#relict tree

[all-hail-the-buescher-27]

okay I'm awful at actually like... blogging on this, the blogging site, so here are some photos from a hike I went on with @all-hail-the-conn-8d and @all-hail-the-kazoo yesterday! we found an absolutely massive dead oak that we'd somehow missed on multiple previous hikes, got an update on beaver activities (they're really good at this whole dam-making thing), and reached the northern edge of the park in a season other than winter! also got a chance to drive Audrey (the 1962 Sprite that somehow hasn't really been mentioned here) on the backroads to the park after finally getting the newly-rebuilt handbrake greased up.

[mutant-distraction]

▪️The Massif de Hogar is a mountain range that rises suddenly to the west of Tamanrassete, Algeria. The region has an average height of 900 meters above sea level, the highest point is Mount Tahat, in the center of Atakor. It culminates at 3,003 meters high, and is also the highest peak in Algeria. The Hogar massif is essentially made up of volcanic rocks and constitutes a vast rocky region within the Sahara desert.

▪️The Hoggar Mountains are home to the Ahaggar National Park, one of the country's national parks. ▪️The Hoggar mountain range typically has hot summers, with a cold climate in winter. Temperatures drop below freezing in winter. Precipitation is rare and sporadic throughout the year. However, because the climate is less extreme than in most other areas of the Sahara, the mountains are an important location for biodiversity, including a number of relict species. The Hoggar Mountains are part of the Western Sahara montane xeric forests ecoregion.

▪️The park also contains a population of herbivores, such as the Saharan subspecies of the Berber sheep and the Dorcas gazelle.

The vegetation in this area includes trees such as Vachellia tortilis, Vachellia seyal, myrtle and Tamarix aphylla which are spread throughout the area. Other plants may include Citrullus colocynthis and Calotropis procera .

▪️The Hogar massif is the land of the Imuagues, a tribe of the Tuareg people. The oasis of Abalassa near the town of Tamanrassete is the site of the tomb of the famous leader Tin Hinan, the matriarch believed to have been the ancestor of the Tuareg people in the Hogar Mountains.

📸 By Дмитрий Дубиковский

[talonabraxas]

The Green Man by Talon Abraxas

Symbol of life and nature:

The most common and perhaps obvious interpretation of the Green Man is that of a pagan nature spirit, a symbol of man’s reliance on and union with nature, a symbol of the underlying life-force, and of the renewed cycle of growth each spring. In this respect, it seems likely that he has evolved from older nature deities such as the Celtic Cernunnos and the Greek Pan and Dionysus.

Some have gone so far as to make the argument that the Green Man represents a male counterpart - or son or lover or guardian - to Gaia (or the Earth Mother, or Great Goddess), a figure which has appeared throughout history in almost all cultures. In the 16th Century Cathedral at St-Bertrand de Comminges in southern France, there is even an example of a representation of a winged Earth Mother apparently giving birth to a smiling Green Man.

Because by far the most common occurrences of the Green Man are stone and wood carvings in churches, chapels, abbeys and cathedrals in Europe (particularly in Britain and France), some have seen this as evidence of the vitality of pre-Christian traditions surviving alongside, and even within, the dominant Christian mainstream. Much has been made of the boldness with which the Green Man was exhibited in early Christian churches, often appearing over main doorways, and surprisingly often in close proximity to representations of the Christ figure.

Incorporating a Green Man into the design of a medieval church or cathedral may therefore be seen as a kind of small act of faith on the part of the carver that life and fresh crops will return to the soil each spring and that the harvest will be plentiful. Pre-Christian pagan traditions and superstitions, particularly those related to nature and trees, were still a significant influence in early medieval times, as exemplified by the planting of yew trees (a prominent pagan symbol) in churchyards, and the maintenance of ancient “sacred groves” of trees.

Tree worship goes back into the prehistory of many of the cultures that directly influenced the people of Western Europe, not least the Greco-Roman and the Celtic, which is no great surprise when one considers that much of the continent of Europe was covered with vast forests in antiquity. It is perhaps also understandable that there are concentrations of Green Men in the churches of regions where there were large stretches of relict forests in ancient times, such as in Devon and Somerset, Yorkshire and the Midlands in England. The human-like attributes of trees (trunk-body, branches-arms, twigs-fingers, sap-blood), as well as their strength, beauty and longevity, make them an obvious subject for ancient worship. The Green Man can be seen as a continuing symbol of such beliefs, in much the same way as the later May Day pageants of the Early Modern period, many of which were led by the related figure of Jack-in-the-Green.

