Hyborian Bridge 116

A natural system is built on action and the presence of dirt. The transformation enables a forest to flourish and all the game associated with it.

Action is strength, and the hunter (Artemis) adds to this cycle of blood and carrion. This is something the modern order seems not to be aware of since they - and even Michael Moore and Greta - are forever talking of an "electric-green future."

Electricity is simply the handmaiden of expressive algorithm (P100 etc.) for whom "they" will write stories that have noting to so with blood, the hunt and the feminine mystique (moon).

This is the world of action and the chase that strengthens with exposure to dirt and germs. Fertility is always going to be associated with dirt because everything comes from strength, not weakness. The flower blooming in the desert is a sign of hope. The active world is therefore counter to what "they" see in the electric-green future of radiant cities (Neom) and the sterilization of culture.

The expressive algorithm is a sign of this, since it is just a construction of light (electromagnetism) as opposed to the physical substance of a forest that destroys light and transforms it, recycles, reuses.

This harks back to Buffy Saint-Marie's motto of use and reuse and leaving things be (HB70). In a system of light or electricity, the transformative enabling of physical substance is rendered null and void.

Instead of the presence of dirt supplying growth and strength, sterility brings about the opposite tendency or a suspicion of dirt. This suspicion takes the form of a compulsion (see Grace Slick quote HB62/1).

The weakness of this psychology has quite a lot to do with words, since words are not action. Heads - whether human or algorithm - deliver words, not bodies. Words often become numbers - as with spokespeople of the corona-crisis like Piers Morgan (prev) - and in the case of expressive algorithms, words ARE numbers (ones and zeros).

Culture doesn't change the facts of nature; it's the old Greek maxim.

.. I do think the preference of writers to agents - the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes by themselves and others - a sign of effeminacy, degeneracy and weakness. Who would write, who had any thing better to do? 'Action-action-action'- said Demosthenes: 'Actions -actions,' I say, and not writing, - least of all, rhyme. Look at the querulous and monotonous lives of the 'genus'; -all except.. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and some of the antiques also - what a worthless, idle brood it is! (Byron, Poems, Prose, Letters, Collins 1959 page 569)

Byron's attitude is admirable, since not only is he a fantastic poet but he acknowledges poets only write words. They don't till fields (like Ruth, prev) or ride horses or blacksmith or climb trees or herd beasts or sheer sheep (see The Wool-Sack, prev.)

What Byron mainly meant was the political and military sphere in the time when Greece was struggling under the Ottomans (he perished at Messolonghi fighting for the Greek cause). However, the political and military are only there to preserve the real world. If that world is no longer active but passive and ruled by words, what's the point?

..but why do they abuse him for cutting of that poltroon Cicero's head? Did not Tully tell Brutus it was a pity to have spared Antony? and did he not speak the Philippics? and are not 'words things?' and such 'words' very pestilent 'things' too? (page 558 on Antony and Cleopatra).

The active world transforms things into use by strength, while the passive world doesn't. The sign of activity is often dereliction -  see C6 D3 C3 - and there is the quote by Lovecraft on Howard's lost cities.

Decadence is the world of the soil and trees, of life and death, of transformation into use, of fertility and dirt, of the moon and fungi, of cities of the night, of seedy districts and dingy wharves. In other words, it is the reality of life on Earth when it is not under the dominion of words. That reality can't be changed by culture, but words are persuasive to the ego, numbers verify "facts" in the parallel reality of resolved space that is composed mainly of light and straight lines.

Outside of this sterility is the world of dirt and recycled use that breeds strength and fertility. It is really the modern infatuation with rubbish - which "they" call hygiene - that keeps us weak.

I suppose you see where this is going; a world of the ego and numbers is also a world that is compulsive about hygiene - the two are the same. Outside of this is the world of rigorous action-in-the-field and exposure to germs. It is the world of forests and disorder and strength - action of body and introspection of mind - that can be equated with Howard. Disorder and stench and seediness and decadence are all signs of psychic and physical strength, as well as some degree of self-government.

Sunlight is destroyed by a forest and the logic of light transformed into the disorder of growth and fertility. If we live in an order of equations as opposed to rustic action and strength, that is part of the reason why.

The shadows and atmospheres of old noir films seem to contain a lot more simply by suggestion and inference - the lost universe of ancient patinas that is the physical substance of Earth, the femme fatale of cosmic fate, or the haunted harbor.

