Columbus-ing Around: Columbus, The Borg, and the Great White Devil

History is portrayed as a science. And yet popular history remains as much subject to emotion as reason. History may be consciously rewritten; much more often, it simply evolves. ... The present is a consequence of the past. But the past is an invention of the present. (Empires Apart.) 

In the process of doing research for the next Fallen Cycle book, I've been taking in quite a lot of history-related books. This has gotten me thinking more lately about race and culture, as all identity and meaning is ultimately historic. (See also: Beyond Narrative: Systems Theory and the Unveiling of History)

One thing keeps sticking out to me, and that is the image that forms of what “whiteness” is. We speak so frequently about the problems and experiences of whites and not-whites, and yet it is arguable if those categories are meaningful beyond the sense that we insist on continuing to use them. I'd like to look at the mirage of whiteness, and the very real history that produced that myth. 

Like all Modern Mythology articles, hopefully it'll at least get you thinking about these things in some new ways, all with the point of better understanding the myths (collective narratives) we use to understand ourselves. As always, nothing here is meant to be final or definitive. Productive comments are welcome in the comments section.

Let's begin with a curious manifesto from “Race Traitor,”

Time is a Flat Circle - True Detective as Psychodrama

Many will agree that HBO's True Detective season 1 has been one of the more thought provoking episodic narratives of 2014. HBO has defined itself for some time now on distributing quality original content, leading the way in that regard, though Netflix is now entering the picture as a serious contender in its own right.
Nevertheless, there is something particularly daring about using the tried and true, rather old school cops and bad guys format for a character-piece.

What do I mean by that? Well, the case they are investigating does little more than provide us a mirror for the two "bad men," our protagonists Rust and Marty. So if you're looking to unlock the Keys to Carcosa, you're going to be horribly frustrated with this series.

The Lange murder is just a Trojan Horse. The real story here is much richer and stranger: who are these men, and how did this murder change their lives? (DailyBeast)

This is where the show will either sing for you or never quite satisfy you. And this division will likely bring out the intrinsic viewing preferences of an audience. I'd like to talk about this division, between "What's it about" vs. "Who's it about", as well as point out a few of the interesting symbols and devices used in this show in particular.

No story is likely to be all one or the other, of course. There needs to be some balance of the two in most narratives—a continuum which is represented rather confusingly in the prose fiction world as being "literary fiction" on one end and "genre fiction" on the other—but it should be amply clear which side True Detective is aiming for.

This conflict comes to a head when the spiral loops back on itself a third time, which is to say the final episode. (More on the spiral motif later.) In a character focused narrative, the plot—series of events that occur—are a device to get into the character's heads. So to go any further into the "world" of the monster in the labyrinth would take the narrative off track. An ending that told us everything about the Dora Lange case, but nothing about Rust would fail the show on its own terms.

"This is a world where nothing is solved," Rust says, before he has found a glimmer of his own redemption. But even though they ostensibly solved the case, many questions relating to it are left open. Nothing is solved, and there are no true endings. Must a narrative deliver us a complete resolution? (Nervous Breakdown article, "Resolutions.")

In the Salon article "True Detective vs HP Lovecraft", the author sees a cosmology of light and dark, good and evil carved out of the story, in other words it's a morality play, but this doesn't jive with what Pizzolatto himself has said about theme and intent.

PIZZOLATTO:
I think what True Detective keeps telling you, over and over again, is that everything’s a story. Who you tell yourself you are, what you tell yourself what the world is, an investigation, a religion, a nihilistic point of view – these are all stories you tell yourself. You need to be careful what stories you tell yourself.
INTERVIEWER:
You said there was no conversion in the story. But was Cohle suggesting he now believes in some kind of afterlife when he told Hart about his near death experience?
PIZZOLATTO:
It’s not a belief – he’s talking about an experience. And he’s not talking about a reconciliation with loved ones after death: If you listen to what he says, he says, ‘I was gone. There was no me. Just love… and then I woke up.’ That line is significant to the whole series: “And then I woke up.” The only thing like a conversion that he has is when he says, “You’re looking at it wrong. To me, the light is winning.” And that doesn’t describe a conversion to me as much as it describes a broadening of perspective. The man who once said there is no light at the end of the tunnel is now saying there might be order to this. I don’t think it says anything more than: Pick your stories carefully.

Or within the story itself,

Once you attach an assumption to a piece of evidence, you start to bend the narrative to support it. (Marty Hart.)

This is one of the fundamental truths about mythology, and as we've discussed at length on Modern Mythology, myth is merely a publicly shared narrative. Little surprise that Pizzolatto was an English professor before trying his hand at script writing.

What's most poignant about the conclusion? Not the unveiling of 'the lawnmower man.' Hardly. The last thing anyone would expect for Rust is redemption. Which is really what the final episode is about. And it's funny because then you go back and realize it puts the apparent theme of the whole season on its head.

I promised that I'd return to the spiral. Throughout the show we see this device used. It's an element of repeated iconography. It exists in the format of the narrative through time (basing the story in 95, 2001, and 2012). It appears in Rust's hallucinations, birds flocking and dispersing in a whirling spiral. And it's alluded to in the various pieces of "Carcosa gobbleygook" that add that Lovecraftian element of high weirdness to some of the episodes. Clearly it is a motif important to this narrative.

The biggest challenge in the spiral motif is that it's always more rewarding the second time around. But it's really neat how the narrative structure is spiral and that image pops up again and again. The spiral is symbolically the unicursal labyrinth, an image that appears throughout world mythology and appears most explicitly in this story in the iconography of the victims as well as the placement of the villain as the monster in the center of the labyrinth, a Southern Gothic Minotaur. The orbit of the spiral leads you ever inward, toward that immanent encounter. Jung wasn't the only one to recognize the monster in this context is a part of the shadowed, divided self.

This "flat circle," the circle that recapitulates rather than repeats itself perfectly, also relates directly to Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. (If you don't think that was on his mind, notice the aside in the clip above, "what's that Nietzsche shut the fuck up!")

The greatest weight.–What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence–even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Nietzsche's The Gay Science, more Eternal Reoccurence quotes.)

