The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Two

[The following is the forty-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, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, and here is the forty-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 and the next chapter deal with “visions” of the future brought on by the use of drugs made from plants, local ones of the tribe’s area, presumably. Which plants in particular were used, we can’t be sure of, since they are never explicitly named in the text.

This chapter includes visions of a future many hundreds of years past the time of writing. The uncanny thing about this chapter is how, at least in the opinion of a few of the researchers in our team, it seems to be describing a feudal society, long before any of the tribe could have known what such a society would be like! It uses the language of someone trying to depict such a society, while of course not being able to describe it properly and accurately, all the while describing it in a way that the people of his or her own world could understand.

The chapter begins with a vision of how the tribe got liberated from the previous trough of slavery to the Zoyans as dealt with in Chapter One. Apparently, the tribe made a set of bracelets, one for each member, each decorated with personifications of the four Crims of the elements. So, Weleb has the face of a man blowing to represent air, Nevil has a face of fire, Drofurb a face of earth and rock, and Priff a watery face. These are mere suppositions of ours: we cannot describe how such bracelets looked for sure, having not yet found even one among the texts and relics.

In any case, it is the magic power of such bracelets that it is believed helped liberate the tribe, with the understanding that they would wear them with bedrock faith in the Crims. A lack of such faith in the future would result in a reversal of fortune. The liberated tribe passed on the bracelets to the next generation, warning the wearers to keep their faith in the Crims strong. The admonition worked, it seems, for many generations. At some point, though, the new wearers of the bracelets must have thought of them as little more than pretty jewelry, for the people soon enough found themselves in a new kind of servitude.

Chapter Two

Glory be to Drofurb, Crim of the earth, from whose plants we may extract drugs that give us signs of the future! From these visions, we Luminosians now know how we can liberate ourselves from the oppressive rule of the Zoyans!

We must make a bracelet for each member of the tribe; of what material each is to be made, we do not know, but we will try many kinds until we know which is correct. The bracelets are to be decorated each with an image of the four Crims, presented as if men. Weleb’s face will huff and puff and blow air; Nevil will have a fiery face; Drofurb, a face of earth and rock, with plants for hair; and Priff will have a wavy, watery face.

The most important thing of all, upon making and wearing the bracelets, is that every member of the tribe have an unshakable faith in the Crims and their ability to sustain a happy life for us all. If ever the wearer’s faith should falter, ill fortune will come back to us.

Our visions have shown that when we finish making the bracelets with the correct material, all of the tribe, fully motivated in their hatred of slavery to the Zoyans, will wear the bracelets with perfect faith. The visions show that we will be liberated; furthermore, many generations in the future will wear the bracelets faithfully, and so will continue to live well in a long, great crest. Bur our visions also show that one day, when the tribe is self-satisfied, they will grow proud, lose their faith, and treat the bracelets as if mere adornments. Then will come the next terrible trough.

Our vision of the trough to be endured was as follows. We saw wide, flat, grassy fields with men and women living off the land. Their crops yielded much food, yet the people were often hungry, for they had to give most of this food to the men who owned the land, those far richer than they.

These poor, wretched workers descended from us Luminosians, who after our liberation from the Zoyans would marry and mix with other peoples. None of these people could read or write; they were all filthy and often suffering or dying of disease at young ages. Many had few teeth, with little to eat or to grin about.

We saw no hope for any of them to rise out of their poverty and squalor. They could only raise crops and give most of the yield to their wealthy lords, who gave hollow promises of protection in exchange for food so desperately needed to fill their bellies with.

No kindness did the lords show their drudges: only an insistence that they know their place, and never try to rise from it, for pain of violence from the lords’ standing armies. We also saw the bracelets on the people’s wrists, never to be removed until passed onto the next generation, for until such a time, the bracelets were stuck to their skin; attempts to tear them off would be intolerably painful, until the Crims forced them to give them to their sons and daughters.

In time, though, one generation would rise up, conquer the evil lords, kings, and queens through bloody violence, which included the severing of heads with devices that had dropping blades. The people would then be free…if only for a short time, for the next trough would be soon to come.

Analysis of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’

I: Introduction

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the sixth studio album by Genesis, released in 1974. It’s also the last Genesis album with original lead singer Peter Gabriel, who then quit after the tour promoting this album to pursue a solo career. So this is the last Genesis album with the classic prog quintet–Gabriel (vocals/flute), Tony Banks (keyboards), Mike Rutherford (bass/12-string guitar), Phil Collins (drums/vocals), and Steve Hackett (guitars)–which gave us Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, their first live album, and Selling England by the Pound.

A rock opera, TLLDOB tells the story of Rael (played by Gabriel), a troubled youth from New York City who goes through a journey of self-discovery in a surreal Manhattan. The story is richly allegorical and metaphorical, drawing ideas from religion, mythology, literature, and psychology. It is by turns brilliant and yet of a frustrating “obscurantism,” to borrow a word from a critic in the Rolling Stone Album Guide (fourth edition, page 328).

Here is a link to all the song lyrics, here is a link to the entire album, illustrated and with the lyrics, and here is a link to Peter Gabriel’s liner notes from the inner gatefold of the album cover.

Since this album is so frustratingly obscurantist, there are probably as many different ways to interpret what it all means as there are people to interpret it. What follows below, therefore, is my own personal interpretation, for what that’s worth.

Gabriel’s narration in the liner notes mostly do more to make the story obscurantist, as do the black-and-white photos on the cover, than do his lyrics. Perhaps obscurantist is the whole idea, though, since as I see it, the story is about Rael going from his angry, rebellious, self-centered youth to reaching a high state of spiritual enlightenment, a mystical experience that cannot be adequately expressed in words, music, or images.

II: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

The song begins with Banks on the piano, playing wavelike phrases with his alternating right and left hands hitting intervals of fifths and fourths on every strong beat (the first, fifth, ninth, and thirteenth of the sixteenth notes in every bar of 4/4 time, the other groups of three sixteenth notes being intervals of thirds). We can hear in his playing the clear influence of classical music, a defining feature of prog.

Then the whole band comes in, with Gabriel singing the album and song title (Collins doing backup vocals and hitting cymbals), to a chord progression of B-flat, B suspended 4th, and resolving to E.

Now, what does “the lamb lies down on Broadway” mean? Note what Gabriel says in the liner notes: “This lamb has nothing whatsoever to do with Rael, or any other lamb–it just lies down on Broadway.”

Are we supposed to take Gabriel at his word here, or is he deliberately trying to keep us from the correct interpretation? I think it’s the latter. Why should we believe it’s just a lamb lying down on Broadway, meaning nothing else? What would be the significance of that, if that’s all there is to it?

Denial is a common defence mechanism used to keep us from confronting a painful truth. Here, at the beginning of the story, Rael hasn’t yet begun his spiritual journey. He’s full of anger, rebelliousness, and hatred of everyone around him. He has yet to understand that the hostility he sees in the world around him is just a projection of his own hate.

The lamb is another lamb: the Lamb of God as symbolic of someone going through a painful journey of self-discovery and enlightenment, who must learn to sacrifice himself for others. Therefore the lamb is Rael. Gabriel would deflect us, for the moment, from that conclusion so that we won’t figure out the meaning of the story too quickly or easily…or to make it obvious that his denials are b.s. I generally regard the liner notes narration as unreliable, so I won’t reference it again.

The lamb lies down-that is, dies, like the light that dies down towards the end of the story–like Christ on the Cross. This happens on Broadway, where theatrical and musical productions are done, for “all the world’s a stage.” Rael will make a sacrifice–saving his brother, John, from drowning–in the middle of the theatre of life.

Rael isn’t at that stage of his spiritual progress yet, of course (a progress somewhat like John Bunyan‘s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Gabriel’s inspirations for Rael’s story, by the way). At this point, he is just angry at the world, part of his reason surely being its phoniness, like the theatre of a Broadway show.

He would have his identity and individuality known to the world, hence his can of spray paint and wish to put graffiti on the walls (“Rael, imperial aerosol kid. Exits into daylight, spray-gun hid.”). He’d have the world know he’s not one of their kind: “I’m Rael!” he shouts.

“Rael” is a pun on real. He’d have the world know he isn’t phony as they are, “all the men and women [who] are merely players,” as Jacques calls us in As You Like It. As I said above, though, everything Rael sees that’s wrong in the world is just a projection of what’s wrong in himself, and his spiritual journey will help him to understand that over time: no, Rael isn’t all that real, either. His journey will make him real.

So if the lamb is Rael, and is a symbol of crucified Christ, the Light that will die down on Broadway, then it makes sense that “the lamb seems right out of place,” for Rael is far from ready to be that salvific symbol, a selfless rescuer of his fellow man (personified in his brother, John).

Rael is trying to establish his identity and individuality, that is, his ego. The problem with doing this, though, is that–as the Buddhists and Lacan independently concluded–ego is an illusion. Our identity is interwoven with every other identity and with everything else around us. By the song, “It,” Rael will come to this understanding.

“Somehow [the lamb is] lying there/Brings a stillness to the air.” Two aspects of the lamb sit in contrast to those of the city: the lamb’s passivity and its representation of nature, as opposed to the aggressive hustle and bustle of New York City, and “the man-made light…the neons dim to the coat of white” (i.e., the white fur of the lamb). The light of the neon is nothing compared to the light of the white lamb.

The passivity of the lamb, its “lying there” and its “stillness,” means it not only has Christian symbolism, but also that of Taoism, which favors the passive, feminine yin over the aggressive, male yang. While ultimately, Taoist philosophy is about having a balance of yin and yang, in Rael’s case, he has too much of the yang in his anger, aggression and vandalism, so he must learn to emphasize the yin as symbolized in the lamb in order to restore a sense of balance in himself. Since the lamb also represents nature as contrasted against the urban reality of New York City, this love of nature is also how the lamb is Taoist in symbolism.

“Something inside [Rael] has just begun,” that is, his spiritual journey is beginning. He doesn’t know what he has done because, contrary to his loud declaration of his identity (“I’m Rael!”), he doesn’t know himself. As he goes on his journey, though, he will come to know himself.

The song ends with an ironic quote from the old Drifters song, “On Broadway” (also covered by George Benson, whose version was used in the All That Jazz soundtrack). The irony in the quote in the Genesis song is how the bright lights and the “magic in the air” are illusory, the fake theatricality of life.

III: Fly on a Windshield

Here is the inciting incident of the story, Rael’s call to adventure. A dark cloud is descending into Times Square. No one else notices it or seems to care.

There is soft guitar strumming as Gabriel softly sings. Banks’s organ is hovering in the background, too.