 

Hyborian Bridge 115

Olivia, staring up from the ground, saw what she took to be either a savage or a madman advancing on Shah Amurath in an attitude of deadly menace. He was powerfully built, naked but for a girdled loincloth, which was stained with blood and crusted with dried mire. His black mane was matted with mud and clotted blood; there were streaks of dried blood on his chest and limbs, dried blood on the long straight sword he gripped in his right hand. From under the tangle of his locks, bloodshot eyes glared like coals of blue fire. (Shadows in the Moonlight).

Mud and blood. Such striking scenes abound in this mainly moonlit tale. Conan may not care for the reeds that cake the body as it squirms, but the realism is palpable.

So saying, he laid aside his sword, and wading out shoulder-deep into the blue water, went about his ablutions. When he emerged, his clean-cut bronze limbs shone, his streaming black mane was no longer matted. His blue eyes, though they smoldered with unquenchable fire, were no longer murky or bloodshot. But the tigerish suppleness of limb and the dangerous aspect of feature were not altered.

What is real and what is unreal? Is an image of such a scene real, or is the scene itself real? Clearly the latter, so is a realistic image actually a type of unreality?

HB1 compared Leonardo and Durer in terms of perfection and imperfection; in Leonardo geometry is incorporated in the figures, in Durer it is kept separate. By the time of Caravaggio (HB114), perfection gives way to the illusion of light in chiaroscuro.

Once that happens, the more real the image appears the less real it is, since it is only composed of light. Outside of light-effects is the physical substance of Earth; the dark forests that harbor Artemis and her hounds; psyche and the symbolism contained in lunar and other motifs.

It's the very realism of light-effects that make them unrealistic in the physical sphere of moonlit forests. The symbolism of a forest is that it destroys light and by so doing transforms it. There is a physical content there that is not contained in the technique of chiaroscuro.

The modern scene is in many ways the heir to Caravaggio; reason (technique) applied for the sake of effect (light). Our modern homes are objects of light (electromagnetism) rather than huts in the forest.

A forest represents physical substance, so that one could theoretically cut down trees and use the wood to build a dwelling. A forest hut exists in dappled shade and abuts on rough sward. In the construction and habitation everything tends to be cyclical, reusable, since it is part of the forest. Same with the beasts (see Buffy quote on transformation, HB70).

This concept of building in terms of physical substance (Earth) was so also with the Romans as I read in an article on Pompeii, where detritus of various kinds was piled along the town wall, apparently stored.

A cyclical system shares in the feminine mystique of the materials of Earth - terracotta, ceramics. This is part of the rustic empire of the introspective mind (see HB1 for details; see HB2 for Roman engineering.)

The modern mind is much more inclined to be taken by a convincing likeness of reality a la Caravaggio, rather than the real thing. The Martian Home is therefore much like a construction of light, built in straight lines from external materials that are erected, all sorts of gizzmos fitted.

Light is resolved space adopting a monotone style; the psyche and rustic content are lacking. Where the rustic habitation is cyclical and part of Earth, resolved space is simply erected, and all unwanted material continually taken away as rubbish.

Psychologically-speaking, this modern fixation for cleanliness creates a mindset whereby a lot of the work involves constantly taking away rubbish. In other words, a fixation for cleanliness becomes a fixation for rubbish.

It's this straight-line sterility that has a very convincing appearance that is almost the heir to Caravaggio. The very conviction points to a convincing illusion of light-effects. The reality of Earth materials (ochres), forest and moonlit groves are lacking.

Resolved space is always very persuasive - see CL Moore P8) but it is psychically lacking and, in CL Moore's Judgement Night, full of reptilian psychosis. The style is monochrome, flashy and tawdry (Trumplike).

The modern psyche, through its fixation on straight-line sterility, actually develops a fixation on numbers and rubbish (see Grace Slick quote HB62/1). In other words, the physique can't be denied, and the brain and body become one. To the Romans, and I guess all pre-industrial people, the Earth is the body and recyles things as a body does. There is no cerebral cleverness because it's not fitting that a house should be clever; it's just mud, wattle, or mortar - nothing more.

The modern types who seem to have the smart ideas for straight-line habitations and gizzmos - be it Bezos or Gates - are at the same time full of rubbish because their cleverness necessitates a fixation on sterility (illusory space, light).