Of course this idea predates Nietzsche considerably, and points the way to Pizzolatto's message–that the ontological fallacy referred to by Rust is based as much on experience as the narratives we tell ourselves. There are facts in life, to be sure, but just as importantly, we bring our story to it. "The locked room."
But there is a cosmological message behind this motif, as well as an ontological one. And here we can see the distinction between an eternal recurrence that is strictly cyclical, and one that is 'spiral shaped,' which is to say that it implies a sense of progression. The shape of the spiral implies a "return," that is attempted but never fully accomplished, like a planet falling ever to the sun but moving fast enough to miss it time and again. Supposing that end is never reached, and so long as we are beings in time, nothing is ever final (except the end of that being, which is a great non-event), the spiral is a kind of asymptote, an elaboration on the circular model, wherein the symmetry of the endless round and teleology are in a sense unified.

Again we can turn to The Sacred and the Profane, “...to Indian thought, this eternal return implied eternal return to existence by force of karma, the law of universal causality. Then, too, time was homologized to the cosmic illusion (Maya), and the eternal return to existence signified indefinite prolongation of suffering and slavery.”
These karmic ties don’t require an actual belief in karma within the Buddhist or Hindu framework of reincarnation. What it refers to is an element of our memory. Consider something that you own that has a great deal of “sentimental value.” Pick it up. Hold it in your hand. Think about the people you associate with it. Grab hold of those emotions, and travel back to the time that the object brings you to. That’s your karmic tie. You are bound to those things.

The same is true of the memories and emotions we hold onto of those we love, who are now gone, and of the life we lived which is also gone. Of course, outside a framework that espouses transcendence, these are neither positive nor negative in themselves, but they are attachments. From this, we can see that a mythic symbol serving some kind of ethical function would arise, when it comes to recapitulation and renewing. To renew, the soil must be tilled. Some attachments can be maintained but others must be severed. (Krampus and Holiday Myths.) 

This seems embedded within True Detective's narrative, as we see at the end with Rust's partial redemption. In this, the final episode fits perfectly within the whole, a masterstroke not marred by the essential irrelevancy of the crime they are investigating.

My only frustration with any of this is strictly personal, as I have been working on exactly the same model in the Fallen Cycle, (the final installment is planned to be entitled "Center of the Spiral,") and now everyone is going to think it's an homage to True Detective, at least in theme. But there are certainly worse things one could be likened to.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

A Year Later: Retrospective. Create to Destroy.

The alchemy of the process...

About a year ago today the fundraiser for Words of Traitors kicked off. A year later, it’s been released as a book, an ebook, and some of the pieces have been featured in numerous art shows across Philadelphia. Moving on to new projects in the same general world over the next year. Many thanks to the artists that collaborated with me on this one, and of course to the contributors to the Indiegogo campaign, who helped me defray the costs of producing a project like this.

But I have a bit more to share here then just the usual back-patting and congratulations for making it past the finish line without dying or whatever. With a project like this you're really talking about 40-50 hours a week for five or six months to get it from concept to first edition. Definitely a labor of love. Why do it? I am forced to wonder what the meaning behind all of this is, when all is said and done. Beyond the narratives, beyond the art and brass tacks, what's the meaning and the message? I can't say I've found anything definitive, but I haven't found nothing, either. It isn't about me and it isn't about the characters in the stories. It's about all of you -- and the distance we create between one another in the midst of all these "communication tools" that we have at our disposal. It's a bit about signal to noise but not about marketing--

Listen up. Seriously. Maybe these videos convince you to check out the final book (or eBook, if you can't cover a full color illustrated book). It's the most meaningful way that I think I enter the world, so I hope so. But just as importantly -- maybe more importantly -- I hope it inspires you to realize that there's nothing standing between you and your own creative muse, so long as you are willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to get from here to there. We don't do it to get famous, we don't do it to get rich -- those goals are perfectly delusional -- we do it because we have no other choice. But sometimes we need a little push from someone else to remind us that it's time, right now, to stop thinking about it and start doing it. 

It's not about identity branding, it's not about con-vincing anyone of anything. It's about listening to your dreams, listening to your fears, to your history, to your losses, and engaging with them. It's about finding your weak spots and splitting them wide open. It's about being crazy enough to not only do that -- but to share the results with the world. Being genuine has been something I've been willing to sacrifice anything for. I'm certainly not giving that up for the approval of strangers. And yet we make these things to be heard. We don't create them to lock them up in a box. The process transforms us, but the detritus at the end of the process is what gets transformed by the audience from lead back to gold.

Time to destroy and create. I expect to be hearing about your projects shortly, yeah?

One final thing... While running the fundraiser, I made a habit of updating everyone every few days with a video. At first it was the usual stuff, details and updates. But when you're babbling in front of a camera without a real plan, sometimes you'll find yourself saying the darndest things. In a way making these videos really helped inform me as well in terms of what the hell this thing was all about. It becomes a sort of weird feedback mechanism. Looking back, I think some of these may actually be of some use to others that are willing to slog it out against all the challenges that face "indie production," from the bare bones financial ones to the common creative ones to the physical hurdles -- you start to discover that the challenges themselves can even inform the narrative.  There's more, but I think I've typed enough words here. I hope some of these videos are useful for other artists and writers out there, as they are embarrassing as hell for me but I'm plenty willing to get past that so long as some of you are likely to get something from it:

The Pieces of a Narrative

Check this video out:

Not at all what it looks like. 

Isn't it interesting how little action is required on the part of the dolls (i.e. none), for your mind to start sort of editing it in, when we're provided with a narrative? Really makes you wonder about just how little can be necessary to tell a good story, and yet on the flip side, just how much the format effects what kind of stories you can tell, and how our brain is going to make (or re-make it) it in our heads as we take it in.

This has all been bouncing around in my head as I'm working on a narrative that has 2 stand alone pieces: a video game (so an interactive medium) and a graphic novel. So I've been thinking a lot about how the audience is likely to engage with these things, and it might be slowing down the mental part of the writing process, but I hope it's worth it. 

Similarly, as I have been building the loose outline of a 10,000 year history on an alien and yet strangely familiar world, I wonder how many different ways there might be to tell stories in that setting? How many lives existed against the backdrop of World War 2? One could just easily create a narrative within the context of a fantasy event of similar scale the doesn't deal with it headlong. 

This is the approach I've taken so far with myth-building, it's anyone's guess whether it's carried through on the other end that there is often far more outside the frame of a shot than there is within it. I believe we can feel the weight of the invisible actors inside the myth that frames the narrative. Time will tell. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

My Story And I'm Sticking To It: A PRISM of uncertainty.

As anyone that hasn't been under a rock for the past week knows, this "PRISM thing" has blown up all over the internet. Which is a good thing -- privacy is something that people should be concerned about, and discuss. And much of what's come up around this issue is deeply troubling. But it's also interesting how many opinions were formed before all that much information was actually made public. That's what I'd like to discuss.

