readoldthings | Entries tagged with something totally different

Hi Everybody,

Posting will probably continue to be a little light around here for the next few weeks. But in the meantime, I'm running a sale on various divination products over at my Etsy store. Could you use a bit of Geomantic advice? Or would you like a tarot reading? Perhaps there's someone on your Christmas list who would love a detailed reading of their astrological chart? If so, head on over!

A short post today on something that I've been thinking about for a while. There are a number of little rules, heuristics and aphorisms I've discovered or adopted over the years, and I'd like to share them here from time to time. Today is one I'm calling Joan's Law.

(By the way, there is a trap hidden in this post-- see if you can spot it.)

Meet Joan

I once worked for a company-- let's not name them-- with an accountant I'll refer to as "Joan." Joan was a very interesting sort of accountant, in that she appeared to be terribel at math. I'm not sure how one gets an accounting job while being bad at math, but Joan did. I know that Joan was bad at math because every time you got your paycheck at this company, you had to carefully go through it and look for errors. When, almost inevitably, errors were found, you then had to bombard Joan with calls and texts in order to get your paycheck corrected.

Now, here's the other thing about poor old Joan-- her errors only ever went in one direction. Both I myself and everyone I knew were regularly paid the incorrect amount, but it was always less than we were owed, never more. Then as now I can understand being poor at math-- many people are, though it's an odd trait for an accountant. But one would imagine that, if simple innumeracy were the issue, the errors would be just as likely to be in our favor as the company's. And yet they never were. What ever could explain this discrepancy?

Well, you know the answer as well as I do. Joan wasn't bad at accounting. Joan was a shyster, and she was bad at honesty. Her sister and brother-in-law were the company's owners, and were themselves, well, let us say "given to morally dubious decision-making."

What's the Point?

The reason I'm talking about this is that it's occurred to me that we have a lot fo Joan's running around our society. Indeed, we all seem to play Joan from time to time. Not that we are all involved in scamming our sibling's employees. No, most of our-- can I call it Joaning? We do most of our Joaning in other areas of life. Above all, for most of us, most of our opinions are nothing but Joan.

Let me give you two examples.

What do aliens, Atlantis, extra-sensory perception, reincarnation, ghosts, Bigfoot, the lost city of Troy, reincarnation, astrology, and the theory of primitive matriarchy have in common?

Taken one at a time, not very much. There's every possiblity, after all, that we may live in a world in which interstellar travel has been discovered by one or more alien species, but not a world in which a large primate has remained hidden for centuries in the North Americna wilderness, or a world in which the Dead occasionally speak with living human beings, but in which no individual can perceive future events by any means; or a world in which an urban civilization had formed on at least one Atlantic island by the year 10,000 B.C., but not in which any society has been ruled primarily by women. And yet, when we find supposed "skeptic investigators" looking into any of these matters, they always come up with the same answer: No. No aliens, no at Atlantis, no telepathy, no precognition, no matriarchs, no magi, no nothing. (By the way, did you notice that I snuck Troy in there? That's to illustrate a point; at one time one was required to believe that Troy was a myth, until someone went out and found it. What was the evidence, prior to Schliemann's excavation of Troy, that it had not existed? There was none.)

Here's another example. What do reparations, abortions, climate change, trade unions, immigration, gay marriage, and gun control have in common? Again, taken one at a time, nothing at all. It's easy to imagine being in favor of reparations for slavery but oppposed to further immigration, and it's equally easy to imagine believing that abortion is fine but that gay marriage is not. But we all know that in practice, if I know your position on any one of these issues, I know your opinion on all the rest of them.

And the reason, just as in the case of so-called "paranormal phenomena," is that what you call "your opinions" are not actually your opinions. They're a set of opinions dictated to you by somebody else, which you dutifully repeat. And you do this not because you've examined them one at a time, but, ultimately, as a demonstration of allegiance. One cannot be a good member of the Skeptic community while believing in Bigfoot and reincarnation but not any of the others. No more can one be a good Woke Democrat while supporting gun rights and restrictions on abortion, even while towing the party line on all the other issues.

And so I'd like to call this phenomenon Joan's Law.

