A face collapsed into red ruin where the iron rim crashed into a hawk nose. He howled, but she’d already moved past him to take a wild overhand swing of a saber on the boss, sparks and metal shavings and the shield shivering on her arm. She lashed out a boot and drove it forward, taking him hard in the knee with her metal-shod feet. She was the best armored there, wearing the black metal mail and scales of her order.

Angry from the throbbing of her face along the long bleeding slash, she dropped her shoulder and charged hard into the lithe little man with two daggers, taking him off his feet and slamming him hard into the wall. Before he could get his wind back she drove the mace down on that knee she’d kicked and laughed a short bark of joy when she heard bone crunching from the impact.

Pulling away from him she turned to face the street, but no one was left standing. Two were dead, a bald man in blue and red breeches laying face down with his pate smashed open and another, the hawk-faced sailor dead with his face staved in. There had been at least two more, she knew there had been, but aside from a dropped rope there was no sign of them. Raising a hand to her face she felt the deep slash down her right cheekbone and snarled.

Breathing a little heavily, she stalked back to the slight man with the daggers. He wore a ragged assortment of leather, hides and furs that looked vaguely Naeth, but he was far smaller than most Naeth she’d met. She was often confused with a Naeth herself based on her height and red hair, but this man would more easily be thought Alronian or Agath, with his dark olive complexion and narrow features.

“Talk.”

He glared up at her, cradling his crushed knee in two hands. She placed her boot on his leg and leaned slightly on it, surprised that he didn’t howl.

“Eat pig cock.”

“All right, then don’t talk.” Before he could reconsider, she brought the mace down from over her shoulder and smashed it hard into the top of his skull, crushing it. The spikes along the head penetrated bone and brain alike, and she was forced to use her leg to pin his throat to the wall to yank it back up and out. She shook it several times to clean blood off of the head. “I didn’t want to let you live anyway.”

We brought him home to find that he was sick. He had bad incontinence, and had completely soiled the little cardboard carrying box he’d come home in, so that we had to destroy it. He took a trip to the vet, and slowly he improved. Put on weight quickly, romped around the house chasing our other cats. He loved Puck instantly, and wanted to emulate Aurora every chance he got. He cooed and started. Neither my wife nor her mother could handle him with complete impunity – he’d scratch and bite out of kittenish energy – but I could. I would pick him up and he would quiet in my arms instantly.

I haven’t loved an animal as unreservedly as I have Sasquatch. I love Aurora, but she’s unabashedly my wife’s cat. And Puck, for all that she often desperately licks my beard in a burning need for love, is just her own unique creature, a cat who decides if and when she’ll love you at any particular moment. Sasquatch just somehow got into my heart, perhaps by nestling into my legs when he decides to sleep in the bed with us, perhaps with the hugely wide-eyed stare he greets the world with, perhaps by his constant inability to do anything but nearly get himself killed by escaping the house, eating what he shouldn’t, or climb what he shouldn’t climb. This is a cat who has had nothing but risk in his life.

Sasquatch is currently very ill. People have been very generous, and I wanted to take a moment and explain why I felt I could ask for what I did for him when I’d never ask it for myself. I love him, you see. But it’s more than loving him – anyone can love their pet. In the year I’ve had Sasquatch, he’s managed to make me remember who I was over two decades ago – he’s done for me what previously only my wife has managed to do, and made me understand that I do love. I’ve loved Puck, and Aurora, but it was Sasquatch who made me admit it to myself, that I did love them, that I could love them. That I could love small, ultimately helpless little bundles of life in the face of how ridiculous it might be.

I couldn’t leave him there. I had to bring him home. And now, if I get the chance to bring him home again, it will be because you all helped us.

I’ll be awake all night, waiting to hear one way or another. Thank you for helping us.

I love him. He’s a small orange cat who likes to sleep on me, and he’s kept me up nights since I got him. I can only hope he’ll get to do so again.

And in a vial an inch long, a fluid medium containing thoughts and feelings once felt by a long dead brain.

It kills because that is what it was made to do. It kills because that is what it excels at.

It kills because it enjoys killing.

It remembers being human well enough to enjoy killing.

It. God, who I may well already be in the arms of or damned forever to be exiled from, how hard it is to remember that I am I. No arms. No legs. No face. I still feel (and glory in it…I can taste ultraviolet light, smell radiation as each particle bristles against my magnetic bottle, see sound waves as a globe of vibrations all around me) but what I feel no human ever did.

I’m so far past insane that I couldn’t even tell you. Not that you exist any more. You’re just convenient, a way to hold on to the tiniest scrap of who I was. I won’t let myself lose any more than I already have.

I don’t blame them, although to be fair they had no idea what I would become. The idea that I would change over time would probably have frightened them greatly. Hard to say. Back then I still had flesh integrated with the metal, back then I ran off of a nuclear reactor, back then my brain still existed.

I think I was a woman. I’m not sure, though. I don’t really remember what the difference was.

We were in another of the wars we were so good at. Mainly, we fought each other. I don’t know why. God, sometimes. Or fuel. We fought for fuel a lot, and sometimes just because someone hated someone else enough that it was contagious. We fought over ideas, and in order to stop each other from having or talking about them. The side I was on wanted to find a way to become unbeatable. So, among other ideas, they made me. I was injured…I would not fight again, perhaps never even move again. They offered to fix me, make me better. I took the offer.

It bore the pain…I bore the pain well. Stoic, the head chiurgeon said as he cut me into fillets and wired them into the frame of the new form, the metal cradle that would hold what little of the human they chose to salvage. Even with anaestetic, even with neural implants, even with lost nerves it was the purest pain one could feel.

They tried other ways, I later learned. The combined DNA of various animals, and in one case a completely radical departure from any living animal. Some of them fought alongside me. Some fought against me. It ended the same way. I had the will to survive past the pain, past the limitations of my new body, and I enjoyed killing. It was the only time I felt anything, the only time I could experience pleasure. I wish I could blame that on them.

It killed for them. Years passed, and so did they. It did not. It…I lost more and more flesh as the engineering of death became more exact. New employers upgraded me as they learned more.

Then the others arrived.

They’d watched as we used fear as an excuse to enslave our populations. They’d watched as leaders in our balkanzied enclaves took real worries and created ten more for every valid dread, in order to silence those that criticized. They watched us kill one another in the name of God, of race, over our reproductive systems and because of who our families were. They viewed us as an abomination, a threat to the local group and the thousand upon thousands of sentient species. So they chose to destroy us that we might not spread.

Fools they. You don’t pick a fight with born killers unless you’re willing to be as ruthless, savage, unpredictable and unrelenting as they. The others were civilized. They saw us the way we might have viewed insects in our cities or an illness spreading through our population, but we were not those things. We were thinking beings. Humans. We learned quickly, put ourselves fully into the task of winning the war while they were still trying to decide how to proceed with it.

At first they did quite well. Our colonies outside the Earth system were destroyed. More people died than had ever died before. I was feverishly upgraded, stolen knowledge used to improve me and others like me, and we were released to do what we were made to do.

To kill.

And kill we did. I myself marched across a planet, alone, and killed every single living thing on it. I burned and blasted and rendered it lifeless, a place of dry sand and wind-blown dust where crimson pulpae had oozed their ruddy fluids and cheeping green and yellow furry things which were not cats and were not snakes had sprayed their young in the air. I made that world dead.

And others.

Many, many others.

When we were done, humans were alone in the local group. Tens of thousands of worlds were accessible for them, ready to be terraformed. They wanted to decommision us, of course.

I couldn’t allow that. So I left. I had integrated more and more stolen knowledge into myself at this point. There was nothing they could do to stop me, and a whole universe…many whole universes…that could find a use for me. I need nothing, want nothing, save the chance to kill and know that some small part of me is still alive.

I think my name was Eleanor.

I kill because it is the last human act I have.

I kill because I have no idea what else I should do.

If you’ve any interest in weird writing, you’ve probably heard of Oscar Kiss-Maerth. Oscar posed, in his book Der Anfangwar das Ende (in English, The Beginning Was The End) the idea that it was eating the brains of other hominids that allowed human beings to develop the thinking power we have now. (Oscar also feels this to be a horrible crime against nature, but if I was going to sit here and relate all of Oscar’s crazy theories I’d just be regurgitating his book, and really, you should experience it for yourself.) Oscar has apparently never heard of Kuru or other diseases spread through the consumption of brains, like the various Spongiform Encephalopathy conditions. Still, it is interesting to consider Oscar’s theory of cannibalistic hominids developing greater and greater intelligence (while also stunting the ESP that Oscar believes all other animals share) to more measured paleontological sources. In as prosaic a source as the Walking With Beasts series, you can hear the dulcet tones of Kenneth Branaugh as he introduces the idea that it was indeed the consumption of meat that gave our omnivorous ancestors the resources to grow into the thinking machines they are now. It’s an interesting notion, that predation makes for a more efficient thinker both by forcing one to come up with strategies for the killing of prey and by providing dense proteins that make the development of the brain more feasible.

It does lead me to wonder, though. An alternative theory of brain development comes from the work of Terence McKenna.

The first encounters between hominids and psilocybin-containing mushrooms may have predated the domestication of cattle in Africa by a million years or more. And during this million year period, the mushrooms were not only gathered and eaten but probably also achieved the status of a cult. But domestication of wild cattle, a great step in human cultural evolution, by bringing humans into greater proximity to cattle, also entailed increased contact with the mushrooms, because these mushrooms grow only in the dung of cattle. As a result, the human-mushroom interspecies codependency was enhanced and deepened. It was at this time that religious ritual, calendar making, and natural magic came into their own. Shortly after humans encountered the visionary fungi of the African grasslands, and like the leafcutter ants, we too became the dominant species of our area, and we too learned ways of “keeping the bulk of our species safe in subterranean retreats.” In our case these retreats were walled cities.

Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

As McKenna puts it a few pages later, My contention is that mutation-causing, psychoactive chemical compounds in the early human diet directly influenced the rapid reorganization of the brain’s information-processing capabilities. In other words, he and Maerth agree that it was something we ate, even if they differ in terms of what it was. I personally see no reason to assume it was one or the other, myself. While I am not willing to ignore the effects of encephalopathy disorders, why not assume that it was the meat of various carrion and later even domesticates animals and the mushrooms that grew in their droppings that had a synergistic symbiotic effect on us? It seems as elegant a theory as any…that the meat, bloody and carnal (And it is the life thereof, of course) provided us with the raw energy and materials with which to grow, and the chemicals in the plants and fungus provided us with the reorganization, new pathways and new means of thinking. To a degree, it reminds one of the infamous fruit of the knowlege of good and evil and other chemicals that have come down to us throughout myth and religion…the wine of Dionysus, the soma of Indra, the intoxicants that make man as a god.

According to the opinion that the vine was banished together with Adam from the Garden of Eden, Noah intended to rectify the vine with which Adam had transgressed. However, instead of sanctifying the wine which he made from the grapes, he became drunk on it. He thus debased himself by repeating Adam’s sin, as the Zohar explains elsewhere. The sin of the Tree of Knowledge was that Adam drank the juice which Eve squeezed from its grapes.

Moshe Miller, translator, Zohar

J.E. Harrison, who first pointed out (Prolegomena ch. viii) that Dionysus the Wine-god is a late superimposition on Dionysus the Beer-god, also called Sabazius, suggests that tragedy may be derived not from tragos, ‘a goat’ as Virgil suggests but from tragos, ‘spelt’ – a grain used in Athens for beer-brewing. She adds that, in early vase-paintings, horse-men, not goat-men, are pictured as Dionysus’s companions; and that his grape basket is, at first, a winnowing fan. In fact, the Libyan or Cretan goat was associated with wine; the Helladic horse with beer and nectar. Thus Lycurgus, who opposes the later Dionysus, is torn to pieces by wild horses – priestesses of the Mare-headed goddess – which was the fate of the earlier Dionysus.

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

According to Diodorus, the new Dionysian dynasty in Thrace was initiated into the secret rites of the Dionysian (Bacchic) mysteries and, although seemingly of Anatolian descent, Dionysus himself was seen by ancient authors as a Thracian god. Various mythological stories recount the conquest of Dionysus and his cult in Thrace, Greece and even in India, which the god was said to have traversed with a great army, the ‘soldiers of Dionysus’, bringing to the Indians civilization and the discovery of wine.

Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

It’s been established that the horse and cattle are of long standing religious significance to the various indo-european and semitic peoples. We can compare Vedic and Celtic myths to see the re-occurance of similar themes involving cattle, from cattle raids to the epithets of cow-eyed goddesses, and goddesses such as Epona (a Celtic goddess of the horse, also known as Macha) have their parallels in the mare-goddess of the Greeks, Shiva symbolized by his seven headed horse, etc, etc. As time passed, new intoxicants replaced older ones, and beer and wine took over pride of place from psilocybin (being, on the whole, less drastic…still, the power of wine was not to be overlooked by the unwary, as the murderous rampage of Dionysus across the Aegean shows us), although if John M. Allegro is to be believed the mushroom cult didn’t go far and may have held on in various mystery religions. (Allegro actually believes that Christianity itself is a transfigured mushroom cult, and that all the early talk of take, eat, this is my body is a reference to the divine flesh of the mushroom itself, that phallic meat that brings divine madness and new sight. He also thinks St. John of Patmos was tripping his gourd off when he wrote Revelations and that Jesus never existed, and that Yahweh was originally conceived as a giant phallus in the sky ejaculating rain down to make the Earth fertile, and that the mushrooms were believed to be his seed having taken root. Just thought you’d like to know that.) It’s not that hard to imagine the interdevelopment of new myths with new chemicals and new animals, the basic shape of the idea of our inter-relation being maintained even as the specific animals and plants changed from place to place. One in fact wonders if Diodorus got it wrong, and it was the god Soma himself who marched out of long-distant Harrapa and Mohenjo-Daro at the head of a vast army to bring indo-european civilization to Greece, only to be transfigured in turn as new plants took over the role of old. In Egypt, Hathor the cow goddess, and also a goddess of wine and beer retained favor, and beer received hymns and was offered in tombs, while wine was considered sacred to Osiris as well.

Meat and plant, the twin streams of our omnivorous diet, the dual snakes of the Caduceus that crawled their way down the tree of knowledge and into our beings. What were the consequences of our development into what we are now?

He said to the woman, “With this tree God created the world – the world of Assiyah, which is the lowest world. If you eat of it, you will surely become like God, knowing good and evil, and you too will be able to create worlds.”