Take a look at some of the other information that came to light in the past few days:

The fictional journalistic "this may or may not be true":

The following article should be treated as strictly hypothetical. It has been editorialized to simplify the content in certain areas, while maintaining as much technical detail as we can offer. Companies named in this article have been publicly disclosed, or used in example only. This piece should not be taken necessarily as fact but as a working theory that portrays only one possible implementation of the U.S. National Security Agency's PRISM program as it may exist today. Several ZDNet writers contributed to this report. --Zdnet article.

The deniers: 

Slides obtained by the two newspapers say that the program was established in 2007 and that seven of the largest Internet communication companies “participate knowingly” in providing NSA direct access to their central servers.
If true, this would mean that NSA had full access to many messages sent using applications run by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, and Apple. (The documents also separately list YouTube and Skype, subsidiaries of Google and Microsoft, respectively.) The unprecedented access would give the government audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs for potentially billions of users.
The revelations caused instant outrage as Twitter exploded with shocked and angry denunciations from pundits across the entire political spectrum. The Washington Post cited an anonymous “intelligence officer” as saying “they quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”
But could the revelations be a carefully constructed hoax? There are several indicators that the PRISM reports may not be entirely accurate... --Business Insiders.

Deniers of the deniers: 

Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers.
The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US."
Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.
However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency. --Guardian Article. 

The middle ground:

PRISM’S SCOPE MAY BE SMALLER THAN FEARED
Over the last day, tech executives including Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg outlined that they did not give bulk or blanket access to user data. However, they may not have been able to discuss the exact volume of the legal demands for data they’ve received. That left the exact scope of how many people had data pulled by NSA open for wide interpretation, and many including myself, in some cases assumed the worst — that while not at the volume of the massive request for data on all Verizon users that’s been reported, huge numbers of people may have been spied on.
However, in the last year, there were only 1,865 FISA requests for data. Some believe those requests could include data pulls as broad as anyone who searched a specific term. Legal experts I’ve consulted, though, believe the requests must be more narrow than that for the tech companies to have not pushed back. That means the the number of people monitored by PRISM may have been in the thousands or tens of thousands, rather than in the tens or even hundreds of millions. --Techcrunch Article.

And, of course, the conspiracy theorists:

PRISM the new Nazi party. Just confirmed!!! BE CAREFUL! They know what you're doing! --Godlike Productions thread.

Of course, hundreds of other examples could be found. The point isn't the particular articles but rather the incredible spread of contradictory information, misinformation, and disinformation. Pretty hard to make an entirely coherent story out of all these divergent pieces, right?

Yet, far before anyone could possibly have an absolutely iron-tight, certain conviction of what the hell is going on here, most people have already made up their minds. They've made up their minds with such certainty that anyone that sees it otherwise must be insane! There is a reason for this, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

Narrative is everywhere. Or rather, we see it everywhere. Of course, we hope to have those expectations confounded. It is in the melody to a catchy blues riff -- playing an assortment of notes enough times for you to expect it a fourth time, and then going down rather than up. Confound them, yes, but only within a certain framework. When artists such as Schoenberg or Cage tried to show our mythic impulse back to us, or even do away with that impulse altogether, many listeners rebelled. The same is what we look for in our fiction -- different, but not too different -- and it is also what we look for when we try to attempt to interpret the real world.

You see, when we test reality, we simultaneously build stories around that testing. We collect little pieces of information and piece them together. In a sense the metaphor of a puzzle and puzzle pieces would be altogether too apt, if somehow a puzzle could be freeform and shift around on the fly.

James Lincke

This is not idle speculation. As we discussed in the introductory article for this site, this mythic impulse -- or narrative impulse, if you prefer -- is built into our brains. It is a big part of how we come to understand the world. This is also the reason why the best way to teach children is often through stories. Our minds are designed to work with them, and to fill in the missing pieces.

As we've discussed before, this is how optical "illusions" work. More accurately, the visual world we build in our heads is itself entirely illusory -- flipped around, taken apart and pieced back together. Yet again we see this same tendency, now in the visual rather than auditory modality. This is not idle philosophical speculation. It is as close to fact as we can come, and therein lies the problem.

There is simply too much contradictory information out there, and too much chaos that needs to be filtered out as unimportant to our aim. For these systems to work on the fly, we have to graft in a schema ahead of time.

In other words, to go back to the puzzle metaphor, we need to imagine what the completed puzzle is going to look like so that we can understand how the pieces might fit together.  If your reality tunnel is based around distrust of authority, then you have one puzzle to cram the pieces into. If your reality tunnel is based around the opposite, or something in between -- you get the point.

This is well and good for many purposes, but it is wreaking a lot of ideological havoc in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Everyone else seems insane because they aren't trying to build the same puzzle that you are.

This isn't to say that everything is an opinion, or that if I think a baseball is a cloud that you can't wing it into my skull. The issue being discussed is how we make sense of the puzzle pieces (mythic fragments) that we're given. It is not a question of the "ultimate reality" of the myth, nor what it represents.

As Robert Anton Wilson once famously said, "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves." Still later, he used the metaphor of reality tunnels:

"When we begin to realize that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels we find it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from or the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant or deliberately perverse or lying or hypnotized by some mad ideology. They just have a different reality tunnel and every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world if we're willing to listen." 

His advice in this case remains as poignant today.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

David Mack on sequential narrative.

David really hit it out of the park on this one, in my opinion. I don't really feel like commentary is necessary.

  Read our 2007 interview/conversation.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Invasive Stories: Wombs, Brains & Survival

By Mr. VI

Allow me to tell you a story – and I say allow, because you will have to give consent. A story can't be told without the audience participating in some way, even if it's simple suspension of disbelief.

The written and spoken word require a little more effort, because that kind of story requires the audience to use their imaginations, and we've already spoken of how communication and storytelling actually require – and produce- a kind of bizarre neurological entanglement.

(If you've not been following this blog long enough to read it, or need your memory refreshing, it's here – Red Riding Hood: Narrative, Neurology & Storytelling. Go on, I'll wait, because it really is essential to what you're going to be reading next, and will help you see where we're going.)

