My wife is very sick
Yeah, that’s basically all I can think about. Whenever someone I care about (and basically, that’s my wife, not that the rest of you aren’t great but I’m not married to you) gets ill I freak the hell out.
I agree that I have said nothing of particular interest to anyone but myself here.
A false memoir
I’m thinking about writing a memoir here. Only it would be filled with lies.
So if you like being lied to, yay.
The reason I make a shitty agnostic
Sure, I don’t believe we can know if there’s a God or not. I believe any attempt by humans to define the ultimate nature of reality to be bullshit. But I don’t really believe in God, either. Belief is a subjective thing: while in a panic I have prayed, I’m not living a godly life or having any real faith in myself, the universe, or a supreme being. Whether or not I should or shouldn’t is irrelevant. Whether or not I think I or any of my fellow jumped up primates have any sort of wisdom or insight into the nature of reality is irrelevant. When I wake up in the middle of the night, aware of my own impending death (inasmuch as everyone’s deaths are either impending or imminent) I hold no comforting sense of the evanescence of the divine, I feel no compelling link to the afterlife… I essentially feel cold, and alone, and destined to be compost.
So although I don’t call myself an atheist, because I believe saying that I know whether or not there’s a God to be the most arrogant thing I could possibly do, I know that in my heart, my faith is dead. It died a long time ago. I don’t believe in God.
However, I did grow up Catholic. So even as I say that I don’t believe, I’m lying in a way. I believe when it is the most painful and least comforting to do so, ultimately.
Enjoy the archives, what I managed to salvage of them.
Julian did all the work, to be fair. But the entries from 2001 to 2003 are saved, showing off how crazily prolix I once was. Since those days are probably gone, at least we get to look at them.
I am now somewhat saddened to realize that folks have died since I wrote these. Mike Simanoff, for one, who was always a generous critic and conversationalist when I was rambling on about something insane or another.
Hopefully I’ll have something better to say soon aside from “I’m sorry I was in my own haze, Mike.”
Demons from beyond infinity are bored. Because there’s nothing to do beyond infinity.
Seriously, it’s totally dead once you transcend all existence and dwell within the capering shadows thrown by the limitless light of the tsimsun. So they get bored. Mostly that’s why they do the stuff they do, it’s kind of like pulling the wings off flies or burning anthills with a magnifying glass, only with us as the bugs.
The Outlaw
It’s relatively common around here to make references to King Arthur, because I’m one of those people who is so utterly in love with the Arthur legend that all a book has to do is whisper the name and I buy it. I’m so besotted with Arthurian tales that I actually considered going to see the Sean Connery movie First Knight and was only snapped out of that by the fact that it was mostly going to involve Lancelot, who I hate and who was a late addition to the legend. Anyway, so often do I dive into the Arthurian well that it has but recently occurred to me that I’ve been giving another English tradition some serious short-shrift.
The archer of the wood himself, Robin Hood.
According to legend, transmitted partially through the ballads, Robin Hood was the leader of an outlaw band that included Little John, Will Scarlett, and Much the miller’s son. They robbed passerby from the shelter of Barnesdale or Sherwood forests, and Robin Hood was renowned for his skill at archery. No firm evidence of his real existence has ever been confirmed despite unremitting efforts to find historical proof linking him to a particular era. The earliest references to Robin Hood occurs in a scribal interpolation in the legal records of the thirteenth century, but it is not until the fourteenth that references to Robin Hood become plentiful.
Lindahl, McNamara and Lindow, Medieval Folklore
So by about 1440 many of the familiar elements of the Robin Hood legend were already in place. King Richard the Lionheart and his troublesome brother Prince John, stock-in-trade characters of the film versions, are conspicuously missing. So are Maid Marion and Friar Tuck, who do not appear in the tale of Robin Hood until later. They are therefore generally regarded as additions to the basic story, and can probably be discounted when searching the historical record for the real Robin Hood.
James and Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries
Without quibbling overmuch as to how ancient something that took place after 1000 AD actually is (I prefer my ancient to be at least before 500 AD, and in truth am more comfortable if it’s before AD entirely) I will say that Robin Hood has had to put up with almost as many efforts to prove his historical validity as poor Arthur has, and it’s just as misguided in his case. However, I suppose completeness requires us to list a few of the candidates that various researchers have put forth as the ‘real’ Robin Hood. First off we have William Stuckley’s attempt to find Robin, which took place inbetween his investigations of Stonehenge (he believed the Druids were behind it) and his candidate for Robin was Robert fitz Ooth, earl of Huntingdon. Now, this goes against the whole original tradition of Robin as a yeoman, a man of the people, but Stuckley decided on the earl and would have none other, even if he had to ‘concoct a marriage between Gilbert de Gant and Rohaise, daughter of Richard Fitz-Gilbert, both great lords of the Norman settlement, which only occurred later between their descendants’ and also ‘made the fitz Ooths lords of Kime in Lincolnshire. This too was fictitious; the pedigree of the lords of Kime is well established and leaves no room for such intrusion. “Fitz Ooth” itself seems redolent of antiquity. It is a strange name, otherwise unknown” according to Sir James Holt. Of course, we know that ‘fitz’ means ‘bastard son of’, usually kings…the origin of the name Fitzroy, for instance, meaning ‘Bastard son of the king.’ We’ll come back to that.
One of the most important clues to Robin’s identity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Historic Documents Commission was cataloguing thousands of documents which represented eight centuries of British history. It was in 1852 that the antiquary Joseph Hunter claimed that he had stumbled upon a man who sounded as if he might be the original Robin Hood. His name in fact was Robert, and he was the son of Adam Hood, a forester in the service of the Earl de Warenne. (Robin was simply a diminutive of Robert – not, in those days, a name in its own right.) He was born about 1280, and on 25 January 1316 Robert Hood and his wife Matilda paid two shillings for permission to take a piece of the earl’s waste ground in ‘Bickhill’ (or Bitch-Hill) in Wakefield. It was merely the size of a kitchen garden – thirty feet long by sixteen feet wide. The rent for this was sixpence a year. The Manor Court Roll for 1357 shows a house ‘formerly the property of Robert Hode’ on the site – so by that time Robert Hood was presumably dead.
Colin and Damon Wilson, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved
Hot land renting action! Seriously, they do have a little more to go on than that. According to Hunter, the Barnesdale location of the earlier Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood was the more likely location for Robin than Sherwood, a bit to the south…and Hunter also noted that in the Geste the King of England was said to be Edward, not Richard. Well, that left a few possible candidates, namely Edward’s I through III. Hunter latched onto a description of Edward in the Geste as ‘Edward, our comely king’ and argued that it must have been Edward II. (Whether Edward the Longshanks or Edward III were offended at Hunter’s assumption that any good looking King named Edward couldn’t be them was kept at bay by the fact that both were long dead by the time Hunter came up with this theory.) Hunter then managed to link the Robert Hood who had served under the Earl de Warenne to a man he’d discovered in several documents of the King’s Exchequer itself, Now it will scarecely be believed, but it is nevertheless the plain and simple truth that in documents preserved in the Exchequer containing accounts of expenses in the King’s household we find the name of “Robyn Hode” not once but several times occuring. This ties in well with the end of the Lytell Geste wherein the King himself goes to Nottingham to deal with Robin, only to meet and make friends with the man, who enters the Kings service for a while before becoming bored and returning to outlawry. Supposedly the Geste and the historical documents connect up well, with Edward II having made a progress through Nottingham specifically to deal with poaching in the royal forests among other things, and having been in Nottingham by November of that year.
Hunter then went on to connect his Robert Hood with the rebellion of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, against King Edward II. Without dragging this out too much longer, he connects Robert Hood to the Earl de Warenne’s support for Edward’s wars against the Scots (he was fined for not participating in the war in 1314, but not in 1317) and that he may well have been part of the Earl of Lancaster’s army in 1322 that was defeated by Edward, thus leading to his outlawry. Eventually, since Edward was still battling against his own barons (Thomas of Lancaster had been behind the appointment of the Ordainers, after all, that council of Barons that had sought to control the King, and it had been Lancaster who killed Piers Gaveston in 1312) it fell upon him to forgive many of the outlaws created by Lancaster’s rebellion, and as such, Robert Hood may well have been one of them, explaining his entry into Edward’s service. Of course, Edward II had plenty of problems besides rebellious barons…his wife and her lover Roger de Mortimer were to eventually overthrow him, and some have argued that on account of his probable homosexuality Mortimer was to have the king executed by having a red-hot iron jammed into his anus…four years later, Edward III seized power from his mother and became King by right as well as name, and one of his first actions was to have Mortimer killed. If Robert Hood was the ‘Robyn Hood’ of the Royal Exchequer documents, then to a certain degree it makes sense that he may well have made friends with the then-young Edward III while serving as one of the King’s household, which would explain how the man was able to continue on in his outlawry for another 22 years after leaving the King’s service, since Edward III was notoriously capable, vicious and cruel and would be unlikely to allow anyone to poach from his royal forests…but a dashing rogue he met when a child, when his father was still alive, might have been winked at.
While it’s a really nice theory, and quite elegant, the problem it has is that there’s no real evidence to support it aside from a few documents in the exchequer. There’s no evidence that the Robert Hood of Wakefield was ever really considered an outlaw, no evidence that he was the ‘Robyn Hode’ of the exchequer documents, no evidence that the gentlemen mentioned in those documents was an outlaw at all…so in the end, we have a plausible sounding theory that does gibe with the Geste to some degree, and that’s basically it. It doesn’t help matters much that the Geste itself wasn’t so much a ballad as a collection of earlier ballads and tales, in effect an encyclopedia of the more popular Robin Hood stories of its time. Sir James Holt, for one, thinks that the Geste is not a particularly authoritative source for Robin Hood at all, but rather contains a few interpolations brought into the story later (much as Lancelot comes creeping into Arthurian stories like a thief in the night) although this does mean that Holt therefore has to ditch the ‘King Edward’ of the Geste because no King of England named Edward reigned before the ones mentioned…unless we count the Confessor, one supposes. (Hmm. We should muse more about that later.) Holt’s theory is that ‘Robin Hood’ wasn’t any one man at all, but rather a general nickname for an outlaw, much as Wolfshead was used in the Danelaw and other Norse territories. Holt traces this back to a ‘William son of Robert le Fevre’ who is mentioned in royal documents from about 1262 as ‘William Robehod, fugitive.’ Using this as a springboard, Holt goes all the way back to an outlaw from Yorkshire named Robert Hod, listed in documents from 1225 as a fugitive and who has been given a descriptive nickname, ‘Hobbehod’. If you know what that means, you’re doing better than myself or Holt for that matter.
