Tag: books

The Tanah: Lyrics–The Last of the Song-Spells Discovered So Far

[The following is the thirty-fifth 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, and here is the thirty-fourth–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.]

Translator’s commentary

The next of these song-spells is supposed to enable shape-shifting: how the ancients believed that the mere singing of this lyric in its original, mystical language would result in any kind of physical transformation, let alone the desired one, is a total mystery to us translators. Apparently, total faith in the aid of the four Crims–Weleb, Nevil, Drofurb, and Priff–is crucial to achieving such transformations. More fool us of little faith, it seems.

Certain words in the spell were deemed to be unutterable by the elders, as such words were also crucial to cause the transformations so abominated by the elders. Again, in English translation, the lyric sounds dull and ineffective, where the magical power is in the alliterative, assonant, and rhythmic words of the original language, all lost in translation. A firm belief in the Crims, as mentioned above, is also crucial. Here’s the song.

[To be sung repeatedly, louder and louder, inserting the words of what is wished to be changed into at the end.]

O, Four Powers, rearrange my parts! /// \\\
Change my shape, colour, and likeness \\\ \\\
into a ____________! ///

Commentary: Naturally, there’s also a verse to have one transformed back to normal. This is it.

[To be sung repeatedly, louder and louder.]

O, Four Powers, reset my parts! /// \\\
Return my shape, colour, and likeness \\\ \\\
back as I was! ////

Commentary: Next is a song-spell for capturing souls in jars, to gain greater magical power from them. The elders abominated this spell most of all.

[To be sung repeatedly, louder and louder.]

Air Lord, move this soul \\ ///
from its case to that one! /// \\\

Commentary: The “Air Lord” is Weleb, Crim of the air, and as we said above about making shape-shifting possible through the mere singing of a verse, it seems that unwavering faith in Weleb and the other three Crims was enough to make the ancient tribe believe that singing the above verse would actually transfer a human soul from its body into a jar.

As of the publication of the current edition of the Tanah, these are the only spells known as “Lyrics” that have been excavated. Apart from these are fragments too slight to be translated and published as coherent spells to be read and understood, but enough to convince us that there are many more to be found, complete copies of those fragments to make the incoherent coherent.

As we’ve promised above, once more Lyrics have been found, as well as more texts of the Beginnings, Migration, Laws, Preaching, Proverbs, and Amores (these last to be examined in the following pages), they will all be translated and published in future editions of the Tanah.

Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’

I wrote up an analysis of the Stephen King novel years ago; if you’re interested, Dear Reader, you can find it here. In that analysis, I made only one or two brief references to Kubrick’s film adaptation, which everyone ought to know by now is wildly different from the novel (much to King‘s annoyance).

I also felt, when I wrote that analysis, that an in-depth analysis of Kubrick’s film would be unnecessary, as others had already done so. I’ve since changed my mind about that, since I feel that an analysis of the themes of Kubrick’s adaptation will put the spotlight on a lot of issues most relevant to our world today.

I’ll discuss changes from the novel to the movie only as pertinent to these issues as Kubrick’s version addresses them. The story is no longer merely about an aspiring writer battling with alcoholism (a semi-autobiographical issue that King had been dealing with at the time of writing his novel), but rather about how issues of settler-colonialism in the US intersect with capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse.

Given the troubled state the US is in now (and how that affects the rest of the world), Kubrick’s film seems to be gifted with “the shining” in how it, 46 years ago as of the publication of this blog article, predicted the intersecting of those above-mentioned problems, leading to today’s nightmare as I see it allegorized in this film.

Anyway, the 1980 film was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and written by him and Diane Johnson. It stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd, with Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, and Tony Burton.

The non-original music used in the film includes a synthesizer adaptation that Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind did of Dies Irae, as Hector Berlioz had used it in his Symphonie fantastique. We also hear excerpts from “Lontano,” by György Ligeti, and the first half of the third movement (“Adagio“) of Béla Bartók‘s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. From Krzysztof Penderecki, there are excerpts from “Ewangelia” and “Kanon Paschalny II” from Utrenja, as well as his “Awakening of Jacob” and “De Natura Sonoris” Nos. 1 and 2, his “Kanon,” and his “Polymorphia.” These are all either modern adaptations of classical music (Carlos/Elkind), classical modernism (Bartók), or post-war avant-garde classical (Penderecki/Ligeti), music originally intended just as expressive in itself or as experiments with sound…and yet here presented as ‘scary music.’

Contrasted with these are a few old-fashioned tunes, such as “Midnight, the Stars and You,” by Harry M Woods, Jimmy Campbell, and Reg Connelly, and “Home,” performed by Henry Hall and Gleneagles Hotel Band, among others. This music gives off a sense of…’Life just isn’t as it was back in the good old days,’ a nostalgic attachment to the past that hides, behind a superficial charm, a reactionary hatred of progressive social change.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The movie begins with a shot of a lake and an island in the middle of it, and forest and Colorado Rocky Mountains in the background, with Carlos’s and Elkind’s synthesizer rendition of Dies Irae. Next is a bird’s eye view of the car driven by Jack Torrance (Nicholson) going on a road between forests of trees, then up a mountain to the Overlook Hotel.

Such scenery is beautiful to behold, but the eerie, portentous music is at odds with such a picturesque charm. We feel, instead, a sense of the loneliness and isolation Jack and his family will feel when they’re in the hotel through the winter. This juxtaposition of superficial pleasantness and underlying nastiness will be a recurring theme in the movie.

The significance of the eerie feeling accompanying the pretty natural scenery will be known when we learn that the Overlook Hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground (a trope that would become a cliché in many 1980s horror films), where during construction of the hotel, the builders had to fight off Native American attacks. What is being established here is a confronting of the issue of the white man’s colonizing of aboriginal land, killing off any resistance to it. This issue will be the foundation of the other issues, as I’ll elaborate on later.

The synthesizer music alone is dark and haunting. If one knew that it is Dies Irae, the “Day of Wrath,” about the Day of Judgement, one would see far greater significance in how settler-colonialism, the genocide of the North American aboriginals, the other issues of social injustice I’ll go into later, and a final day of reckoning are all interconnected. We see the land of the aboriginals, land taken from them by the white man, whose descendants will do far more evil over the ensuing centuries; and if one were to read the text of Dies Irae, one would sense the depth of these men’s guilt.

In the Overlook Hotel, Jack meets Stuart Ullman (Nelson) for his job interview to be the hotel’s new caretaker for the coming winter. The Ullman of the film is not the “Officious little prick” of King’s novel; here, he’s quite a gentle, smiling, genial fellow.

As Jack’s employer, though, Ullman personifies capitalism, and with not only the juxtaposition of this job interview with the preceding scene of Jack’s drive through the formerly aboriginal landscape, but also Ullman’s soon-to-come comments about the Indian burial ground and fighting off the aboriginal attacks, we see the connection between colonialism and capitalism (for a contemporary example of this connection, recall the current ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the wish to convert the area into a set of resorts for vacationers…a whole beach of Overlook Hotels.

Ullman’s, as well as Jack’s, smiling throughout the job interview reflect that superficial pleasantness masking nastiness. Ullman is the easy-going boss explaining to Jack how the job is not physically demanding: he just has to do some repairs here and there, keep the boiler room running, and heat different parts of the hotel on a rotational, daily basis. Jack is smiling away and insisting that the job will be perfectly suited to him and his family, partly because, as with anyone trying to get a job, he wants to reassure the boss that he’s the right man to hire, and such reassuring involves some ass-kissing; it’s part of how a powerless worker has to deal with a capitalist.

Under this pleasant veneer, though, is the nasty reality about the job that Ullman has to be frank about with Jack. There’s a terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation that one can feel doing the caretaker job over the long winter months, and this led to a caretaker named Grady (Stone) killing his family back in 1970.

Under capitalism, there’s this idea that supporters of it promote: the taking-on of a job is a voluntary agreement between employer and employee rather than something the employee must do to live–it amounts to wage slavery. That a worker can just quit if he doesn’t like his job fails to grasp the fact that, if he even finds a new job to replace it, will it even be any better, or all it be (much) worse? The worker, always needing to sell his labour to live, isn’t the free agent the pro-capitalist claims he is. This issue is the unpleasant underbelly of the pleasant outer skin of the job one hopes to get.

The isolation and loneliness of the caretaker job, the underbelly Jack will confront soon enough, are representative of what Marx discussed as worker alienation. And alienation, as has been seen especially in the US over the past few decades, has led to many gun killings, rather like Jack’s violence at the climax of the movie.