One of the interesting things about stories is that they build on each other – they provide a referential framework. A story is not just one event, it is in fact an arrangement of events. Story, as a word comes from the same linguistic roots as history:

history

late 14c., "relation of incidents" (true or false), from O.Fr. estoire, estorie "chronicle, history, story" (12c., Mod.Fr. histoire), from L. historia "narrative of past events, account, tale, story," from Gk. historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record, narrative," from historein "inquire," from histor "wise man, judge," from PIE *wid-tor-, from root *weid- "to know," lit. "to see" (see vision). Related to Gk. idein "to see," and to eidenai "to know." In Middle English, not differentiated from story; sense of "record of past events" probably first attested late 15c. As a branch of knowledge, from 1842. Sense of "systematic account (without reference to time) of a set of natural phenomena" (1560s) is now obsolete except in natural history.

As you can see, it's quite literally a recounting of events – an order of experience conveyed to you.

That same earlier post you will have read was collected in a best-of Modern Mythology 2011 – a selection of our work last year. It's a peculiar thing, because it ends up giving you a snapshot of events which may lead you into looking back on 2011 with new eyes. Certainly, many of those posts were inspired by events in our lives and the wider world.

Those events spawned those pieces, which even now are spawning this piece, folding in current events, reacting and changing in accordance with circumstance and stimuli. No story, no myth, no recounting of events is immune to this.

Not even the Bible – or at the very least, the interpretation of it.

Icunabula vol II: Cut ups and Becoming

By Mr. VI

"When you cut into the present the future leaks out." - William S. Burroughs.

Previously, I've spoken of the incunabula - natives of the mythic. I've argued that the distinction between between myth and reality is meaningless because 'reality' as we know it is a model, a narrative created to comprehend our perceptions; reality as we know it is born out of the same construction process that we use to make myth and spin our tales.

You can't separate it from physicality, because the physical is our interface with the wider universe. It's as intimate as blood, breath and bone, as vital as sexual secretions and just as rich.

And just like those fluids, it's a lubricant; a fluid-smooth space that allows flow and tranverse movement. It contains the potential for life, and also death and disease of the psyche

It's not a thing of top-down authority and hierarchy, indeed if there is any movement which could be described as solely vertical in terms of myth, it's an upwelling - born from the ground of being itself - bottom up.

Urðarbrunnr. The Well of Wyrd; the dwelling place of the Weird Sisters, the Nornir who lay down and weave the events of a person's life into what they will become.

Cut, arrange, and put together; folding events in and under over. Perhaps Burroughs was more right than he knew, perhaps it's not the future that leaks out when you cut the present, but the wyrd-fluid, the raw material for becoming?

Make the incision, cut the flesh and the vital fluid wells up - for incunabula the blood of their body flows free, an opening is made to serve as entrance and exit. It becomes an access port to their own becoming-as...

Endorphins get you high, get you flying, get you soaring, get you awake and alive. Opening yourself, creating a gate to the unknown, the unintelligible spaces beyond the senses. It's blood magic, to feed and gift yourself to all comers.

We'll come back to that later - for now recall that the body-as-text is an essential of the incunabula. That being the case, who owns the text? Who has the right to edit and re-write its narrative?

Glossy magazines and moral prohibitions; eidolons of form to aspire to - these are not bottom-up processes. No, they are hierarchical and top-down. The individual must operate as a thrall to such imagery - authorative texts.

Taxonomy via text - classification and definition; truly People of the Book, an inviolate and holy manuscript.

An immovable arrangement of form, sanctified by divinity because YHVH made humanity in his own image and there's only one divinity, yes?

The brimming cornucopia of myth says otherwise; this apparent transcendent authority is not alone. Kami, landvaettir, alfar, dwergar and muses. Annunaki, shedim and lilitu, bodhisattvas, asuras and daevas. Nagas, tulpas, piskies, puccas and ghul.

Not one text - and the knowledge of this is reaching common awareness now - for did G-d have a wife? Anyone with half an interest will smile and tell you this is nothing new. Asherah has been around for years, god-wife or no.

But the incunabula makes the ink into blood, running on skin, carving out new juxtapositional language by dismembering the old - powerful creation. Just ask Odin, Marduk or any personages - human or not - who've broken things down, remixed them and come up with something new.

There's a glorious multiplicity of form here; the fluidic spaces of becoming certainly echoing the amniotic fluid.

The poem by Gabe Moses entitled How To Make Love To A Trans Person speaks loudly of such wonderful becomings and though it's a little long to reproduce on this site, here's an excerpt:

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.

Godzilla's Rage: Japan's Doom, Myth, Magic and Black Swans

By Mr. VI

Godzilla is distinctly annoyed. So is Mothra, and it’s not good to annoy giant monsters, whether they be saurian or of the genus Lepidoptera. Earthquake, tsunami and radiation? Japan knows what’s happening - it’s known for years.

Don’t tell me otherwise. This is the realm of strange beasts, the kaiju; the giant monsters, the daikajiu. Plumes of atomic fire, thousands dead, cities crushed while valiant nuclear workers struggle to stop their power stations from meltdown.

Across the world, the panicked peoples twitch and bulk-buy radiation pills, echoes of Chernobyl reverberating up from the memory of the past. Whole cities emptied, half-ruined in irradiated moments - petrified by absence as man fled.

Go back a quarter of a century. Wormwood blazed out then; bitter blasted grass marking the passage of star-fire - and yet people have the gall to ask ‘what’s in a name?’

And the inexorable biological movements continue. The biosphere creaks and groans, an alien speech which is way beyond hominid primates. It adapts and shifts, moving with epochal speed; tellurian movements ripple and shudder like the scales of some great monstrosity beneath the waves.

The gloaming is Cherenkov blue; between today and tomorrow the chaos is raising its head, birthing monsters like Tiamat from the salty seas.

The Tower’s been blasted, and everything is in free-fall.

Listen to the narratives, the white noise - the babble of confusion. Myriad voices, all striving to be heard. Experts rise and fall like the wave of a tsunami. The fact that Japan wasn’t totally destroyed by 9.0 earthquake is conveniently forgotten.

Yes, Godzilla is pissed off. The kami stretch and yawn; mountains shiver in their beds. In time, the risk assessors will sagely nod. Oh yes.

And yet:

'The Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goals set in 2003: " The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1x10^6 per year (that is , at least 1 per million years)".

That policy was designed only 8 years ago. Their one in a million-year accident occurred about 8 year later.'

Synchronicity and a Call for Papers - All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming

By Mr. VI

Synchronicity works in funny ways:

I came up with the idea of incorporating Dragon Age 2 into a post on interactivity, incorporation, identity and storytelling. I mentioned this to James and discovered he'd been thinking on ARG's and transmedia projects - you can read some of his thoughts here and listen to an intriguing podcast here on the subject published by the folks who are also publishing the forthcoming Immanence of Myth book.