The cloud is like a “wall of death.” The wind blows dust into Rael’s eyes; where he thought he saw clearly before, now he realizes he cannot see. That same dust, settling on him and making a crust on his skin, has immobilized him. He is terrified and wanting to run to safety, like the hero rejecting the call to adventure, but of course he can’t, so he feels like a fly, about to die by smashing into a windshield.

There’s an instrumental outro in E minor in which the whole band joins in, with Collins bashing away on the drums and Hackett playing leads. It goes up to F-flat, then to B, segueing into the next track.

IV: Broadway Melody of 1974

Here’s where the surrealism of the story really takes off. Gabriel’s lyric is of a stream-of-consciousness style (some might call in self-indulgent writing).

We’re hit with a barrage of images from a variety of sources in popular culture, religion, myth, and politics: Lenny Bruce, Marshall McLuhan, Groucho Marx, “mythical Madonnas,” the Sirens, the Ku Klux Klan, Howard Hughes, the song “In the Mood,” and criminal Caryl Chessman. So we have people involved in performance, as is Broadway, though many have in some sense failed (Bruce got busted for obscenity, Groucho’s “punchline failing,” and media man McLuhan has his “head buried in the sand”), since Rael sees through the fakery of the theatre of life.

There’s a sense of a mix of good and evil throughout, for “Ku Klux Klan serve hot food,” “the cheerleader waves her cyanide wand” (we may find cheerleaders charming, but cyanide is usually extremely toxic), and a robber, kidnapper, and serial rapist “leads the parade.” Chessman “knows, in a scent”…a pun on innocent, from a man who was most certainly guilty. This mix of good and evil, a blurring of opposites making everything to seem a chaotic mess, implies that Rael has entered the realm of the Real, Lacan’s notion of an undifferentiated, traumatic world that cannot be described verbally…hence, Gabriel’s obscurantist lyric.

The song ends with some soft guitar strumming and Banks on the Mellotron (strings tapes).

V: Cuckoo Cocoon

Rael finds himself in some kind of cocoon-like cave. Like Jonah, who also refused his call (from God) and thus was caught in the belly of a great fish, so is Rael caught in this dark, enclosed space wherein he’ll undergo a spiritual transformation.

He is perhaps too early to be going through this transformation, though: “Cuckoo cocoon, have I come to, too soon for you?” He’ll need to experience a lot more before he’ll be ready to shed his ego and live for humanity, his brother (literally John, and metaphorically everyone).

Gabriel sings over soft 12-string guitars from Hackett and Rutherford. Gabriel also does flute solos in the middle of and at the end of the song.

VI: In the Cage

Where at first he felt “secure” and “good” in the “cuckoo cocoon,” now Rael is “drowning in a liquid fear,” and he wants to get “out of this cave.”

He’s felt like an embryo slumbering in the womb, but now he wants out. Rael is experiencing something comparable to Jesus’ harrowing of hell, or Jonah’s terror in the belly of the great fish. Rael’s “sleep in the deep” will feel like a nightmare.

We hear Tony Banks’s organ with a heartbeat pulse in 6/4, in B-flat minor. When Gabriel sings of keeping self-control and being safe in his soul, the key changes to E-flat major; but when Rael’s “cynic soon returns, and the lifeboat burns,” the key goes down to C-sharp minor, with an A-flat major for a dominant chord.

Stalactites and stalagmites shut Rael in and lock him tight. On the one hand, they could be seen as teeth about to bite and chew him up; on the other, they are like the bars of a cage. Now he wants to get “out of the cage.” He’s “dressed up in a white uniform,” like a straitjacket, since he’s obviously troubled and difficult for society to control: has he been put in an insane asylum, and the cave/cage is just a hallucination from his unstable mind?

He sees others trapped in cages like his, with the stalactite/stalagmite ‘bars’: “cages joined to form a star, each person can’t go very far.” This sight has the potential to give him the understanding that we’re all in the same predicament, caught in a trap of some kind. Rael also sees his brother, John, for the first time in the story. He calls out to John, hoping for help, but John leaves him there.

Gabriel then makes references to two old songs: “Runaway,” by Del Shannon, and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head,” sung by BJ Thomas, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and heard in the soundtrack for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. John is Rael’s “little runaway,” leaving him in the lurch as the raindrops keep falling on his head, the raindrops of pain he wants to get out of. If he could be a liquid like those raindrops, he “could fill the cracks up in the rocks” and escape, but he is solid, his own bad luck.

Interestingly, though, when John disappears outside, Rael’s cage dissolves. This moment is a hint as to what he must do to be spiritually edified and enlightened. John is the key to Rael’s salvation. If he cares about John, he’ll be free of the cage of his own egoism. In this sense, his sojourn in the cave, or cocoon, like Jonah in the belly of the great fish (a moment in Joseph Campbell‘s Hero’s Journey, as are the call to adventure and the refusal of the call, as mentioned above), has been spiritually transformative for him.

VII: The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging

The song begins in A major, with Banks at a keyboard and Gabriel singing. The verses generally are in A major, with some shifts to C major in later verses; the refrain, in which Gabriel sings the title of the song, is in E major, and the song is more dissonant at the end. Collins’s drumming is rather like a marching beat, suggesting the regimented life of the scene Rael is about to see.

Rael is now in a factory, being given a tour by a women there. He sees people being processed like packages of dolls. Here we can see the source of Rael’s suffering, as well as that of everyone else in those cages: capitalism. People are being commodified, hence, “the grand parade of lifeless packaging.” This is the society that has produced Rael’s rage.

He recognizes some of the people in the production line, members of his New York City gang, it seems, with the same rage as he because of everybody’s commodification, “in labour bondage.” Indeed, the imagery of capitalism runs throughout the lyric: “Everyone’s a sales representative/wearing slogans…”, “I guess I’ll have to pay.”

Unlike the “free market” delusions of the market fundamentalists, a true understanding of capitalism recognizes that there’s “no sign of free will.” We live, work, buy, and sell under capitalism because we have no other options…and this lack of choice is among us leftists, too. Such is the hegemony of neoliberalism, which had only gotten worse after the 1974 release of TLLDOB.

We get a sense of worker alienation and the commodification of humanity in lines like “The hall runs like clockwork/Their hands mark out the time/Empty in their fullness/Like a frozen pantomime.” People feel like machines, operating with mechanical precision, yet they’re empty, frozen, and lifeless, bereft of humanity, even in the “fullness” of everything they’ve shopped for and bought.

It seems that the commodified people have all been fittingly given each a number, since John, among them, “is number nine.” Is this a reference to Lennon, with “Revolution 9”? This also seems fitting. If I’m right in that interpretation, and so much of the source of the suffering of Rael and everyone else–including John–is capitalism, then revolution is the solution. Lennon spoke of “Revolution 9” as an attempt to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. If John is the key to fixing what’s broken in Rael, then he’s his brother’s inspiration, like the nine Muses, to a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

We just need to understand how such an overthrow is to be done successfully. First, we’ll examine how not to do it.

VIII: Back in NYC

The song begins in D major, and it’s mostly in seven. Banks’s synthesizer playing is prominent throughout the song.

Gabriel sings of Rael’s rough life as a kid in New York City, being in gangs, getting into fights, and being incarcerated in Pontiac Correctional Facility as a juvenile delinquent when he was 17 years old, and released then, too. He also sings of Rael’s use of Molotov cocktails, damaging property with them.

These are examples of young punks using violence to rebel against establishment systems like capitalism and the bourgeois state. They can be seen as forms of adventurism (a typical tactic of anarchists), which while being romantic and exciting, are ultimately bad for the working class because they provoke stronger waves of violence by the bourgeois state against the rebellious punk agitators (e.g., Rael being put in Pontiac). Such actions, thus, are how not to do revolution, as opposed to building a disciplined working-class movement and party, rooted in Marxist-Leninist theory, and engaging in revolution only when the time is ripe for it.

Rael, therefore, must learn to tame the wild man inside him. This is what shaving the hair off of his heart symbolizes. The hairy heart, in turn, is represented by a porcupine that Rael cuddles. He has no time for romantic escape (i.e., adventurism) when his fluffy heart is ready for rape (i.e., wishing to commit crimes in the name of revolution, when as Che Guevara observed, the heart of a revolutionary should be filled with love–that is, selflessness). The hairs, like a porcupine’s sharp spines, cut when you touch them; they hurt, like a raping phallus.

So Rael must learn to do revolution out of love for others, to help others, not just do violence for the sake of violence. He will eventually learn this virtue when he has to sacrifice his return to NYC by saving his brother from drowning. If he just goes back to New York City, as in the title of this song, he’ll just go back to his old violent, rebellious ways, and he’ll have learned nothing.

During the verses about cuddling the porcupine and “No time for romantic escape,” the key is D minor, and we hear groupings of four bars in 7/8, each followed by one bar in 6/8. During the “Off we go” part, there’s a grouping of two bars in 7/8, then a bar in 3/8, another two bars in 7/8, then a bar in 4/8, and the whole pattern repeats one time. This section is in A major.

The hair on the heart to be shaven off, like the spines on the porcupine, are phallic symbols, so shaving the heart, a taming of the wild man in Rael, is thematically connected with his and John’s emasculation later. It’s all about extinguishing desire–being “ready for rape”–to end Rael’s egoism.

IX: Hairless Heart

This is an instrumental, in D minor. There’s some soft guitar strumming with Banks’s organ arpeggios in the background. Hackett plays a lead using a volume pedal. Collins comes in later, playing the drums gently. The sedateness of this music suggests the beginning of the taming of Rael that the shaving of the heart represents.

This music segues into the next track.

X: Counting Out Time

This song, the one following it (“The Carpet Crawlers”), and the title track were the ones we heard on the radio, released as singles.

In this song, Rael has “found a girl [he] wanted to date,” and he wants to “get it straight” when he gets it on with her, so he has a book to teach him how exactly to stimulate her erogenous zones. This is all perfectly well-intended, of course, but ultimately wrong-headed, for to get his girl off properly, he has to listen to her, to know exactly how this girl in particular likes it.

Now, this is the surface meaning of the song. There’s also a deeper meaning that makes the surface, sexual meaning most ironic. Note how as Gabriel sings early on, he asks the Lord for guidance, noting how “the Day of Judgement’s come.”

The book he bought, which has all the advice that “the experts” give him, should be seen as symbolic of the Bible, “the experts” being the prophets. The girl he wants to date is actually God, whom Rael wants to please, the sexual ecstasy being symbolic of spiritual ecstasy.

Such an interpretation fits in the wider context of Rael’s ‘pilgrim’s progress,’ his spiritual journey. The body here is symbolic of the soul; his ‘knowing‘ her (in the Biblical sense [!]) representative of growing in spiritual knowledge and enlightenment, of knowing God deeply.

