antipythagorasxii

[antipythagorasxii]

Cotton-Eyed Jennifer

says her name is Sibyll

and she can predict the future

but no one will listen to her

I wonder where you come from;

wish there were some way to know,

but I can't yet believe these prophecies don't come conceived by you and you alone

Your winged words are worth their weight, but Lady I have no faith.

Cotton-Eyed Sibyll, she

swears she can see

She could steer us forward faster, if only we'd unmask her

If I'd never crossed the cotton-eyed girl, she'd have been merry in a long-gone world

I know too well where we've come from

but who knows where we'll go?

The coast is close, but the winds are scarce and slow

Looks like a long way home to row

[antipythagorasxii]

Upon this rock buried in this electric cave, I carve my divine lineage:

Antipythagoras XII, avatar of Apollo and Neptune;

born of the triplicate Aphrodite/Hera/Hestia, and the avatar of Hermes and Hephaestos;

she born of Persephone and her Hades, now with Gaia;

and he, of Athena and the wise barbarian king Tyrnachtag.

Hades, descended from Titans and wicked Kronosians;

Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Ares;

Athena, Hera's own daughter by an Orphic wizard;

and Tyrnachtag the Wise, whose king-father built his kingdom on the Jovian cattle trade after surviving the war in his teens, enlisted underage as a messenger. His father died fighting their similarly-named neighbors, and he would have done the same if not for his mother Frigg's divine intervention. When she was later captured in a mob uprising, his alliance with Zeus and hers with Demeter turned the minds of governors in the Old and New Lands to secure her deliverance from danger.

In this way was I brought to these colonies; to seek the Logos, to know The Mysteries, and to spread my fickle flame among the masses.

[antipythagorasxii]

Oedipus at Colonnus

I came chased, my life behind

After all, the blindest seer would find me out

For my mistakes, I have paid

But still my soul is stained

My past presents; what I left, arrives

Not devotion but obsession

This soul is no possession

For my mistakes, still I pay

As they gather over my grave

Which side assents when the fight relents?

Will we be worthy to ascend

Past the wrath of every end?

For my mistakes, we will pay

For still, my soul is stained

Hey Zeus! Hey! Zeus!

Into the wash, I will wave

To see this city saved

[antipythagorasxii]

Hades, your nephew beckons you again

I offer nothing more than I offer

My motives are plain: the seat of your throne.

I have no hurry, bear thee no ill humor

My indenture will be brief; some decades

By which I might earn my mantle.

But who doesn't deserve your embrace;

As Liberation, Justice, or Redemption?

[antipythagorasxii]

Dysthymia, my silent Muse

I beseech you from nowhere, with nothing:

Embrace me by the root in my ribs

Slow my beating to a thrum

Grace my matter in motion

See how I sluice

[antipythagorasxii]

TW: a "Boy Do I Feel Old" log

Hephaesto! Govanno! Creidne!

How many eons have passed, that even in my brief candle-span I've seen your inventions lose faith and sputter out:

Rotary phones*

Electric typewriters

Beepers*

CRT TVs

Landline phones

Laptop mouse button*

Floppy disks

Zip drives**

Mouse balls***

Hard-disk drives

None know what comes next but the dreamers of dreams;

then another reality/language/culture will blink out, to be forgotten with us.

This is our path to redemption.

*thank the gods

**my family has years' worth of information stored on these

***when my ship comes in, I'll invest in a nice gaming mouse; with the trackball on top.

[antipythagorasxii]

So Spake Taliesin to Arthur

"Hast heard thou of the God of Wine?

Rendered pulp and juice by the Titans,

His body consecrated to the fields,

His blood the ichor of enlightenment;

He rises like Osiris,

Deified by daughters of Isis

And, in a flash of Logos the Light,

Appears before Thomas the Twin,

Cast as Doubting Pentheus,

Who follows his own path to perfection,

Charged with The Logic Truth: 'You are I.'

What martyr's mother wouldn't shred her own son for pride?"

[antipythagorasxii]

Did Dionysus die at Delphi?

Has Apollon led us in tandem with Caduceus the Snake playing Voice of Reason?

Why else nail your wisdom to a tree? but to possess it and name it yours; to preserve it until it's seen and believed; to acquiesce to Logos the Word and Thought, the Form and Function, the Note and Sound.

But when Caduceus the hognose has his fill of playing dead, and Zagreus takes up his sylphic thursus, will he know the words to lead his maenads? or might gray Orpheus lose himself in his songs? How long can a lyre sing before someone's guts get strung?

But even if Apollo ap Modron could smite out every gentle mystic who threatened his Blessed Dogma, it takes only one psychopomp to liberate any number of souls by cosmic revelation.

We haven't yet escaped the jaws of His Holy Mission Samsara, but we are free to try.

[antipythagorasxii]

On Deity and Divinity

To borrow a question my parents thought I might have the capacity to answer by age 5: What is God?

