The Tanah–The Laws, Book 1, Chapter 3

[The following is the nineteenth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, and here is the eighteenth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Part of maintaining the unity of opposites, and finding a balance between them is to respect the unity between oneself and all other people, as well as animals and plants–the Unity of Space. All life must be respected when using magic, as so it must be used for good, used selflessly.

Magic spells must be conjured with thoughts to help those in need, not to harm others. Are there many poor among you? Use magic to lift them out of poverty, not to immiserate them further.

Conjure up food for the hungry to eat with your spells. Give them water to drink: if the rivers and lakes have dried up from a drought, use magic to make the rain fall again–call on Priff, the Crim of water, for aid. If the plants have all died, your spells should make the plants grow again, to fertilize the soil–call on Drofurb, the Crim of the earth, for aid.

Are there any sick among you? Use magic to heal them and restore them, in body and mind. If you use your spells to cause sickness or death on those you hate, the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, will bring such sickness and death back upon you!

Are there any without learning, without the ability to read and write, or who are lacking the knowledge and skills needed for a livelihood to earn one’s daily bread? Use your magic skills to give the ignorant this learning, these abilities, this knowledge, these skills. In helping others to learn and grow, you will be helping yourself, for their knowledge and abilities will come back to you one day, to help you through the Echo Effect.

Are there many among you without homes? Use your magic to build homes for them. Are there any naked and cold among you? Do spells to clothe them and keep them warm–call on Nevil, the Crim of fire, for aid.

When you use your magic to do good for others, do not ask for anything in return from those people: ask not for gold, servitude, nor for the pleasure of a woman in bed. Wait instead for the Echo Effect to give you your reward–waiting without impatient expectation!

Any use of magic for the benefit of oneself must be done with the greatest of care. Is this benefit to oneself justified? Is it reasonable, or is it in excess? Is it a waste of power? Is it indulgent? Is it truly needed, as those uses of magic to help others are, as noted above? Or is the benefit at the expense of other people?

Is the pleasure you receive from the spell harmful to others, or eventually to yourself? Do you use it to violate a woman? Do you use it for a temporary euphoria that will become poisonous to you? Do you use magic to gain by taking from others? Do you use it to rise in power by making others fall from it? Do your spells increase your wealth by making others poor?

If you do any of these evils, the Echo Effect will ensure that you will be harmed, violated, poisoned, losing by theft, falling from power, being made poor. In using magic, use the greatest of care. Consider how the Echo Effect may turn your spell around. Will it be turned around in a way that will do you good, or will it do you the evil that you yourself have caused?

Unplugged

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friends online can sometimes feel as if you are ramming
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because
if the plug is left pulled out, there might as well have never been a wall, or even the pins
to go in.

wall + socket
= neighbours

Analysis of ‘Super Dark Times’

Super Dark Times is a 2017 coming-of-age psychological thriller directed by Kevin Phillips (his directorial debut) and written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski. It stars Owen Campbell, Charlie Tahan, Elizabeth Cappuccino, Max Talisman, and Amy Hargreaves.

The film has an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It won the best feature film award at the 17th Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival. It also won Best Sound Design in a Feature Film at the 2017 Music+Sound Awards. It also got nominations for the Saturn Award for Best Independent Film at the 44th Saturn Awards, and for the Someone to Watch Award at the 33rd Independent Spirit Awards.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to the full movie.

What’s particularly intriguing about Super Dark Times is how there is so much that is subtly, vaguely hinted at beneath the surface, but is never explicitly demonstrated. The viewer is truly left in the…super…dark, leaving the film widely open to interpretation.

That title, for example. Why “Super” Dark Times? Why not just Dark Times, or Very Dark Times, or Dangerously Dark Times, for example? Super Dark sounds rather inappropriately inarticulate and colloquial as an intensifier…unless another word is being implied here, like Supernatural Dark Times. I’ll build on this idea later.

The film certainly begins with the natural in darkness, for the opening shots show scenes of nature in 1996 Upstate New York, just as the sun is starting to rise. We see the trees of a forest as the sun continues to rise. Opening shots of a movie should be understood as setting the tone and establishing its central themes. This scenery isn’t there just to be pretty: there is meaning to it, or else it wouldn’t have been shot.

The natural will invade a local high school in the form of a deer having inexplicably crashed through a window and gone into a classroom. Wounded and bloody, it has managed to go out the classroom door, through a hall, and end up in the cafeteria, where it’s found bleeding to death on the floor.

Two policemen at the scene have decided to put the animal out of its misery by stomping on its head. Allison Bannister (Cappuccino) watches the killing with a troubled face, yet she’s fascinated with it, while everyone else leaves. Why does the violence interest, rather than repel, her? Why did a deer crash through the window in the first place? More importantly, how will this scene link up with the rest of the story?

So much of this film, as I said above, is about what we don’t know, rather than what we do. It’s all so…super dark. Natural imagery permeates the backgrounds of this small, lonely town, with trees and grass all over the place, as well as all of the darkness. Super natural dark times.

The setting is, more specifically, late autumn in 1996, with Christmas around the corner, and so all the decorations and Christmas trees are being put up. One thing to remember about the holiday season is that its pagan origins are in the celebration of the winter solstice, when the sun is furthest away from those living in the northern hemisphere. In pagan language, this means that the sun god (before he’d be seen as the Son of God) is to be born, when the supernaturally dark times are at their darkest.

These elements form the background behind which to place our story, about two rather dorky high school boys, Zach Taylor (Campbell) and Josh Templeton (Tahan), who are introduced in Zach’s house looking through a yearbook, and after laughing at some guys they consider ugly, they drool over a few beauties, a young teacher named Mrs. Barron (played by Anni Krueger), and more significantly, Allison. Both boys clearly want this girl, and there’s potential already set up for their mutual jealousy and competition over her.

The geekiness of the two boys is further developed not only in their interest in comic book superheroes like the Silver Surfer and the Punisher, but also in their, however reluctant, association with a universally-disliked, annoying, foul-mouthed, and socially awkward boy named Daryl Harper (Talisman). There are also examples of them being bullied, including even this deleted scene.

In a convenience store, these three are with a fourth boy from middle school, Charlie Barth (played by Sawyer Barth), who asks about a black fan on the ceiling. Josh simply says it’s always been there. This spinning black circle will become something of a recurring motif, with a number of variations on it, throughout the film. It’s full of symbolic meaning.

The winter solstice is part of the cycle of the seasons, the darkest of times before the returning light. The darkness comes and goes in cycles: day, dusk, night, and dawn, this last being seen significantly at the beginning of the film. The winter solstice is the dawn of the year. Recurring images of a spinning black circle, having always been there, are part of that cyclical symbolism.

After the convenience store scene, the four boys go to a bridge, on their way to which we see, again, a lot of natural scenery in the background: trees, grass, water, etc. On the bridge, as the boys are chatting, Josh at one point gets up and stands on the edge of it, looking out glumly at the water. During their chat, the boys have discussed how it would be if someone fell off. All of this foreshadows what will later happen to John Whitcomb (played by Ethan Botwick).

John is a stoner who’s dyed his hair blue. Just after the bridge scene, and Daryl and Charlie have separated from Zach and Josh, the latter two–after discussing how unlikeable Daryl is–run into a group of bullies Josh particularly hates, one of them being John. Another of these bullies gives Josh a hard time, and when Josh gets mad at him, the bully shoves him to the ground and has his foot on Josh’s head. Josh and Zach leave with Josh even more upset, of course. The scene not only fully establishes how the two boys are unpopular and targets of bullying, it also shows us Josh’s potential to be violent…if only he had a weapon.

Zach and Josh go up to where Allison’s house is in the neighbourhood. Again, the discussion is about how much they like her, with Josh mentioning a moment when he was with her in art class, and she accidentally splashed jizz-like glue, from a phallic glue bottle, onto her hands, then giggled. Josh’s eyes widened, and he tells Zach this was “the most erotic moment of [his] life,” demonstrating what an obvious geek and virgin he is.

Just after Zach shouts out “penis!” to describe the glue bottle, they see the light in the window where, presumably, Allison’s bedroom is, and the embarrassed boys immediately run off with their bikes. What’s interesting about this scene is how we’ll later learn that Allison not only heard the shout, but she also knew it was Zach who shouted it.

It’s quite a distance from her window to where the boys are outside, making it not so easy for her to have seen who they were clearly. Also, assuming she hadn’t known they were out there until the “penis!” shout, she’d turned on her bedroom light (if that even was her, as opposed to her gruff older brother or anyone else in her family) and gone to the window to look, she’d have had very little time to determine if it really was Zach and Josh who were there. Still, she knew…

If she had, say, been watching them from the beginning from her living room window, one would wonder why she’d do that, and what about them would have caught her attention when they were chatting too quietly for her to have noticed. Now, Allison is a pretty girl, who presumably could get herself a big, popular boyfriend, one far more desirable than Zach or Josh. Surely, she knows the two boys are considered geeks at school, boys who are bullied, and who often hang out with that loser Daryl. Why would she be interested in either of them? Even if she thinks Zach is cute and a nice guy, as a typical teenager who’s insecure about her identity and her reputation, she’d fear being associated with a crowd of ‘losers.’

Still, she later phones Zach and invites him and Josh to her birthday party. Not long after that, at a particularly tense moment I’ll get into in a minute, she shows up in Zach’s house! Does she really like these two geeks…or does she have a secret use for them? Again, I’ll come back to this idea in a little while.