Consider The Song of Songs, a book of sensuous love poetry in which the groom professes his love of the bride. The book is traditionally allegorized by Jews as an expression of God’s love for the Israelites, and by Christians as an expression of God’s love for His Church. We can thus allegorize Rael’s sexual encounter with the girl as Rael’s attempt to love God; here, with the roles of bride (man) and groom (God), the sexes are reversed, with a female God.

So how does Rael try to reach God with his Bible, the Good Book of Great Sex? He’s “found the hotspots, figures one to nine,” which sound like nine of the Ten Commandments, or of the Mosaic Laws in general (he later mentions a “number eleven”). In other words, Rael has the superficial idea of reaching a state of spiritual enlightenment by merely following religious laws. Accordingly, he is doomed to fail, “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6)

The song is in A major, the verses following a descending major scale progression of tonic (A), leading tone (G-sharp), submediant (F-sharp), dominant (E), subdominant (D), mediant (C-sharp), supertonic (B), and dominant again. The tune has a light, almost trivial quality, to the point of being comical, since Rael is being clumsy and overconfident in bed (allegorically, too trustful of the efficacy of following religious laws). Hackett’s guitar solo is fittingly spastic.

In the refrain where Gabriel sings of how Rael loves erogenous zones, we hear a progression of G major (subtonic), D major (subdominant), and tonic A major; then, when Rael wonders what a poor boy would do without the book’s guidance, we hear chords in C major (a natural mediant in the context of the key of A major), B, and a bar in 5/8 (subdominant resolving to tonic). Bars in 5/8 (representative of the Pentateuch) will alternate with bars in 4/4 in the verses.

The last time we hear the chorus about erogenous zones, there is significantly no use of the bars in 5/8, for at this point, Rael has grown disillusioned with the book, since its erotic tips have been of no use in helping him satisfy the girl sexually. As far as my allegory is concerned, this means that adherence to religious laws (i.e., the Pentateuch) isn’t working for Rael, so he has abandoned them–hence, no bars in 5/8 time.

During our hearing of “Back in NYC,” Hairless Heart,” and “Counting Out Time,” Rael experienced a flashback from which he has now come back, getting us ready for the next song. In other words, aspects of his spiritual journey had begun before this story even began…and perhaps he hadn’t even realized he was already on that journey.

XI: The Carpet Crawlers

This song is also about an attempt to attain spiritual enlightenment and salvation that ultimately fails, that in fact leaves one trapped in hell. Here, instead of there being false hope in following religious laws, as I saw as an allegory in “Counting Out Time,” there is false hope in following spiritual leaders (“callers”). One might think of people watching televangelists on their TVs, foolishly giving them money.

Rael feels lambswool under his feet, which is “soft and warm, giv[ing] off some kind of heat.” Since the lamb represents Christ, this lambswool carpet that feels so good is actually representative of that false Christian path that promises, but fails, to deliver salvation.

Rael sees examples of carpet crawlers going to their deaths, such as a salamander going “into flame to be destroyed,” “imaginary creatures…trapped in birth on celluloid,” and “the fleas cling to the Golden Fleece hoping they’ll find peace.” Note how the lambswool is, apart from representing the Lamb of God, also the Golden Fleece, religious fraudsters’ promise of heaven while enriching themselves with others’ money.

Later, Rael sees his “second sight of people,” the first having been those in “the grand parade of lifeless packaging,” while these new ones have “more lifeblood than before.” Nevertheless, they’re being no less exploited than the previous bunch, for they’re crawling like the insects “to a heavy wooden door/Where the needle eye is winking, closing on the poor.”

It’s the rich who aren’t supposed to be able to pass through the eye of a needle, not the poor. But in this Golden Fleece version of the Lamb of God, religion–the opium of the people–is being used to serve the rich.

Still, the masses mindlessly follow the voices of their corrupt religious leaders, crawling on the carpet like the self-destructing salamander and the fleas, all the little ones…the poor. The carpet crawlers are yet another grand parade of lifeless packaging; religion is used to serve the interests of capitalists.

While it is true that one can only get out of one’s problems by going through them, not avoiding them (“We’ve gotta get in to get out.”), in this case, the “callers” are drawing the carpet crawlers into a trap by chanting a mantra that, though true in itself, is being misused and applied in a way to lead the crawlers astray. The callers thus are false prophets, who twist true ideas out of context to deceive their followers by taking them in what only seems to be the right direction.

They’re being taken “to the ceiling where the chamber’s said to be.” Upwards to heaven, up into the light, which the trees crave. “Believing they are free,” the carpet crawlers mindlessly follow the voices of “their callers.”

Even the strongest of these people are lured to their destruction, for the meek here will not inherit the Earth (“Mild-mannered Supermen are held in Kryptonite.”). Gabriel’s lyric doesn’t seem to make a distinction between “the wise and foolish virgins,” the former of whom, according to the parable (Matthew 25:1-13), had enough light for their lamps when waiting to meet the bridegroom (God), while the latter didn’t prepare enough oil, and so they were excluded from the wedding banquet. Here, all carpet crawlers, strong and weak, wise and foolish, are led to ruin by their callers, not to heaven.

The chord progression of the chorus is, essentially, F-sharp minor, A major and G major twice, then D major, and C major leading out to the next verse.

XII: The Chamber of 32 Doors

Rael has gotten past the carpet crawlers, gone up a spiral staircase, and reached a chamber with 32 doors, There are people everywhere around him, “running around to all the doors.” They all want people to acknowledge them.

After all the religious chicanery of the callers tricking the carpet crawlers, as well as Rael’s failures with gang violence bringing about social change and with the book’s advice not pleasing the girl, Rael “need[s] someone to believe in, someone to trust.”

People in the country are more trustworthy than those in the city, for the former people’s eyes and smiles are more sincere. Someone who works with his hands, the proletariat, is more trustworthy. But Rael is down here, alone with his fear, alienated from everybody; every door he’s gone through brings him back to the beginning. He’s making no spiritual progress trying to follow the ways of others, so he must find his own way.

Everyone’s pointing where to go, even Rael’s mom and dad, “but nowhere feels quite right.” He still needs someone to believe in, someone to trust.

A man who doesn’t shout what he’s found is trustworthy. Such a man doesn’t need to sell his path to salvation, “he won’t take [Rael] for a ride.” The “chamber of so many doors” is thus just like the cage: Rael wants to get out–“take [him] away.”

XIII: Lilywhite Lilith

Just as he wants to get out of the chamber and away from all the people, so does a blind woman, “Lilywhite Lilith,” want help to get out. He guides her out of the crowd of people, and now that she can “feel the way the breezes blow,” she can show him where to go.

Rael is gaining an early insight as to how to find spiritual enlightenment and salvation. He will get the help he needs if he helps others and gives up his egoism.

She takes him “into a big, round cave,” and tells him not to be afraid. Just as she is blind, so is he in the darkness of the cave, sitting on a jade seat. Being in the darkness, in his fear, is like confronting his Jungian Shadow, in order to attain enlightenment.

The darkness is gone when two bright, golden globes float into the cave and hover above the ground.

XIV: The Waiting Room

This track is an instrumental. Tony Banks called it “the best jam [they] had in the rehearsal room,” and it was originally called “The Evil Jam.” The band apparently played in the dark, just making noises on their instruments, and this track resulted from their experimentation. It was quite frightening.

You really get a sense–from all of the spooky, eerie sounds the band is making that Rael is waiting in a dark, scary place, in the belly of the whale again, so to speak, confronting the Shadow.

XV: Anyway

The song begins with a sad piano motif in G minor. Banks develops the wave-like, arpeggiated motif by replacing its perfect fifth with ascending and descending minor sixths, major sixths, and minor sevenths. Gabriel comes in singing of Rael’s experience of impending death, trapped under a cave-in of rocks.

Gabriel’s lyric uses a number of metaphors to refer indirectly to death. It’s “time to meet the chef,” who I assume is supposed to be God. “It’s back to ash,” as in ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Rael has had his “flash,” the brief light of life. He’s heard that Death “comes on a pale horse” (Revelation 6:8), yet he’s sure he hears a train, which can be associated with death in dreams and poetry. He feels “the pull on the rope,” which is a hangman’s noose. He’ll “stretch for God’s elastic Acre,” which comes from the German Gottesacker, an ancient designation for a burial ground.

Rael imagines he’ll keep his deadline [!] with his Maker, that is, meet God in heaven. Anyway, he’s not really dying; he’s just going through that maddening confrontation with his Shadow, and so it feels like dying. Accordingly, the musical tension is heightened, with Banks playing those mournful piano arpeggios much faster, backed up by the band. Hackett adds some harmonized, overdubbed guitar leads.

XVI: Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist

We hear some 12-string guitar strumming in A major, then Gabriel comes in (with Collins’s backing vocals) singing about personified Death as “the Supernatural Anaesthetist.” He just puffs a toxic powder into your face, you breathe it in, and die. As “a fine dancer,” he’d be doing the danse macabre, I assume.

What comes after this one, four-line verse is an instrumental passage, also in A major, that is rather upbeat for something that’s supposed to be about Rael’s death. Indeed, Hackett plays a sweet lead of C-sharp, D, C-sharp, B, and C-sharp. the fact is that Rael is not really dying; the whole thing was just a hallucination, like a really bad drug trip.

XVII: The Lamia

Since there’s a dialectical relationship between Eros and Thanatos, or the life (sex) and death drives, then it seems fitting to juxtapose Rael’s near-death experience with a sexual encounter.

Out of the cave, Rael finds himself in a pool with three Lamia, the tops of whom are beautiful women, but instead of having legs, each has a snake’s tail. Rael makes love with them, after which they would consume him, but it is the three who die after drinking some of his blood. He eats their corpses and leaves.

The point behind his sexual encounter with and mutual eating of the Lamia is that these acts represent Rael’s giving into the animal side of himself, his bestial, sexual nature. This is the symbolism behind Gabriel’s choice of Lamia, half-woman, half-snake, for his story. Rael must learn from the mistake of giving in to sensual pleasure…and he will learn this the hard way.

XVIII: Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats

This track is another instrumental. Mostly keyboards, Hackett’s leads are put through a volume pedal, and Collins plays a little percussion. Very dreamy, melancholy music. The party of sensual pleasure is over for Rael, so like a drug addict who is coming down from the peak of his high, Rael is feeling the depression that inevitably comes when he realizes the pleasure he’s so attached to is impermanent.

XIX: The Colony of Slippermen

The instrumental intro of this track sounds like an imitation of Chinese or Japanese music–plucked guitar strings sound like those of a koto or zheng. Collins hits wood blocks, which again give an Asian effect. It’s a unique moment in the history of the musical style of Genesis. Why the band chose to play the intro like this I don’t know: are we meant to think that Rael has wandered into the Chinatown section of New York City?