So this morning, I was cruising through my livejournal friends-list when I came across this:

All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming (more details below after I've finished pontificating)

I know, I know. LJ is so very stone-age, so very Web 1.0 but I love it anyway, even though as writer Warren Ellis says: '[I]t's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands.'

And actually, Warren's a bit of a favourite around here. His epic Transmetropolitan cyberpunk comic series has a main character who seems to have mainlined the Gonzo journalism of the late, great Hunter S Thompson which in turn has inspired the Gonzomentary of the CLARK webseries.

Warren's also no stranger to games either; he wrote the script for the 2001 game Hostile Waters:Antaeus Rising and more recently worked on the storyline for the well known survival horror game Dead Space - which the Call for Papers below actually refers to in terms of 'templarization of history'.

Interestingly enough, I didn't originally intend the remark about LJ to be anything more than a throwaway one - I missed the original reference to Dead Space in the Call, and yet it's there; an acausal connection.

Because here's the thing, narrative doesn't have to flow one single way. As James has already said in his post on time, place and convention of literature:

[O]ur expectations of narrative structure are actually incredibly unnatural. Our cognitive experience is not linear. Someone says something to you. You are reminded of something a few years ago. You wonder about the future. All of these things can happen while you are also walking and other things are happening around you which themselves may have past, present, and future layers occurring simultaneously, again from the perspective of their perception.

Red Riding Hood: Neurology, Narrative & Storytelling

By Mr. VI

Once upon a time, half-way back and a little off to one side; this is where the stories live. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin:

Stories are a form of communication, and they open doors. Doors to understandings and concepts that are unbound in time – their relevancies shift according to circumstances, environment and culture.

'To understand and remember stories, readers integrate their knowledge of the world with information in the text. Here we present functional neuroimaging evidence that neural systems track changes in the situation described by a story. Different brain regions track different aspects of a story, such as a character's physical location or current goals. Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities. These results support the view that readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change. ' - Psychological Science August 1, 2009 vol. 20 no. 8 989-999

Read that again.:

Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

Certain parts of your brain do not discern between 'reality' and 'fiction'. They simply create and act. Further:

'Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.' -PNAS August 10, 2010 vol. 107 no. 32 14425-14430

Before there was written text or visual media such as film, stories were the primary method of cultural transmission:

'The speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity'Let these two statements combine in your head for a moment; see what they point to – scientific evidence that a story can draw you in, change your perception and have an affect on you.

Suddenly the idea of the magic word doesn't seem too far fetched, does it? Immerse your listeners in a narrative and it becomes their reality. Expose them to it every day to reinforce it – this is the province of politicians and news anchors the world over.

If you go deep enough, the statement 'It's not real' loses potency. Of course it does, because your brain is modelling it 'as if', and some stories are extraordinarily old.

From a 2009 article in Britain's Daily Telegraph:

'A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.
The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.
Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.
Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.
[…]
Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the variants shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.
[...]
The original ancestor is thought to be similar to another tale, The Wolf and the Kids, in which a wolf pretends to be a nanny goat to gain entry to a house full of young goats. '

Let's think about that:

Red Riding Hood is a modern iteration of a story that's older than the Christian religion. Its themes and characters have inhabited the human consciousness for longer than the dominant religious narrative on this planet of approximately 7.2 billion human beings.

Here at Modern Mythology, we've been talking werewolves, witches, zombie apocalypses and vampires lately. We've given nods to Twilight, to Buffy:The Vampire Slayer, True Blood and more; pop-culture narratives, flirtations with the shadowy Other – these are wildly successful in capturing money and attention.

Millions of people the world over have synchronised their brains in similar ways as they've been drawn into the narratives, and so I find myself wondering – is this actually modern at all? If our brains become spatially and temporally coupled with the tales, are we in fact moving in myth-time, sacred kairotic time?

If stories can be modelled on taxonomic lines, then familial structures apply – then each generation partakes of some of the others.

This year, we see a new iteration of Red Riding Hood – a film released in March, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, of Twilight movie fame no less.

As the second trailer for the new film states in blood red letters:

HOW CAN YOU KEEP OUT WHAT IS ALREADY IN?



Gary Oldman's werewolf hunter Father Solomon makes much of what we've discussed about the terror of the monster, explicit in the trailer:

“The real killer lives here, in this village – it could be your neighbour.”

And even this current version owes much to an earlier predecessor – its structure and plot appears to be strongly influenced by the 1984 film The Company of Wolves.



“The worst kind of wolves are hairy on the inside and when they bite you, they drag you with them to hell.”

Contagion and the Outsider on the Inside – the deepest fear of any community. Is it any wonder that deception is often classed as morally reprehensible? Consider then what seemingly innocuous actions might somehow become imbued with a sense of the sinister if a strange affect occurs.

Imagine what would happen if that which forms groups - the act of communication, of coming together at a fundamental, even neural level – can be used to alter and manipulate individuals and the group itself?

Might this skill be viewed with suspicion - the very act of alternative narrative-construction becoming potentially morally dubious, and even synonymous with evil and falsehood? Even the notion of 'a fabrication' seems to imply something less than righteous; an ersatz version of events which gives the concept of myth its general pejorative sense, doesn't it?

And thus myth and mythmakers are at worst reviled as liars, frauds and mountebanks, and at best regarded as irrelevant and perhaps semi-entertaining because of their ability to make people feel emotion. Even spin-doctors and political speech-writers are somewhat derided by the general populace, and they and their siblings in the advertising industry are either ignored or derided as manipulative individuals whose sole goal is money – something which alienates them from the general populace.

Which means, as aliens, they often are perceived as faintly sinister – they operate in the murkier realms of the human psyche, away from the clear and rational. In a sense they are lunar and mercurial – both in the planetary correspondence sense, and the adjectival. They take the enlightened solar construction of language, born of the neo-cortex, and use it to produce movements in the deep emotive dark of the reptile brain.

And what's more they do this in such a way as to hijack the investment in the rational, non-mythic narratives – the same machinery that models 'reality' can be used to create and work with the mythic precisely because, as already noted, parts of the brain cannot tell the difference!

Due to this this investment in the rational narrative, so-called irrational or mythic narratives must be treated as second-class in modern society, because to do otherwise is to suggest that the dominant narrative may also be a made thing – a fabrication in the truest sense of the word.

This would, apparently, undermine an awful lot of important things.

Imagine, if only for a moment, what would happen if all narratives were held created equal. Imagine if Merlin stood shoulder to shoulder with Einstein, or Zeus went for a stroll with Michael Faraday and they met Thor and Benjamin Franklin chatting about super-heated plasma?