The shot of Allison’s bedroom window from the outside, with the light turned on, switches to an interior shot of the kitchen window of Zach’s house, where instead of seeing Allison, we see his mother (Hargreaves) by the kitchen sink. This kind of subverted expectation-thinking we’ll see Allison at the window, looking out at the boys, instead of Zach’s mother there, being startled by him and Josh–will be seen later in the film. The subverted expectation also implies a connection between Allison and Zach’s mother.

Speaking of that connection, after Josh leaves the house, Zach’s mother tells him that Allison has called him (How does Allison know his number?); his mother seems more than usually interested in this girl coming into her son’s life, in a manner that seems beyond the usual hope that her boy will get a girlfriend.

Zach calls Allison back and gets the invite (along with Josh) to her birthday party, a call that is abruptly ended by her nasty older brother demanding that she get off the phone. Again, I must ask why she, a pretty girl who could get any popular guy–presumably one with a car instead of a mere bicycle!–would be interested in geeky Zach and Josh associating with her. How did she know it was them in front of her house just a while ago, and why was she so determined to contact Zach, all of a sudden, that she got his phone number? What purpose do these two geeks have for her? The next major event in the story may contribute to an answer to these questions.

The next–and last–time these four boys will hang out together is, first, in Josh’s house. He, Zach, Daryl, and Charlie go up to the bedroom of Josh’s older brother, who’s away in the marines. Daryl is in love with the brother’s waterbed, his bag of weed, and the pornographic photos on the ceiling.

Josh next reveals his brother’s katana, an obvious phallic symbol as well as an instrument of death. That the katana represents both of these things, Freud‘s Eros and Thanatos, is one example of many, recurring throughout the film, of a link between sexuality and death. Note in this connection how that black circular fan is also a yonic symbol.

Josh refuses to let Daryl have any of his brother’s weed (not that socially-inept, selfish Daryl will ever respect Josh’s wishes, tragically), but he will borrow the samurai sword so the boys can have fun slashing milk cartons in two with it. They’ve emptied the cartons of milk and replaced it with water from a hose. Milk implies mammalian femininity, water splashing out of the bisected cartons implies vaginal fluids (with broken hymens), and so the hacking of the cartons with a phallic sword is a combination of violence and sexual symbolism. Josh is relishing the experience in a way that foreshadows the tragedy soon to come.

Daryl is caught smoking the weed he’s secretly stolen, and Josh is furious. A fight between the two boys escalates, and Josh (accidentally?) stabs Daryl in the neck with the katana, killing him.

Before he dies, though, Daryl runs into a forest for a bit and falls into a bed of fallen leaves (significantly, this has all happened in a secluded park area…out in the middle of nature). His having been mortally wounded and running in a natural setting reminds us of that deer at the beginning, in the high school that three of the boys attend. These two scenes are a pair of a number of recurring motifs indicating cyclical events in the movie…like that spinning black fan.

Josh sobs, “He’s dead. We’re fucked […] FUCK!!!” This juxtaposition of words reinforces the film’s link of death and sexuality, along with the phallic sword cutting a yonic wound. Zach throws up, he and Josh cover Daryl’s body with the surrounding fallen leaves of the area, and they and Charlie decide to hide the katana in a large hole in the ground. Again, this is sexual symbolism, with the phallic sword put in a yonic hole…a super dark place.

Zach shares some of Josh’s guilt, because the former foolishly pulled the blade out of Daryl’s neck, cutting it a second time. In his guilt and rage, Zach later punches his fist against a wall at the entrance of a tunnel for a train track, injuring himself and thus needing a cast. This self-injury is a symbolic castration: in spite of Allison’s later advances on Zach, he’ll be unresponsive even though he likes her so much. Josh, on the other hand, will find the phallic katana most empowering, so he’ll get it back and, so it seems, use it to impress her.

Still, she seems to like Zach more, and when he gets home that evening, he is surprised to find her there, in his house! How fortuitous it is that she would be there right on the very day that the killing happened, so soon after it! What’s more, his mom was happy to let her in, a girl neither Zach nor his mom know all that well…or so we assume.

His mom is also OK with Allison going into Zach’s room with him alone. In his room with him, Allison indicates that she knows it was he who shouted “penis!” outside her house. She can see the troubled look on his face, but he never tells her what happened at the park. Still, there’s some sense, in the sympathetic look on her face as she hugs and comforts him and they almost kiss, that she…somehow…knows what happened out there. Maybe his mom…somehow…also knows. She certainly likes how “cute” Allison likes him.

At school, the teacher takes attendance and we learn that while Zach is at school, Josh isn’t. We see a brief shot of that spinning fan, then Zach rides his bike to Charlie’s school; but Charlie refuses to have anything to do with what happened to Daryl.

Josh has been staying at home the whole time, spending much, if not most or all, of his time in his bedroom, brooding. He’s rather been like Jonah in the belly of the great fish (Jonah 1:17), or like Christ harrowing hell; only instead of returning to the world a better man, or in some sense apotheosized, Josh has become worse. As Virgil says in True Romance, “Now, the first time you kill somebody, that’s the hardest.”

That Josh is going to find it easier to kill people brings us to an issue that is being alluded to in Super Dark Times, whose setting in 1996–made clear not just with the conspicuous absence of smartphones, social media, etc., but also with a brief moment of Zach seeing a speech by then-President Clinton–is anticipating something horrible to come several years after: the Columbine High School massacre.

While the motives speculated for the massacre–bullying, goth culture, video games, etc.–have been considered dubious, they have been alluded to in the film, enough to make the connection between the fictional and factual violence clear. I’ve already mentioned the bullying; references are also made to video games, as when Zach asks Josh, during a visit to his home, what game is on his TV screen, as well as Josh’s reference later to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; finally, at one point we see a shot of Zach sitting next to a girl wearing fashions making us think of goths.

One connection that can be made between Columbine–one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history and one that has inspired more than 70 copycat attacks as of June 2025–and seeing Bill Clinton on the TV is how his administration in a big way helped push the post-Soviet, neoliberal capitalist agenda–gutting welfare, allowing mergers and acquisitions in the media, keeping that unpopular drunk Yeltsin at the head of Russia, etc (all three of which happened, incidentally, in 1996, the year the film is set!). The link between Clinton and Columbine is how unfettered capitalism can exacerbate alienation, the kind that pushes some people to go crazy, get their hands on weapons, and kill people. Times have been super dark, and increasingly so, since the 1990s.

While the TV is still showing the Clinton speech, Zach falls asleep on the sofa and has a nightmare of Daryl in his home, first lurking in the dark, then getting violent revenge on Zach. Before the attack, Zach sees in his dream a hole in the ceiling with the spinning black fan there. In the room, a Christmas tree is in the background. Note the juxtaposition of all of these elements and what they represent: violent killing, eternal seasonal cycles, yonic symbolism, and nature. These elements, I insist, are interrelated in ways, and for reasons, that I’ll get into soon enough.

Back at school, after hearing the whispered gossip about missing Daryl, we’re in one of Zach’s classes, during which the teacher (Mrs. Barron?) is discussing–of all things–the male sexual organs, and the principal brings up, on the PA, the disappearance of Daryl. Once again, sex and death are thrown together. This juxtaposition is heightened when, during the principal’s announcement, a girl sitting behind Zach is moaning and playing with her pen, as if to simulate the sex act…or, perhaps, a stabbing.

There’s something almost ritualistic about what she’s doing. In fact, it seems like an act of sympathetic magic. That all of these elements–Daryl’s violent death and disappearance, the coming of the winter solstice, Allison’s uncanny knowledge of what she’s unlikely to know about, as well as her odd interest in, unpopular, bullied Zach and Josh, and the girl right behind Josh playing a sex game with her pen–are so interrelated that I feel I must come up with a theory.

I believe there’s a pagan coven in this town.

There are some theories floating around on the internet that Allison is the secret villain of the film, that she’s manipulating Josh and Zach into being violent, and she’s taking advantage of their crush on her. Admittedly, this theory is extremely thin on the ground, lacking any real hard evidence; it’s also been condemned as misogynistic, incel rubbish.

We’re meant, instead, to believe that her being tied up by Josh during the climax is real and not staged, as the theories would have it, and that the peaceful look on her face at the film’s end simply means that she’s gotten over the traumatic experience of the climax. I don’t buy that she’s gotten over anything as extreme as a threat to her life and watching a friend, Meghan (played by Adea Lennox), get sliced to death with the katana, especially not after only three to four months’ time to get over it.

Yes, there’s very little, if anything, to prove her involvement in the murders; but the subtle suggestions of it are fascinating to contemplate nonetheless. If Super Dark Times were just a film about a kid going crazy after an accidental killing, doing some deliberate murders, then getting arrested, it would be, quite frankly, a rather dull film. The idea that invisible forces are quietly pushing the violent events along, however, makes the film’s sense of paranoia and tension more intense, and therefore more interesting.

And it’s not misogynistic to have a female villain, especially when most villains are male, anyway. Actually, having Allison as a psychopath makes her intriguing and powerful, rather than just a dull, innocent teenage girl who’s had the bad luck of getting mixed up with a psycho like Josh, who, just because he may have been goaded along by her doesn’t excuse him for his scurrilous actions.