So we see how a number of issues intersect already. The construction of a hotel, a business to make a profit, on an Indian burial ground, which includes the need to fight off and kill aboriginals trying to preserve and protect a sacred space, shows how settler-colonialism and capitalism intersect. That the job of maintaining this for-profit building involves a long spell of maddening loneliness, in which the caretaker would be haunted by ghosts (many, I suspect, being of murdered Native Americans), shows how worker alienation intersects with settler-colonialism and capitalism…if only symbolically.

Next, we have to deal with Jack’s alcoholism and abuse of little Danny (Lloyd). A doctor (played by Anne Jackson) is curious about an injury Danny had, one mentioned in passing by his mother, Wendy Torrance (Duvall), in her conversation with the doctor. Wendy says, with more of that saccharine smiling, that one night five months prior to this discussion, Jack had been drinking, came home late, and saw that Danny had scattered some important papers of Jack’s all over the room. The official explanation is that Jack ‘accidentally’ dislocated Danny’s arm by yanking the boy away from the papers with too much force. The doctor is not smiling after hearing this story.

We’ll notice here that this is yet another example of the attempt to hide nastiness behind a veil of pleasantness. Wendy, in trivializing Jack’s alcoholism and brutishness, is also demonstrating her subservience to him.

This leads to the next issue to intersect with those previously mentioned: the patriarchal family as represented here with the Torrances. We see in them the usual sex roles: Jack is the breadwinner, and Wendy is the housewife…though, oddly (or, perhaps not?), during their time in the Overlook, we see that it is Wendy who is checking over the hotel. Jack, who should be doing this, is instead bouncing a ball against a wall, kind-of-sort-of writing his novel, and slowly going insane.

We ought to look at the word patriarchy a little more carefully than usual, especially as it applies to Jack’s relationship with his family. We all know the word is used to refer to a male-dominated society, of course, but technically, it means “father-rule.” Danny is as male as Jack is, of course, but as a kid, he’s hardly dominant in any way over anyone, including Wendy, even with his “shining” power. It’s Jack, the father–just as did Grady, the father–who has the power, and who wields it so brutally.

This “father-rule” can be symbolic of which men in particular dominate society: the rich and politically powerful, those in leadership positions, not the ordinary, working-class men of the world. Of course, none of this is to deny, trivialize, or invalidate the painful experiences of powerlessness that all women and girls around the world suffer because of sexism, sex roles, and the patriarchal family. It’s just that we need to focus on which men in particular to blame, the powerful ones, when we work for solutions to these problems. Women’s liberation will come through socialism, not through the divisiveness of idpol.

As far as blaming working-class men like Jack is concerned when they help to perpetuate sexism, it would be more useful to focus on their dysfunctional solution of ‘punching down,’ rather than ‘punching up.’ Jack should be raising his fist in anger at the system that’s made him and his family so powerless, rather than raising an axe to kill Wendy and Danny with.

Wendy’s role in the film as submissive, weak, and frail (as opposed to her much stronger and more resourceful portrayal in King’s novel) demonstrates not only the issue of the patriarchal family, but also how this issue intersects with that of the white man’s genocide of the Native Americans. It has been noted by film critics that Duvall, through her clothing and long, thin black hair, is made to resemble a Native American. She dresses this way while in the hotel, as opposed to how she and Danny look in their home at the beginning of the film, in their red-white-and-blue clothing. We go from the pleasant, American-as-apple-pie look to the nasty look of one oppressed by the white man.

The hotel interior significantly has a lot of North American indigenous art on display, as well as other art that can be associated with aboriginals. I mentioned Jack’s bouncing of a ball against a wall: a Native American tapestry is on it. This, of course, is symbolic of the white man beating the aboriginals.

A nation built on the genocide of those who lived there before (as symbolized by building a hotel on an Indian burial ground) is hardly one that will grow into one based on freedom, justice, and equality, in spite of the myths of ‘American democracy’ that many have been brainwashed into believing. That is what Kubrick’s Shining is all about: hence, the intersecting of the aboriginal issue with those of capitalism, sexism, and racism…this last of which we must go into now.

As with the others, things start off superficially pleasant, as Dick Hallorann (Crothers) shows the Torrances–Wendy and Danny in particular–around such areas of the Overlook as the kitchen and the pantry. Hallorann is all smiles as he lists off all the delicious foods the Torrances will enjoy eating. He, also gifted with “the shining,” immediately senses Danny’s telepathic abilities, knowing the boy will be sensitive to the presence of all the ghosts in the hotel.

As a black man, Hallorann of course represents how his people have been victimized by American racism. He is the only one we see murdered by Jack, with an axe in the chest. He is referred to as a “nigger” by the ghost of Grady and Jack in the bathroom scene, where the latter wipes off a spill off the former’s jacket and warns him of his son’s interfering in the hotel’s affairs.

In all of this we can easily see how racism against blacks intersects with racism against the Native Americans. White supremacism, as we know, is used to justify not only the genocide of the aboriginals, but also the slavery of blacks. Such an attitude is clearly expressed when Jack says to Lloyd, the ghost bartender (Turkel), “White man’s burden,” as he is about to play for a drink.

Note also the significance of how the two killing fathers, Grady and Jack, are not only two white men, but also, the first is British, and the second is American. The order of the two men’s appearances and murder sprees in the hotel is particularly significant, as they represent the brutality first of British colonialism, then of American colonialism. And just as with Jack’s smiling first appearance in the film, so is ghost-Grady’s first appearance one of a gentle, polite, affable chap…until he shows his true colours in the bathroom scene, as he, frowning, would “be so bold” as to tell Jack about the need to ‘correct’ Danny.

The hotel is on an Indian burial ground, yet oddly, we never see any Native American ghosts. There’s all that aboriginal art everywhere in the hotel, though, as I mentioned above; it’s as if the hotel ate the remains of the natives, whose digested remains are all of that art, a cannibalism like the kind (which included the eating of two Miwok guides) Jack and Danny talk about in the car ride up the mountain to the hotel.

We don’t ever see aboriginal ghosts–only white ones–because the whole point is that the aboriginals are all gone. Even the memory of them is all but erased. The collective guilt of the white man has been repressed into the unconscious…and yet the repressed returns to consciousness, albeit in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight (aboriginal art, white ghosts, Wendy’s clothing and hair in the hotel).

Many Americans–conservatives in particular, like Michael Medved in his book, The 10 Big Lies About America (Medved, pages 11-45)–are in denial about the genocide of the Native Americans as a basis for the beginnings of the country. They’ll make claims that the spread of diseases from whites to aboriginals, the massacres, and the forced displacements (clearly ethnic cleansing) did not intentionally or systematically cause most of the deaths, but such claims are nonsense. Violence was encouraged through payment. The government enacted laws, such as Andrew Jackson‘s Indian Removal Act of 1830, to displace aboriginals by the tens of thousands, causing many deaths among them from the hardships of the journey from where the whites wanted to settle to where the aboriginals were required to go.

Such denials can be said to be symbolized in The Shining by this ‘repression,’ as I described it above, in the replacement of the indigenous dead with the hotel’s aboriginal art and white ghosts. Being as sensitive as Danny is with his “shining,” he can sense the ghosts, particularly in the forms of Grady’s daughters and in his being lured by ghosts to room 237.

Jack’s seeing of the ghosts coincides with his slowly going mad, of course, for it is the contemplation of the white man’s guilt that is maddening, the confronting of it, as opposed to denying the genocide. Wendy doesn’t see the ghosts and other supernatural phenomena until the climax of the movie, when affairs have gotten so extreme in their violence that the consequences of genocide can no longer be denied by white people.

The guilt may be denied, but it keeps coming back to haunt the guilty. That’s what the motifs of recurrence can be said to represent. Think of the recurring patterns on the rugs and walls, the back-and-forth alteration of the sound of the wheels of Danny’s Big Wheel rolling on the hard floor vs their silence on the rugs, or “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over again on the pages of his ‘manuscript.’ Similarly, Jack’s reincarnation as the hotel’s eternal caretaker, his having been in the Overlook back in 1921, and his resulting feelings of déjà vu.

The cyclical nature of events in the Overlook–the killing of aboriginals when building the hotel, the murders of the past, culminating in Grady’s and Jack’s, represent how a nation founded on genocide will return to murder again and again throughout its history. We see this in the history of the US, where apart from the Native American genocide, there is the great majority of the country’s history involving either waging or at least being somehow involved in wars; we see it in how Manifest Destiny inspired Hitler; and we see it in Israel’s taking of Palestinian land and continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (backed by the US).

