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Imagine a flood of pure inky darkness spreading inexorably across the land and destroying all living things in Stygian gloom. Well…actually you don’t have to imagine it. Such a phenomena exists! When rain falls immediately after forest fires, the baked earth can not absorb any water and all of the ash, char, and soot become a gelatinous flash flood. I have never mastered the WordPress tool for videos, but you can see such a flood by following this link. I was fascinated by the horrible, otherworldly sight and I watched the clip again and again, but, be warned, it is as troubling and awful as it sounds (perhaps more so, since such events spell toxic doom for any aquatic or amphibious animals living in arroyos, riverbeds, and floodways so afflicted).
So why am I posting this unwholesome sight during this already dark plague year? It is a warning, obviously. After one thing goes horribly awry, it is all too easy to start a chain reaction of bad things which ruin the land itself. Lately (since 2016) things have been going wrong in all sorts of directions. We need to prepare for attendant woes and gird ourselves against them. We also need to guard our forests against fire (and axes, invasive pests, and industrial mayhem).
For various seasonal reasons, I was thinking about the holidays and about the nature of the past and the present when suddenly “Entombed” popped into my head. “Entombed” was a video game from 1982 which was made for the Atari 2600. My family found our copy in a discount bin at Hills (a long defunct chain store from Middle America), and bought it for the picture…which made the game seem like a cartoon-y Indiana Jones sort of affair. Hilariously, the single online photo I could find of the package shows a similarly marked-down copy–so probably everyone bought this thing from a discount bin for the low price and the wacky package art. There was also a vague narrative blurb which made it seem like the player would be exploring catacombs and dodging phantasms. Fun!
Yet when you started playing “Entombed” you were immediately dumped into a rudimentary hell world the color of artificial cheese…and the only escape was death (which came with merciless speed). The player was a little purple stick man who had to keep moving downwards through twisting matching pathways in luridly colored walls which were marching upwards (if that description makes no sense here is a link to the stunning gameplay on Youtube). Occasionally little blue apparitions appeared which would kill you by touching you, however the cause of death was almost invariably getting caught in a tunnel and crushed by the top of the screen (which caused a grim noise and then oblivion).
The real problem was the walls moved upwards with relentless speed and they moved faster and faster as you moved down. A game of “Entombed” was about 45 seconds of descending an ugly zigzag and then being crushed with a resounding digital crunch. The game swiftly found its way to the bottom of the game cartridges and there was no question about how it ended up in the bargain bin at Hills. Something about 2016 and my progress through the world (or maybe our collective progress) called this long-lost memory to mind and now it is stuck in my head.
Well, time to head to bed so I can get up for a fresh day at the office tomorrow!
A Flayed man holding his own skin (Gaspar Becerra, 1556, Etching)
It’s Halloween week already: the time when the spirit realm comes closest to the mortal world (well, according to ancient lore, anyway). This is always a “theme week”, which Ferrebeekeeper devotes to a single topic which is sinister, magical, disquieting, and macabre. In past year’s we have taken on dark subjects like the children of Echidna, the Flowers of the Underworld, the undead, and the realm of nightmares, but this year we are going back to the roots of civilization to examine an ancient horror. Sadly, this ghastly topic is not a dark myth or an accursed dream, but an all-too real invention of human savagery.
Flaying is a method of torture and execution, which was used in ancient times (and not-so-ancient times) to kill a person in the most terrible and painful way. Of course hunters and animal farmers are familiar with flaying as stripping the skin off of a dead animal so that the hide can be cured as a pelt or a leather, and so that the animal’s meat can then be butchered for consumption (although this is more commonly known as “skinning” in English). This is done with a knife or similar sharpened implement and farmers/hunters/chefs generally try to keep the hide as intact as possible. At some point in the depths of prehistory, some evil person first realized the same method could be used to cut the skin off of a living person. Skinning more than a portion of a person is fatal. Wikipedia blandly cites Ernst G. Jung, a famed dermatologist, writing: “Dermatologist Ernst G. Jung notes that the typical causes of death due to flaying are shock, critical loss of blood or other body fluids, hypothermia, or infections, and that the actual death is estimated to occur from a few hours up to a few days after the flaying.” How did Jung know that? We want to know and yet clearly we also do not want to know. I found a lot of arguments online about whether modern medicine could rescue a flayed person. I will summarize the upshot of lots of nightmarish dumbassery as “maybe… in perfect circumstances, but probably not.”
