“In the jungle the strong slay the weak until only the strong remain,” said Tanub. “And then the strong prey upon each other?” asked Orne. “That is a quibble for women,” said Tanub. “It’s too bad you feel that way,” said Orne. “When two cultures meet like this they tend to help each other.”
Frank Herbert, Missing Link
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert.
Here’s a book I looked at with interest when I was a teenager who had read and enjoyed Herbert’s Dune. I believe I passed it over then because it was the sequel to a book I hadn’t read (Whipping Star), and which wasn’t in the public library collection where I found The Dosadi Experiment. Since then, Dosadi has gone from being the second of a series to being the fourth, in the narrative chronology of Herbert’s ConSentiency novels. Still not having read the others all these decades later, I went ahead and tackled this one, inspired by praise I had read for it on LibraryThing.
It may be that I would have enjoyed it more if I had been already acquainted with the ConSentiency milieu and the protagonist (Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary) established in Whipping Star, but I did like it all the same. It certainly has a number of themes in common with the original Dune books, most especially the idea of a eugenic program transforming humanity. But even more it reminded me of the later Charles Stross novel Glasshouse. Both are far future espionage stories where the protagonist must infiltrate an experimental world in an effort to discover its true purpose, knowing only that there is some great culpability involved. In both cases, the world being investigated is more like the reader’s world than the somewhat utopian future of the novel’s larger scenario. In Dosadi, “The whole thing reminded McKie of stories told about behavior in Human bureaucracies of the classical period before deep space travel” (222). There are other interesting similarities between the books that would be spoilers to detail.
Unique to Herbert’s tale is the focus on the exotic legal system of the frog-like Gowachin aliens, an important peer-race of humanity within the ConSentiency. McKie is the only human credentialed as a “legum” in the jurisprudence of their “courtarena,” where both lawyers and litigants are routinely exposed to mortal hazard. Far from a crude gladiator’s brawl, however, the operations of this system depend on great subtlety and creativity, demanding both a reverence for tradition and the power to upend precedents and conventions.
This book read quickly, even though there were passages that were written with such verbal economy that they became ambiguous to the reader. That style is thematically consistent with the book, which attributes it to the inhabitants of Dosadi themselves. I don’t know how far in our future The Dosadi Experiment is supposed to be set, and it glances lightly over many technological details, but it has aged pretty well for forty-year-old science fiction. I’m glad to have finally read it, and I appreciate the recommendations that got me to do so. [via]
An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together …
Luise Henriette Wilhelmine von Anhalt-Dessau as Diana, 1765 [via]
“‘Most people here, I imagine, love to read,’ she continued. ‘[The esoteric] really encourages that kind of bibliomania. And if you’re someone who loves to read, you’re also someone who is comfortable being an autodidact, comfortable seeking out knowledge externally and also within yourself. And [you trust] the patterns that that weaves, as opposed to relying on someone else to tell you what wisdom is or what divinity is.'”
“‘My take on it is, [occultists] aren’t necessarily interested in a truth or a singular truth,’ he said. ‘I think they’re interested in a consensus-based or consensual, metaphorical set of constructs that become truth-like.’ He viewed his community as being a place of infinite individual systems of reading, practice and belief — combined and coalesced only by their commitment to individual agency.”
“Which brings us to the fuzzy ‘between spaces’ where apophenia meets synchromysticism. Given that old gods regularly become new angels, then new goddesses may become largely-hoax angels. And so I see the goddess Apophenia hiding behind the Angel of the Thames.”
“Muriel Bruce Hasbrouck (1890 — 1981) was a student of both Paul Foster Case and Aleister Crowley. She dedicated her book to these two men, a lesser-known book entitled Pursuit of Destiny, written in 1941. … Here are her keywords for the Minor Arcana Suits and Numbers. […] So, by putting these keywords together, you can see how they create meanings for each of the forty Minor Arcana.”
“A Tellurium clock combines both clock and orrery in a single movement. Last week I received pictures from Marc Maradan of a Tellurium clock he is working on. Marc is a process engineer based near Bern in Switzerland.
Inspired by a 2006 documentary on the Antikythera mechanism he set out to build his own Heliocentric calendar machine. He produced his designs using open source CAD software and manufactures all the components himself (no CNC machining) using only the technology available to the ancient Greeks.”
The Tellurium Clock of Marc Maradan at The Computus Engine [larger]
“[…] investigators also identified deeper causes, one of which involved what some accident-investigation specialists have dubbed the ‘normalization of deviance’ — small malfunctions that appear so often that eventually they are accepted as normal […]”
“Systemic problems require systemic solutions, and thinking the radical change necessary to preserve what life remains on the planet is possible without the complete removal of the system that is killing us, is futile.”