Cyclical systems are not smart; they have a primitive appreciation of fertility - much as Conan does of Olivia. With fertility or dirt comes strength of body, germs that stimulate the immune-system.

It's not rocket-science so "they" don't find it interesting. It's ancient psyche, ancient style and ancient heart.

DICKENS GENOCIDE

(sacred geometry?)

HB60

Hyborian Bridge 114

Is it true to say that the active universe of the warrior and the shaman has to be pre-Galileo (prev)? Yes, because it's a question of direction; the sun's rays are straight, and this creates a very convincing "realism" composed of perspective and light.

Galileo's contemporary, Caravaggio, was the first artist to employ this type of near-photographic realism that uses dark and light (chiaroscuro). Realism tends to replace physical substance and psyche with pure light effects (later Impressionism.)

David and Goliath

Realism is therefore only real with respect to the sun, not the Earth or the moon. The art that's pre-Caravaggio/Galileo tends to have above all physical substance - and therefore psyche. Caravaggio has a conviction that can be convincing composed of light-effects; compare with Durer.

 

By physical substance I mean the exploration of line and movement, especially in cartooning and action. Living things are active as opposed to just creations of light (photo.)

It's the exploration and cartooning that is the area of art that came to prominence before Caravaggio, and is why comic books hark back to those glory dfays of yore. I've been reading Conan and the Gods of the Mountain in Savage Sword (from the Philip Green novel), and Kayanan's mesmerizing patinas of ruins and churchlike abodes are something to behold.

Savage Sword #211

This image of fungi growing over a rotting carcass has a curiously spiritual aspect but then, why not? Ancient Man in caves would be surrounded by fungi and spores and minerals such as phosphorus that gives off spooky radiance. The ancient Greek Oracles are thought to have got high on noxious subterranean fumes.

The spiritual and the physical are closely connected, and this is an Earth-aspect of life. As I tend to say, the exposure of the body to germs prompts the immune-system to produce antibodies. So, this is the body being active in rough and unkempt situations (see HB108 trade-routes). The suggestion nowadays is that health goes in one-direction, when it is always a balance between germs (strength) and cleanliness (action in the field, rituals).

Because we now live in a straight-line world, we are told to believe that sterile conditions are healthy when,in actual fact, dirt strengthens us. We live in weakness and reap the consequences. We are beset by words of acolytes reciting numbers (prev.) this is the way that a straight-line system indoctrinates us.

Savage Sword #211

Here, Kayanan is drawing the dreamy, textual contours of a living planet exuding psyche.

 

 Here is the Ichiribu's churchlike conclave. When Seyganku hears from the witch-doctor that Emwaya will live he cries,

"My heart soars sunward like a bird."

HE LIKES THE SUN

What I'm getting at is that all the beliefs of a pre-industrial age are born of activity, not inertia. In Nyoka (P110) the rays of the sun goddess are harnessed to gradually inch toward the rope suspending her from a fiery fate. Not just the sun, the moon god is emblemised by a crescent-shaped pendulum. The wind gods are harnessed in the tunnels of of Tauregs while, in the Conan yarn, God-men of the mountain are the speakers for the Living Wind.

All the elements are products of the Earth spinning through space. The Earth activates life, emblemises it and achieves a psychic rapport. Today we are stuck in a no-man's land that is really emblematic by talking and singing ciphers that spout nothing but numbers. The sexual becomes the numerical through the dominion of the head (see prev. on the expressive algorithm.)

It's a sterile situation, since sex in the field is just the act of working and moving the body, women wearing clothing that bunches to accentuate sinuous curves and the strength of spine (P103).

The transportation of the sun from the skies to some nebulous centre sterilizes the situation, renders it infertile and inactive. The words of acolytes then recite convincing numbers that seems to keep the direction of thought in the same sterile zone.

I'm not saying it's deliberate. They are true believers. They live in their heads and not in the field with the beasts and the herbs. They are not warriors or shamans.

Behind the words of acolytes of course lies the inductive reason prophesied by The New Atlantis, convincing in the sense a hall of mirrors is convincing (HB20). Sorcery is convincing, that's its job.

However, the nobility of the beliefs of being active on the face of planet Earth, as opposed to Martian acolytes, harness a poetry that has a psychic rapport with the cosmos, figures in a landscape.