At this point, if you are like me you are probably saying “GLAAARGH! What the hell? Why would anybody ever do such a thing? And why write about it? Why should I even think about such monstrous savagery? I am going to go look at pictures of cute little songbirds.” That is a good point and those questions/sentiments are very pertinent, but you should not go to the cute animal site yet.
Here is a cute little bird to break the tension.
Flaying keeps cropping back up in human history, art, and myth. It reveals something about us in a dark tale which stretches across millennia. Mostly, of course, it reveals that we are very tragic and cruel animals, but that is a truth well worth remembering (assuming you can somehow not see it within the daily news). Flaying also reveals some of our stagecraft for manipulating and controlling each other–which I will get into tomorrow with the story of the Neo-Assyrians. Additionally there is a mysterious and otherworldly hint of true transformation within this topic—a suggestion of the butterfly, the cocoon, and true transcendence from the body—although admittedly this miracle which did not quite come off properly. We will get to this as we look at flaying in art and religion.
High Fashion by Jean Paul Gautier
If you can stay with me, this week ends with a fun surprise on Halloween (which I have been working on for a long time and saving for you)…but there is some pretty dark territory to get through before then. Gird up your loins (no seriously, you may want to tie something protective around your flesh), tomorrow we are going back to the age of chariots and horror to spend some time with the neo-Assyrians. Aaaagh!
l’Écorché “The Flayed Man” ( Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1767, cast)
Lovecraft’s Nightmare (Painting by Michael Whelan)
Even among modern folk with our science, technology and networked thinking machines, dreams possess an unearthly and overwhelming power. To state this bluntly: nightmares can be terrifying to a degree unrivaled by anything save the most terrible moments of trauma or devastating personal loss.
In nightmares I have watched our lovely world of nitrogen skies, teaming oceans, and green forests snuffed out in an instant by ghastly void. As a ghost, I have swum through oceans of plague skeletons each of which glittered with unwholesome light. Worst of all, with mine own hands I have poured oil on my chanting followers and touched the torch to them and exalted as together we burned like fat in a fire.
And it was all just dreams, of course it was. But, oh! it seemed so horribly real…
「菌類学者Hの誤算」 パネルにテンペラ、油彩 1988年 1621x970mm
Awaking from such visions, it is difficult not to see the hand of providence writing out the dire warnings of destiny. In ancient times, when science did not exist to explain the world, people thought exactly that—that the gods communicated through dreams.
Dream augury is mentioned in the most ancient Mesopotamian texts as well as throughout ancient Egyptian writings. In both the Iliad and Odyssey, the gods communicate with mortals through dreams (in the Iliad, beautifully, false dreams fly to the world from a gate of ivory, but real ones go through the gate of horn). Even the first book of the Bible has the following story, where the reader goes into Pharaoh’s dreams with him.
And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river. And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow. And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river. And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke. And he slept and dreamed the second time: and, behold, seven ears of corn came up upon one stalk, rank and good. And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them. And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears. And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream. And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh.
Then spake the chief butler unto Pharaoh, saying, I do remember my faults this day: Pharaoh was wroth with his servants, and put me in ward in the captain of the guard’s house, both me and the chief baker: And we dreamed a dream in one night, I and he; we dreamed each man according to the interpretation of his dream. And there was there with us a young man, an Hebrew, servant to the captain of the guard; and we told him, and he interpreted to us our dreams; to each man according to his dream he did interpret. And it came to pass, as he interpreted to us, so it was; me he restored unto mine office, and him he hanged.
Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him hastily out of the dungeon: and he shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.
Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dreams as an omen of coming climate change: the seven fat cows are seven years of plentiful harvest while the seven starving cows represent a terrible drought. Only by long-term planning can the political leadership of Egypt avert humanitarian crisis (coincidentally, it is a story which makes me wonder if the most stridently religious folk have even paused to think about their favorite text).
Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dream
Dreams are the most numinous experience we are likely to have. It is very hard not to be like Pharaoh and see portents of the future in the strange imagery of dreams. However for all of the time that dreams are filled with apocalyptic farm animals or oracular produce, they are just as often filled with the Flintstones, sailboards, toothpaste, the girl from algebra class, Honda hatchbacks and suchlike detritus of one’s personal experience and/or contemporary mass culture.