Those who prefer a singular narrative might say that such a moment would be a retrograde step, a movement back to the dark ages of superstition. Yet that moment exists every time we spin a tale and immerse ourselves within it – the data seems to confirm what we already know!

We speak spells, we weave worlds from songs and stories. If it's any kind of movement, it's not merely retrograde because it goes so far back as to be beyond any world we can conceive. It's so far back it's looped around and met the deep future, and the only way we can get to that space is to perform an act of wilful imagination.

Beyond superstition lies hyperstition; fictions that make themselves real in the place where the eldest ancestor meets the last child of mankind. Both are creatures so far beyond us that they are literally dreams, which means that every time you step into that dreamtime, you are with them as part of a community which is hard-wired into the very heart of our brains.

And if that isn't a damn good pedigree for a mythmaker -to be standing amongst wizards, sorcerers and shamans and storytellers and poets from the Before and After It All - then I don't know what is.

So think on that, as you browse this blog, as you cruise the corpus of the contributors here, and maybe muse on it if you go to see the latest spawn of Red Riding Hood at the cinema or next time you become engrossed in a story regardless of media.

Then feel yourself carried away by the spell, or admire the lay of the charm with a professional eye.

Because it doesn't matter which you do when it happens; every time you are drawn in, you're only being human, and that's a very interesting thing to be - however you look at it.

I'll leave you with a quote from the introductory voice-over to the wonderfully odd 1974 film Zardoz:

“In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation - and a magician, by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented, too, for your entertainment - and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?”

Be seeing you.

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Twilight Selves: Cannibalism, Werewolves and Identity Part #2

By Mr. VI

(This is Part 2 of a series. The first is available here.)

So, have you been thinking on the things you know that others do not? The mysteries of code, the runes of circuit and mechanism, the rituals of spreadsheet and year-end? All these and more are incomprehensible to many.

How do you accept such things as normal, as easy and mundane? There are things in your life which appear arcane to those not living as you. Whether it be a hobby, or occupation, take a moment to examine the things in your life which you perform and may sometimes use as an identifier.

I, for example, write things like this. If you look at my profile, you'll see 'writer' there. Not particularly arcane, you may think. Except I spend a good portion of my time stringing together words in varying combinations in order to affect *you*, the reader. I could no more cease stringing these words together than you could stop your heart beating without risk of damage.

Take away a keyboard, and I'll write with a pen and paper. Take those away and I'll compose pieces in my head, use my tongue and lips to form words and speak them out loud. It's like breathing to me. I cannot cease playing with language.

Thus I identify as a writer. Rhythm, language, communication; I love these things, I really, truly do. To me, there is glory and ecstasy in it; to evoke a response in the audience and lead you in a certain way to show you things - this is what I do.

For others though, the idea of choosing to write words on a page is a chore, a necessary evil rather than an attempt at art. It's not a matter of glory and and wonder, it's simply utilitarian.

And that's fine, because it illustrates the point we're making here; there is a difference between the two groups I have outlined. I could say that writers and thinkers will intuitively understand the compulsion I am speaking of. I might say that non-writers will not understand the brutal horror of the blank page, or conversely, are incapable of experiencing the thrill of possibility that same brutality engenders.

Of course, that would be elitist. A cadre of writers, artists and poets who intuitively understand the world in a unique and important way, vital to the rest of humanity; this would be the narrative I would be situating myself within, rubbing shoulders with all others who've identified as a writer.

But in the last post, I promised you I would show you how mythic analysis can help you to parse the seeming contradiction of the wolf-pack and cannibalism:

On my personal blog, I've discussed the Germanic conception of luck and might and how it ties into the notion of kingships, heroes and power. Such things were held as transferable properties, able to be lost or stolen, and more importantly, won through great deeds.

Whereas most feudal monarchies claimed their authority from the Divine Right of Kings, wherein God ordains the lawful king, pre-Christian Germanic traditions often claimed descent from the gods directly – by blood and affiliation rather than dogmatic assertion.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the following genealogy for Penda, a pagan 7th Century King of Mercia, in a time when most rulers had converted to Christianity:

'Penda was Pybba's offspring, Pybba was Cryda's offspring, Cryda Cynewald's offspring, Cynewald Cnebba's offspring, Cnebba Icel's offspring, Icel Eomer's offspring, Eomer Angeltheow's offspring, Angeltheow Offa's offspring, Offa Wermund's offspring, Wermund Wihtlaeg's offspring, Wihtlaeg Woden's offspring.'

Both the Chronicle and the poet Snorri Sturlson mention such divine genealogies within the Angle and Saxon tribes. The latter, although a Christian, is mainly responsible for the preservation and recording of the tales which we know as Norse mythology.

Snorri was a renowned poet, historian and politician. Twice elected to the highest legal office of Iceland, he was influential enough to be a thorn in the side of King of Norway, which indirectly led to his death at the hand of a chief named Gissar.

History records that Snorri received a warning letter informing him of the intent to kill him, but as the runes were ciphered, he could not read it. For all his influence, it was the arcane and specialised form of writing which prevented him taking steps.

Those myths preserved by Snorri present the god Odin as the chief deity of the Norse – pater familias of a pantheon of gods including Thor, Loki and Freya. This arrangement appears to be something of an attempt to model the old gods along Classical lines.

However, regardless of any such attempts, archaeology seems to indicate that the majority of Icelanders honoured Thor in their pagan days, while Odin was reserved for poets and the aristocracy.

Often sinister and nearly always morally ambiguous, Odin shares a root name with his Anglo Saxon and German counterparts – Woden and Wodan respectively. This Proto-Indo-European root is *wodh which is variously glossed as madness, fury, or poetic inspiration. The suffix implies a mastery thereof, and so it is no surprise that Snorri, as a poet, might seek to place the god in his proper place.

Modern depictions of Odin often focus on his aspect as a god of war and slaughter – legions of metal fans know the name from countless songs. Death, sex, battle and darkness – all these thrill, and more importantly, sell records.

It is Odin who hanged himself for nine nights to gain the runes, pierced by his own spear. It is Odin who is said to have brought the gift of poetry, albeit indirectly, to the world of man. As an exemplar of cryptic wisdom, and even the physical image of the wizard – all long grey beard, funny hat and staff – the god stands squarely in archetypical territory.

But what has this to do with the wolf-pack and the cannibal?

Consider the previously stated fact that it was Odin who was honoured by the aristocracy - the kings and powerful folk in Germanic society. Now, imagine why these luminaries would ally themselves with a figure surrounded by wolves and ravens.

