Hyborian Bridge 90

Godric de Villehard in Red Blades of Black Cathay chanced on a kingdom (and a queen) while following the trail of Prester John. Howard makes mention of how the Norman knights sacked Constantinople, and other ports when the “mercenary” Venetians denied them ships.

These posts quite a few times have made mention of mercenary and mercantile activities in past ages – including Hyboria (Hyborian Bridge 1,5). Mercantilism as a facet of human behaviour is one thing; it didn’t govern them, since city-states such as Venice functioned on a self-organizing principle.

This principle is really the natural one that lines are irregular, that things just happen (Makkalet Hyborian Bridge 19). Even in towns and cities that are regularly laid-out, the self-organizing principle of localities develop spontaneously – until Big Govt steps in.

The self-organizing principle can be seen in Detroit (C3) and can be seen as a counterpoint to the coroporate state. It’s a type of social harmony similar to music. Harmonics – like the development of organic form – is uncertain and indefinite and also prone to disorder and strife.

Another word for that is freedom of behaviour – there is never pure order. Where there is pure order there is no freedom, no irregularity and therefore none of the variations on a theme that constitute traditional human settlements.

Such as fantastical or naturalistic architecture, art-deco skyscrapers and the corresponding romance of its citizenry (the Neapolitan dinginess and disdain for light). The theme is the psyche of the citizens; their reliance on the countryside they hail from, the Earth at large. The theme counters the pure order of a logical system. Otherwise one inhabits a parallel system (Hyborian Bridge 89).

The parallel system – of straight-lines from the sun – impresses acolytes and the corporate dragon of ego-lust. This is what takes the form of (most) mainstream news – economic, political – and the news is what governs people’s behaviour.

This is why the principle of self-organization is so indispensable to any rebellion against mainstream ego-lust. Where there is an Earth-theme there are also bound to be sensual and romantic relationships with nature, the blood-cycle of strength and vigour.

So, the hunt and the chase and the virility of rural pursuits constitute a counter to rampant ego-lust. Blood and death inspire fear in the ego of the mainstream. I happened on this news item from Cambridge 

Frans Snyder, Fowl Market

Blood sacrifice is a powerful theme through human history, as well as of course in pulps – see Noto Hyborian Bridge 71,72 . I happened to see the film of Elektra the other day. Films have storytelling, music and emotional impact, and Elektra is practically a study in theme-making with her metal jewellery which says death, armband which says assassin and belt which says destiny!

On the DVD, Sienkevicz made the observation that working on the Elektra Assassin series with Frank Miller, he had

“..no certainty in the dialogue between them.”

He seemed to work from chiaroscuro themes alone and let the graphics take him where they would. This ability of pulp idols to take you into a thematic world of twilight contrasts is akin to delving into the uncertain psyche. What that really amounts to saying is that the unconscious is itself a fantasy-world, and the myths we make are fantasies that we apply to reality.

This is an old idea, going back really to Plato (idealism) versus Aristotle (realism). While the modern world says there is something called “reality”, it means neither psyche nor physical reality, because both are interlinked.

It means a parallel reality of straight line accuracy (sun), a convincing illusion to bolster the ego. Physical reality is something that happens – like Sienkevicz’s work process – and is not thought. Self-organization; tribal drumming. The psyche emanates from the physical (Hyborian Bridge 10)

This must be why films like Elektra seem so emotionally real (even with the CGI). They are in actual fact more psychically real than our outdoor lives in this era usually get to.

I mean, we do our best with our sex lives and so forth, but what’s missing is the sinuous pleasure through proportionate balance with reason. Without balance the pleasure is directed by the reasoning aspect of society.

But, reason is not story, music or emotion – which is what a film is. While we inhabit a reality which is “certain” (logical), it doesn’t have the uncertain psychic aura of Elektra. An uncertain reality is sensual and virile feminine because all those are self-organizing aspects – they cannot be governed, they just develop (by uncertain rhythms).

That is why a self-governing society has to be uncertain. It’s the old Western township of Lil Abner. We are being sold the idea that certainty = reality; by economists, politicians, bankers, AI pioneers and gene aficionados. In fact, it means a parallel reality that is not sensual or virile or feminine. A life-by-numbers.

It is pleasing to the ego, almost a comfort-zone that is afraid of the big bad wolf of the forest. Myth is the fantasy that occurs deep in the human mind and that connects to the cosmos. Since the cosmos is uncertain and irregular, that is the reality.

