Tag: books

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!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 5

[The following is the twenty-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, and here is the twenty-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.]

There is one particularly wicked way to control others, and to be cruel to others at the same time. This way is through the taking away of another people’s land by use of military force, and this brings us to a discussion of the next sin.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Now, using magic in aid of defending one’s land against invading armies, or in aid of resistance against an occupying power, is a perfectly worthy aim. We elders do not recommend, however, that we Luminosians, currently under the yoke of the Zoyans, should use magic in resistance against them. Indeed, we should not resist the Zoyans at all, for it is the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, that justly put us in bondage to them as punishment for our having invaded the city of Zaga and oppressed and killed their people. The Echo Effect will one day free us of the Zoyans, once our penance is complete; we must have faith in the eventual arrival of the judgement of the Echo Effect.

It is indeed providential that the name of the people who oppress us, the Zoyans, should be so similar to the name of the people we Luminosians once oppressed, the Zagans. In this similarity of names, the Echo Effect seems to be teaching us something of the law of sow and reap. What we do to others will one day come back to us, like our voices echoing back to us.

We had succeeded in using magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Tenebrosians, as related in “Migrations,” because our bondage to those people was not a reaping of any evil we had sown. Our invasion of the city of Zaga, however, had a success that would not last because it was evil. We therefore should not use magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Zoyans; nor should we–once we are finally liberated from the Zoyans, through the Echo Effect–ever contemplate invading, making war with, and oppressing another people, especially not with the aid of magic.

War is political murder, and murder is one of the Ten Errors as related in “Beginnings.” One must never kill or harm another, except when absolutely necessary, as in self-defence or the defence of others.

No people has the right to take land away from another people. If one people has done so, in order to mitigate the punishment of the Echo Effect, they should restore the land they stole to its original inhabitants as soon as they realize the gravity of their sin; for if they do not do so, terrible will be their loss one day!

We Luminosians, enslaved by the Zoyans, are a lesson in history, not only to the children of our posterity, but also to the peoples of all nations of the earth. If ever you invade other lands and kill their people, you will one day have your land, stolen as it is, stolen from you, and you will be killed, too! The use of magic in aid of such sins only strengthens and intensifies the sin, resulting in a harsher punishment for you!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 4

[The following is the twenty-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, and here is the twenty-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.]

There are many ways to be cruel to others, and to use magic in aid of being cruel to others; but there is one form of cruelty that deserves special attention, and so we will focus on that here.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling others.

We have seen in Chapter Two how magic can be, and mustn’t be, used in aid of seducing others. We gave the example from the writing called “The Migrations” how a Luminosian boy used magic to seduce a girl living next to his home, and how after using her to satisfy his lust, he beat her to death when she, realizing after his magic’s power had worn off, was horrified at what he had done to her.

We repeat the same warnings again and again because they are never heeded, and we will continue to make the same warnings until they are finally heeded! Just before the writing of this chapter, another young Luminosian, among us slaves here in Zoya, used magic to help him seduce a Zoyan woman. He was discovered with her in bed, her slave, and then taken away to be put to death. Some never learn.

Seducing others is a form of controlling others. It must be stopped among us Luminosians if we are to have any hope of liberation from our Zoyan masters. They used magic to help them control and enslave us. We must not think, as some Luminosians do, that using magic to control the Zoyans and enslave them will be our revenge on them, as that boy did.

The law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect does not come about through man’s attempts at manipulating it. The Echo Effect works of its own accord, as a direct consequence of man’s actions. The Zoyans will one day receive the Echo Effect from their own control and enslaving of us; we Luminosians, too, will receive the Echo Effect from our own control and enslaving of others!

There are those who rule a country who may use magic to control, seduce, enslave, and lie to others in order to strengthen their power. Upon the day of our liberation from Zoya, we Luminosians must resist the temptation, when founding a new nation for ourselves, to use magic to be tyrannical rulers. If we tyrannize others with the aid of magic, the Echo Effect will ensure that we one day will be tyrannized again, as we are now under the Zoyans.