Holt’s theory also has its problems: for one thing, by abandoning the Geste, you lose the most cohesive body of Robin legends out there, since the previous rhymes of Robin Hood mentioned by William Lackland in his Piers Plowman are long lost to us. However, Robin Hood was dated as far back as 1283 in the Chronicle of Scotland:
Then Little John and Robin Hood
As forest outlaws were well renowned,
In Inglewood and Barnsdale
All this time they plied their trade.
Granted, the Chronicle of Scotland was written in 1420 or so, and Walter Bower mentioned both Hood and Little John as having been extant in 1266, but he was writing even later than Andrew de Wyntoun. By the 1600’s Robin had been moved back to the 12th century, becoming a contemporary of Richard coeur de Leon and the later King John. It seems interesting that Robin Hood should have slid backwards in time from the time of Edward II all the way to his ancestor, Richard…it’s also interesting that the ‘Robert of Loxley’ interpretation of Robin which helped Graham Phillips associate Robin Hood with Sir Robert fitz Odo, Knight of Loxley, also dates from the 1600’s. (Robert fitz Odo, who may have lost his knighthood in the 1190’s, could also have been known as Robert Odo, which is close enough to Robert Hood for government work and batshit theorizing.)
So, where does this lead us? Well, so far, it leaves us with a whole pile of possible Robin Hoods from all over the place, from practically everywhere except Sherwood and varying in time from the 14th Century all the way back to the 12th. There’s no real evidence for any of them. Which is why I often prefer my legendary figures be allowed to remain legendary…really, what’s the appeal of a Robin Hood without a Marian? Whether you prefer the stronger Marian of Parke Godwin’s Sherwood or the excellent Robin of Sherwood series (which also worked in Herne the Hunter, an addition this lover of mythologizing applauds) it’s just not Robin without Marian. Although I am glad to see that Little John appears in just about every version of the story that exists as well. Ultimately, all this digging for the ‘real Robin’ misses the bloody wonder of the tale, the burning stories of a rebellious man unsatisfied with the world as he found it, who made battle with lords and princes on behalf of the common man. The reason he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor became such a truism of outlawry is because it resonated in a country that would see the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381, some sixty years after the events of Hunter’s theory. Robin Hood was a symbol of the untamed in opposition with order, especially a repressive order imposed from without, as Norman Feudalism had been imposed over the more complicated Saxon system of thanes and earls.
Of course, there are those (like Stephen Knight) who view the Robin Hood myth as a recurring reinvention of a real resistance to oppression on a local level. (I half expect someone to write a short story of a ‘Robin in the Hood’ any day now, taking this mythology into a more modern form in reaction to modern overreaching like the Patriot Act and racial profiling…but that’s for another time, I suppose) And that’s certainly an interesting approach to the idea of Robin Hood. There are also those who see Robin as an older tradition manifesting itself again…from the Robin of Sherwood take on the myth as a creation of ‘Herne the Hunter’ (himself a take on the Wild Hunt legends of Europe, as popped up time and again), to the arguments of Margaret Murray that Hood was a tranfigured form of the ‘old god’ of pagan Britain, to Sir Sidney Lee’s derivation of Hood itself from the germanic ‘Hodekin’, which supposedly meant elf in old Teutonic tales…and we’d no doubt be quite amiss if we allowed old Puck himself, Robin Goodfellow, from being mentioned here. (Interestingly, both Herne and Puck pop up in that great mythologizer Shakespeare’s work…and some people think he was a myth, too.) Those that take too much from tales of King Arthur (he states blandly, with his tongue jabbed firmly in his cheek) also are reminded that Hood pops up in T.H. White’s tale of King Arthur, The Sword in the Stone, as Robin Wood, and we all know that Arthur would have predated the previous candidates for Robin Hood by some 700 years. (Yes, alright, assuming he existed.) It’s even been argued that ‘Robin Wood’ was a psuedonym for a figure derived from the same sources as the Norse god Woden, which is interesting for the later Herne interpolation because both Herne and Woden are considered to be the leaders of the Wild Hunt, and Herne clearly derives from the earlier Celtic figure known to us as Cernunnos, the Horned God. (Woden/Wotan, as a germanic figure prefiguring Odin, ultimately comes from the same indo-european roots as Cernunnos himself) and both figures could be linked to the Wild Man traditions of Europe, specifically those that ultimately inspired such figures as Merlin of Wales. All of this is very fine, yes, but what does it ultimately tell us about our dear Robin?
Robin Goodfellow. In British folklore, a name for the hob-goblin Puck, who was noted for his mischievous tricks and his habit of misleading travelers. He was also able to change shape.
Puck. Half-human, half-fairy, Puck was a hobgoblin who, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, served as Jester and attendant to King Oberon. A mischevious character, Puck could change the appearance of familiar objects as well as his own shape, and would mislead mortals with his tricks.
Hobgoblin. A mischievous imp or goblin who produces fear and apprehension, especially in children.
Neville Drury, Dictionary of Mysticism and the Occult
Hobgoblin, Robin Goodfellow, or Puck: An English domestic fairy or brownie of nocturnal habits. He is of a happy disposition, and is believed to be one of the courtiers, probably the jester, at the court of Oberon. Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, says: – “Your grandames’ maids were wont to set a bowl of milk for him for his pains in grinding of malt and mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight. This white bread, and bread and milk, was his standard fee.” He is perhaps best known in Britian by his appellation of Puck, and his qualities and attributes are represented under this name in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” By some he is believed to be the demon who leads men astray during the night. Sometimes he is clothed in a suit of leather close to his body, and sometimes he wore green. He is usually represented as full of tricks and mischief.
Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia of Occultism
Now, were I a folklorist, I would merely call attention to the attributes of Robin Hood as revealed in the Geste…his many disguises, his habit of playing tricks on the powerful, his charity to the less fortunate, his close association with kings, even his name and his typical attire…as they seem to relate to our friend Robin Goodfellow here. There’s certainly enough there to make a case, but then, that would leave us with a merely mythical Robin Hood, and I’d hate to abandon all that work that Stuckley and Hunter and Holt and others have done for us to try and give us a historical Robin Hood. No, I’m certainly not the kind of fellow who would like to throw out the baby with the bathwater, here…just because it doesn’t matter if there was a real Robin Hood or not, it doesn’t follow that we can’t try and establish an insane theory that takes all these potential Robin Hoods into account. It’s what I do, after all. Besides, in looking at Puck himself, I’m reminded of a passage from Peter Berresford Ellis’ Celtic Myths and Legends that has oft stuck to the insides of my head: Of the greatest of the gods, the victor of the battle on the Plain of Towers, Lugh Lamhfada, god of all knowledge, patron of all arts and crafts, his name is still known today. But as memory of the mighty warrior, the invincible god, has faded, he is known only as Lugh-chromain, little stooping Lugh of the sidhe, relegated to the role of a fairy craftsman. And, as even the language in which he was venerated has disappeared, all that is left of the supreme god of the Children of Danu is the distorted form of that name Lugh-chromain…leprechaun. Reading of the household Puck who old maids left milk out for, the distorted shoemaker elf, bread grinder, I was immediately reminded of that passage, as I am when reading of the jester of Oberon’s court. For some reason, I read behind that tale a darker, wilder, more anarchic spirit, a rebel in the courts of the fair folk, a figure of power and danger, a figure like the Orc that Blake would conjure up later, a patron of rebellion and freedom. A dark twin to the king, serving to protect the kingdom by opposing tyranny. A figure like Merlin, like Mannanan Mac Lir, even like Lleu Llaw Gyffes himself, the sure hand. I began to consider this shapeshifting trickster, known as Puca, Pwca, Bukkys in older mythologies and considered to have entered into the language from Norse settlements, from the word puki, and we suddenly return to shapeshifting tricksters like Odin himself, Wotan the Grey Man, and his stepson Loki the God of Mischief himself. Then it occurred to me that such a spirit, a hater of tyranny yet a confederate of kings (not so strange, really, considering the Celtic and Norse traditions of Kingship were much more along the lines of a first among equals than the later Feudal ideal) might well not go gentle into the good night and become a stunted, pallid version of himself so easily.
To a certain degree, I admit I see a kinship to the whole concept of seelie and unseelie fey, or sidhe, here, with our proto-Puck as a sort of Shadow Lord, a dark king in relation to the shining Oberon, only later to be stunted into the role of jester by a people who held a more rigid view of hierarchy. Similar to the way both Nuada and Lugh were king, it was possible for the people who the Robin Goodfellow spirit engendered among to see what the later tellers like Shakespeare could not understand, a division in the roles of Kingship itself. Whereas to a late-Medieval/early-Renaissance mind, the people aren’t especially important (until they rebel and teach you humility in the face of their outrage, teach you that even Kings reign at the sufferance of the people) it was well established to the ancients that while the King may in fact be the land, divinely wedded to it, and as such only king as long as in perfect health….but there needed to be a Champion of the Kingdom itself, someone who fought for the people as much as the crown. Sovereignty deriving from their will, not merely from a hereditary tie to the land. The voice of the people, their chosen one. This dichotomy was well preserved in various myths, only being compressed with the coming of a more unified idea of rulership (the legend of the brothers Aurelianus and Uther in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain may be a remnant of it) – the idea of a King who rules, and a Champion who leads. (Also, the Norse, who may well have contributed the word Puck to the language, had the tradition of the althing, which in turn entered into England as the Witan, the council of lords…somewhat similar to the Ordainers that Thomas of Lancaster attempted to place about King Edward’s neck, and we remember that Robert Hood was supposedly on the Lancastrian side.)