Reality has to contain a fantasy element because that is the nature of irregularity. By “fantasy” I mean archetypal forms like owls, raven, worms. Platonic idealism. We are being sold the idea that straight lines are reality when it is simply a world without archetypes, without art-deco skyscrapers, run by super-computers run by clockwork.

Superheroes and pulps and heroic fantasy are strongly biased toward the fantasy-unconscious, sensual, virile and feminine. Perhaps this is a ploy on the part of the creative unconscious to rebalance society toward a more human and less abstract/robot state?

BREATHE NO MORE

Myths are themes, self-governing themes, that cannot be governed, that just are. The counterpoint to the corporate-dragon of ego-lust that must be slain by the pure knight so that mundanity can be seen for what it is, a corporate lie that serves the dollar and not the soul.

Hyborian Bridge 89

Here’s where it gets really confusing! In a world of hyper-accuracy, words are misused because organic lifeforms do not live in that parallel reality. When Price Andrew said (in an interview), “Sex is a positive act”, that’s an accurate statement from the point of view of organic life. So that’s why the media was all over it – take it from me.

Yellow Flower you possibly thought was a misused song, since it has nothing to do with Belit? But it has to do with memory and death – feelings that permeate Queen of the Black Coast. Words and images that are apt can have allegorical similarities and lyrical correspondances. In that sense, they are not hyper-accurate, but well-used. In a world of hyper-accuracy, we become like robots; less sensual, less virile, less feminine.

The world of hyper-accuracy cannot

FEEL IT ALL

The spokesperson for accuracy and certainty in a parallel dimension is of course The Selfish Gene’s Dicky Dawkins. The dimension being the logic that words construct to convince the ego of their veracity.

Since nature is not the product of reason, it comes of an economy of line that is simple and emblematic. 

  ( more Granada tiles, natch)

Those things that just are, whose archaic simplicity is proof of meaning and use in the realm of acts. Cobbles on the rutted roads of Khitai

Conan #32

Their worth is a savage simplicity that is strong and graceful. The world that is not the world of words, but the world that words may aptly describe. The difference is that the words are meaningful because meaning comes not from words alone; that is a false tautology we forcibly inhabit.

Meaning comes from the unthinking power of the cosmos that manifests as the forgotten idols of Earth’s past. The lost past which does not enter a parallel dimension of certainty and temporal accuracy (“We count not time” – Howard poem). For accuracy is also a product of straight lines (sun), the atomic clock that powers super-computers.

AI is nothing less than a super-accurate clock – as much atomic as is atomic combustion (see The Long Tomorrow Pictorial 75). Add to the mix DNA, and the words flow from acolytes’ lips like poison from a nest of vipers.

The meaning words have in our forced confinement is a logical tautology that is ever-more dependent on.. words that are ever-more detached from cosmic simplicity, psychic grandeur,  forgotten idols of the invisible empire of Earth’s physical form.

Conan 32

Flame Wind of Lost Khitai from Conan #32-34 –was adapted from Norvell Page’s pulp, which was actually about the far East adventures of Prester John (Wan Tengri). It’s quite typical of US pulp writers to make fantastical versions of European history, and Prester John is ideally suited to this as he was very close to a medieval fantasm!

It all centres round one of Howard’s favorite haunts, Black Khitai, and a Christian kingdom called Keraits who carried the cross against these Black Saracens. I did some reading, and round about the 12^th century the Crusaders were on the lookout for Christian knights from the far East to fortify their struggle against near east Saracens. The notion of Prester John became practically talismanic as the Crusades progressed and were forced onto the back foot.

So, while there is some historical evidence, what came to the Crusaders was hearsay, a barely tangible hope. This hearsay is found in Howard’s historical The Sowers of the Thunder. Now, “hope”, meaning a type of feeling, a bolstering of the psyche, does have an effect on physical circumstances – the ability to change circumstances for the good.

Going even further than that, Christianity is “Good News” which is designed to bolster the spirit of mankind against the forces of darkness. In other words, “news” in the Middle Ages was much more to do with psyche.

Once that is the case, the psyche – or state of mind of men and women of good faith – affects the physical circumstances. This is almost the other way round to nowadays!

Whereas today “news” is factual events where the psyche is not given any credence (to change the events), in the Middle Ages “news” could easily be non-factual or amount to hearsay. That news had a psychic truth that impacted on believers, affecting their behaviour.

In other words, the psychic effect that “news” imparted then had the result of producing or influencing physical behaviour that THEN resulted in facts. This gets to the root of the tautology at the heart of a “factual” world. A “fact” is really tantamount to words emitted by news channels; but how are the facts produced?

