Saturday, 11 April 2020

Hyborian Bridge 111

I wonder if it's true that all these corona-conspiracy theorists are on a similar illusory tack as the mainstream? After all, they deal solely in "facts" - non-ionizing emr - which is just mainstream science. Like the flat-Earthers, they think in straight-lines when the cosmos is throwing a curveball.

Facing a live centaur just a moment ago. Facing the creature that had left the world before there had been a name to fit the man that Niven had become. A god without worshippers, this centaur. In a world that did not believe, facing a man who did not believe... Now he had to face one of the lost gods. A god who now sought revenge on the race of Men who had devised machines that would banish them from the real world.. (O Ye of Little Faith by Harlan Ellison, The Time of the Eye, Panther 1974, page 76)

..For as he had believed in no god...
No god believed in him. (page 78)

This comes from a collection of theoretically lonely stories. Harlan says in the Introduction that in all but three of the stories loneliness is not triumphant. Maybe, but even so the theme has an overpowering resonance. Is it loneliness where facts have replaced the gods?

Is loneliness closely associated with an absence of dirt? Meaning the field and therefore fertility. In The Wizard of Oz, Garland sang Over the Rainbow in a barnyard. It's far from a rustic song (as Louis B Mayer was wont to point out) but it is the peasant homeliness the film ultimately represents.

It is the land of disordered dirt and little girls with pigtails running wild in the fields, Toto to heel. There's something archaic and quasi-erotic about women working in fields or as dairymaids. The clothes are full and bunched to give the body space and grace, to be lithe and accentuate strength of figure (HB92)

Garland trained as a dancer (as did Naveena, prev.) and The Wizard of Oz is a skipping trip in many senses. It's less easy to be lonely when dancing gaily through kaleidoscopic landscapes, a place where the psyche meets the physical in sound and motion.

That place is the harmonic power of the Earth, sun, moon and planets that emanates psyche (Madame Blavastsky HB67) Water is intrinsically harmonic; the womb is wet (HB82)

The planets have infinite inertia, and that land has been co-opted by solar-centrists into an equation of straight-lines.


The most powerful superstition would be one that was supposed not to be one. And that is where the acolytes have led us. Instead of a dance of the planets that is fun and gay, we have a drone of solar radiation.

The Wizard of Oz (like a lot of Bollywood, natch.) is a dance and a dance makes it less easy to be lonesome. Robert Yaple, in part 1 of The Gods of Hyboria (Savage Sword #6), sets out his case by saying that sorcery and religious ritual have a lot in common. The rituals we endure in the modern world are mostly to do with news and numbers, and that is the superstition that seeps into our brains masquerading as "fact".

Facts are in a world without dance. Or, to quote Nietzsche, "Life without music would be a mistake."The mistake was entered many years ago, and we are now reaping the benefits with the "safe and sterile" lies of acolytes and their expressive algorithms. Lies that deny the primitive dance of fertility seen in The Wizard of Oz.

The primitive in religion is very often allied with animals - here the closeness to Toto. Derketo, the Shemite/Acheronian fertility goddess with obscene cults, is related to the Phoenician Atargatis, or fish-goddess.

The priests were described by Apuleius as mendicants that traveled around with an image of the goddess dressed in a silken robe on the back of a donkey... The priests were described as effeminate, wearing heavy makeup, turbans on their heads, and dressed in saffron colored robes of silk and linen; some in white tunics painted with purple stripes. They shouted and danced wildly to the music of flutes, whirling around with necks bent so that their long hair flew out..

Fertility is a celebration of dirt - prairie - and disorder, and has always been associated with wild or obscene rituals and corn dollies. Our (or "their") rituals are stories of sterility otherwise known as the black hole of hygiene. Where there is sterility there can be no fertility, and no dancing in the fields, either by little farm girls or tantric cults.

As Yaple remarks in Savage Sword #6, the western peasants of Zingara and associated places would likely have adopted primitive fertility cults or imported Shemite ones rather than the widespread Mitraism of cities. Rituals are meaning and power related to work practices. Since our rituals are without meaning and power it shows our superstitions about facts are only a way to weaken us, make us susceptible to cybernetic transformation, friend to the expressive algorithm.

Equations and numbers are not reality and it's pure superstition. A superstition of sterility that has denied Dionysus entry to the sausage-factory (see Tout va Bien). The facts that are "their" religion. A world of disorder has the infallible harmonic of the cosmos. while a world of social-distancing and hygiene has the fallibility of ego, the weakness of number and calculation.

Dancing in the gloaming, the feminine dynamic, the shapes of animals, the creatures that crawl in a clod of earth. Exposure to germs teaches the immune-system to make antibodies; they are health-empowering "deities" of yore. Symbiotic shapes as opposed to information.