Sigmund Freud, the doyenne of dream interpretation in the contemporary(ish) world, believed that our dreams and nightmares revealed truths hidden by the conscious mind. In the symbolic language of dream imagery, we are able to put together patterns which are obscure (or distasteful or forbidden)—at least according to Freud.
Naturally I am an adherent of science and reason. I hold no truck with imaginary supernatural beings such as ghosts and gods. Yet dreams constitute phenomena which I have experienced—which we have all experienced-which can and do stand outside the ordinary mundane frame of reference. Even if they are not sent by Hypnos or Yahweh, it seems wise to allow dreams to influence what you create and desire…and what you are afraid of.
As the poet said, “Learn from your dreams what you lack”
How do spiders manage all of these limbs?
Speaking of horrible nightmares, here are two photographs of my Halloween costume. I chose to dress as a redknee tarantula (Brachypelma smithi) a large terrestrial spider from the Sierra Madre mountain range in Mexico. Spiders of this species mature very slowly and become adults late, which makes it an ideal costume. In all seriousness though, these spiders suffer from an extreme sexual dimorphism. Males and females are of a similar size and look alike, but while female spiders can live for thirty years or longer, males are usually dead before they reach five. Talk about scary!
I’ll write something more serious about dreams, nightmares and our ability to understand the world tomorrow. In the mean time have some candy and enjoy the holiday with your friends and family! Happy Halloween!
National Museum of American History
The other day I was chatting with a friend about my long-ago job as an assistant curator at the Smithsonian history museum and we began to muse about what the quintessential artifacts of today will someday be. When historians of the future try to represent our time will they display a bunch of obsolete computer kit (which can not be made to works after a couple of years—much less decades or centuries), or Britney Spears memorabilia, or Segue scooters, or “as seen on TV” junk like salad shooters and such? What is the quintessential object which shows who we are and how we live? We came up with all sorts of answers—most of which did not paint contemporary culture in a wholly positive light—but the one which struck me as the truest was the simple disposable air horn.
An Air Horn
An air horn is a plastic noisemaking reed attached to a jar of compressed air. When the player (possessor?) presses a button, the infernal device issues a hellish shriek of ear-piercing volume. I do not mean that last descriptor as a metaphor: air horns, like firearms and jet engines, are very capable of causing serious irreparable hearing damage. These horrid novelty items are available everywhere for next to nothing. People use them at sporting contests to distract the opposing team or sometimes in cruel pranks to make an unwitting victim panic. Mostly they are just used to call attention to the loutish person with the horn. Air horns have only one note, but that note is so loud it drowns everything else out—a perfect description of today’s celebrity personalities, advertising tactics, and political discourse.
Air horns evolved from the whistles of trains and the mighty horns of ships. These horns used compressed gasses from engine function in order to warn of eminent departure or collision. They had a real purpose. Yet, while it is possible that Alfred Hitchcock or Tom Clancy (or some other master of contrived suspense) could invent a scenario where a disposable air horn saved the day, I doubt it has ever happened. These objects exist only to make insufferably loud noise. If someone on the street was blowing one to warn of North Koreans, Godzilla, or zombie attack I would ignore it in the belief that it was just some drunken oaf showing off.
or we could just rename it the “fun horn”
Worst of all, I think an air horn speaks directly to the reptile/Kardashian part of the brain which lurks in us all. I do not like air horns, but if someone gave me one I would be fascinated by it and would want to push it. It would sit there menacingly, like Chekov’s gun, just waiting till I could resist no longer and gave it a tiny test. I wish it were not so, but I would have to push it, despite the deleterious effect it would have on my personal relationships and happiness. Because they bear this unwholesome power, I would be shocked if air horns do not end up in a “late 20th/early 21st century” display case highlighting the nature of our times. They will sit there with other loud self-aggrandizing artifacts like Nascar jerseys, Jeff Koons art, MySpace, and Kanye West.