By-and-large by logical processes of the market and politics. Processes that have no affinity to the human psyche – apart perhaps from greed. This world is ordered, but is not psychically attuned to human needs.

So therefore, “news” and logical processes amount to pretty much the same thing. In what you could call the lost world of forgotten idols – like Prester John – “news” meant a psychic spur to action. The psyche and the physical were connected, and events followed.

When the psyche influences the physical (action), then the facts that result are also tainted by psyche. What that essentially means is that a belief-system needs to be in place. In the high medieval, each city-state had an idol – or patron-saint – that epitomised its own belief-system.

Unless one has a belief purely in money (the $) one has to believe in some psychic reality, some force for good work (or bad, actually, as in Flame Winds, where the city Wan Tengri is ruled by seven malevolent wizards).

The city is under the influence of nefarious forces, in the form of the seven. Conan adopts the mantle of Prester John and undergoes a series of adventures that finally overthrow the false idols

Conan #34

And the restoration of the imprisoned princess. Unfortunately, she turns out to be an even worse sorceress and Conan and Bourtai are left..

Conan 34

The real question is, why do we in the modern age give credence to marketing and politicians without any psychic manifestation of belief? I mean, at the moment we’re in the “X-mas season”, but what does that mean? Just shopping. Then we’re in some other season – and so on.

Where is the psychic manifestation of human behaviour on Earth? Nowhere. It’s back there with the forgotten idols. What seems to happen is that shopping becomes essentially electronic and what we are actually getting is electromagnetic impulses beamed into our brains (by acolytes of sorcerers). These same acolytes in the press then use words to give us a good impression, of what is essentially nothing (physical on planet Earth).

Where is the mix of psychic strength and physical action that gives meaning to existence?

Happy Trails Pictorial 75

The answer seems to be that it’s in the Earth itself – the hills and ranges and fields and streams and ancient forests, habitations and horses, women and men of good faith. We are being sold something that is a copy, merely straight-lines from the sun, not the authentic irregularity of Mother Earth.

Hyborian Bridge 88

Another CL Moore story, The Code, is as confusing as anything I’ve read even if it contains a neat description of parallel realities Tales of Faith 12

The mutability of genes and genesis of body in the story become almost infinite, branching into parallel lines of reality – and it all hinges on the Einsteinian idea that “Time doesn’t exist” (Pictorial 17

); it’s an invention of the mind.

(page 584)

Here, Moore is saying that mind affects body – and vice versa. Yes, but where you have affect there are circadian and other wider rhythms that transmit the affect. Time is not a mental phenomenon, it is a powerful physical reality of wheels-within-wheels. Because acolytes think logically, they tend to identify easily with computer-time (certainty) and not with intersecting rhythms that are actually how the body functions (bones, lungs, breathing, singing, eating, sipping).

This leads to the conclusion that time does not exist organically, even though in order for an ear or a throat to develop (in the watery womb) they can only do so rhythmically.

Moore’s story, which imagines a parallel reality of development, can be taken as an idea of what might happen in a universe where time functioned like clockwork, or like computer-switches (or an exchange).

But that’s exactly how organic time doesn’t work! If you replace “temporal idols” with “physical idols”, these are very powerful and archetypal shapes that have symmetry and proportion.

Sirius the dog-star (Earth-myth)

Have you ever wondered why all dog breeds are fairly cutely proportioned? That’s why. It’s not temporal, it’s archetypal. Archetypal forms have strong rhythms; they’re irrational forms and not based on temporal certainty.

Acolytes crave certainty – their ego-logic – and archetypal rhythms are uncertain. In the story, when Moore imagines the genesis of this guy Rufus, rearranging in time, it’s predicated on time being a certain factor, one that can branch into different avenues.

But the archetypal forms are constructed of intersecting rhythms that are uncertain and that – together – form something unique, such as a dachshund. We can trace figures in the sky because they have primordial shape (power, ability to hunt, leap, prowl). So, when Moore talks of the genes rearranging, genesis rearranging, she’s talking of the certainties of DNA, and not the uncertainty of rhythmic form.

What follows from that is that the science of DNA has no connection with rhythmic form, yet rhythmic form is the ultimate source of health. CL Moore’s story, even though I think it’s wrong, is also very convincing because a wrong rhythm can be convincing (disturbing, weird).

It’s also very dark so, in the sense that it accurately mimics the mindset of science, that’s its strong feature. Accuracy and certainty are dark because they are so convincing – and so wrong that they enter a parallel dimension.