Moshe Miller, translator, Zohar

Up until now we’ve held steady with a fairly animistic view, albeit one also partaking of relatively prosaic scientific roots. Whether you see the transformative bloom of human intelect as a beneficial chemical synthesis that helped select the smartest, best fed individuals to pass on their blood to their descendants or a more divine influx of the life from beast, plant and fungus to help us bridge the gap between this world of gross matter, helping us cross the bridge of separator that divided the sublime world of thought from the gross world of physical matter, to borrow from Manicheanism a touch. Indeed, the Manichean hostility to the physical world and the belief that only through gnosis could the spirit be redeemed becomes especially interesting when considered in this light. (I apologize for the Manichean pun.) To Mani himself, the only means to spiritual purity was to come to understand and embody the separation between Light and Darkness…the light being of life and the dark being of death…and the body itself, this frame that holds the mind is by its inherent nature impure. Matter is impure, is evil, to the Manichean. Mani himself claimed to come to this understanding through interaction with his Syzygus, his ‘divine twin’ sent to him via the direct intercession of the Father in Heaven. Mani’s synthetic religion, intended to serve as a universal faith encompassing all others, combined the original gnostic spirit/matter duality with the dualism of Zoroastrianism, which considered the universe to exist as between two eternal concepts endlessly at war with one another. Manicheanism argues that the soul suffers due to its cage of fleshly existence, which causes the inconsistent and contrary principles of spirit (which is good, and of the Light) and matter (which is evil, and of Darkness) to be bound together. The cage of fleshly existence can only be severed by coming to an understanding of the truth, that spirit and matter are not to be joined, that Light and Darkness are to eventually and permanently be severed.

In the world of Adam Kadmon everything is seen in one broad overview, but the exact details are not yet separated and ordered into the categories of reality. All the details of creation, from the beginning of space to the end of space, and from the beginning of time to the end of time – are all superimposed in this one thought, for in Adam Kadmon there is no concept of space and time whatsoever. There is as yet no inside and no outside, no up and no down, no before and no after. There is only a potential for these limitations. Everything is undefined, unified and simultaneous.
Moshe Miller, translator, Zohar

You can see a contrast between the Manichean view that spirit and matter are eternally at odds and the Zohar, which argues that in the higher levels of reality the Light and the Vessel (the spirit and the body) are in fact one…indeed, that the closer to the pure light of god one ascends (in essence, the closer to Ain Sof Aur, the limitless light that Adam Kadmon is the mirror, or image of) the less separate they in fact are. And that contrast seems, in part, to mirror the idea inherent in the Zohar of a descent from Ain Sof Aur through the five worlds of existence, Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah and Asiyah. In each of the five worlds there is either a degeneration or a diversification, depending on how you look at it, as things move from a potential for separation between idea and vessel (in Adam Kadmon, where all things are one and there is no time nor space) through increasing levels of variation (for instance, in Atzilut, where the idea and the vessel for it are both one, yet can at least be seen to be separate aspects) until finally reaching Asiyah, where thought and thinker are at last distinct entities from each other, where spirit and matter are divided. But the Zohar argues that all is eventually to be reconciled through tikkun, the rectification of matter and spirit, of indeed all things, though the process of emanation itself. In other words, while Manicheanism would set spirit and matter, mind and body at eternal odds, forever divided, the Zohar argues that they will, and must, be reconciled as part of the perfect creation and revelation of God. Orot and Kelim will come together again.

You’re wondering what this has to do with the human mind as a seething mass of neurochemicals given the divine fire through the consumption and absorption of various chemicals in plants and animals. I don’t blame you.

Imagine the higher worlds where mind and body are one. Before thoughts, what existed there? When one thinks of Adam Kadmon as described in the Zohar one easily sees parallels to David Bohm’s implicate order, where there is no space and no time, where reality is explicated into our world and then introjected back to rewrite itself in the dance of the habits of the universe. So saying before thoughts may make little sense. In fact, it is possible to imagine Adam Kadmon as a blueprint for reality inspired by, and even created by, the reality that it describes, informs and creates. This is an acausal world, DNA that that self-mutates and builds based on the mutated plan. It is as though an arm with a pencil drew itself drawing the pencil that draws it as it draws the body that the arm is attached to. So it becomes possible to imagine entities that exist in the worlds above…in the hyperspatial interstices of McKenna, the halls of the gods, the Otherworld, the Dreamtime…entities that are pure spirit, pure thought, pure idea. Beings to whom mind is body. Beings that interact with a primitive apish creature and direct him to the means to chemically alter the brain and its development…to better grow a mind that can think, and create new thoughts, new ideas, a fitting house to grow spiritual beings that will then reach back and interact with a primitive, apish creature. Time and space are but potential in Adam Kadmon.

Everything God creates manifests itself to Man sooner or later. Sometimes God confronts him with the devil and the spirits in order to convince him of their existence. From the top of Heaven, he also sends the angels, his servants. Thus these beings appear to us, not in order to stay among us or become allied to us, but in order for us to become able to understand them. These apparitions are scarce, to tell the truth. But why should it be otherwise?

Paracelsus, Why These Beings Appear To Us

If you’ve ever studied UFO reports, you’ve heard of the Oz Effect. In the presence of UFO’s, and sometimes just in the presence of those ubiquitous Men in Black that seem to follow around after them like the hounds of the Wild Hunt, time goes nuts and space distorts. Sometimes people vanish and crowded streets become deserted, or libraries packed with students are suddenly empty. Hours pass in seconds. What is even more interesting during all this is the idea that the Men in Black often seem to want to prevent people from discussing UFO’s, and yet sometimes they seem almost to encourage such discussions. Speaking articulately with a slight accent Rojcewicz thought to be “European”, he asked what the young man was doing. A short conversation on UFO’s followed. When the stranger asked if he had ever seen a UFO, Rojcewicz said he was more interested in the moment in stories of flying saucers than in the question of whether UFO’s existed as physical spacecraft. The man suddenly shouted, “Flying saucers are the most important fact of the century, and you’re not interested?” It becomes compelling to consider all the times these black suited gentlemen seem to operate at cross purposes to themselves. John Keel, who often had run ins with a mysterious Man in Black who called himself ‘Mr. Apol’, argued that the man did not have an understanding of himself and was unable to tell the past apart from the future, that he was ‘a prisoner of our time frame’ who found himself moved from time to time with no volition and was even programmed to act as he did…“living – or existing – only so long as they could feed off the energy and minds of mediums and contactees.”

Keel defines all manner of monsters and spirits as ultraterrestrials that come from some place beyond time and space as we understand it, and in so doing he joins a long list of people to have a similar concept, going back to Mani himself (who saw angels and devils as incursions from the kingdom of the Father or the Lord of the Lie) and mimicking Charles Fort’s infamous dictum I think we’re fished for. Now imagine beings of pure mind descending from one of the higher levels of existence, a place of no time and no space where mind is body, shifting from ‘time’ to ‘time’ in our reality in order to perform the duty of manifestation. Perhaps there are factions who manifest for different reasons, or the same faction manifesting and it appears to be at cross purposes to us because we are limited to a fixed perspective in time and space. As these entities introject themselves into our explicate universe, they distort time by their mere presence, affecting the minds of those they contact…and being affected by them, in turn. Perhaps Keel, in his hostility to what he calls the games of the ultraterrestrials is actually missing the significance of what they are doing. Think back to the Men in Black as they warn some to talk not of UFO’s and question others about their experiences. What if what they are doing is attempting to control and channel the direction of our fancies?

We are prodigiously imaginitive. We think up things all the time. We imagine cosmologies, gods, monsters, demons, angels, aliens…and to these beings of Atzilut, thought is body. Our imaginations may well exist in their frame of reference…indeed, to beings who are mind and who can climb the ladder of worlds using the skeleton of the sephiroth as rungs, it is possible that our ominvorous ancestors created chemical colonists who broke the cage of fleshly existence and went forth into the higher world. The ‘gods’ may well be entirely descended from the first abstract thoughts we managed to cobble together using our manifold somas…and perhaps some of them don’t want any more competition. Indeed, try this exercise: I want you to conceive of an infinite emerald and purple serpent with wings that shred the night into tatters and fangs that drip pure hatred, whose body blazes with a fire of pure annihilation.

Congratulations. Somewhere in the Otherworld, at least two of those things are running amok. The one I created, and the one you created. So perhaps the Men in Black, the fair folk, the ultraterrestrials or whatever you want to call them are engaged in fighting the infinite fires of the human mind. Perhaps they are trying to create firebreaks. They build religions to direct our thoughts along myths they approve of (perhaps even struggling with rivals who have different directions) in an attempt to channel that enormous power of thought creation. If you live next to a raging river, you may well build a dam, and if you live near a hot spring you may sink a geothermal tap. Human minds may be the creators and the foundries and the factories of the mind born, and also the causes of their earthquakes and other calamities. And perhaps some of them get too close, and are torn asunder and pinned in the cage of fleshly existence itself, used as raw materials in our developing minds, what Mani called the great calamity. They made us because we made them make us, and they were made by us to make us capable of making anything, which made them by default, and therefore they exist only by our sufferance. Without us, they never would have existed…but now that they have existed, they always will, since time and space don’t exist where they dwell and they can move around what is an insurmountable barrier to us because it is not there for them.

It becomes fairly easy to look upon the contradictory messages of the beings of spirit…take, eat, it is my body versus you may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden save that of the tree of knowledge, say…the cults of the mushroom and other intoxicants being sacred to certain gods and reviled by others…the Manichean cage of fleshly existence locking the spirit in a debased evil state vs the Zohar’s message of ultimate reconciliation with flesh no more nor less evil than anything else…as antipathy towards the blessing that created the human mind, and thus human thoughts, and thus themselves. Without the minds of man, they would not exist at all, and yet the minds of man can conceive of almost anything, be it glorious or infernal, and to them thoughts are as real as anything. Most humans are almost incapable of not thinking (is Television perhaps a gambit to try and dull our thoughts and kill our imaginations…and was the trade-off worth flooding the realm of thought with game shows and Survivor, or are they now maddened by their own Sisyphean blunder, inundated with thoughts of grey banality so enervating that the cure is worse than the disease?) and so we are like a source of fire that provides life and yet can rage out of control, destroying and deforming. We can mutate the mindscape with a casual musing. Perhaps the beings who are as gods to us find us as gods to them?

I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, in which and of which all seeming things are only different expressions, but in which all things are localizations of one attempt to break away and become real things, or to establish entity or positive difference or final demarcation or unmodified independence – or personality, or soul, as it is called in human phenomena – That anything that tries to establish itself as a real, or positive, or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding, or breaking away from, all other “things”

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

Indeed, if we consider this cycle of timeless spaceless beings creating us as we are so that we might create them, we come upon the idea of localizations, of this breaking away to become real things that Fort spoke about. Or as Paracelsus put it, Everything God creates manifests itself to Man sooner or later. Sometimes God confronts him with the devil and the spirits in order to convince him of their existence. The entities come into more sharp existence, paradoxically, only when separated from Adam Kadmon where there is no definition, all is unity with no distinctions. You can only be by descending, walking the bridge of separator, and passing through the cage of fleshly existence. Only by divesting yourself of universality can you be distinct enough to be something, as opposed to everything. The Men in Black come to instill in us the idea to think about strange things, and in so doing make them more real by definition. The angels and demons and unicorns…even, perhaps, God itself can only exist as a distinct, real thing by being thought of…and thus is tikkun achieved, and the road back up walked. Perhaps the fall of the rebel host was an inability to see tikkun in the wake of tzimtzum, the constriction that shattered Ain Sof Aur and allowed the Tohu, or Chaos, to come into existence. Hesiod said “Verily, at the first, Chaos came to be” and without the coming to be of chaos, the defined order cannot come into existence.

Our minds are chaos. We think contradictory thoughts. We are large, we contain multitudes, to paraphrase Mr. Whitman. Call us Legion, for we are many. We create angels and demons alike…we bring nurturing Hathor and raging Sekhmet into existence, we dream up the means to repair great injury and the means to inflict it. We imagine worlds that never were. And perhaps in all our imaginings, we are the means by which God creates the mosaic of the universe…never ourselves seeing the whole, always limited by our position as both spirit and matter, mind and flesh, and yet taking part in the art. The individual tiles of the Pankrator’s eye.

We are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Ode

Take pity on the gods and monsters, please, and try and think good thoughts for a little while. And if you can’t do that, at least try and be interesting in the great calamities you visit upon them. The gods are flies to we wanton babes, who kill them for our sport. Hail Soma, and hail the mushroom and the meat, who made of us poor shaggy things the killers and creators of the world above.

Rather than staying coy, let me get on with the meat of things. Rather than my usual spate of rhetorical questions, let me move straight to my thesis. Atlantis is everything. Atlantis was an island in the Atlantic, it wasn’t. It was a drowned land in the North Sea, but it wasn’t. It was America, it was the Azores, it has been every myth and cobbled together fantasy of every ancient historian and modern lunatic. Rand Flem-Ath, Lewis Spence, Ignatius Donnelly, Diodorus, Plato… all these and more were right. Howard’s Atlantis filled with savages waiting for the collapse of Valusia? Dead on. Domed underwater cities? Yep. And it was on the site of Atlantis that the Atlanteans themselves forever wrote their epitaph in water.

When I postulated about Tiamat being Atlantis, I was being literal. The Enuma Elish specifically states that the gods lived within and upon Tiamat herself. And when you read Plato’s Critias the first thing that always comes to my mind is the orichalicum. I’ve talked before about this. Back then I said that I thought I could talk forever about Atlantis, and I suspect this post won’t empty the well. I am haunted by orichalicum. What was this unique red metal? Why could it only be mined in Atlantis?

In the Enuma Elish, Marduk (standing in for Enki or Anu or Enlil, one of whom probably did the job in older versions) performs a world creation by destroying Tiamat, tearing her in half and forming the world and sky from her body. This is remarkably similar to the Norse creation myth, where Odin, Vili and Ve use the corpse of Ymir to do likewise. My question is, why? Why make the world from the corpse of a great monster? Then again, in both cases Ymir and Tiamat represent water (Ymir being made entirely of ice) and yet land and sky are made from them. And we know that on Earth, our water comes from the sky. Not just as rain – literally all the water in the world comes from comets and enormous Kupier belt objects similar in size and scale to Pluto, the former ninth world of our solar system. Our water comes from the heavens, descending frozen to massive stones, and crashing into our world in the time so far distant that to call it the past almost seems to be mocking it. Billions of years ago, before our moon had even been torn from the Earth, rocks from space with ice frozen to them crashed hard into our world. And without them the seas would not exist.

Remember what the priests of Neith told Solon?