Now, if you’re our dark lord, our Unseelie King, our Cernunnos to rival Oberon for Titania’s hand and you don’t want to be destroyed or deformed by the coming of Hierarchical Christian England, what do you do? Granted, you can bend with the times, as Lugh did, and become the pooka…but perhaps you can hedge your bets a touch. Perhaps Lord Ragland and Margaret Murray weren’t entirely wrong when they saw in Robin Hood the hand of an old lord, a horned god…perhaps he was there in proxy. Think back to T.H. White’s knowing inclusion of Robin Wood, the Pan-figure, the wild laughing man of the witchcraft festivals. According to the accusations collected there were two full-scale covens active in the 1660’s in the Somerset area, one at Wincanton and the other at Brewham. Both were presided over by the Devil, answering to the name of Robin, who was described by his minions as a deep-voiced and handsome, though little, man in black according to my copy of Cassel’s Dictionary of Witchcraft. Perhaps black leather, worn close to his skin? I wonder if the demon that sired Merlin was perhaps a demon of the night who loved to lead mortals astray?
Imagine the horned god, not wanting to go quietly into that good night, seeking paths out of the doom foresaw for all the Children of Danu, seelie and unseelie alike, by the goddess Domnu whose children they displaced. Even your children are not immortal, my sister. The time will come when they will be defeated. The time will come when no one will want gods and goddesses to nurture them, when they will be driven down into darkness, like my children have been this day. So what do you do, when you see the doom coming, and you know that your legends will all be forgotten? Simple enough. You create new ones.
After all, you’re a shapeshifter. You wear new faces all the time. And you are a spirit of lust, of the drives of the flesh, of the will of the common men and women who dwell on the land…so pop in from time to time, seduce a few, sire a line of visionaries and rebels to dwell in the green and pleasant land, starting perhaps with a mystic who attached himself to the struggling court of a young warrior called Riothamus who we may or may not know today as Arthur…and time and again, when the land needs a sacred rebel, out of your half-human bloodline springs a man hooded in green, who melts into the forests, who takes up arrow and sword against tyranny and reminds Kings to rule mindful of their people, or risk ruling no longer. Did Robert Hood leave the court of Edward II when he realized the King could not be turned to the will of his own subjects, abandoning him to his demise? Did Edward III allow the outlaw to dwell as a king in the royal woods because he’d learned from his father’s mistakes? Is it possible that Fitz Ooth existed, that before him Holt’s William Robehod (shades of Arianhod, mother of Lleu himself…a family name?) and even Robert Hode, Hobbehod himself, both felt the stirring of the fiery blood of the god of rebellion, of mischief, the head of the loyal opposition of the Sidhe courts? (Interestingly enough, Fitz Ooth puts me in mind of John Dee and his Enochian, especially the great elemental kings like Ohooohaatan for some reason…perhaps Robert fitz Ooth knew himself to be the bastard son of the king of fire, the lord of Beltane itself?) It’s interesting to consider that the first mention of Robin Hood takes place a mere four years before the Peasant Rebellion of 1381, and also interesting to note that Richard Rutherford-Moore claims that Robin Hood’s bones were removed from their grave in the mid 18th century, and the Luddite movement began picking up strength right around that time…perhaps Robin Goodfellow having some fun at Nuada/Nudd/Ludd’s expense, Cernunnos thumbing his nose at the bright king, or even just reminding him of his responsibilities to the people? The fact that Blake and the American Revolution both come after this exhumation are also interesting little notes…did the sudden mania for freedom burst its way out of the tomb and into the hearts of men again, flaming old bloodlines into full fire?
In other words, were they all right? Is it possible that all proposed Robin Hoods were, at one time or another, indeed Robin Hood? And have there been more? When Edward the Confessor outlawed Earl Godwin and his son Swein, did Godwin’s son Harold find in himself the power of Hood, and seize the crown upon Edward’s death, only to find that as King the rebellious spirit no longer answered him? Was there a Hood indeed who opposed Prince John and befriended King Richard, and was he on the battlefield when the Magna Carta was first forced upon John Lackland? Was Sir Thomas More infected with the spirit of Hood when he refused to bend his spirit to a King’s demands and died? Was it Hood who whispered in Guy Fawkes’ ear, and also showed the servants of the king where the danger was, sacrificing his own pawn to teach a lesson to those in power? Did Hood stalk the corridors of power and strike King George II mad in order to aid a ragtag band of forest rebels in their conflict? Did the Hood drive Thomas Paine to his flights of rhetoric and inspire Blake and Byron to their poetry? Did dark Robin walk the streets of Paris during the terror and see the revolutions of 1848, and wonder where his opposite half was to do battle with him? Does the outlaw of the gods walk among us still?
I can imagine a legion of Robin Hoods, each one driven to resist oppression and oppose tyranny, and keep the name of the Horned God alive in some fashion, to prevent him from ever being wholly tamed as poor Lugh-chromain was. To always keep alive the dangerous, wild, rebellious streak in the human soul, that allows common men to challenge kings and lords and remind them that no matter their oppressions, they rule wholly at the sufferance of the people, and the people can and will remove them from rule. I can even imagine…indeed, I may well have to imagine…that there waits for us another Robin of the Woods, a Hooded Man to show us the way past tyranny and into freedom again. He’s late, but one longs to see him, to see that crooked yet handsome smile, and to hear the rustling of the woods as he passes.
The Outlaw
It’s relatively common around here to make references to King Arthur, because I’m one of those people who is so utterly in love with the Arthur legend that all a book has to do is whisper the name and I buy it. I’m so besotted with Arthurian tales that I actually considered going to see the Sean Connery movie First Knight and was only snapped out of that by the fact that it was mostly going to involve Lancelot, who I hate and who was a late addition to the legend. Anyway, so often do I dive into the Arthurian well that it has but recently occurred to me that I’ve been giving another English tradition some serious short-shrift.
The archer of the wood himself, Robin Hood.
According to legend, transmitted partially through the ballads, Robin Hood was the leader of an outlaw band that included Little John, Will Scarlett, and Much the miller’s son. They robbed passerby from the shelter of Barnesdale or Sherwood forests, and Robin Hood was renowned for his skill at archery. No firm evidence of his real existence has ever been confirmed despite unremitting efforts to find historical proof linking him to a particular era. The earliest references to Robin Hood occurs in a scribal interpolation in the legal records of the thirteenth century, but it is not until the fourteenth that references to Robin Hood become plentiful.
Lindahl, McNamara and Lindow, Medieval Folklore
So by about 1440 many of the familiar elements of the Robin Hood legend were already in place. King Richard the Lionheart and his troublesome brother Prince John, stock-in-trade characters of the film versions, are conspicuously missing. So are Maid Marion and Friar Tuck, who do not appear in the tale of Robin Hood until later. They are therefore generally regarded as additions to the basic story, and can probably be discounted when searching the historical record for the real Robin Hood.
James and Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries
Without quibbling overmuch as to how ancient something that took place after 1000 AD actually is (I prefer my ancient to be at least before 500 AD, and in truth am more comfortable if it’s before AD entirely) I will say that Robin Hood has had to put up with almost as many efforts to prove his historical validity as poor Arthur has, and it’s just as misguided in his case. However, I suppose completeness requires us to list a few of the candidates that various researchers have put forth as the ‘real’ Robin Hood. First off we have William Stuckley’s attempt to find Robin, which took place inbetween his investigations of Stonehenge (he believed the Druids were behind it) and his candidate for Robin was Robert fitz Ooth, earl of Huntingdon. Now, this goes against the whole original tradition of Robin as a yeoman, a man of the people, but Stuckley decided on the earl and would have none other, even if he had to ‘concoct a marriage between Gilbert de Gant and Rohaise, daughter of Richard Fitz-Gilbert, both great lords of the Norman settlement, which only occurred later between their descendants’ and also ‘made the fitz Ooths lords of Kime in Lincolnshire. This too was fictitious; the pedigree of the lords of Kime is well established and leaves no room for such intrusion. “Fitz Ooth” itself seems redolent of antiquity. It is a strange name, otherwise unknown” according to Sir James Holt. Of course, we know that ‘fitz’ means ‘bastard son of’, usually kings…the origin of the name Fitzroy, for instance, meaning ‘Bastard son of the king.’ We’ll come back to that.
One of the most important clues to Robin’s identity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Historic Documents Commission was cataloguing thousands of documents which represented eight centuries of British history. It was in 1852 that the antiquary Joseph Hunter claimed that he had stumbled upon a man who sounded as if he might be the original Robin Hood. His name in fact was Robert, and he was the son of Adam Hood, a forester in the service of the Earl de Warenne. (Robin was simply a diminutive of Robert – not, in those days, a name in its own right.) He was born about 1280, and on 25 January 1316 Robert Hood and his wife Matilda paid two shillings for permission to take a piece of the earl’s waste ground in ‘Bickhill’ (or Bitch-Hill) in Wakefield. It was merely the size of a kitchen garden – thirty feet long by sixteen feet wide. The rent for this was sixpence a year. The Manor Court Roll for 1357 shows a house ‘formerly the property of Robert Hode’ on the site – so by that time Robert Hood was presumably dead.