The parallel dimension is the product of certainty, like the mirrored reptile-helix of DNA. In there, everything is certain, but also indescribably wrong. The wrongness is the certainty itself, since the easy thing is to attach DNA to AI, thus bypassing organic rhythm itself.

More words from the tongue of acolytes

Savage splendour, uncertain silence

In that respect, the “wrongness” is also that of the symbiot of Heir Apparent; the “improper geometry” of Kiss of the Black God. In the latter, Jirel is shrived as she faces some anti-moral force that harbours hell itself. Reptilian form that is attached to a brain gone mad. A brain that cannot sail the seas of destiny with soul intact.

YELLOW FLOWER

The delicate song, the lusty fantasy – Howard’s writing has the sensual meaning of both.

Conan #90

 

Hyborian Bridge 87

On the subject of oil men (Pictorial 76), CL Moore’s Paradise Street is set on a planet (Loki) where the pioneering wild men are being pushed aside, or incorporated into the ranchers and fruit-growers new-town settlements. The ranch hands have the look of men who have no love for the land and work and play hard, the type who are quite akin to rowdy oil men.

He hated the cockroach and the discoloured curtains and this whole filthy, stinking town the settlers had built upon his world, his clean, wild, lonely Loki. (page 529, Omnibus)

Moore writes like a dream; there is a musical, kinetic quality to her descriptions of malfrequented quarters with hardened spacers. When Morgan realights on Loki, he is in a whole heap of trouble mighty quick, and by some Byzantine foul play, finds himself  atop a Harvester bull, leading a herd of total destruction “with nightmare speed” into the settler town.

The guy is a gambler and, like KT Tunstall’s Invisible Empire, has in his mind’s eye the “wild ranges and untrodden valleys” of virgin territory. Spacefaring in CL Moore is almost like sailing through the mind’s eye, the state of mind of a rover. The Earth is still floating through the cosmos of forgotten idols that make up Man’s endless psyche.

One of the best known tales is the medieval Jirel’s first sortie in Weird Tales

 

It’s all so familiar I guess there’s little point recounting the flesh-whitening surrounds of Jirel’s subterran ordeal. Reference is made to the improper geometry of her descent, and there is a suspicion that the plastic geography she encounters is made up of the physical and psyche together (se DH Lawrence quote on stars Pictorial 67).

There is also a reference to “scaly hides” of those who presumably built the vortex tunnel down which she slides. The cosmic emptiness at the core of the black idol is also manifest. The idol has a strong physical power, but a psychic desert at its core.

For all that Jirel is something like 9^th century medieval, if every age can be said to have its own idol, ours is clearly not that of a Christian church, and has something of the subterran darkness of Black God’s Kiss.

The reptilian aspect of modern life – the surges of heat, cold-light of electronics that burns into the brain –  Pictorial 75 - what of the cold emptiness at its core?

The sterility of electronics is like the solar serpent, with the head of a man – Howard’s man-serpent from The God in the Bowl. I know you can say Moore and Howard were just writing fantasy, but why such soul-devouring fantasy as Black God’s Kiss? Is there at the heart of modernity, in amongst our fleshy idols of screen and political stage, a cosmic emptiness resembling the one Moore observes in the subterran medieval forte of Jirel?

Apart from the sterile emptiness (sterile meaning infertile), we live in a land of mirrors (electronic reflections, copies), and mirrors are reputedly the artefacts of sorcerers (HB20).

Every society requires idols – often called icons in the medieval Christian tradition of Byzantium or Greek orthodox

 

(hand painted icon)

If they are not manifestly moral, perhaps they may be the opposite?

A mirror (reflection) because it is not physical can have no psychic emanation. What it does have is words – words that emanate from talking-heads. What if, behind the talking-heads of our masters is a sterile solar serpent – rather than the human figure? This cold serpent – that is attracted to the cold-light of electronics – replaces the moral force of the physical body that manifestly has a psyche.

The moral force of the body-in-action comes out strongly in Jirel, the psychic luster that the steely red-hair emits, like the ancestral heroes and heroines of Troy.

The modern era is curiously lacking in moral force, which seems to have been replaced by the idea that money (or the $) has its own luster. So the West sees no flaw in dealing with China’s vast market, despite the Chinese Communist Party being the moral equivalent of a cold-blooded reptilian robot.

The reptilian side to West and East maybe see eachother in themselves. Even if the West is less obviously repellent, the psychic emptiness at its core may echo that of the far East. The serpent underneath Black Gold was serenaded in the seventies by Grace Slick

BE YOUNG YOU

If in a way the oil men of South Texas had a roughness that was a match for the wilderness-pioneers, our modern “masters” have a steel smoothness of oil and (snake’s) tongue that already is sliding toward an electric-green future, replacing the antiquated machineries of oil.