Besides, my expansion of the villain Allison theory to include her in a coven, if anything, reduces the perception of misogyny, since male witches can be in a coven with female ones, in spite of the stereotype of female witches. Though the other members of the coven, as I interpret it, are all seen as female in the film, this far from precludes the possibility of male ones as well. Allison’s birthday party, I suspect, is full of members from the coven, including a number of guys.

My point about the pagan coven is their closeness to nature, not what sex most or all of the members are. The coven is preoccupied, as pagans, with the cycle of the seasons. Some pagan traditions in the past practiced human sacrifice around the winter solstice in the hopes of ensuring good luck (e.g., a good harvest) in the following year. I believe the killings (even an animal sacrifice in the case of the deer) are part of promoting good luck, hence Allison’s smile in the spring sunshine at the film’s end.

The sacrificial victims (John and Meghan in particular) may or may not have known they’d be killed. As members of the coven, they may have been so fully accepting of their imminent deaths (because of a spell put on them?) that they show no signs of fear. In any case, the linking of nature with the winter solstice, marijuana (a natural high that puts you under a ‘spell,’ of sorts!), sex and death can all tie in with the cycles of life and death that are a major feature of pagan beliefs.

Zach’s dream of having sex with Allison in that yonic hole in the forest, with the phallic katana in there as a sword of Damocles hanging over his head, and with Josh watching over them threateningly, fits in symbolically with what I’ve been saying.

Zach is woken up from his dream in, significantly, the class taught by attractive Mrs. Barron, and Allison is sitting by, watching him with concerned eyes. He asks to go to the washroom, and a classmate jokes “Boner!” as Zach walks out. Again, we see now sex is linked with the death connection in the dream.

Contrasted with the dream of Zach and Allison having sex at the scene of the killing is what seems to be the reality of Josh taking Allison there, retrieving the sword from the hole, and mutilating Daryl’s corpse further. (It’s also interesting how the cops still haven’t found the body.) So much of this film is about Zach’s and Josh’s jealous rivalry over Allison. We also see, in this idea of both Zach being with her and Josh being with her in the forest, a blurring of the boundary between the two boys, an idea I’ll develop later.

Later, in the school library, where we hear a boy say, “I’m sure I’m about to try to give us a curse” [!], Zach learns that Josh is back in school, because he’s been sent to the office for calling a teacher a “cunt.” Zach rushes over there to see his friend; there he sits next to the girl in the quasi-goth fashions (who I believe is also in the office for cussing at a teacher or librarian). He looks down at her Sony Walkman, and we see a close-up shot of the spinning cassette inside, reminding us of that black fan on the ceiling of the convenience store.

The eternal cycles of nature have “been there forever.”

Next, we’re taken to Allison’s birthday party, which is being held in Meghan’s house. Zach is surprised to see Josh there: he told Josh about the invite, but Josh never said he’d come. In fact, Josh gives Allison, as a birthday gift, a bag of weed (presumably the very bag of weed, his marine brother’s, that he was so insistent on never taking away). Both Allison and John Whitcomb, clearly present at the party with his blue hair and stoned face, are impressed with Josh, the latter hoping to score weed from Josh. Straight, nice-boy Zach, is not impressed.

What I find interesting is the choice of a paper to roll some of the weed in: of all things to use, it’s a page from the Bible. It may be only a page from the Introduction, but it’s close enough to be ‘holy,’ to have a magical, spiritual connection. A joint, long and thin, is also phallic, like the katana, and so it can be connected via sympathetic magic to the ritualistic murders soon to come.

This film makes a number of subtle allusions to other famous and violent films. Marijuana is linked to violence and death in a way reminiscent of oranges in The Godfather trilogy. At the climax of Super Dark Times, in Meghan’s house, Josh DeLarge, if you will, drinks a glass of milk as if to sharpen him up for a bit of the old ultraviolence with that katana. Also, Zach’s final confrontation with Josh in her house, using a fireplace scooper as a weapon, then going upstairs and finding our Billy-like psycho in the bedroom with his two female victims, reminds us of Black Christmas, fittingly with all the Christmas decorations. Then there’s the boys’ brief ‘swordfight,’ ending with Zach saying he loves Josh, who is fuming with Anakin-like rage, reminding us of Revenge of the Sith.

To get back to Allison’s party, I suspect that it’s Zach’s repeated rejection of her advances on him that ultimately saves his life. He’s not as much under the spell of the coven as Josh is, and while he gets badly injured during the climax with the katana (a wound in the balls?), I think he’ll survive.

His mom’s encouragement of him hanging out with both Allison and Josh suggest that she might be in the coven, too, willing to sacrifice or at least allow her son to be hurt for the sake of good luck in the next year. Now, I know that such an unmotherly thing to do to one’s son would make my speculation seem unlikely in the extreme, but one major issue that’s been observed in this film is how the teens’ pathologies are allowed to grow because of parental non-involvement in their lives. Zach’s mom, of course, seems like the one exception to this rule, but her involvement in the coven’s planned human sacrifices would thus make her, in a special way, very much a part of the issue.

Another speculation I’d like to make, if you’ll indulge me further, Dear Reader, is how “Allison” can mean “little Alice.” This name can make us think of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and how Zach is going down the rabbit hole, deep into a strange and scary place, such as where that katana was hidden. “Alice” can also suggest shock-rocker Alice Cooper, Vincent Furnier’s stage name, the however apocryphal story of his having gotten the name via Ouija Board, learning of his former life as a 17th century witch (Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, Third Edition, page 209). The singer denies this story, insisting that the name is meant ironically to suggest the contrast of a sweet, innocent girl, as against the violent stage acts of his concerts.

Rather like the contrast between Allison’s sweet, innocent exterior and…her inner witchery.

After an anxiety-inducing dream of him jogging at school with police cars in the background, Zach wakes up in class, with the student sitting behind him telling him about the death of John. Remembering Josh telling him of how much he’s hated John, Zach is fearing the worst about his friend.

Zach talks with Allison about John’s death, among other things. She writes her new number on his cast. She assumes John just fell off the bridge in an accident, while Zach suspects Josh pushed him. When she wonders why Zach cares so much about how John died, we suspect that her lack of empathy could be linked to psychopathy. When she wonders if it’s all been her fault–that is, how both Josh and Zach have a thing for her, and that it’s affecting the boys’ friendship–we further suspect her involvement in the violence.

Zach’s fear growing, he grabs a flashlight at home and rides his bike back to the forest to see Daryl’s body, which as I said before is with new stabbings, the wind having blown away many of the leaves that had been covering it (and again, I must wonder why the cops still haven’t found it). Using the flashlight to look in the hole and discovering the katana is gone, Zach rightfully suspects that Josh took it and gave the body the new wounds.

It doesn’t occur to Zach, though, that Allison could have been with Josh and watched him stab the body to impress her and titillate her fascination with violence. Such an interpretation works because it dovetails with the opening scene of her watching in fascination as the cop stomped on the deer in the classroom. Daryl (his name almost a pun on deer) is the deer here, as little endearing as he’s been, having run in the woods with a mortal wound, and then finished off with further mutilation. The deer and Daryl scenes exemplify the motif of cycles in the film, recurring events paralleling the seasons and reflecting pagan preoccupations with cycles, as a witches’ coven would have.

Zach hurries back to his house, gets the number for Charlie’s home from Allison [!], and calls him to tell him that he suspects Josh has killed John. Charlie, of course, still wants to stay out of all of this bloody business, and he wants Zach to stop bothering him about it.

Later, Zach’s mom returns home with…Josh! She’s as content to have her son around Josh as she is to have him around Allison. I know it doesn’t prove anything about her, but I’d say it raises suspicions. As the argument the two boys have outside indicates, their friendship is dying. No sooner does Zach mention John’s name than Josh flips out about it, further raising suspicions against him.

After Josh leaves and Zach goes back in his house, his mother expresses a deep worry about the safety of the teens of their neighbourhood in general, with the knowledge of what’s happened to Daryl and John. She speaks of empathizing with the boys’ mothers, which may be real, or it may be reaction formation, hiding her own coven participation in the crimes. Remember that in Super Dark Times, things aren’t always what they seem.

The next day, Zach goes to Josh’s house to talk to him. Josh isn’t there, but Zach discovers Allison’s new number on the phone in Josh’s house. In his growing panic and paranoia, he’s too addled to realize that it isn’t Josh who’s called Allison, but she’s called him. The phone number we see displayed on our phone is there to tell us of any possible incoming calls we’ve missed; we know who we’ve called, so we don’t need our phones to tell us who we’ve called!

Since she’s been calling Josh, that means she’s as interested in him as she is in Zach. Both are unpopular, bullied, geeky kids–especially Josh. I must ask again: why would such a pretty girl be interested in such losers…unless she has a use for them? Zach-attack, and the–so to speak–deer hunter.

Zach rushes on his bike over to Allison’s house–we see a shot of her Mona Lisa smile from back when she was at his house on the day of Daryl’s killing, which should tell you something about who is seeking whom here–and he’s frantically ringing the doorbell and banging on the door. When it opens, we expect to see her, or someone else from her family; instead, the film subverts our expectations again, and we see Josh at the door of Meghan’s house, with her and Allison there to greet him.

As with the previously subverted expectation of seeing Zach’s mom at her kitchen window, rather than Allison at her bedroom window, there is the identification of a character with another here, as well as more cyclical repetition. I identified Allison with Zach’s mother before; now, I identify Zach with Josh, and Allison with her aggressive brother.