We get repetition in my favourite scene in the movie, when Danny confronts the Grady sister ghosts, who invite him to play with them…”forever, and ever, and ever”…a line Jack repeats to Danny: “I wish we could stay here forever, and ever, and ever.”

It’s been said that the spatial layout of the hotel makes no physical sense. One might try to attribute the inconsistencies of the layout to continuity errors, but that doesn’t make sense either, given Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism. There are windows and doors that shouldn’t be there, rooms in one place at one time and in another place at another time, and furniture that appears and disappears from scene to scene.

In this sense, the hotel interior (which Wendy calls a maze) is rather like that labyrinthine hedge arrangement, in miniature on that table where Jack looks at the model of it, and the real one outside that the model dissolves into. (The hedge maze, incidentally, replaced the animal topiary hedges of the novel, those that come to life, because of limitations with the special effects of the time.)

The point is that the hotel is a trap from which one (usually) cannot escape. As a symbol of the US (which both dominates in its overseeing the affairs of everyone everywhere, and which overlooks its guilt and responsibility for all the wrongs it’s done), the Overlook is a place irrationally constructed, and a labyrinthine trap, because so is the country it represents.

Some may complain that the pacing of the plot is too slow. Such complaining misses the point. It’s slow because the growing evil is meant to be felt as insidious. Jack’s descent into madness is slow, and the tension of the music accordingly grows slowly, from the eeriness of the music of Carlos/Elkind in the beginning and the eeriness of that of Bartók early on and in the middle, to the extreme dissonance of Penderecki’s music leading up to and during the climax.

If we see The Shining as an allegory of the history of the US (or just about any nation founded on settler-colonialism), then it makes sense to see, from white people’s point of view, how the horrors only gradually build until the end. Sensitive Danny and Hallorann can see it from the beginning, like so many of us on the left and black activists, those powerless to do much about it; but many white Americans, like Wendy, are only now seeing the horrors of state-sanctioned violence.

Yet another thing that intersects with the issues of settler-colonialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse is narcissism, and we can see Jack indulging in that, symbolically and literally. Though most people would dread the sense of isolation in being the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, Jack welcomes the job, for he enjoys his solipsism there. He doesn’t want society to be all around him. He wants other people to exist only as reflections and extensions of himself.

He gets irritable with Wendy, even if she just enters his writing room to talk about…anything. He flies into rages if she talks about leaving the hotel with Danny to get him to a doctor. The Overlook is like a Bower of Bliss for him: superficially pleasing, but trapping him in it and slowly eating him up.

There’s evidence of him being frustrated with his family right from the beginning. We see it in his face when he grins in exasperation at Danny ‘s saying he knows about cannibalism from the TV, and this is before the family has even reached the Overlook Hotel. He’s frustrated with his family because it’s a triadic relationship, so–to use Lacanian language–this puts him in a situation of dealing with the Other, where being with at least two other people means dealing with them on their own terms, rather than dealing with the other, where only one other is a reflection of oneself.

It is significant that whenever Jack has a conversation or interaction with a ghost, there’s a mirror behind the ghost. This is true of his interactions with Lloyd, Grady, or the naked woman he embraces and kisses in the bathroom. He enjoys these interactions because he’s in a dyadic relationship with each of them–they are each a reflection and extension of himself.

To use Lacanian language again, Jack is retreating from the sociocultural/linguistic world of the Symbolic, to reenter the dyadic, narcissistic world of the Imaginary. Such a retreat is extraordinary given his ambition to write a novel, yet it is explicable as soon as we realize the entire ‘novel’ is just the repetition of a single sentence–his writer’s block.

Jack’s seeing the ghosts in front of mirrors has him fuse the two sights together each time in his mind. As a result, each ghost becomes the narcissistic ideal-I before his eyes. Each ghost feeds his ego and represents an ideal either to be fused with sexually (the naked young woman ghost), to legitimize his alcoholism (Lloyd), or to be emulated as a perpetrator of uxoricide and filicide (Grady).

Narcissism is used as a defence against psychological fragmentation, and Jack’s belief in his ‘calling’ as the caretaker of the Overlook is an example of such a defence: hence, the firing-up of his rage at the mere thought of leaving the hotel. The Overlook as a sanctuary for his narcissism cannot last forever, though, and this is not solely because of the urgent need to get Danny out of there to see a doctor. His experience with the naked woman also shows this impermanence.

As I said above, the specular image in the mirror is an ideal-I, which one strives all one’s life to attain, ultimately failing. Jack would…attain, to use the word euphemistically, the naked young woman in front of the bathroom mirror because man’s desire is the desire of the Other, the wish to be what the Other wants, so Jack’s wanting her to want him is to see, narcissistically, his desire as idealized in her, to see her as an extension of himself, to see himself as her.

Her youth, beauty, and thinness are also the ideals of femininity in modern, career-woman society, supplanting the old ‘pleasantly plump’ ideal for the ‘barefoot-and-pregnant mothers’ of the past. These issues, of course, are also tied in with the values of the patriarchal family, and so we see how Jack’s narcissism in this manifestation intersects with the other issues mentioned above. The impermanence of the Overlook as a sanctuary for Jack’s narcissism is also seen in the girl’s sudden transformation into a cackling old woman with the mouldy skin of a decomposing body.

The switch from the young to the old nude woman, and the switch from Jack’s aroused to horrified reaction, are also a comment on society’s attitude toward prevailing norms of feminine beauty, as well as on the male addiction to that beauty. This addiction can also be seen in Dick Hallorann when in his Florida home, on the walls of which we see pictures of nude or seminude black women.

Jack rejects the Symbolic–that is, he rejects society (any people other than those as mirrors of his narcissistic self) and language (not only can’t he type any more than the one repeated sentence, but as he freezes in the hedge maze searching for Danny, his speech becomes unintelligible babbling and moaning). He also finds the dyadic Imaginary to be unreliable (the Overlook is a sanctuary of his narcissism that cannot last as such). The lack of the Symbolic and the Imaginary means that all he is left with is the Real, an undifferentiated state of being that cannot be symbolized or expressed through language…a traumatic, chaotic mess.

This messy Chaos is vividly expressed in that iconic deluge of blood splashing out from the elevator and filling up the room so much that it even hits and soaks the camera lens. It’s a redrum running amok. The Real is what results when there are no others, no ability to express oneself or make sense of a world of non-differentiation, and not even another person to reflect oneself against. It’s the trauma of total loneliness.

Danny has a sense of that inability to express and verbalize the Real when, in Tony’s voice, he tries to warn sleeping Wendy of Jack’s imminent attack with the axe by chanting “redrum” over and over. His use of her lipstick to write “REDRUM” on the door, with the second R backwards, represents the Real’s inability to be articulated, as does the word’s being intelligible only in the mirror reflection as “MURDER,” with the E and the second R backwards, too.

The patriarchal dominance of Jack is seen not just in his abusive treatment of Danny and his maniacal yelling at Wendy as noted above, but also in how, after hacking open the door to the room his wife and son are in, he says, “Wendy, I’m home.” We’re reminded of the husband of the 1950s coming in the house after finishing his day at work and calling out to his stay-at-home wife, “Honey, I’m home,” implying that he expects dinner to be ready for him.

Jack’s famous line, “Here’s Johnny!”–with that iconic shot of his maniacally smiling face through the hacked-out hole in the bathroom door, on his way to try to kill Wendy–was improvised by Nicholson. The black humour allusion to Ed McMahon introducing Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show (as well as that of the Big Bad Wolf calling out to the Three Little Pigs) is not only jarring in the context of the terror of the scene, but it’s also unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with the show, including even Kubrick, who’d been living in England at the time. The line thus could be heard as yet another example of the Real’s inability to be expressed.

Now, Jack’s attempt on his wife’s and son’s lives, as well as Wendy’s discovery of all the ghosts and supernatural activity in the hotel, can be seen to represent the imperial boomerang, what happens eventually to the people of the imperial core, or to colonialists, when their repressive measures against the resisting colonized come back to harm them–a kind of colonial karma. This boomerang is happening in the US right now, where ICE has been trained by the IDF to use the very violence, originally used on the Palestinians, which is now being used on American citizens. Wendy sees white ghosts, but they’re really Native American ones, repressed into the unconscious and returning to consciousness in an unrecognizable form; that torrent of blood she sees from the elevator would be aboriginal red.