After all, whether we use fossil or atom for fuel, the steel of electronics is what is plugged into by the heads of our masters.

It was only thus a Ganymedan could speak to an Earth-born human.. It meant nothing. There are higher barriers than these between human minds. (Promised Land, Omnibus page 569)

Thus is another pioneer/settler story by CL Moore. Here the distionction is much harder, and the human Fenton is siding with the Ganymedans who have been bred to breathe the cold vapors of the Jovian moon.

The difference is not told by niceties of physique and height but by the cold, implacable minds of the masters in the Unit, the monstrous Torren octopusely connected to all he surveys. Like another of her tales, Heir Apparent, the human mind that is connected to the machine loses humanity. It’s not a physical thing but an emptiness of psyche.

They may retain the human figure, but to all intents the body is the machine; the cold serpent of steel and electronics and neverending surveillance screens (iphones?) Similarly, in the modern world when the head overreaches the body, it becomes attached to octopoid machines. This happened recently in the UK when Prince Andrew had the bad idea of speaking to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis. The result of that was severe curtailing of his Royal duties. “Big deal”, you may think, yet he merely made the mistake of being honest rather than gurning to the cameras.

The real point is the Ganymedans of Promised Land work the land with their bodies and don’t try to run it with their minds.

It seemed odd to watch them carrying hoes and garden baskets in the snow, but the valley was much warmer below the mist.

Kristin came toward him, very tall, moving with a swift, smooth ease that made every motion a pleasure to watch. She had warm yellow hair braided in a crown across her head. Her eyes were very blue, and her skin milk-white below the flush the cold had given it. (page 570)

Even on Ganymede, the forgotten idols are winging round the mighty satellite. Such is destiny. An empire that is invisible to the mind playing with its inward-looking toys that have no physical destiny, no psychic luster.

The image of DNA is yet another cold, serpentine illusion playing tricks on the mind, when strength is in the body, working within the seasonal cycles of life and death for the wider life of the soul in the forgotten cosmos of the invisible empire.

Pictorial 65

Pictorial 76

I had a look at linefacedscrivener’s video on South Texas oil men, which was the world that Howard wasn’t necessarily that keen on. Oil feeds the habits of an industrial civilization lit-up by neon signs and running on superhighways.

The one thing oil wells aren’t is hygienic, which places them at the very onset of the modern era. I mean, the rough-and-ready aspect of it might not have been that unappealing to Howard. Still, at the end of the road is the modern city-based Man of neon.

The Man of neon has been, in the 21^st century, basically a head that is attached to a hygiene-machine of some type. An electronic device, something that is encased in plastic or metal so that the inner works are free of air, water (as in a sterile lab, an infertile environment).

That seems to imply that, in order to thrive in the modern scene, reality is essentially hygienic, or else the semi-conductors wouldn’t be as infallible as they are.

“A vagrant charge,” said Gutierrez, “A speck of dust, a relay too worn to function right, and how could you ever know?”
“Julio,” said Erdmann. “You know better. If the slightest thing goes wrong with her she stops automatically and asks for attention.” (The Long Tomorrow, page 188)

This is the “electric-green future”, symbolised by new towns like Babcock Ranch (Tales of Faith 2). What “they” call green is merely the loss of the elegant simplicity of the irregular lines of variety found on an archaic map.

Pictorial 65

An electrical future has no theme save that of straight lines, so cannot have variety. All it has is infallibility. In order to be infallible in the electronic-sphere – one needs hygiene-machines, then that reality is a hygiene reality. But –Hyborian Bridge 86- a hygiene reality tends to be mathematically observed, and is therefore not "real".

The very fact of hygiene discounts the physical reality that is bound to cycles of lifedeath, regeneration. The mathematical detail obtained is therefore a hygienic fantasy – very convincing but false.

To obtain truthful data one would have to rejoin seasonal cycles of nature. The evergreen of Gilgamesh that is frightening to the ego; the ego of acolytes of the electric arc. It’s frightening also because of its pungency. The 19^th century Shanghai of pig farmers (Tales of Faith 2) is a far cry from the Shanghai of

 

But the old Shanghai had a decadent character, a grandeur that feeds the psyche of inhabitants great and small, of wayfarers.

Al Coutelis

Without the physical decadence that defines place (on Earth, not Mars) the sense of moral existence fades to nothing, and all one can do is shop (electronically).