Colin and Damon Wilson, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved
Hot land renting action! Seriously, they do have a little more to go on than that. According to Hunter, the Barnesdale location of the earlier Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood was the more likely location for Robin than Sherwood, a bit to the south…and Hunter also noted that in the Geste the King of England was said to be Edward, not Richard. Well, that left a few possible candidates, namely Edward’s I through III. Hunter latched onto a description of Edward in the Geste as ‘Edward, our comely king’ and argued that it must have been Edward II. (Whether Edward the Longshanks or Edward III were offended at Hunter’s assumption that any good looking King named Edward couldn’t be them was kept at bay by the fact that both were long dead by the time Hunter came up with this theory.) Hunter then managed to link the Robert Hood who had served under the Earl de Warenne to a man he’d discovered in several documents of the King’s Exchequer itself, Now it will scarecely be believed, but it is nevertheless the plain and simple truth that in documents preserved in the Exchequer containing accounts of expenses in the King’s household we find the name of “Robyn Hode” not once but several times occuring. This ties in well with the end of the Lytell Geste wherein the King himself goes to Nottingham to deal with Robin, only to meet and make friends with the man, who enters the Kings service for a while before becoming bored and returning to outlawry. Supposedly the Geste and the historical documents connect up well, with Edward II having made a progress through Nottingham specifically to deal with poaching in the royal forests among other things, and having been in Nottingham by November of that year.
Hunter then went on to connect his Robert Hood with the rebellion of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, against King Edward II. Without dragging this out too much longer, he connects Robert Hood to the Earl de Warenne’s support for Edward’s wars against the Scots (he was fined for not participating in the war in 1314, but not in 1317) and that he may well have been part of the Earl of Lancaster’s army in 1322 that was defeated by Edward, thus leading to his outlawry. Eventually, since Edward was still battling against his own barons (Thomas of Lancaster had been behind the appointment of the Ordainers, after all, that council of Barons that had sought to control the King, and it had been Lancaster who killed Piers Gaveston in 1312) it fell upon him to forgive many of the outlaws created by Lancaster’s rebellion, and as such, Robert Hood may well have been one of them, explaining his entry into Edward’s service. Of course, Edward II had plenty of problems besides rebellious barons…his wife and her lover Roger de Mortimer were to eventually overthrow him, and some have argued that on account of his probable homosexuality Mortimer was to have the king executed by having a red-hot iron jammed into his anus…four years later, Edward III seized power from his mother and became King by right as well as name, and one of his first actions was to have Mortimer killed. If Robert Hood was the ‘Robyn Hood’ of the Royal Exchequer documents, then to a certain degree it makes sense that he may well have made friends with the then-young Edward III while serving as one of the King’s household, which would explain how the man was able to continue on in his outlawry for another 22 years after leaving the King’s service, since Edward III was notoriously capable, vicious and cruel and would be unlikely to allow anyone to poach from his royal forests…but a dashing rogue he met when a child, when his father was still alive, might have been winked at.
While it’s a really nice theory, and quite elegant, the problem it has is that there’s no real evidence to support it aside from a few documents in the exchequer. There’s no evidence that the Robert Hood of Wakefield was ever really considered an outlaw, no evidence that he was the ‘Robyn Hode’ of the exchequer documents, no evidence that the gentlemen mentioned in those documents was an outlaw at all…so in the end, we have a plausible sounding theory that does gibe with the Geste to some degree, and that’s basically it. It doesn’t help matters much that the Geste itself wasn’t so much a ballad as a collection of earlier ballads and tales, in effect an encyclopedia of the more popular Robin Hood stories of its time. Sir James Holt, for one, thinks that the Geste is not a particularly authoritative source for Robin Hood at all, but rather contains a few interpolations brought into the story later (much as Lancelot comes creeping into Arthurian stories like a thief in the night) although this does mean that Holt therefore has to ditch the ‘King Edward’ of the Geste because no King of England named Edward reigned before the ones mentioned…unless we count the Confessor, one supposes. (Hmm. We should muse more about that later.) Holt’s theory is that ‘Robin Hood’ wasn’t any one man at all, but rather a general nickname for an outlaw, much as Wolfshead was used in the Danelaw and other Norse territories. Holt traces this back to a ‘William son of Robert le Fevre’ who is mentioned in royal documents from about 1262 as ‘William Robehod, fugitive.’ Using this as a springboard, Holt goes all the way back to an outlaw from Yorkshire named Robert Hod, listed in documents from 1225 as a fugitive and who has been given a descriptive nickname, ‘Hobbehod’. If you know what that means, you’re doing better than myself or Holt for that matter.
Holt’s theory also has its problems: for one thing, by abandoning the Geste, you lose the most cohesive body of Robin legends out there, since the previous rhymes of Robin Hood mentioned by William Lackland in his Piers Plowman are long lost to us. However, Robin Hood was dated as far back as 1283 in the Chronicle of Scotland:
Then Little John and Robin Hood
As forest outlaws were well renowned,
In Inglewood and Barnsdale
All this time they plied their trade.
Granted, the Chronicle of Scotland was written in 1420 or so, and Walter Bower mentioned both Hood and Little John as having been extant in 1266, but he was writing even later than Andrew de Wyntoun. By the 1600’s Robin had been moved back to the 12th century, becoming a contemporary of Richard coeur de Leon and the later King John. It seems interesting that Robin Hood should have slid backwards in time from the time of Edward II all the way to his ancestor, Richard…it’s also interesting that the ‘Robert of Loxley’ interpretation of Robin which helped Graham Phillips associate Robin Hood with Sir Robert fitz Odo, Knight of Loxley, also dates from the 1600’s. (Robert fitz Odo, who may have lost his knighthood in the 1190’s, could also have been known as Robert Odo, which is close enough to Robert Hood for government work and batshit theorizing.)
So, where does this lead us? Well, so far, it leaves us with a whole pile of possible Robin Hoods from all over the place, from practically everywhere except Sherwood and varying in time from the 14th Century all the way back to the 12th. There’s no real evidence for any of them. Which is why I often prefer my legendary figures be allowed to remain legendary…really, what’s the appeal of a Robin Hood without a Marian? Whether you prefer the stronger Marian of Parke Godwin’s Sherwood or the excellent Robin of Sherwood series (which also worked in Herne the Hunter, an addition this lover of mythologizing applauds) it’s just not Robin without Marian. Although I am glad to see that Little John appears in just about every version of the story that exists as well. Ultimately, all this digging for the ‘real Robin’ misses the bloody wonder of the tale, the burning stories of a rebellious man unsatisfied with the world as he found it, who made battle with lords and princes on behalf of the common man. The reason he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor became such a truism of outlawry is because it resonated in a country that would see the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381, some sixty years after the events of Hunter’s theory. Robin Hood was a symbol of the untamed in opposition with order, especially a repressive order imposed from without, as Norman Feudalism had been imposed over the more complicated Saxon system of thanes and earls.
Of course, there are those (like Stephen Knight) who view the Robin Hood myth as a recurring reinvention of a real resistance to oppression on a local level. (I half expect someone to write a short story of a ‘Robin in the Hood’ any day now, taking this mythology into a more modern form in reaction to modern overreaching like the Patriot Act and racial profiling…but that’s for another time, I suppose) And that’s certainly an interesting approach to the idea of Robin Hood. There are also those who see Robin as an older tradition manifesting itself again…from the Robin of Sherwood take on the myth as a creation of ‘Herne the Hunter’ (himself a take on the Wild Hunt legends of Europe, as popped up time and again), to the arguments of Margaret Murray that Hood was a tranfigured form of the ‘old god’ of pagan Britain, to Sir Sidney Lee’s derivation of Hood itself from the germanic ‘Hodekin’, which supposedly meant elf in old Teutonic tales…and we’d no doubt be quite amiss if we allowed old Puck himself, Robin Goodfellow, from being mentioned here. (Interestingly, both Herne and Puck pop up in that great mythologizer Shakespeare’s work…and some people think he was a myth, too.) Those that take too much from tales of King Arthur (he states blandly, with his tongue jabbed firmly in his cheek) also are reminded that Hood pops up in T.H. White’s tale of King Arthur, The Sword in the Stone, as Robin Wood, and we all know that Arthur would have predated the previous candidates for Robin Hood by some 700 years. (Yes, alright, assuming he existed.) It’s even been argued that ‘Robin Wood’ was a psuedonym for a figure derived from the same sources as the Norse god Woden, which is interesting for the later Herne interpolation because both Herne and Woden are considered to be the leaders of the Wild Hunt, and Herne clearly derives from the earlier Celtic figure known to us as Cernunnos, the Horned God. (Woden/Wotan, as a germanic figure prefiguring Odin, ultimately comes from the same indo-european roots as Cernunnos himself) and both figures could be linked to the Wild Man traditions of Europe, specifically those that ultimately inspired such figures as Merlin of Wales. All of this is very fine, yes, but what does it ultimately tell us about our dear Robin?
Robin Goodfellow. In British folklore, a name for the hob-goblin Puck, who was noted for his mischievous tricks and his habit of misleading travelers. He was also able to change shape.
Puck. Half-human, half-fairy, Puck was a hobgoblin who, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, served as Jester and attendant to King Oberon. A mischevious character, Puck could change the appearance of familiar objects as well as his own shape, and would mislead mortals with his tricks.
Hobgoblin. A mischievous imp or goblin who produces fear and apprehension, especially in children.
Neville Drury, Dictionary of Mysticism and the Occult
Hobgoblin, Robin Goodfellow, or Puck: An English domestic fairy or brownie of nocturnal habits. He is of a happy disposition, and is believed to be one of the courtiers, probably the jester, at the court of Oberon. Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, says: – “Your grandames’ maids were wont to set a bowl of milk for him for his pains in grinding of malt and mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight. This white bread, and bread and milk, was his standard fee.” He is perhaps best known in Britian by his appellation of Puck, and his qualities and attributes are represented under this name in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” By some he is believed to be the demon who leads men astray during the night. Sometimes he is clothed in a suit of leather close to his body, and sometimes he wore green. He is usually represented as full of tricks and mischief.
Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia of Occultism
Now, were I a folklorist, I would merely call attention to the attributes of Robin Hood as revealed in the Geste…his many disguises, his habit of playing tricks on the powerful, his charity to the less fortunate, his close association with kings, even his name and his typical attire…as they seem to relate to our friend Robin Goodfellow here. There’s certainly enough there to make a case, but then, that would leave us with a merely mythical Robin Hood, and I’d hate to abandon all that work that Stuckley and Hunter and Holt and others have done for us to try and give us a historical Robin Hood. No, I’m certainly not the kind of fellow who would like to throw out the baby with the bathwater, here…just because it doesn’t matter if there was a real Robin Hood or not, it doesn’t follow that we can’t try and establish an insane theory that takes all these potential Robin Hoods into account. It’s what I do, after all. Besides, in looking at Puck himself, I’m reminded of a passage from Peter Berresford Ellis’ Celtic Myths and Legends that has oft stuck to the insides of my head: Of the greatest of the gods, the victor of the battle on the Plain of Towers, Lugh Lamhfada, god of all knowledge, patron of all arts and crafts, his name is still known today. But as memory of the mighty warrior, the invincible god, has faded, he is known only as Lugh-chromain, little stooping Lugh of the sidhe, relegated to the role of a fairy craftsman. And, as even the language in which he was venerated has disappeared, all that is left of the supreme god of the Children of Danu is the distorted form of that name Lugh-chromain…leprechaun. Reading of the household Puck who old maids left milk out for, the distorted shoemaker elf, bread grinder, I was immediately reminded of that passage, as I am when reading of the jester of Oberon’s court. For some reason, I read behind that tale a darker, wilder, more anarchic spirit, a rebel in the courts of the fair folk, a figure of power and danger, a figure like the Orc that Blake would conjure up later, a patron of rebellion and freedom. A dark twin to the king, serving to protect the kingdom by opposing tyranny. A figure like Merlin, like Mannanan Mac Lir, even like Lleu Llaw Gyffes himself, the sure hand. I began to consider this shapeshifting trickster, known as Puca, Pwca, Bukkys in older mythologies and considered to have entered into the language from Norse settlements, from the word puki, and we suddenly return to shapeshifting tricksters like Odin himself, Wotan the Grey Man, and his stepson Loki the God of Mischief himself. Then it occurred to me that such a spirit, a hater of tyranny yet a confederate of kings (not so strange, really, considering the Celtic and Norse traditions of Kingship were much more along the lines of a first among equals than the later Feudal ideal) might well not go gentle into the good night and become a stunted, pallid version of himself so easily.
To a certain degree, I admit I see a kinship to the whole concept of seelie and unseelie fey, or sidhe, here, with our proto-Puck as a sort of Shadow Lord, a dark king in relation to the shining Oberon, only later to be stunted into the role of jester by a people who held a more rigid view of hierarchy. Similar to the way both Nuada and Lugh were king, it was possible for the people who the Robin Goodfellow spirit engendered among to see what the later tellers like Shakespeare could not understand, a division in the roles of Kingship itself. Whereas to a late-Medieval/early-Renaissance mind, the people aren’t especially important (until they rebel and teach you humility in the face of their outrage, teach you that even Kings reign at the sufferance of the people) it was well established to the ancients that while the King may in fact be the land, divinely wedded to it, and as such only king as long as in perfect health….but there needed to be a Champion of the Kingdom itself, someone who fought for the people as much as the crown. Sovereignty deriving from their will, not merely from a hereditary tie to the land. The voice of the people, their chosen one. This dichotomy was well preserved in various myths, only being compressed with the coming of a more unified idea of rulership (the legend of the brothers Aurelianus and Uther in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain may be a remnant of it) – the idea of a King who rules, and a Champion who leads. (Also, the Norse, who may well have contributed the word Puck to the language, had the tradition of the althing, which in turn entered into England as the Witan, the council of lords…somewhat similar to the Ordainers that Thomas of Lancaster attempted to place about King Edward’s neck, and we remember that Robert Hood was supposedly on the Lancastrian side.)
Now, if you’re our dark lord, our Unseelie King, our Cernunnos to rival Oberon for Titania’s hand and you don’t want to be destroyed or deformed by the coming of Hierarchical Christian England, what do you do? Granted, you can bend with the times, as Lugh did, and become the pooka…but perhaps you can hedge your bets a touch. Perhaps Lord Ragland and Margaret Murray weren’t entirely wrong when they saw in Robin Hood the hand of an old lord, a horned god…perhaps he was there in proxy. Think back to T.H. White’s knowing inclusion of Robin Wood, the Pan-figure, the wild laughing man of the witchcraft festivals. According to the accusations collected there were two full-scale covens active in the 1660’s in the Somerset area, one at Wincanton and the other at Brewham. Both were presided over by the Devil, answering to the name of Robin, who was described by his minions as a deep-voiced and handsome, though little, man in black according to my copy of Cassel’s Dictionary of Witchcraft. Perhaps black leather, worn close to his skin? I wonder if the demon that sired Merlin was perhaps a demon of the night who loved to lead mortals astray?
Imagine the horned god, not wanting to go quietly into that good night, seeking paths out of the doom foresaw for all the Children of Danu, seelie and unseelie alike, by the goddess Domnu whose children they displaced. Even your children are not immortal, my sister. The time will come when they will be defeated. The time will come when no one will want gods and goddesses to nurture them, when they will be driven down into darkness, like my children have been this day. So what do you do, when you see the doom coming, and you know that your legends will all be forgotten? Simple enough. You create new ones.
After all, you’re a shapeshifter. You wear new faces all the time. And you are a spirit of lust, of the drives of the flesh, of the will of the common men and women who dwell on the land…so pop in from time to time, seduce a few, sire a line of visionaries and rebels to dwell in the green and pleasant land, starting perhaps with a mystic who attached himself to the struggling court of a young warrior called Riothamus who we may or may not know today as Arthur…and time and again, when the land needs a sacred rebel, out of your half-human bloodline springs a man hooded in green, who melts into the forests, who takes up arrow and sword against tyranny and reminds Kings to rule mindful of their people, or risk ruling no longer. Did Robert Hood leave the court of Edward II when he realized the King could not be turned to the will of his own subjects, abandoning him to his demise? Did Edward III allow the outlaw to dwell as a king in the royal woods because he’d learned from his father’s mistakes? Is it possible that Fitz Ooth existed, that before him Holt’s William Robehod (shades of Arianhod, mother of Lleu himself…a family name?) and even Robert Hode, Hobbehod himself, both felt the stirring of the fiery blood of the god of rebellion, of mischief, the head of the loyal opposition of the Sidhe courts? (Interestingly enough, Fitz Ooth puts me in mind of John Dee and his Enochian, especially the great elemental kings like Ohooohaatan for some reason…perhaps Robert fitz Ooth knew himself to be the bastard son of the king of fire, the lord of Beltane itself?) It’s interesting to consider that the first mention of Robin Hood takes place a mere four years before the Peasant Rebellion of 1381, and also interesting to note that Richard Rutherford-Moore claims that Robin Hood’s bones were removed from their grave in the mid 18th century, and the Luddite movement began picking up strength right around that time…perhaps Robin Goodfellow having some fun at Nuada/Nudd/Ludd’s expense, Cernunnos thumbing his nose at the bright king, or even just reminding him of his responsibilities to the people? The fact that Blake and the American Revolution both come after this exhumation are also interesting little notes…did the sudden mania for freedom burst its way out of the tomb and into the hearts of men again, flaming old bloodlines into full fire?
In other words, were they all right? Is it possible that all proposed Robin Hoods were, at one time or another, indeed Robin Hood? And have there been more? When Edward the Confessor outlawed Earl Godwin and his son Swein, did Godwin’s son Harold find in himself the power of Hood, and seize the crown upon Edward’s death, only to find that as King the rebellious spirit no longer answered him? Was there a Hood indeed who opposed Prince John and befriended King Richard, and was he on the battlefield when the Magna Carta was first forced upon John Lackland? Was Sir Thomas More infected with the spirit of Hood when he refused to bend his spirit to a King’s demands and died? Was it Hood who whispered in Guy Fawkes’ ear, and also showed the servants of the king where the danger was, sacrificing his own pawn to teach a lesson to those in power? Did Hood stalk the corridors of power and strike King George II mad in order to aid a ragtag band of forest rebels in their conflict? Did the Hood drive Thomas Paine to his flights of rhetoric and inspire Blake and Byron to their poetry? Did dark Robin walk the streets of Paris during the terror and see the revolutions of 1848, and wonder where his opposite half was to do battle with him? Does the outlaw of the gods walk among us still?
I can imagine a legion of Robin Hoods, each one driven to resist oppression and oppose tyranny, and keep the name of the Horned God alive in some fashion, to prevent him from ever being wholly tamed as poor Lugh-chromain was. To always keep alive the dangerous, wild, rebellious streak in the human soul, that allows common men to challenge kings and lords and remind them that no matter their oppressions, they rule wholly at the sufferance of the people, and the people can and will remove them from rule. I can even imagine…indeed, I may well have to imagine…that there waits for us another Robin of the Woods, a Hooded Man to show us the way past tyranny and into freedom again. He’s late, but one longs to see him, to see that crooked yet handsome smile, and to hear the rustling of the woods as he passes.
Unrelated
First off, I need to thank you all for really toning back the Christmas this year. I don’t know if it’s somberness over our continued presence overseas in Afghanistan, Iraq, and probably seven other countries the American people aren’t allowed to know about yet (although I’m sure we’ll be retroactively informed…between that and the attorney general of the United States, the one who is afraid of seeing a naked breast, the one who annoints himself with cooking oil, having to pay a fine because he cheated in a senate race against a man who died in a plane crash and yet still beat him in the election I’m feeling great about democracy lately, whoo boy, and the first one to explain that we don’t live in a democracy walks away with a mouthful of bloody chicklets for teeth) or the continuing economic collapse that no amount of Republican hand-wringing and fabulating can make go away…when apartments are going unrented for two years and stores are collapsing everywhere you go and people are trading in $75K jobs for $25K ones, we do indeed have a problem, Houston…but whatever the cause for the extreme lack of annoying holiday cheer this year, I’ll take it. Thanks for being too tired and listless to badger me into celebrating Christmas this year, everyone. It’s most appreciated. You’ve even managed not to be too annoying about the Lord of the Rings movies, which I also appreciate. (Nope, didn’t see TTT, not going to see ROTK either…just not feeling it, sorry) Now, if you could stop tarting up your houses with Christmas lights so that they look like a collection of Christina Aquilera videos, or rampaging sentai Parisian whores as I like to call it, we’d be golden.