Joan's Law states that if a series of repeated actions, whether in the form of accounting errors or expressions of opinion, don't seem to make sense, but all tilt in one particular direction, the tilt is the point. That is-- the accounting errors aren't errors, they're scams; the opinions aren't opinions, they're statements of loyalty. In fact, I'd suggest that loyalty tests are actually very common in human groups, and that proofs of loyalty underlie a great deal of human behavior, especially behaviors that don't otherwise make sense.

And so a Corollary to Joan's Law: If someone's actions don't make sense to you, try to figure out who they are trying to impress.

Today's post is not fun, but it's something that I felt that I had to say.

The Situation

Yet another war has broken out, as you're doubtless aware. As of this writing, it's unclear where it's going or when it will end. If we're very fortunate, it will be confined to Gaza, which will be horrible enough. If not, it will spill over into Lebanon and Syria at least, which runs the risk of drawing in the United States and Iran in turn. At that point the powers involved might just well decide that the Ukrainian war and this war are the same war after all, in the same way that everyone decided that the Sino-Japanese War and Anglo-German War were the same war after 1941 or so.

This is not a blog about current events and it's not a blog about politics. As originally conceived, it is a blog about books. And the reason I want to say something about current events is that I'm concerned that some of the books that we have on offer will make very bad guides for the present moment. To say it another way, I believe that we need better bards.

Let me be more specific. There are two stories which I love very much which I think are utterly useless for the present moment, and I worry that since many of my generation were raised on them, they will be floating around in our heads and, whether we realize it or not, guiding our actions. What stories are these?

One is The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The second is not a book but a movie, though I often imagine that in a thousand years schoolchildren will be forced to read its screenplay the way that modern children read Shakespeare's plays. Of course, I'm talking about Star Wars.

And there is a third, hovering in the background of these and informing both, which we'll get to.

Good and Evil

Both of these are war stories, and that's helpful enough to have on hand in a time of war. The trouble is the way that they present war. In both of these stories, as you know, the war is between a Good Side and an Evil Side. The Good Side is all Good, and the Evil Side is all Evil. Moral ambiguity concists only in the possibilty that some characters may move between sides. Once they have done so, however, they then become entirely good or entirely evil as the case may be. Darth Vader, once redeemed, is good; Saruman, once fallen, is evil.

Since the outbreak of war on Saturday, I've seen many, many comments on the war between Hamas and Israel, and every last one of them has framed this conflict in these terms. One side must be good, and equivalent to Aragorn and Luke Skywalker, and the other side must be evil, and equivalent to Sauron and Darth Vader. There are no other possibilities.

Hovering in the background, of course, is that ur-story, the creation myth of the modern world:

The story of World War II.

This is our great modern epic, which has now so consumed the collective imagination that we cast every conflict past or present in its terms. Indeed, as the capacity for reason has diminished-- especially among public intellectuals-- it seems our moral compass consists entirely in determining, in any given situation, which side represents Hitler. New Hitlers are always turning up; in my life, Hitlers have included Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein again, Barack Obama, Moammar Qadaffi, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin. And, right on cue, today I saw a right-wing commenter on Twitter frame the new war in the Middle East in precisely these terms: "Ask yourself, which side would Hitler support?"

If you think that these sorts of stories are applicable either to the Russo-Ukrainian War, the war between Israel and Hammas, or any third and nightmarish war which may result from the combination of these two, let me make a suggestion. Find someone you know who supports the opposite side to the one you do, and ask them to make their case to you in detail. Don't say a word; just let them regail you with tales of the atrocities of the Palestinian terorists, the Israeli Defense Forces and settlers, the Russian Army, the Ukrainian Army, the Azov Batallion, on and on and on. I'm not going to do this for you, by the way. If you're a reader who supports the Palestinian Resistance and hates the Zionists, or who supports the state of Israel and hates anti-Semites, don't bother lecturing me in the comments; I'll just ban you. Do the work on your own. Talk to someone who disagrees with you, and ask them why. By the end, you will either understand that you are not the side of the good guys anymore than they are, or you will scream at them to shut up. I'm afraid the second choice is unfortunately common these days, and it's a choice I want to circumvent if I can.