The underlying reason seems to be that electronics is a copy (reflection) and not a physical reality. The physical reality is Earth, and the theme is Earth’s. The theme that emanates a psyche, powerful, subtle and cosmic.

Al Coutelis’s La Dame de Singapour

is musical, kinetic – and therefore emtional, a variation on an earthly theme of flesh, bone, stars, seas. That is romance; the geographical and oceanic reality of place on Earth. 

 

INVISIBLE EMPIRE

A copy or a reflection only looks realistic; there is no room for the expression of human psyche as a concomitant of the cosmos. Where there is variety and the strength of psychic existence, opne sees a sublime economy of line in the signal cultural artefacts.

This is where Weird Tales – and the covers of Margaret Brundage – takes its place amongst the singular and archaic psychic emanations of history.

It could be from Knossos (Wild Horses); 19^th century Japanese prints; Isis and Osiris (Hyborian Bridge 48)..the strength of economy emanates from a place on the map of Earth, floating through the cosmos of forgotten idols. The theme that is eternal and is invisible to an electronic empire.

Granada peasant tiles (family heirloom)

Anything that is a copy (reflection) is both realistic and false! This is the confusion running round the modern globe. I did mention Hong Kong: the protests appear to be active, but there is no real rebellion, which means taking over the reins of power (bloodlessly) and pledging to uphold Basic Law.

A rebellion has consequences, or it is nothing. There’s no point bandying words (or electronic images). A rebellion is a physical act that has emotional, psychic consequences – or it is nothing , pictures on a screen.

The pictures we see from history, the covers of Weird Tales, have this physical and psychic aura that tells us they are real. They exist in the cosmos, they are not copies, they are eternal.

 

Hyborian Bridge 86

I don’t know if you recall the film Royal Kill (Ninja’s Creed) from C14? It has an oddly abstract air, which probably put off reviewers. The world we live in, though, IS fantastically abstract – we don’t hunt for food, we barely see the agrarian process, we’re attached to smartphones and detached from meaningful cycles of creation and destruction (Quetzalcoatl).

An abstract world has no acquaintance with death since it is essentially just words on paper, or marks on a screen; the emanations of the mind, or AI or a combination of the two. What if that world is a fantasy, and the kinetic grace of life and death is reality?

The film appears to be a game – which is a fantasy – and yet the story and the music belong with the game and not to the bland abstraction of the city-lights and sounds.

The things which make modern life real are abstract qualities of order and predictability (straight-line progress) – the very things which in nature are unreal! The physical reality of nature is life and death, much like the game played against Nadia, the ninja assassin in the film.

This reality turns out to be a fantasy, in that Adam (the protector and good guy) and Nadia (the assassin and evil) toward the end become one entity. At that point, Morita says, “Are you ready?” and Adam returns to his life as a security guard (for Morita).

That sequence in the film is the most lurid and cheapso visual effects of all, but if one is distracted by that one may miss vital clues. For instance, his flat is nothing ordinary in that there are hanging Persian (magic) carpets. He lifts one and underneath is a tome on an 11^th century hero, the figure who appeared at the start.

The entire story of the princess you can then take as an 11^th century fantasy that he plays out. He also says, the worst thing in the world is “an ordinary life”. At the conclusion, another American guardian (woman) and girl appear at the park, and so there is a circular plot a la Watchmen.

The real question is: is the abstract “reality” we live in fantasy or reality? In the film, the only way Adam can escape from mundanity is to imagine a fantasy world akin to Hyboria. But if our “reality” is false or fantasy, the Hyborian-style fantasy has more music and kinetic story – which makes it emotionally real.

This is played-out in the performances, with Lalaine’s (the girl/princess) anguished “Adam!?” as his conflicting nature is revealed. Is a “reality” which is emotionally and musically insipid actually NOT reality? (I often note that contemporary pop has an almost asexual nullifier!)

The real problem is one can’t “prove” anything because at the root of things – quantum physics – things are plumb weird. All one can do is go on a hunch and follow it through. Back in Hyborian Bridge 48 I did make an analogy between a reflection in a mirror (Alice Through the Looking Glass) and Relativity. In a reflection, everything is relative to the speed of light in that what you are looking at is simply beams of light (not physical reality).

Is it fair, then, to say that a reflection in a mirror is simply the most basic example of relativity? Secondly, any razor-sharp image we see on our smartphones is a reflection; it’s not inverted – as a mirror is – but all it takes is two mirrors reflecting eachother to see an image the right way round.

So, electronic images are just electronic reflections; there’s no difference. Thirdly, electronics is the medium of mathematics; ie. all the algorithms fed into computers. Hyborian Bridge 48  quotes Einstein..