After this intro, the music suddenly changes to a light, upbeat sound, with Banks playing the organ over a shuffle rhythm. I find it intriguing that Genesis chose such a happy theme given what we’re soon to learn what’s happened to Rael as a result of his sexual union with the Lamia. The upbeat theme seems to represent his blissful ignorance of something that will soon shock him.

Gabriel begins singing with a quote of the first line of the famous William Wordsworth poem about daffodils. Again, the association with the poem reinforces this odd sense of everything being positive…when all that Rael has to do to know he has nothing to be happy about is look in a mirror.

Indeed, instead of “all at once, [seeing] a crowd/A host of golden daffodils,” as in Wordsworth’s poem, Rael had “never seen a stranger crowd” of Slippermen, with skin “all covered in slimy lumps,” and “twisted limbs like rubber stumps.” Rael is told that they all made love with the Lamia, too, who made them look as grotesque as they do, and therefore, he now looks the same as they do.

Naturally, Rael is horrified to realize this, and the music changes, with some synthesizer playing, to reflect this shocking realization.

All of this section of the song has been Part I: the Arrival. Rael must join his brother John with Doktor Dyper in Part II: A Visit to the Doktor. What has happened to Rael and the Slippermen is essentially the catching of a sexually transmitted disease, for which the only cure, apparently, is…emasculation.

So, Doktor Dyper emasculates both Rael and John, and Rael looks normal again…except that both he and John have their penises in tubes that they wear as pendants around their necks. The point is that Rael’s desire and indulgence in pleasure (his union with the Lamia) have made him ugly (like the Slippermen). Emasculation represents a renunciation of physical pleasure so Rael can progress spiritually.

Part III: The Raven He still feels some attachment, naturally, if not physically, to his penis. This is when a raven appears and snatches his tube. Rael asks John for help, and not getting it, runs after the raven as it flies away, but he’s never able to retrieve the tube, for the raven–far off ahead–drops the tube in some water at the bottom of a ravine, and all Rael can do is helplessly watch the tube float away.

John’s indifference to Rael’s need for help is just like his indifference when Rael was in the cage. This cool reaction hurts Rael, but what he must learn is that it’s not about people caring about him: he has to learn how to care about others.

He also has to learn how to let go of his attachments and desires, as represented by what’s in the tube.

XX: Ravine

This track is another instrumental. It’s essentially Banks playing melancholy music on a synthesizer. One imagines Rael standing at the top of a ravine, looking down where his lost penis was dropped in the water. He’s staring down at the abyss. One may ask if he’ll ever be a man again, and one hears the raven’s answer: “Nevermore.”

XXI: The Light Dies Down on Broadway

Fittingly, much of the music for this track is thematically similar to that of the title track, for at this point in the story, Rael has come full circle. He sees a window in the rock of part of the ravine wall, and in this window he can see New York City: his home!

Once again, this is a temptation of his selfish instincts, for he’ll be left with a difficult choice: escape this hellish world and be free, or sacrifice the fleeting opportunity and help his brother in need. In this dilemma of his, we can see a link in meaning between “the lamb lies down” and “the light dies down”: Jesus as the Lamb of God and as the Light of the world gave His life for His friends (John 15:13). Rael as a Christ-figure must do the same for his brother, John, representative of all our brothers and sisters, all of humanity.

The lamb lies down, dead, and the light dies down, dead.

The surreal world Rael feels trapped in seems fake because of its fantastical qualities, yet it is the real world of his New York City home that is fake, the Broadway world of theatricality and phony performance, the stage that is the world.

XXII: Riding the Scree

Not only does Rael have to give up his chance to go through the window and back to New York City, but he also has to risk his life slipping down the loose rocks of the scree along the side of the ravine if he wants to get to drowning John in the water below.

Still, he chooses to be brave and go down to save his brother’s life. He imagines himself much braver than even Evel Knievel.

The music is largely in 9/8 time, the subdivisions of the beats being tricky and ambivalent in how they could be heard as 4+5 or 3+3+3. Banks does some flamboyant synthesizer soloing.

XXIII: In the Rapids

This is where Rael has to confront a turbulent, chaotic, unpredictable world, a kind of hell that is the only way that leads to heaven. For to save oneself, one must be willing to save others.

The turbulent hell of the rapids, where he must swim to rescue drowning John, is symbolic of the undifferentiated, non-verbalizable Chaos of what Lacan called The Real–a fitting place for a man named Rael to enter, since he will soon become one with this Void.

This climactic moment, of course, is also what is depicted in the photos on the front cover of the album: specifically, the left photo showing John being pulled by Rael out of the rapids. For the great climactic moment of the story, though, it’s odd that the music would begin with soft, gentle 12-string guitar playing.

The emotion and the volume build, of course, towards the end, where Rael has succeeded in pulling his brother out and back onto land. We realize at the end of all of this, though, that the real climax of the story is not Rael’s brave self-sacrifice and his defying of the danger in the water: it’s his realization, upon seeing John’s face on the land, that he’s seeing himself. It’s like looking in a mirror. In saving John, Rael has saved himself.

XXIV: It

Now with the polarized sides of himself fused, Rael–as a complete human being, complete with John as the complementary good half of him–can feel his Atman, “It,” linked with everybody and everything around him. Hence, the victorious, triumphant, rejoicing music.

“It” is described as being a host of diverse things: cold, warm, all around Rael, and most importantly, “It is here. It is now.” It is Brahman, the pantheistic oneness underlying everything. Rael has attained the nirvana of Brahman, absolute bliss and blessedness.

Other things that are part of “It,” include any food “cooking in your hometown,” “chicken,” “eggs,” and what’s “in between your legs,” that is, sexuality–even that can be a part of It.

“It” is inside spirit, too…literally, so it is in both the physical and spiritual realms, and as spirit, the essence that can be known to be manifested in so many different kinds of things, “It” is the divine spark of everything–Brahman.

That It is here and now also emphasizes the immanence of the divinity, to be understood as a pantheistic concept, not a monotheistic idea, a divinity separate from humanity. “It never stays in one place, but it’s not a passing phase.” It’s eternal, but always moving. As Heraclitus said, “Everything flows.”

A useful connection to be made with “It” that can make the meaning clearer is to compare the idea with a concept in a famous passage in the Chandogya Upanishad. “Tat Tvam Asi,” or “That thou art,” is a famous expression a Hindu spiritual teacher, Uddalaka, says of a number of things to his son, Śvetaketu, to get him to understand how “that” is in everything…even in his son. So we can say that “it” here is “that.”

This is significant when we hear Gabriel sing, “It is real. It is Rael.” “It” is real, in that it is the truth. It can also be compared to the Lacanian concept of the undifferentiated, ineffable Void mentioned above. It is also Rael, because his Atman is now at one with Brahman. Yes, Rael, that art thou!

As often happens throughout TLLDOB, Gabriel makes a reference to a popular song: in this case, “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It),” by the Rolling Stones; but Gabriel sings, “It’s only knock and know-all, but I like it.” “Knock” seems to refer to the pain of life, the school of hard knocks; “know-all” seems to mean Rael’s attainment of enlightenment, from having been absorbed into the oneness. It’s painful, but he likes it.

XXV: Conclusion

TLLDOB is a difficult album to understand conceptually, but an ultimately explicable one. As I said above, Gabriel’s obscurantism is valid because the story is about understanding the deeper mysteries of life.

Rael’s character arc is a voyage of self-discovery and enlightenment. He must learn that being angry and violent is no solution to his problems. Learning to see beyond himself and to help others is the solution.

The surrealism of the story is an expression of the non-rational, symbolic world of the unconscious mind. That Rael would become one with Brahman suggests a shift to the collective unconscious.

All of these things tell us that TLLDOB is a universal story with themes we can all relate to…despite Gabriel’s idiosyncratic way of telling it.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter One

[The following is the forty-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, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, and here is the fortieth–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

The ancient tribe that wrote the books of the Tanah conceived of history as a series of crests and troughs, the former being periods of good fortune, and the latter being periods of bad fortune. The writers chose to collect the major troughs of their sacred history and narrate the happenings of each in the chapters of this book, and to collect the major crests of that history and tell of them in the chapters of the next book.

The beginnings of these books of crests and troughs deal with those current to the writers at the time of writing; that is, the first chapters of each deal with the enslavement of the Luminosians by the Zoyans (Troughs), and their prophesied liberation (Crests).

Subsequent chapters in each book deal with scenarios believed to happen hundreds of years after the writing: a trough of servitude to wealthy owners of land, what reads like a prophecy of feudalism; then, a crest will come, liberating the people from this servitude. A final trough concerns a world with increasing and extreme wealth inequality, with authoritarian states that use violence to keep the masses in check, and various methods of lulling the masses into docility and complacency, again, to keep them in check–that is, breads and circuses. It prophesies a world disturbingly close to our own, so accurate is its prescience.

As for the corresponding crest meant to lift the world out of that distant, dystopian future, there is an ambiguity to it as to whether the future world will be saved by the leadership of some messiah-like figure, or if the Earth’s only salvation will be a kind of Armageddon, killing and wiping out all of human, animal, and plant life, leading to a far-off, gradual regeneration of life in a completely new form. Again, the prophecy seems chillingly prescient.

Chapter One

Woe to us Luminosians! Our punishment is just!

We have been under the yoke of the Zoyans for ten years now, and no end to our misery is in sight! We only know that a crest will one day come to liberate us, yet it seems so far away from us.

We toil, we dig, we build, we break up rock, we serve meals to and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We do all of these tasks as just punishment for our wicked and selfish use of magic, turning the once-benevolent Crims against us! We deserve our suffering!

The Zoyans degrade us because we degraded others. They conquered us because we conquered others. They make us slaves because we made slaves of others. They use our women for their sexual sport because we used the women of others for our sexual sport. The Echo Effect taught us of these dangers, but we would not listen.

These hard times that we must endure are a trough. A trough is part of a wave, and therefore a crest will come. Ill fortune is no more permanent than good fortune is. A trough will move up into a crest just as surely as a crest will move down into another trough.

We cannot know how long this trough will last. We only know that, one day, the wave will begin to rise again. Will that day come tomorrow? Will it come next week? Next month? Next year? In how many years will it come? In how many decades will it come?

We do not know any of this. We only know that the wave will rise again into a crest. We must therefore be patient, have faith, and endure.

So for now, we must continue to do our work, as hateful as it is. We must continue to toil, to dig, to build, to break up rock, to serve meals and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We must do all of these tasks as penance for having made others do these tasks for us one time in the past, what had been a crest for us.

We must remember: if the beginning of a new crest has not come yet, it is because our penance for our own sins is not yet complete. It will be complete one day: we must have faith, and be patient. The Crims know when that day will be, and we know that they are faithful to us.