Secondly, I’m still debating if I should take the next couple of weeks off here at OIN, let the batteries recharge, or try and write some long and possibly blasphemous screeds about the Hermetic nature of the holiday. So if you’ve got a preference, or if you’ve got a suggestion for something that you’d like to see worked into an entry (similar to the alphabet entry of a few years back, I suppose, which I shamefully borrowed from both Clark Ashton Smith and Harlan Ellison) than feel free to work that comment button.
Finally, I gotta work a pet peeve of mine here. I recently read here an argument that has in the past and will in the future hold absolutely no water for me. And so, because I got myself a webpage, I figured I’d address it (to my knowledge, he has no comment feature, or I’d probably just comment on it) here. I should point out that Carrington represents his case well, and you should go read his argument first, if only to see the context I’m working with.
Carrington writes: Agnosticism is the notion that one cannot have knowledge of the existence of a god. Note that being agnostic has nothing to do with belief. And I cry bullshit, because according to my dictionary, agnosticism is The belief that there can be no proof either that God exists or that God does not exist. So yes, Carrington, agnosticism is a belief. Also, I should point out that by your definition, atheism is rooted entirely in faith and is therefore nothing more than another religion. I quote again: Okay, where were we? Oh, right: if you have a belief in one or more gods then you are a theist. Conversely (and here’s the part that trips people up for some reason) if you are not a theist, then you are an atheist. That’s the only other choice. Atheism and theism are a binary, tautological pair and they cover the entire range of possibilities. There is no third choice. That means that theism and atheism are in fact two parts of a faith based tautology, if you accept the idea that they are in fact the only two possible responses. They are not, however, since it is possible in fact to believe that it is impossible to know. It is quite possible to answer Do you believe in God or gods with the statement I don’t know. One can in fact be in doubt even of one’s own belief, and even beyond that, one can believe that there is no objective way to answer even that question. One does not have to pick between two binary opposites simply because theists and atheists have. I am not an agnostic because I’m wishy-washy, or because I can’t make up my mind between two choices that are the only valid ones. I’m an agnostic because I don’t know if there is a God or gods. Furthermore, I’m an agnostic because I lack the faith to make such a decision in the lack of sufficient evidence to make a choice in the first place. I am an agnostic because I do not know, not because I’ve already made up my mind but don’t like a label. Again, according to my dictionary, agnosticism is the disbelief in any claims of ultimate knowledge whether that claim be that there is in fact any sort of prime mover or movers or that there isn’t. I agree with Carrington when he says These are not mutually exclusive terms, any more than being a theist and being French are mutually exclusive terms. You can be an agnostic theist, just as you can be an agnostic atheist but I disagree that you in fact must be either an atheist or a theist, and cannot simply be an agnostic. Quite simply, you do not get to define the terms of the debate here and exclude or partition as you choose.
Agnosticism is indeed a belief, a valid religious expression of faith or lack thereof, just as theism or atheism are. Doubt is in fact a valid answer to your original question of belief. In fact, the whole reason I and many others are in fact agnostics by definition is when we are asked whether or not we believe in a God or gods, we answer that we do not know, or that we doubt either position. Remember, if you put atheism in the terms of being merely a rejection of the belief in God or gods as has been done here (and not by me, I point out) it becomes merely an act of faith, and thus a religion. Agnosticism is not merely the idea that one cannot have knowledge of whether or not there is a divine existence, although it contains that…it is also the belief that either claim is in fact unproven, unprovable, forever unanswerable and thus not worth making. It is doubt as a religious statement, and thus is in fact a third option in this instance.
Just something that was bugging me. Anyway, happy holidays if you celebrate them, happy fairly close to the solstice day if you don’t, and see you anon, I hope.
Light that came from beside the sea
Now, I know if I say Palenque, at least a few of you are going to groan and think I’m dragging in Erich Von Daniken. A few more of you are going to realize that it’s far more likely that I’m going to use Jacques Vallee’s far superior Passport to Magonia instead (and really, not only is Von Daniken’s work almost entirely garbage, but the few tidbits in it that are worth anything are seemingly cribbed from superior works like Vallee’s…if it were up to me, Von Daniken would be paying Vallee royalties) and beyond that, I’d hope a few of you would realize that I’m probably not going to retread the old alien astronaut path others have travelled so well before me.
Still, Palenque is a fascinating subject.
The team was investigating the impressive Palenque monuments, located in the state of Chiapas, on the site of a well-known Mayan city that scientists were busy restoring and mapping in systematic fashion. Yucatan is a region of constant humidity and high temperature, and the tropical vegetation had caused considerable damage to the temples and pyramids erected by the Mayas, whose civilization was marked by the genius of its architects and is thought to have declined in the first centuries of our era, disappearing almost completely about the ninth century – that is, at the time of the Charlemagne Empire in Europe.
Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia
The roots of Mayan civilization may lie in the prior civilization of the Olmecs, which was flowering on the Gulf costal plain of Veracruz and Tabasco by about 1200 BC. A more immediate antecedent is the Izapan culture, which ran along the western and southern edges of the Mayan world and reached inside that world at the highland site of Kaminaljuyu, on the west side of what is now Quatemala City. Beginning in the first century BC, Izapan stone monuments display an iconography and writing system similar to the ones that emerge later in the sites archaeologists designate as properly Mayan. This emergence took place during the period they call the Early Classic (AD 300-600) and it was centered in the lowland rain forest that separates the mountain pine forest of Chiapas and Guatemala from the low and thorny scrub forest of northern Yucatan.
Dennis Tedlock, Introduction to the Popul Vuh
To be honest, the Palenque ruins are interesting for far more than one sarcophagus lid that looks funny. They’re very impressive remains of high Maya culture. They prove that when Europe was having a hard time building huts out of thatch, the Americas had a civilization that could work in stone to amazing effect. The squabbling barbarians who destroyed the western Roman Empire couldn’t match the Maya…Rome itself would have been hard pressed to create more elaborate architectural displays. (And it wasn’t the Maya alone building such fantastic structures…Macchu Piccu dates to about 800 AD) Deriving from societies like the Olmec, which dated back to 800 BC at the most conservative estimate (1200 is more likely) the Maya achieved a sophisticated society with detailed knowledge of the stars and how they could be used to mark time as well as their already admitted architectural gifts. And Palenque is a great example of these abilities manifested in tangible form. The Pyramid of the Inscriptions in Palenque is where the tomb of Pacal exists, and where the aforementioned sarcophagus lid can be found. Pacal supposedly died in 683 AD, and became something of a semi-mythological figure…according to Kay Almere Read and Jason J. Gonzalez’s Mesoamerican Mythology, Pacal was ‘an important ancestor with close connections to the cosmos. Lord Pacal’s sarcophagus lid portrays him beginning his journey through the afterlife, entering the underworld Xibalba like a setting sun.’ It’s an established fact that Pacal was remembered as much for his long rulership and his program of monumental construction…in his way, he was a Mayan Ramses II, erecting structures all over Palenque. (It might be better to compare him to Gilgamesh, who was more identifiable with a city.)
However, I won’t bullshit around here. The sarcophagus lid does look a lot like Pacal’s reclining in some sort of capsule. It’s even more notable if you turn the thing on its side…it almost looks like Pacal’s riding on some sort of rocket sled. That doesn’t mean that Pacal took off in a spaceship or anything, and I’m not saying that he did, I’m merely pointing out that the idea that he’s descending into Xibalba like the setting sun in that image is no more plausible than the idea that he’s ascending somewhere. You could read it either way. It has been pointed out as well that Pacal, or whoever was found in that sarcophagus, was one hell of a specimen for the time period: at six feet tall he was close to eight inches taller than the average Mayan then or now. That makes him a rival for the Carolingian kings in size, and one wonders what kind of conversations these near contemporaries could have had. If nothing else, they might have had some interesting talks about where to buy clothes.
Not only was Pacal of heroic stature, his supposed descent into Xibalba (if that’s what the sarcophagus lid depicts) mirrors the descent or the Hero Twins (who were, in their turn, sons of 1-Hunter who also descended into the lands of the dead alongside his brother, 7-Hunter) into Xibalba to play ball with the lords of the dead. Once there, they passed various tests (smoking a cigar all night without burning it via lighting it with a firefly, offering the blades that dwell in the Razor House animal meat to devour so as to not become food for them, sealing the drafts of the Cold House, tossing bones to the Jaguars of Jaguar House, enduring the heat of the Fire House, and restoring Hunahpu’s head after he lost it in the Bat House and was forced to use a pumpkin for a head)…of course, Pacal was not considered to have sacrificed himself only to return from the dead and trap the lords 1-Death and 7-Death in a magical dance. And also, Pacal was not considered to have ascended into heaven as either the sun or the moon…say, wait a minute. Interesting that the supposed ‘descent’ of the Hero Twins into Xibalba ends with them ascending into heaven, now isn’t it? If this reminds you of the cult of Orpheus in Greece, or of Osiris in Egypt…well, of course, the idea of a divinity who descends into the otherworld, has great magical powers and who dies and is reborn is hardly unique to Mayan and other Mesoamerican mythologies…nor is the cross unique to Central and South America, either.
