Hyborian Bridge 81

Is there a lost Earth-power that is not given by Man to Man but by the cosmos to men and women? A civilization that speaks always to the individual cannot have that power.

At one time Kate says something like “the direct blows of words” injure her and she desires “veiled elusiveness” in the “third person”. Is it not true that in the modern world we are addressed directly, as individuals? What do an infinite number of individuals comprise, though? Could it be nada?

The direct form of speech is the land of logic (sun) but there is another land, where the sun is weak. It is actually the figurative language of primitive naivety that signifies Earth’s face turning to the cosmos. This is the land of balance and proportion where individuals can have Earth-souls and not word-filled emptiness.

I tell you, the day should not turn into glory,
And the night should not turn deep,
Save for the morning and evening stars, upon which they turn.
Night turns upon me, and Day, who am the star between.
Between your breast and belly is a star.
If it be not there
You are empty gourd-shells filled with dust and wind.
When you walk, the star walks with you, between your breast and your belly.
When you sleep, it softly shines.
When you speak true and true, it is bright on your lips and your teeth. (ch XXI The Opening of the Church)

The ceremonies are infused with virility - against “fascist” salutes (this was in 1923). It’s clear Lawrence was convinced the technological life was not suited to all men – by which he menat the virile.

By “virile” it seems he meant the masculine body in all its glory.

Four men came to him. One put a blue crown with the bird on his brow, one put a red belt round his breast, another put a yellow belt around his middle, and the last fastened a white belt round his loins. Then the first one pressed a small glass bowl to Ramón's brow, and in the bowl was white liquid like bright water. The next touched a bowl to the breast, and the red shook in the bowl. At the navel the man touched a bowl with yellow fluid, and at the loins a bowl with something dark. They held them all to the light. (ch XXI)

The body has power in its symmetrical proportions. In likewise way, a dragonfly has power in its finely honed thorax, abdomen, wings, antennae. So it’s a pretty animalistic way of thought.

One can think with the virility of the body. Not only that, but nothing is left out, and “the secret places” indicated in intimate ritual seem to mean genitals and anus.

Ramón bound him fast round the middle, then, pressing his head against the hip, folded the arms round Cipriano's loins, closing with his hands the secret places. (ch XXII The Living Huitzilpochtli)

Once Cipriano becomes the living Huitzilopochtli, the native Indian Earth-dances are brought to life with spear brandished to sun. The dance is “thinking” rain, wind, Earth and moon in the virile expression of body to earth.

Cipriano speaks

'Man that is man is more than a man.
No man is man till he is more than a man.
Till the power is in him
Which is not his own.

The power is in me from behind the sun,
And from middle earth.
I am Huitzilopochtli. (Ch XXIII Huitzilpochtli’s Night)

This is Nietzsche but also Aristotelian teleology (Hyborian Bridge 76), which says that minds cannot exist without the body. The body has a soul and that soul is the Morning Star (“behind the sun”).

Now, all of this is implicit in the Earth turning its face to the cosmos or the Morning Star. It is Earth-power, the Indian dance on the earth, bending low, rising to salute the sky.

All this is to do with balance and proportion on a cosmic scale. We who live in the modern world may live in our bodies – but which part of the body? If it’s the head (“the brow”) we are under the dominion of acolytes of age-old sorcerers who have constructed a universe of straight lines and numbers.

If this universe is in the head, it is also in the body since (as previously noted) we cannot escape our own physique. However, it is not the physically virile body that dances on its feet to the sky above.

A body which is physically weak, which has numerical compulsions of the head is often called anal-compulsive (Hyborian Bridge 62/1). Reason being, one can’t escape one’s physique, and it is either strong or weak, expressive or inert. The acolytes are under the illusion that words – to us as individuals – are reality, whereas reality is the sky and the earth, sun and moon.

This is the naïve physical reality. To believe in the gods is a naïve thing, when one could believe in words in a universe of straight lines. One belief is strong and virile; the other belief is weak and of the head.

It all gave him a certain wild, childish joy. The strange convulsions like flames of joy and gratification went over his face!