Jack, of course, dies with no redemption the way he does in King’s novel, this being one of the many reasons that King dislikes Kubrick’s adaptation of it. The Jack of the novel is flawed, of course, but sympathetic–not so for Kubrick’s Jack.

We must understand, though, that while Kubrick’s Shining is based on King’s novel, it’s a fundamentally different story (hence this being my second analysis of it), which explores almost totally different ideas and themes. Kubrick’s Jack shouldn’t be sympathetic or redeemed because he personifies so much of what is fundamentally wrong with a nation built on the genocide of aboriginals.

The perpetrating of mass murder doesn’t just change the killers; it also changes the descendants of those killers as they enjoy the privileges of living on stolen land. We see this mentality among conservative Americans who enthusiastically support open carry, yet who also defend ICE murdering Alex Pretti, who legally owned a gun that was holstered at the time, making him no threat at all to his murderers. We also see this mentality among Israelis who cheer on the continuing genocide in Gaza.

So King’s complaint that Kubrick’s “cold” ending is fine from the point of view of his novel, yet that cold ending is perfectly fitting for the film. The kind of people that Kubrick’s Jack represent do leave us cold: they keep coming back, as Jack did in his reincarnation from 1921, in that photo, aptly dated July 4th, from the Gold Room, a place where the wealthy American elite can enjoy ‘the good old days,’ dancing and trampling on an aboriginal grave.

The Tanah: Lyrics–More Spells

[The following is the thirty-fourth 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, and here is the thirty-third–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.]

Translator’s note: please remember that all of this collection of spells is incomplete. As excavations of the area continue, more will be found and published in future editions. The current set is only what has been found for the moment.

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with increasing intensity. Pluck individual strings on a zither, each plucking for each line.]

May I take, ///
and escape. \\\
May I keep ///
what I steal. \\\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, in as low a bass voice as possible, with the soft hitting of a gong.]

Take your life, \\\
take your soul. \\\
Take your breath, \\\
leave you low. \\\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, with accompanying flute.]

Make my tales \\\
seem as real ///
as if they \\\
had been seen. ///

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, with loud drums.]

Ai, Lord of Fire, ////
god of lust ///
and desire, //
come from hell ///
to the earth, ///
give me what ///
in my heart burns. ////

Commentary: The following two spells are not particularly ‘wicked’ ones, yet they are included among the Lyrics all the same. The first is a verse of protection, often sung before one is about to eat a dish blessed by the spell. It is also sung while the singer, naked, has his or her hands on the plates on the dishes, to transfer the spell into the food, and give its power to the eaters.

[Sing the following repeatedly, with hands on the food to be blessed and to protect those who eat it. The singer must be naked.]

Keep our enemies far away. \\\\\
We eat what will keep us safe. \\\\\\\

Commentary: the second spell is of protection put on necklaces.

[Sing the following repeatedly, with the necklaces to be blessed lying nearby. The singer must be naked.]

Keep the necklace wearers safe. ///\\
May no enemy give them strife. ///\\\

Commentary: in keeping with the malevolent nature of so many of these lyrics, though, one spell has been devised here to make the wearers of the protective necklaces want to take them off, rendering them vulnerable to their enemies again, as we’ll see.

May the necklace itch, itch, itch. /\/\/\
May the wearer twitch, twitch, twitch. /\/\/\
May the wearer take it off, /\/\/\
and at his protection scoff. /\/\/
The wearer being naked now, /\/\/
I can make him kneel and cow. /\/\/\/

[Sing the following repeatedly, with flute and drum accompaniment to guarantee success.]

May boils grow all over your skin! ////\\\
May no one love you ever again! ////\\\

The Tanah: Lyrics–The First Four Spells

[The following is the thirty-third 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, and here is the thirty-second–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.]

Translator’s Introduction

And at long last, we come to the wicked spells of the Tanah.

When one considers just how heinous the intentions are of many, if not most, or all, of these spells, and how much the ancient elders abominated them and fought to keep people from using them, it is amazing that so many of the texts have survived, rather than all of them destroyed.

But here they are, as incomplete as they may be.

These Lyrics are verses set to music, for it is the nature of the music–the melodic contours of the singing (as expressed in an upward or downward slash for each word, beside each line of verse), the instrumental accompaniment–that makes an important contribution to the efficacy of the spells (the poetic power of whose words is rendered rather dull, unfortunately, in English translation). Little of the musical arrangements has survived, though, in terms of how the music is precisely to be performed: there’s no notation even of the sung melodies of the verses, except for the above-mentioned slashes, as mentioned above, which only suggest a tune; and there are only vague indications of what instrumental backing is recommended…if that.

These are spells for selfish ends. They fulfill individual desires, or those of the tribe, and they often have outright malevolent purposes. Examples include the summoning of such demons as Ai, the demon of lust as introduced in Part Two of The Preaching, or the capturing of souls in jars, for the purpose of gaining greater magical power from them.

Elsewhere, there are songs meant to help in the conquering and subjugation of foreign peoples, cruelty to enemies, controlling people, gaining wealth, stealing, and more.

For sexual exploitation, wait for the book of spells known as Amores.

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with accompanying flute and drum.]

Your land is our land. \\\\
Your home is our home. \\\\
Your wealth is our wealth. \\\\
Your food is our food. \\\\
Your men are our slaves. \\\\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with increasing intensity, until the singing sounds like screaming, with the dissonant plucking of adjacent strings on a zither, and harder and harder pounding on drums.]

May you hurt, ///
may you groan, ///
may you cry, ///
may you bleed, ///
may you die! ///

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, in a breathy voice, with no instrumental backing.]

I take you, //\
I have you, //\
I use you, //\
I own you. //\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with increasing intensity, and with the tapping of more and more cymbals.]

My gold and silver grow. /////
My gold and silver double. /////
My gold and silver triple. /////
My gold and silver, endless. /////

Comment: Each upward slash represents a rise in pitch, and each downward slash represents a lowering in pitch, each slash being for each word to the left.

The Tanah: Proverbs

[The following is the thirty-second 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, and here is the thirty-first–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.]

Translator’s Introduction

This set of pithy maxims was not thought to be requiring a magical ritual, involving the use of the four elements personified by the Crims. The words were thought to be magically effective in themselves: the original language uses such musical elements as metre, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme felt sufficient to influence the feelings of those in the tribe and to deter them from using magic in aid of sinning, by curbing unhealthy emotions.

They are to be chanted repeatedly, louder and louder, and with more and more emotional intensity.

  1. Pride is the father of shame.
    Humility is the mother of honour.
  2. Anger is a moment of madness.
    Calm keeps sanity everlasting.
  3. Envy is admiration and hate embracing.
    Its lack looks on without malevolence.
  4. Greed never grasps enough.
    Giving never gets empty-handed.
  5. One getting fat while many starve
    reverses how food should be shared.
  6. Lust loves the flesh and hates the heart.
    Lovemaking gives life, never taking.
  7. Despair hates all the outside world,
    because it hates all that’s inside.

Commentary

It’s fascinating how this ancient tribe, through these proverbs, seems to have anticipated the deadly sins of the Church.

Analysis of ‘Phantasm’

Phantasm is a 1979 supernatural horror film written and directed by Don Coscarelli. It stars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester, and Angus Scrimm. The film was independently produced, being financed by Coscarelli, his father, and local investors; the cast were mostly amateurs and aspiring professionals.

Following its expanded theatrical release, Phantasm would become a box office hit, grossing $22 million internationally. It got mixed reviews from critics, but in the years since its release, Phantasm has become a cult film. It’s on several critics’ lists of the best horror films, being praised by film scholars for its surrealistic qualities and themes of mourning, loss, and sibling relationships. JJ Abrahams is a fan of the movie.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here are links (<<< this second one’s really bad) to the full movie, and here is a link to the (only first nine chapters, unfortunately, of the) novelization.

Since mourning and loss are major themes in the movie, I think it’s useful to go into the psychoanalysis of mourning. It’s also useful to examine the difference Freud saw between mourning and melancholia. In mourning, the painful process of dealing with the loss of a loved one is eventually gone through, and the mourner can redirect libido to objects other than the lost one; we can see Jody Pearson (Thornbury) largely getting over the loss of his parents and redirecting his feelings towards friends, bandmates like Reggie (Bannister), and women.

Things haven’t been so easy for Jody’s 13-year-old kid brother, Mike (Baldwin), who I would say is experiencing a repressed, unconscious form of melancholia, which involves not only a failure to accept the loss of his and Jody’s parents, but also involves the absorbing of their lost parents into his ego to make them internal objects (which in turn is the basis for object relations theory).