As in the oldest temples and catacombs of Egypt, so this type likewise abounds in the ruined cities of Mexico and Central America, graven as well upon the most ancient cyclopean and polygonal walls as upon the more modern and perfect examples of masonry; and is displayed in an equally conspicuous manner upon the breasts of innumerable bronze statuettes which have been recently disinterred from the cemetery of Juigalpa (of unknown antiquity) in Nicaragua.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis – The Antediluvian World
The late Dr. Augustus le Plongeon and his wife spent many years in trying to prove that a certain Queen Moo of Yucatan founded a colony in Egypt; but as they professed to be able to read heiroglyphs that no one else could decipher, and many of which were not heiroglyphs at all but ornamental designs, and as they placed side by side and compared with the Egyptian alphabet a “Mayan” alphabet which certainly never originated anywhere but in their own ingenuity, we cannot have much faith in their conclusions.
Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia of Occultism
Yeah, Moo was probably as fictional as Ah Pook the Destroyer. Nevertheless, Spence spent much of his life trying to prove that Atlantis was real and existed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (even if he did dismiss a lot of Donnelly’s similar conclusions as being insufficiently rigorous) and so he had a bit of an axe to grin on the subject of Central and South American civilization and its possible contact with Europe and Africa. Most people who approach the issue take either the Donnelly/Spence tack that there was once an Atlantean civilization that contacted and possibly even was the progenitor for both American and Eurasian/African cultures, or that explorers from Europe or Africa (sometimes relatively latecoming explorers, like the Phoenician mariners written about in Herodotus who circumvented Africa for the Pharoah of Egypt, or the Irish Monks of St. Brendan’s time, or the Vikings of Leif Erikson’s) made contact with America. Similarly, there are those who argue that Chinese fleets reached America and that America was a mythical land to the east spoken of in Chinese reports of the time. Some argue for Sanskrit writings in ancient sites that may have meant that mariners from India were visiting the Americas before Columbus came west in search of India. And of course, there are always though who take the Graham Hancock position (similar to that in Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings) that the myth of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan is a legacy from an older civilization that once girdled the world. However, none of them ever seem willing to take up Plongeon’s idea that civilization in fact developed in Central America before spilling out onto the world, and this seems to me to be a shame.
Well, except for T.E.D. Klein in Children of the Kingdom, I suppose. But that was supposedly as fictional as Ah Pook and Queen Moo, more’s the pity. However, being as how I have no thesis to prove and am liberated from the twin curses of plausibility and probability, what say we take a look at what couldn’t possibly be the case? For starters, I’m going to reject the alien half of the alien astronaut theory right out of the gate. Why should the peoples of ancient America be assumed to need alien help to have developed their culture any more than, say, the people of ancient Europe? But it does occur to me, looking upon the Palenque sarcophagus lid, that Pacal does appear to be seated in a vessel of some sort, a sweeping, growing thing built like a throne, built like a cross…but if there was any such technology in ancient America, wouldn’t we have found evidence of it?
Not if they grew it.
And here is the beginning of the conception of humans, and of the search for the ingredients of the human body. So they spoke, the Bearer, Begetter, the Makers, Modelers named Sovereign Plumed Serpent: “The dawn has approached, preparations have been made, and morning has come for the provider, nurturer, born in the light, begotten in the light. Morning has come for humankind, for the people of the face of the earth,” they said. It all came together as they went on thinking in the darkness, in the night, as they searched and they sifted, they thought and they wondered. And here their thoughts came out in clear light. They sought and discovered what was needed for human flesh. It was only a short while before the sun, moon and stars were to appear above the Makers and Modelers. Split Place, Bitter Water Place is the name: the yellow corn, white corn came from there…and these were the ingredients for the flesh of the human work, the human design, and the water was for the blood. It became human blood, and corn was also used by the Bearer, Begetter.
Dennis Tedlock, trans., Popol Vuh
Biotechnology. The mastery of flesh from synthetics created from plant matter. Agriculture yoked with genetics, the production of perfectly disposable, perfectly self-renewing technology. When something breaks down, you use it for compost for the new batch of devices growing in one of the swamps they cleared. For that matter, it brings to mind the theory of Terence McKenna that mushrooms growing in cow dung helped accelerate human mental evolution…those of us who’ve read Burroughs know of his trips south seeking yage and of McKenna’s own experiences among the ayahuasqueros of South America. (An interesting aside to McKenna’s theory: it was recently reported that researchers in Italy have found evidence that cocaine and ecstasy affect DNA, causing mutations. Now, if this holds true for mushrooms and yage, well…) Did the ancient pre-Olmec peoples of the Yucatan use powerful drugs synthesized from the various plants they cultivated and perhaps even created to alter their consciousness, perhaps even their own genetic codes? Did they consider man to have been created from plants because they used plants to help develop their brains, to become more human? Did they grow their cities while developing their mental abilities, perhaps even entering into a psychic symbiosis with their plant creations…consider the image of the Palenque sarcophagus. Was Pacal reclining in tendrils of animate symbiotic plants that allowed him to range his mind, his very being out into Xibalba, the world beyond this one?
One of the reasons that the spiritual world impinges upon us is that it knows something that most of us don’t. It knows that each of us was originally a resident of a spiritual world. Eons ago, for some reason that few people know, we left the spiritual world to incarnate our ‘spirit’ into physical bodies in a physical world dominated by pleasure and pain. Some occultists think this represents the ‘fall’ of the angels, but I think not. ‘New Agers’ feel that we are to develop ourselves sufficiently that we can free ourselves from the physical trap we have been caught in.
Gregory L. Little, People of the Web
That supposedly ‘new age’ idea is as old as Manicheanism and Orphism, but we’ll forgive Greg for that. For now, let’s just consider the possibility that what Pacal knew, his cosmic connection was that he realized that this world is Xibalba. This is the underworld that we live in, this is the realm fallen from heaven into. The spirit descended into bodies of matter, lived its life amidst pleasure and pain and learned the secrets of the Sovereign Plumed Serpents, the power of the plant over the flesh, the chemicals that could grant the mind ascension again, allow it to escape what Little calls the physical trap. From inside his organic cage, his own private tree of knowledge, Pakal ascended into the cosmos and became a god to the people of Palenque, much as Kukulcan had earlier. Is it possible that Pakal himself was Kukulcan? Looking upon the Palenque sarcophagus lid, we see two angry faces hanging from the top of the tree-like structure, each to the side of the strange plumed head at the top of it. Are they Hunahpu and Xbalanque, having cheated death and risen into the stars, showing Pakal how to seize the secrets of the Sovereign Plumed Serpents that created man out of the plants?
With the ability to free the mind of the body…call it apotheosis, astral projection, ascending the tree of life from Malkuth to Kether again, walking Yggdrasil and learning the secrets of the runes while seeing the nine worlds, or even defeating the lords of the underworld and reassembling the father as first to be worshipped…perhaps the people of Mesoamerica didn’t need to go anywhere to influence the developing cultures of the rest of the world. Maybe they didn’t need to build anything. With powers over life and death, over the growth and development of crops and other plants, perhaps even to awaken the hidden powers of the mind itself, they could well have been Shamans, and theirs a Shamanic empire.
She must have grown into this role, I thought as I drank. It was warm and salty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old, old thing…When I regained consciousness I appeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave of brightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high. Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realized that my wave was speeding toward a rocky coastline. Everything disappeared in the roaring chaos of informational wave meeting virtual land. More lost time and then an impression of being a shipwrecked sailor washed onto a tropical shore. I feel that I am pressing my face into the hot sand of a tropical beach. I feel lucky to be alive. I am lucky to be alive? Or is it that I am alive to be lucky? I break up laughing. At this point the old woman begins to sing. Hers is no ordinary song, but an icaro, a magical curing song that in our intoxicated and ecstatic state seems more like a tropical reef fish or an animated silk scarf of many colors than a vocal performance. The song is a visible manifestation of power, enfolding us and making us secure.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods
the Maker, Modeler,
named Bearer, Begetter,
Hunahpu Possum, Hunahpu Coyote,
Great White Peccary, Coati,
Sovereign Plumed Serpent,
Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea,
plate shaper, bowl shaper, as they are called,
also named, also described as
the midwife, matchmaker
named Xpiyacoc, Xmucane,
twice a midwife, twice a matchmaker
Dennis Tedlock, trans., Popol Vuh
Imagine the mounds of Cahokia, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Ziggarauts of Sumeria, the monumental architecture of Chavin de Hunantar and Mycenae and the Minoans, all inspired by astral astronauts voyaging out from the feverishly living jungles of southern America and attempting to explain the path to and from infinity, creating solar cults wherever they went, pyramids and temples raised high to the sun. The myths of heroes who descend and return from the land of the dead, dying and reborn gods of vegetation…Adonis, Dionysos, Balder, even Christ himself a transformed, carried forward reinterpretation of the lore of the ancient pre-Olmec societies that lived in ancient America, and made of agriculture a religion and a science. Perhaps they themselves were the original Atlanteans or perhaps the Atlantis myth was created to attempt to explain why the visitors stopped visiting. One imagines Nazca as an attempt to call them back, perhaps, to gain the attention of Kukulcan and the Hero Twins, who had abandoned this fleshly existence to perhaps settle in the stars above us, to colonize the Pleiades and Sirius and the other stars that were so sacred a mystery to the Quiche and other Maya peoples. Indeed, once free of their bodies and in the firmament of heaven, it’s possible to imagine that time and space themselves had no meaning to these travelers…perhaps they even reached back to the beginning, and descended again to start the cycle of creation over, as they had before? The Feathered Serpent who came from the East may well have been the Sovereign Plumed Serpent who started all of creation in the first place…the keeper of the reincarnation house mat may well have started as Pakal, and moved further and further back, becoming the father of Hunaphu and Xbalanque, then further back to Kukulcan, and further back to Sovereign Plumed Serpent himself…and also sideways through time and space to the rest of the world, to be the serpent who bears knowledge from a tree. Perhaps Pakal bore his culture back to the very Izapan who inspired it in the first place. Perhaps he walked the Yucatan of the future and saw the city he built covered in vines, and thought it fitting that plants should destroy what plants helped create. Perhaps he imparted his stolen knowledge of the agricultural transformative to the very tribes he learned it from, walking the jungles of the Yucatan before his birth as a shade, a mind detached from the body by the power of his biological computer, his plant-based throne, his chemically enhanced brain.