The identification of the two boys with each other is about the violence between the two, as part of the coven’s planned human sacrifices: the more people killed, or at least badly hurt, the better the good luck of the following year. The linking of sex and death is a part of this: the deaths ending the cycle of this year will lead to the life of the beginning of the next year, the spring’s brighter light after this winter’s darkness. First, Thanatos, then Eros, a resurrection of life after death. So, the two boys’ competitive sexual infatuation with Allison and their resulting violence results in their mutual identification.

Recall that Allison seems disappointed that Zach won’t show up at Meghan’s house, meaning she’s expected him to come with Josh, or soon after, at least. That allusion I made previously to Revenge of the Sith, with Josh as Anakin and Zach as Obi-Wan…but with ‘Anakin’ winning the sword fight and ‘Obi-Wan’ losing…fits in with this identification idea, since the boys are exchanging roles and thus the boundary between the two is blurred.

Zach has been told by Allison’s surly older brother that she is at the house of that ‘bitch’ (almost sounds like ‘witch,’ doesn’t it?) Meghan, so Zach rushes over there, where Josh is drinking his, if you will, Korova ‘milk-plus.’ The drug element, of course, will be introduced in the form of a bag of weed, and he’ll be sharpened up for a bit of the old ultra-violence, in which the stabbing of Meghan with the katana can be seen as a kind of symbolic, droog-like rape–more linking of sex with death. Allison is eerily calm the whole time.

Josh, on the other hand, is his usual awkward self, even a bit jittery in comparison to her, though by now, this third time he’s to kill someone should be, as Virgil noted in that scene in True Romance (link above), easy. As he is chatting with Meghan and Allison, he and the latter exchange glances, her giving him what seem to be knowing looks, as if he and she know something Meghan might not.

The three go up to Meghan’s bedroom to smoke the weed (the bedroom, with a boy and two girls in it, implies another link of sexuality and death, since Meghan will be lying on her bed all bloody and dead). Zach, oddly, is running from Allison’s house to Meghan’s instead of riding his bike, as if the spell I imagine everyone involved to be on is meant to slow him down so he’ll be too late to save Meghan, one of the main sacrificial victims in my conception of what’s secretly happening. Josh’s examination of one of Meghan’s pretty pink brassieres is yet another link of sex and (her) death.

Allison is aware of previous surprises from Josh, which could include her having seen Daryl’s body and the sword, since she’s not at all surprised to see it when Josh unsheathes it in Meghan’s bedroom. One would think that both girls would be scared, or at least worried, to see it, especially in the hands of this awkward, possibly disturbed (from his looks) geek, and just after knowing about the disappearance/deaths of Daryl and John. Getting high on pot should also intensify feelings of paranoia in the girls with the sight of jittery Josh brandishing the sword, but both girls are oddly cool about it. Meghan is even fascinated with the phallic thing, wanting to play with it [!].

It’s as if all three know, or at least two of them know, what’s about to happen.

As Meghan is having fun with the katana, Allison is grinning and enjoying the feeling of the sunlight on her face. Not only does she not fear the sword, even when Meghan swings it close to her face, but in enjoying the sunlight, it’s as though she’s anticipating the coming light and good luck of next year’s spring; note her enjoyment of the sunlight at the end of the film, too, in the spring.

If she’s really been traumatized by Josh’s killing of Meghan and threatening of her with the sword, which is right after that well-noted feeling of the sunlight, wouldn’t the springtime sunlight trigger a painful memory of the killing and threat to her life, rather than be something she enjoys? This is part of why some of us have doubts about Allison’s innocence.

When Josh asks for a puff of the joint, it’s significant that Meghan thinks he’s asking for the sword instead. Both are phallic symbols, the enjoyment of the joint immediately precedes the killing with the katana, and I imagine the getting high is part of the ritual–getting one’s head in a ‘sacred space,’ since marijuana has sometimes been used in religious contexts–leading up to the human sacrifice.

As Josh is puffing on the joint, he and Allison are sharing what look like knowing glances, as if they’ve planned what’s soon to come. Just before Josh says, “Alright, my turn,” meaning he wants to have the katana now, he has a slightly nervous look on his face as he looks at Allison. She, on the other hand, looks back at him calmly, giving him another of those knowing looks.

Zach knows, too, of course, and he’s running like crazy to Meghan’s house. Again, his entrance–without getting permission to come in, ascending the stairs using the fireplace shovel as a weapon, then leaving and climbing up on the van to get in through Meghan’s bedroom window–remind us of, in Black Christmas, not only Jess’s ascent up the stairs with the fireplace poker, but also killer Billy’s going up into the attic at the beginning of that film. Zach is thus identified with both the final girl and the killer, which, as I said above, blurs the distinction between himself and Josh, since both boys are meant to be involved in the human sacrifice.

I really do feel that Allison’s fear and being tied up are staged. Josh, in spite of his growing mental instability, would not want to hurt her. He likes her! He’s always been motivated to win her love, with the marijuana and, I believe, having her know of the killings of Daryl, John, and Meghan–not to scare her, but to impress her. Also, Allison doesn’t really do any crying before or after Zach arrives at the bedroom.

As we know, Josh fights with Zach and wounds him, first in the arm and then, outside, in the groin. As Josh is twisting the katana blade in Zach’s…balls?…a teen girl is watching from across the street. She is perfectly calm…why? Shouldn’t she be shocked? And why add this shot if it doesn’t have any meaning? Like the girl playing with her pen in class, I believe this one is another member of the town’s coven, content to see the bloody sacrifices that will lead to a bright spring of good luck the next year.

The boys continue fighting on the lawn in front of Meghan’s house, in the rain as the sun is going down, until a man runs over and pulls Josh off of Zach, who hits him in the face. Police cars some, and Josh is arrested.

Zach asks a female medic if ‘they’ll be OK,’ and she says she’ll put a pad on them; I find it safe to assume that ‘they’ are his balls, not the two girls up in that bedroom. Allison is taken out on a stretcher, and her brother shows surprising concern for her. Josh is sitting all glum in the back of a police car, looking rather like Detective Mills at the end of Se7en, which is fitting, because wrath was Mills’s, and Josh’s, deadly sin.

The following spring, we see Allison taking a shower, some cleansing water to contrast how the rain had added to the harshness of the previous scene. At first, her face seems to express some bad feelings about what happened several months before; but then she looks up with a slight smile, seeing a bird outside near some leafy trees. She seems quite well.

Then we see her in a car, presumably on her way to school the same day, and again she seems quite at peace, enjoying the sunshine on her face, as she had just before seeing Meghan butchered before her very eyes. People do not heal that quickly after a trauma like the one that, supposedly, she’s so recently endured.

That enigmatic smile she has here reminds me of the one on the Mona Lisa’s face. To understand why the Gioconda’s smile is so “unnervingly placid,” as Camille Paglia once described it, consider the natural background of the portrait for context: it’s “deceptive and incoherent. The mismatched horizon lines…are subliminally disorienting…without law or justice…What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear.” (Paglia, page 154)

The exact same things can be said about that look on Allison’s face, especially when we consider the natural background we constantly see in Super Dark Times. Allison and the coven are powerful forces of nature. They sit back (yin) and let others do the evil (yang) in the world, in spite of their quiet engineering of the whole thing. This idea ties in with how we all allowed Democrats and other liberals like Clinton become clones of the GOP and other conservatives back in the 1990s, leading to the aggravated evils we now see in the 21st century. It’s often said that the passivity of ‘good’ people is crucial to bringing out and encouraging evil in others. We’ve all been put under the spell of neoliberalism.

The movie ends with Allison in class, and a boy sitting behind her seems to be admiring her beauty just as Zach has been seen doing earlier in the film–another example of cyclical recurrence. I see in this also a subtle allusion to Spellbinder, in which a beautiful witch seduces a young man and lures him to his death, then at the end of the film, she begins a new seduction of her next male victim. That boy sitting behind Allison: is he going to be among the next of the coven’s victims?

I’m not concerned with those scratches on the back of Allison’s neck; whether she got them from the katana or somewhere else is neither here nor there to me. What I find more significant is how she’s about to answer a teacher’s question: What was women’s contribution to the Industrial Revolution? We can consider Allison’s contribution to nature’s cyclical revolutions in this connection.

Super Dark Times is, as I noted above, always dropping only hints of things that are suggestive of many possible interpretations. The coven theory is my interpretation: make of it what you will.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 1, Chapter 2

[The following is the eighteenth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, and here is the seventeenth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The basic principle that must always be remembered and respected whenever using magic is that all opposites are unified: one never has one idea without its opposite. So many times did the Luminosians try to achieve one thing while being oblivious of its opposite when practicing magic, and this negligence led to so many evils for them.

This principle, the Unity of Action, is something that Rawmios tried to teach the people many years before this writing. The Luminosians were taught this idea, too, though many chose not to listen, and so they were taken into slavery not long after having liberated themselves from it.

In their attempts to free themselves from the Tenebrosians, the Luminosians used magic most carelessly: they would wildly aim their magic at the oppressors, but end up harming so many of their own in the process. This error resulted from a failure to keep in mind the Unity of Space–how all of us are unified, including even slave and master.

In their final attempt to free themselves from the Tenebrosians, the successful attempt, the Luminosians traveled and found a land they chose to settle in–Zaga, a place already inhabited by a people whom the Luminosians chose to treat with no less contempt than the Tenebrosians had shown them. This disregard demonstrated how the Luminosians had failed to understand both the Unity of Action and the Unity of Space. In oppressing the Zagans, the Luminosians failed to see their own unity with the Zagans, that of their both being oppressed peoples.