Symbol of fertility:

Although the Green Man is most often associated with spring, May Day, etc, there are also several examples which exhibit a more autumnal cast to the figure. For example, some Green Men prominently incorporate pairs of acorns into their designs (there is a good example in King's College Chapel, Cambridge), a motif which clearly has no springtime associations. In the same way, hawthorn leaves frequently appear on English Green Men (such as the famous one at Sutton Benger), and they are often accompanied by autumn berries rather than spring flowers. The Green Man in the Chapelle de Bauffremont in Dijon (one of the few to retain its original paint coloration) shows quite clearly its leaves in their autumn colours.

This may have been simple artistic license. However, acorns, partly due to their shape, were also a common medieval fertility symbol, and hawthorn is another tree which was explicitly associated with sexuality, all of which perhaps suggests a stronger link with fertility, as well as with harvest-time.

Symbol of death and rebirth:

The disgorging Green Man, sprouting vegetation from his orifices, may also be seen as a memento mori, or a reminder of the death that await all men, as well as a Pagan representation of resurrection and rebirth, as new life naturally springs out of our human remains. The Greek and Roman god Dionysus/Bacchus, often suggested as an early precursor of the Green Man, was also associated with death and rebirth in his parallel guise as Okeanus.

Several of the ancient Celtic demigods, Bran the Blessed being one of the best known, become prophetic oracles once their heads had been cut off (another variant on the theme of death and resurrection) and, although these figures were not traditionally represented as decorated with leaves, there may be a link between them and the later stand-alone Green Man heads.

There are several examples of self-consciously skull-like Green Men, with vegetation sprouting from eye-sockets, although these are more likely to be found on tombstones than as decoration in churches (good examples can be seen at Shebbear and Black Torrington in Devon, England). Such images might be interpreted as either representing rebirth and resurrection (in that the new life is growing out of death), or they might represent death and corruption (with the leaves growing parasitically through the decaying body).

The Green Man as archetype:

The very fact that images of the Green Man have appeared historically in such disparate and apparently unconnected locations have led some commentators, notably Roweena Pattee Kryder and William Anderson, to suggest that the figure is part of our collective unconscious, and represents a primeval archetype (in Jungian parlance) which is central to our relationship with Nature.

Phyllis Araneo has suggested that the appearance of the Green Man in European and worldwide art is a cyclical phenomenon triggered by times of crisis or significant change. For example, she suggests the proliferation of Green Man imagery after the 11th Century can perhaps be associated with feelings of relief and celebration after the widely predicted apocalypse of the millennium failed to materialize.

In the same way, the modern resurgence may have been triggered by the environmental crisis we are currently living through. In its modern revival, in the wake of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and the birth of the modern Green movement, the Green Man can be seen as the archetype of the “conservator”, whose brief is to counsel us to take from the environment only what we need to survive and to conserve the rest, and to remind us of our responsibilities for the stewardship of the natural world. A quote from Mike Harding succinctly summarizes this position: “If anything on this poisoned planet gives us hope of renewal it is this simple foliate head that has been there in one form or another since the beginning.”

-The Enigma of the Green Man - Theories and Interpretations

[alphynix]

Strange Symmetries #22: The Whalerus And The Twisted Tusks

Mammalian tusks usually grow in symmetrical pairs with only minor developmental asymmetry, but a few species have evolved much more uneven arrangements.

Odobenocetops peruvianus was a small toothed whale that lived during the Miocene, about 7-3 million years ago, in shallow coastal waters around what is now Peru. Around 3m long (~10'), it was a highly unusual cetacean with binocular vision, a vestigial melon, muscular lips, and a pair of tusks – features convergent with walruses that suggest it had a similar lifestyle suction-feeding on seafloor molluscs and crustaceans.

In males the right tusk was much more elongated than the left, measuring around 50cm long (~1'8") in this species and up to 1.35m (4'5") in the closely related Odobenocetops leptodon. Since these teeth were quite fragile they probably weren't used for any sort of combat, and they may have instead served more of a visual display function.

And despite being closer related to modern narwhals and belugas than to other toothed whales, Odobenocetops' long right-sided asymmetric tusks actually seem to have evolved completely independently from the iconic left-sided asymmetric spiral tusks of narwhals.

———

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) lived across Eurasia and North America during the last ice age, mostly from the Pleistocene about 400,000 years ago to the early Holocene about 10,000 years ago – altohugh a few relict populations survived until around 4,000 years ago in isolated areas of Alaska, Siberia, and eastern Russia.

Around 3m tall at the shoulder (~10ft), these hairy proboscideans had very long curving tusks that were used for digging out vegetation from under snow and ice, scraping bark from trees, and for fighting.