Furthermore, this internalizing also involves taking in those aspects of Mike’s parents that he doesn’t like, and so since those aspects are in him now, he dislikes himself for those aspects. His way of dealing with those disagreeable parts is to split them off and project them into the external world. These expelled objects would be what Melanie Klein called the bad father and the bad mother, those aspects of one’s parents that are frustrating and withholding of gratification.

These would be the Tall Man (Scrimm) and the Lady in Lavender (Lester), symbolically speaking, of course. Her sexual allure is symbolically in the Oedipally-desired parent, and his creepiness is symbolically in the Oedipally-hated parent. Since both are aspects of the same phantasm, they can also be seen to represent Klein’s notion of the combined parent figure, in which a child sees or imagines, in the primal scene, his mom and dad engaging in violent sex, which traumatizes him.

These phantasies (or phantasms) are the unconscious basis of all of the terror that Mike is experiencing as he continues failing to accept the loss of his parents. He’s been having nightmares ever since they died. Since part of him felt the usual frustrations any kid feels towards parents who don’t always do as a kid wishes, he imagines that he somehow ‘willed’ their deaths, and so he’s racked with guilt and self-hate over having ’caused’ their deaths–hence his being terrorized by the Tall Man, or the internalized bad father object, as his punishment for having ‘wished for’ the deaths of his parents. The terror he’s going through is all in his head.

Note that “phantasm” can mean both “spectre” and “fantasy,” or “figment of the imagination.” The Tall Man can be understood in both of these senses. He is a ghost terrorizing the Oregon town in which the film is set, and he is a fantasy in Mike’s mind. That fantasy comes from the internalized object of the bad father in Mike’s mind.

His conflict (and to a lesser extent, Jody’s conflict) with his mom and dad stem from the universal, narcissistic trauma of his love/hate relationship with them. They drove him crazy (presumably with their list of dos and don’ts) while alive, and now he can’t bear to lose them, now that they’re dead. He keeps them present and alive in his mind, in the unrecognizable forms of the Tall Man and the Lady in Lavender, for such is the way that repression works: feelings are pushed into the unconscious mind, then they return to consciousness, but in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight.

What’s good and bad in Mike’s parents is split, in what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (“schizoid” referring to this splitting). The Tall Man, as Mike’s bad father, terrorizing him represents the persecutory anxiety the boy feels (“paranoid”) as a result of having rejected (and, as he imagines, having unconsciously wanted the death of) his father.

As with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm blurs the distinction between dream and reality. Because of this blurring, we can see the supernatural horror and the surrealism of Phantasm as being an allegory of the inner workings and conflicts of the unconscious mind. The dreamlike state that permeates not just this film, but also its sequels (generally regarded as inferior), explains to a great extent their many plot holes and inconsistencies.

The film begins at night, with a young man named Tommy making love with the Lady in Lavender in Morningside Cemetery. She takes a knife and stabs him to death, then changes into the form of the Tall Man. The juxtaposition of sex and death (or of Eros and Thanatos), as well as of the Lady in Lavender (or bad mother transference) and of the Tall Man (or bad father transference) allegorizes and personifies the unconscious processes described above.

Tommy has not just had the Oedipally-desired mother transference, he’s also experienced the combined parent figure, whom he penetrated and was penetrated by with a phallic knife (Indeed, in the novelization, the stabbing is described thus: “Quickly she sank [the knife] as hard and fast into his heart as he had plunged his body into hers.”). He later can be understood to be a kind of brother-figure for Mike, the way Reggie will be understood to be by the end of the film when we learn of Jody’s death, since we learn that Jody, Reggie, and Tommy were supposed to be a kind of Crosby, Stills, and Nash-style band of singers and guitar strummers (“It’s a hell of a way to end a trio,” Jody says of Tommy’s death to Reggie on the day of the funeral). The togetherness of the three young men suggests a tripling of Jody for Mike.

Because of the trauma Mike has suffered from his and Jody’s parents’ deaths, the boy has terrible fears of abandonment, and so he follows his older brother everywhere around town. Jody in fact plans on leaving Mike in the custody of his aunt, which of course the boy will hate, but Jody wants his freedom to pursue making music with Reggie, and leave that dull town.

Part of Mike’s fears of losing Jody the way he lost their parents can be seen as expressed in nightmare form: the stabbing of Tommy, and later of Reggie, the two victims being symbolic brothers. Mike’s unconscious mind is thus displacing the status of brother onto two men who aren’t his biological brothers, in order to ease the anxiety of facing up to the loss of his actual brother, Jody.

Mike’s melancholia, expressed musically through the haunting synthesizer theme in E minor, demonstrates the self-hate Freud wrote about in his paper on the subject (link above) in how the boy subjects himself to dangerous situations. His hanging out in the cemetery at night where the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves are, his going in the mausoleum, and even his rather precocious (for a 13-year-old) riding around on a motorbike (and, at one point, driving Jody’s car) all demonstrate at least potentially self-destructive behaviour, indicative of Freud’s death drive, something people who hate themselves might do, because they have bad internal objects haunting them.

After Tommy’s funeral, his death understood (but not believed, according to the novelization) to be a suicide, and it’s understood just how heavy his coffin is, Mike comes to the cemetery and sees the Tall Man pick up, carry, and put the coffin in a hearse all by himself. Mike is so amazed at the mortician’s superhuman strength that he whispers, “What the fuck?” and wants to tell a local fortune teller (played by Mary Ellen Shaw) about it. The height and strength of the Tall Man (especially as compared with the height of his dwarves) reinforces him being representative of the bad father, who from the point of view of a child, is much bigger and stronger.

The fortune teller, who has reassured Mike that if Jody leaves, they’ll go together, is an old lady. As such, she is as much a symbolic mother to Mike as the Tall Man is a symbolic father. (Her granddaughter, played by Terrie Kalbus, is a symbolic sister.) That the fortune teller is amused at Mike’s fear from feeling his hand trapped and hurt in a magic box indicates that she, like the Lady in Lavender, is a bad mother figure, too.

That the box seems to be taking away Mike’s hand and is scaring him (the losing of his hand would have been a symbolic castration) is indicative of castration anxiety, and castration at the hands of the bad father (or here, of the bad mother) can in turn be representative of corporal punishment. To overcome his melancholia, Mike must overcome his fear and unconscious hate of his dead parents. Only then will their bad internal objects stop tormenting him. Hence, the granddaughter (Sarah in the novelization) tells him not to be afraid, and only when he controls his fear does the box, a yonic symbol, release his hand.

The old and young women want Mike to understand that it’s fear itself that is his problem. A funny thing, though, happens soon after, for the granddaughter goes to the cemetery and enters the mausoleum; and when she finds a room in it with containers holding the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves (as we’ll eventually learn), she finds herself overcome with terror, and screams. We don’t see or hear from her again. The fear she warned Mike about became her very problem.

While she’s at the cemetery and mausoleum, Jody is at home, singing and playing his electric guitar on his porch, and Reggie arrives in his ice cream truck with his acoustic guitar and joins in playing the new song Jody has been working on. He’s singing of his lady having left him, and I can’t help linking that idea with how his parents’ death must have felt like an abandonment (hence, Mike’s fears of abandonment). The unconscious Oedipal attachment to Jody’s mother could have easily been displaced to his lady leaving him (his local girlfriend [see the novelization], or his coming sexual encounter with the Lady in Lavender). An expression of his displaced grief in song is one way Jody has been successful in overcoming his grief and loss–something Mike can’t do.

The novelization points out in Chapter Two that Tommy sang and played guitar just like Jody and Reggie–hence I say their trio would have been like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, especially judging by the mellow style of the song we hear the surviving two musicians working on. They only need to work out the vocal harmonies, which would have been three-part had Tommy still been alive, like the harmonies of CSN. As a trio, they would again be a tripling of brothers for Mike, an unconscious wish-fulfillment for a boy so scared of losing any more of his family.

When Jody and Reggie finish playing the song, Reggie takes out a tuning fork and strikes it, then touches it with his fingertips to stop the ringing sound. Immediately after that, we see Sarah, the fortune teller’s granddaughter, walking through a hall in the mausoleum towards the door to the room with the dwarf containers, where she’ll scream.