The Tanah: Amores–The Last Spells

[The following is the fortieth 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, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, and here is the thirty-ninth–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.]

Beautiful Woman’s Protection Spell

[Stand in a flat area of grassless dirt holding a long stick. Use it to draw a large circle around you, a deep cut in the earth. Pour water in the circular groove. Set twigs in a circle just inside the circle of water, and set the twigs on fire so there is a circle of fire as well as of water. Wait for a gust of wind to blow on your body to begin reciting the verse. Begin each repetition of the verse–nine recitations of it in total–with another gust of wind.]

Weleb, blow unwanted men away!
Nevil, bring only wanted men’s fire here!
Drofurb, build a stone wall around me!
Priff, wash away unwanted men’s foul filth!

Commentary: while the elders would surely have wanted the women of the tribe to be protected from male predators, the purpose of this spell is to allow beautiful women to be as coquettish around men as they like, without fear of unwanted men making advances on them. Since such actions encouraged lewdness, the elders disapproved of this spell.

“Epstein” Spell

Translator’s Introduction: the name of this spell as given in the original language referred to a man, Vorl, who devised this spell to allow himself and his circle of wealthy, powerful friends to indulge in all kinds of decadent, sexually predatory behaviour while being protected from punishment for it. We translators found it fitting, therefore, to replace Vorl’s name with one that today’s readers would recognize as equivalent to him. Accordingly, the elders considered these verses to be the most wicked of all.

[Use a large tablet of rock on which to carve the names of all of the participants of the orgy about to be enjoyed. Once all of the names are carved on it, begin chanting the verses while, on a windy day, burning a fire of twigs surrounding the tablet, then soaking the tablet in water while the fire continues burning and the wind continues blowing.]

Weleb, blow away those who accuse me!
Nevil, burn the fire of my lust in safety!
Drofurb, may the names on the rock stay secret!
Priff, wash away all of our sinfulness!

[After reciting this first verse nine times, use a chisel and hammer on the rock to break it up into pieces small enough never to allow anyone to recognize any name carved on it. Then, recite the following verse nine times.]

Weleb, blow away others’ suspicion!
Nevil, burn away all proof of sin!
Drofurb, grind all our guilt into gravel!
Priff, drown all our accusers into silence!

Comment: These are the last of the Amores spells found so far. As with the other sets of writings, as more Amores are found, so will they be translated and published in future editions of the Tanah.

The Tanah: Amores–Four More Spells for Attractiveness

[The following is the thirty-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, 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, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, and here is the thirty-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.]

Physical Attractiveness Spell

[Take a ritual bath in the manner described in previous spells. Recite the following verse over and over again as the lather is spread on your body and rinsed off.]

Weleb, blow on me a flower’s fragrance.
Nevil, make whom I love burn for me.
Drofurb, make his love as strong as stone.
Priff, give me long and flowing, lovely hair.

Comment: this spell was meant for women to use on men.

Spell for Knowing and Being Another’s Fantasy Lover

[Burn a flame in a pile of twigs surrounded in a mound of dirt. Do this on a windy day. As you hold a small pot of water just over the fire, to heat the water, stare into the flame and recite the verse below, over and over. When the water is hot enough–not so hot as to burn the skin–pour it on your arm and continue repeatedly chanting the verse.]

Weleb, blow on me the secrets of his dreams.
Nevil, teach me all of his desires.
Drofurb, make me the ground of what he wants.
Priff, pour on me the scent of all his lusts.

Comment: again, this is a spell meant for women to use on men, not vice versa.

Weight Loss Spell

[Dig holes large enough to fit your feet in, holes in a circle around a large fire. Fill the holes with water, enough to go up to your ankles. Do this on a windy day. As you recite the following verse, go around the fire with your bare feet going in the holes and splashing in the water. Make sure never to miss the holes. Continue to do so until there is no more splashing water, only mud, always repeating the verse.]

Weleb, blow thinness on me!
Nevil, burn my fat off me!
Drofurb, make my fat sink into you!
Priff, wash my fat off me!

Comment: the desired weight loss was expected to be achieved within a week or two.

Spell for Sculpting the Desired Body Shape

[Take a ritual bath as described previously. As you spread the lather all over your body, move your hands in shapes that accurately imitate the contours you wish your body to have, pushing in or pulling out wherever you want the curves to go in or out, all while repeatedly chanting the verse below.]

Weleb, blow on me the shape I want!
Nevil, burn away the curves I hate!
Drofurb, set my wanted shape in stone!
Priff, make my wanted curves flow like waves!

Comment: this, too, is a spell meant for women–usually. It was rare that men ever used it. The desired body shape was expected to come within a few days, at most.

Even though these four spells were thought to be relatively harmless as far as the elders were concerned, reliance on them to make one–usually, a woman–more attractive was still frowned on by the elders, who wished their people wouldn’t base their worth on their physical attractiveness alone.

The Tanah: Amores–Four More Love Spells

[The following is the thirty-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, 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, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, and here is the thirty-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.]

Translator’s Comment: apparently, men in the ancient world were as insecure about their size as they are today.

Phallus Enlargement Spell

[Burn a small flame on the ground outside on a windy day. Hold a long, thick rock over the flame, close enough that the flame is almost touching the rock. Recite the following line over and over.]

Drofurb, grow it!

Comment: try not to chuckle as much as we translators did.

Improve Lovemaking Skills Spell

[Put a pot filled with water over a small flame on the ground. Do this outside, on a windy day. As the water begins to boil, start dropping small, spherical rocks into it. Stir the rocks inside slowly with a wooden spoon as you repeatedly chant the following verse.]

Weleb, blow a lover’s skill into me!
Nevil, make my lover burn with desire for me!
Drofurb, ground, solidify our love!
Priff, have effortless pleasure flow through us!

Power Through Vulnerability Spell

[Take a ritual bath in water that has been heated in pots over a large fire. Have round stones placed on the bottom of the bath. Get naked, go in the water, and lie on your back after briefly soaking your head in it. Stay in the water as you chant the following verse slowly, nine times.]

Weleb, in my weakness, give me strength.
Nevil, in my coldness, give me heat.
Drofurb, in my nakedness, clothe me.
Priff, in my thirst, give me drink.

Comment: this spell is one of the most blatant to use the principle of the unity of contraries as a basis of the power of magic. In weakness and vulnerability, one finds strength and power, because these opposites are one, as are all opposites understood to be, for the one always flows toward the other, like Priff’s water.

Because of women’s lack of political power in the ancient world, it was women who usually used this spell to gain some kind of power, however indirectly. Being naked while doing the spell was thus indispensable for this purpose.

Resolving Arguments/Making-up Spell

[If the other party does not wish to take part in this spell, you must make an effigy of him or her, life-sized and as close in likeness to the other as possible, to make this an effective spell. Either you and the other party, or you and the effigy, must embrace tightly while reciting the verses over and over. Recite them twice as many times if with the effigy.]

Weleb, blow the two of us back together!
Nevil, change our fire of hate to love!
Drofurb, make our love as strong as stone!
Priff, make our love flow into each other’s!

Comment: this is one of those rare ‘Amores’ spells that the elders actually approved of.

Analysis of ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a 1988 horror movie directed by Wes Craven. The screenplay was by Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman, loosely based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Wade Davis (for a comparison of the book with the film, which added the political element, go here). The film stars Bill Pullman, with Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield, Brent Jennings, Michael Gough, and Paul Guilfoyle.

Roger Ebert gave TSATR three out of four stars, praising Pullman’s performance and the “stunning” visuals, while also noting the the story took the religion of voodoo more seriously than most horror movies, which merely used it as a “gimmick.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the film, and here’s a link to the script.

Davis, on whose character the anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan (Pullman) is based, is an ethnobotanist and anthropologist whose book recounts his experiences in Haiti as he investigated what happened to Clairivius Narcisse–on whose character Christophe Durand (played by Conrad Roberts) is based–who was allegedly poisoned, buried alive, and revived with an herbal brew that made him into a “zombie.” A practitioner of voodoo allegedly did this to Narcisse, making him into a slave.

Though TSATR is marketed as a horror film, Craven saw it as more of a political drama with an exploration of the voodoo religion. The one who poisoned and enslaved Narcisse was a bokor, or Haitian Vodou priest “practicing for both good and evil” and creating “zombies.” In the film, Christophe is made into a zombie by Captain Dargent Peytraud (Mokae), commander of the Tonton Macoute–the secret police of right-wing Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier–and a bokor, thus making him the villain of the film. The screenwriters’ creation of Peytraud is the one on whom the added political element of the film is centred.

Christophe is made into a zombie because, though a mere grade school teacher, he spoke out for the people, for freedom, and this of course was a threat to Duvalier and Peytraud. The terror of the bokor poisoning, live burial, and zombification of dissidents and political agitators like Christophe is how the right-wing dictatorship of Haiti keeps the people intimidated and well under control.

According to Haitian legend, the Serpent represents Earth (how like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, which bites its own tail while circling the Earth!), and the Rainbow is Heaven. We all live and die between the Serpent and the Rainbow. Because we have souls, though, we can be trapped in a state between life and death, the zombie-state that Christophe suffers because Peytraud has stolen his soul. Live burial is also part of that hell of being between life and death, which leads me to my next point.

TSATR exploits a deep fear many of us have, taphophobia, the irrational fear of being buried alive. The history of this fear in the West is well-documented in the book Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, by Jan Bondeson, which gives examples of many who were so afraid of being accidentally pronounced dead and unintentionally buried alive that one would have strings attached to bells above ground that the buried living could ring by pulling the string going all the way down into the coffin.

Peytraud’s live burials, of course, are not accidental, but as I said above, are a cruel act of intimidation and control. They make their victims experience a kind of living death, as does Peytraud’s stealing of the victims’ souls. In our experience of not only imperialism but also its boomerang now affecting the imperial core, we too–that is, the global proletariat–experience a living death of wage slavery while elites get away with atrocities…they’ve stolen our souls.

This ‘living death’ idea brings me to a discussion of a recurring theme in this film: duality and the merging of opposites. Apart from the unity of life and death, there are also the unities of the First World and the Third World, of white people and people of colour (not just the blacks of Haiti, but also the Amazon shaman seen towards the beginning of the movie), of houngans and bokors (respectively, good and evil voodoo priests, for the purposes of this film–namely, Lucien Celine [Winfield] and Peytraud), body and soul, the Serpent and the Rainbow (earthly and heavenly existence), Catholic ‘monotheism’ and voodoo ‘paganism,’ science and religion, Erzulie and the Virgin Mary (as Mater Dolorosa in particular), tyranny and revolution, even genius and idiocy.