“In 1918 Weber had proclaimed that all ‘mysterious incalculable forces’ were being eradicated from the world by science and scientifically based technologies. Entzauberung — literally the disappearance of magic (Zauber) — signified a new mentality in which modern people believed that anything around them could, in principle, be comprehended rationally, and that no offerings to capricious deities or magical manipulations of occult forces were needed to master the world.
‘Magic’, however, failed to disappear. Whether we are talking about self-designated modern magicians coming out of the various currents of occultism and neopaganism, or about that vague and poorly defined set of ‘occult’ and ‘supernatural’ beliefs and practices that somehow will not fit neat categories such as ‘religion’ or ‘science’, ‘magic’, in fact, seems to thrive at the heart of high modernity. Some have even connected the resilience of the ‘mysterious incalculable forces’ to the secularization process itself […]”
“Inner life manifests itself in various elements and conglomerations of external life, especially in those almost imperceptible surface data which form an essential part of screen treatment. In recording the visible world—whether current reality or an imaginary universe—films therefore provide clues to hidden mental processes. […] Films are particularly inclusive because their ‘visible hieroglyphics’ supplement the testimony of their stories proper. And permeating both the stories and the visuals, the ‘unseen dynamics of human relations’ are more or less characteristic of the inner life of the nation from which the films emerge.”
“This fascinating documentary explores the genesis of one of cinema’s greatest epics that never was: cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s (EL TOPO) adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune, whose cast would have included such icons as Salvador Dali, Orson Welles and Mick Jagger. In 1975, following the runaway success of his art-house freak-outs EL TOPO and HOLY MOUNTAIN, Alejandro Jodorowsky secured the rights to Frank Herbert’s Dune — and began work on what was gearing up to be a cinematic game-changer, a sci-fi epic unlike anything the world had ever seen.”
“Life, to me, is mainly about opposite forces coexisting in the same space (this being a binary universe, and all): light and dark and the play of shadows across landscapes; tension and flexibility and all the combinations of the two; power, or the confidence that comes with great ability, and the understanding that comes at some point that no matter how skilled you are, you are still small. Humility, and sense of purpose. Holding on, and letting go. Doing what you can, and at the same time surrendering oneself to the constant movement that is life.”
“Occasionally, we are walking along our path, and we forget who we are. We forget that the tugging pulling us forward is the longing of heart and soul. We get caught in the pattern of habit and assumption. We forget we had intention. We forget we play a vital part in the world. We need reminders that life itself holds magic.”
“‘For 20 years I researched the fathers of the Ouija board,’ [Robert] Murch said. ‘Turns out, it had a mother.'”
Ouida aka Maria Louise Ramée
“Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
‘This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,’ said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.
The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like ‘amplituhedron,’ which yields an equivalent one-term expression.”
“In summary, [Joanna Kavenna] says, ‘being a writer stopped being the way it had been for ages — the way I expected it to be — and became something different.”
That ‘difference’ amounts to a revolution. To writers of my generation, who grew up in the age of Penguin books, vinyl records and the BBC, it’s as if a cultural ecology has been wiped out. […] It was a mutually dependent ecosystem.”
“In 1979, William S Burroughs delivered a series of lectures on creative writing (though he insisted that he was teaching creative reading — that is, analyzing the writing process by reading, because everyone can be taught to read, but only some will be able to write) at Naropa University. Three of these lectures, running to over four hours, are up on Youtube, covering writing exercises, Brion Gysin, Aleister Crowley, science fiction, General Semantics, and cut-ups.”
“The rabbis explained to me that it was their duty to determine the nature of the interest of prospective buyers before selling any copies of the newly printed work.”
“LibraryBox is an open source, portable digital file distribution tool based on inexpensive hardware that enables delivery of educational, healthcare, and other vital information to individuals off the grid.”
“The Swinburne Project is a digital collection and scholarly project devoted to the life and work of Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and to digital encounters with Swinburne’s works and related documents and information resources.”
“The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive is an open source scholarly archive containing primary material for students of Emma Hardinge Britten. Materials include annotated editions of all major EHB texts, bibliographies of primary and secondary material, a short biographical summary of EHB’s life, chronologies with backing evidentiary records, various artifacts of EHB’s life, and papers and articles on topics in EHB scholarship.”
“Years back, when a small group of us were trying to get a decent run of some of the fundamental Theosophical periodicals online, a discussion broke out among the team doing the digitization scut work under the heading “mission, vision, values” (you know, the sort of thing that would occasion a high-ropes offsite, with too much drinking, in a corporate setting) and one of the participants wrote that he thought the only common belief the team needed to share was the belief that the material in question was in danger, hard to come by for ordinary seekers and readers, and worth preserving.