We learn towards the climax of the movie, when Jody, Mike, and Reggie find that room, that there’s a pair of metal bars sticking up from the floor. These look like a giant tuning fork, but without the connecting bottom. Mike will put his hand between the bars and see it disappear, just as when his hand disappeared in the box; he’ll discover what Sarah must have seen–a hot, hellish world of slave dwarves toiling away for the devil Tall Man. Reggie later will touch the tops of those bars, just as his fingertips touched the tuning fork. This causes a vacuum in the room from which he narrowly escapes.

We are left wondering what connection there could be between the tuning fork, the bars, and the box. Since as I said above, the events of Phantasm are an allegorizing of the goings-on of the unconscious mind, there will be an association of various images that we see, all signifiers of some kind meant to represent certain mental concepts. Since the magic box is a yonic symbol, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as phallic. Putting one’s hand in the box or between the bars makes the hand disappear, a symbolic castration.

Touching the tuning fork or bars, and putting one’s hand in the box, is symbolic masturbation. The threat of castration, symbolic of corporal punishment, is parental discipline against a child’s indulgence in forbidden pleasures.

Furthermore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as both phallic and yonic, the spaces in between the “phalli” being yonis; therefore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be associated with the combined parental figure. That Mike’s hand disappears in the in-between “yoni” as well as that of the magic box indicates the vagina dentata of a punitive bad mother, one every bit as threatening as the bad father of the Tall Man, disciplining a child for his Oedipal urges. Recall how the Lady in Lavender, knife in hand, is ready to stab Jody just outside the mausoleum as Reggie is about to touch the bars and cause the vacuum in the room and the storm outside.

All of these elements in combination reinforce the idea that Phantasm is all about unconscious paranoid anxiety that the hated, internalized mother and father are out to punish Mike and Jody for wanting them dead and gone, however repressed that wish may be.

We learn from Chapter Seven of the novelization that Jody doesn’t want to take over his father’s bank. One can imagine some nasty argument between Jody and his parents over whether or not he should pursue a career in music rather than take over the family business. Jody’s wish to be free of his parents’ dictates surely contributed to an unconscious wish on his part to be rid of them…and so their deaths would have been a source of unconscious guilt for him as well as for Mike.

While Jody is visiting the bank in Chapter Seven of the novelization, he’s in the suit he had on during Tommy’s funeral, and apart from giving the management of his dead father’s bank to George Norby until Mike is old enough to take over, Jody also has a brief, intimate moment with Suzy, an employee there who likes him in that suit and, being of a traditional woman’s mindset, hopes her boyfriend will be the new boss of the bank. One of the film’s outtakes shows her with him in the office that was his dad’s.

Being an aspiring musician, though, Jody doesn’t want to be part of the money-obsessed, capitalist world. As I said above, I imagine his dad being upset with him for not wanting to do that. This conflict can be linked to the later scene of Mike seeing the slave dwarves in that hellscape beyond the metal bar portal in the room with the dwarf containers. Jody doesn’t want to be a slave to capitalism, angering his father, and so his and Mike’s unconscious is showing them the infernal punishment their devilish bad father (the Tall Man) has planned for them.

You see, Jody has a bit of paranoid anxiety of his own, though it’s not as intense as Mike’s is. Jody, too, has a nightmare, one of dwarves grabbing him and pulling him away into hell, just as Mike has a nightmare of the Tall Man standing over his bed with his arms out, ready to grab the boy, and the dwarves all then do.

With the blurring of the line between dream and reality, we don’t know for sure how much of Phantasm is actually in waking life. For all we know, it’s all a great big, unending nightmare, Dante’s tour of the hellish unconscious with Virgil. For this reason, I feel free to interpret any and every character as an extension of Jody’s and Mike’s family.

Thus, Suzy can be an extension of Jody’s unconscious Oedipal feelings for his mother (with Dad dead, he can have her, provided he’s willing to carry on with the family business). If not, though, he’ll be with the Lady in Lavender that night in the cemetery, taking his chances with the bad mother instead of having the good mother transference in his dad’s office in the bank.

Indeed, because things have gone sour between Jody and Suzy (she representing the good mother), he’ll go that night to the local pub and pick up the Lady in Lavender. Mike will be following Jody, as usual. The two lovers going at it in the cemetery represents a fusion of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives.

Mike, of course, will be in the cemetery, too. He’ll be scared by the presence of those dwarves, making him scream for help and distract Jody from her…also saving his life without him even realizing it.

The whole point of the Oedipus complex, properly understood in its expanded sense to include the jealous wish to hog the Oedipally-desired object to oneself (be this object the mother, father,…or really anyone), is that it’s a universal narcissistic trauma expressing hate and hostility to anyone who wishes to share that object and not let one hog him or her to oneself. This is what we see when Mike is following Jody everywhere, not wanting his older brother to be free to live his own life (e.g., to be with the Lady in Lavender). Saving Jody from her knife is thus a justification of Mike’s narcissistic wish to hog his brother all to himself, and is thus a wish-fulfillment. Remember how all of Phantasm could just be Mike’s ongoing dream, all an expression of his unconscious.

The next day, Mike is downtown, and across the street he sees the Tall Man walking up to Reggie’s ice cream truck. The cold of the truck seems to affect the Tall Man negatively. Indeed, we come to understand that the antagonist, being a devil of the hottest hell, has a strong aversion to heat’s diametrical opposite.

Later, Mike is in the garage, tinkering with a car. His precocious talent at fixing cars seems to reflect a wish to know how to bring things back to life, as it were. If only he could bring people back to life, like his parents. Dwarves scare him again, and he tells still-disbelieving Jody about them.

That night, Mike will go with a knife to the mausoleum to figure out what’s going on there. As he’s hiding in a coffin, he sees a caretaker looking around. This is another middle-aged man, like the Tall Man, so as far as Mike’s unconscious is concerned, the man is yet again representative of the bad father that the boy has internalized and whom he wishes he could be rid of.

Note how in all of Mike’s fear of the Tall Man and his dwarves, the boy still ventures out to the places that are the sources of his fear. This willingness to go out there demonstrates his self-destructive nature, which in turn demonstrates the self-hate he feels from his having internalized his bad parental objects, the source of his melancholia in the Freudian sense. He hates himself because he hates them, who are now a part of him.

Still, he keeps trying to project them outward, hence he has to confront them in the forms of the caretaker and the Tall Man. The coffin he hides in is a yonic symbol, representing his forbidden Oedipal desire, which as I said above is much more than just the wish to have his mother incestuously; but in the more expanded sense, it means he wants to hog all desired objects (her, the good father, Jody, and other brother-figures–Reggie and Tommy) all to himself.

Lacan‘s Non! du père forbids Mike to hog everyone just to fulfill his personal wishes, though: Mike must enter society and share everyone with everyone else; he cannot be the symbolic phallus for the mother, which represents the wish to be the desire of the Other. This inability to be that phallus is thus a symbolic castration, which is a recurrent motif in Phantasm.

Mike struggles with the caretaker, even biting his hand…and we’ve seen how a hurt or disappearing hand is symbolic castration. Mike wants the frustration of his wishes to be projected onto others. Immediately after the biting of the hand comes the flying ball with the blade, which stabs the caretaker in the head and kills him. This flying testicle and phallic blade are both castrated and (symbolically) castrating in their mutilation of the man’s face.

Right after this struggle, Mike has to confront the Tall Man, who chases him into a room, with Mike bolting the door to keep the mortician out, his hand slipping through the crack. Mike uses his knife to slice off the Tall Man’s fingers, yet another symbolic castration and Mike’s wish-fulfillment to project the frustration of his desires onto his bad father internal object. This wish-fulfillment is a form of revenge against his father’s frustration of his desires, which led to his unconscious wish for his parents’ deaths, which in turn led to his guilt and melancholia over their actual death. Instead of human blood, the severed fingers drip yellow ichor (the blood of the Greek gods), fittingly the colour of piss and therefore it reinforces how the fingers are phallic.

Mike takes a finger, puts it in a little box [!], and takes it home to show Jody the proof that he isn’t going crazy. Later on, the finger turns into a horrible, black flying insect that attacks Mike and then Jody and visiting Reggie soon after. Its ugliness, and the revulsion that the insect causes, are the diametrical (and dialectical) opposite of the beauty of Aphrodite, who emerged nude from the foam of the sea into which the severed genitals of Uranus were thrown. Indeed, the original sky-father god was castrated by his son, Cronus, in a reversal of the fear of the castrating father of Freud’s conception (Freud, on page 469 of his Interpretation of Dreams, wrote of a variation in which it’s Zeus who overthrows and castrates Cronus in revenge for devouring all of his children.).