Magic must never be used in aid of telling lies to others, to create false proof of lies. Heads of state may create such false events to bolster their power, or people in communities, families, places of work, or schools may do so to harm others. Such sinning must be condemned and stopped if our people are to survive, be free again, and grow. If we allow liars to use magic to make their falsehoods seem more vivid, and their illusions seem more true, then one day, the lies will come back to us all in the most convincing of illusions. The Echo Effect will make disproving those illusions impossible!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 3

[The following is the twenty-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, and here is the twenty-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.]

There is the sinful use of magic in aid of indecent pleasure, and there is also the sinful use of magic in aid of inflicting undeserved pain on others. This leads us to a discussion of the second sin on the list from the first chapter.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Such cruelty is not to be limited to cruelty to one’s fellow man, but also cruelty to animals, the needless destruction of plant life, or that of any form of life in our world. Killing of any kind must have justification and be necessary.

Cruelty exists in many forms, and magic can and has been used in aid of these forms. They include beatings, intimidation of the weaker and smaller, torture, murder, sexual violation for the purpose of causing another pain, the spread of lies and slanders, and many others.

The Luminosians, on the taking of Zaga and in their rule of it, were guilty of all of these cruelties, as well as the use of magic in their aid.

When Zagans tried to resist the Luminosian theft of their land, we used magic to aid us in beating them. The magic spells we used gave us greater force in our fists and the clubs we used to hit them with.

Against Zagan resistance, we also used magic in aid of intimidation. Our magic spells made us appear larger, fiercer, and more frightening to the Zagans, making them recoil and retreat.

We Luminosians would capture Zagan resistors and subject them to torture. We would use magic spells to sharpen and intensify the pain we inflicted on them, to deter the rest of them from resisting us.

Other Zagans, who tried more aggressive forms of resistance, what we called ‘terror,’ were murdered by us. We Luminosians used magic spells to murder many more Zagans than ordinary weapons could, and our spells made the deaths far more painful and slow than ordinary weapons could. This sin of ours was the true terror.

While in the previous chapter, we discussed uses of magic in the aid of using women, girls, and even animals for the sake of filthy, lewd pleasures for oneself, there is also the use of magic for such filthy and lewd use of these objects of supposed love that is meant to inflict pain. This sin was often committed by Luminosians against Zagan women and girls, as part of our intimidation and subjugation of all Zagans.

We also used magic spells to help spread lies and slanders against Zagans, calling them ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbarian,’ ‘animals,’ and the like, in order to justify our cruelty to them. The magic spells were used on our own people, so Luminosians would never doubt the lies about the Zagans. Only a few of us had the wisdom not to allow ourselves to fall under the spells of the wicked among us.

In time, all these evils came back to us in kind! The Zoyans use their own magic to aid them in beating, intimidating, torturing, murdering, raping, and slandering us. The Echo Effect returned our sins to us. Those sins will also be returned to the Zoyans one day, freeing us finally. When that day comes, we must remember never to use magic for evil again!

Analysis of ‘First Blood’

First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell. It was adapted into a 1982 movie by Ted Kotcheff, the screenplay written by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone, the last of these three of course starring as Rambo. Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna costarred.

The film went through development hell for ten years because of such difficulties as finding the right director and cast, and getting a suitable screenplay. Morrell had sold the film rights in 1972 to Columbia Pictures; the rights were then sold to Warner Bros., and finally Orion Pictures produced the film. Another reason a film adaptation didn’t appear in the early to mid-1970s was that the Vietnam War was still going on, and film studios were worried about moviegoers’ reactions to such sensitive subject matter as that of a Vietnam vet waging a one-man war against an American town.

A suitable adaptation was finally created, to a large extent from Stallone’s rewrites, when the novel’s violence was toned down, Rambo was made more sympathetic, and he would survive in the end, which–thanks to the box-office success of the film–allowed for sequels to be made.

In fact, Morrell wrote the novelizations for Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, having informed readers in the preface to Part II to disregard the death of Rambo in his original novel. Then came two other films, Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood; all of the sequels’ screenplays were co-written by Stallone, with Morrell having no involvement in any way with the writing of the last two…though he praised Stallone’s portrayal of Rambo in the fourth film, saying Stallone had returned the character to Morrell’s original intentions as angry, cold, burned out, and filled with self-disgust.

