‘Thine is a sickness uncommon in youth these days:
since young folk have given up tending their betters. The remedy is sleep and
certain drugs,’ said the Sahiba; and he was glad to give himself up to the blankness
that half menaced and half soothed him.
She brewed drinks, in some mysterious Asiatic
equivalent to the still room – drenches that smelt pestilently and tasted
worse. She stood over Kim till they went down, and inquired exhaustively after
they had come up.. ..Best of all, when the body was cleared, she cut out from
the mass of poor relations that crowded the back of the buildings – household dogs,
we name them – a cousin’s widow., skilled in what Europeans, who know nothing
about it, call massage..
The ground was good clean dust – no new herbage that,
living, is half-way to death already, but the hopeful dust that holds the seeds
of life.. And Mother Earth was as faithful as the Shiba. She breathed through
him to restore the poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from good
currents. His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands
surrendered to her strength. The many-rooted tree above him, and even the dead manhandled
wood beside, knew what he sought, as he himself did not know.
(Kim, page 412, 413)
Starting from where P181 finished, in the old days medicine was meant to be repulsive since that is the way the body was meant to be purged of foulness and invasions.
Incidentally, in the classic B movie, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, one of the aliens remarks,
"I find the human female the most disgusting of all - though it can be fun if you relax."
An invasion of foreign bodies always seems to have its repulsive aspects, and like-for-like treatments were in the past deemed efficacious.
In the Conan mythos, there runs the idea that cities have their repulsive aspects. In Milius's 1982 film, the Cimmerian wrinkles his nose in disgust and his companion says something like, "The wind cannot enter here."
The implication is that nature harbors repulsive aspects that are cleansed by the free processes of nature. In a city, the squalid areas - such as the maze in Rogues in the House - invite alien invaders and do not sufficiently quench them.
In modern days these would be termed infectious and would be "cured" with hygiene. However, hygiene itself is not the cure since living involves both dirt and cleanliness. An organic mixed farm cycles materials in this guise in order to retain fertility.
A city does not need to be hygienic - witness the scene of Jenna thrown into an open cesspit - but in order to be healthy it has to have a balance that maintains a level of cleanliness amongst the squalor.
If nature contains repugnance, it also contains the means to deal with it. This is the ecological balance that provides strength and fertility (to the cities and the farmers' markets.)
In terms of fertility, some revulsion is par for the course, and in Hyboria seen in the obscene cults of Shemitic peasants (see Yaple, prev.)
Obscenity in traditional societies is par for the course, and occurs in the Amerindian trickster Wesakechak (see Buffy website/art)
So, in that sense it's a sign of strength that acknowledges the repulsive aspects in nature that must be contained by a balance of forces.
This cannot happen in a society that believes only in information and, in fact, degrades stable ecosystems (see P181) that harbor contained viruses.
Without the stable environment, viruses are free to mutate at will in the preformed hygienic areas that have more-or-less banned repulsive aspects.
As was noted in P181, the ego (of acolytes) is attracted to the same hygienic areas as the viruses for the same reason - that they're unstable. They are pure information (straight-line or resolved space, algorithm) and attractive to the ego. The same ego that will detect and attempt to repel these repulsive invaders.
In place of resolved space, ancient societies honored places of power that harbored the gods of nature (see HB2 Roman Baths, Minerva). The bedrock of nature is mineral and bountiful, powerfully health-giving and robust, and allusive to the stars in the strong rhythms of place (Earthspin.)
In other words, there is a psychic element to the beliefs in ancient power, manifested in goddesses such as Minerva. Modern technology does without these elemental beliefs and, of course, in many ways it improves on the old.
I noticed Kemp put-up a link to a Toledo cane-sword, and I happened on a piece in Linde-story on the Viking Ulfberht, a 9th century supersword made of wootz or crucible steel.
The raw material of crucible-fired wootz originated in India, and was exported westward to the Arabs where Damascus became a centre of swordcraft. The Vikings, as river and sea traders, probably got their wootz from the Arabian source.
I read some more, and the high carbon content of the crucible steel appears to contain nano-tubules that may be formed from charcoal or plant-matter during the forge-welding.
One way to look at this is to say that ancient technologies can approach similar areas to modern advanced techniques while not losing the essential, elemental sense of balance and proportion.
A finely tempered blade has to be both hard in the edge and bendable in the centre so that it did not break on encountering resistance. The finished product also relied on the use by practiced and muscular swordsmen (or women).
The fact that modern.technology is superior in technique disguises the fact that we no longer have the sense of balance and proportion in an age where information alone is a belief.
Viking technology - or Damascene technology - lived amongst the harsh and lusty tremendousness of crags and lakes that personify nature as a force of rough balance, replete with repulsive aspects.
The denial of the need for rough, outdoor balance (of the body), that has its repulsive aspects in city squalor, is the bane of modernity and the reazon why technological advance is an illusion of straight-lines (sun or resolved space, algorithm, AI).