You find in Howard, and Kayanan's intricate, Smith-influenced linework has that primitive quality that harks back to Man's greatness. Yes, Earth is primitive because it is not simply cerebral. There is fungi and there are germs. There is a direction, the harmonic cosmos that is almost a battle of opposites; sun, moon, man, woman (see Bruce Lee " a battle between a robot and a wild beast".) There is a mystical quality that an active life in the fields generates.

GENERATION

Hyborian Bridge 113

Talking about Clair Noto's "Red Lace" HB71 made the comment: In this story, sorcery and sword are never wholly parted... Only when the sorcery departs from the purely physical – and hence human – is it a black and inhuman force.

Apah Alah is like some sort of misguided Earth Mother figure, peeking through the twisting bush at the imperiled Sonja (HB70). She is not out for self-gain as would be Thoth Amon; she is interested in the human themes that now play-out between Sonja and her rebellious son Suumaro, as any serpentine mother would be.

As the themes of blood and death play-out in the classic "Red Lace", the universe of Apah Alah is shown to have a strength of revival born of physical substance (blood).

It's the very opposite to the cerebral sorcery of Thoth Amon; it does not have the logic-chopping capabilities of black sorcery, and is more like misguided motherly love.

A gothic world of rapid growth, bloody death and revival is always going to have a fairly filthy fertility that is almost akin to a life-force. It is as far  from black sorcery as it is from hygiene!

This gives the clue that the cerebral sorcery of Thoth Amon is also akin to a hygienic universe of logic-chopping. If you look back at the top of HB71 there is a piece on the bending of light by crystals, used in X-ray diffraction for instance for identification of DNA. The point made there was that the crystal world is precise but not real. The reality is the water and gel in a cell. But the precise world can be measured. Logic--chopping is therefore also hygienic - outside of the natural cycles of decay and rebirth of the physical substance of a cell.

Logic-chopping is numerical (precision) and nowhere is this more apparent than in the news-media. Piers Morgan, in an interview with a corona-minister, quote

 

First he asked how many NHS and care workers had died. “43,” Dowden said confidently.

Actually it was 80, said Morgan, illustrating his assertion by holding up a double-page spread from a morning paper that clearly the minister hadn’t been bothered to read.

Hell, it was early and it wasn’t like he had a serious job where it was his business to know the news. OK, Morgan continued. How many care home residents had died? “217,” Dowden replied. Er ... how about 7,500? (see "numerical" in Tout va Bien, prev.)

It's because we live in a hygienic logical system that we are assaulted by such numbers. Outside of this system is the balance between dirt and cleanliness (germs). Meaning, the active life in fields and forests that exposes the body to dirt and invites the act of cleaning (see places of power and Mosaic Law, prev.)

It's because we live in a world of the head that these cycles of dirt and cleanliness no longer exist, and are usually declared unhealthy. In fact, they're a way the body self-governs its health, as opposed to being treated by external measures. Since we live in an Airtight Garage of facts relating to a logical universe of hygiene, this tends to go unnoticed.

So, Apah Alah's white sorcery of blood and dirt is very germaine to the human themes that relate to death and revival. As noted also in HB71 ancestor worship is an acknowledgement of the psyche in the blood-cycles of rebirth.

The Earth turns, the sun shoots across the sky, followed by Artemis and the transformative enabling of Apollo. Transformation,decay followed by revival (see also Buffy Saint Marie HB72) Because this transformative world of blood and strength is outside a sorcery of straight-lines, it is also outside the verbal/numerical proclamations of acolytes that one is given to think is reality.

This is the black sorcery of hygiene where numbers rule through the mouths of acolytes. Reason being that a universe of numbers is a universe of straight-lines (sun) that originated with Galileo (circa 1600, after the Renaissance heyday, natch.)

Straight lines (light) are obviously not cyclical, and so are outside of the cycles of blood and dirt, of death and revival that you see in "Red Lace". The area from where the psyche emanates and Primitive Man worships ancestors.

Modern Man has turned his back on this area of mystery, and it is left to fantasy writers like Howard. One of his best - and earliest - Conan tales is The Scarlet Citadel, much of it set amongst the macabre lifeforms of the said citadel of Tsotha Lanti.

Savage Sword #30

This page I think you might recognize as similar to Clair Noto's obscene fronds that here lasciviously draw the life-essence of Tsotha's rival, Pelius.