The tusks showed a lot of variation in their curvature, and were often rather asymmetrical, a condition also seen in the closely related Columbian mammoth. Like modern elephants mammoths may have also favored using one side over the other for certain tasks, which over their lifetimes could result in uneven wear exaggerating the natural asymmetry even more.

———

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[boissonsaumiel]

My favorite honey that I get locally boasts to be harvested from bees that pollinate high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I use it for my hōjicha mead. I decided to look up what kind of plants grow there. I assumed the answer would be mostly pine trees, but apparently not. It's these little perennial shrubs.

From the wiki article:

Over 90% of California's alpine flora are perennial herbs.[5]: 18  Annuals are not common.[5]: 18  Depending on the elevation used to define its lower boundary, the Sierra Nevada alpine zone may have almost 600 species, about 200 of which are only found here (endemic).[5]: 17–18 [9] The flora includes plants that are descended from the plants that survived the glaciation of the last ice age (relict plants), because they were growing on mountain peaks that stood above the ice sheets like islands.[6]: 17 

Flowers that survived the last ice age! They were basking in the sunlight above the snowline when all their genetic relives got trapped under un-melting snow and starved in the darkness.

Incredible!

That makes it so much more amazing that I get to eat honey and brew mead from these amazing flowers.

ETA: Nope! I misread the honey description. The elevation was written in feet, not meters, which puts the foraging area in the Sierra Nevada lower montane forest, not the Sierra Nevada alpine zone. My first guess was right. Most of the plants there are various species of pine trees, as well as shrubs like wild currants and lilacs.

[landwriter]

honestly would love to hear more about twinflower if you felt like sharing? :)

I have been drafting this ask response on and off for over a week because I want everyone to love twinflower as much as I do thank you for your patience uh I mean yes! I do feel like sharing! thank you for enabling me! make yourself a cuppa and get comfy. it's Gloam's Natural History Hour, and here is everything you should love about the twinflower

Let us begin with the Latin name: Linnaea borealis. But first, it was Campanula serpyllifolia. Let me explain.

Twinflower is a small and unremarkable evergreen plant that nonetheless captured the heart of one of the world's most influential scientists in the eighteenth century. Species Plantarum is best-known for containing the first consistent use of binomial nomenclature (genus and species), but it was also there that Carl Linnaeus described twinflower for the first time.

It is a creeping subshrub that grows along the ground, with green and glossy shallow-toothed oval leaves about the size of dimes. Blooms come from delicate hairy stems that have unfolded themselves to the comparatively towering height of two or so inches above the ground. They are pinkish-white, nodding, and look like the sort of thing you'd imagine a fairy lives in. As you might suspect from the name, they grow in pairs. Some three centuries after Linnaeus first described it, one Mark C. in the comments of a 2013 blog post described the fragrance as "a delight to the most jaded sniffer".

In portraits, he is often found holding it. (Linnaeus, not Mark C.) He dearly loved it. But he could not name twinflower after himself: at first, it was classified in a different genus, and besides, it was poor taste. What's a guy to do?

Become acquainted with a wealthy Dutch botanist, Gronovius, son not of preachers and peasants but classical scholars, who would name it for him in his honour. Naturally. In gratitude, and advocacy for such acts of commemorative botanical naming, Linnaeus wrote in Critica Botanica:

It is commonly believed that the name of a plant which is derived from that of a botanist shows no connection between the two...[but]...Linnaea was named by the celebrated Gronovius and is a plant of Lapland, lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space — after Linnaeus who resembles it.

He would go on, of course, to receive fanmail from Rousseau. Contemporary Goethe would later write: "With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly."

Lowly Linnaeus himself chose borealis, for Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind; and indeed it grows where the north wind blows, in a great circumboreal ring around the globe, from semi-shaded woodlands in southern British Columbia (hello), to tundra and taiga in Sweden and Siberia. You can find the same blooms in China and Poland and Minnesota. It's as old as glaciers. In Poland and other European countries it is in fact protected as glacial relict, and you can find it isolated at high elevations far south of its range, where it was left behind in the Pleistocene.

And now it is Linnaea borealis.

When Linnaeus was ennobled twenty years later for his services to botany, zoology, and medicine, he put the twinflower on his coat of arms. Some references use hedging (pun intended) language to describe their relationship: he was 'reported to be fond'. It was 'rumoured to be a favourite.' Bullshit, I say. He was in love. Anyone can see it.

One final etymological point of interest: his surname is itself borrowed from nature. After enrolling in university, his father had to abandon his patronymic last name and create family name. A priest, he created the Latinate Linnæus after linden - the great tree that grew on the family homestead.

And so from Latin and nature sprung the name, and not a generation later, unto Latin and nature it had returned. A name crafted of whole cloth in homage an enormous tree now describes the genus of a plant that tops out at three inches tall and has flowers smaller than your thumbnail.