“I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade, I will be the loudest voice.” [Actual Quote]
Naturally I love my readers with all my heart and I wanted to present a spooky Halloween treat to you for today’s post. I started out by writing an essay about the nature of reality, but it was filled with cubicles, creditors, skin cancer, and dead oceans. To be honest, the dystopian sci-fi novel which is waking life was way too scary to be any fun (since it turns out that reality is completely horrifying). As a back-up plan, I have returned to my old stand-by: strange creepy mascots. Because of capitalism, nationalism, and the savage tribalism at the heart of humanity, our world is filled with weirdos and sad actors who are paid to don rubber costumes and act like bears, pelicans, and sundry bobble-headed freaks. Or, alternately, mascots can be animated or digitally created characters which are deeply wrong on an existential level. Here are some of these mascots and these are their stories:
Let’s start with a punch from the past. I remember being appalled the first time I saw a Kool-Aid commercial. I mean Kool-Aid man is a being who is a fragile glass pitcher who crashes through a brick wall. He then pours himself out into delighted children who drink his very essence like the Eucharist and go into a sugar high. What the hell? How did marketers come up with this and how is it a thing we all immediately understand?
The New Orleans Saints’ primary mascot is Gumbo, a McGruff-style weeping hound with a blood-red tongue who is actually fairly lovable (as such things go). However, Gumbo has recently been teamed with Sir Saint, a gruff football villain with elephantitis of the chin. Sir Saint was one of the original Saints mascots during their first seasons of loss and misery and, for some reason he has been brought out of retirement to cast a shadow over this halcyon era.
Long ago, a wandering mage/bar-owner cast a curse upon the Chicago Cubs when they ejected him from the stadium for bringing his beloved pet goat to a game. Yet even before the curse, the cubs walked in darkness–as demonstrated by this image from 1908 which shows them with a nightmare bear. Bears are scary enough, but this one looks like a rabid muskrat or a bear shaman who got trapped in a hell dimension.
Past posts have touched on the subject of how bizarre Olympics mascots are. Yet even Wenlock and Mandeville cannot compete with Shpitzik, a sentient fire-wielding cactus who was meant to represent the Israeli Olympics team. Not only was Shpitzik a walking atrocity which should not exist, he was also a blatant rip-off of a character from a children’s show popular in Israel in the 1970s. The cactus mascot was soon at the center of a giant expensive law suit. The website theclassical.org told the harrowing story here and described the lawsuit’s conclusion (which also was the end of Shpitzik). In the final judgment, the presiding magistrate determined that Shpitzik was “’far more than a ‘humanization of a cactus” but was also a copyright infringement. He then ordered Shpitzik’s “permanent destruction and erasure from memory.”
Boltman of the San Diego chargers does nothing to help alleviate the rumors that steroids are rampant in professional football.
The Chiquita Banana was created by a famous cartoonist, Dik Browne, who also created “Hagar the Horrible”. The talking over-sexed banana was introduced to America as an animated character in 1944 (because apparently that year was not traumatic enough).
You don’t have to be a sports mascot created by committee to be completely horrible, as demonstrated by these two mascots for a drug store in Kyoto. Apparently they are renowned for making generations of children cry.
This is “Boomer”, a (possibly retired) mascot of the Columbus Blue Jackets. I think he is supposed to be a geriatric cannon pointed directly up, but he looks like a reject from a movie about steampunk sorcerers.
I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on new Orleans but the newly renamed basketball team “the pelicans” just unveiled their new pelican mascot and it is widely being heralded as a creature of nightmares. This mascot is so atrocious it made the front page of CNN and has already inspired the internet’s underemployed digital artists to create an entire history for it.
Thanatos, God of Death, sculpted from marble in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos. Circa 325 BC
In ancient Greece, there were two incarnations of death. The more well-known Greek personification of Death was Thanatos, the child of Nyx and brother of Hypnos (Sleep). Thanatos represented natural death and was portrayed as a gentle being. He was represented either as a kind handsome bearded man with wings or as a beautiful winged child. Thantos is sometimes portrayed carrying a butterfly, a wreath, or an inverted torch. Thanatos is frequently represented on funerary stele and on vases—a peaceful figure who led souls away after they had lived full lives.
Thanatos Takes Alkestis (Attic Red Figure Vase, Attributed to the Amphitrite Painter)
However Thanatos had a flock of hellish sisters, the Keres, dark flying beings with sharp teeth and an insatiable taste for blood. The Keres represented violent senseless death. They flew in the thousands above battlefields and hung over plague ravaged cities. The Keres were associated with the apparatus of violent death–famine, madness, agony, hate, and violence, yet classical authors also sometimes treat them as oddly personal—like a bullet with a soldier’s name on it. Keres were portrayed like harpies or demons—cruel women with fangs and talons dressed in bloody ripped garments. When they found a wounded or sick person the Keres would descend to feast on blood. Hesiod’s harrowing poem, The Shield of Heracles describes them in such a manner:
The black Keres, clashing their white teeth,
Grim faced, shaggy, blood-bespattered, dread,
Kept struggling for the fallen. They all wanted
To drink black blood. Whom first they caught.