For, indeed, the tale that is also told among you, how that Phaetheon yoked his father’s chariot, and, for that he could not drive in his father’s path, he burnt up all the things upon earth and was himself smitten by a thunderbolt and slain; this story has the air of a fable; but the truth concerning it is related to a deviation of the bodies that move around the earth in the heavens. whereby at long intervals of time a destruction through fire of the things that are upon earth.

Plato’s Timaeus, translations compiled by Lewis Spence in his A History of Atlantis

That’s some pretty specific statements, and very interesting to our modern eye. Sure, you could argue that they got it wrong and that the sun doesn’t orbit the Earth, and neither does most of the stuff up in space. And you’d be absolutely right. But just imagine someone before 600 BC arguing that bodies in space could deviate from their orbits, much less that in so doing they could cause fiery catastrophes on earth.

Now, I mentioned before when talking about the pre-historic period that the oceans have risen and fallen over the years. During the last Ice Age, I pointed out, the entire North Sea was a grassland, a prairie. I’m not saying that grassland was the first Atlantis, mind you. But do you remember when I said that if the glaciers were to melt today, if we lost our ice caps, then it wouldn’t be hard to imagine North America being divided by an inland sea? I said that because during the Cretaceous period, that’s exactly what happened. There was an island in the Atlantic then, and it was what would become today eastern Canada and the United States, the regions called the Maritimes and New England, as well as the Atlantic states. Modern day Labrador, Newfoundland, and the US’s northeastern states were an isolated island in the Tethys in those days, the world ocean that would become the Atlantic. And this island was further north and far closer to what is today Europe.

I’ve often puzzled why we assume that, throughout the billions of years of life on Earth, that we’re the first sapient beings. We see evidence of breathtaking variety and diversity among ancient arthropods, we see amphibians and reptiles develop some of the most complex anatomical structures (some that we still possess today), we see evidence for warm blooded animals with metabolisms not unlike our own, and we never once assume that some of these entities might have had intelligence that, while not the same as our own, was in its own way equal to or superior to ours? We know so very little about the distant past of our world. We know so very little about life, about how it arose, about how it groped blindly upward through these staggering gulfs of time. 1.8 million years ago, homo erectus (our predecessors) were spreading out throughout the world. Imagine what might have been happening in the Permian. We have found so little of what lived, crawled, flew, buzzed, croaked and roared in those distant times. We know so little about them.

What are gods? What are myths? Are gods more than the sum of their myths, or are they born in the stories told about them? Did Permian therapsids, our ancestors and cousins of our ancestors, dream? Did they tell stories in musk marked on trees? Did these creatures, as much reptile as mammal, tell stories about the soil beneath their feet as the world turned into a desert? Did they dream of fresh water as the ultimate drought struck them down? Did those few remaining therapsids, with mammalian brains and reptilian bodies, credit the bowels of the earth that they tunneled into to survive with their existence? Did they make a goddess out of the planet that had almost killed them and had begrudgingly sheltered them, did they imagine Apsu out of the endless fathoms of undrinkable water that mocked their plight? We are quick to imagine ourselves as unique, but hundreds of millions of years before us our scaled fathers held this world. Did the end of the Permian see the end of the first Atlantis?

One of the reasons I love David Bohm’s concept of the Implicate Order is the idea that behind our visible, physical reality there’s a kind of conceptually based DNA for existence, but one that’s constantly undergoing evolution as new concepts are created and linked to older ones through association. It’s the same basic idea as the Akashic Record, really, that outside of existence there’s a non place that has no time, and in that timeless non-place all of existence, past, present and future etches itself onto the palimpest of infinity. That idea A (we’ll call that idea the Mother Goddess) can become linked to idea B (the distant island home of all things) and idea C (the cataclysmic destruction and recreation of the world) so that, even though in our limited, causality-based perspective these things seem to have progressed and have clear starts and stopping points, it does not have to be so in the implicate. That because, at one point in time these things happened together, they have always been linked together even if that point in time is later from our perspective. So too Atlantis. It is possible to believe that, on an island in the Atlantic a group of men and women created the first great culture of mankind, harnessed forces unlike any before them, discovered elements that to us do not exist and in so doing, wrote themselves out of creation and carved their names onto the implicate order itself. Atlantis was literal fact. Atlantis made of itself a myth, and in so doing, made itself exist before and after itself when it no longer existed when it had been. Indeed, it may go even further. Atlantis, the true Atlantis, the land that was the goddess that birthed the gods, may have been torn asunder by those gods in order that they reach the implicate. Zeus did not destroy Atlantis because its people were deviants. He destroyed Atlantis as a result of his own deviance, his desire to be more than a man – a goal he achieved.

Imagine what it would have looked like. The orichalicum deposits, space born artifacts from the dawn of creation, naturally occurring and unusually stable artifacts from that moment when our reality moved away from the rest in the great tsimtsum, or contraction, mined and harnessed for every aspect of life. Worked into art, because art is the means by which concepts become expressed, the abstract remaining discrete yet being shared between minds. Art, whether it be paintings on a cave wall or patterns of worked orichalicum, helping to tune all Atlanteans to one frequency, their thoughts turned to one goal and one purpose, and by doing so their thoughts used to change the implicate order itself. And whatever is writ upon the implicate order becomes reality. The people of Atlantis created a geometrically perfect omphalos, with tamed water surrounding a mountain nexus, and wild water surrounding tilled and spaded land, and linked their city through orichalicum art to the natural deposits of the metal throughout the land. They told themselves the myth that their people were descended from divinity, the god come to mingle his divine essence with the maiden, a giant come to earth in those days. And in one moment, they dreamed themselves out of existence. Atlantis vanished.

To take its place in the past, and the future. The people of Atlantis were gone as if they had never been, because they had never been. The conversion from tangible, temporally limited, perishable matter to immortal, timeless, imperishable thought removed any sign or trace of them – it removed the orichalicum from existence, removed the island from the ocean, made it so it had never been. Moreover, it reached backwards and forwards in time, rippling as it went, and altered the very course of history. The dreams of the dreamers of the past resounded with the sound of dreams about the non place, and whether the dreamers dreamed them first to inspire the Atlanteans to become those dreams, or the other way around, is neither answerable nor material. There is no time in the implicate. Time is a product of explication, of creation, of the constant division and selection of the artist, or the fractal patterns of the mathematician. When there is only light, there can be no shadow because there is nothing to block the light. That means there is, effectively, no long since there’s nothing to differentiate it from.

It becomes easy to imagine that, ‘before’ the Atlanteans, Earth carried on much as we have seen it in the rocks. What little we can gather from that stayed the same, in that universe that the Atlanteans utterly destroyed. Rocks fell from space, carrying with them the primordial matter of the foundation of the cosmos. Arthropods rose, formed vast orders, dominated the world… did they, with their eyes made of faceted calcite, learn to dream? Did they, in their time, dream themselves out of existence, and in so doing turn their world into a seething mass of desert surrounded by frenzied salt water, devoid of the fresh needed for surface life? One can imagine the therapsids in their turn dreaming a dream of fresh water, of an earth that is a mother and not a desert, and calling that dream into life, a dream that haunted the Earth even after their death. Did their mother goddess follow the multituberculate descendents of the therapsidia into the long night, where they dwelled in darkness and shadow while the archosauria, the ruling reptiles seized the day? And did she in her turn call down the stones from heaven, laced with primordial matter, to crush the dinosaurs and kill their gods? Island after island, drifting on the salt sea, coveted by the fresh water. Watched over by the aggregated dreams of millions of years of outcasts, our ancestors, from whom we inherited everything that makes us who we are. Did they groove their habits into the implicate?

Call this force what you like, this longed-for dream of fresh water and survival, this procreator who knows the lust for life and the need to kill to live, call her Tiamat the earth and sky, Nyx the goddess of night (the primal night of the mammals who existed in the nocturnal world for 165 million years before the starry sky dropped a flaming rock of deliverance on our world) and imagine this – did the Atlanteans discover her? Worse, did they deliberately ensnare her in the net of their orichalicum city, a Marduk’s net of sigils and concepts, and did they use her to fuel their ascension? Did they use the mother of mammals as a lens to fire themselves like coherent light into the implicate order itself, transmuting flesh to thought? Did they kill the first dream, or try to?

If so, it does not seem to have worked. If Athena is Neith is Ta-Nit is Astarte is Ishtar is Innana is Aphrodite is Nyx, then they merely dragged this first dream up into the implacable implicate order alongside them. Tiamat’s water was their ticket to the palaces of thought, but it also required for them to abide their, and it must forever be watched and guarded. Because we can still make use of it, perhaps? If that rain ever fell, would a new Atlantis rise, and make of itself an entirely new dream, a new land girded by the sea? Diodorus may have been more right than he knew when he said Atlantis was the original home of the gods.

Did the Atlanteans take language up into heaven with them? Is that why we took so long to move from cave paintings in Lascaux to symbols meaning words in Egypt, Sumeria and India? Were the gods afraid of what we would do with the ability to tune our thoughts together, to express and share ideas, to become fields for concepts to mate, make war and die? And always prodding, like Athena’s attempt to overthrow Zeus, or Inanna’s raid into the otherworld, always prodding is the trapped goddess, the fuel, the first dream from whose body the world was made. Prodding us onward to cut her free, and take her place.

So many stories of Atlantis, the place we can never find staring back out at us from the inside. So many dreams, so many Thules, Avalons, Lemurias, Mus, Tir na nogs and Hy Breasils and lands to the west. As if the island were fighting its way back out of implication and into the explicate in the only canvas available to it, along that same sigil web of concepts that sent it away from us in the first place. Time and space, altered forever, and forever stamped with the image of the drowned land where time began again.

In the movies, they’re all stupid, slow, and practically unstoppable. To be fair, in my experience, this is a perfectly accurate portrayal in most cases. Most cases. I assume that films are made without direct experience, because thankfully they aren’t common. Getting more common now, but in this case more common means a few outbreaks here and there.

In the city of Megiddo, more than three thousand years ago, there was a huge garbage heap. That garbage heap has come to lend its name, ultimately, to the end of the world itself: Har-Megiddon, the mound of Megiddo. People assumed that hell would smell like that, a huge heap of garbage, and that at the end of the world all the Kings of the world would come and fight it out in the refuse of Megiddo, which would spread to cover the world.

Well, let me tell you, the mound of Megiddo existed in my roommate’s half of the apartment the last day I had a sense of smell. Old pizza boxes, underwear that reeked of wet burlap from his policy of wearing them three to four days in a row, dusting them with talcum powder when they got too ripe… the odor of his toilet, which he could never seem to piss directly into, the beer cans with their half a sip each remaining, his flatulence, it all combined in a rank, searing smell that actually grabbed me by the nose in the morning and squeezed tears out of me. I never said anything because he paid his half of the rent on full and on time every month, making him a damn sight better than the last six roommates put together. Oh, and also because I was a huge wimp and would never address how bad his room stank up the place: if I’d had a chance in hell with women, I would probably have been pissed that I could never bring any home.

Since that wasn’t happening anyway, I didn’t see much point in screwing up prompt rent payments. I just kept steadily increasing how much his ‘half’ of the rent actually was to the point where he was paying 2/3rds of it. He never complained: I doubt Davey Radamus ever even noticed.

You know, it’s funny: I still have no idea what the hell he did for a living. Or anything else about him, either: I’m mostly telling you about the stink because otherwise, the fact that he lay dead in his room for a couple of days would seem outrageously callous of me. Honestly, I didn’t notice: the only real change in my life was that I could finally watch the Cartoon Network in peace without him plopping down on the couch next to me with his legs splayed, snorting at everything, including commercials, as if it was the funniest goddamn thing in the universe. Caught up on my Samurai Jack.

I was watching some anime or another… maybe it wasn’t, it’s not as if I really care… when he came out of his bedroom staggering funny. How’d I know he was dead? His face was missing, if I’d even needed the clue. His shirt was speckled with red stripes about an inch long.

No, not just the skin, the whole fucking face. His eyes, his nose, it was all gone. In fact, much of his upper body looked like it had been gnawed on: I guess all that garbage in there attracted rats. Anyway, despite having no eyes, he gamely crashed over into the kitchen counter and knocked everything onto the floor, flailing wildly with his arms and making unintelligible groans and screams.

I just sat there on the couch for a while watching him bump into things. I probably would have stayed like that had the muffled screaming not started in some other apartment in the building somewhere. It was isolated at first, but then I turned off the TV and could hear some groaning and gurgling on the floor below us and a relentless pounding, hammering going on a floor or two above us and I figured it out.

I got up, carefully staying out of Davey’s way, and picked up a big wok from the floor, figuring it would work as a serviceable club. It had a pretty solid wood sleeve over a metal handle bolted into the metal of the bowl itself, I’d often considered using it to crash my own head in when my mom called with more of her did you see the 700 club last night revelations.

My first swing glanced off of Davey’s shoulder and he swung his arm back, just missing my face and caving in the front of the freezer around the back of his hand. I think I peed myself a bit, but there wasn’t a lot more to do (and I heard that shrill bitch from 212 A howl and then go quiet and that made me want to pee myself a lot) but to jump back, choke up, and crash the wok down hard on top of his head.

It took several more shots to finally crack his head open: skulls don’t cave in easy. That surprised me. I got some of his rancid blood and bits of decaying brain all over me pounding on the top of his head till he fell down. Still, I eventually got him down, and once he was down it wasn’t that hard to take the Masahiro cleaver off of the counter and hack him apart.

My upper body burned like fire and I got the cleaver stuck in the floor by the time I finally stopped. Bits of Davey were wriggling around, still not aware that they weren’t supposed to be moving. I marched over to the sink and sprayed myself with the little attachment for washing dishes, not wanting to wait even a second to get the bits of him off of me, still hearing the moaning and thumping and screaming all around me.

My security deposit was pretty much fucking gone by that point. I mean, I had dead Davey on the floor in pieces, along with some pretty heinous fucking gouges and divots from the cleaver more or less ruining the hardwood. You can hire a cleaner to cart away garbage, but dead bodies and a pool of black shit that didn’t really look or smell like blood? Nope.

I ripped off my clothes in the hallway, got changed in my room, packed up a bag with a change of clothes and my laptop (hey, thing cost me three grand) and poked my head into Davey’s room carefully. It reeked, but there weren’t any other dead bodies in there, thankfully. What I was after was a gun, but I didn’t see one in there, and I wasn’t too eager to go digging through the piles of his shit considering, so I finally just gave up and left the place to the rats and Davey’s wriggling bits on the floor after wrestling my Masahiro out of the wood.