For Tsotha Lanti is lord of a symbiotic citadel, host to all sort of creepy-crawlies out of arcane, clammy wells. Neither of these two wizards strike me as truly black; they are too much in the world of living things, albeit really strange (though nothing like the level of Piers Morgan, natch.)

The ending is again macabre and not exactly typical Howard humour. 

They almost act like light relief to the arcane cerebral ferocirty of Thoth Amon of the black circle (black sun). Black sorcery exists where the head is really detached and exists in a reality devoid of living things, save the intellect itself.

In such a land there can be no death, and so no revival. There is no blood and no dirt, as in the plant and symbiotic-infested kingdoms of "Red Lace" and The Scarlet Citadel.

Black sorcery is quite akin to hygiene or a pure cerebral space. This goes back to ancient Greek philosophers like Diogenes, who was sceptical of all advance and lived in a barrel. The basic point is that, even if advance happens, it shouldn't upset the psychic vistas with which living things thrive. A cerebral order does just that.

A cerebral order is essentially words, but nowadays the words are much akin to numbers; numbers and the straight-line order (sun). This is why anything associated with dirt is outside of a logical order. IE the Earthspin that transforms sunlight into the eternally turning sky of day and night, Apollo and Artemis, the transformative enabler through growth and decay and blood.

The acolytes use words and numbers to constantly establish a black sorcery of hygiene. The process is self-reinforcing, since numbers are always going to be convincing (to the ego, see Grace Slick quote HB62/1).

As P109 did note, this is a black sun, not the true sun that races across the sky. The black sun  deprives the Earth of fertility, physical and psychic. This is the Earth of the serpent brood, of Thoth Amon and the black circle.

Pictorial 110

What was referred to in P109 as the transformative enabler of the sungod is really what Walt Whitman might have referred to as Kosmos. Somewhere in his Song is the line, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself." Ralph Waldo Emerson's line, "A feeble consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." is pretty much a spin on that.

The  great American barbarian is set against the logic-chopping European. However, since Whitman's day atmospheric decadence in the garden has not made many inroads - apart from the brief flowering of the late 60s. India is maybe the main country that retains that flowery decadence; unfortunately, the UK is now run by logic-chopping Indian politicians such as Richi Sunak!

The problem with logic-chopping is it deceives the intellect. I happened to read some of BWS's Opus online, and he has to resort to quantum physics to explain his brain's delusions when it could just as well be intellect itself.

Whatever quantum physics is - apart from something mathematical and abstruse - I don't know; but I do know what a garden is and it is this that occupies a lot of Leaves of Grass.

Nature is contradictory, so that is reality. It may not be the logic-chopping reality of Sundak or Zuckerberg, but it is the one fitting for animals and plants (rather than Martian interlopers).

A garden is enclosed space, atmospheric and expressive where things happen.C6

There are no laws except those of blood and kin. The jungle is a place where light is absorbed by green chlorophyll in the photosynthetic effect (that provides rain to nourish Earth).

This is where the hunt reigns and Artemis runs free and wild. The pulp version of Artemis is Nyoka. In the comics, Nyoka is "athlete, world adventurer, explorer, animal trainer and gift-shop proprietor" (AE #94), but in the Republic serial she is just a jungle girl.

The jungle is somewhere where adventurous white explorers can cope admirably. There is no logic-chopping to nourish the ego, only devious games of cat and mouse. I was reading in AE of Bill Black's homage The Return of Nyoka; called a chapter play, or episode in an imaginary yarn. He proudly recounts how he shot it very fast in Florida with a feather budget using a handheld camera, no storyboard, a guy in a gorilla suit, Nicola Rae (granddaughter of Kay Aldridge) and CG only for the pendulum scene.

Maybe so but, watching Jungle Girl with Francis Gifford, there are a wealth of sets with tribal crockery, snakeskin drapes and a vast amount of devious subterfuge by witch doctor Shamba and Latimer.

In Nyoka and the Tigermen, the fight scenes are interlinked and sequential with galloping horses cutting this way and that. Nicola Rae talks of, girlish and strong heroines in control of their destiny." I'm not blaming her, but really the action sequences in the old serials are all about split-second timing. There are multiple camera-angles, either shot with several cameras or several takes; about half is sets with lighting; the props are used to perfection.

The point is the old serials are all about sequential action, and without that there's not much there. The white heroes are extremely competent, both physically and mentally. In one scene concerning a machine-tooled blow-dart Tom Neal comments, It took a white man to figure that out."