If we are to imagine an incomprehensible life force, let us suppose there are two essential types: institutional, from the top down; and endemic, from the ground up. For the sake of convenience, here I will reduce the entire spectrum, from saintly to supernatural, to "gods."

The institutional gods reign over particular regions by supernatural might and by their dynastic virility; following groups like the Dorians and Ionians to settle/dominate someone else's world, as the situation presents. These deities, having slash-and-burned their way across the Untamed Wild, then set about reproducing their own reality on top of the ashes.

The endemic gods are, by their nature, less easily defined. When the Romans brought interpretatio romano to Britannia, they left behind scores of altars to various genii loci, local gods. Many represented natural phenomena -- Coventina, clean water springing from the soil; Grannos and Sulis, the hot springs -- but the most common veneration was to the spirit of the crossroads, to language and its oaths. Every local Mercury was not not-warlike, but had the capacity to start with an olive branch* before resorting to the club.

I must pause here to trouble my easy distinction between what is institutional and endemic. It is easy to suppose that Jupiter, son of the Phrygian Kronos, ruled the Aegean and Tyrrhenian by thunder and bolt; meanwhile, that Camulus Mars embiggened the spirit of Caradoc and his other freedom fighters against Caesar, the avatar of Jupiter. But whose god was Camulus? and whom did he depose? We'll never know the complexities of indigenous realpolitik, in part because the presence of our written sources** destroyed the source material.***

Ideally, the practice of interpretatio**** builds upon extant power structures and, by contextualizing the status quo within a symbiotic hegemony, offers to incorporate "the smallfolk" into the fold of Imperial Civilization. In the name of lasting peace, the people were allowed to retain their local divinities, so long as they also venerated their numismatic deity ROMA.

While the deity's name and form have shifted from the Eve of Latium to the Sun-Fish of Nazareth, the numismatic structure reappears. Western society stands upon the shoulders of paranoid Christianized societies, driven by fear to out anyone who might be incurring God's wrath. These days, after surviving the Satanic Panics, Red Scares, and literal witch-hunts, it is easy to find nonbelievers at church, simply trying to pass in their community. Theoretically, anyone can get along by saying "God bless" and "Amen," so as to comfort the faithful/fearful.

As Nietzsche taught in The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian social order stands for that which is visual, perfected, and permanent; while the Dionysian stands for the unbound freedom of the Promethean spirit. In America, the Apollonian Puritans worked tirelessly to venerate the Pure and Ineffable by eradicating any devilish Dionysian aspects they might perceive.***** While secular Deist factions balanced these impulses in the 18th century, and 19th-century Romanticists revived Pan and Artemis for their pseudo-Christian mystery rites, the divinity of the paganos persists in the image of The Lamb; or Sol Invictus; or Buddy Jesus; the avatar of YHWH, the storm-deity of the Levant.

In the face of all of this, I cannot say that I believe in any of these deities; but neither can I allow myself the easy out of repudiating them. For those who believe, they exist as the pinnacle of culture: the divinity, for what can be changed; the deity, for that which can only be accepted.

But even while we accept The Deity and His Power -- render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's -- may we yet retain our divinity under duress.

*or a cup of mead; to each their own. **Julius Caesar & friends ***the Druids of Mona, traditionally regarded by the Gauls as the center of oral knowledge in the West ****not new to the Romans, or to the empires they borrowed from; see: Sobek/Re *****one imagines for their War on The Devil the satirical TSA signs from 30 Rock: "See anything, say anything"

[antipythagorasxii]

A Syllabus

In the name of Tri-Via the Third Way, I synthesize from the anecdotal global collective prototypes for the After-Life -- the life that grows on when I have left it behind.

My post-Christian biases will be apparent, if only by the infinite vacuum of my blind spots. The Euro Exodus instituted for its passengers a process of de-culturalization, and so all the knowledge I have ever accrued sits in the shadow of post-Enlightenment thinkers operating within the bounds of an Apollonian bureaucracy: the Cult of Self-Improvement.

The congregation of my youth resented their Christian upbringing, reinforcing my position in the Culture Wars of Reagan's Realm. Now that I'm not marching anymore, Marx guides my heart in empathy: not to argue with the faithful, like Socrates, but to follow the path of the Hegelian Didactic; away from the duality of Thesis/Antithesis, toward Synthesis.

I take my name in honor of Hippasus, the first recorded martyr of mathematics. To him, many heresies are attributed -- irrational numbers, material preceding the incorporeal, a sphere made from twelve pentagons. Legend has it, He and his followers drowned The Acusmatus at sea.

I've taken no lives, but I have killed faith in a higher power; the death of culture pains like a life. Those integers which one man regards irrational may be merely misunderstood. And so, like the mystic teacher Johnny Appleseed, I seek the knowledge to leave in my wake only life.