Here is a link to quotes from the first film, and here is a link to an audiobook of the novel.

While the two sequels from the 1980s, as I said above, novelized by Morrell (fittingly, as you’ll see why below), were little more than mindless action movie nonsense, and one can basically say the same about the other two sequels, in a sense it is fitting to see Rambo in actual war situations (in Vietnam in Part II, in Afghanistan in Rambo III, in Burma in Rambo, and in Mexico in Last Blood). I say this because I see the original novel and first movie as telling a story that, while set in an American town, is an allegory of the Vietnam War, with Rambo personifying US imperialism, and the local cops representing the Vietnamese army.

Accordingly and predictably, as far as the sequels are concerned, the Vietnamese and Soviets are portrayed negatively (except for pro-US Vietnamese spy Co Bao (played by Julia Nickson) in Part II, the Soviets are portrayed negatively in Rambo III, the Burmese government is portrayed so negatively (which should not be misconstrued that I’m advocating for the junta) in Rambo as to have had the film banned in the country, and in Last Blood, Mexicans are portrayed so badly that there have been accusations of this last sequel promoting racist and xenophobic attitudes towards the country (in a rather Trump-esque vein). This sort of propagandizing against and vilifying of any country or government going against US interests is typical of imperialism.

As for the first movie, the local police of the town of Hope, Washington (in the novel, the town is Madison, Kentucky) are also portrayed negatively, with sheriff Will Teasle (Dennehy) being prickly to Rambo right from the start. Deputy Sergeant Arthur “Art” Galt (played by Jack Starrett) is abusive to Rambo to the point of psychopathy; and the other police, when chasing Rambo in the forest and getting wounded by him, cry out to Will for help like children weeping for their daddy.

In contrast, the novel’s portrayal of Teasle is much more sympathetic and nuanced, with lots of backstory to tell us the kind of world the sheriff is from. His wife has left him, so he has to deal with the pain of that. Also, Teasle is a Korean War veteran, so in that, among other things, he parallels Rambo the Vietnam vet.

Also, in the novel, Teasle doesn’t arrest Rambo (who is called only “Rambo” or “the kid”; the “John” and “James” are inventions of the movies) until after he returns to the town several times. This is opposed to Dennehy’s Teasle, who is abrasive with Rambo just upon first seeing him and not liking how he looks. He arrests him immediately for vagrancy upon Rambo’s just beginning his first return to the town.

It’s important to contrast the tone of the film with that of the novel in light of my allegorizing them as representative of American involvement in Vietnam. The film is, as I’ve said, far more sympathetic to Rambo, and far less sympathetic to the local police and reserve army “weekend warriors,” while in the novel, there’s much more moral ambiguity between the two sides.

In the film, Rambo injures those coming after him, but he never kills them, except for Galt, and even he is killed only accidentally, in self-defence. In the novel, Rambo kills many cops, and most deliberately, including Galt, who isn’t the ACAB pig of the film, but rather a somewhat inept cop who often forgets to lock the door leading upstairs from where they keep the incarcerated downstairs.

This contrast can help us understand the film’s attitude, as opposed to that of the novel, concerning the Vietnam War allegory that I see in both. The film, in having us sympathize with PTSD-stricken Rambo, as against the obnoxious local cops, takes the pro-American attitude towards Vietnam. The novel, with its morally ambiguous attitude towards both sides, allegorically takes into account how wrong it was that the US went into Vietnam and did all the damage it did there.

When we see Teasle telling Rambo, with that American flag on his jacket, to get out of town and stay out, we can see Teasle’s intolerance towards Rambo as representative of the Vietnamese not wanting any more imperialists or colonialists in their country. After all, they had just finished driving out the French colonialists by the mid-1950s, and because of Western Cold War paranoia about the ‘Red menace,’ then, by the 1960s, they had to put up with Uncle Sam moving into their country.

So the cops’ arresting Rambo, then chasing him into the mountainside forest, are allegorical of US troops taken as POWs by the Vietnamese, who then would have chased any escaped POWs in the jungles of Vietnam. Certainly in Rambo’s PTSD-addled mind, his reliving of the trauma he suffered in Nam as he flees to the forest from the cops makes the whole story into the Vietnam War all over again, from his perspective.