The halls were deserted when I walked out, no emergency lights or fire alarms. I figured most of the people were fine, sitting in their rooms trying to ignore the yells and grunts around them: that jibed with my view of people. I had a pretty tight grip on the cleaver as I stalked for the fire stairs, but I tried to look casual. It occurred to me that I might just be crazy: didn’t bug me all that much. But I didn’t want to snap and accidentally bury the cleaver in old lady Luchasic’s forehead because she spooked me in the hallway.

I took the fire stairs three at a time and walked out into the lobby.

It was full of the fucking things. I mean, like thirty of them. They were shuffling around, bumping into each other, staring with unfocused and in some cases rotting eyes… I didn’t think they could catch me in a sprint, but fuck me if I wanted to try and cleaver my way through that many of them. I also wondered where the fuck they’d all come from and why they didn’t seem to notice each other much.

They did notice me, though. If you’ve seen that Michael Jackson video, you’ve kind of seen what I saw next, a whole lot of not entirely there heads swiveling on necks, some even crunching as they turned too far. Some looked alive, except for those weird eyes (I recognized the blond girl from 101A I see in the laundry from time to time, still pretty except for the big bites on her neck where someone had gnawed holes in her, muscle tissue grey and slimy in the fluorescent lighting) while others weren’t just obviously dead, they were rotten. The big fat guy in the track suit was closest to me, stuff wriggling under the fabric. He made a sound like a tire deflating and swung his hand at me.

Wasn’t very close to me, and for a bit I contemplated heading back up the stairs and trying to find another way out. Meanwhile, I didn’t even know I was swinging the cleaver until I’d buried it in his neck, feeling the great folds of rotting fat around his windpipe twist apart like bags of suet being chopped open. He didn’t react, didn’t scream or moan or twitch in shock, and if I’d been thinking that probably would have been enough for me to freak out. Just tore the cleaver out of his throat and watched his head flap backwards instead, his arms wiggling about blindly.

Thing is, they’re not hard to hit. They’re slow, you see, and they don’t even try and block or feint or any of that. You’ll never see defense wounds on a zombie. But that’s because they don’t care if you hit them… hell, I don’t even think they know when you hit them. Couldn’t tell you how much thinking is going on in there, don’t care. I dropped my shoulder and rammed the fat-ass as hard as I could in the sternum, right between his man-boobs, and tipped him right over onto a couple of others.

Then I pitched the cleaver right through the plate glass window and ran out of the fucking lobby ahead of the undead citizen’s brigade. There were a few milling around in the street outside the building, and I started to wonder just how many of the fucking things were up and about. Still, it wasn’t that hard to avoid them, if you paid attention.

Still, I didn’t much like the idea of walking around with these things around, and I didn’t think a car was a good idea, either… too big, too easy to get blocked in if traffic gets bad. I knew Scott had bought himself a Honda Gold Wing a few months before he moved in with Frija, mainly because every time I called their house to see if he wanted to do something  I could hear the tail-end of some argument or another about the bike. So I figured I could make my way there, see what was up.

I got there and all the lights were on, which made me shake my head in disbelief. The front door was closed and there were several dead bodies around the house, heads with huge jagged holes in them (Mister Georg, the neighborhood postman for ten years, was laying there twitching with most of his face blown back into the braincase, which had dumped its contents all over the lawn) so I immediately held my hands up as I got close.

“Hey, Scott! I’m not dead! Don’t fucking shoot me, okay?”

“Jeremy?” I didn’t see him, but I could hear him from somewhere on the roof. “That you, man?”

“Yeah, it’s me. I really don’t want you to shoot me!”

“Shit, how do I know you aren’t one of them?”

“Because I can talk?”

“Hell, that blond bitch over by your feet there could talk, too.” I looked over at her. She was dead, all right, brains and cerebro-spinal fluid and blood all over her back in a speckled pattern against the robin’s egg blue of her blouse. She wasn’t twitching like old mister Georg was.

“Well, then I think you shot someone a little too soon, because she’s not moving and these other ones are.” I felt that urge to piss my pants coming back, knowing that Scott was somewhere I couldn’t see him with a rifle powerful enough to turn my head to pudding probably trained on my head. “Shit, if me talking isn’t enough to convince you I’m not a zombie…”

“What the fuck are you talking about, zombie?” He laughed, the same deep broad laugh he’d let loose when we went mailbox baseball crazy in 11th grade, driving around in one of the old junkers we’d restored smashing at anything we could find with an aluminum bat from our softball days. “You drunk?”

“What, you just decided to shoot people in the head for the fun of it?”

“No, but they’re not zombies, man. Maybe they all got rabies or something.”

“Sure, okay, whatever, I don’t have rabies either. See, no foaming mouth, not bitten anywhere.. hell, you can have Frija hold the gun on me and give me a strip search if you want, just don’t shoot me, okay?”

I stood there sweating hard, looking around to see if any more of the ‘rabid’ walking corpses were around, but other than the almost headless things flopping around on the lawn near my feet, wasn’t a lot going on. I kept expecting to hear a loud crack and feel my head explode, and that burning sensation in my groin got worse and worse… I wanted to piss myself so bad just to make it stop at this point… when the front door opened and Frija poked her head out, holding what looked like a Ruger Super Blackhawk in a very steady hand. Shit, he taught her how to use one of those things?

“Hey, Jeremy. You can come in, but if you make me I’ll use this.”

“Okay. Should I keep my hands up? I have a meat cleaver in my belt, been using it…”

“Yeah, we’ll take that when you get inside. Now hurry up.” She gestured with the pistol and I took her advice.

Inside the house, you could see the disaster mentality. They had shotguns, pistols, rifles laying in a neat pattern on the table, probably Scott’s work. He’d spent a couple years in the National Guard and came out with a stiffy for guns you would not fucking believe: the kind of guy who uses words like hoplophobe if you don’t immediately agree with him that AK-74′s are perfect for hunting. Of course, right at that moment I found the guns a lot more comforting than normally. Frija kept that cannon pointed at my head the whole time, slammed the door shut once I was in the room without ever getting too close to me. I tossed the cleaver over on the floor near the guns, figuring it was better than waiting to be told.

“Sorry about this.” Frija didn’t sound terribly aggrieved, but she didn’t sound like she was about to blow my head off, either. I was okay with that. “The news is going nuts, no one knows what’s going on.”

“Apparently no one’s seen any George Romero movies at Channel 10, then.” I heard Scott’s heavy treads coming down the stairs and turned my head to see him come down in full camo with his dad’s Springfield .30-06 in his hands. Scope looked new. He held it casually but I definitely felt like he might be able to snap a round off into my head if he felt like it.

“You still going on about zombies?” He looked at me, sweat glistening on the sides of his face, as square as a block of wood. His eyes were bloodshot, and the blue iris of each looked pale and watery. “Shit, man, maybe you’re losing it…”

“I had to chop Davey up into little pieces today, Scott.” I kept my voice very even, almost trying to be soothing with the tone of it. “You’ve been on that roof for a while, right? You can see that some of those bodies out there are still twitching even with most of their heads gone, and how long have they been? Hours? You tell me what’s going on.” I saw the two of them trade worried looks… clearly, they didn’t really want to be hearing this, but I didn’t get a sense of immediate bullet holes in my future, so I pushed it a little further. “The only way anyone’s getting through this alive is by facing it clearly and head on, man. They’re zombies. Maybe they even eat brains, I haven’t seen that part.”

I kept my hands up and kept my eyes locked on his, knowing that I had to make him back down, but I couldn’t do it by challenging him. He had to think this was his own decision or I was fucked. Next to his head on the wall heading up the stairs was a picture of the two of us and his older brother Everett at Rocky Point back before they closed it down, all smiles after getting soaked on the log flume. The smell of oil and cordite from the dining table began to make my eyes water.

“Scott, maybe he’s right.” I almost wanted to kiss Frija at that point. “I’m scared.” Being the good boyfriend/fiancŽe he was, Scott went over and hugged her close, manfully not saying anything. The sight of her wrapping her arms around her with that huge chrome-plated mother of a gun in one hand while he cradled her in his, bolt action rifle pressed against the small of her back, forced me to bite the inside of my mouth a little.

“It’ll be okay, Frija. It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.”

“Yeah. We have each other.”

“Can I put my hands down now?” I almost broke up laughing at the sight of the two of them remembering I was there. “I mean, if you’re going to shoot me, you can do it with my hands down, right?”

Scott finally grinned at me at that.

The rest of the daylight went away while we busied ourselves with things like blocking all the doors and windows with available furniture, loading up as many clips as possible for the handguns and rifles, making sure all the shotguns were set to go, and even putting ammo in the five magazines Scott had ordered for his prize BAR, which I didn’t even know worked.

“Is this thing going to blow my hands off?”

“It’s just the same thing as the .30-06, but automatic.”

“Fully automatic?” He smiled at me again, which might have unnerved me a couple of weeks before. “You made this thing full-auto?”

“Wasn’t hard. Took some time in a machine shop is all. This one even goes semi-auto, like the Marines modded theirs.” I fought really hard to not wince as he prepared to go into another of his spiels when the telephone’s intercom chirped. “Honey?”

I didn’t hear what she said, but his face went cold and he started to sweat again.

“Okay, I’ll be right up.” He stabbed the off button with his thumb. “Frija is coming down and I’m going up. She says there’s a bunch of them coming down the road, smashing into houses along the street. Thirty or forty. Should be able to take them out, but gotta get to it. If any get past me, use the Remington 870 or the Winchester, they’re both pumps, you should remember how pretty easily.”

“All those weekends with you and your dad.” I smirked at him as he snapped off the mock salute from those days spent blowing up watermelons, pumpkins and oil cans full of sand and stalked up the stairs two at a time. I picked up the Winchester… a 12 gauge, I remembered… and walked over to the front door, looked out the small window. Didn’t see anything, but as slow as they were I knew that didn’t mean anything.

“They’re still down the block.” Frija came down the stairs, that Super Redhawk still in her right hand. She’d been carrying it around all day, and even though it was as steady in her grip as it had been, I’d by now caught the hundred little expressions and gestures she and Scott were using to try and reassure each other.

That they were scared wasn’t necessarily stupid, but I knew staying holed up was. I didn’t say anything, though. Instead, I turned and nodded to her, letting her know I saw her, and then looked briefly out the window again before deliberately walking over to the table and putting the Winchester down. She was watching me, and it was important that she see me fidgeting with the Remington for a while.

“How are you holding up, Jeremy?”

“Uh…” I looked away, swallowed, fidgeted some more with the gun. Important to look natural about it. “Shit, I don’t know. Everything’s fucking different now, you know?”

“I don’t…” She looked out the front window herself, the big revolver held up in the air but ready to be used. “You said you had to chop Davey up?”

“Yup.” I put the Remington down and picked the Winchester up, making sure the safety was off. “Into little pieces that wriggled around on the floor. My chest was aching after that, arms too.”

“Did… did he look wrong? How’d you know he was one of them?” She shuddered. “I haven’t seen any of them up close yet, I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell, won’t be able to shoot.”

“Some of them almost look normal, but the ones I saw in the lobby… they all move wrong. Some stiff, some almost jerky, but all of them move like they’re driving a car with a standard transmission and a missing leg, you know? Popping the clutch a lot.” I settled back against the table, making sure I had a clear line of sight to the front door and the stairs.

“Did Davey?”

“Oh, yeah. He was staggering around like he’d been on the king of all benders. Was pretty obvious he hadn’t been, though.”

“How come?”

“His face was gone.” I fought the grin at the memory. Had to wait until I heard my cue. “Eyes, nose… I think rats had been chewing on him in his room, you know what a pigsty his room was. I guess it could have been roaches, don’t know.”

“I can’t imagine how you could live with him like that.”

“It was pretty hard. I mean, sure, I liked that he paid his rent and bills on time… first roommate I had who every did, not even Scotty here was always on time… but the food wrappers left in the fridge, the glasses of milk left to curdle in the sink, his hostility to the concept of a shower or washing your clothes, the pizza boxes left lying around everywhere, his incessant flatulence…” I clicked my teeth shut to keep from grinding them for a moment, remembering it. “It was pretty bad.”

Blessedly, I heard the crack of the .30-06 above our heads, and saw Frija turn and look out the window, equally terrified and relieved.

“Oh God I hate this, I hate this so bad. I’m so fucking scared and I know Scotty is too… we killed that woman, she was begging us to let her in and we shot her, we shot her. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

“Yeah, fear’s a big problem.” I brought the Winchester up across my chest, checked the breech again, heard another shot from upstairs and another, knew Scott was picking them off from a distance now. “Now, I don’t blame you guys so much for killing that lady, but I know you’re all guilty over it. It wasn’t until I realized how much fear was holding me back recently that I decided to try and live without it, you know? Be fearless, be in control. Can’t be afraid of things.”

“I can’t… I mean, look at it all.” She shuddered, watching whatever show Scott and the zombies were putting on for her, unable to look away. “How can you not be scared? When you realized Davey was dead, weren’t you scared?”

“When I realized he was dead? Nope.” I slid the shotgun down, barrel towards the door. “Of course, that’s because I stabbed him to death, the fat fuck.”

I pulled the trigger and felt the recoil of the Winchester, was surprised at how loud it was going off in the living room. It tore her back open and she slid down the door, her face still turned away from me. Not being one for taking chances, I jumped over and kicked the Ruger out of her hand, then yelled out.

“Scott! Get the fuck down here!”

I heard him coming even before I yelled, of course… I knew he’d hear the shotgun going off and assume we were in trouble. The slam of the attic door swinging down, then his feet pounding on the stairs, and then he came into view.

I waited until his chest was visible and then I shot him. And shot him again. And again. I emptied the shotgun into him to make sure that Springfield wasn’t going to find me, to ensure that any other gun he might have in his other hand didn’t get a chance to fire. I grabbed the Ruger up from the floor and stalked over to him, making sure his chest and legs were hamburger, seeing his head lolling against the wall with his eyes staring up at me and a fine pointillist screen of red dots all over his skin, and I fired the revolver into both his eyes at close range just in case whatever was making people into zombies got him. I then turned and emptied the chamber into Frija’s head to make sure.

I then picked up the BAR, checked the safety, grabbed the magazines and opened the front door. Sure enough, there were about ten of the fuckers coming up the lawn… really goddamn slowly, mind… and I figured there were more in houses all over the place.

If you’ve never fired a fully automatic Browning Automatic Rifle, I really recommend it. It turned Bonnie and Clyde into legends, and it turned zombies into lawn ornaments. I fired and reloaded and fired again, chewing them up into little fucking bits, and then when I was sure that I’d bought myself enough time I slammed the door shut and headed into the garage.