There Is Another Way To Look At War

Humans think in stories as surely as we count with numbers. If we want a different way of thinking-- about any situation-- we need a different story to think with. And so in this case we'll need a war story. The good news is that, as Western people, we are heir to one of the greatest war stories of all time. It's a powerful, dark, difficult and thought provoking story. It's a story with heroes on both sides-- and the heroes are real heroes, the sons of gods. It's a story where men make bad decisions, and good ones, rise to the occasion or are brought low by their own pettiness. It's a story about a war in which the very gods themselves took part, siding with one force or the other as the occasion demanded.

I'm talking, of course, about Homer's Iliad.

You probably know the story; if not, you should. But let's take a moment anyway and review the facts.

The Iliad begins in the ninth year of the Trojan War. A great coalition of Greek city-states has united against the kingdom of Troy, in order to rescue Helen, the bride of the king of Sparta, taken captive by the Trojan Prince Paris. Over the course of nine years the Greeks have pushed their way through the Trojan lands, and now besiege the sacred city of Illion itself.**

(**You've probably heard that it was a ten year siege of a city called Troy, and that's how I learned it too. But the poem makes continuous references to the Greek armies having conquered many different cities of the Trojans, which implies that Troy was a kingdom or empire and Ilion its capital. Achilles himself tells us that "With my ships I have taken twelve cities, and eleven round about Troy have I stormed with my men by land." And yet everyone claims that the war was a ten year long siege, and that's what you'll see repeated by sources like Wikipedia. No, I don't know why.)

Over the course of the poem, the Greeks and the Trojans fight back and forth, and neither side is able to defeat the other. The gods themselves intervene. Poseidon and Hera and Athena fight alongside the Greeks; Zeus and Aphrodite and Ares stand with the Trojans. The heroes contest with one another. Aeneas, the Trojan son of Aphrodite, contends with Diomedes, and is only saved from death by the intervention of his mother and Apollo. Patroclus, companion of Achilles, kills Sarpedon the son of Zeus. Hector, great leader of the Trojans, kills Patroclus in his turn.

Patroclus is the companion of Achilles, greatest of the Greek warriors, and up until now Achilles has behaved like a sulking child. At the beginning of the story his captive bride is taken away by Agamemnon, and Achilles withdraws from the fighting, refusing to intervene to save the Greeks from certain defeat. When he finally, grudgingly, allows his men to return to the fight he still refuses to go himself, and Patroclus is only killed because he was wearing Achilles' armor and mistaken for Achilles himself. Now Achilles, filled with rage, sacrifices a number of Trojan soldiers on Patroclus's funeral pire and marches into battle, girt with new arms and armor made by Hephaestos. Armed by the gods, he kills Hector before the walls of the city.

Thorughout the story, as I've said, Achilles has behaved like a spoiled brat, while Hector has been brave and sympathetic, an honorable leader of men. And now, not even Hector's death is enough to appease Achilles. He mutilates Hector's body and drags it behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. Oh, and he sacrifices a number of Trojan warriors on the funeral pire of Patroclus to boot. It's still not enough; like a child having a tantrum, he can't calm himself, and he falls to brooding, periodically taking a break to drag poor, dead Hector around some more.

At the very last, Priam, Hector's aged father, comes to Achilles to beg for the body of his son to be returned to him. And now, after 24 books of sulking and murder, Achilles relents. He invites the old man to his tent, and together they drink, and eat, and tell stories. They weep for the dead on both sides. Achilles returns Hector's body with a promise that the Greeks will obey a truce for twelve days, so that Priam will have time to bury his son.

Here is how the story ends:

Forthwith they yoked their oxen and mules and gathered together before the city. Nine days long did they bring in great heaps of wood, and on the morning of the tenth day with many tears they took brave Hector forth, laid his dead body upon the summit of the pile, and set the fire thereto. Then when the child of Morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared on the eleventh day, the people again assembled, round the pyre of mighty Hector. When they were got together, they first quenched the fire with wine wherever it was burning, and then his brothers and comrades with many a bitter tear gathered his white bones, wrapped them in soft robes of purple, and laid them in a golden urn, which they placed in a grave and covered over with large stones set close together. Then they built a barrow hurriedly over it keeping guard on every side lest the Achaeans should attack them before they had finished. When they had heaped up the barrow they went back again into the city, and being well assembled they held high feast in the house of Priam their king.

Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses.

The End.