The Luminosians’ disregard of the Unity of Action resulted also in a disregard of the Echo Effect, how actions are unified in the form of sow and reap. Whatever good or evil one does to others will echo back to oneself. As we know, not too long after the beginning of the Luminosians’ oppression of the Zagans, the Zoyans invaded the settlement and made slaves of the Luminosians.

These are the bitter lessons one learns when one doesn’t heed the warnings of magic rashly used. Thus, the following laws have been devised with the hope that the practitioners of the future will not suffer the same dire consequences that the Luminosians suffered.

Magic must be practiced with a disciplined and restrained mind, ever mindful of the union of contraries. Whenever any one particular goal is sought, its opposite must be considered. To gain the love of another through magic, for instance, the practitioner must allow for the possibility that the object of his love has no regard for him or even hates him. Love must not be forced, as many Luminosian men tried to do on the women they raped and killed with their spells.

One must never practice magic with an indulgent, impulsive, or reckless attitude. That which comes quickly to the user of magic can just as quickly be taken away from him. The freedom the Luminosians enjoyed from the Tenebrosians, quickly gained, was then quickly taken away from them by the Zoyans. A lasting freedom would have been enjoyed by the Luminosians had they been patient with their magic, carefully crafting their spells to avoid killing their own as well as the Tenebrosians, and waiting to find a fertile but unused patch of land, instead of stealing land from the Zagans.

Achieving what one wants for oneself must be balanced with respecting the wants of others, for such is the essence of the Unity of Space, to see a unity in the self and the other.

The heat of the fiery passion of Nevil must be tempered with the cool calm of watery Priff. The impulsive, volatile floating and fluttering about of airy Weleb must be balanced with the stability, consistency, and surety of stony, earthy Drofurb. As mighty as the four Crims are, the misuse of their power can be deadly.

So one must be always aware of the dangers of the disregard of the Ten Errors and the Echo Effect. Never deny or forget the fundamental unity of all things. If one sees only one side of a matter, while being blind to the other, one is engaging in mad thinking, the first of the Ten Errors, which will lead to the evil use of magic.

If one is dazed by beautiful images while ignoring the unpleasant, the second of the Ten Errors, attachment to the former when using magic will lead to evil, which in turn will cause the Echo Effect to bring the evil back upon oneself.

Never use scurrilous language (the third Error) when doing incantations! Never use magic to drive others to work only, and never rest (the fourth Error)! Never use magic to provoke family fighting, murder, adultery, theft, lying, or greed (the rest of the Ten Errors)! The Echo Effect will bring all of these sins back on the sinful user!

Damocles

I
f
all of you
o
l
i
g
a
r
c
h
s

think that
your wealth
will make you
all live forever,
think again.
Your
fate is hanging by
a single horsehair.

Analysis of ‘Le Petit Prince’

I: Introduction

Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) is a 1943 novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the US that year, and published posthumously in France following liberation, as the Vichy Regime had banned it.

The novella was Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling about 140 million copies worldwide, and thus being one of the best-selling books in history. It’s been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, second only to the Bible among the most-translated works. Le Petit Prince has been adapted into many art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, TV, ballet, and opera.

Here is a link to quotes from the novella in French and in English translation, and here is a link to a PDF of an English translation of the story.

II: Chapter One

Saint-Exupéry begins his tale by discussing a time, when he was six years old, that he was fascinated with how a boa constrictor eats its prey, swallowing it whole without chewing it, and needing six months to digest it. The boy decided to draw a boa constrictor having swallowed an elephant, but on showing the picture to some adults and asking if it scared them, they saw nothing scary about it, since it looked as if he’d simply drawn a hat!

In this moment, we see the beginning of a recurring theme in Le Petit Prince: the folly of adults when compared to the wisdom of a child. The boy tried a second drawing, this time showing the inside of the boa constrictor so the elephant could be clearly seen. Now, the adults advised him to forget about boa constrictors and what they eat, and instead focus on learning geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. The folly of adults is the reversing of what’s important and what’s unimportant, so Saint-Exupéry gave up on the dream of being an artist at the age of six and would eventually become a pilot instead.

In meeting more adults over the years, he never changed his low opinion of them, since as a test, he’d show them his first picture, and they always saw only a hat.

III: Chapter Two

Here is where the story really begins, a fanciful rather than a logical one. Adult Saint-Exupéry had been living alone, with no one to talk to (loneliness is another major theme of the novella), until six years before his telling of his story, when he was flying his plane over the Sahara Desert and it crashed with a broken engine. Again, he found himself alone, with no passengers or mechanics to help him.

He had to fix his plane alone, he was miles away from civilization, and he hadn’t enough drinking water to last a week. This was a life-and-death situation. You can imagine the stress he was going through.

This predicament really happened to Saint-Exupéry and his copilot-navigator, André Prévot, in 1935. Though they’d survived the crash, they faced rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat, with limited food and drink. They both began to have vivid hallucinations. By the fourth day of their ordeal, a Bedouin on a camel found the two and saved them. Saint-Exupéry described their ordeal in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes).

The notion of having hallucinations while suffering in the desert heat can explain Saint-Exupéry seeing the little prince. While the boy is, on the one hand, a projection of the pilot having regressed to a childhood state (to ease his stress), the prince can also be seen as a Christ figure, a sinless child coming to Saint-Exupéry’s rescue, just in time.

One idea that you can glean from all of my posts involving my interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros (i.e., the dialectical relationship between opposites) is that at the moment of the most hellish despair, salvation can come. The prospect of certain death in the desert (hell, the bitten tail of the ouroboros) leads to Saint-Exupéry’s delivery from it (heaven, the biting head of the serpent). This delivery, this salvation, comes to the beleaguered pilot in the Christ-like form of the little prince.

If adult Christ was King of the Jews, then as a child he was a prince, the Prince of Peace, the little prince. We are instructed that we can attain the kingdom of heaven only as a child (Matthew 18:3), and so Saint-Exupéry must get back in touch with his original, naïve childlike nature. This is the purpose of the little prince entering the pilot’s life right at this moment…saving him in the most unlikely way.

On the morning of the second day of Saint-Exupéry’s ordeal, he wakes up to the voice of the boy asking him, of all things, to draw a sheep for him. The importance of this seemingly trivial, frivolous request, interrupting the man from his urgent work, exists on several levels. First, there’s the dialectic of prioritizing the trivial over the urgent, a child’s wisdom versus an adult’s. Second, the sheep makes us think of a lamb, the Lamb of God. Third, the man is being brought back to his childhood love of drawing…but drawing a peaceful, rather than a threatening, animal.

What makes the pilot’s ordeal in the story even worse than that of Saint-Exupéry and his copilot, Prévot, in the real-life ordeal is precisely the absence of a copilot, or anyone else, for that matter. The man is alone in the hot desert, far away from civilization, with a plane needing repairs, and he’s running out of drinking water. He could die, and he has nobody with him. This is the hell of death and loneliness.

Being alone only intensifies annihilation anxieties, leading one all the closer to psychotic panic, or what Wilfred Bion would have called a nameless dread. The pilot is sweltering in oppressive heat; this heat is an example of unpleasant stimuli that Bion would have called beta elements, stimuli that have to be processed, via alpha function, into alpha elements, or processed stimuli that one can cope with. (Read more about Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts here).

As I said above, the extremity of the pilot’s ordeal has forced him to regress to a childlike state, to a simpler frame of mind that doesn’t have to cope with complexity. Still, though, that complexity has to be coped with, and in his regressed, childlike state, the pilot needs someone to help him process the physical irritants (beta elements, the dehydrating heat) that he can’t deal with all alone. It’s out of the question, of course, that his mother could be there for him, the one who normally does the vicarious processing of her baby’s unpleasant stimuli via maternal reverie. The pilot must resort to something else.

As a result of his helplessness, loneliness, and urgent need to save his life, the pilot projects his inner child out into the external world in the form of the little prince, who is for the pilot what Bion would have called a bizarre object, a projected hallucination from his inner psychic world, sent out of him to keep him company in a desperate attempt to save his life.

With the bizarre object of the little prince come all the other bizarre objects: the tiny planets of the boy and the men the boy visits, the talking rose, the talking fox, and the talking serpent. This childlike fantasy world is the pilot’s escape from his desperation, his ordeal.

Getting him to draw a sheep several times, criticizing each drawing for this or that flaw, and finally accepting a drawing of a sheep ironically obscured in a box, are ways of helping the pilot process his childhood trauma of his original artwork having been rejected by adults. Had he only been encouraged to be an artist as a child and thus to express his emotions freely, he might have pursued that ambition, instead of becoming a pilot (symbolic of trying to fly away and escape everything), and thus finding himself in his current, life-threatening predicament. On a symbolic level, his danger in the desert represents his psychological crisis resulting from having abandoned and betrayed the true self (in Winnicott‘s sense) of his childhood. In this sense, the little prince has truly saved the pilot.

IV: Chapter Three

We get a sense of how small the planet is that the little prince comes from when he tells the pilot that the sheep he’s given him won’t need a rope to restrain it, since if it strays, it won’t be able to wander very far.