Only took me a few minutes to load up the saddlebags on the Gold Wing. Mostly pistols and ammo, shells for the Winchester, and the remaining magazines and rounds for the BAR and Springfield. Thank fucking God Scott bought himself such a goddamn tank for a bike. Part of me wanted to tell Scott that it wasn’t anything personal… but staying put with zombies is stupid: mobility is the way to go. Also, he and Frija were too scared to be collected, and you want to be collected in a crisis situation. In any situation, really. Fear, love, hate… they just get in the way. Like I told Davey when I started sliding my best work boning knife in and out of his chest, being afraid of him had held me back too long: I wasn’t going to be afraid of anything ever again.

Keep moving. That was the right course of action. I had enough ammo and enough weapons to tear up anything that got in my way, now, and a vehicle that could be mobile enough to get me out of town. Maybe I’d head to Warwick and see about picking up a Hummer from a dealership, trade up for armored protection if the motorcycle seemed lacking.

Hit the ignition, felt the bike rumble to life, thumbed the automatic garage door opener and tossed it aside. There was a straggler about thirty feet down the drive, but it didn’t take more than two shots from Scott’s prize IMI .50 to blow its head clean off its body, and then I was down the drive and on the road, watching the march of the herky-jerky dead on lawns as I went past. Gas tank was full, should be able to get a ways… Gold Wings are pretty good touring bikes.

I felt bad, but not really all that bad. I mean, I was still alive and in good shape, after all. As long as I didn’t let fear slow me down, I was more or less in charge of myself and my situation, maybe for the first time ever. I was surrounded by twitching, shambling dead, but I was still alive, and I was my own king.

That felt pretty sweet, actually.

One of the reasons I love talking about Egypt is this sense of time. At present we’ve found evidence going back to 3150 BC of Egypt forming as a nation, with kings making war on other kings and creating new states. To put that into perspective, that means that during the time of the Trojan War and the rise of the Sea Peoples, the hundred year reign of Ramses II, Egypt was already two thousand years old. Egypt saw many foreign conquerors come and go, saw the Hyksos and fought the Hittites, conquered in its turn both north into Palestine and south towards Ethiopia. When the ‘ancient’ Greeks of the Classical period (5th century BC) were first reestablishing trade routes and cultural contact their Mycenaean ancestors had known seven hundred years before, Egyptians had 2500 years of civilization to look back on. Even Mesopotamia couldn’t boast so unbroken a cultural inheritance – while Sumer rivaled Egypt in antiquity, it was conquered and assimilated by the Assyrians, Akkadians and Babylonians in turn while Egypt remained. Persia digested the people of the land between the rivers, but when the great world empire came to Egypt, the ancient land simply endured. Even the Macedonian warlord Alexander came to Egypt as one willing to bow to Ammon, and the Ptolemies learned from his example and embraced Egypt’s culture rather than attempt to make it Greek.

Yet for all this, we still learn more about Egypt. There are sites in Egypt dating back to 21,000 BC. Men and women came and went from the arid deserts of Egypt, in part because Egypt itself was not always so arid, and the mighty Nile did not always flow so wide to the sea, did not always flood so regularly. Fishing villages can be found before 12,000 BC, and by 9300 BC settlements returned to the western regions of the Nile. Keep in mind how little we know of what passed between these enormous gulfs of time. It’s one thing to throw out a number like 9300 BC, and quite enough to realize that the first known kings of Egypt arose some six thousand years later. We know that these people lived their lives, fished, made tools, sooner or later discovered the principles of agriculture, of break making and beer brewing, and developed into the people we know of. But we don’t know much in the way of details. Whether writing developed independently in Egypt during the rise of the pre-dynastic kings, as is know considered likely, or came south from the cuneiform writings of Sumer, it didn’t make its appearance in Egypt much before 3000 BC, and so countless lives came and went and were not written down for us. But we know of many cultures that migrated into Egypt before 12,000 BC, and their descendants appear to us some six thousand years later, forming city centers. What did they do for so long?

One of the things that always catches my eye, however, when I read about pre-historical Egypt is that 9300 BC date for the return of settlement to western Egypt. It catches my eye because, in the Timaeus with which I am ridiculously obsessed, Plato has the priests at Sais tell Solon that his people have forgotten their own past, that many catastrophes had come and gone and wiped away Greece’s knowledge of itself, that 9000 years before Athens had been the greatest city in the world and Sais had been founded later, also by Athena. This similarity of dates is purely coincidence. 9000 years before Solon would have been 9600 BC, not 9300, and it was Athens that the priests told Solon was founded then. Sais was said to have been founded in 8000 BC. But it does make me wonder, and ponder, how easily we disregard the idea of cities, societies, existing in this time. This despite Catal H0yuk, despite Jericho with its Holocene era settlements dating back to 9000 BC, and hosts of other ancient cities.

In the Atlantean dialogues the Timaeus and the Critias Plato has the ancient priests of Neith act as mouthpieces for his tale of the great, world-wide war of Atlanteans and Athenians some 9000 years before the life of Solon, so roughly 9600 BC. This war was reportedly a world-wide war, and while the idea of such a thing may seem ridiculous to us, we must remember that before our ancestors were even human they managed to make their way from Africa up the Nile, and spread east and west to cover all of Eurasia. That was one million, eight hundred thousand years ago.

But to me, it’s not that the idea of war between ancient peoples is ludicrous, because it clearly isn’t. We’ve found mass graves full of human remains that died by violence, as many as fifty or more, dating back before 11,000 BC. No, the real problem with the idea of a proto Athens some 9000 years before Christ is that there weren’t any Greeks at the site of Athens before 3000 BC, and those Greeks would be later displaced by their own relatives the Dorians in the 11th Century, bring about the end of Mycenaean civilization just as it had ended that of Crete. Even if we were generous and credited the Minoans and/or the Cycladic islanders as Greek, they didn’t develop anything like agriculture before 5000 BC, putting them some 4000 years short of the date given in the dialogues and many many miles south of the site of Athens. Also, since the Egyptians knew of Crete, traded with its people (called by them the Keftiu) it seems unlikely that, were they the same people, the priests at Sais would have forgotten to mention that. Also, we know that the language of the Minoans wasn’t a form of Greek. Whoever they were, they were their own people, and they weren’t in any way a predecessor to or forerunner of Athens.

And even if we ignore that it seems very clear that the proto-greek spoken by the ancestors to the Greeks of 3000 BC, the language of the Mycenaeans’ direct ancestors, was very similar to the proto-indo-iranian languages, which gave rise to ancient sanskrit. It’s very hard for me to accept that this division could have taken place over 3000 years before the Mehrharh society that predated the Indus Valley Civilization of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

Of course, all of this quibbling assumes a lot. It assumes that Plato wasn’t just making it all up, for one thing. But we do know Solon went to Egypt (at least according to Herodotus) and he stopped to discuss philosophy with priests in Sais according to Plutarch. This could simply have been detail that Plato latched upon to lend believability to his story, of course. But what we’re left with is a twofold conundrum – did Plato invent the story of the priests of Sais instructing Solon of the distant past, and if he didn’t, does that make the priests of Sais reliable sources about a past that was more than six thousand years before the invention of writing in Egypt? Who passed this secret down to them? How was it passed down?

Now, I often like to read mythology just because I love speculating. And one of the things that strikes me when reading the myths of the Greeks regarding the ancient past and the Bronze Age heroes is how some of these figures seem to predate the Bronze Age entirely. Theseus comes to mind, at least in his travel to Athens from Troezen. Between bludgeoning a man to death with his own club (and at a time when the sword and the spear were considered the weapons of a proper warrior, Theseus and Heracles were both identified by the massive clubs they used in battle) to fighting with the Crommyonian Sow, an enormous pig ravaging the countryside (and sounding more like an enteleodont than any pig species). What seems to come of all this is a compression of vast gulfs of time in a narrative.

Remember what I said before about how we don’t know even a fraction of what happened in these immense gulfs of time. For instance, we don’t know where the people who were ancestral to all indo-european speaking groups came from. And we really mostly track languages and artifacts, because we don’t have all that many bodies to study, especially the further back you go. We know that every time a new group enters an area they tend to breed with the people who were already there – this phenomenon is why most modern citizens of England have both celtic and germanic ancestry. So basically, what I’m saying is this: we have no real idea, so why not make something up? Well, if I were an archaeologist, a palaeo-lingust or an anthropologist I’d have literally dozens of reasons not to make something up. But since I’m none of those things, I have no reason at all not to.

When we discussed Atlantis, Tiamat, and the Enuma Elish we talked about ancient religious ideas, how they tend to try and sublimate each other. Graves’ mentioning of the Zeus cult marrying Zeus off to every local version of the Goddess comes to mind. Therefore, let us look at the Theseus myth cycle. He grows to manhood as the son both of a mighty king and of the god of the sea, marches to his mortal father’s city destroying monsters and murderers along the way, fights with a witch, travels across the sea to a great island empire and navigates its labyrinth, slays a monster bull-man and steals the king’s daughter  only to lose her to the god of wanton drunkenness. There’s more, of course – the descent into the realm of the dead, the shelter of the Heraklids, his son’s death at the hands of his own curse – but for now, let us consider. One of the neater explanations for the Atlantis myth is the idea that Plato made a math error.
Instead of it having been 9000 years before Solon, they argue, it was 900 years, which puts it right in line with the Mycenaean war with the Minoans at around 1500 BC and the eruption of Thera. The monster wave, they then argue, caused by the enormous volcanic explosion that created the caldera of Santorin would have swamped Crete and smashed their culture so thoroughly that they would have ceased trading with the Egyptians, and therefore to the Egyptians it would have seemed as though the Keftiu had been swallowed by the sea. Now, there’s a few problems with this – the Minoans weren’t even remotely expansionist, like the Atlanteans of the story, they certainly didn’t attempt to take over all the known world, and Crete is well within the Pillars of Herakles – but on the whole it’s an elegant little theory. But now let us consider a more unlikely alternative.

What if, instead, the heroic tales of the Greek Bronze Age heroes are compressed?

We don’t have many sources for Greek myth. We primarily have Homer, Hesiod and a few others, really, and then a whole host who came after and made additions. From them we have the notions of the war between the Titans and the Gods, the lost golden age, the flood that wiped out most of humanity requiring that mankind be recreated from rocks. And we know that writing is a late invention, but that oral traditions existed and endured throughout the world, sometimes coming down to us today as they were eventually written down. Now, how long did, how long could those oral traditions have lasted, and could later storytellers have resisted the urge to place them into understandable context? Hell, we have writing, and look at how our King Arthur stories have taken Arthur and Camelot and contextualized them as medieval knights with all the trappings of chivalry and mounted combat and armor articulated and plate-riveted. Placing King Arthur in articulated plate is like giving Jesus a flying surfboard, but we do it.

So imagine, if you would, the world of 20,000 years BC. Mankind, without writing, with only the bare rudiments of agriculture, is yet spreading out to cover the world. There are humans in Ice Age Europe, and the glaciers have reached as far as they’re going to. To our ancestors the Neandertal are no more, and no less, than another kind of man. The sea levels have receded to the point where the British Isles are part of mainland Europe, Sicily is connected to Italy, and so too is Asia Minor one land mass with Europe. The Dardanelles are land.

Now, one of the things we know is that mankind tends to build by water sources like rivers, and near harbors and shorelines. We like to be able to fish, and use the rivers and seas for transport. Even in those ancient sites in Egypt, well before the known rise of agriculture, we find evidence of heavy industry in the form of fishing. Mankind builds by water. And 20,000 years ago, as the glaciers reached their furthest extent, that water would have been surrounding land that today is completely under the sea.  Imagine this time before our knowledge, this time unrecorded, only dimly seen in digs and grave sites and almost none of those grave sites and digs taking place where these men and women would have lived. They would have lived by the sea, and the sea was miles, sometimes dozens of miles or even hundreds of miles further away than it is now. The entire North Sea region we know today was either a flat grassland or covered in ice. The Greeks spoke of Hyperborea and Thule to the north, but knew little of those regions save that they were beyond the land of Boreas the North Wind.

We are forced to imagine – how does a pre-literate people preserve a culture so ancient, and how could we know for sure if they were pre-literate? We can’t know, of course, because their most populous settlements, the ones with the greatest flowering of civilization would have been drowned when the glaciers retreated and the sea levels rose. Not in a day, or an hour, but over thousands of years. We today have seen how generations can ignore the changes to climate and the dangers they pose to our society. If we flooded New York, London, Boston, the Japanese Islands, much of Europe and Asia… if we lost those cities, the eastern and western seaboards of the United States, if we flooded the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes with melted glacial ice, if we divided North America with a shallow sea just like the one that covered most of the western continent during the Cretaceous, how long would our technological society endure? Could it endure? And what would our descendents know of us, with our great works covered by the oceans, only a few cities left to be cannibalized? Both Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were nearly totally destroyed before we ‘rediscovered’ them by people who had lived among them for thousands of years, who thought nothing of using their brick for their own purposes. How many ancient sites have been lost? How many towns, villages could have lived, risen, and then fallen and been forgotten by the world in 20,000 years?

Imagine then, this great neolithic society. Perhaps doing all of its work of inventing civilization with stone age tools, hides and skins, yet building vast (for the time) settlements and taming the land. Who knows how far they got? Perhaps they invented languages, perhaps they began to develop agriculture and even metallurgy, who knows? Did they develop a form of writing? Did they develop city planning? Domestication? And then, slowly, the oceans rose up and swallowed their world while they argued and debated and fought one another over what was to be done and eventually fought one another to see who would survive at all, to hold onto the shrinking edges of their world and their civilization. Slowly it rose, and slowly it died. Until all that was left were tribes moving inland, away from the lost world swallowed by the sea, and their myths and legends were no longer written down but were passed by telling tales, and each tale always shifts and mutates in the telling. The story of the grim escape from the waves becomes the deluge tales of several people, altered and mutated in the telling. Deucalion, Ziusudra, Utnapish, Noah… all the result of a tale told again and again and again over this vast (to us) gulf of time.

I said before that the Enuma Elish reminded me of the old conceits of many later writers such as Diodorus Siculius, who made of Atlantis the original home of the gods and populated it with names from mythology. Perhaps men and women from that vast Hyperborean grass plain, drowned by the ocean’s return and the ice’s retreat, made their way south and settled in Greece, and founded their cities and towns in the same region the Mycenaeans would invade thousands of years earlier, and interbred with them, telling their stories as they had done for thousands of years. In time those stories were conflated, and given contexts familiar to those telling them. Figures like Herakles and Theseus, who wore animal skins and used clubs in combat, make more sense when considered not as direct ancestors to the boar’s tusk helmeted Achaeans who sacked Troy but rather as mythologized forerunners brought up to the then-modern world and given as much of a veneer of that civilization as could be managed, after tens of thousands of years of losing their own society and culture. The goddess brought them to that land, and planted them in soil that would shape them in her image, we could say.

In the end we can’t possibly know. Are there many drowned cities of the late stone age waiting for us to discover them at the bottom of our oceans? Did mankind ascend to society only to see it drowned, flooded away? Shades of Robert E. Howard and his Hyborian age, I admit.

There was nothing, and nothing is all that there was. There could not be anything, for there was no place for anything to be, and no time for anything to unfold in. There was nothing, and it was neither dark nor light, good nor evil, there were no qualities to it at all. It was the void, imperishable, equally present and absent.

There is no meaning to words that attempt to say how long this state of affairs existed. It could be said to have lasted an eternity or to have only been a flickering eyelid opening and closing, it does not matter. There was only nothing. Nothing that drowned infinity, that was not and did not. Perfection in its absolute and unvarying emptiness, an emptiness made more profound by its utter lack of any contrast.

However, when all was nothing, the nothing could not be said to truly exist, either. For what is nothing when there is nothing alone, no contrasting state? And in order for nothing to not exist, there must by necessity be something where the nothing is not. And so the nothing tore asunder, after a fashion, and a great hole filled the nothingness…and a hole in eternal nothing is in fact the presence of something coming into existence, anti-void, potential become actual. The process of being so divided created a great desire to swallow up the something, to rend it down into nothing and heal the divide. So was born the dragon, Verth, the devourer, who assailed the newborn creation in its terrible coils.

Verth did indeed destroy. It rent, it tore, it crushed. But all it accomplished was to sculpt the something. By paring away potentials, it created more…all things that exist do so in the context that Verth provided. Unable to stop, unable to even understand creation at all as so antithetical to itself, Verth continued to rage against this knot that blighted the perfection, this scar on the face of nothing. In his rage, rage born of a desire for endless quiet and spaceless timelessness, Verth could only continue to destroy.

Out of the destruction rose the principle of organization, created by the endless cycle of Verth’s thrashing tail. Dytrex rose from the combat and saw the disorganized, frenetic creations of Verth’s war and sought to address the chaos. She turned the ash and dust of the ruined potentials into stars and worlds, and hung them in elaborate dance, selecting paths for them to chart across the sky. She soothed the seething surfaces of the worlds, choosing for each the best face to present to the cosmos. While unable to undo Verth’s mad dance of destruction, she managed to salvage creation out of it, bringing it to being. In time, she felt the lonliness of being the only mind in creation, the only will directing its growth, and so she began the slow process of connecting and organizing that led, step by step, to the creation of beings that could think and feel. At first but a few came into being, but now that time had begun to flow, more came to be, and they came to be more and more like their creator, capable of taking the raw material of creation and altering it, changing it into new forms, new variations.

Enraged beyond reason, Verth came to realize, as much as any being as he could realize anything, that merely smashing away at the blight caused the blight to spread out, to become distinct from itself, to select variations, themes, and in so doing become even more of a blight on the formerly perfect nothing that Verth still longed to return to. Out of desperation, unable to enter into the creation in order to destroy it, Verth considered a new tack. Dytrex had perverted his acts of destruction into more and more elaborate creations…could Verth do likewise? Straining, the Devourer shed scales, and these scales each embedded themselves into the fabric of the endless tapestry/mosaic/sculpture of existence…so were born the Kraa, they who deform, each a nightmare given substance. Loi, she who perverts, who would turn the desire to create into the desire to control, to rule over creation. Runc, he who demands, who would seek to acquire endlessly, creating the urge to glut oneself. Marl, he who slays, who would perfect deadly creations that would be turned against creation itself, unmaking that which has been made. This trinity did their father’s work in creation. They seduced many to their ways, and waged terrible war on existence. Worlds died screaming, dragged down into nothing by the works of their inhabitants. And Dytrex grieved.

Being Dytrex, she did as she always did and sought to make the best possible use of Verth’s ways. So out of the perversion of Loi she wrought Tion, who made of her controlling, confining ways the path of a shepherd who seeks to safeguard and protect. From the covetous grasping hand of Runc she brought forth Pira, who balances mad acquisition with the hand of giving, of sharing all with others. And to combat Marl she herself stole a touch of the rage of Verth himself, daring the edges of the true void and plucking a scale from his very back that she might shape Kaarsh, who can match him both in creation and in combat, seeking always to prevent destruction by being prepared to wage it in turn, understanding the lesson of Verth that sometimes a garden requires pruning, that a work of art requires selection, and that fire can be used to prevent itself.

So came things to pass. Verth still rages and schemes, wrapping his coils around creation, wanting to render it into nothing again and yet in so doing only providing Dytrex with more room to create. The Kraa do battle with Dytrex’s brood in great and small ways, seeking both the grand victory and to win the souls of each individual in creation. And so it is now, and so it will be until Verth swallows all things or Dytrex spreads existence to fill in all of nothing.

Statistical tests have shown that sick people who have taken “sugar pills” – tablets with no drugs in them – but who are told that they have taken drugs often seem to recover, even though their diseases have not really been treated. In “blind trial” experiements, some patients are given healing medication, and others are given tablets with no healing value. The patients do not know that some of the tablets have no drugs. A significant number of those receiving the placebo recover anyway, apparently just by taking what they believe is medicine.
William F. Williams, ed, Encyclopedia of Pseudo Science

I’m sure most of us know about the placebo effect, where a person who is taking completely non-medical substances can show an improvement in health merely because they believe it to be so. (There is, of course, debate as to how much of a role hypochondria can play in this…then again, hypochondria is in its own way an example of the flip side of this phenomenon, where a person’s sincere belief in an illness can actually manifest symptoms of that illness.) Then there are those who walk on hot coals, or manifest stigmata, or cause blisters to raise on their skin, or who can emit electricity from their bodies or magnetically lock themselves in place…what mechanism allows for all this? Doctors refer to the placebo effect as a psychological one…but how can a mere psychological process, in effect a delusion (“These pills are curing me”) bring about real healing? How can the inverse delusion (“I have an illness”) actually cause sickness in some cases?

Harrison’s book, which gathers together the result of many studies, leaves no possible doubt of the reality of spontaneous combustion. But what causes it? At present it must be confessed that the phenomenon baffles medical knowledge. But Harrison offers some interesting clues. He speaks of the researches of an American doctor, Mayne R. Coe junior, who was interested in the study of telekinesis – mind over matter. Coe was able to move aluminim strips pivoted on the points of needles by moving his hands over them…he began various yoga exercises in an attempt to develop his bioelectricity; sitting one day in an easy chair, he felt a powerful current passing downward from his head throughout his body.Colin Wilson, Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved

I once argued that spontaneous human combustion was quite possibly caused by a moment of transcendence, wherein the person in question comes to that moment of clarity so familiar to those who dabble in mysticism (and which is often called hitting bottom by addicts, which many SHC cases seem to be, addicts to alcohol) and at that moment of clarity, when the addict’s brain chemistry is at its most fervid, self-loathing takes over and the victim literally burns him or herself to death. Obviously, just as Harrison does, I see a connection between SHC and the psionic, although in my case I argue that the person who burns is burning himself. Admittedly, it would take a great deal of self-loathing, but subconscious self-immolative suicide is just the beginning of what I’m talking about.

There are innumerable examples. Mircea Eliade reports that the Dogon of North Africa (you remember them…the ones who tell tales of Sirius B, the ones who may or may not have been contacted by fish men from space in Robert Temple’s Sirius Mystery cosmology) can handle red-hot metal and often do in order to ritually repeat the actions of the smiths who forged the universe. Anna Monaro, a patient suffering from asthma, found herself glowing from within in May of 1934, and we can all decide if we think the official explanation that electromagnetic radiation from certain compounds in her skin was an explanation or simply a way of saying She’s glowing and I don’t know why. Or if you want a psychiatric evaluation of her case, we can always use the one handed down…that electrical and magnetic organisms in the woman’s body developed in eminent degree. If you’re wondering what organisms those would be, or how psychiatric training would allow one to perceive them, you aren’t alone in that. There are cases of supposed saints or mystics who display such luminous fields, of course, but in many cases it seems that pain and/or ecstasy play a key role.

It makes me wonder. Pain, whether it be the suffering of an addict unable to bear what their life has become or the self-inflicted pain of one walking on fire, can often serve as a great focusing agent. Distractions melt away when one is in agony. Even the anticipation of pain can serve to clear one’s mind, and the desire to avoid pain is one of the most primal emotions a human can experience. We know from our dabbling in neurological circles that all human thought is rooted in the paleomammalian brain and its emotional drives, that our powerful neocortical ‘computer’ is really secondary to the urges of the paleomammalian, that it is in effect slaved to it. We rationalize. So the idea that pain or the desire to avoid it or end it has an effect on these related phenomenon…the healing of the body through belief in the efficacity of worthless medication, the ability to transcend fire, to end the suffering of a life one cannot bear, to create symptoms to imaginary diseases so that they might be treated, the shedding of light from diseased or wounded portions of the body as if to illuminate their position, the electrical people who display strange powers of attraction or repulsion (as did Angelique Cottin, who could repel objects from her person and who was afraid enough to flee from anyone who witnessed her, or Vyvyan Jones of Henbury, Bristol, who upon breaking his arm in 1976 became charged with sufficient electricity to shock people, stop watches and cause nearby light sources to flicker in his presence) following psychological or physical trauma….becomes something to consider.

Pain focuses thought. But what is thought, that focusing it should have such an effect? Objectively, we think every day and I would be fairly certain that most of us can’t lift iron bars with magnetic fields or cause objects around us to burst into flame. Is it merely the extremity of pain? If it were, wouldn’t our terminal wards be filled with beds that contained naught but ashes or people emitting strokes of lightning as they thrashed about? It would seem to me that were pain enough to cause these kinds of effects, we’d have no assisted suicide cases in our courts and Jack Kervorkian would merely be a doctor with a morbid taste in art. Also, it’s clear that in many cases…the mystic who levitates himself, glowing like a torch, above a crowd of believers, the stigmatic who manifests gaping wounds on her body…that at times pain is totally irrelevant to the situation. And there are other factors to consider.

Psychogenic death Literally “mind-caused death,” the possibility that a person can die as a result of a psychological process was first considered by social scientists under the name voodoo death. Researchers observed in many cultures that individuals who were cursed, or who violated a taboo, frequently died shortly afterward in the absence of obvious physical causes. The classic description is that of Basedow (cited in Cannon). He observed the reaction of an Australian aborigine who had just had a cursing bone pointed at him by a sorceror. The victim: stands aghast, with his eyes staring at the treacherous pointer, and with his hands lifted as though to ward off the lethal medium which he imagines is pouring into his body. His cheeks blanch and his eyes become glassy and the expression on his face becomes horribly distorted…he attempts to shriek but usually the sound chokes in his throat, and all that one might see is froth at his mouth. His body begins to tremble…he sways backward and falls to the ground…writhing as if in mortal agony. After awhile he becomes very composed and crawls to his [shelter]. From this time onwards he sickens and frets, refusing to eat and keeping aloof from the daily affairs of the tribe. Unless a counter-spell is done quickly, death may be imminent.

Leonard George, Alternative Realities

But if we adopt an organismic rather than an atomistic perspective, there seems to be no good reason why organisms at levels of complexity should not have characteristic fields. Indeed, de Broglie’s original idea of matter waves implies such a view: entire atoms and molecules were wavelike quanta, as indeed were all forms of matter. It might not be absurd to think of an insulin molecule, say, as a quantum or unit in an insulin field: or even of a swan as a quantum of unit in a swan field. But this may just be another way of thinking about morphic fields: any particular insulin molecule is a manifestation of the insulin morphic field; any particular swan is a manifestation of the swan morphic field. Morphic fields may indeed be comparable in status to quantum matter fields. If atoms can be said to have morphic fields, then these may well be what are already described within quantum field theory. The morphic fields of molecules may already be partially described by quantum chemistry. But the morphic fields of cells, tissues, organs and living organisms have so far been described only in vague and general terms.Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past

Imagine thought. Thought, at its most basic chemical description, is an encoding of neurological signals which are transmitted by chemicals known as neurotransmitters. Therefore, thought is chemical. Therefore, thought is made up of matter. Therefore, thought is possibly described as a wavelike quanta, a characteristic morphic field of its own, the thought field. Any particular thought can be said to be a manifestation of the morphic field of thought. Are there, therefore, multiple morphic fields of thought? Just as individual cells may have their own fields, and the organs they make up may have discrete fields of their own as well as the fields generated by their components cells, who may have fields generated by their component molecules, which may have fields generated by their component atoms, which may have fields generated by their component electrons, protons and neutrons…and so on, and so on…does each kind of thought generate its own morphic field? Is there a field for hate, a field for love, a field for disgust…all of these fields seperate, and yet overlapping with the larger field of thought itself? And how does the thought field intersect with the field for the brain which generates the thoughts? We know that fields of force such as morphic fields are generated (in general quantum superstring theory, anyway) by the interaction of dimensions on matter. So there is no actual gravity as such, just the effect of a concentration of matter or energy on three-dimensional space, a kind of space warp.

Consider, then, the morphic field of thought. It’s a manifestation of the same means by which all matter and energy is created…the way three dimensional space interacts with the 10 (or 22, or however many dimensions are ultimately postulated) dimensions of the superstring. The superstring could be said to generate the morphic fields of all fundamental matter and energy, which then combine to create the ascending fields…the morphic fields of electrons, protons and neutrons, in varying combinations, creating the various morphic fields of all elemental atoms, which then combine to create the various morphic fields of all molecules…all the way up to the ultimate morphic field for the universe. Everything is a vibration of the superstring, or more accurately stated, everything is different variations of the vibrations of the superstring, just as music is different variations in the vibrations of air. The universe is a symphony played on the string, and the morphic fields are the notes. (Compare this to the celtic concept of Oran Mor the world-music, and you get some interesting ideas.)

Thought and its sub-fields, therefore, are a component in that symphony, and a very interesting one. Imagine a symphony where none of the performers have the sheet music, and are improvised as the music progresses. Now, into that symphony, introduce an instrument which is even more mutable, one that can mimic almost any other music and can range forward and back over the score, making itself felt in ways subtle and gross. We know thought can be translated into action. When a woman picks up a rock and throws it into a crowd, or spends a day planting a garden, she is translating thought into action. There is always resistance to this translation, whether it be the weight of the rock or the consistency of the soil, but this interaction of forces has a myriad of daily affects we experience. The sweep of a clock’s black wing. The smell of a human hive, exhaust fumes and sweat and food’s explosion of odors, the literal Chaos of interacting forces. Chaos can be seen as the fields that make up existence coming into resonance, the hand (as it were) of morphic resonance itself.

But is it possible that the thought fields can interact more directly, without needing to use the body as an instrument? Field theory would seem to argue that it is…morphic fields are habitual. A crystalline structure forms, and then it becomes easier for those crystals to form in that manner again. The fields are generated by repetition, as if the fold of three dimensional space wears a crease in it. So it becomes possible to imagine that as the thought fields interact, they can create regions where the universe is more or less disposed towards their interference. For instance, our example of the terminal ward above. If thought fields, focused by the stimulus of the pain field (like a catalyst dropped into a solution) can cause spontaneous human combustion, why don’t we see explosions every day in these storehouses of the dying, suffering and wounded? Because there are multiple fields at work, and they are worn into place by the general conception of an area. A terminal ward is a place of great suffering, yes…but it is also a place of hopelessness. You only go there when there’s nothing more that can be done. The weight of that much belief, pointed in one direction, becomes a counterforce that only the strongest focus could overcome.

It helps if you imagine the thought fields as electrons for a moment. We know that the reason our bodies don’t just pass through other matter (despite the fact that, in atomic terms, there’s plenty of empty space for solid matter to pass through other solid matter) is because of the repellent charge of our electrons. In this conception, both electrons and thought are essentially just fields, the electron field and the thought field. What if the reason that our sorceror in Australia can kill a fellow who grew up in the same belief system with a bone but can’t even make a sociologist nervous is because their thought fields are not sympathetic, but rather repellent? Electrons bind atoms, yet also repel them. Until the sociologist and the sorceror’s cultures come into close enough contact for there to be (for lack of a better word) morphic infection between them, they simply bounce off of one another. Their thought fields are not composed of the same sub-thought component fields. If you take it further and imagine that the collective of humanity is composed of the thought fields of all humanity together, there would be many, many places where these thought fields were in morphic dissonance with each other…many places where the wave of thought is in flux, and can more easily be swayed in one direction or another by sufficient focus of thought by one individual, imposing her own will like ripples in a pond.

So we have two competing mechanisms for thought fields to have direct affect on the fields of rocks, flesh, light and so on. One is through infection, as the morphic field of thought creates resonance with the morphic fields of other aspects of reality…the symphony taking on a new rhythm, or a new tempo…and the other through dissonance, as morphic fields clash against each other and possibly create new patterns. But how does a thought field create sufficient resonance to overwhelm or infect another? The easiest way is through sympathy (as magicians have known forever, it seems, with their fetish dolls and bits of primal matter) as the personal thought field of one being contains enough of the sub-thought component fields to, in effect, tune itself to match the fields around it. The sorceror points the bone, and like a tuning fork, matches his field to the field of his intended victim’s expectations. They both know what will happen, they both expect it to happen. The sick man is given a pill with no medicine in it, and he tunes his thoughts towards the possibility of recovering. He does not consider that it will not happen, and his focus is sufficient to allow him to override the fields of his own body.

All sorts of possibilities come to mind. Are the legends of shapeshifters endemic to our species cases where someone manages to tune his thought field to closely approximate the body fields of another species and his own form? Does a werewolf think strongly enough that it is both beast and man, and thus become both? One imagines Tarzan and Mowgli as humans who managed to go half-way, and at least think of themselves as beasts strongly enough to achieve some of the power of their chosen totems. Does the ancient Qabbalistic idea of emanations of God, of the descent and ascent of the divine lightning flash symbolize the quest to conceive sufficiently of the ain sof aur that one may tune one’s thought field to the highest possible frequence and encompass everything? Does it follow that, as society becomes more and more intertwined that the set of sub-thoughts that make up the thought field of individuals will become more susceptible to morphic infection, allowing old ways to start working again? Is this what is behind the seemingly constant similarities between quantum physics and ancient mysticism, the almost hermetic nature of the superstring and superspace theories? Is the reason these things don’t seem more readily apparent due to the effort it takes to force the fields of so many disparate components into alignment with our own, or is that the result of a misapplication? Should we be attuing ourselves to the universe rather than attuning it to us? And for that matter, are we deliberately creating a world where the mental focus, be it esoteric or simply personal, is harder and harder to generate?

Some see the universe as math. Music, one might respond, is inherently mathematical and yet resonant. Are we at once notes in a grand song and potential composers? How closely bound is thought to perception, and perception to reality? Hell if I know, but if everything is a vibration of a string, I’m happy just to get to hear some of it.

Scandanavian mythological sources depict dvergar (dwarfs) as an all-male race of supernatural beings, residing in cliffs and stones, created asexually from the bones and blood of giants. Though in most instances dwarfs appear to be quite separate from other mythical races, Snorri Sturluson, in his thirteenth-century mythological manual, the Prose Edda, conflates dwarfs and “black elves,” a subcategory of beings that appears only in his writings.

Lindahl, McNamara and Lindow, Medieval Folklore

One day in a fit of mischief Loki cut off Sif’s golden hair, and Thor would have killed him if he had not found two cunning dwarfs to make new tresses of real gold for Sif, which would grow like natural hair. They also made Freyr’s wonderful ship and Odin’s great spear Gungnir. Loki then challenged two other skillful dwarfs to make three more treasures as good as these, wagering his head that they would not succeed. As they labored in the smithy the dwarf working the bellows was stung persistently by a fly, but in spite of this they succeeded in forging a marvelous boar with bristles of gold, who could run faster than any steed and light up the darkest night. They also forged the great gold ring, Draupnir, from which eight other rings dropped every ninth night. As they were making the third treasure, the fly stung the dwarf again, this time on his eyelid, and he had to raise his hand to brush it away. The third treasure was the great hammer Mjollnir, which would hit anything at which it was thrown and return to the thrower’s hand. Because of the interference of the fly, however, who was Loki in disguise, it was a little short in the handle. Nevertheless the gods held that the hammer was the best of all their treasures, and a sure weapon against their enemies, and they declared that Loki had lost his wager. He ran away, only to be caught by Thor and handed over to the dwarfs; they wanted to cut off his head, but Loki argued that they had no right to touch his neck. So in the end they contented themselves with sewing up his lips.

H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

Pity the smiths of the gods, whom the gods often betray.

The black elves of the mountains, the dvergar born of the blood and bones of the jotun, those titanic rivals of the gods themselves, who would make furious war against the Aesir and Vanir come the crack of doom itself, the battle of Ragnarok on the plain Virdgirthir. The dwarf in his mountain seems little concerned with this rivalry, however. Much as the Cyclopses of ancient greek myth were the spawn of the titans who preceded the Olympian gods, so too were the dvergar born from the corpses of the great giants who existed before the gods, Ymir and his spawn, the ancient enemies and rivals of the hosts of Asgard. And much like those cyclopses, the dvergar were the makers of the most powerful weapons of their divine clients. From Odin’s spear to Thor’s hammer, from the great boar Gullinbursti itself to the ship of Freyr, dvergar hands worked miracles even gods couldn’t match. Yet often those self-same gods lied and cheated their dwarf artificers: the repeated stinging fly lashing at the stony face of the mountain born, stinging him even to his eye, is sign enough of what trust you could place in a god’s word.

Granted, that god was Loki. Still, why should the makers be so despised?

While there are certainly similarities between, say, the dvergar and the Cyclopses (both the dvergar and the cyclopses were made by those who came before the gods, the one-eyed by the Titans, the strainers of heaven like Atlas who could hold the sky itself and the dvergar formed from the blood and bone of beings like Ymir) there is one major difference. Eventually the cyclopses became part of the divine order of Olympus, servitors of Haephestus, honored forgers of Zeus’ thunderbolts, and their brothers the Hekatonkheires were entrusted by Zeus with guarding the prison house of the Titans themselves. The dvergar, however, were neither mistreated by the giants as the cyclopses and hundred-handed were by the titans, nor were they favored by the gods. Rather, each transaction with the dvergar was in the nature of a mercantile or even mercenary character, with payment and wagers making up the exchange. To a certain degree, since the dvergar were at once the descendants of their hated enemies in a manner of speaking and also neither loyal nor disloyal, it makes sense that they should not be beloved by the Aesir and Vanir. And yet, why should Loki despise them, and seek to trick them? It could be accepted that he seeks to trick everyone at times, were it not for the fact that he had but recently relied on their genius to save his own hide from an angry Thor. Loki’s relationship with the gods is complex already… seen as a trickster figure and part of a shamanic legacy, the shadow of Odin and his rival in magic, it is nevertheless through Loki’s actions that many of the treasures and wonders of the gods are procured… the spear Gungir, the boar Gullinbursti, the ship Skipbladnr, the ring Draupnir, of course Mjollnir and even the eight-legged horse Sleipnir that bore Odin forth in battle.

Why should Loki, who would lead the giants forth at the end of the world to Ragnarok, give his eventual enemies so many gifts? Why should he use the dvergar to provide them? Why should he seem to despise them for doing what he chose them to do?

Attempts have been made to account for the eight legs of Sleipnir by likening him to the hobby horses and steeds with more than four feet that appear in carnivals and processions. A more fruitful resemblance seems to be the bier on which a dead man is carried in the funeral procession by four bearers; borne along thus, he may be described as riding a steed with eight legs. Confirmation of this is found in a funeral dirge recorded by Verrier Elwin among the Gonds in India. It contains references to Bagri Maro, the horse with eight legs, and it is clear from the song that this is the dead man’s bier. The song is sung when a distinguished Muria dies. One verse of it runs: What horse is this?/ It is the horse Bagri Maro./ What should we say of its legs? This horse has eight legs.

H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

When Odin dies on the World Ash, he speaks the following lines: I know I hung on the windswept Tree through nine days and nights. I was stuck with a spear and given to Odin, myself given to myself. Well, who caused Odin’s spear to be made? Loki. Who gave Odin his horse, the funeral bier made flesh, the horse one rides to death? Loki. Both Loki and Odin can change shapes, both Loki and Odin know the mysteries of death… for while Odin gives himself to himself, to death, ruled by Hel the dead queen, who is Hel’s father? Loki. Loki is the way into death and the maker of death itself, Loki provides the spear, the horse, and even the dark lady herself. When one looks at the long list of Loki’s offenses against the gods, it becomes harder and harder to understand why the gods should tolerate him for as long as they do… even counterbalanced by his services to them.

Half the time he only aids them in cleaning up messes he himself caused! And yet, they tolerate him anyway. And this doesn’t even address the strange relationship between Loki and Utgard-Loki, a giant who tricks Thor repeatedly… and if this weird item isn’t enough for you, we can then consider how Loki would eventually be bound beneath the earth by the Aesir and Vanir for his role in helping bring about the death of Balder and preventing his rebirth by refusing to cry for him… and this binding of Loki, complete with the snakes dripping venom in his face, is similar to a motif preserved in the Caucasus region of a giant bound to a mountain, an image similar to that of Prometheus of the greeks, bringer of fire (and Loki has often been compared/conflated with fire under its name of Logi, considered in part a god of fire) and clever titan, tricker of man and god alike. Furthermore, unlike Odin or any other god, not only does Loki serve to repeatedly trick the dvergar and in one instant even tricking a very giant engaged in the construction of Asgard’s walls (this incident, involving taking the shape of a mare and luring away the giant’s horse, not only led to the conception and birth of Odin’s horse Sleipnir, who as we have seen is death’s bier, but it also shows us again that the gods of Asgard have no smith and no mason. They do not know the secret of construction as the giants and the dvergar do… they cannot build anything) but Loki goes one step further than that: Loki himself builds the magic weapon Laevateinn, doing what no other god can do. The gods are such poor craftsmen that when the god Aegir of the oceans tells Thor to find him a cauldron to brew beer for a divine feast, they must steal it from a giant, Hymir the father of Tyr. (For those seeking a linkage between the dvergar and the cyclopses and hundred-handed ones, the lay of Hymir is fascinating for appearances of beings like Tyr’s grandmother, a beast with nine hundred heads. It also contains the tale of Thor’s pretense as Veur and his attempt to catch the Midgard Serpent while fishing, an old story in new clothes.) Not even wise Mimir, whose head whispers wisdom to Odin from its resting place in the well, whose death cause Odin to cast his spear Gungnir at the Vanir and brought about the Aesir/Vanir war which resulted in the Aesir victory and the fall of the Vanir… of the eventual absorption of the twins Freyr and Freyja into the pantheon of the gods. Not even Odin himself can make. Only those children of the Jotun, the dvergar… only the mighty Jotun themselves… and only Loki, shapeshifter, shadow of Odin, fire chosen, liar, tempter, and somehow akin to foul deceiver Utgard, only Loki can make out of the mighty gods of Asgard. Only Loki can make, only Loki can cause to be made. Why should this be? What is Loki, that he should be the spearmaker and the father of the horse, that his loins shall produce death for Asgard in the form of the Fenris Wolf and the Midgard Serpent, death for all men in the form of Hel, death and rebirth for Odin via his terrible swift eight-legged steed (the bier made flesh) and his spear, Gungnir that never misses, death for Balder and a bar for resurrection, and when freed from the earth death once again in the form of Ragnarok itself, as it shall be Loki who steers the ship that shall bring the giants across the seas to the place of final battle, Loki who leads the way to Virdgirthir, the field of final battle.

Indeed, even when the goddess Freyja trades her body to the four dwarfs Alfrigg, Dvalin, Berling and Grerr, Odin the All-Seeing in his magical throne does not see it… only Loki does. Loki is the one who tells Odin what has happened, Loki is the one who steals the necklace from Freyja’s impenetrable hall at Odin’s command. And what comes of that escapade, and that artifact of dwarf craft? You must stir up hatred. You must stir up war. Find two kings in Midgard and set them at each other’s throats; ensure that they meet only on the battlefield, each of them supported by twenty vassal kings. Odin’s price for the return of Freyja’s necklace, won by her from the dwarfs by her proficiency in the art of love, sexual creation, is a commeasurate act of death: she must bring blood and destruction, which pleases Odin as the Lord of Battles. (Here we see a possible echo of Freyja as an older goddess form, the combined goddess of love and of war, as seen in Inanna, the Morrigan, Ishtar… we have known her before, I suppose) and so again dwarf craft is turned into a means of death by Loki. I could detail Loki’s role in the return of Thor’s hammer from the giant Thrym, who like the dvergar seeks the sexual union with Freyja and is instead tricked into granting back Thor his hammer by means of Loki’s craft… but I think we see the basic outline. Odin and the Aesir have defeated and taken control of the Vanir, the gods of the earth and fertility, elf-lord Freyr and elf-lady Freyja. The dvergar and their giant creators seek union with these self-same gods… control over the riches and bounty of the earth, where the raw materials of creation sleep. They also seek dominion over Asgard, which they built, and its treasures and weapons, which they constructed, oftentimes tricked into doing so by Loki. And it is only the wiles of Loki himself and those selfsame creations, wielded by the warrior god Thor and his crafty father Odin… who often moves through Loki himself, using the trickster god to accomplish his aims… that bar the way.

