Mathematical calculations distort the natural rhythms of proportion (body), entering a parallel system of number that is persuasive to the ego. The parallel system operates with variable time (machines, computers) and we enter a future of Google Maps and the Amazon House.
The counter to that is that undeveloped societies contain the rhythms of the spirit (of the commune). This takes the form of superstitions, the kind one finds in the early stories by Gilbert Hernandez of Love and Rockets.
As one might guess, the voodoo phantom turns out to be Hoyt, who exploits a geochemical fault to turn superstitions into reality.
In the other story, an industrial accident on a Stark subsidiary is damped-down with Namor's help, but at the expense of the island's fertile soil.
A psychical component is imbued by a fertile universe (of morbid revival). Ghosts inhabit milieux which are rich and fertile for the reason the physical degradation imbues spiritual force. The Greek ruin syndrome.
The physical reality of things - the debasement or lustiness - is basically Dionysus.
The superstitious medicine men live off of natural rhythms that exist in invariable time, the herbs that sustain a body's natural resistance. Muscular beats, the body-in-motion. The physical situation is laced with mechanisms - the sounds of cicadas - that cannot be calculated, that just exist (see HB110, the psychic element of a physical reality of invariable time.)
The 1972 Jamaican film
Is imbued with this type of morbid force. Bookended by the previous classic, Django, the corrupt studios divert struggling musician Ivan into ganja smuggling, and he sings and shoots his way to a bloody climax.
For sheer physical atmosphere that is imbued with grinding rhythms of spiritual performances, the film is second only to a couple of Godard efforts.
Rasta or colonial Christianity are both what could be called superstitions. The degree to which superstitions rely on a physical degradation that ultimately and cyclically revives is something modernity blithely ignores.
I mean, a compost heap is a physically degraded object that imbues health and cyclical fertility, smell, succulence, psychic luster. These are the physical rhythms of invariable time.
In short, superstition is not just a psychic condition, but a result of the physical and mechanical power of fertility, ploughing the soil, morbidity (the Creole bayou.)
The modern world, in its sterile illusions of number, can only have a distorted psyche, the result of the distortion of natural rhythm.