For that cultural epoch undoubtedly it was true. What modern Africans have gained from the white-man's ways they have lost in the tactile and animal. What I'm meaning to say is that the jungle is Walt Whitman territory. The body-in-action gains a sense of the self, which is not the brain isolation. It is a harmonic exercise of wits while mounted or running or negotiating trails.

The self is something which cannot be exercised in straight lines because other animals and plants are excluded. This is the great modern delusion. Think of Bin Salman's projected city of flying cars in Saudi Arabia, Neom. Each car is an ego-trip rather than a real trip (on a camel to Wadi Barta).

The modern confusion is that the logic-chopping brain is the human, whereas it's merely the ego. The human is expressed by wits in athletic exercises of strength that don't take place in flying cars but in caravanserai. An oasis is a place where the sun (logic) no longer has ascendancy. It is an enclosed, atmospheric space where things happen.

Photosynthetic woods absorb light and therefore destroy its logic-chopping effect. White Rabbit made that point about the wood enclosure of BWS's splash to Conan #24, The Song of Red Sonja.

 

 Enclosures, like an Arabian tent, are expressive places that cut-off light. Where there are logic-choppers one is under the dominion of fact, but facts that relate to a logical order. A tent, or an oasis or a wood are not logical; they are enclosed spaces that cut-off light and are quite rough, smelly or nomadic (like Tudor retinues).

Moamer Kadhafi's tent

This sort of active life is there for the survival of the human soul, not the shekel (the soul - or the body - as Whitman says, contains nothing vile.) But this is not good enough for the number-crunchers who want experimental zones of light and hygiene, such as Neom.

Yes but, as noted previously, where this happens the transformative enabler of the moon goddess Artemis is rendered null and void. There are no hunts in wooded glades.

That is why cities such as Neom represent the black sun of hygiene; an imitation or false god, rather than the traveling sun that soars with the spin of the Earth in the cosmos.

The problem really is that in a kingdom of light we're all supposed to be mini-Einsteins with logic-chopping capabilities. But, actually, all that does is lead us into the black sun of hygiene rather than the true sun that nourishes the soul of the wanderer in the groves and oases.

Pictorial 109

Did Newton create an alternate reality by induction from the particular, to form general principles of this parallel reality (C6)? Without a general sense of proportion, trees, animals, stars, sun and moon are simply things that we see rather than the cosmos.

What this means is that the cycles of dirt and cleanliness, the decadence of the physical world of strength, are no longer part of this alternate reality of hygienic experiments.

Because the physique can't be denied, the result is physical boredom, a numerical compulsion (head) that is tied to the body (sex). Another name for this is the black hole of hygiene (HB 111 etc) since that is what a numerical compulsion of the body is.

In this parallel reality, the sun is not the real sun which races across the sky from east to west. Instead it is an imitation sun, induced from a dark box. This is really the sun in reverse since, unless the sun travels across the sky, it has no connection to the Earth's physical presence in the cosmos. It is light without meaning and power - see figures in a landscape Weird 11.

This is the material world we inhabit. Where the sun is no longer racing from east to west it must be shining out of the hygiene zone that is designated by inductive experiment. I won't give a literal answer, except to say that Clara Noto's Red Sonja story Wizards of the Black Sun contains a clue. 

Savage Sword #23 

The triune goat warns Sonja to beware of the door of the black sun. When she encounters the wizards of this nameless city, the final one reveals a radiating tondo. 

 

 

Having escaped through the right door, the goat finally reveals to Sonja the city is a "grand illusion." 

 

Another way to say it is that a grand illusion is where the sun is never supposed to shine. Myth tells us that Daphne (Artemis) is sister to Apollo and the transformative enabler of the frivolous god - White Rabbit.

Hyborian Bridge 112

Titian, Noli me Tangere

In an Eastertime review, the DT's Alastair Sooke admired Titian's depiction of Christ ("Touch me not") meeting Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane. He admires,

that beautiful, verdant landscape, softly illuminated by the light of dawn – and suffused, for believers at least, with sacred magic. Easter Sunday commemorates Christ’s resurrection. But all of us – Christians and non-Christians alike – find solace in rebirth. It’s, in part, what makes us human – which Titian, surely, understood. Happy Easter.

It's a slightly curious phrase, "find solace in rebirth.. what makes us human." Does he mean the natural world, like the tree which, in the picture connecting the gaze of Magdalene to that of Christ?