The smallness of the little prince’s planet–like that of the planets of the king, the vain man, the drunk, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer–has different levels of meaning. On the one hand, it means the planets are like small islands in a universal ocean, isolated places of loneliness and alienation. Thus, they represent projections of the pilot’s loneliness as well as the loneliness of all of us. The small planets also represent a wish-fulfillment for a man stranded on a stretch of land far too large for his comfort. If only he, like the little prince, could fly away from his world to explore others and escape his danger, taken away with the help of a flight of migratory birds (Chapter Nine), instead of being stuck in a desert with his broken-down plane.

V: Chapter Four

Indeed, the little prince’s planet is as small as a house!

The pilot believes the boy’s planet is an asteroid known as B-612, discovered by a Turkish astronomer in 1909, whose discovery was ignored by the International Astronomical Congress because the Turk wore the traditional clothing of his country rather than European clothes. When the Turk was in European clothes, though, and he presented his discovery to the Congress again in 1920, the Westerners acknowledged him. We see in this an example of both Western prejudice as well as the addled adult mindset.

The pilot notes more examples of this mindset, in how adults seem to think that numbers and figures pertaining to anything are more important than, say, its beauty. These numbers and figures, of course, often represent monetary values for the adults: ‘Does his father make much money?’ or ‘I saw a house worth a million dollars […] What a pretty house!’ Such a mindset is a reflection of the capitalistic values we’ve all been taught, and so Saint-Exupéry’s critique of such values must have been among the reasons that the pro-Nazi Vichy government wouldn’t allow Le Petit Prince to be published. Fascism is hyper-capitalism: it exists to thwart the growth of socialism–more on that later.

Now that the little prince is out of the pilot’s life (it’s been six years, as of the telling of this story, that the little prince has returned to his planet), and so not only does the man miss the little boy, but he has revived his childhood interest in art, having bought a box of paints and some pencils, and not wanting to be interested in only numbers. He is getting older physically, but the return of the little prince to his planet really means, paradoxically, that the projection of the pilot’s inner child has returned to his heart.

VI: Chapter Five

In this chapter is a discussion of the issue of baobab trees. As soon as the little prince is aware of the growing of a bad plant like a baobab on his little planet, he must destroy it at once. For if he allows any baobabs to grow freely, they will take over his entire planet and the roots will burrow their way down. And on a small planet like his, the baobabs will wreck it entirely.

Researchers have contended that the baobabs represent Nazism’s attempt to dominate and destroy our Earth. Small wonder the Vichy government wouldn’t let Saint-Exupéry’s novella be published, and only upon France’s liberation from Nazi occupation would the story be published there.

Note that it isn’t enough to uproot this or that baobab, and then be content that one’s work is all done. The little prince tells the pilot that one must regularly go to work, every day after washing and cleaning, spotting the baobabs and distinguishing them from the similar-looking rosebushes, and pull the baobabs out as soon as they’re spotted as such.

The same vigilance must be applied to fascism…though few have heeded the warning since the end of WWII. The defeat of Nazi Germany, more the sacrifice of the Soviets than of Western Europe and North America by a long shot, was merely a setback for fascism. The far-right soon regrouped and acted clandestinely, seeming no different from the rosebush-liberals of the postwar world.

Ex-Nazis found lucrative employment in the US via Operation Paperclip, for no one was more effective at fighting ‘those lousy commie Reds’ than fanatically anti-socialist fascists during the height of the Cold War. These ex-Nazis worked in NASA, NATO, and West Germany, causing tensions in East Germany that necessitated the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, also known as the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, to keep Nazi espionage out, as well as to prevent brain-drain, or the loss of skillful engineers, scientists, etc. to the capitalist West through tempting salary offers.

Then there were Operations Aerodynamic and Gladio.

After all of that fascist terrorizing of the European left came the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the use of Ukrainian fascists by the US and NATO to provoke Russia into a needless and dangerous war, and the rise of Trump via Zionists like Biden. This is why we can never stop being mindful of baobab fascism.

But I digress.

Saint-Exupéry may have been born to an aristocratic family, but that doesn’t necessitate elitist, let alone fascist, sympathies. Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince; he was also an anarcho-commmunist. Friedrich Engels was a bourgeois; he was also Karl Marx’s trusted friend and colleague.

But I digress again.

VII: Chapter Six

The little prince loves to watch sunsets, which on his tiny planet come forty-four times a day! Here on Earth, though, the boy will have to wait and wait.

The frequent sight of sunsets (and therefore also of sunrises) implies that the little prince has a far more conscious sense of how cyclical life is than we do. He watches sunsets when he is sad, implying that they have a therapeutic value for him. Seeing the coming darkness will bring to mind that the light will soon return.

We on Earth, on the other hand, must wait much longer for both the light and the dark, giving us the illusory feeling that both the good and the bad are closer to being permanent states of existence. The boy knows better, though.

VIII: Chapter Seven

The little prince wants to talk to the pilot about flowers, and if the sheep will eat flowers, but the pilot is terribly busy and stressed trying to repair his plane. The boy’s incessant questioning feels so annoying in its triviality.

When the boy asks what a flower’s thorns are for, the man snaps at him that it’s because flowers are cruel, which the prince can’t believe. The pilot’s words seem to imply that the little prince is being a cruel flower himself for pestering him in his life-or-death situation.

The boy is shocked that the man doesn’t think flowers are important, and that he is being just like any other adult, bereft of understanding. Recall that the little prince, as a Christ-figure, is trying to get the pilot to understand that, in order to save himself, the pilot must be as a child, to be an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), and therefore in agreeing that flowers are important the man is imitating the prince and being like a child.

The little prince speaks of a man on a planet he’s visited who thinks that doing sums is the only important thing in the world; this man has never smelled a flower or looked upon a star. He’s swollen with pride, like a balloon. He sounds like the businessman we’ll learn about in Chapter Thirteen, he who imagines all the stars out in space are his possessions, his accumulated wealth. If so, he counts the stars, but never looks on them. In other words, he has all the inverted values of a capitalist. He doesn’t care about beauty; he only cares about numbers as money-values.

The pilot feels ashamed to seem like a man similar to this businessman.

IX: Chapter Eight

The little prince tells the pilot about a special seed that was blown onto his planet from some other place. It gave birth to a new kind of shoot, making the prince look it over very closely. Was it a new kind of baobab? No.

It grew into a beautiful flower that captivated the boy’s heart. She was a speaking flower, and one that is rather vain, her words annoying him. She wanted him to attend to her needs–watering her, and putting a screen around her to protect her from gales. He feels that one shouldn’t listen to flowers, but rather just look at and smell them, and admire their beauty.

Apparently, the flower, a rose, was inspired by the author’s wife, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who was from El Salvador, the country that inspired the little prince’s planet, with three volcanoes like those in her country, too (including the Santa Ana Volcano). I suppose we’re meant to assume by all of this that his wife was kind, yet petulant and vain as well.

The little prince’s leaving his planet and the rose behind, later to encounter the vast field of roses on Earth, is meant to represent Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity to Consuela, presumably during his travels by plane. In all of this, we can see again how the little prince is a projection of the pilot’s idealized version of himself, and is therefore also in turn a projection of Saint-Exupéry.

X: Chapter Nine

The little prince has left his planet, apparently, with the help of a flight of migratory birds, obviously symbolic of a plane for Exupéry to fly, and therefore a wish-fulfillment for the man stranded in the desert. The leaving can also represent the loss of innocence upon having grown up and having to face the adult world.

Before leaving, though, the boy’s had to be responsible and make sure his planet has been left in the best condition possible, which meant cleaning his three volcanoes, two active and one extinct, as well as pulling out the last of the baobab shoots and making sure his rose was safe from harm.

She says she won’t need the glass dome he’s used to put on her to protect her. She’ll enjoy the cool night air, and her thorns will protect her from any wild animals. Just as he is maturing and getting more responsible and self-reliant, so is she.

XI: Chapter Ten

In his travels in space, the little prince visits a number of asteroids not unlike his own in essence. The first of these has a king on it, and every other asteroid also has a solitary man living on it, each man in his own way demonstrating the foolishness of the adult mindset.

This adult absurdity is put into full effect here with a king who, all alone on his asteroid, rules over nobody. We see what a bad thing authoritarianism is when it’s presented in an absurd way. The king’s commands are pointless, illogical, and unenforceable. Quite an ironic position to get from an author who was born into an aristocratic family.

If the king can’t forbid the little prince to yawn, then he’ll command the boy to yawn. If the prince is too shy to yawn, then the king will command him sometimes to yawn, sometimes not to.

The king wants respect for his authority, and hates to be disobeyed, yet he is consummately ineffectual, thus demonstrating all by himself just how invalid regal authority is.

If the boy asks the king if he may do something, such as to sit down or ask a question, then the king commands him to do these things instead of simply permitting him to do them. The king is alone on his asteroid, yet he insists he rules over everything, even the stars, which he imagines must obey him in everything. In a while, we’ll be introduced to the businessman, who imagines the stars are his property.

The king says that authority rests on reason, and that he demands obedience because his orders are reasonable…yet the examples given above demonstrate how his orders are anything but reasonable.

The little prince wishes to leave the king’s little planet, yet the king forbids him to, offering to make the boy his minister. There being no one else on the asteroid, though, means that he as “minister” will have no one to judge. The king says the boy then can judge himself. The insists on leaving, yet the king offers to make him his ambassador. The prince leaves.

XII: Chapter Eleven

The second planet the little prince visits is inhabited by a vain man, who imagines the approaching boy to be an admirer. The prince considers the vain man’s hat to be an odd one, yet its owner says he raises it to anyone who praises hm…yet no one ever comes to his planet.