Seen in this light, the notion of who really “drew first blood” has a chillingly ironic new meaning.

It’s assumed by most in the West that Vietnam started the war because the “commies” were out to take over the world and ‘enslave’ everybody, so the US had to stop the spread of communism (i.e., the ‘domino theory‘) and intervene. Actually, the US lied, through the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident, to justify greater involvement in Vietnam. US imperialism and colonialism (i.e., the French) drew first blood, not Vietnam. Allegorically speaking, Rambo’s insistence on coming into town again and again (as in the novel)–defying Teasle’s insistence that he not do so (however more patient he is with Rambo in the novel, even allowing him to have something to eat in a local diner)–is what has metaphorically drawn first blood, too.

In the film, why should Teasle think that Rambo’s entering town with the American flag on his jacket, of all things, to be a sign that he’s looking for trouble? And looking the way he does, in combination with the flag (long hair, sloppy, and smelling bad), is what’s implied, of course, but allegorically speaking, it can represent a white man in Southeast Asia in a green army jacket, with that flag on it, implying a military uniform.

To make Rambo more sympathetic in the film, we see good-looking Stallone with combed hair and no beard or mustache…unlike the far shaggier and scruffier-looking Rambo of the novel. Also in the film, he is further humanized in its opening scene, in which he tries to visit a veteran friend from his team in Nam by going to the vet’s home, only to learn that he died of cancer from Agent Orange. Rambo is lonely, homeless, and suffering from PTSD. The Rambo of the novel has the same problems, but because of his tendency to kill, he’s far less sympathetic.

The issue of veterans’ PTSD, emphasized in the film, is of course a valid one, especially given how shabbily the US government has treated its veterans when they’re no longer of any use to the imperial war machine. Empire doesn’t just harm those outside the imperial core: it hurts those within it, too, and that’s why it’s valid to allegorize a vet’s war in an American town as a war in one of those Third World countries that the empire wants to subjugate and plunder.

These soldiers traumatize others and get traumatized themselves. Rambo’s loneliness represents the alienation and estrangement people feel in society and workers feel doing their work. Accordingly, while Col. Samuel Trautman (Crenna) in the film knows Rambo well (calling him “Johnny”), has personally trained him, and–as the final scene makes clear–is a father figure to him (once again reinforcing our sympathy for the US Army’s point of view), in the novel, Capt. Trautman merely headed the training facility where Rambo learned to be a soldier, he hardly knows Rambo at all, and he’s the one to put a bullet in Rambo’s head at the end of the novel.

My allegorizing of the story as one of Rambo fighting in the Vietnam War, instead of the local American cops, can be seen clearly in the novel, when shortly before Rambo’s breaking out of the police station and racing off to the forest on the mountain, he remembers a time in Nam when labouring as a POW, he gets sick, and he is given a chance to escape when the Vietnamese guards leave him to his own devices. Going through the jungle, he’s given food by local villagers, and he eventually rejoins members of the US Army.

Paralleling this Vietnam memory is Rambo’s escape from the police station, where instead of being sick, his vulnerability is from running outside completely naked (he’s just had a shower to clean away his body odour, and before he even has a chance to get dressed, he’s freaking out from a PTSD trigger from the cops’ attempt to shave his beard and give him a haircut). In the forest on the mountainside, Rambo gets clothes, food, and a rifle from an old man and a boy illegally making moonshine from a still; this help parallels the Vietnamese villagers having fed him.

Rambo is extremely averse to getting a haircut and a shave. In the novel, he’s kept in a cell that gives him claustrophobia. In the film, the sight of the straight razor gives him a PTSD flashback, making him relive the terror of a Vietnamese guard bringing a blade up to his chest and slashing it, triggering Rambo’s fight/flight response. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard, as the cops try to do in the novel, can be compared to the cutting of Samson‘s long hair, thus depriving him of his great strength. In the end, Samson kills all the Philistines, but also himself; in the novel, Rambo kills many of his enemies, and himself gets killed, too.

Having Rambo escape naked reinforces our sense of how tough he is. He can ignore public embarrassment, the discomfort of his unprotected nut-sack slapping against the seat of the motorbike as he races into the wind on it, and the possibility of scraping his skin on the ground if the bike crashes. Him naked among the trees on the mountainside also reinforces our sense of how feral he is.

