hohne’s comparison
between the folk tale of two Indian twins, and the Old Testament story of Jacob
and Esau.
Indian myths are
supernatural, and this one concerns two twins called Flesh and Stump, who were cut
from their dead mother’s womb. One of them was hidden in a stump in a wood; the other
stayed in the lodge and was called Flesh by his father.
The boys met up
and had various adventures, being killed and brought back to life several
times. Eventually, Earth Maker sent Rucewe to bring the Twins to him, and told
them they could stay in heaven as they had become too troublesome.
In Genesis,
Rebekah felt the struggle between Jacob and Esau in her womb. Esau became a
hunter (Stump) while Jacob was a “man of tents” (Flesh). After various
escapades, Jacob returns home years later and wrestles in a dream with a “mysterious
adversary”. This being turns out to be Yahweh (Earth Maker), and Jacob is
renamed Israel, which means “he who strives with Yahweh" (and prevails).
As Hohne says,
this is very far from the obedient dogma of Cortez’s Catholic missionaries, and
is really quite rowdy and earthy behaviour, allowing for “natural curiosity”
(page 151).
CC Beck had
makes a similar comment in Cosmic Curmudgeon
In the Old Testament, those angels were
terrible creatures. They came down armed with fiery swords and everything
else.”
Christianity had
a tendency to be unwordly, but most blatant of all were the Gnostics of eraly Christianity,
who
taught that
the sensory world had been created as a mistake and that Jesus had come to
deliver man from Yahweh’s error. (page
150).
Even though
Gnosticism was never official teaching, the idea of an imperfect creation (Man
and nature) did become currency, To the Indians nature is perfect, and Man
gains by mimicking her.
What is
perfection, though? She quotes Aristotle.
He taught
that the flaws in nature were due to the substance that the orchestrating force
of life utilized to achieve perfection. The inability of matter to fully
realize its form was similar to a sculptor using brittle or faulty material to
achieve his vision. Nothing in nature is perfect; this is at the root of why it
explores change. (page
152).
In other words,
perfection and imperfection are part of one process – otherwise there would
just be stasis (death). Nature is perfect because imperfect t.
The Aristotelian
concept is much more true to American Indians or Old Testament than it is to
the modern idea of competitive order – since order means something that cannot
deviate from unbroken progress.
Actually, nature
is disordered as well as being ordered, in that flesh rots, becomes carrion and
the cycle of lifedeath continues. In fact, the idea of an ordered world is much
more true to the Gnostic idea that the sensory world (flesh) is a mistake!
The world we
actually live in is a convincing numerical illusion that just happens to have
flesh living inside it. A world of pure order is like Korvac (Weird 8);
a type of living death with no revival, no decadence.
Order cannot
exist in nature without disorder. All it means is that we live in a very
convincing (perspective) illusion that is not physical (body) nor psychic (the
clues that are found in nature to feed our inspiration).
The clues we
find are what Hohne’s book is about; our dreams which mirror age old myths that
connect Man to the cosmos. As I tend to say, the clues of astrology or Tarot
are vague for the reason they’re not part of an ordered numerical universe (of
perspective or light).
The real
universe is symmetrical and proportionate. Why is it symmetrical and proportionate?
Because it’s not pure order. If you want pure order you get precision, not the
strength of a lifecycle that balances life and death in a disordered
naturalism.
The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
We live in a
world that happens to have flesh and blood in it, but it does not have the
strenght of lifecycle. It is barren; the land of Seth (Pictorial 61)
and of reptilian urges that emerge from the deep unconscious that cannot be
repressed. Reptiles that slither towards the sun (order).
We are at the
mercy of innumerable acolytes of sorcerers of so-called order which is just a
convincing illusion of the head.
Hyborian
Bridge 30