The Iliad is a very difficult book for modern readers. Its ending is not triumphant. The Death Star does not explode. The ring is not cast into the fire. Hitler does not shoot himself in a bunker. It ends in the funeral of a good man, with more war still to be fought. It is a hard story, a bitter and a sad story. And in that it is more thoughtful than every World War II remake that the past 80 years has given us-- very much including our fanciful and self-aggrandizing account of the war itself.

In the Iliad, there isn't a right side and a wrong side. The war began long before the text itself, with Paris, prince of Troy, carrying off Helen, wife of the Spartan King Menelaus. But Paris was promised Helen by Aphrodite, a goddess, and some sources claim she went willingly; in any case Paris himself is no mere robber. He is also known as Alexandros, "defender of men," a name that he was given for heroic deeds in his childhood. And the Greeks are not the Star Wars rebels or Tolkien's elves. Agamemnon, their supreme commander, sacrificed his own daughter to Artemis to ensure victory. And victory he was given, but for his deeds the gods allowed him to be murdered by his own wife upon his return to Argos. There are heroes on both sides, villains on both sides, gods on both sides.

It is a story for our time, and it is the story of our wars.

An Hour For Men

Let me tell you a hard truth. And for this I'm going to have to ask that the children and the faint of heart leave the room; this isn't for you.

Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings are stories for children. Moreover, the story on which they are based, the tale of our heroic struggle against evil in World War II, is a lie. The Second World War was a war like other wars. The Nazis were guilty of monstrous war crimes. And so was our great ally, the Soviet Union, a monstrous prison-state which would have been destroyed if not for American aid. And so were we. At Dresden and Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki we murdered hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians. World War II was a war like other wars; we celebrate it because our side happened to win.

Now, there is an easy way to misunderstand what I'm saying, and so I'm going to address it now. My point is not that America should not have been involved World War II, or that we were "just as bad" as the Nazis. My point is that there were evil deeds on both sides, and there were good men on both sides. Again, we like to use the word "Nazi" as a stand-in for "evil," but it's easy to see that this isn't so. Imagine that you are a German of military age. The year is 1944. To the east, the Red Army is rolling through Poland, bringing murder, rape, and mass enslavement. To the West, the Americans and their British allies are advancing through France, and the New York Times has just published the Morgenthau Plan to reduce Germany to an agrarian society after the war. For years British and American planes have been raiding German cities, killing indiscriminately. You loathe Hitler, and you believe the rumors you've heard about the camps at Dachau, Auschwitz and elsewhere. But everyone knows what the Soviets have done at places like Katyn Forest, and your cousin who survived Dresden has told you what the Americans are capable of. What do you do?

In real life, evil doesn't dress up in a black helmet, and good doesn't wear white wizard robes. There are no good or evil people. There are only good or evil actions.

And--

This is the really hard part--

In real life, unlike in fantasy stories, two people can both choose good, and still end up on opposite sides of a conflict. They can even end up killing each other. This is what it means to say that "The gods fought on both sides" of a war. This, actually, is why polytheism is more realistic than monotheism, especially as regards life on Earth.

A Thought Experiment

Let's illustrate the point.

Suppose a family member, a member of your household, got into a conflict with a neighbor. How it began doesn't matter. Let's just say that it became, over the course of months, one of those intractible human conflicts marked by tit for tat retaliations, with each side blaming the other. Let's say that when you tried to talk to your family member-- let's say it's your son-- about the matter, it was clear that both sides were at fault, and had done terrible things, but that he had started it. Maybe the neighbor was another boy, and your son called called him a name, and the other boy hit him, and your boy retaliated by getting his friends together to beat up the other boy. On and on and on.

It's a terrible situation, right? And a situation all too common among human beings. The right thing to do is to have both sides sit down, admit their own part in the conflict, apologize for their misdeeds and forgive the other's. That's what should happen.

But-- Uh oh.

It looks like the neighbor kid's snapped. The beating he took from your son and his friends was the last straw. Now he's coming over to your house with a knife.

Your son is in the back yard. You yell, but he doesn't hear you. There's the neighbor kid. He runs into the backyard and knocks your son down. There he is, holding the knife, about to kill your son. But now, as luck has it, you have a gun in your hand, and a clear shot.

What do you do?