Perhaps, too, their expertise with the very stuff of growth, of biological matter, is remembered dimly in the stories of gods whose flesh changes shape at their whim, who can be the bull or the wolf or the bird, a long-distant memory of their gift with the shaping and growing of their technology. Or perhaps they actually learned to treat their own flesh as a canvas, as an object…would those who viewed their minds as caged in flesh hesitate to change their cages to suit them, or to create images that they were whatever they chose? After all, shapeshifter legends extend from the Jaguar-idols of ancient America to the wolf-shifting Neurians of Herodotus to the tiger-men of Indonesia to the fox-spirit Kitsune of Japan.
Perhaps he sacrificed himself and was reborn, as the Hero Twins did, as Dionysos burst forth from his father’s thigh, as Taliesin found himself a bubble in beer, as Odin hung from the tree for nine days and saw the nine worlds, as Osiris rose green like fertile soil after a flood. Perhaps it was in the Americas that these ideas took hold, and were spread by the sheer power of the chemically augmented brain. Perhaps there were in fact ancient astronauts in Palenque…astronauts who needed no ships, who could reach the stars themselves, who could even slip loose from time and travel back to their own beginnings and discover themselves waiting for them. The primordial ones. The Elohim, the Ennead of Heliopolis, the Anunaki, the council of Atlantean kings…the Maker, Modeler named Bearer, Begetter, Hunahpu Possum, Hunaphu Coyote, Great White Peccary, Coati, Sovereign Plumed Serpent.
Perhaps, too, they watch us still, or more accurately, they watch us throughout our history at once, for time is nothing to them. After all, South America is a hotspot of UFO activity…perhaps the lights in the sky are the star-travellers returned from their long sojurns in the night, to see what we’ve become, what we’ve done with the green, pleasant world they left us so long ago. Perhaps they aren’t very pleased, or perhaps all things are the same to them who know the beginning and the end of the story, who see the whole wheel of time clicking through the ages of man, and know we have to be what we are if we are to become what we will. I suppose, if McKenna was right, we’ll find out in 2012…one can only hope that Ah Pook is fictional, and not an example of Burroughs’ gaining true enlightenment from the ayacusha…then again, who is to say that old Bill didn’t manage to free himself from this cage of fleshly existence and take his place next to Pakal amidst the starry sky? Ah Pook may have had the last laugh after all.
The orderly progression of chaos
Was just in the shower when I began thinking about magic, probability and improbability. It started out simply enough, musing on an idea I’ve had before about a magical typewriter that would allow anyone who used it to write the absolute best story or novel or what have you by adjusting their probabilities so that they made all the perfect word and sentence choices. Think of it as a Monkey-Shakespeare-1000E Superselectric. Anyway, I got to thinking about how such a machine would function…how does it adjust probability? Is probability something that can just be tinkered with endlessly, or is there a limited amount of it to adjust and if you raise some probabilities in one place do you lower them in another? I began speculating on probability as a kind of energy, falling back on morphic field theory for the shape of it. Inspired also by old comic books (particularly the X-Men and Avengers character the Scarlet Witch) I considered that it might make sense that probability flows from the Implicate Order into the Explicate Universe based on exactly how strongly connected various idealized concepts and forces are in their Implicate forms. In an incredibly simplified way of looking at it, the fact that coins usually come up either heads or tails is a result of their shape, of the gravity and airflow around them, the surfaces they come in contact with, how they are tossed…and all of these things are in some way associated with the coin in its original, pre-introjection form in the Implicate Order, that non-space non-time where all things are one. All the variables exist there, and are associated with each other. So if you could affect how the Implicate introjects into the Explicate, you could control how things unfold, since time and space only exist here and not there. (Since we know that events in the Explicate are thought to feed back into the Implicate, creating new associations, this could be possible.) In essence, you could control probability by changing the parameters inside the Implicate before introjection manifests them. The more improbable a result you wanted (for instance, if someone who is barely literate wants to write an epic novel of sweep and power) the more feedback back into the Implicate you would need…in effect, the more change you want, the more power it costs.
So it might be said that magic could be the ability to learn exactly how the Implicate-Explicate introjection process works, and how best to alter it through tailored effects rather than trying to overpower it through brute force. Instead of just trying to create the most improbable effect in one go, a series of smaller improbabilities are created that chain their way to the result you want. You just happen to meet the daughter of a famous author. She just happens to take you home for Christmas. Her mother just happens to think she sees potential in your work and decides to help you develop it, and she just happens to show it to her agent, who agrees with her. Together, they just happen to help you shape your work, get it sold, and bang you’re on the NYT best seller list.
Thinking about this, I then began to consider the normal state of Implicate-Explicate introjection as a sheet of malleable plastic. Ordinarily, the associations flow from the Implicate Order in their randomly organized form. In essence, things happen as they are accustomed to happen, to use the morphic ‘habitual’ theory. Everything that exists around us, the entire universe as it can be perceived, exists by means of the Implicate Order introjecting, or unfolding, into the Explicate Universe, moving from timeless spacelessness into constantly expanding space and time. By this process, the universe ‘learns’ how it will come into being by coming into being, moment by moment, and developing the associations between concepts that feed back, or introject back if you will, into the Implicate Order from the Explicate Universe. The cosmos becomes what the cosmos learns to become. The universe seeks a general state of random action based on chaotic forces in conflict with each other, with turbulence underneath the dynamic systems falling out into what we perceive as ‘life’. Now, what happens when you began tinkering with the introjection, creating improbabilities that force a specific order upon a desired outcome? In effect, by tinkering with probability, you prevent randomization from happening. The more improbable an event you create, the less probability can be counted on at all, since the general randomization that allows us to say ‘this is probable’ and ‘that is improbable’ is now gone. The improbable is not only happening, it is imposed, and as a result becomes not only probably but in fact the only possible outcome. There is no random chance in this case. Now, imagining the probability field of the universe as a malleable plastic sheet, the improbable occurance is like grasping hold of the sheet and pulling on it, deforming it and creating tension along the rest of its surface. As a result, to compensate for the entire lack of probability in the imposed order of the desired event, all around the aspiring ‘magus’ we must see as a consequence a counterbalancing chaotic surge as randomization is distributed throughout the sheet by this tension.
I then imagined the end of the imposition of order. What happens when the mage has what he wanted? He lets go of the sheet. If it has not been pulled on too hard for too long, it snaps back to its original shape, causing a brief ripple effect as the ‘elasticity’ of probability causes chaos to redistribute itself. In effect, the Implicate Order’s normal flow of introjection is restored and the usual chain of associations…physics…is restored. There may be some unusual peaks and valleys for a brief while as reality reasserts itself. However, if the mage has pulled for long enough or hard enough, she may well distort the sheet, creating places where the Implicate does not, cannot properly introject itself into reality as is normal. Its associations are altered permanently in that region, perhaps a moving region around the mage, or perhaps a specific locale where a great act of will took place. Hermeticism would probably view this as a case of a specific magician having taken on so much identitfication with specific entities or effects that they can no longer disassociate themselves…much as the Comte de Saint Germain later appeared following his death in places such as Mount Shasta, having become an archetype of his own. Similarly, places like the fabled (and admittedly mostly overblown) Bermuda Triangle could be seen as regions of bent introjection, where reality’s usual dynamic flow has been permanently distorted and nothing works right…or, rather, the right way of things seems wrong to those of us habituated to a different one.
There is, of course, another possibility. If your aspiring mage pulls too hard and too long on the plastic sheet, well…if the sheet is simply too durable for the mage to deform it (due to an insufficient strength or lack of proper leverage) then she will lose that grip and at best fall on her ass, at worse go flying and perhaps even injure the hand that pulled too hard. However, if there is present sufficient force and a specific place to apply it, a hole could be torn in the process of introjection itself, separating the flow of reality from Implicate to Explicate from the guidelines of association within the Implicate provides. In essence, anything would be possible since there would be no probability at all to guide introjection. The path from Adam Kadmon to Assiyah, for those of a Qabbalistic frame of mind, would have been widened and the greater world would be pouring through the hole into the lesser one, distorting the relationship between the light of revelation and the vessels. This could result in any number of effects. If tied to a location, you could have the classic haunted house/poltergeist effect, as the subconscious expectations of everyone inside were manifested by the out of control unfolding of reality with no predetermined order. If tied to a person…well, imagine if anything you could conceive of was happening around you, perhaps even everything you even errantly conceived of. Either life would spiral into a pure chaotic mess, or you’d be forced to develop a titanic self-discipline to compensate, constantly willing the world around you to work the way it does for most people. That’s not even to mention the possibility of the tear getting larger, unless someone went and sealed it up. And how does one seal up a hole in the probable? I suppose you could well wish it closed, if you could get your wish to be heard over all the others.
It even occurs to me that this might be how apotheosis works. You start out with a man or a woman who consciously or unconsciously seeks to impose their will on the world around them, working to constantly create the improbable. Perhaps he or she becomes a hero in the classical greek sense, one who routines does the improbable…rubbing the sheet a little thinner with each legendary feat, as the sheer weight of improbability of killing the Nemean Lion, cleaning the Augean stables, capturing Cerberus becomes just too much and eventually a hole opens up around said legendary figure, and he or she becomes a god.
The cosmos becomes what the cosmos teaches itself to become, and we are parts of that learning process. In this conception, it is possible for us to teach the universe to change, perhaps permanently, perhaps not for the better.
Then I ran out of hot water and had to get dressed. So yeah, anyway, I’m going to go back to playing Hordes of the Underdark now. I’m going to see if I can get through Shadows of Undrentide and into HoTU using a single-classed fighter, and see what he looks like at 32nd level. Speaking of improbable people, I suppose. I have an idea for a companion piece to the book if I ever manage to get it written, which deals with the idea of self-made apotheosis…maybe this is part of the puzzle.
Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall 