Hope and the Apocalypse

One of the side problems of the total history world we are moving into, where all history is prescient is that we develop a certain jadedness to problems which in the past we were able to deal with by summoning a kind of belief necessary to overcome them.

The specific instance of this I'm interested in dealing with today is the perception of apocalyptic literature and prophecy in the modern era. In the past, apocalyptic literature typically arose during times of great societal stress, generally around certain year types, but not always(side point, it's interesting the correlation between time which is for all intents and purposes man created, and the chronal aspects of apocalyptic prophecies--you always need a date, if only because we wrongly assume all aspects are moving in concert according to our own perceptions of time, when they are as incongruous as the planets (time for a plant is diffrent than time for a human, as is time on Venus is different than time on mars (time is diffrent for someone who has lived longer and whose perspective of time is as a much more fleeting thing, than someone experiencing it for the first time and for whom it must feel interminable)). Many people wrongly dismiss Apocalyptic art as being doom, and in that being bereft of hope and not serving any real purpose for them.

However, the function of Apocalyptic art is oftentimes completely about hope. An end point prescribes value for the individual on the now. If you think that you have ten days left to live, then those ten days become very valuable, and the things you do in them take on an increased importance to you--whereas if you have an interminable amount of time left, then those moments may not feel valued at all.

But why do we need this value? We need it as a survival mechanism. Because there are times in human history, that money, food, shelter, and quality of life are all very much on the wane. And during those times the only thing we can value is our time, and the possibility of our pain ending. In those times, doom becomes hope. The notion that everything will be washed away and a new beginning will be attained is very appealing to those in duress. Apocalyptic writing like dystopian writing is as much a reflection of it's time as it is a projection into the future.

The problem arises, that because of postmodernism, the internet, and the overflood of information, the ability of the human mind to respond effectively to apocalyptic art has been severely compromised. It becomes a boy crying wolf situation. And what happens in that story, which is significant, is that eventually a wolf does come, and the boy is crying wolf, but nobody is listening.

You see this more and more as a response to issues that require people to sacrifice for the greter survival of the species. Such as the American response to global warming, which has been a grumble at best and at worst a willful denial of the oncoming crushing reality. Global warming is seen by many as the new Y2K bug. And this is a direct result of the past knowledge that the post information society has instinctively absorbed into it's sub-consciousness.

The worry I'm expressing here, is that our basic instinct to be wowed by the sublimity of apocalyptic vision has been sufficiently beat into the ground, such that we are in fact heading for a coming apocalypse, that is more likely than ever, because we are lacking in our normal ways to adapt and change to the on-rushing eschaton.

Actually, worry probably isn't the right word. Because I do think the event that does happen is going to result in an evolution of the species. So it may be correct to lens this jadedness as yet another aspect of our general evolution to the eschaton event. Like, very plant following the sun over the horizon.

Sex, Index Cards, and the Proto Internet Occult Conspiracy

A late fix for a fantastic Tuesday.
This by way of Kenneth Hite and Rob Mcdougal:
"The wise and devious robotnik gave me a pointer to this entry in Paul Collins'³ blog, which contained the following snippet of almost unimaginably pregnant occult metaphor:

In the US, for instance, the War Department struggled with mountains of haphazard medical files until the newly touted method of card filing was adopted in 1887. Hundreds of clerk transcribed personnel records dating back to the Revolutionary War. Housed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC -- the scene of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a generation earlier -- the initiative succeeded a little too well. Six years into the project, the combined weight of 30 million index cards led to information overload: three floors of the theatre collapsed, crushing 22 clerks to death.

Can anyone say Ascension of the Bureaucrat in 1894? [EDIT: Per Wikipedia, on June 9, 1893.] Blood sacrifice to begin the Information Age? Creation of the "mass man" from data (which is to say, DNA) and crumpled flesh (of 22 people -- where was the 23rd, necessary to complete the full chromosomal pairing?), intermingled on the blasphemous regicidal altar of America? The possibilities are limitless."

Also I definitely want to link to this.

Debauchette apparently had an interview with Diane Sawyer, and has written two very great blogs on sex work. So yeah. Worth seeing that if you haven't. Good stuff.

An excerpt:

"In some ways, I feel the way I felt when I was sitting across from Sawyer. I feel like I can only sigh, because I doubt I can begin to penetrate the many layers of misunderstandings and preconceptions, let alone that relentless working assumption that a woman’s value as a human being decreases as she gains sexual experience. (Sawyer asked me about preserving the ’sanctity’ of my body, as though sex without the imprimatur of love were inherently degrading.). I’m glad my mother didn’t lash out in anger or patent disgust — what’s come across in her note is some mix of restraint, confusion, and extreme discomfort. That deserves some kudos, even if I still feel miles away from having a real conversation with her about this, which, unsurprisingly, is exactly how I felt when I sat down with Diane Sawyer. We just don’t see eye to eye."

Fairy Tales in Your Astral!

Here's an interesting article about the do's and dont's for the shamanic traveler using germanic magic. It's based upon the rules of fairy tales which the author, Jenny Blain, has so politely broken down to their key elements:

"Ground rules for conduct

Basic principles

1. Be aware of what is around. Look before leaping. Don't rush into situations.
2. Speak to those that you meet. Always be polite and courteous. Be truthful when they ask you questions
3. If a creature asks to come with you, accept their company or help. (Caveat below -- if they put conditions on their help, be wary!)
4. If some creature or person asks for help, give it. If the help is beyond your means, explain this -- the creature may tell you how to fulfil it. Your ally may assist you, if you ask. The help may be needed within the journey, or in ordinary reality.
5. If you make a promise, keep it. This is regardless of whether it refers to actions within the journey, or those you should complete in ordinary reality.
6. If some creature or person asks you to share food, share it.
7. If a creature you've helped gives you a token, poem, or anything else, keep it. It will later be useful.
8. If you undertake a task, do it to the best of your ability.
9. If you cannot do a task, ask your ally or those with you.
10. If you want to go home (return to a safe place in the journey, or wake to ordinary reality), say so."

I've always loved fairy tales, and feel like their importance is oftentimes in a very cliched way dismissed. Or certain fairy tales are in favor of others. But I just love the sense in which we project nightmares into our children's psyche at such a young age, and the stories or at least pieces of them stay with you for the rest of your life. I can still go to that place in my head where Little Red Riding Hood is walking through the dark forest on the way to grandma's house. I can still see the bread crumbs that Hanzel and Gretel tried to leave. I can see cackling wild hags of the forest. And I haven't probably heard these stories in quite some time.

It's so hard to do modern day fairy tales I think. I'm not sure why. Perhaps the magic is missing? How were these original stories crafted? I know according to the wiki the Grimms were primarily linguists whose by-product was fairy tales. But a lot of those stories are older than them. I'd like to think these stories were crafted around campfires with everyone entranced, from states of shamanic storytelling ecstasy.

I was thinking maybe Texas Chainsaw Massacre might be something of a modern fairytale. In particular the chase scene through the woods, because that taps into a primordial shared nightmare, of never being able to outrun the wolf. That blue darkness, and how she keeps going back and forth through those woods, in almost never-ending loops, with the chainsaw breathing closer and closer. And then we have like American Tall Tales, which tend to lack the proper horror to really have the weight to stay. With the possible exception of John Henry. But those stories seem to occur past a point historically where storytelling was already quickly being engulfed and avoided by things like the radio and the television.

So I dunno.

Infomancy and the Coming Ragnarok

This is a word I discovered today that is one of those things that describes a sensation I've felt for some time now. So it's with a great deal of happiness I present:

Infomancy! Defined here as:

"n. 1.The field of magic related to the conjuring of information from the chaos of the universe. 2.The collection of terms, queries, and actions related to the retrieval of information from arcane sources."

See it in practice here.

Basically it's a description of a phenomena I've seen on message boards for years. You shoot out an inquiry into the internet. Pretty much anything. If you charge the intent enough that it's interesting to the will of the collective information, you will get a drove of experts flocking to your fired questions, tripping over one another to answer your previously innane query.

In the instance above it was about the pinging of information regarding japanese robots. But it can really be anything. It really is the basis of how a search engine even works. You put out the coded information for what you want into the little search box, and it comes out the other end in useful or arcane information that you can apply outside of the internet or turn around and redistributed back into it. There's a frictive force at work here of ideas gyrating off of one another constantly generating new realities and factoids because of it.

It's almost it's own kind of alchemey. In the purest form, a true infomancer is just looking for elements of information to combine into a coherent gnosis which will allow them to break the bonds of the world of information around them.