The insect is shoved into the kitchen sinkhole, just as the Tall Man will be trapped in a hole going down into an abandoned mine shaft. Apart from being more yonic symbols, these traps also represent attempts at repressing traumatic memories…and of course, neither of them will last long or be effective. Reggie’s seeing of the insect means he too will be involved in doing something about the Tall Man.

Jody is the next to go to the mausoleum alone, and he’s attacked by the dwarves, one of which then chases him in a hearse, it being too short for Jody to see it through the car windows. It turns out that, once Mike has arrived in Jody’s car to help and that the dwarf has been stopped, that it was a crushed, shrunken version of Tommy.

Jody and Mike come to realize that the Tall Man has been killing people in the town (including their parents), and he has been crushing the bodies down to dwarf height, reanimating them, too, in order to do his bidding. As Mike later learns through the twin metal bar portal in that room with the dwarf containers, the dwarves will be the Tall Man’s toiling slaves.

On a symbolic level, this all means that the bad father wants to infantilize Jody and Mike (i.e., to shrink them down to size), and thus make them obey their dad’s every command (e.g., continue to run their father’s banking business, and so abandon their dreams of a music career, etc., and be good slaves to capitalism) without question. Another thing to consider is how the dwarves, as symbolic children, are projections of Mike’s self-loathing. He screams in terror at them because they are him; they’re what Wilfred Bion called ‘bizarre objects,’ hallucinated projections of Mike.

As Jody tries to confront what’s going on in the mausoleum, he tries to keep Mike out of it, in a misguided attempt to protect him. The Tall Man will go after Mike in the house, anyway. Jody trying to lock Mike up in his bedroom just makes Jody into yet another bad object, frustrating Mike in his wishes to be involved with confronting the Tall Man. Mike, in his frustration as Jody is carrying him upstairs to his bedroom, struggles and screams, calling Jody a “goddamn bastard!” and fearing that Jody will abandon him forever.

Mike manages to break out of his bedroom, and the Tall Man, all fingers intact again, abducts him and puts him in a hearse to take him to the mausoleum. Mike has a pistol, though, and he shoots his way out, making the hearse crash and go up in flames. He goes in the mausoleum and finds his father’s coffin, as Jody has already done.

Just before opening the coffin, Mike says, “I’m sorry, Dad, but we had to”…do what? Wish for his and Jody’s parents’ deaths? He’s horrified to see his father’s corpse gone. A bladed ball flies at his head, but Jody intervenes and shoots it with a shotgun. Instead of being mad at Mike for disobeying and escaping his bedroom, though, Jody hugs him. Jody is thus a good object again.

They’re pleased to run into Reggie again, knowing he isn’t dead (after having assumed that he and a couple of young women were killed earlier by the dwarves). Mike is especially pleased, of course, since Reggie’s another brother-figure. They go in that room with the dwarf-containers and the portal. Mike calls the other world, the one he’s almost fallen into, another planet, but I think it’s supposed to be hell, where the Tall Man and his dwarves are all evil spirits.

Finally, with everyone outside the mausoleum again, Reggie, thinking he’s helping the Lady in Lavender, is stabbed by her, just as Tommy–another brother-figure to Mike–was. Then Jody devises his plan to lure the Tall Man into the mine shaft and trap him there.

Mike has to confront the Tall Man yet again at home, the mortician calling him “Boy!”, like a harsh, disciplinarian father. He chases Mike out to the mine shaft, where he falls in the hole, one which Jody then drops boulders from on high to trap the Tall Man in. Jody seems like a triumphant hero.

Mike wakes up in bed. It was all just a dream…wasn’t it?

As it turns out, it was Jody who died…in a car wreck, and not Reggie from a stabbing. Mike knows those rocks won’t hold the Tall Man for long (if he could survive the fire from the crashing of the hearse into the pole, surely he can get out of that trap): of course not–Jody’s trap is merely symbolic of repression in the unconscious. We know Mike has been having nightmare after nightmare ever since his parents’ deaths, and now he’s having even more of them after Jody’s death.

Has the whole film been a dream, on and off?

We see Mike and Reggie in the living room of the house, with a fireplace burning behind them. It looks almost like a romantic setting. I don’t mean to say that Reggie is being a pederastic predator, or that Mike is welcoming such predation in his unconscious; but rather that these overtones are symbolic of Mike’s deep need to have the (platonic) love of a brother-figure, a need that would be particularly intense now that he’s just lost Jody. His feelings of abandonment are overwhelming.

Since Mike has been frustrated as well as loved by his now-all-dead objects, the bad versions of them, including that of Jody now, will all be internalized by the boy. He’ll need Reggie as a good object and brother-figure. Fittingly, Reggie picks up his acoustic guitar and begins humming and strumming that song he played earlier with Jody, the one about his woman leaving him. The film is all about loss, mourning, and a feeling of abandonment.

When Mike is in his room to begin packing for the road trip he and Reggie have planned, he sees the Tall Man again, in the mirror. Seeing the bad father, instead of himself, in the specular image is a reminder to us that the boy’s demons are all inside himself, internalized, not out there somewhere and so he’d be safe from them.

Like a stern father about to spank his son, the Tall Man calls out “Boy!” again, and the dwarves’ arms crash through the mirror glass, grab Mike, and take him screaming away. The childlike dwarves, about Mike’s height, get him because, like the Tall Man, they are him.

The Tanah–The Preaching: The Remaining Spells for Preventing Sin

[The following is the thirty-first 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, and here is the thirtieth–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 following are the remaining spells for preventing sin–their instructions and verses.

[Find an expansive, flat area of land. Perform a ritual with one group of people at one side, and another group of people at the other side. As the verse is chanted, the first group will march together to the other side, as if to take it from the second group of people; then the second group will do the same, marching to the first side while grabbing the arms of the people in the first group, as if to take their land and enslave them. This will all be done while repeating the following verse, louder and louder, and with more and more emotional intensity.]

What you from (others) take(,) others
>>>………………………………………..<<<

Commentary: The verse is to be read thus: “What you take from others, others take from you.” The syntax in the original language allows a smooth reading back and forth.

[Collect coins of gold, silver, and copper, and pile them in a hole in the ground; do this ritual on a windy day. Surround the pile with dirt, leaves, and kindling. As the verse is chanted, burn the leaves and kindling, then put out the fire with water, and bury the coins in the dirt. Chant the following verse repeatedly and in a growing volume and emotional intensity.]

Weleb, Crim of air, blow away my greed!
Nevil, Crim of fire, torch my greed!
Priff, Crim of water, drown my greed!
Drofurb, Crim of earth, bury my greed!

Commentary: It should go without saying that, as the wind blows on the coins, Weleb’s line is chanted repeatedly; as the leaves and kindling are burned, Nevil’s line is chanted repeatedly; as the fire is put out with the water, Priff’s line is chanted repeatedly, and as the coins are buried, Drofurb’s line is chanted repeatedly.

[Prepare a bag of coins to be ‘stolen,’ in this ritual of mock-robbery. Participants in the ritual will run around, each ‘stealing’ the bag while having it ‘stolen’ from him soon after. This running around and ‘stealing’ will continue, again and again, as the following verse is repeatedly chanted.]

When you from (others) steal(,) then others
>>>………………………………………………….<<<

Commentary: As with the verse above meant to prevent the stealing of others’ land, this verse, meant to prevent the stealing of others’ wealth or possessions, is to be read in a similar back-and-forth manner, to represent the karmic nature of the Echo Effect: “When you from others steal, others then steal from you.” Again, the syntax of the original language allows for a smoothness of reciting that cannot be properly reproduced in English.

[This ritual is to be done by one man alone. He is to stand in a flat, open field on a windy day. A circular ditch is to be dug, surrounding him. Leaves and kindling are to be left surrounding him, too. As he chants the verse over and over, he is to light the leaves and kindling on fire, then put it all out with water, then go in the ditch and crawl around in it, rolling in the dirt until his whole body is filthy.]

Weleb, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Nevil, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Priff, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!
Drofurb, if I think of myself alone, may I be alone!

Commentary: Again, each act in the ritual is to correspond with the Crim repeatedly invoked, so Weleb is addressed during the blowing wind, Nevil during the burning, etc.