There's no good side in the conflict, and your son started it in any case. You can imagine what drove the neighbor kid to react this way-- imagine his fear and humiliation as your son and his friends beat him into the ground behind the school. Now you have a chance to shoot and kill him on top of it, and become a murderer. Would you do it anyway?

I would, and I'll bet you would too.

Why? Because the other kid is evil? Because he's no better than a nasty orc or a Stormtrooper or-- worst of all-- A Nazi?

Grow up.

I'd shoot him and you'd shoot him because it would be the right thing to do. It would be the right thing to do not because he is evil, but in spite of the fact that he is not evil. In the final analysis, it would be the right thing because duty to family is a part of the virtue of piety, and piety is a part of Justice.

It's a horrible thing to think about. No one wants to face a situation like that. But in this real world, situations like this are far more common than fights with orcs or goblins or stormtroopers or "Nazis."

Why Talk About This

If we are fortunate, and pray to God that we will be, the latest conflict in the Middle East will be resolved quickly. But there's a chance that it won't be. If so, many of us are going to have to make choices. They are going to be hard choices.

What I want is for us all to make them with our eyes open, like men. If we have to choose sides, let us each choose the right side.

The right side is not the side of the elves, or the angels. The right side is not the side of whoever is fighting "Nazis." There are no Nazis. There never really were, in the mythical sense. There are only other human beings, all a mix of good and evil, some more good on the balance, some more evil.

The right side is the one which Justice demands you support. Not me, not your cousin, not your favorite YouTuber: You. Justice is a virtue, and it has a clear definition: It consists entirely in right relationships. Now loyalty or Fidelity is a component of Justice, and each of us has groups which rightly demand our loyalty. In order to act justly, we must decide which groups those are, and act accordingly.

In the Iliad, the Greek kings join Menelaeus and Agamemnon because that is what Justice demands of them. The Trojans also had allies; the Amazons fought alongside them, and so (after the events of the Iliad) did the Aethiopians. When Memnon, king of the Aethiopians, obeyed the summons to war, he obeyed the command of Justice; when Achilles slew Memnon as he had slain Hector, he too obeyed the commands of Justice. It's not cinematic, it's not satisfying, it doesn't make us feel better about ourselves. But it's real.

Obedite mandata Iusticiae-- "Obey the commands of Justice." Let this be our slogan, and not "Kill the Nazis." We'll likely feel worse about ourselves, and worse about whatever killing we do or our side does. And I'd suggest that that's a very good thing.

Gathered Accidents

A great many of the philosophers associated with the Platonic tradition either have names that begin with P, or else feature a P very prominently. This includes:

Pythagoras
Parmenides
Plato
Philip of Opus
Philo of Alexandria
Plutarch of Chaironeia
Apuleius
Plotinus
Porphyry
Plutarch of Athens
Proclus

And we might also mention Apollonius of Tyana and his biographer, Flavius Philosostratus. According to Grimm's Law, Ps and Fs are equivalent sounds in Indo-European languages, as in pater and father, so we're justified in including F-names in our survey.

Later, in the Renaissance, we have Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandala.

The exceptions to the rule include Iamblichus, Olympiodorus, Damascius, Simplicius and Syrianus in ancient times and Thomas Taylor in our own. On the other hand, two of the most important modern Platonist philosophers are Pierre Grimes and John Vervaeke, and V is also equivalent to P-- see the German Vater.

In a similar way, the genre of punk rock, which defined much of my (badly) misspent youth, exists in large part thanks to three men of Celtic origin named John.

John Lydon is an ethnic Irish Catholic from London. You might know him better by his stage name Johnny Rotten, under which he performed as lead vocalist for the Sex Pistols.

John Cummings was an American of Irish descent from Queens, New York. Performing under the name Jonny Ramone, he was the guitarist and leader of The Ramones.

John Mellor was the son of a Scottish diplomat who grew up overseas. In 1976 he was asked to join a band that would rival the Sex Pistols. He agreed, and, performing under the name Joe Strummer, became the lead vocalist for The Clash.

The Ramones, The Clash, and the Sex Pistols were the three most important bands of the early punk movement. It might be argued that the Damned were the first to release an album in the UK, but their success was limited-- probably due to a lack of Gaels or Johns. Oddly enough, medieval Christian theology was strongly shaped by two other Gaelic Johns, viz. John Duns Scotus ("John Duns, the Scotsman") and John Scotus Eriugena ("John the Scot, an Irishman"). But let us return to our subject. Prior to the Sex Pistols, John Lydon had lived with a group of men known locally as the "Four Johns," because there were four of them, and all were named John. One, Simon John Ritchie, would later join the Sex Pistols under the stage name "Sid Vicious."