Another point of contrast between the novel and the film is in who they emphasize as being the main victims of the Vietnam War. In my allegorical interpretation of the novel, Rambo’s shooting and killing of all of Teasle’s cops, as well as that of Orval Kellerman (played by John McLiam in the film) and his dogs, and on top of them, his setting of much of the town on fire suggests the American troops’ shooting and napalming of the Vietnamese and their villages. The film’s emphasis on Rambo’s PTSD, leading to him breaking down and crying at the end, as well as his never deliberately killing anyone, emphasizes how victimized the American vets felt.

Now, Rambo’s rant to Trautman at the end of the film, about how wrongly he and other vets were treated by antiwar protestors, them spitting on him and calling him “‘Baby-killer,’ and all kinds of vile crap,” is valid insofar as some troops really were innocent of such atrocities. Other troops, however, weren’t so innocent, as was the case with the My Lai massacre of 1968.

In any case, the antiwar protestors should have reserved most of their ire for the top military brass and American government. Recall that old antiwar song by Black Sabbath, which condemned the generals and politicians that plotted and started the Vietnam War, then had the poor–young men like Rambo–do all of their dirty work for them…and it was those very same poor who came home–if they weren’t killed–traumatized, unemployed, and often homeless, like Rambo; it wasn’t the generals or politicians who suffered thus.

I mentioned above how there are parallels between Rambo and Teasle in the novel, i.e., they’re both vets. Also, it’s not just Teasle et al hunting Rambo; it’s vice versa, too. Both men sustain nasty injuries in the mountainside woods, and it’s as if there’s a psychic link between the two, because later on in the novel, when Teasle is back in town, he’s had a vision in a dream that Rambo is coming back into Madison.

This time, Rambo’s going back into town to torch it all, linking this return to the other ones at the beginning, which prodded Teasle into arresting him and starting the whole conflict in the first place. This linking of going back into town, in terms of my allegory, shows how Rambo’s arrival has always been an invasion, even if he didn’t kill anybody at first. It’s like the imperialist establishment of South Vietnam (or South Korea, for that matter), a preparation for coming war and prompting the establishment of the Viet Cong.

The whole point in allegorizing the conflict in First Blood, with a US vet fighting a local American town to represent the US army fighting in Nam, is to show how imperialism’s ravaging of other countries eventually turns back on itself, causing the empire to eat itself up and ravage the imperial core. This is what we can see the Trump administration doing as I’ve been writing this post: first, they did the usual–continue to enable the Gaza genocide and Ukrainian war, and threaten Venezuela; now, they’re sending the National Guard into American cities like Washington DC, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles to terrorize American citizens, regardless of whether or not they’re illegal immigrants, in response to an “enemy within.” When we hurt people outside, we hurt people inside (e.g., Vietnam vets’ PTSD), because in the end we’re all one.

Before Rambo goes back into town, though, he still has to hide from those doing the manhunt for him, which by now has included the National Guard and civilians. He goes deep into a mining cave, in which at first he imagines it’s like being in a Catholic Church where he can go to confession; indeed, he contemplates how he wasn’t justified in killing those cops–he could have simply escaped, but he knows that his instinct to keep fighting is powered, at least in part, by his enjoyment of killing. In his bloodlust, we can see how he personifies US imperialism.

Deep in that black pit of a cave–which in the novel, at one point shorty after he’s come back out, is aptly compared to hell–Rambo comes to a filthy chamber with toxic fumes and a floor covered in shit. Bats fly out all over him, biting and scratching him (in the film, it’s rats). He is repelled back, but he soon realizes that it’s only through this awful chamber that he’ll be able to come back out to the surface. Only by going through the darkest hell can one come back out to the light: this heaven/hell dialectic, like any dialectical unity of opposites, is something I’ve discussed in a number of blog posts before.

So in this situation, Rambo is like Jesus harrowing hell before His resurrection…though Rambo’s return to the earth’s surface will make him anything but holy.

