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.
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).