The vain man asks the little prince to clap his hands, which the boy does, causing the vain man to raise his hat “in a modest salute,” as if he were receiving applause for having put on an impressive performance.

The vain man, like the king, is demonstrating the absurdity of adults’ narcissistic affectations of greatness, when no such greatness is at all in evidence. He asks the boy if he thinks him “the handsomest, smartest, richest, and wisest man on the planet”…yet he is the only man on the planet, just as the king is alone on his planet, ruling over nobody.

Adult narcissism seems to stem from loneliness.

The prince leaves the planet.

XIII: Chapter Twelve

He arrives on a planet where a drunk lives. The little prince learns that this man drinks to help him forget how ashamed he feels…because he drinks!

The sadness of the drunk drives home the idea that it’s the loneliness of all of these adults that drives them to do the absurd things that they do. Hence, each man lives alone on his planet. The boy was alone on his, too, yet at least he had the sense to leave and look around, to find people.

Accordingly, he leaves the drunk’s planet, too.

XIV: Chapter Thirteen

The little prince arrives on the planet of the businessman, who is in the middle of doing sums. We see here especially how numbers are meant to represent monetary values, as I mentioned above, since the businessman is counting the stars.

He imagines he owns them simply because he was the first to think about owning them. He sees a difference between his owning them and a king ruling over them; we could see in this ‘difference’ a satirizing of the difference between capitalism and feudalism.

The businessman imagines that his ‘owning’ of the stars will make him rich…so he can ‘buy’ more stars! The little prince notes that the businessman’s avarice is based on the same kind of circular reasoning as the drunk’s shame is based on. One gropes for things only for the sake of groping for them.

The notion of justifying one’s ownership of a thing on the basis of having ‘discovered’ it is extended by the businessman into the realm of imperialism and settler-colonialism. He says, “When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours.” We all know what happened when Christopher Columbus discovered land that “belongs to nobody.”

The businessman’s ‘discovery’ of the stars, those islands in the sea of space, and his subsequent ‘owning’ of them, amassing his wealth through them, is the author satirizing capitalism by demonstrating the absurdity of accumulating capital for its own sake, claiming ownership of things that don’t belong to you.

He justifies his ownership of the stars further by calculating their totals, writing the totals on a little piece of paper, and putting the paper in a drawer to lock them in. This locking-away of the paper is his “bank.”

Like the king, the vain man, and the drunk, the businessman is all alone on his planet, engaging in his absurdity to compensate for his loneliness. The alienation caused by capitalism, fittingly, is felt most keenly by him. He pays little attention to anybody or anything other than his calculating.

The little prince observes that his own ownership of volcanoes and a flower are far more meaningful because he actually tends to their needs. The businessman, on the other hand, does nothing of use for the stars, just as any capitalist does little more than accumulating profits and overseeing those he overworks and underpays, his workers, who are the ones who are actually making the products and who thus should manage themselves and earn the full fruits of their labour.

The little prince leaves the businessman’s planet.

XV: Chapter Fourteen

The next planet the little prince comes to is one inhabited by a lamplighter. This planet is the smallest of them all, with only enough room for the lamplighter and his street lamp.

This man doesn’t seem to be engaging in absurd acts on first inspection, though, as has been the case with the previous four men, for lighting a street lamp does in itself have meaning. Still, his work is discovered to have plenty of absurdity in it.

The lamplighter’s planet is so small, and it has been rotating faster and faster over time, that morning and evening fall almost immediately the one after the other, so he must light up and put out the street light with hardly any rest in between.

And why? Because these are his orders.

Still, the boy sees good in the lamplighter, for “he cares for something besides himself.” The lonely little prince could also see a friend in the lamplighter, yet sadly, his planet is too small for both of them to live on, so the little prince leaves.

XVI: Chapter Fifteen

The next planet he lands on is one with a geographer, an elderly man who writes long books and imagines the approaching boy to be an explorer. Recall that geography has been one of the pilot’s studies, so when we discover the geographer’s absurdities, we will see another example of our narrator poking vicarious fun at himself.

One would think that this geographer would have an encyclopedic knowledge of every nook and cranny of his little planet, but he knows of no oceans on it, nor of any mountains, cities, rivers, or deserts. The reason for his ignorance, he says, is that he has no explorers to discover all of these things for him. He is only supposed to receive the explorers’ information, ask them questions about it, and write it all down.

Considering the little prince to be an explorer, the geographer is eager to hear the boy describe his planet. The prince tells of his volcanoes and his flower, though the geographer is not concerned with the latter, since it is “ephemeral.” Geography books are concerned only with what lasts forever on a planet, the geographer insists.

Similarly, he is not concerned with whether a volcano is extinct or if it lives. What matters to him is the mountain itself, which does not change. If the geographer records changing things in his books, then they’ll be out of date, sooner or later, and he can’t have that.

The little prince is saddened to learn that that which is ephemeral is “that which will die.” Since his flower is ephemeral, he fears for her death. In his heart, the boy knows better than the man: that which will die is far superior to that which is “everlasting,” since the ephemeral’s value is its rarity in the brevity of its life.

The geographer recommends that the little prince go next to the Earth, since good things have been said about the planet. So Earth is where the boy goes.

XVII: Chapter Sixteen

Ours is no ordinary planet, for instead of having only one king, one vain man, one drunk, one businessman, one lamplighter, and one geographer, there are many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and/or millions of each of these kinds of men on Earth. So many adult fools, all occupying one planet.

The narrator discusses the many lamplighters of the world before the invention of electricity.

XVIII: Chapter Seventeen

The narrator notes, yet again, another absurd thing that people often do: they lie to sound smart. While he acknowledges that people occupy very little space on Earth, grownups will think he’s lying about that, since they in their pride would prefer to believe that they take up a great deal of space here. “They think they are as large as baobabs.” As I discussed above, we should all know what that kind of poisonous pride can lead to.

When the little prince arrives on Earth, he’s surprised to find no people at all. Well, he is in the middle of a desert, after all. On a planet with so many people, the boy is still lonely.

He soon finds himself in a conversation with a snake. Since as a Christ-figure, the little prince could thus be a kind of second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:47, for example), then it is fitting that he have a conversation with a ‘second serpent’–not one that will tempt him (via Eve) into sin and death, but one that will give him genuine knowledge and wisdom.

The boy learns from the serpent that, while it is surely lonely to be in the desert, “It is also lonely among men.” One could be surrounded in a sea of people, yet still feel lonely if one doesn’t have any friends. Many people here on Earth have that experience. The boy’s encounter of many, each living alone on his own tiny little planet, is symbolic of that loneliness, isolation, and alienation we all feel, at least from time to time. The absurd behaviour of those men on their asteroids can be seen as at least representative of trauma responses to their loneliness.

The serpent says other things to suggest his links with the Biblical one. He says he’s “more powerful than the finger of a king”, suggesting he’s in a way like Satan, the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). He also says, “Whoever I touch I send back to the dust that created them” (Genesis 3:19). This is a good serpent, though, and he won’t hurt the little prince, for he is pure and comes from a star. He is concerned about the boy, and he can help him.

XIX: Chapter Eighteen

The little prince walks across the desert and finds a flower with whom he has a conversation.

He asks the flower where the people are, but the flower has once seen a caravan go by, and it believes there are only six or seven people, all blown about by the winds, so who knows where they are. The people’s lack of roots “causes them many problems.”

That’s what we need: roots to hold us in place!

XX: Chapter Nineteen

The boy goes up to the top of a high mountain. Before, he knew only his three tiny volcanoes, going up just to his knees. He imagines he’ll be able to see the entire planet from this tall mountain, but he can see only “sharp, craggy peaks.”

He calls out, and hears only an echo for his answer. To hear only himself is like meeting the pilot, a lonely mirror of himself.

XXI: Chapter Twenty

This is the chapter in which the little prince, as I mentioned above, encounters a garden of roses. These roses look just like his flower, the one he left on his little planet. He’s saddened by how their likeness to his rose, his true love, makes her no longer unique, but common. He sees five thousand roses here!

Recall how I mentioned above that his flower represents the author’s wife, Consuela, and that these many flowers represent his extramarital affairs. Consuela, incidentally, had affairs of her own, which I suspect Saint-Exupéry knew of, or at least suspected, hence she, like the many roses here, must have seemed disappointingly “common” to him.

Since the little prince is an idealized version of Saint-Exupéry, then the replacement of the women in his life with flowers is an attempt to smooth over and mitigate his sins, as well as those of Consuela. We see, in the weeping of the little prince over his “common rose,” a touching moment revealing how, in spite of Saint-Exupéry’s naughtiness (and Consuela’s), he still loved her.

XXII: Chapter Twenty-one

As the little prince has been weeping, a fox appears. The two have a conversation, and the boy, feeling lonely, wishes to play with the fox.

The fox insists, however, that the prince tame it first. By “tame,” it means that the boy must “make a connection” with it, thus they would need each other, and be unique to each other. The boy thinks of his rose, and he tells the fox he thinks she’s tamed him. In this taming, it is apparent that his rose became “unique” to him…unlike now.

The fox doesn’t like its dull life because all it does is hunt chickens and is hunted by men, each of both types being all identical, lacking uniqueness, and thus their lives are boring; but if the little prince could tame the fox, then its life would be so much better. The boy’s and the fox’s lives would have meaning, because taming would make them connect with each other, and give each other uniqueness.