These opposites merge, overlap, and interact with each other in a yin-and-yang, dialectical way. White Dr. Alan, an American from Harvard University, goes to the Global South (first, to the Amazon, then to Haiti) to get local drugs and bring them to the First World for use as medicines and anesthetics. It’s said that he and the people he finds the drugs for (e.g., Dr. Andrew Cassedy [Guilfoyle], head of Boston Biocorp, a pharmaceutical company, and Dr. Earl Schoonbacher [Gough], a consultant for the pharmaceutical company) have only altruistic motives in providing these drugs for the world–saving countless numbers of patients on the operating table from death because of anesthetic shock. Let’s be frank, though: in their use of these Third World drugs, the pharmaceutical businesses of the First World hope to rake in huge profits. Alan’s explorations are for exploitation.

When Schoonbacher wonders if the Haitian “zombie drug” could give proof of the existence of the soul, Alan scoffs at the idea, asking where in the ‘car,’ if you will, of the human body the soul resides, and insisting it “begins and ends with the brain.” When in Haiti, in conversations with Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Tyson) about the voodoo faith–in which she sees no conflict between religion and science–Alan hears that the Haitian God isn’t just up in heaven, but also in their bodies, their flesh (in the Serpent as well as in the Rainbow, in other words). When found in the graveyard at night, Christophe tells Alan that the zombie drug is a powder blown on people’s faces: it runs through the skin to the soul. Body and soul are one–the latter is indeed in the physicality of the brain, as Alan atheistically intuited.

Many Christians like to contrast their faith as sharply as possible with that of pagans, though the places of comparison and similarity are obvious. This close connection is even more obvious in how, as Duchamp tells Alan, “Haiti is 85% Catholic, but 110% voodoo. For [them], Erzulie and the Virgin Mary are the same.” Erzulie is a family of loa, or spirits, in Vodou. They are feminine, and Erzulie Fréda Dahomey, a spirit of love and beauty, is often identified with the Mater Dolorosa. Note that Mary is chaste, but Erzulie is flirtatious and seductive of both sexes. Mary suffers, but Erzulie has fun. Lust and chastity are one, as are desire and suffering (as the Buddhists would also observe of the latter pair). It’s significant that, immediately after Duchamp immerses Alan in the spirituality and culture of voodoo, the two make love. Not long after their lovemaking, Alan will be terrorized by Peytraud, with that nail in the scrotum.

To pursue that topic further, Haitians are being tyrannized and terrorized by Peytraud’s government precisely because the country is on the verge of revolution, and therefore of ensuing freedom (Could this be the near future of the US?). It’s always darkest before the dawn, a resurrection after death–like Christophe’s…and Alan’s.

In a Haitian man aptly named Louis Mozart (Jennings), we see the dialectical link between genius and idiocy. He’s brilliant enough to know the exact procedure to make the zombie drug, but when he unsuccessfully tries to con Alan out of hundreds of dollars for a fake drug, Alan–not one so easily conned–calls Mozart “an idiot” to his face, thus pushing Mozart to show Alan the process of making the real drug.

Later, when Alan is forced to leave Haiti on a trumped-up murder charge, while he’s on the airplane and ready to take off, Mozart comes up to him and gives him a jar of the powder for free (and a watch), foolishly hoping Alan will make him famous by telling the world he is the maker of the zombie drug. His foolish helping of Alan will in turn lead to him being beheaded by Peytraud’s men.

Let’s return to the death and resurrection theme. Note the apt naming of Christophe, Peytraud’s ‘dying and resurrecting’ victim. Since TSATR is at least as much a political thriller as it is a horror film, it’s useful to put its Christ symbolism in its proper political context, as I did in my analysis of the Christ myth. Please look at that article for the full argument of that political context, as a complete repetition of it is beyond the scope of this article. In brief, the point is this: the Jesus of history never intended to create a new religion with himself worshipped as divine; he was a Torah-adhering Jew who, seeing himself as the Messiah in the Jewish sense, tried to rise up in revolution against Palestine’s Roman oppressors and failed.

Christophe’s speaking up for the rights of the Haitian people also ended in failure, with him being drugged with the zombie powder, pronounced dead, buried alive, then revived, a Christ-like death and resurrection of sorts. As Duchamp tells Alan, Christophe once inspired courage, but now as a ‘zombie,’ he only inspires fear.

Jesus’ followers were similarly demoralized upon knowing of his arrest and crucifixion, losing all hope until believing in his resurrection. As I argued in my article on Christ (link above), we leftists can see in the Christ myth an allegory in which His death and resurrection represent failed attempts at revolution that then are revived with new hope and ultimate success. In TSATR, we can see similarly crushed and revived hopes in Christophe’s live burial and revival, then Alan’s, and the final defeat of Peytraud and revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier, freeing all of Haiti.

Interactions in TSATR between the First and Third Worlds, and between whites and blacks, are interesting enough to warrant further discussion. Imperialist incursions into the Global South to extract resources and exploit them for the benefit of the rich countries is common enough, of course, and Alan’s forays into the Amazon and Haiti for this purpose are no exception. An interesting irony, though, is in how we see a lone white man in a country of blacks, we see him terrorized by their government, and his home country is even ‘invaded,’ as it were, through Peytraud’s possession of Cassedy’s wife (played by Dey Young) at the dinner table–during the party after Alan’s return to the US. Peytraud’s attack thus is a kind of ‘inverse imperialism.’

In Dr. Alan’s first meeting with Peytraud, in his office outside of which one can hear the groans of the tortured enemies of the regime, Alan is given a simple warning not to continue nosing around Haiti with “a radical” like Duchamp, or inquiring about Christophe. Peytraud talks about the volatile political situation in Haiti, and how setting things off could return the country to slavery, as it had been with the French. We’re thus reminded of the successful black slave revolt in Haiti that sent shockwaves throughout the Western imperial world at the time, on an island just southeast of the then-slave-owning United States.

To justify his iron-fisted rule of Haiti with Duvalier, Peytraud tells Alan that the US government would like to see anarchy in Haiti (thereby giving them a pretext to take over the country and rule it with an iron fist of their own). He reminds the American Alan that Haiti isn’t Grenada, where US imperialism in 1983 crushed the people’s revolution, established in 1979 as the only Marxist-Leninist government in the British Commonwealth.

The American government under Reagan was content to have right-wing, anticommunist Duvalier ruling Haiti, for obvious reasons. If the Haitian poor were to liberate themselves from him and the likes of Peytraud, their revolution would soon backfire and lead to even worse oppression from the white West, as Peytraud reasons–hence, the ‘necessity’ of his rule with an iron fist.

So in the references to the Haitian Revolution, the Grenada revolution and counterrevolution, and the current oppression of Haitians under Duvalier, Peytraud, et al, we can see the intermingling of white imperialism in Haiti with the black Haitian pushback against it, even to the point of Peytraud’s magic going all the way to the US, infiltrating the dinner party with Alan, Schoonbacher, and the Cassedys, a kind of ‘inverse imperialism,’ if you will.

Just as I spoke of the merging of opposites in TSATR (like that of imperialism and anti-imperialism mentioned in the previous paragraphs), so is there lots of just plain duality in the film. Its very title evokes duality (heaven and earth), as does that of Romeo and Juliet, which incidentally also involves a drug to make her seem dead, and thus also involves a live burial.

Alan seeks out two drugs: one from the Amazon shaman at the beginning, then one from Mozart in Haiti. There’s the historical Haitian Revolution Peytraud alludes to, and the final Haitian revolution at the end of the movie. There’s Christophe’s live burial and zombification, and there’s Alan’s. There’s the dual Catholic/voodoo syncretic religion. There’s the nail piercing Alan’s scrotum, and there’s the revenge nail piercing of Peytraud’s crotch. There’s the good voodoo priest, Celine, and the evil priest, Peytraud. There’s Alan’s lovemaking with Duchamp (in bed, as it were, though not literally), and there’s him in bed with Christophe’s decapitated sister. There are two women momentarily possessed by spirits: Duchamp dancing in Celine’s tourist nightclub, and Mrs. Cassedy attacking Alan with a knife at the dinner table.

The duality of the nail piercings in the crotch need closer attention now. The P, t, and r of Peytraud come across almost as a pun on one of the possible inflections of pater–that is, patri, patre, etc., or “father” in Latin. The nail piercing of Alan’s scrotum is symbolically castration, reminding us of the punitive father of Freud‘s castration complex, or the father who threatens his son with castration for wanting his mother.

I’m not saying that that’s what’s going on between Alan and Peytraud, either literally or symbolically. The point of the association I’m making here is that Peytraud’s authoritarian bullying of Alan and the Haitians is like that of a cruel, tyrannical father, a Kleinian bad father, as opposed to the good father as seen in Lucien Celine.

Another point of comparison with Peytraud as the bad father is with the primordial sky-father king gods of Greek myth: Ouranos and Cronus in particular. Ouranos had his children imprisoned in a secret place in Gaea‘s body; Cronus ate his children. These two gods, fearful of being overthrown and losing their power, oppressed their children just as paternalistic Peytraud oppresses the Haitians and Alan–anyone who is a threat to him.

But just as a father can be castrating (literally or symbolically), so can a son. As I explained in my analysis of the Ancient Greek creation myth, not only did Cronus castrate his father, Ouranos, while liberating his imprisoned Titan children, so–according to an uncensored version of the story as recalled by Freud (page 469), John Tzetzes, and Robert Graves–did Zeus castrate his father, Cronus, upon freeing the eaten Olympian gods. These violent but liberating acts can be paralleled with Alan’s vengeful driving of the nail into Peytraud’s groin and the liberation of Haiti from Duvalier.

The point I’m trying to make here is that associating Peytraud with a cruel father reinforces, in a psychological sense, how oppressive he is to Alan and the Haitians. He attacks Alan and Christophe, like God the Father (in an evil Demiurge sense) sending God the Son to die, be buried in the tomb, then resurrected. Peytraud attacks them because he is threatened by them, the way a man with the Laius complex is afraid of being supplanted by his son.

Peytraud is so threatened by Alan, a white American and therefore of the imperial core, that even with him kicked out of Haiti and back in the US, he must be terrorized all the way back there, too. I mentioned above how Peytraud fears an American intervention if the Duvalier government is overthrown and the country descends into anarchy. He feels he must coax Alan back into Haiti so he can make a zombie out of him. Hence, what happens at the dinner party with Schoonbacher and the Cassedys. Part of the irony I mentioned above, of the ‘inverted imperialism’ of Peytraud’s possession of Mrs. Cassedy, is how at the dinner party there’s a black servant, Albert, who speaks with a Caribbean accent. The whites are his master, yet Peytraud is the whites’ master there, too. The imperial boomerang goes both ways.

