Pictorial 61

Using the symbolism of the granaries which the Egyptians established to safeguard the crops fed by the ever unpredictable Nile, Hohne notes the “healing journey” that establishes an inner terrain of self-worth, that can be associated with Isis. Feminine introspection overturns Seth, the god of the wasteland.

Isis seems to represent inner belief in earthy sensuality as well as sexual desire (allied to dirt). While Howard’s serpent-man and man-serpent represent the Stygian wasteland of fire and fury that is ruled over by Seth (Set) and the repressed energy of the snake, Horus and his mother Isis represent hope reborn and fertility.

It seems possible, then, that Howard’s Stygia is not so much Egypt as the wasteland of the mind that holds repressed energy in the form of a snake. That land is actually much closer to our own than it is to ancient Egypt. In order to bring forth the reborn child Horus (A Child is Coming) and the goddess of feminine introspection and fertile terrain – inner reflecting the experience of outer – our world has to imagine a modernday Nile.

Meaning something that is earthily sensual and associated with dirt and fertility. The wide open ranges, cowboys and herds, or the Indians of Allegheny (prev.)

Out would go the hygiene-machines of vast beef-lots and factory-farmed chickens etc; and in would come the more happy-go-lucky atmosphere of dirt and cleanliness (moral or Mosaic Law). This is a fertile atmosphere and hence associated with Isis.

Hohne identifies Isis with Maat, or “the way” (inner worth). The outer sensual world of work and the inner sense of worth are strongly connected. This atmosphere tends to assert the energy of reptilian anxiety, or at least gives it a means of expression. Reptilian energy, in out modernday mind, is identified with the way our outer world is fantastically over-ordered and like a logical brain.

This is another way of saying order doesn’t exist, since our unconscious universe is reptilian at a primitive level (Pictorial 1). This brings us naturally to the Greeks, who brought in detached logic and Aristotelian syllogisms to a universe that was actually full of the misdirected urges of omnipotent gods and goddesses (The House that Rand Built 2).

Hohne makes the point that logical games inhabit a strange detached labyrinth of the mind, away from feeling, while the Sophists believed truth was unattainable. The difference with us is the Greeks exercised logic of the brain, whereas we live IN a logic of the brain.

This is the fallacy at the heart of modernity since, as she points out (page 70), Greek studies

In trying to understand the true nature of the universe still remain a mystery today. When we go out to measure the fabric of life, we find we somehow  participate in the measurement by affecting the result.

She uses the myth of Prometheus to personify the scientist, who develops a fire of the mind while denying gut feelings as primeval throwbacks. Prometheus’s punishment was to be chained to a rock and have an eagle eat his liver every day, only for it to grow back overnight, and the cycle to repeat.

She likens this not only to the “sugar rush” of an addict, but also to the hiding place of the scientist –

a mountain of thought in a world of puzzles.

The point of the eagle daily devouring the liver is “escaped” by mental processes. This is the reality of mortality, which like Icarus who “thought he was invincible”, melts and we come face to face with death.

This is the cyclical world of disorder, symmetry and proportion that a scientist can never feel, in their logical labyrinths of the detached minds. In this altered state, they resemble the depersonalised characters of Greek myths who are turned into inanimate objects.

Daphne is pursued by Apollo and is changed into a laurel tree. Arethusa is pursued by Alpheus and becomes a spring, while Alpheus changes into a river.. (page 68)

The mind, unlike the body, is not active, not like the eagle on a dive, not muscular and lithe, not graceful and pirouetting. In its labyrinth, its detached logic denies it the chance to see and feel the pirouettes of birds in trees, the lowing of cows at sundown, any of the rhythmically physical things that constitute the simple reality of balance and proportion on Earth.

While the Greeks only exercised logic, keeping all their rural pursuits intact, modernday scientists have – like Blake’s print of Newton (Pictorial 59) – transmuted the mind into this land (body) of inertia we inhabit. The arid wasteland of Seth where anxious reptiles are daily attracted to the order of the artificial brains (algorithms) of Musk and Bezos, who seek to entice us from heroic bodies that exist in balance with self-governing minds, on the hunts and ranges of the mind.

Weird  Science

"The People's Choice" (Orlando art)