In addition to "John" the related sounds "Joe" and "Jones" also featured prominently in the punk movement. The Ramones' vocalist, born Jeffrey Hyman, performed under the name "Joey Ramone." The Sex Pistols' guitarist was named "Steve Jones." The Clash featured both a Jones and a Joe, with John Mellor performing as Joe Strummer alongside lead guitarist Mick Jones (a Welshman). Influential on both the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were the New York Dolls, fronted by Johnny Thunders. Like the Damned, their success was limited-- perhaps because Thunders (John Gonzale) was of Italian and not Gaelic descent.

In addition to Johns, Joes, and Joneses, the early punk movement featured an outsized number of Jews, including Joey and Tommy Ramone, Johnny Thunders (1/4 Jewish), Richard Hell, Mick Jones (half Jewish), Bernie Rhodes (Jewish manager of the Clash and the Sex Pistols), and the ill-fated American Jewish groupie, Nancy Spungen. One must be careful about saying such things these days, lest one run afoul of online Jew haters such as E. Michael Jones (an Irish Catholic).

What Does It All Mean?

Patterns like this aren't limited to Platonism or to Punk. You'll find similar patterns in other currents. Following Aristotle there was Al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Aquinas. Averroes and Avicenna were actually named Ibn-Sina and Ibn-Rushd, but received the Perpipatetic "A" in translation. After punk came grunge, but rather than sharing a letter or an ethnicity, its major exponents shared an early death by drug or suicide. See: Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Lane Staley of Alice in Chains (dead on the same day, 10 years apart), Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone's Andrew Wood, and Chester Bennington of Stone Temple Pilots. Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder escaped this fate, but the young actor who played the role of "Jeremy" in the band's most famous video seems to have been taken in his place.

To some, the accumulation of coincidences like these are like little calling cards, left by the sinister conspiracy of freemasons or Satanists or Cabalists or Pagans or Occultists-- or, often enough, Jewish Freemason Satanic Pagan Occultists-- who control our world through endless, public, magic rituals.

To others, these are the signatures of the archons, those Demonic Entities who rule our material world, or, rather, those Space Aliens who control life on Earth, or, rather, that cabal of sinister Nerds who have programmed the computer simulation that we take for reality.

I myself am nowhere near sufficiently advanced in mental illness to accept these sorts of explanations. But neither am I a believer in "coincidence." The theory of coincidence states that there can be events without meaning. But in the occult tradition, such a thing is not possible, because the level of reality on which "meaning" exists is higher than material reality, and relates to it as cause to effect. You can have meaning without matter, but you can't have matter without meaning.

In the fully developed theology of Iamblichus and Proclus the work of the gods is carried out upon the material plane by the aid of the daimones. Daimones are intermediary beings, greater than men or heroes, less than the gods themselves. Unlike gods, daimones are capable of evil; they can also appear very frightening to us. Saint Augustine didn't like the daimones at all, which is why the word "daimon" or "demon" now means "evil spirit."

One of the best books on paranormal phenomena in general is Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality. Harpur points out that the daimones always have a strong trickster element. Trickster? By that I mean the archetype of deception and magic, the thinning of boundaries, the liminal. From our perspective, the daimones don't really make sense, and there is often an element of deception or confusion when they act. One of the other great contemporary books on paranormal phenomena, The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen, makes this case in great detail. Hansen points out that elements of the Trickster archetype are always associated with the paranormal, and the paranormal is often associated in some way with trickster phenomena. As daimones mediate between the divine and human worlds, they are naturally always gathered under the Trickster. In the Grecian theology the trickster is Hermes, the god of magic, the market, and thieves, the conveyor of the will of Zeus and cunductor of souls to (and from) the Underworld. The great ancient patron saint of the daimonic, Iamblichus, tells us that all magicians have share Hermes as a patron. Now, every particular daimon is suspended from one of the particular Gods, and its job is to mediate between the God and the material world. But the daimones as a genus and the entire shifting, liminal, gray boundary area that they rule-- that is governed by Hermes.