I've talked often about the eschaton of 2012, and the theories of the mayans, and the norse, that the world will end, but come out in a new way that is changed. But I'm starting to think what we will experience is a loop back around. A lot of the concepts that we are seeing on the internet seem to correspond with earlier ideas and methods for villages and early groups of people. In all seriousness, the most important books you can read on understanding the internet and the coming(existing) world are ones based in concepts that we thought were long dead. Metaphors of shamanism, the village, black plague--the internet has already kicked off the next age of human life, and some of the former patterns are playing out in a predictable and usable way.

Our future is going to be shaped by the collision of magic and technology, and the resulting friction will usher us into a new sublime. But I don't really know if the two are just going to fuse, or repel. Judging some of the current metaphors I'm seeing though, I think some sort of fusion is at place. Or at worst a co-opting.

At any rate, this is a great quote:

" Where’s my flying car, you ask? You’re driving it right now."

Loki's Taunt

This is a fun little page which has a story of Loki taking on all comers with his wits like Steven Martin in Roxeanne.

A great Grinding.be blog on Total History.

Barbelith debating wod.

Don't say I never do anything for you. Sorry for the short blog today. Going to write more later, but this is for the middle of the day folks, with nothing to do.

Bob Haskins (Roger Rabbit): Unwitting Magician

As a refresher here is an exerpt from the Wiki on Tulpas: Evans-Wentz (1954: p.29) discusses tulku (or nirmanakaya) and tulpa:

Inasmuch as the mind creates the world of appearances, it can create any particular object desired. The process consists of giving palpable being to a visualization, in very much the same manner as an architect gives concrete expression in three dimensions to his abstract concepts after first having given them expression in the two-dimensions of his blue-print. The Tibetans call the One Mind's concretized visualization the Khorva (Hkhorva), equivalent to the Sanskrit Sangsara; that of an incarnate deity, like the Dalai or Tashi Lama, they call a Tul-ku (Sprul-sku), and that of a magician a Tul-pa (Sprul-pa), meaning a magically produced illusion or creation. A master of yoga can dissolve a Tul-pa as readily as he can create it; and his own illusory human body, or Tul-ku, he can likewise dissolve, and thus outwit Death. Sometimes, by means of this magic, one human form can be amalgamated with another, as in the instance of the wife of Marpa, guru of Milarepa, who ended her life by incorporating herself in the body of Marpa."

Bob Haskins inadvertently creates a Roger Rabbit Tulpa:

"And then I watched my daughter, Rosa, she was three at the time, and she has all these invisible friends whom she talks to - Geoffrey and Elliott. And I realized that, as we get older, our imagination goes further and further to the back of our head. When we're a kid, we can actually take it out and look at it. I mean, we can see it. As we get older [still], senility comes in, and the imagination comes to the forefront again, and takes over.

"So, I just concentrated on an immature imagination - forcing it back to the front so I could actually take it out and look at it. And I managed to actually see them, which was all right, but you do it for 16 hours a day for five months... ! I started to lose control and hallucinate in all kinds of embarrassing places. Some of it's quite rude, but there's not much you can talk about. At one point, it was quite frightening, weasels and all sorts of things turning up."

Get Familiar! Human-Animal Spirit Relations (eww!)

The relationship between animals and humans is always an interesting one. This topic comes by way of two straight days of visiting New England Zoos and a crackpot I-just-woke-up-mind. But um, yeah--humans and animals, huh? Whether it's herding sheep, providing transportation--we've always had animals helping us in various ways.

This extends into the spiritual realm with the concept of familiars. A familiar is a spirit usually in animal form, that helps the magician in various tasks. It's kind of a servitor in that way. But mostly it's probably best to not confuse the issue.

Anyways. Wikipedia has one of my favorite familiar anecdotes:

"During the English Civil War, the Royalist general Prince Rupert was in the habit of taking his large poodle dog, named "Boye", into battle with him. Throughout the war the dog was greatly feared among the soldiers of Parliament and credited with supernatural powers, evidently considered a kind of familiar (see Prince Rupert). At the end of the war the dog was shot, allegedly with a silver bullet."

Were-poodle!

There's also a pocket fox that is a familiar of sorts in Japanese magics. The Kuda-Gitsune. Or Pocket fox. Which is a little fox that lives inside of a bamboo pipe that you ask questions to.

I can't even begin to guess how the familiar situation will change as these animals actually die out. Will they grow in mythology as they become extinct, or will we just lose the idea of these animals as effective metaphors for communicating with the hyper-conscious?

It seems a shame, no?