Damned good sense, I thought. Focus on what we agree on, and leave your hermeneutics in the car.”
“The IAPSOP is a US-based non-profit organization focused on the digital preservation of Spiritualist and occult periodicals published between the Congress of Vienna and the start of the Second World War.”
“Yet, while LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage prejudice as ‘religious liberty,’ they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, ‘our Southern segregation way is the Christian way … [God] was the original segregationist.'”
“70% of Millennials think: ‘Religious groups are ‘alienating young adults by being too judgmental on gay and lesbian issues.””
“1 in 3 Millennials say they have no religious affiliation at all.”
“Everybody knows that the Tea Party has structured their political platform on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Tea Party Jesus has a lot of political views. Unfortunately, after a little journalistic digging, we have uncovered some facts that may make a few members of the Religious Right a teeny, tiny bit uncomfortable…”
“The authors, all Jesus Seminar Fellows, agreed on several points:
· Jesus of Nazareth did not refer to himself as the Messiah, nor did he claim to be a divine being who descended to earth from heaven in order to die as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.
· At the heart of Jesus’ teaching and actions was a vision of a life under the reign of God (or, in the empire of God) in which God’s generosity and goodness is regarded as the model and measure of human life.
· Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic view of the reign (or kingdom) of God”
“Always worth a pause is consideration of whether one greater enemy of Christianity, Gnosticism is an eradicated virus or a recurring outbreak of disease in our body. While it is difficult to arrive at a settled definition of Gnosticism, it can be thought of as an influenza which takes various forms.”
“Gnostics were trying, each in their own way, to indigenize Christianity in the Greco-Roman world by marrying it to platonic cosmology and cutting the chord [sic] from its Jewish roots.”
“If you answered ‘B’ to any question, then not only is your religious liberty not at stake, but there is a strong chance that you are oppressing the religious liberties of others. This is the point where I would invite you to refer back to the tenets of your faith, especially the ones about your neighbors.”
“The stench from your houses of worship is wafting its way across this country, polluting citizenship, demoralizing parents and families, mocking accountability and blaspheming the Holy God whom you say you love and worship. If that offends you, try reading Amos.”
“The time is not always ripe. It may be past, it may be still to come. But woe to the church if when the time does come it is silent…”
“Close your eyes, and visualise yourself standing in the middle of the country of Ukraine — somewhere near Cherkasy (see map). Now imagine that your astral form grows to a colossal height — so much so, that you can look round and see all of the territory of Ukraine around you.”
“Could this be part of Cantre’r Gwaelod, a mythical kingdom believed to have disappeared beneath the waves thousands of years ago? Has Wales’s very own Atlantis been found? […] It was buried under a peat bog 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, then inundated by rising sea levels until this winter’s violent storms stripped away the covering of peat and sand.”
Photo by Keith Morris, LNP
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Incal Classic Collection by Alexandro Jodorowsky, illustrated by Moebius, introduced by Brian Michael Bendis:
This beautiful hardcover collects the six original books of Jodorowsky and Moebius’s classic science fiction epic The Incal, originally published in French in the 1980s. A work as self-consciously mythic as this one is going to invite comparison to many other tales. But some of the lines of influence here are pretty obvious, with references falling outside the medium of comics into science fiction novels and films, as well as esoteric traditions.
Clearly, Frank Herbert’s Dune played a major part, with the contention of corrupted factions in a galactic empire, framed by a mystical apocalypse. Qabalistic references include the “theta dream” of Tiphareth, succeeded by the “daath dream” ascending the Tree of Life.
While the influence of The Incal on Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element is so overwhelming as to incite accusations of plagiarism, it can also be traced in movies like The Matrix and its sequels. Jodorowski’s antihero John Difool is not Neo, who could be compared to the messianic Solune. Instead, as we see in “Planet Difool,” he actually bears closer comparison to Wachowskis’ Agent Smith!
The 10,000-light-year-view used in the narrative framing of The Incal leaves it open to accusations of stereotyped characters and perfunctory plotting. But this book occupies a pole diametrically opposed to literary realism; it is mystical allegory, in which the characters and factions represent spiritual orientations and capabilities. Moebius’s art is perfectly suited to its task here, and the revolting panels of the nightmare sequence near the book’s end are only rivalled by the exaltation that follows them.
Enjoyable in their own right, the contents of this volume are a landmark in the development of the graphic story medium and the science fiction genre. [via]
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