And so I wonder if accumulated coincidences like those documented above this aren't meaningless, but are instead traces left by the daimones, hints of their role in channeling a particular current of ideas into reality. One of those currents is the high philosophical tradition represented above all by Plato. This is a great current which has endured for millennia. But there are other currents with briefer shelf-lives. Genres of modern pop music are the easiest to identify. Notice how "punk" refers to not just to a form of music but to an aesthetic, a range of social behaviors, a sub-culture and even a political stance. These together form a current in the Astral Light into which one can easily be swept. The particular songs, on their own, are just collections of chords; typically based around the I-IV-V chord progression, they're not dissimilar to other forms of Western folk music, going back generations. And yet somehow the encounter with this set of chords, in this setting, can quickly transform an ordinary adolescent into someone who looks more like this:

Where else do we see the daimones moving? I don't know, but I suggest a criterion. Wherever we see at once great movements within the culture or the intellect, and accumulations of absurdities, with a hint of divine laughter in the background-- there they are.

(Disclaimer: Because this is the internet, I probably need to add... In the name of all the daimones, please take this post with a grain of salt.)

Proposition

In the United States at the present time, there are approximately 2,000 chimpanzees, 400 elephants, 200 bonobos, 600 giraffes, 13,000 emus, and 4,700 ostriches.

Many of these animals live in zoos, of course. Some others live on farms, or in managed wildlife refuges. Six years ago, an experimental population of 90 kangaroos was released into the wild in Wyoming. Of course, this is only continuing a process which began 500 years ago. In 1492 there were no horses in North America; today there are 70 million, including 300,000 wild horses. And there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of zebras in zoos, and at least one wild heard of at least 150 in California. For a time there was a wild population of camels in the American Southwest, abandoned by the United States army during the Civil War; though that population did not survive, we still have at least 3,000 in captivity.

At some point-- maybe over the next century, as JMG thinks, maybe over a thousand or two thousand years, or more-- our civilization is going to collapse, and at some point after that, no memory of us will remain. The creatures that we have imported here from all over the world will remain here, and one day no one will remember that they came from somewhere else.

At some point in the future, North America is going to be a place where hunting peoples are as likely to follow elephants or kangaroos as bison and farming villages are as likely to be patrolled by emus as chickens. I like to think that a future civilization will produce detailed studies of the wild American sasquatch, and that its biologists will scoff at both our disbelief in this well-known animal and at our credulous belief in a creature called the "gorilla" in Africa.

Digression

Some years ago I wrote a novella set in a future North America in which a remnant population of humans abandons their attempts to rebuild civilization and instead become elephant hunters. It was called "The Elephants Out of Babel". The people in the story had a few fragments of the Bible, and believed themselves to be the survivors of the fall of Babel, which they thought referred to a nearby mega-city whose ruins were now overrun by autonomous robots of various sorts. On a journey to the city, the pair are attacked by an enormous machine built originally as a construction vehicle, complete with a cutting laser, which they believe to be a dragon.

Much later, I discovered that an author named Michael Swanwick had written a novel entitled The Dragons of Babel which also featured a mechanical dragon. This was published in 2008, 3 years after my story was written. But there is no possible way for Mr. Swanwick to have known about me. Another plot point was that one of the characters remembered a variation on the Hail Mary that his mother had sung to him as a child, except that the words were addressed to "Holy Spirit, Mother of God." This would then-- it was implied at the end-- become the basis of a nature-oriented and more female-centric religion, once the survivors abandoned their attempt to rebuild civilization. Yes, I was very much a conventional Leftist at the time, and committed to ideas like radical ecology and eco-feminism.

Years later I picked up a random book in the science fiction section of a Borders somewhere and found the characters saying a version of the Hail Mary addressed to "Holy Spirit, Mother of God." And again, there was no way at all for the author to have known about me, and I can't even remember what her name was, or what her book was about. But that was when I gave up on the idea that our thoughts are internal to ourselves, or that minds are part of individuals. No, Mind is clearly something in which we participate, and thoughts can be found wherever they like; I never completed my story to the point of publication, and so the thoughts found other vectors for expression in the physical world.

In my mind still I see a future America in which hunters pursue elephants past the ruins of gargantuan cities. Where do these thoughts come from?