Nonetheless, the notion of Rambo emerging from the cave as a kind of resurrected, avenging Christ is apt when we consider, in the context of my allegory, how the missionary spread of Christianity (in places like Africa, for example) has been used to justify colonialism and imperialism. Recall Ann Coulter‘s incendiary words about Muslim-majority countries immediately after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” The Western capitalist complaint about “Godless communists” would have also been used as a rationalization for fighting the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

In any case, when Rambo comes out of that cave, he feels “good,” as it says in the novel, being the only apt word to describe how he feels. He’s full of resolve and energy, eager to fight his personal war on the town. This good feeling is comparable to experiencing the transformed, ‘spiritual body‘ of the resurrected Christ, ready to go out and fight as a Christian soldier against the ‘civilian’ pagans, or those whom Rambo fights, those without his military training and discipline.

In the film, he steals a military transport truck carrying an M60 machine gun. In the novel, he steals a police car and some dynamite. With these weapons, he’ll cause a mayhem to the town comparable to the napalm mayhem the US Army caused in Vietnam. He’ll blow up two gas stations, the police headquarters, and much of the town.

But of course, he can fight this personal war only for so long before he’ll be stopped. His inevitable, ultimate defeat is allegorical of the quagmire that the Vietnam War turned into, an unwinnable one that was beginning to be seen as such by the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the year Morrell began writing his novel.

Trautman tries in the film’s and novel’s varying ways to convince Rambo to stop fighting and thus to save his life. Allegorically, this is like the US Army’s big brass realizing that they had to pull out of Vietnam before more of their men needlessly got killed.

In the novel, Teasle and Rambo shoot each other, and Teasle–in that connection I said he has with Rambo–feels a need to be near Rambo when he’s finally killed. The police chief, a former vet, and this Vietnam vet parallel each other in their shared forms of pain (sustained injuries in the mountainside forest, alienation and loneliness [recall Teasle’s wife having left him], etc.).

The ultimate connection, though, between Teasle and Rambo is, in terms of my allegory, a dialectical one, in the sense of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic. One can be recognized as self-conscious only through the other recognizing him as such. Rambo and Teasle react to each other at the beginning of the story. They have a fight to the death; one becomes lord, and the other, bondsman (in my allegory, these would respectively be Rambo-as-US-imperialist and Teasle-as-Vietnamese-resistor). The contradiction between the two is resolved through the efforts of the local police to stop Rambo in the end, making him realize he cannot go any further. This resolution is allegorical of Vietnam fighting so hard for many years until finally liberating themselves from Uncle Sam.

On the surface, it might seem that it’s Teasle who is the lord, and Rambo the bondsman, since it’s through Rambo’s hard fighting that he ends up outdoing the cops for so long, and escaping them; but even if we take this interpretation, it just shows how dialectically interchangeable Rambo and Teasle are, each other’s yin and yang.

Finally, what is ironic about a franchise with a seemingly indestructible tough guy is how, in this first film, the one unequivocally good one, in its climactic and emotional final scene, Rambo cries like a baby, just like Teasle’s wounded cops in the forest. Trautman comforts Rambo like a father figure (as opposed to the novel, in which Orval–the old man with the hunting dogs–is Teasle’s father figure, yet another parallel between Rambo and Teasle). The big action hero is thus a rough, tough cream puff, a Herculean masculine ideal as impossible for men to live up to as is the Marian/Aphrodite ideal for women to attain.

A scene was filmed of Crenna’s Trautman being made by Stallone’s Rambo to shoot and kill him, a forced suicide; for obvious reasons, it was disliked and excluded from the film. As I said above, in the novel, Trautman blows Rambo’s head off; earlier in the novel, wounded Rambo intended to kill himself with some of that dynamite he had.

In any case, Rambo dying at the end may not be pleasing to moviegoers who’ve invested so much time sympathizing with him, but it is the fitting end to the story, because the whole point of First Blood is how Rambo’s projection of who ‘started the fight’ is ironically how he started it (if only allegorically so, according to my interpretation); also, the whole point of the story is how it ends, with Rambo-as-US-imperialism killing many others, then self-destructing.

As of the writing and publishing of this analysis, Americans have been witnessing that self-destruction of empire on their very soil. They ought to reflect on that, and not wish for any sequels to the fighting.