Yet another merging of opposites occurs in how, at the very darkest (quite literally so) moment of the film, Alan’s live burial, the revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier also happens. The Christian symbolism is powerful: Alan is experiencing a kind of harrowing of hell, not just in the terror of being in that blackness (like those hellish near-death experiences many talk about), gasping and screaming upon reviving from the zombie drug, but also in his zombification, Peytraud’s stealing of his soul. Yet this is just when the salvation of Haiti begins. It’s like Satan knowing he’s lost upon Christ’s death on the Cross.

Could we now, upon learning of the total depths of depravity of our global ruling class, be–in our boiling collective rage–on the cusp of a revolution? Could the bitten tail of the ouroboros of our current oppression soon dialectically switch over to the biting head of our liberation? Could my oft-used symbol of the dialectical unity of opposites, that auto-cannibalistic serpent, be leading us to a rainbow?

The Tanah: Amores–Three More Love Spells

[The following is the thirty-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, 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, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, and here is the thirty-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.]

Hypnotism Spell

[Lure your lover into a dark place lit only with a small flame on the top of a stick or candle held in your hand. Look your lover in the eyes, recite the verse, and immediately on finishing the recitation, blow the flame out in the direction of his or her face. Your lover should lose consciousness and fall to the ground if you have recited the verse with proper diction and sufficient faith in the Crims.]

[Lover’s name], sleep for me.
[Lover’s name], yield to me.
Weleb, blow Nevil’s fire.
Weleb, give me my desire.

Comment: one of the especially wicked spells that were abominated by the tribal elders, this one was believed to be most effective if particular materials were used for the stick or candlestick: a wood favourable to Drofurb, Crim of the earth, such as silver birch, or tallow whose smoky, foul smell has been somehow minimized. As with so many of these spells, details on what specific materials are to be used are scant. Perhaps a separate, as yet unfound set of writings has these recorded?

Pheromone Perfume Spell

[Mix wood and citrus scents into the soap used for the ritual bath for this spell, a bath to be prepared with the same instructions as those for the anti-aging and sexual attraction spells previously given, but with this new verse.]

Weleb, spread my allure throughout the air!
Of Nevil’s fiery scent be all aware!
May Drofurb’s herbs be all-enticing smells!
May this bath make the best of lovers’ spells!

Comment: though there was of course no such thing as a “pheromone perfume” (i.e., using synthetic chemical compounds, as used today) in the ancient world, we felt that “Pheromone Perfume Spell” was a better translation of Akhnar Wayat Bilm than “Animal Sex Smell,” which though a literal translation, sounded off-puttingly crude to us. While this spell is largely a variation on the “Sexual Attraction Spell” given previously, two differences should be noted: firstly, this one emphasizes the scent, whereas the previous one only briefly refers to fragrance; secondly, where the previous spell is meant only to attract this or that particular lover, this new one doesn’t discriminate–any and all lovers are welcome…to the point of orgies, even.

Commitment Spell

[Make two small wooden figurines as effigies of oneself and the desired lover; their closer resemblance to the actual pair of lovers in real life, the more effective the spell. Use birch bark tar to make the two adhere to each other while repeatedly chanting the following verse.]

Drofurb, make our love as solid as stone!
Nevil, make my love burn in his bones!
Weleb, never blow his love away!
Priff, always have his love flow back my way!

Comment: this spell was generally a woman’s prayer to the four Crims to make her man commit to her, hence, our translated name of it, “Commitment Spell,” as opposed to the “Stick Him to Her Spell,” which is a more literal translation of Guro Shuk Er Im Bah, but also a cruder-sounding one, in our opinion.

The Tanah: Amores–Translator’s Introduction and First Four Spells

[The following is the thirty-sixth 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, here is the thirty-fourth, and here is the thirty-fifth–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

Here we come to perhaps the most controversial of the spells, for on the one hand, the elders of the tribe abominated them for their wickedness, while others coveted them for their perceived ability to fulfill so many sexual desires. As with the Lyrics, these Amores‘ efficacy seems to depend on their users’ unshaking faith in the power of the Crims–Nevil, the Crim of fire (and therefore, of sexual passion) in particular. These spells are chanted, not sung, as are the Lyrics.

Apart from the supposed magical power of the original language–whose rhythms, alliteration, assonance, etc., cannot adequately be rendered in English–some other items are to be used to aid in the effectiveness of the spells, being either indispensable or at least helpful in achieving the best results. These include early forms of soap that combined animal fat with fire ashes; though the spells involved bathing while wiping the soap all over one’s body, the purpose wasn’t cleaning oneself–it was about spreading the benefits of the magic’s power all over oneself.

Anti-aging, youth-preserving spell

[Burn wood to ashes while invoking Nevil. Drip animal fat on the ashes, still invoking Nevil. Get naked and bathe with the soap made from the ashes and animal fat while repeatedly chanting the following lines.]

Nevil, keep all wrinkles off of me!
Nevil, keep my skin smooth as can be!
Nevil, keep me beautiful and desired!
Keep me young with your so holy fire!

Sexual attraction spell

[The following lines are to be repeatedly chanted with the same instructions as those of the anti-aging spell above. Be careful, upon completion of the ritual bath and incantation, to have present only the desired one to be attracted by the spell.]

Nevil, make him want me.
Nevil, draw him to me.
Make my fragrance pull him near.
May I have his eyes and ears.

Comment: this spell was generally used by women to attract men, hence the warning to ensure that only the desired men be at hand once the bath and spell were completed. Spells for men to attract–really, to seduce–women, were of a different sort, an example of which will be found soon below.

Potency spell

[Burn a fire surrounded in a mound of dirt. Wave a rock, ideally, one of a phallic shape, over the flame while repeatedly chanting the following lines.]

Nevil, have me ready for her.
Nevil, do sustain me for her.

Seduction spell

[Burn a small flame in a private room into which you would have the desired woman enter and meet you. Repeatedly chant the following lines while, on one side of the flame and her on the other, you keep eye contact with her.]

[Her name], receive me.
[Her name], yield to me.

Analysis of ‘Indent’

Indent is a live album by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, recorded in March of 1973. It was the first solo piano performance he ever released, recorded at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He taught at Antioch from 1971-1973.

I’d first heard of Cecil Taylor’s music through an enigmatic quote from Frank Zappa: “If you want to learn how to play guitar, listen to Wes Montgomery. You also should go out and see if you can get a record by Cecil Taylor if you want to learn how to play the piano.” You will find this quote to be all the more enigmatic once you hear Taylor’s music, wondering how one is actually supposed to learn how to play the piano from emulating Taylor’s relentless, indefatigable virtuosity, especially as it is applied to such an unconventional musical style.

Indeed, to say that Taylor’s music is not easy listening would be the understatement of the year. It is undoubtedly an acquired taste, so be forewarned before hearing any of it. If you stick with it, though, and keep an open mind, you’ll find it rewarding.

I recommend starting with an album like Indent, or Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) from 1976, for these are solo piano albums, and you can clearly hear what Taylor is doing without what will (at least at first ) seem like the chaos of saxophone wailing and endless drum rolls by players like Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille respectively, two regular members of Taylor’s “Unit.” This is why I’m analyzing Indent, apart from the fact that there is also poetry, on the back cover of the LP, which I wish to analyze.

Taylor’s music is characterized as being rushes of seemingly endless energy, eschewing conventional melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, or structure. He was part of the free jazz movement that developed in the early 1960s with players like saxophonist Ornette Coleman, so the music is generally atonal and dissonant. Strongly influenced by 20th century classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, Taylor started off as a classically trained pianist before going into jazz.

While many jazz musicians of the 1960s were getting inspiration from 20th century classical music, Taylor went beyond the more usual influences of these to create a musical style totally unique to him, with–for example–cascades of tone clusters as being a regular feature of his improvising. He once said that he liked to imitate the leaps of a dancer in his playing, and one can hear that in the way the tone clusters fly along the range of the piano keys.

His piano is a percussion instrument, in effect: “eighty-eight tuned drums,” as Val Wilmer once described Taylor’s playing. This music is demanding on the listener, who must give full attention to it. Lacking conventional rhythm, the music cannot be tapped to or bopped to; I once read somewhere that listeners tend to sway to the music instead, for it is constant, frenetic energy, like fast triplets going on almost forever. At the end of any performance, Taylor had to be exhausted.

Cecil Taylor wasn’t just a piano player: he was also an accomplished poet. As I mentioned above, he had some of his poetry printed on the back cover of Indent; these are called “Scroll No. 1” and “Scroll No. 2.” I will be going into an analysis of these, as well as of the album’s music, below. It will be clear upon reading them of how he was preoccupied with politics in the US.

He was black, with some Native American ancestry. He was also gay, though he didn’t want to be labelled as such, feeling there was so much more to him (of course) than his sexuality. Staying in the closet all the way to the 1980s (when he was outed by Stanley Crouch), because of the homophobia of the jazz world (as well as that of conservative blacks), was necessary for his survival.

These three aspects of his humanity–being black, aboriginal, and gay–left him on the margins of society, and they therefore surely affected his music and poetry, making both highly experimental and expressive of the alienation he must have felt. Being part Cherokee on his mother’s side, and part Kiowa on his father’s, he would have been close to nature, having been taught by his father to appreciate the trees in Manhattan; we can see some of his love of nature in “Scroll No. 1,” as we’ll take a look at soon enough.

The choice of a title for the album seems to represent an aspect of the ‘scrolls” presentation on the back cover. Apart from the left margins, each beginning with “Whistle into night” and “Nation’s lost diplomacy,” there are middle indentations, each starting with “blue’s history” and “crophandler,” then there are far-right indentations, each beginning with “White crucifix” and “asleep.” That the whole album is named Indent rather than the poems seems to indicate that the music on it is supposed to be linked with the poetry.

Certainly, Lynette Westendorf, in her analysis of Cecil Taylor: Indent–“Second Layer” (which by the way gives a much more detailed analysis of the musical structure of that part of the performance than I am capable of doing of any or all of it), sees a link between the ‘scrolls’ and the ‘three layers,’ as the album’s music is divided into. As she understands it, the left margin lines correspond to the First Layer, the middle indented lies correspond to the Second Layer, and the far-right indented lines correspond to the Third Layer (pages 314-319 of her analysis).

Now, apart from dividing both the music and the poems into threes, I can’t hear any other parallels to be made between their structures, as Taylor’s musical style remains quite consistent throughout (unless one were to do as meticulous and scholarly an analysis as Westendorf does). Indeed, with no intention of bad-mouthing Taylor, his pianistic style sounds quite the same more or less throughout his mature period, so it’s hard for me to differentiate.

So, what do the indentations represent? It’s interesting how the…far right…indentation begins with imagery associated with white supremacy: “White crucifix” and “White God” to represent the religion that the Ku Klux Klan, with their “White flame” and “White hood,” use to justify their racism. By way of analogy, could the middle indentations and left margins respectively correspond, in any way, if only ironically so, with the political centre and left in the US?