'Ah, God!' she thought. 'There are more ways than one of becoming like a little child..'

.. As she sat in that darkened church in the intense perfume of flowers, in the seat of Malintzi, watching the bud of her life united with his, between the feet of the idol, and feeling his dark hand softly holding her own, with the soft, deep Indian heat, she felt her own childhood coming back on her. The years seemed to be reeling away in great circles, falling away from her.

Leaving her sitting there like a girl in her first adolescence. The Living Huitzilopochtli! Ah, easily he was the living Huitzilopochtli. More than anything. More than Cipriano, more than a male man, he was the living Huitzilopochtli. And she was the goddess bride, Malintzi of the green dress. (ch XIV Malintzi)

These images are so Weird Tales it’s untrue. It’s like the innocence and purity of naked bodies that have a strong sense of physical reality; the strength that is manifested by idols.

How else, she said to herself, is one to begin again, save by re-finding one's virginity? And when one finds one's virginity, one realizes one is among the gods. He is of the gods, and so am I. Why should I judge him? (ch XIV)

Innocence is lost when words are deployed in all the areas outside of physical reality.. the brain of the acolytes, physically weak and obsessing on numbers (see Pictorial 59 Blake’s metamorphosis of Newton).

Like the Trolls of Norse mythology, their cleverness with abstract words hides their origin as maggots on the face of the Earth (Pictorial 56 Kari Hohne). The abstraction is a clever illusion; the physical degradation is the truth.

But the illusion is attractive to the ego of those who deliver torrents of words (politicians, natch.) In the final chapter of The Plumed Serpent Kate agonizes over her destiny.

Kate was a wise woman, wise enough to take a lesson. It is all very well for a woman to cultivate her ego, her individuality.. Kate knew all this. And as she sat alone in her villa, she remembered it again. She had had her fling, even here in Mexico. And these men would let her go again. She was no prisoner. She could carry off any spoil she had captured.

And then what! To sit in a London drawing-room, and add another to all the grimalkins? .. 'No!' she said to herself. 'My ego and my individuality are not worth that ghastly price. I'd better abandon some of my ego, and sink some of my individuality, rather than go like that.' (Here!)

Previously, Kate agonized over the question of whether the individual is an illusion. Is a world of individual egos (a la Trump) merely an advanced form of illusion? Not physical substance; not the hidden star of inner strength and psyche?

She had a strange feeling, in Mexico, of the old prehistoric humanity, the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the glacial period. When the world was colder, and the seas emptier, and all the land-formation was different. When the waters of the world were piled in stupendous glaciers on the high places, and high, high upon the poles. When great plains stretched away to the oceans, like Atlantis, and the lost continents of Polynesia, so that seas were only great lakes, and the soft, dark-eyed people of that world could walk around the globe. Then there was a mysterious, hot-blooded, soft-footed humanity with a strange civilization of its own..

Cipriano was going down to bathe. She saw him walk out on the masonry of the square basin which was their own tiny harbour. He threw off his wrap and stood dark in silhouette against the pale, unlit water. How dark he was! Dark as a Malay. Curious that his body was as dark, almost, as his face. And with that strange archaic fulness of physique, with the full chest and the full, yet beautiful buttocks of men on old Greek coins. (ch XXVI Kate is a Wife)

The lost world that is physically pure and strong. When “they” want order, it has disorder; when “they” want hygiene, it has strength. It’s like the difference between Bill Gates’ hygiene-machine (pathogen-killing toilet Hyborian Bridge 31) and BWS’s Adastra in Africa. The former destroys native culture while the latter honours the ancestors in trees that grow ancestral roots (Tales of Faith 1-4).

WHEN THE EARTH MOVES AGAIN live (from Bark)

It starts with the loam of the land and ends with the cosmos. Sift through the fine crumbs of fertile loam and they contain water, air, the fire of seed, the earthworm turning. This is primeval symmetry that is a priori a factual world or words. One is strength, the other is weakness; one is body, the other is head; one is blood, the other pure abstraction to kill hope, daylight sorcery.