Lying or fallen newkly wounded, around him
They threw their might talosns, and the shade to Hades
Went, in icy Tartarus. Their hearts were glutted
With human blood: they threw away the corpse
And back to the tumult and fighting rushed, in new desire
(verses 248-257)
Hesiod also indirectly indicates that the Keres were among the horrible fates which flew out of Pandora’s box and have subsequently plagued mankind. The Romans also believed in these cruel & deadly incarnations of fat. The Roman name for the entities was tenebrae—“darknesses”
Ker or Poena (Lucanian red-figure krater
ca. 4th century B.C.)
The Keres do not fit neatly into the larger Greco-Roman pantheon. Perhaps, like Nyx herself, they were outsider gods left over from some earlier tradition. Throughout the course of classical history, their portrayal and their fatalistic meaning changed. However they were a part of classical thought. It is important to mention them when writing about the Greek underworld. The dark realm below was haunted by these cruel children of night—they would fly forth when disaster struck humankind.
Kali (artist unknown)
In Hinduism, Kali is the dark mother goddess who represents the force of change and transformation in the universe. The Devi Mahatmya, a Sanskrit text of the 5th – 6th century AD, relates that Kali was born from the brow of the mother goddess Durga, but it may be that she actually is Durga or vice versa (the mutable forms of divinity in Hinduism are transfigurative and sometimes subsume one another).
In appearance, Kali is one of the most fearsome deities in any pantheon. Her skin is completely black, like the night sky, or like the oblivion which awaits all living things. Nude but for certain terrible adornments made of human body parts, Kali wears a skirt made of severed limbs and a necklace of 50 bloody heads, one for each letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. Her nudity is important as it represents her freedom from maya—the illusory false consciousness in which the mortal world is steeped. Her four hands clutch different ceremonial items: a great sword/cleaver, the severed head of a huge demon, a trident, and a bowl fashioned out of a skull to catch the blood flowing from the head. Kali’s eyes are red with wrath and she has fangs at the edge of her howling mouth. Her nude body is spattered with gore and her four long arms bend at improbable angles.
kali (artist unknown)
Many representations of Kali show her in fury, rampaging over the prostrate form of her husband Shiva, the creation god. There is a story behind the image. The Devas and Devis (gods and goddesses) of the universe were engaged in a conflict with terrible demons and they were losing the fight when Kali was created. Her rage and her battle fury were so terrible that no demon could stand against her awful onslaught. As she slew, she begin to drink demonic blood and grow in strength. No force could withstand Kali and the universe began to tremble and shake. But, before she could annihilate all things, Shiva assumed his comeliest form and cast himself like a corpse at the feet of his wife. When Kali realized that she was touching her husband with the soles of her feet (an incredibly disrespectful act within the code of Hindu morality) her rage died. She stuck out her tongue in distaste and horror and her awful slaughter came to an end. Other myths pick up the story and tell of how she and Shiva (both nude and heated from carnage and near disaster) began to engender new life, but you will have to look those up on your own.
The familiar tableau certainly suggests that without the power of Kali, great Shiva becomes inert. This juxtaposition is important and reveals something about Kali. Worshipped on the charnel ground where the bodies of the dead are cremated, Kali is obviously a death goddess, however her divine status transcends that of other chthonic gods. Terrible though her appearance may be, Kali is one of the most beloved goddesses of India. She is universally held in reverence by sages and gurus who have begun to see through life’s illusions. These wise people esteem Kali as the mother of all things because without death there is no possibility for rebirth. If things are not unmade there is no material with which to create newer finer things. Thanks to Kali we do not live in a derelict world of disease, rot, and senility. Instead we march forward and upward and we are replaced as we wear out.
Or at least we seem to stumble forward—whether we are getting anywhere or not is a question for the gods themselves (and to my way of thinking they themselves are just another illusion).
Kali (artist unknown)
ferrebeekeeper 