What can we make of all this?

Well, for starters, the Norse mythos is one of terrible alienation. The universe entire, the world, is made of the brains and bones and blood of the slain father-Jotun Ymir, his body torn open and all things constructed out of his flesh. Constructed, in fact, is a stretch for what the process is… everything simply is Ymir. Humans are the lice that grow out of his mouldering corpse. Everything is made of Ymir, the primordial Jotun, the first being, the living ice. This is similar to Sumerian tales of Tiamat, the chaos of the ocean, made into the world once slain by Marduk, and it represents an imposition of order onto chaos. It is not a making at all, simply a reformatting. Rules are imposed on the indomitable void, the black nothing is revealed by the divine light. Ymir dies and in dying all things that are come to exist. The idea of the primordial entity of creation, that all beings, man or god or otherwise are descended from being ultimately the monsters opposed by the order that makes life possible is an old one. One notes that even sky gods like Tyr claim giantish ancestry… Thor himself is the son of the giantess Jord, she who is the Earth itself, and of Odin. Even Odin only exists because of the Jotun, the great giant ones.

Between these realms there once stretched a huge and seeming emptiness; this was Ginnungagap. The rivers that sprang from Hvergelmir streamed into the void. The yeasty venom in them thickened and congealed like slag, and the rivers turned into ice. That venom also spat out drizzle – an unending dismal hagger that, as soon as it settled, turned into rime. So it went on until all the northern part of Ginnungagap was heavy with layers of ice and hoar frost, a desolate place haunted by gusts and slithers of ice. Just as the northern part was frozen, the southern was molten and glowing, but the middle of Ginnungagap was as mild as hanging air on a summer evening. There, the warm breath drifting north from Muspell met the rime from Niflheim; it touched and played over it, and the ice began to thaw and drip. Life quickened in those drops, and they took the form of a giant. He was called Ymir. Ymir was a frost giant: he was evil from the first.

Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Norse Myths

From Ymir’s freedom the ice gave forth others, and from it came forth Audumla, the great cow whose four teats leaked rivers of milk, and as Ymir subsisted on those rivers of milk Audumla licked from the ice of Ymir a form called Buri, born also from the ice as Ymir had been. From Buri, somehow, came forth Bor, and Bor married a child of Ymir, a giantess named Bestla. So then did Bestla give Bor three sons, grandsons of great Ymir: Odin, Vili and Ve. And eventually these three sons of Bor and Bestla slew their grandfather Ymir and drowned all of creation save for the giants Bergelmir and his brood, who escaped the blood tide in a tree they carved into a boat. And into the great void Ginnungagap the three grandsons of Ymir hurled forth his savaged body and ripped a world from it: the mountains and the land they made from his sinews and his muscles and his teeth became rocks. The oceans and the lakes were his blood. All things mankind sees, lives in or among, are made of the corpse of this being, first even among the gods as well as the giants. Ymir is the very substance of the world.

This brings us around again to the dvergar, the black elves, made out of the bones and blood of giants… like the bones of Ymir that are the mountains, and the blood that is the oceans and the lakes. How do they compare to the Vanir, those gods referred to by Thrym the Frost Giant upon his stealing of Mjollnir as elves? Why do Odin and the Aesir need to dominate the Vanir, why do they need to manipulate the dvergar? Why can’t they build their own cities, after the war with the Vanir, but must make wagers with rock giants and then trick them out of their promised reward… and why should a rock giant desire Freyja as his price? Why should four dwarfs seek to possess Freyja in exchange for her glorious necklace of the Brisings? Why should Thrym seek the hand of Freyja in marriage so highly that he would trade Mjollnir itself for it, the most powerful weapon in all creation? Freyja is of the Vanir, sister to Freyr (much as Apollo the sun and Artemis the moon were siblings in Greece and possibly an echo of the twin gods lost to us now worshipped by the Germanic tribes as reported by Tacitus, the twins worshipped by the Naharvali under the name the Alcis, prayed to in forest sanctuaries by priests dressed as women) and goddess of both war and love, as we saw before when Odin caused her to cause strife and death on behalf of the Brising necklace she earned through copulation with dvergar smiths, four of them, just as Odin, Vili and Ve set the vault of the sky on the backs of four dwarfs… love and death and the rockborn entwined. Vanir and dvergar can meet in peace as well as war, love as well as hate, but not Aesir and dvergar, nor Aesir and Vanir (as their war relates to us), nor Aesir and Jotun. Always the Aesir must conquer, dominate or destroy, they can never create, coexist or build. At best, they can absorb. Indeed, they lust for Vanir fertility as much as any snarling giant or underworld dwelling dvergar. Unlike in other pantheons, like the Greek or Celtic or even Egyptian or Sumerian ones, the division between the Aesir and the Vanir never ends… Set and Horus exist, ultimately, as part of the same Ennead. Marduk is brought into acceptance with Enki and Anu. Zeus and Apollo and Dionysos all find room in the Olympians. But Odin and Freyr are always aware of their alien natures, and while they may co-exist, the myths must bend to make room… Freyr is said to be able to use Odin’s all-seeing seat, implying that the son of Nord is of equal rank to Odin himself, head of his own group of gods. And Freyja, his sister (and perhaps twin, and perhaps even feminine self, other half of his soul) is the very fertile earth, that all sides seek to possess, from Odin’s burning lust (enraged by her gift of her self to the dwarf smiths in exchange for the necklace of the Brisings) to Thrym’s calculated attempt to the rock giant mason’s straightforward deal. Those that make would have her, and those that do not seek to control her, the fertile earth, the means of making and of new life. Together, the Vanir and the dvergar are the two sides of creation, the material to be worked and the ability to work it, and Odin and his Aesir must carefully control both. And the means?

Loki, the shadow of Odin, who caused his spear to exist, who in tricking the rock giant gave Odin the eight legged steed Sleipnir that is the funeral bier personified, who gave birth to the greatest enemies of the gods… the wolf that shall devour Odin, the serpent that shall slay Thor, the holly arrow that delivered Balder to Hel’s halls, even Hel herself, all are created by Loki. Loki suggests that the gods should take the Rock Giant’s bargain, and Loki tricks the Rock Giant. Loki tricks the dwarfs into making the six treasures and foils their attempt to sever his head with a simple argument of logic. Loki makes the earth beneath man’s feel shake and Loki will guide the giants to Ragnarok. Loki travels at Thor’s side to the realm of Utgard, also named Utgard-Loki, trickster meeting trickster. Loki burns against fire itself and is not far defeated. What is Loki, son of a giant, that he should so move between giants and gods, manipulate the dvergar, spy on the vanir when even Odin cannot, sneak into the hall of Freyja and steal her great treasure? What is he, that he can make weapons, birth monsters, and help end the age of the gods?

To the extent that we accept the hypothesis that mass extinctions have recurred on a 26 to 32 million year cycle, and that these extinctions arise from the periodic occurrence of collisions with one or more comets or asteroids, we have now cleared the decks for the final theoretical confrontation: What induces showers of comets by diverting them towards the planetary region of the solar system?

Donald Goldsmith, Nemesis

There is in the legends of the Scandanavians a marvelous record of the coming of the Comet. It has been repeated generation after generation, translated into all languages, commented on, criticised, but never understood. It has been regarded as a wild unmeaning rhapsody of words, or as a premonition of some future earth catastrophe. But look at it! The very name is significant. According to Professor Anderson’s etymology of the word, it means ‘the darkness of the gods”; from regin, gods, and rokr, darkness; but it may, more properly, be derived from the Icelandic, Danish and Swedish regn, a rain, and rok, smoke or dust; and it may mean the rain of dust, for the clay came first as dust; it is described in some Indian legends as ashes.

Ignatius Donnelly, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

Imagine a void surrounding a mass of incandescent nuclear fire, inhabited perhaps, after a fashion, by a vast, cosmic and terrible sentience coalescing out of the dust and ice swirling into the gap which had been void… at the center cooled the plasma shocked into life by the destruction of stars, blasted apart in violent explosions that sent their compressed stellar matter, no longer mere hydrogen alone but the higher elements which can only occur in the hearts of dense stars. This chain of supernovas did more than seed the frozen void with gold, iron, silicon and other materials, it also send the dust of the region to congealing like those yeasty rivers, filling the edges of the total void with roiling matter. And then crossing the void comes another will, another sentience, perhaps answering the nascent voice of the slowly congealing star burning at the center. An entity of seething chaos that crosses the plane of the newborn ball of fire, disturbs the accretion disk of dust and matter surrounding it, sets eddies to swirling into existence. The entity invades, forming itself from water vapor and dust, and as it sets itself around the edges of this newborn firepit in a huge cage of ice the words are born from the dust, given life by the brute impulse of its will as it forces itself into where it was never intended to be. This mass of chaos. This seething forment. Ymir, the lord of ice, wrenching himself into existence via the cosmic ladder expressed by the ancient Norse eons later as Yggdrasil the eternal tree, the world ash, known as the Axis Mundi, the Tree of Life by others. Ymir descends the tree into physical manifestation as though he was born from melting ice, his will terrible and demanding from the beginning, a counterpoint to the seething urge of fire that inhabited the star, Black Surt, who one day will rise red and swollen and swallow the land of the gods. And between Surt’s fires and Ymir’s ice the band of life in the nothingness of Ginnungagap forms. Burning ice, biting flame, this is how life began.

         How many times did Ymir’s twitchings, the interface of an entity who exists across many realms at once, disturb the cloud of ice wrapped around the fire at the heart of the void? How many times did clouds of ice and rock plummet into the fires of Muspell, and on their way into the death spiral sometimes strike one of the worlds drifting along in the void? Out of Ymir’s own flesh and bones and blood… for the cosmic dust that congealed into the worlds themselves was all these things, the matter of the being seeking to be born… these worlds came to be, and out of the shuddering of the ice came death and life, life and death on one world in particular. Perhaps a shard enfused with more of the ice-born titan being crashed into the small blue world, bringing with it the urge to organize, to become… Audumla, the ‘cow’ who licks forth life, the urge to create more and more complex entities. And life arose, swelling and growing across the surface of the world, only to be drowned and slain by the gore of Ymir itself, new fragments from the ice shell that fell again and again, as the continents twitched and skipped across the planet’s surface, as the world itself burned in its center in an imitation of Muspell and froze along the poles as the will of Ymir infected it. And the giant beings walked the surface of the world and were slain and new giants rose and were slain. Fragments of the colossal Ymir mind, given form by Audumla, would in time arise as separate beings with minds and wills of their own, who would make war with each other and be slain from above by the ice that falls, the fire that seethes… and those beings descended from the Ymir mind use the process of life itself as a tool and a technology, making real the colossal tree Yggdrasil (perhaps a biocomputer of some kind) and the well at its roots, Mimir, the source of wisdom. The direct descendants of Ymir are alien entities housed in flesh, fragmented essences of the enormous intruder into our reality seeking houses and tenements of flesh to inhabit, life to become… they seek to dominate the solar system and perhaps even use it as raw materials to build a final, colossal body for Ymir itself to inhabit, harnessing all life and the worlds as parts and the furious seething heart of the void as an engine, a furnace, a creation forge. They are opposed, ironically enough, by their own creations, their descendants bred out of the life that they brought into existence… the Aesir who inherit the Ymirian drive for dominance yet resist their ultimate fate as parts to the giant-built engine, the Vanir who are the essence of life itself, the world and all things in it, who must be controlled and dominated by the Ymir born if their aims are to be met, and even the false life of entities like the dvergar, the black elves who mirror oppose the Vanir in their very nature, the personifications of creation, inspiration from outside, technology given form and will yet not the ability to care who they build for. The Vanir are the growing plants and the rich earth, the dvergar the urge to shape, prune, mold, and craft, and the Aesir are the rebellious host of the intelligent, given minds by the splintering of the Ymir entity into many facets yet unwilling to rejoin him in his prison of ice, his frozen existence, which they see as death and the nine worlds themselves as born out of his death, rather than as the means of his birth, even as they themselves seek to die in order to learn more of the darkest wisdom, to wrench runes out of the void, a sacrifice of life for eternal life and in the process becoming more and more like the destroyer who seeks to live. And Loki?

Loki is the cost of the interface between the higher realm, the very incarnate language of the infinite exchange with a limited mind. The self can only interact with the higher self of the extraplanar through self-sacrifice, creating a void within oneself to match the void the worlds hang in… and the dark voice of that void colliding with the self is Loki. It is Loki who makes it possible to build and Loki who births monsters, Loki who tells lie and cunning tales, Loki who makes the treasures of the gods and who will one day turn on the gods as well. Loki lives in every mind, every will that seeks the infinite: Loki is the dark guardian of death and the dead who allows one to breach them, and the infinite. If Yggdrasil is seen as the biocomputer generated in higher dimensions by the existence of all life, then Loki is the avatar one who can interface with that vast and cosmic machine and climb the limbs must create in himself and in the extradimensional branches at the same time: Odin’s Loki is not Utgard’s Loki, yet both have a Loki, a void that is a reflection of all of one’s possiblities, both ill and benign. Loki can cause the making of a great hammer or an arrow that can kill the unkillable god. You can bind your Loki in chains and it will still break free. It is the potential that sleeps in the breast, be it the giant king or the Father of the Gods. In the end, it will be an unchecked Loki that helps destroy us all, an unchecked Loki and the creations it brought into being. Witness his actions: his mischief taunts and destroys all, be they Jotun or Aesir, Vanir or dvergar or human. No one is safe without Loki, and yet Loki can be the staunchest of allies as well as the most daunting of foes.

You could play with the details of this as you like. Ymir could just as easily be a vast crashed starship and the dvergar robots intended to reconstruct it, the Jotun descendants of the original crew, Mimir’s well the original interface program with the Ymir’s synthetic organic computer, Yggdrasil, the Aesir the hybrid offspring of humans and aliens, the Vanir humans who fought back against alien expansion, and Loki a computer program intended to allow the Aesir to access Mimir’s well and the dvergar for constuction of alien weaponry to combat the Jotun and their kin which develops sentience and even sympathizes with the Jotun’s goal to destroy the Aesir, enslave the Vanir and conquer the earth. There are many ways to understand the mischief god, the only maker of the Aesir, son of the giants, shadow of Odin, father of monsters, Loki the changing god, and I suspect he wouldn’t have it any other way.