Conjure the images in your mind; the fields of corpses, a veritable feast for the black birds with shining eyes and knowing calls. Or perhaps the speed and lethality of the wolves, acting together to bring down their prey, pitiless in pursuit?

In society where most are illiterate, the power wielded by those who knew the runes as alphabet – quite apart from their purported mystic dimensions – is great. Consider also the notion of Valhalla; a post-mortem existence in which scarcity does not occur, where men may fight, fall, and rise again endlessly, until the final doom of all things where they may perish utterly in one last world-shaking battle.

At first glance this mythological reflex might seem similar to the notion of Paradise or Heaven so beloved by the Peoples of the Book, however it may be examined further in relation to the wolf-pack in ways which are useful to us.

(A subsequent post will address the place of the eschatology of Christianity, Judaism and Islam in relation to these issues.)

First of all, one of Odin's by-names is anglicised as Valfather, literally 'Father of the Slain' implying that all those who fall in battle are inextricably connected to that god. Indeed, though first pick of the fallen warriors passes to Freyja, she takes only half, and Odin the other.

These warriors are hence known as the 'Einherjar', or 'lone fighters' in Old Norse. Bold and valorous, they have attracted the god's attention and are brought to Valhalla by the valkyries. Etymologically, both '-herjar' and 'harry' seem somehow connected:

harry
O.E. hergian "make war, lay waste, ravage, plunder," the word used in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" for what the Vikings did to England, from P.Gmc. *kharohan (v.), from *kharjaz "an armed force" (cf. O.E. here, O.N. herr, O.H.G. har, Ger. Heer "host, army"), from PIE root *koro- "war" (cf. Lith. karas "war, quarrel," karias "host, army;" O.C.S. kara "strife;" M.Ir. cuire "troop;" O.Pers. kara "host, people, army;" Gk. koiranos "ruler, leader, commander"). Related: Harried; harrying.

The former of these two has been linked to the Harii tribe by Orchard, Simek and Lindow, of whom Tacitus writes in his Germania c. 1 AD:

'As for the Harii, quite apart from their strength, which exceeds that of the other tribes I have just listed, they pander to their innate savagery by skill and timing: with black shields and painted bodies, they choose dark nights to fight, and by means of terror and shadow of a ghostly army they cause panic, since no enemy can bear a sight so unexpected and hellish; in every battle the eyes are the first to be conquered.'

Consider the bond between warriors in a given band; an elite grouping capable of striking fear into their enemies; they attack at night and use terror tactics to win their battles, combined with natural skill. By coming out of the night, they defy the usual rules of war, and with fear as their ally they become a feared foe, catching the enemy at its weakest and most unprepared; the victory may be achieved more easily than a straight fight, as proponents of guerilla warfare have found, the world over.

Military hazings, gang tests and ritual initiation – these are born of the same reflex. By ensuring all members are bonded by experience and activity, the individuals identify as part of the group. They are an elite, sharing qualities, experiences and knowledge; identity shifts so that the definition of individual self necessitates partaking of the group-self.

Indeed, the former identity may be destroyed, and the newly initiated pack-member may survive; in short they may 'die' and 'rise again'. Combine this with scenarios which subtly alter the position of consciousness - whether by ritual, ordeal, or entheogenic consumption – and we are presented with a journey of the psyche which may mirror those in other so-called shamanistic cultures.

Indeed, as god of magic, a figure such as Odin may be regarded as having strongly shamanistic overtones.

Plus, the runes themselves are held to be Mysteries, containing more than simple shape and sound values, rather like the notion of the Greek stoicheia - elements – or the mystic attributions to Hebrew letters. The sense of such mysticism is one which is grounded in elitism – only the initiated can comprehend the full utility of the symbolism.

Finally, one cannot invoke the idea of Odin without considering the notion of the berserker. The 9th century skaldic poem Haraldskvæði describes the ulfheðnar 'men clad in wolf skins' as follows, emphasis mine:

I'll ask of the berserks, you tasters of blood,
Those intrepid heroes, how are they treated,
Those who wade out into battle?
Wolf-skinned they are called. In battle
They bear bloody shields.
Red with blood are their spears when they come to fight.
They form a closed group.
The prince in his wisdom puts trust in such men
Who hack through enemy shields.

Further, in Ynglinga Saga, Snorri writes:

Odin could make his enemies in battle blind, or deaf, or terror-struck, and
their weapons so blunt that they could no more but than a willow
wand; on the other hand, his men rushed forwards without armour,
were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong
as bears or wild bulls, and killed people at a blow, but neither
fire nor iron told upon themselves

These two quotes suggest a significant change in consciousness which alters the berserker at the biophysical level, a frenzy which caused the Norwegian King Harald Finehair to make good use of them in battle during his campaign to unite the kingdoms of that country.

All these considered, these facts imply that there is a link between the extra-ordinary and the idea of power, something which is deepened when one considers that ravens and wolves are often eaters of carrion. This motif is intrinsically linked with cannibalism as an ability and desire to consume that which is thought beyond use through social convention.

Truly, when one opens up to cannibalism and consumption of the dead, more food becomes immediately available, removing one from the privations of scarcity. This allows prosperity when others are short on resources, something which is extremely valuable when enmeshed in dynamics of power.

The pillar of the community maintains their position by the employment of wolfish tactics; the state cuts the most vulnerable of services and repurposes its funding. The werewolf bite is contagious, and soon it becomes the case that the weaker packs are cannibalized, gobbled up.

The tactics which make the aristocracy/plutocracy so successful are hence demonised when they are external to it – wolves which are not part of the power-bloc are hunted down and killed, just as all berserkers were eventually outlawed in medieval Iceland – by the 12th century, berserker bands had all but disappeared.

But the nature of a werewolf is literally a wolf in human shape, and thus it might be said that it is difficult to discover their existence. Guerilla strategy and tactical dissimulation are still options, despite indications to the contrary. In the next post, we'll examine how eschatology and warfare combine to form acts of creative resistance – in short, how to remain in the twilight and prosper under seemingly impossible conditions, by being true to that '[O]ther who hides in me' as Machen puts it.

Until then,

Be seeing you.

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Twilight Selves: Cannibalism, Werewolves and Identity. Part #1

By Mr. VI

“We now see ... wolfpack behaviours (on markets), and if we will not stop these packs, even if it is self-inflicted weakness, they will tear the weaker countries apart,” Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg 9th May 2010

Economics, politics, sociology and philosophy; history and diplomacy. All these involve study of narratives, both the past and the present, in order to predict and if possible control the environment. That which is controlled is in a sense rendered stable and coherent, it is fixated like an insect in amber; integrity is preserved and the body politic is kept intact. The meaning extracted from mythic narratives provides reference, often an origin point – a kind of social genealogy which specifically situates the community at large within time itself.