That got me thinking about how rustic religions are in general. The Buddha and his fig tree are well known. The lotus that grows in muddy water as an emblem of blossoming from the murk. The Hindu Kamadhenu or cow-goddess, which is "the source of all prosperity". A non-erotic fertility symbol that contains all the gods in her body.

You'd think this might not apply to Islam, and yet Kamadhenu iconography was influenced by Buraq, the female-faced horse that carried the Prophet. The Quran contains the story of a female camel who was born from a rock as a miraculous proof to disbelievers of the Prophet Salih.

The disbelievers then maltreat the camel, and are enjoined to, "Let her feed from Allah's Earth" (11:64). There are six Surahs specifically on animals. Surah 2 (cow); surah 6 (cattle); surah 16 (bees); surah 27 (ants); surah 29 (spiders); surah 107 (elephants). In general their integrity and work-ethic are lauded as well as the social aspect of the communal ones. The horse (surah 100) is cited as an example of fire and fury to follow for the faithful.

So, these creatures that feed or graze from Mother earth and are noble are praised. The implication is that the Earth is praised - as distinct from cosmopolitan cities. The deserts and their intrepid camels.

Religions that find animals praiseworthy and useful are also temperamentally rustic. Whether the image is of a garden or an oasis, the same idea of growth, death, rebirth is apparent.

So, therefore in order to have rebirth one must also have death, whether it is Christ or of the vegetable order. So the very notion of rebirth means disorder, a falling-off and disintegrating.

That could easily be likened to the feminine dynamic of dancing on the new-arisen earth that grows from the eternal cycle of destruction - Kali or the red-brown ochre of Rudra-Shiva; or the effeminate eastern god Dionysus.

Dance and destruction and destiny are tied-together as surely as the fiery sun hurtling across the sky is tied to Earthspin. A dance has destiny whereas a straight-line does not. Reason being that the destructive ingredient of the dance invites in new creation.

The material world (of light or straight-lines) is an Airtight Garage that actually approaches the immaterial (algorithm). This is the world we enter when we open the door to the universe of straight lines.

Tales of Faith 12

I think I mentioned before that where I live there is a Creative Quarter where artists are established from as far afield as Russia? One casualty of the enterprise was a large lobster mural that was eccentric and boasted history here on the coastal east. Of course, it was replaced by a lot of straight lines with a locked door - clearly from The Airtight Garage.

One of the old gods of the maritime workers

I've nothing against artists and, actually, met my own illustrator Elena in this area. However art, historically, isn't a development, it's a spontaneous outgrowth of the society, as with Venice.

The spontaneity has a type of naive charm. The Renaissance masters like Titian have a naive grandeur that has never been equaled. Naivety being just a tactile contact with Mother earth and the red loam of home.

This contact is a contact with the dance of destruction and creation, the fiery sun traveling across the sky. Earth and sky have a naive simplicty. The simplciity is the simplicity of a dance that has power and meaning in the cosmos.

A straight line, for all its complex parallel reality, does not have that and that is the universe we're in. The meaning of powerful, monumental simplicity often has a religious tone, as was picked-up by Robert Yaple in his essay on Stygia (Savage Sword #23).

Places like Khemi had a decadence, almost a decline,

"a grim massiveness.. that was overpowering and oppressive."

The torpor of such ancient kingdoms reeks of decadence, and also a strange writhing power. As Yaple notes, only Stygia survived the catastrophe that engulfed Hyboria, eventually to become the kingdom of the Nile.

Yaple asserts that the Stygians were "obsessed with stability", but it is also characterized by a wild, rhythmic swaying of its serpentine heritage (see Milius's Conan, the scene at Thulsa Doom's palace).

The serpent, a bit like the Chinese dragon (Tao) belongs to the Earth and manifests destruction and creation. It's not dormant, but it can appear like the same cycle is repeating endlessly.

By contrast, the straight-line world appears to advance, but is it advancing towards self-destruction? Destruction of the psyche through physical boredom manifested by acolytes of sorcerers of number.

As Yaple says in the same essay, sorcerers like Thoth Amon weren't government employees, they were out for self-gain, even enemies of the state. Our position in modernity is exactly the opposite. Our psyches are increasingly under peril from number and sex, since the two become one in the expressive algorithm (prev.)

The society of physical boredom is also the society of psychic weakness, and that trend could be self-destructive.