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

..What that means is, if everything were mathematical it wouldn’t be reality (nature is not a product of reason, prev). IE mathematics is certain mathematically only.

The physical reality we live in is clearly not mathematical since it is proportionate, strong and virile, tigerish (like Nadia). The kinetic reality depicted in Royal Kill is more medieval or Hyborian than it is modern; there is dynastic loyalty and servitude, heroism.

The real point is that a pin-sharp image – whether we see it on a smartphone or via a radio-telescope – is not physical reality. It is a reflection. The black hole observed recently (Hyborian Bridge 56 Katie Bouman) was a combination of mirrors and algorithms. What “they” are observing is the universe seen through lenses – another type of mirror that reflects or refracts light.

In other words, a universe of reflections, that is relativistic, is also mathematical. Going by Einstein’s quote, that means it could be a fantasy. It’s not certain physically, only mathematically. Again, CERN is another example of a “hygiene-machine” (Pictorial 44) that sees things mathematically (only) so could be fantasy.

Whether you call it fact or mathematical data depends on your view (similarly, DNA is a one-sided view of an abstraction, rather than the life and death reality of the cosmos). Anything that is pin-sharp and super-accurate doesn’t exist in the physical sense of bone, stone, star.

When “they” say there is something called the “microcosm” (quantum physics) it cannot be seen without observing it mathematically. It’s a mathematical construct (Kari Hohne in The Mythology of Sleep says something very similar).

Therefore, then only physical world is the one that we see from the Earth, Midgard, strung midway between sun and moon. That is the unthinking world that – yes – one can apply math to, but it is far more, and introspective to the wanderer under the stars above. Unblemished by the thoughts of acolytes.

Here’e one visual example of that disparity. The mathematical world can appear very certain and resolved, like something on a microscope slide.

“where are we?” “Search me”

It’s all above board, except that it may lack the cosmic reality of the oceans and geography of the coast. What this is really getting to is that the physical world (of planets and moon and stars) allows for the moral or psyche. Starting from Newton’s experiments with refracting knives, we live in an inductive universe of experiment, and not in the physical universe that just is (C6 etc.)

The intense physicality of Weird Tales can be seen as a rebellion against the abstractions of a world built on light and electronics. A yearning for a physical sense that is not just sexual but cosmic.

The Weird Tales covers by Brundage are not merely sexy, they lust for more, they identify with idols. Idols are representations of cosmic forces and balances of Earth, man and woman.

Hyborian Bridge 85

GODZILLA

In the physical universe, naturalism is forever pitted against reason, for only Man has reason. Thus is the tautology born for, unless nature is a product of reason, the mind is forever circling back to its source in the straight-lines of solar light.

Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow began with this

As I’ve been saying for awhile, in classical Greece there always were two things: the city and the agrarian surround; the Apollonian temple and the unkempt Delphic Oracle seeing into uncertainty; the reasoning philosopher and the Bacchanalian followers of Dionysus, god of the vine.

In other words, our culture is not classical by any means. Nor does it have the advantages of barbarism – of freedom from cultural trappings as Howard often notes. What we have is a one-sided civilization that Francis Bacon seems to have foreseen in “The Four Idols” (Tales of Faith 10).

We are in the Idol of the Den, or the mind of the acolytes. Where Newton was a scientist-sorcerer who saw that certain things were so, his acolyte followers have us trapped in his light-box.

This is the world of the cities that is so attractive to the ego; the ego that runs like the robot on lines of steel. But the ego also runs on fear; fear of the labyrinthine ways of the forest (see Kari Hohne Gilgamesh); the forest of ragged pathways, spoor of deer, the signs that gamekeepers cherish, that the hunter chases (Tales of Faith 11)

The path joined a deer trail. Several times he bent to look at fresh signs, and when he crossed a clearing with long grass in it he could see the ground crushed in places whewre the deer had bedded. (The Long Tomorrow, page 33)

The Gilgamesh epic probably harks back to the Mesopotamia of verdant hills and luxurious hanging gardens that bore far closer resemblance to Howard’s Turan that presentday Iraq. What Kari Hohne refers to as the “Shadow Self” is the labyrinthine ways of the forest that quells the ego the the savagery of blood and revival, decay and rebirth.

Savagery is something that can be reconciled with the beliefs of Man – as in the Christendom of the Middle Ages – which is a good reason why Howard’s historical tales all come from those ages of faith and blood.  An age of faith of an age that attempts to answer what modern Man no longer even admits – the fate of the dead.