It is the idea of control and bodily integrity which generates a shadow; an uncontrolled, amorphous idea of insatiable hunger; an enemy which devours all those things which enable the maintenance of the status quo. As can be seen by the quote at the beginning of this piece, the old metaphors still hold evocative power – with the economic upheavals of the early years of the 21st century, the wolves are once again to blame; their greed has supposedly placed the right thinking folk in a great deal of trouble. What is this terror then? This fear of another form of life, of existence, which somehow exists outside the norm, and is unnatural enough to evoke such a violent response? Or to frame it another way, in terms of myth, why is the monster a recurring theme, its unspeakable hunger something that arises again and again, irrespective of time and place?

So runs the introduction to an essay of mine in Immanence of Myth. Like any good editor, James has to impose limits on writers, both for coherency and reasons of space. Understandably, it's difficult to cover a whole line of thought in a few thousand words, and fortunately we have the extra space of this blog to examine things in more detail. Thus, this is the first in a short series of explicitly connected posts by myself (and the other contributors if they feel so moved) on the implications of cannibalism and the wolf-pack in relation to levels of self-hood. We've discussed the cannibal as an exterior entity, as an auslander – the malign stranger; what then of those wolves in the board-room etc, curled at the heart of the status quo itself?

As Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen puts it:

'[W]e lead two lives, and the half of our soul is madness, and half heaven is lit by a black sun. I say I am a man, but who is the other that hides in me?'

And lest we think the discussion of wolves and predators is purely theoretical, this article dated 7th February 2011 from Britain's Daily Mail on a so-called 'super-pack' of four hundred wolves killing horses should put that to rest.

As the article states - emphasis mine:
“Dr Valerius Geist, a wildlife behaviour expert, said the harsh Siberian winter - where temperatures plummet to minus 49C - had killed off the animal's usual prey.

He said: 'It is unusual for wolves to gather in such numbers of hunt large animal like horses.

'However, the population of their usual prey, rabbits, has decreased this year due to lack of food, so wolves have had to change their habits.
'Wolves are very careful to choose the most nutritious food source easiest obtained without danger - which in this case happens to be horses. "They will start tackling dangerous prey when they run out of non-dangerous prey.'”

The whole metaphor of a ravenous, insatiable wolf with great big teeth – all the better to eat you with, my dear – is predicated on the idea that the creatures will kill and eat anything; nothing can stop that hunger. In actuality, they hunt easy prey, and this in itself is the true root of the terror. Easy prey is vulnerable prey, defenceless or otherwise weak.

The sick, the disabled, the old and the very young; these are perfect prey for the wolves, and to devour them is to commit an act which is beyond the pale of society - pale being a pointed stick which serves as marker or boundary, as in impale or fence paling.

This violation of the social order is an act of violence against it by those beyond the boundary.

Where does this idea of violence fit within the status quo? Suppose we posit that in fact, the actuality of the situation is more complex; the function of the metaphor is to provide a descriptor for those whom the rules of a culture of scarcity do not apply.

In my previous post, I suggested that scarcity is essentially what gives rise to the notion of power, and conversely, that of weakness. It is manipulation of scarcity that drives demand, and those that can provide are valued and feted over those who cannot.

All we need to do is view the recent banking crisis to see how quickly the dichotomy is revealed. The individuals who ran the Western world's financial system were once economic giants moving millions and fuelling the globalization machine which has brought us wonders undreamt by our great-grandparents.

Now they are abruptly wolves, preying on the weak and the vulnerable, ruining lives and wiping out life-savings. Supposedly violating the trust of investors, they are said to have committed an act of violence against those who trusted them.

Yet, the ease with which they moved through the world, their wealth and power, is still desirable. If anything, the rage occurs because the act of violence is sublimated as theft. The perceived removal of power breeds anger - the loss of the signifier of power highlights the division between have and have not.

This increases desire - again scarcity tightens the knot. That same desire leads to increased occurrences of 'wolfish' behaviour. In time, scarcity renders us all wolves, but the lone wolf stands little chance against a pack. A pack is able to hunt prey that would be dangerous to a single individual.

In a pack therefore, the danger quotient falls, increasing yield. Thus, the individuals are perceived to be more powerful both in and of themselves as well, as members of the pack. Again, it is desirable to become part of the group.

The larger a pack, the greater the risk of internal conflict - only under extreme conditions can necessity overwhelm dominance, and this is not always enough. Thus often, multiple packs or groups evolve, each with an exclusive set of identifiers and protocols. This creates an inclusive and exclusive division, an inner and an outer within the larger group.

Do those within the in-body view those outside as like themselves, or has the very act of assumption of identifiers induced a sense of difference? As an elite evolves, it separates itself from the larger body, becoming a law unto itself. Could we argue that this sense of difference and identity is a primary root of almost all idealogical conflict?

These levels of identity-within-identity raise interesting questions about the very idea of cannibalism itself. If cannibalism is the consumption of one's own kind, then what of the consumption of those who are not of the same kind?

Since the metaphor of consumption also implies incorporation, it follows that those within the body necessarily utilise those without. The co-option and capture of the external to maintain and enhance the body can easily be seen in the actions of say, large corporations or the enslavement of the enemy and the conquered. On the microcosmic scale, we ingest external entities and re-purpose them for our own bodies.

Mythologically speaking, if one is elevated to the post-scarcity of godhood, what happens to one's humanity? What happens when a group of individuals are able to communicate in their own jargon, their own secret language; sub-prime mortgages, exchange-rates, currency fluctuations, hedge-funds?

All these are occult, beyond the ken of those not inculcated or initiated into the mysteries of finance; the virtual trading of ideas and potentials is as esoteric as the Greek Magical Papyri, and yet these hidden spells influence the lives of billions.

By these secret ways, they render the act of utilization of easily accessible resources into a cryptic thing, only performable by those properly trained and operating within their particular framework.

In the next post in the series, I'll show how analysis of a given mythic construct may yield the keys you need to subvert the apparent duality between the monstrously strange cannibal which inspires such horror, and the pillar of the community who has wealth, power and respect.

But for now, consider this: What secret codes and magic spells do you know, that others don't? What runes and arcane operational knowledge do you possess by which you effect your daily life?

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.