The little prince says, however, that he hasn’t the time to tame the fox, for he must look for friends and try to understand the ways of the Earth. The fox says it would be better to tame and be friends with it, for people, having no time for understanding, would rather buy things in shops. One cannot buy friendships, so people don’t have friends anymore…what a trenchant comment on how modern capitalism causes alienation.

To tame the fox, the boy will have to be very patient. Since ‘taming’ in this story essentially means making friends with others–calming down their wildness and making them civil with you–we see how important patience is in building relationships…a skill we have been losing more and more as we fetishize commodities in the shops mentioned above. It’s easier to have things than it is to have people, and to have people have us.

“Words can cause misunderstandings,” says the fox, which is part of why having patience in relationships is so hard.

And so in taming the fox, appearing for it at regular times and thus making it happy, the little prince has made friends with it and made it unique, not like a hundred thousand other foxes. Similarly, his rose is unique because of its taming, so it isn’t like all those other roses that seem so common. Because of this understanding, he can feel good about his rose again. One imagines that, in real life, this understanding must have helped Saint-Exupéry to reconcile himself to his wife, in spite of their troubled marriage.

We see most clearly through our hearts, the fox tells the little prince. Seeing through the heart must be the basis of a child’s wisdom, while seeing through the eyes seems to be the basis of an adult’s folly. What’s more, the boy’s rose is important because of the time he’s spent with her, the taming process.

The fox is believed to have been inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, and she is the one who apparently gave the author the wisdom of seeing clearly with one’s heart. It’s ironic that the source of some of the novella’s wisdom, if it’s the true source, came from a paramour.

XXIII: Chapter Twenty-two

Next, the little prince meets a railway signalman. As the trains race past from one side to the other, the boy wonders why they’re in such a great hurry, to which the man answers that even the passengers don’t know why. The prince asks if the passengers were unhappy where they were before they took the train, and the signalman tells him, trenchantly, that one is never happy wherever one is; in other words, traveling anywhere will never bring happiness–one cannot find it by merely going out there…one must be content where one already is first. The little prince might well have just stayed on his planet with his rose. Oh, the folly of the pilot’s many flights!

One interesting point that the railway signalman makes is that the adult passengers are following nothing, just sleeping during the train rides, while it’s their children who have their faces pressed against the windows. The boy notes that only children know what they are looking for, implying the folly of the sleeping adults, who have let their sense of curiosity wane.

XXIV: Chapter Twenty-three

The little prince meets a merchant who sells small smart pills that can quench one’s thirst. If only the pilot were here! The little prince would use the time saved by taking the pills to go to a water fountain.

XXV: Chapter Twenty-four

As of this point in the boy’s telling of his story to the pilot, the latter has used up all of his drinking water. He is desperate, in his stress, to get water and repair his plane, so he has no use of the boy’s stories!

Since the little prince mentioned going to a water fountain, fortuitously just in time, rather than indulge in the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment of taking one of the merchant’s water-pills (whose saving of time is a further wish-fulfillment, alleviating the pilot’s anxiety about urgently finding water), he simply takes the pilot to look for such a fountain. They search until night falls, and thirst is making the man a little feverish.

At one point, the little prince remarks about how beautiful the desert is, and the pilot must agree. Then the boy says that the beauty of the desert comes from how a well is hiding within it.

The pilot has an epiphany on hearing this second observation. He realizes that what makes anything beautiful–a house, the stars, a desert–is something that stays invisible, hidden.

The boy falls asleep, and the man carries him. He realizes how valuable the little prince is. He looks at the boy and understands that what he sees is just a shell, but that what’s important about the little prince is invisible, hidden.

We see with our hearts, not with our eyes.

The little prince has tamed the pilot, who is no longer frantic about fixing his plane, and is patient in his growing thirst. Instead of being lonely, the pilot has a friend…if only a hallucinated projection of himself. He and the boy are unique to each other. The pilot understands that relationships are more important than things.

And it is at this point, at daybreak, when he has discovered, at last, a well.

XXVI: Chapter Twenty-five

The little prince seems to be recalling his conversation with the railway signalman when he says that people go on trains without knowing where they really want to go. They go in circles and get frustrated. It isn’t worth it. As I said above in my comment on Chapter Twenty-two, it doesn’t matter where one travels if one doesn’t have happiness. Was it worth the trouble for the boy to leave his planet? Have any of the pilot’s plane trips been worth it, if he’s been so lonely?

When they operate the well to draw water from it, the boy says, “The well is now awake, and it is singing.” He wishes to drink, too, but he’s always aware of beauty before his material needs.

As the boy drinks, the pilot comes to understand what the prince has been looking for: not just the nourishment of the water, but also forming bonds with people while seeking such material needs, and appreciating beauty along the way.

The little prince gets a picture of a muzzle for his sheep, drawn by the man so the boy’s flower will be safe from being eaten when he returns to his planet. Then the pilot must return to his plane and finish repairing it; after that, he must go back to the boy, as he in turn had to do to the fox, for this is part of being tamed: remembering your relationships with others.

XXVII: Chapter Twenty-six

The pilot returns to see the little prince, who is sitting on the top of a dilapidated old stone wall, with his feet dangling from it. The pilot notices that there is a yellow snake at the foot of the wall, one that could bite and thus kill the boy in less than thirty seconds. The prince tells it to go away, so he can get off of the wall. The pilot is getting his pistol out to shoot the snake, but it slithers away quickly.

He wonders about the boy speaking with snakes, but instead he learns that the little prince knows he has repaired his plane. So he can go home…and so can the boy.

The pilot knows already that he’ll miss the little prince when he is gone. He longs to hear the boy’s laugh. The prince has given the man so much wisdom; the boy has reawakened the child in the pilot.

Because of the child, the man has a way of valuing the stars that other adults haven’t. For scientists, the stars are trouble; for the businessman, they are wealth. For the pilot, because he knows the little prince is among them, the stars laugh for him.

The boy has given him the gift of happiness, of friendship, and of the end of loneliness. He doesn’t want to leave the prince.

XXVIII: Chapter Twenty-seven

Six years have gone by since the little prince left Earth.

Since he forgot to draw a leather strap for the muzzle for the sheep, the pilot wonders if the sheep has eaten the rose. Perhaps it’s safe, protected under its glass dome…or maybe there’s been an occasion when the boy has forgotten to put it on the rose, and the sheep has eaten it!

Whether the sheep has or hasn’t eaten the flower, everything changes if the answer to this question is yes, and this is important in a way no adult will ever understand, for it’s about caring deeply about a child’s happiness.

Saint-Exupéry ends his tale by twice drawing the spot in the desert where he met the little prince, and also where the boy left him. Thus, it is both the happiest and the saddest place in the world for the pilot.

Recall what I said in my commentary on Chapter Two, about the ouroboros, and that the head biting the tail represents where extreme opposites meet in a dialectical sense. In this instance, I mentioned heaven and hell: back in that chapter, hell led to heaven, the stress of facing certain death in the desert led to the pilot’s encounter with the Christ-like little prince; by the story’s end, though, happiness has led to sadness, in how the pilot has experienced a kind of enlightenment through the boy, and yet now he deeply misses the boy’s company.

After Buddhist-like enlightenment, the pilot feels himself thrown back into the samsara of attachment, wanting his little prince back. He thus asks his readers, if they should see the boy there in the desert, to let him know of the boy’s return, to comfort him.

XXIX: Conclusion

The complexities of life, the songs of innocence and of experience, make us adults forget the simple truths we knew as children: be kind to people, help those in need, appreciate friendships, weed out the bad things before they get worse, and prioritize what is beautiful over material gain. Don’t let pride turn you into a fool.

Thus it makes perfect sense that Saint-Exupéry wrote a novella, to remind adults of the above values, in the form of a children’s story.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, France, Editions Gallimard, 1946

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 1, Chapter 1

[The following is the seventeenth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, and here is the sixteenth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

When these laws, for the ethical and responsible use of magic and invocations of the Crims, were first being formulated, the Luminosians had been under the yoke of slavery at the hands of the people of Zoya for about five years already. Therefore, the Luminosians had had ample time to reflect on the consequences of their sinful treatment of the Zagans. As miserable as the Luminosians were, they also knew they had deserved their misery.

Finally, they had heard the chiding of the elders. They understood their former slavery under the Tenebrosians had not given them the right to invade and colonize Zaga, either enslaving the Zagans or exiling them, leaving them to starve in the wilderness, as the elders had told the Luminosians so many times.

With bitterness, the once-again-enslaved Luminosians saw the error of their ways from having used their magic selfishly, to amass wealth and indulge in the physical pleasures of fornication and drug-induced euphoria, neglecting their duty to their fellow man, to the poor, and to the outcast. Their return to drudgery was only their just punishment.

Still, the use of magic and invocation of the four mighty Crims–Weleb of the air, Nevil of the fire, Priff of the water, and Drofurb of the earth–was not entirely devoid of virtue. If such use is for the greater good of all, to help the needy, to gain in wisdom, and to defend from danger, then magic can perform a great good.

Similarly, the elders showed humility and generosity in acknowledging the limits of the old teachings. Now, a consensus was reached among all Luminosians: balance the use of magic with the old teachings–have the two complement each other. Such is the purpose of the chapters to follow.

Commentary

As the above is a commentary in itself, no additional commentary was deemed necessary.

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