It’s no real surprise since, if we no longer live in a physical world of Earth – seasons, planets, moonrise – we can also no longer live in a psychic world (of the planets and the moon). What seems to happen in the modern world is that countries – by way of the capitalist system which is essentially abstract reason – tend to gradually lose both their physical sparkle and their psychic or moral basis.

As mentioned before, I lived in Franco’s Spain as a kid and those two things have always stayed with me (Pictorial 72.) Spain today now has a very typical split between two abstract ways of reason – ie left and right – and there is even confusion about what Spain is (Catalonia). The king did attempt to unify the country in the wake of the false referendum, and that may be their best bet.

Confusion is even more prevalent in China, where the abstract reason of the Communist Party eclipses all the traditional millennia old physical patterns of communal living in town and country. China is neither a physical nor moral country, much more like a living AI (head or electromagnetism).

The principle of Tao or the Chinese Dragon is an uncontrollable force of crazed dance that existed in all towns in the vastness of the mainland. A primeval theme that allowed for variations of story and music. The physical that allows for the moral.

Similar things are true for the cosmic being Quetzalcoatl (Hyborian Bridge 78 etc) who visits Earth at equinoxes, appearing in shadow-form at El Castillo (Chichen Itza). Earth lies suspended between sun and moon, and these cosmic serpents or dragons enact extravagant balancing acts.

DH Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent (Hyborian Bridge 82) did suggest that religions are variations of a theme, and in this case the theme has to relate to Earth being suspended between sun and moon, and that is the physical reality.

I did notice in the book that he introduces quite casually Nordic elements to Quetzalcoatl, such as the Midgard serpent, probably because he thought the religions were variations on a single mystic root (Carl Jung, natch.)

The variations of irregular patterns existing over the Earth also applies for similar reasons to Howard’s Hyborian Age. Amongst all the c ontrasting beliefs of city-states and kingdoms, it’s noticeable that the followers of Set are the only ones to attempt world domination.

Set, in Howard’s mythos, is much more akin to our modernday sorcerers of the sun – dominating the human figure to such an extent that there exist man-serpents (Conan #7) and serpent-men, such as these from Conan #89

 

(Conan is reciting Red Sonja’s phrase from #24)

Thoth Amon desires not only rule, but the subjugation of mankind  - not by cosmic forces, but by the snake that is forever bound to its master; the sun. Thoth Amon you could liken to a twisted sun-god, or the false Apollo that invites slime.

(ch 4)

Thoth’s ram’s horns represent the abstraction and expansion of the head over the vibrancy of the body. This is always a sign of physical weakness and the false copy that only appears true – such as the man-serpent.

The false-copy can only gain a foothold where the primeval theme of Earth’s balance has been abandoned by the sorcerers of the sun.

Where the body is a false-copy, it does not have the strength that derives from the cycle of lifedeath – the cycle that follows the seasons of the Earth. Strength is in the soil that supports plantlife that grows and decays over the seasons in a fertile cycle.

This cycle is a primitive belief that sanctifies the land and life of a tribe – see BWS Adastra in Africa (Tales of Faith 2 etc). As mentioned, the hygiene-machines of modern Man do not allow for the primitive cycles that support a tribal culture (Bill Gates’ pathogen-killing toilet Hyborian Bridge 31). The reason is that Gates and others like him have no concern with death and decay; they are only concerned with the living, and once they cease to live they have no value.

Traditional tribal cultures are the exact opposite. They revere ancestors and preserve their memory in trees and shrines and land (Adastra again). The cycle of plantlife and decayand rebirth therefore strengthens their ancestral culture and their belief.

Where the physical culture of the land and people is strong (fertile) there is much less need for advanced cures relating to people is the abstract sense. In other words, people who are strong exist on fertile land that is theirs, that they work and venerate ancestrally (belief). People who are weak don’t have that and tend to live in cities.

This is the false Apollo that invites slime, since the very fact people need treatment implies they are less well. The same applies to other things, such as hazardous sex. What the false Apollo does is consider people when they are living, but not in the cyclical sense of death and decay and revival. The false Apollo supplies treatment for people in the abstract sense, discounting the strength of primitive cycles of lifedeath.

I saw this ad which looks really great, until you realize it is a treatment for the body as a machine that lives, and is a type of weakness.

 

The false Apollo invites slime because it invites weakness; it is a snake with the head of Apollo as in Howard’s story. The head is so fantastically convincing that one doesn’t realize until too late that there is no human figure atall, and it is sliding up to you.

Conan #7