[Prepare a weighing scale, piles of dirt, small amounts of water, leaves and kindling, and do this ritual on a windy day. First, put unequal amounts of dirt in the two bowls of the scale so they’re uneven; then as the line addressing Drofurb is chanted, move some dirt from the heavier bowl to the lighter bowl to reverse the unevenness. As the line addressing Priff is chanted, have unequal amounts of water in the bowls, then move some water from the heavier bowl to the lighter one, again, to reverse the unevenness. Do the same with the leaves and kindling, lighting them on fire while addressing Nevil with his line. Finally, let the wind blow against the scale while chanting the line for Weleb.]

Drofurb, may my unfairness come back to me!
Priff, may my unfairness come back to me!
Nevil, may my unfairness come back to me!
Weleb, may my unfairness come back to me!

Commentary: As with the rituals meant to prevent the stealing of land or money, and to prevent selfishness, this ritual, to prevent unfairness, dramatizes how the Echo Effect punishes our sin, and so it is meant to instill in the tribe the importance of knowing never to bring bad karma on oneself.

The Tanah–The Preaching, Translator’s Introduction, and First Spell

[The following is the twenty-ninth 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, and here is the twenty-eighth–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.]

Translator’s Introduction

And now, after all of those mythical narratives and moral injunctions, we finally come to some spells. This book is called “The Preaching,” since it concerns itself as much with the danger of using spells for evil or selfish purposes as in the previous books; but in this book, the difference is in the wish to use magic itself to prevent the use of evil or self-serving magic.

What follows is a series of verses, each coupled with instructions on how to perform the spell. These include the materials to be used–usually the air, earth, fire, and water that correspond to the four Crims, or Weleb, Drofurb, Nevil, and Priff, to whom the magic practitioners prayed to resist the temptation to do evil with magic–as well as how to use the materials for these good purposes.

Once the materials are prepared and used properly, the verses are to be chanted repeatedly, many, many times, with increasing volume, speed, and emotional intensity. Something that cannot be rendered with justice in English is the original language’s deliberate repetitions of sounds–assonance, consonance, alliteration, and even some rhyming, as well as the pounding rhythmic cadences. In these sound repetitions was the believed power and effectiveness of the magic, for it was believed that the whole universe consisted of eternal undulations, and so through sympathetic magic, an imitation of those undulations–“the rhythms of everything”–one could influence what happens in the world.

Each magical incantation attempts to prevent the committing of each of the sins listed in Chapter One of The Laws, Book 2. So we will find verses meant to stop the use of magic in aid of fornication, cruelty to others, controlling others, starting wars, taking others’ land, gaining excessive wealth, stealing, selfishness, and treating others unfairly. The verses also have a visual presentation, as did those at the end of each chapter in Beginnings, though our rendering of them inevitably will fail to preserve that visual element perfectly.

Here is the first spell of the book; others will follow in later installments. Note the shape of the verses, which represents a symbol this ancient civilization used to represent unity in plurality.

[Collect rain in a large basin. On a windy day, set a fire with clumps of dirt surrounding it. Use some of the water to put out some of the fire. Let the wind blow out some of the fire. Any remaining fire is to be smothered in the clumps of dirt. Do all of the above while chanting the following verses, over and over, louder and louder, with more and more emotion.]

All
is
the
the Void is all

Rain
falls
into
the ocean is rain

The
many
make
the One, from which many come

Water
drowns
the
water, by fire, is made air

Commentary: This is an introductory, generalized spell meant to promote oneness in the community before dealing with the specific sins. For ‘rain,’ and ‘many,’ read the Pluries. For ‘the Void,’ ‘ocean,’ and ‘the One,’ read Cao. For ‘water,’ ‘fire,’ and ‘air,’ read Priff, Nevil, and Weleb, respectively.

As for the first, second, and fourth verses, they are meant to be read as “All is the Void; the Void is all,” “Rain falls into the ocean; the ocean is rain,” and “Water drowns the fire; water, by fire, is made air.” These four verses are all meant to represent the back-and-forth movement of everything, the undulations of the universe that unify all plurality. The remaining verses will appear in subsequent installments, as mentioned above.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 8

[The following is the twenty-eighth 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, and here is the twenty-seventh–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 underlying the avoidance of all sins, put in another way from that of the preceding chapter, can be summed up in this final law:

Magic should never be used in aid of treating other people unfairly.

The basis of fairness is found in what was discussed in the first chapter of Beginnings–the principle of Cao, a never-ending ocean that is the entire world. The waves of Cao make everything equal–the Unity of Action.

That equality, however, is not rigid and unchanging, like a straight line. All things in Cao are fluid and moving, and therefore fairness is also dynamic.

To ensure a fluid fairness, one must look where the crests of good fortune, and the troughs of ill fortune, are, then reverse them. After such a reversal, reverse them again, and again, and again.

So if those in the crests of good fortune have plenty, while those in the troughs of ill fortune have little, that plenty must be moved to those with little; then when those formerly lacking are sated with much, their abundance must be moved to those newly lacking.

The waves of good and ill fortune must be always moving to share the abundance with those who lack. The good and wise will always be vigilant in seeking out who has little, and therefore who needs to have crests move to new troughs. The wicked, however, refuse to do this sharing of crests.

The wicked will try to justify keeping the crests of wealth to themselves, imagining their fortune to be the natural way of things, when it most certainly is not! Thus, they will leave those in troughs of poverty to remain in a state of want. In this way, the wicked would have the waves of Cao freeze, with their own crests a permanent advantage, and the troughs of the poor a permanent disadvantage. The wicked will also use magic in aid of their greed.

Depriving the poor of food, drink, housing, medicine, or clothing is already wicked. Using magic to aid in this deprivation is far worse. Refusing to aid the vagrant foreigner entering one’s nation is already wicked. Using magic to worsen his plight is a far greater sin.

Trying to freeze the flow of the waves of Cao is as impossible as it is to stop the alternating of day and night, of halting the light of Dis and the darkness of Noct. The heat of Nevil’s fire, the heat and desire of Hador, must not be used to cause the coldness of Calt to deny the poor of warmth.

When the rich and powerful try to keep their crests of wealth to themselves, using magic to aid them in their greed, they can be assured that the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, will keep the waves of Cao moving, to bring a deep trough of sorrow to punish them for their sin!

When the fortunate try to keep the light of Dis, and the heat of Hador’s desire, to themselves, they can be assured that the Echo Effect will bring them Calt’s coldness and Noct’s darkness!

[The text breaks off here.]

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 7

[The following is the twenty-seventh 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, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, and here is the twenty-sixth–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 underlying the avoidance of all of the sins previously discussed is one that can sum them all up in one law.

Magic should never be used in aid of only oneself.

Use of magic with oneself as the one and only concern is what leads to all of the other sins. This is why the teaching of the Three Unities, as passed down to us from Rawmios, is so important. These unities of space, time, and action teach us our place in the world, as well as how to live well in it.

As for avoiding selfish purposes in using magic, one must focus on the unity of space, for it teaches us that we are not separate from each other, as our sense perception deludes us into believing. We are all one: everywhere is here. The suffering of one causes suffering for others, and the joy of one causes joy for others. When we can fully understand how the self is in the other, and the other is in the self, we will know the unity of space, we will have compassion for each other, and be selfless in our use of magic.

The selfish use of magic, though, leads to the Ten Errors, which deny the unity of all things. Selfishness leads to mad thinking, being dazed by images, the scurrilous use of language, all work and no rest, family fighting, murder, adultery, theft, lying, and greed.

Selfish uses of magic, as noted above, also lead to the sins warned against in the previous chapters.

Using magic in aid of all the forms of fornication makes a mockery of the unity of humanity. We are to be unified in spirit, not in body (except through marriage).

Using magic to be cruel to other people, or to animals, denies the unity connecting all of life. Kindness to each other, and to animals, restores and strengthens that unity.

Using magic to control others denies our unity with others and reinforces our illusion of separateness. Relinquishing control of others allows for the full freedom of everyone.

Using magic to start wars, or to take the land of other peoples, denies the unity of all of humanity. We must always be mindful of our common humanity, all around the world, and never regard one nation as greater than any other.

Using magic to gain excessive wealth, or to steal, denies the unity maintained between honest livelihoods and obtaining our necessities with the use of money, as elucidated among the Ten Errors. It also denies the unity of humanity between the rich and the poor, creating even greater division between men by making the rich overly luxurious and the poor wretched.

These abuses of magic, only for one’s own gain and at the expense of all other people, not only cause pain and suffering for many, but also ensure division between men, egoism, and isolation. The Echo Effect, moreover, will ensure that the pain, division, and isolation will come back to punish the sinner. Do not think they won’t come back to plague the guilty!