Not exactly, but I’d say the far-right indentations embody a hate hidden by polite society, the Third Layer. The left margins embody illusions of goodness and justice not so well disguised, and the middle indentations embody various desires, sexual and otherwise, and how those desires are frustrated.

Here is a link to the poetry, and here is a link to the live recording.

In the left margins, we “whistle into night,” and perhaps the tune we whistle is what’s heard on the piano at the beginning of the First Layer: octaves of B, B-flat, C, A-flat, B-flat, G-flat, A-flat, these then played an octave lower, all to a jerky rhythm. We seem to be in a good mood as we whistle this tune, but the feeling is illusory, given how later on down the left margin, “indignation laments.” The political world that Taylor grew up in, a superficially liberal one, was also one he was left out of as a black gay man.

In the America that marginalized him, “difference” was an “excuse” to mistreat him. These liberals, so superficially progressive, weren’t particularly kind to the environment, either. Their “city technique” resulted in a “tar flesh” that “trampled seeds.”

Almost as a kind of call and response, the next piano tune, again in octaves, and one that you could “whistle into night,” is G-flat, B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat, then lower with B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat again. Then, back to variations on the first tune, with a brief return to the second. With the jerky, irregular rhythms are also contrasts in dynamics that from time to time remind me of those in the second of Olivier Messiaen‘s Quatre études de rythme, louds and softs often divorced from conventional expressivity…that is, except for the anger of Taylor’s percussive pounding on the keys.

Just as the left margins of the poem go from illusory pleasantness to hard underlying reality, so does the music move from relatively consonant (by Taylor’s standards, at least) tunes in octaves to the more dissonant use of minor and major seconds (about a minute into the recording). And as anyone familiar with Taylor’s music knows, it will get much more dissonant very soon.

“Spring cotton answer” may seem like an answer to a problem, but the picking of cotton sounds like the opposite of an answer to black people, whose “indignation laments” their history as slaves.

A confrontation with the “duplicity” and “demagogic democracy” of Scroll No. 2 shows that matters are getting worse. One tries to be so “damned dutiful” in a country of “lost diplomacy,” with so much “white white.” A few black politicians (in recent years, think of Obama or Kamala Harris) do not do much to compensate for continued racism against blacks–hence, the sarcasm of “‘yeah bo’/I’ma Senatah!”

I can imagine the first of Taylor’s trademark cascades of tone clusters up and down the piano in this First Layer as corresponding to the line “You just sing dance unseen,” like so many invisible, marginalized American blacks and gays trying to be heard in a mainstream society that is so deaf and blind to them. Recall his words in this connection: “I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.”

Later on down the left margin of Scroll No. 2, Taylor continues his sarcastic ‘Uncle Tom’ voice by saying “‘Ah is so happy/Youse mah master” to the moderate white liberal who pretends to care about blacks, but in their…whitewashing…of people like MLK, whose socialism they conveniently gloss over, they are little better than the old white slaveowners–hence, “Youse mah master”…”Kick me agin.” These untrustworthy faux progressives have “ground life out.”

Because of the white moderate, “justice [is] invisibly/impenetrable.” Why can’t the white moderate, or any liberal in general, be trusted? Because capitalism corrupts everything, or as Taylor put it, “Dry cell of money/ has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.” The love of money is a prison cell we’re all locked in.

Next, we come to the Second Layer, which on the LP is divided into two parts so the whole performance would fit on the record’s two sides almost equally, but which is really just one long, continuous performance, and which combined together would be of exactly equal length to the First Layer (13:40). Since, according to Westendorf’s interpretation (see link above), the Second Layer corresponds to the middle indentations of the two ‘scrolls,’ I’ll be examining these with this particular part of the music. As I said above, I find as a recurring theme in the middle indentations one of desire and the anatomical part-objects of such desire, sexual or otherwise.

As I also said above, Westendorf’s analysis (link above) of the Second Layer is far more thorough and capable than what I can give, so I recommend reading it. Still, I’ll do my best here.

The music starts with a ‘melody’ of succeeding B octaves in the bass register of the piano. Then, we have, in octaves played at the same time, B and F-sharps, Bs and Gs, Bs and Es, and Bs and F-naturals. So, as with the opening ‘whistled’ tune of the First Layer, here there’s no substantial dissonance…yet. There’s desire, but its frustration is soon to come.

As for the poem, “blue’s history” can be the sad history of African-Americans, or a history told through singing he blues. In all of this, there is a desire to rid themselves of the pain, to ‘exorcise’ it. This desire is the “awakened needs” of black people.

There is a desire for “recognition” (as Lacan also observed), to be acknowledged and desired by the object of one’s desire, including such part-objects as the “titty,” “ass’n” “prick.” The “bent whore’s” desire may also be desired, with her “recognition” of us.

The middle indentations have all the naughty words in them (including the aforementioned ones, and “shit”; “Damned,” from the left margins, is mild enough of an oath not to count–in fact, it could simply mean that corrupt politicians are “damned” in the religious sense for being “dutiful” to the ruling class). The desire to have fun saying dirty words is an example of how “puerility romps” and delights in breaking the rules.

Desire’s “tongue tastes,” and it moans “ooh ooh ooh” as the “prick” sprays its “sperm” where the “bent whore’s lost” and “puerility romps/unchided…in night cesspools” (brothels?). Desire isn’t just of a sexual sort, though. There’s also the sweetness that comes from “honeysucklevine” and “molasses” that one’s “tongue tastes.” (Or is the former quote a pun on Honeysuckle Divine, with her “dimples” and “sweat titty”?) There’s the desire of “scampering” children at play, with “pigtails stompin’.”

The point of all of this discussion of desire, centred in the middle, between the illusion of the ‘progressiveness’ of the politics of the liberal white moderate on the one side (the left margins) and the unreserved hate of the white supremacists on the other side (fittingly, the far-right indentations), is that the African-American in his “awakened needs” (a result of the raised consciousness of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s) is caught in the middle, controlled by the whites on either side of him. Thus, his desires and needs are never met in an America where he has no power.

The frustration of that desire is clearly expressed in Taylor’s piano playing, which of course gets very tense and dissonant in short order. Variations on that motif introduced with the low Bs, that chromatic ascension of E, F-natural, F-sharp, and G are heard (see Westendorf’s analysis above for details). The variations are often played in fast arpeggiated forms with added fifths. Soon, the upward arpeggios get much more dissonant.

I’d like to skip ahead to the beginning of “Second Layer, Part Two” beginning Side Two of the LP, because it stands out in my memory. This would be “Paragraph J–Section J-1” of Westendorf’s analysis (page 306, 9:53 minutes into the Second Layer part of the recording). To use her words, here we have “A light pattern of repeating grace-note clusters featuring C♯-B…in the high register”. It is subdued and reflective, to use her words again. For those finding his usual percussive, dissonant playing grating on the ears, this passage will feel refreshing in its softness.

It won’t take too long for the harshness to come back, though, and the Second Layer will end, with more cascading clusters, within less than four minutes of that soft passage I mentioned in the previous paragraph. More desire has been frustrated for the African-American.

The Third Layer, corresponding with the far-right indentations of the ‘scrolls,’ is about four minutes longer than the other two ‘layers.’ It begins in the bass, with a quick ascending line of E-flat, E-flat an octave lower, and B-flat, repeated several times, then with variations using other notes in ascending arpeggios. It’s softer than the beginnings of the other two ‘layers,’ but dissonances are added sooner.

This added tension is fitting as it corresponds with the poem, which is where the fascism resides, hidden under the liberal First Layer (left margins) and hiding under the frustrated desires of the Second Layer (middle indentations). This is made perfectly clear right from the beginning of the far-right indentations, with the opening allusion to the Ku Klux Klan: “White crucifix/White flame/White God/White hood.” The liberal mask is off (or rather, the hood is off), and we can see who is behind it.

The “White white” that follows is repeated in Scroll No. 2 with the opening left margin, though also pushed out to the right of “blue serge,” as if indented, too. Here again we can see the relationship between the white liberal moderate (as represented by the left margins) and the far right of the far-right indentations. “White white” represents not just white skin, but also the White Terror of conservative, reactionary forces against leftists. Recall, in the connection between the liberal moderate and the far-right, Stalin’s words about social democracy and fascism.

Blacks feel the “pains” and “shame” that come from the fascist repressions of types like the Ku Klux Klan. “Whitness” is a pun on “whiteness” and “witness,” from blacks being a witness to whiteness, to which they matter not a whit.

A “surreptitious/Seraph” of “sin sinning/Singing” a “song/Set 4 centuries long” is a white angel that has pretended to be holy while surreptitiously harming the black man over about four centuries of the European slave trade. The whites, in our posturing as racially superior, have pretended the whole time to be angels, while denigrating blacks as the descendants of Ham to justify enslaving them.

Continuing with the far-right indentations in Scroll No. 2, we have only the words “asleep” and “stranger.” The world has been “asleep” to the oppression of blacks only until recently, as of the publication of these “scrolls” (first in 1965, then republished as liner notes to Indent in 1973). The black man has been a “stranger” to the rest of the world because racism has estranged him from us.

As for the dissonance of the piano playing in the Third Layer, and how it can be said to represent the pain felt by blacks because of this estranging racism and how asleep the rest of the world has been to it, one noteworthy section of the music, towards the end of the performance of this layer, should be focused on. Taylor does a particularly thundering moment of tone clusters around the middle-to-lower register of the piano, at about 43:35 on the CD.

We can hear some applause from the audience immediately after that moment. It would seem that, through Taylor’s performance, the pain of the black man has finally received its deserved “Recognition” (line 8 of Scroll No. 2). His piano has sung and danced unseen (line 10 of Scroll No. 2) until only recently; indeed, it took forty years for Taylor to be recognized by the academy, him being named a Jazz Master by the NEA in 1990, and in the following year receiving a MacArthur Fellowship.

In the middle indentation, Taylor refers to giving “recognition” to George Washington “Carver‘s oil” (lines 8-9 of Scroll No. 1). Since Carver promoted alternative crops to cotton and promoted methods to prevent soil depletion, as well as promoted environmentalism, then his “oil” is an ironic metaphor Taylor is using to illustrate Carver’s valuable discoveries for the good of the earth, a major issue of Scroll No. 1.

Still, Carver’s recognition “estranged/outer earth’s garments” (i.e., the tar and concrete covering the ground), for the big money-making interests–typically white Americans–have little to no concern for environmentalism. Their “scorched exclusivity” alienates the earth as well as blacks, gays, and aboriginals. “Tar flesh trampled seeds.”

It’s good to give recognition to Taylor and Carver…but recognition isn’t enough, for the “dry cell of money/has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.”

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