In spite of this, its uses are myriad. A common name of twinflower in Norwegian, nårislegras, translates to corpse rash grass, for its use in treating skin conditions. It can be made into a tea to take in pregnancy or provide relief of menstrual cramps. Scandinavian folk medicines use it for rheumatism. Humans have made it into teas, tinctures, decoctions, poultices, and even administered its therapeutic properties via smoke inhalation. And then there is its persistent and widespread use in filling our hearts: lending itself century over century and season over season to mankind, to a coat of arms, a poem, a photo, a fond memory—

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Woodnotes I, says this of twinflower and the man it's named for:

He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads, And blessed the monument of the man of flowers, Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.

Art is subjective, but I will happily admit I prefer this passage, from Robert of Isle Royale, on the website Minnesota Wildflowers:

My wife and I encountered Linnaea borealis in the last week of June 38 years ago on Isle Royale. We now live in Vilas County in northern Wisconsin and were happy to find a large patch of Twinflowers growing under the sugar maples, balsam fir and hemlock on our property there. This is now very special to us and we await their flowering each June around our anniversary.

A final note. Twinflower requires genetically different individuals to set seed and reproduce sexually. This is known as self-incompatibility. Thus the plants in those isolated spots - old glacial hideouts, or places with fragmented plant populations like Scotland - only reproduce clonally. Let us end with imagining a plant that has not reproduced with another for millennia, but instead carries its line on its own back, and survives by creating itself over and over again, in a genetically identical colony that grows with wet summers and shrinks with dry ones; that briefly blooms every June, lifting its flowers high above itself, a hundred tiny beacons that will be answered only by its own voice; and there, too far for pollination, but a distance you or I could travel in minutes, is its nearest partner, doing the same thing, across an impossible void that looks to us as nothing more than a gap between one part of the woods and the next. Yet it is L. borealis, named for a man named for a tree, that is capable of looking out across generations of humankind walking fragmented pine woodlands and the ghostly southern border of the Laurentide ice sheet, and seeing nothing more than the gap between one seed-set and the next.

Let us end with imagining a tiny plant, and ourselves beside it, loving it for hundreds of years, even smaller.

[pandorias-box]

What's your favorite area of Ultra Space? I've heard there's some pretty wild stuff out there... crystal deserts, jungles where the trees are as tall as Dynamax Pokemon, that sort of thing.

Crystal deserts and odd jungles… You must be describing Ultra Desert and Ultra Jungle respectively, correct? Ah, but that is not the primary focus of the question.

I have talked many a time about how I am fond of both Ultra Hive and Ultra Forest due to both their unique environments and cultures, but one world I have had yet to discuss is the primary homeworld of Stakataka — Ultra Relict.

I have only been there a handful of times, and what I have seen there is truly remarkable. Not only did the native organisms there act as if they were living ruins, but there were actual ruins and ancient artifacts hidden among them indicating that my kind had once tried to inhabit this world but something happened to them.

Was it plague? A natural disaster? Or was it simply because my ancestors migrated to other realms? Much speculation among historians is being debated on the subject even now.

[mountaindmned]

FROM THE FIELD JOURNAL OF DR. LOCKWOOD.

AN ARROW OF YEW AND TAR: AN ENTHNOGRAPHIC AND ETHNOBOTANIC STUDY OF THE TREES AND LOCALS OF MADHEE MOUNTAIN.

A collection of thoughts that will hopefully become a rough draft of a thesis, 2015.

TAXUS MASONII-- think of a pine tree. An evergreen with splayed fingers like needles. But no cones-- no, only bright orange olive-like berries. The interesting thing about T. masonii in particular? It comes from the ice age, the late Pleistocene. It's an extinct cousin of this plant:

Or, it was believed to be extinct until 2015.

Sure, the Yew tree existed all over. It's been used in all sort of cultures to make bows and arrows and to ward off infection. Yew trees have long been connected to death and gateways between life and death in cultures all across the globe.

But this one, this stand was special. Both due to the species and because of the specific beliefs that the caretakers seem to hold.

The relict-- the only living remnants-- of this extinct cousin of the English Yew & the Pacific Yew has only been found on the interior of the northernmost rockies on the crest of [LOCATION REDACTED TO PROTECT THE SITE FROM VANDALISM]

Dr. Sattler did an enthnobiographic study of the area, with Dr. Lockwood interviewing the locals who considered themselves caretakers of the stand of living fossil trees.

The Fiddlers are a group of mixed heritage and origin, not any specific indigenous ties, mostly only significant anthropologically as something that would haunt Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, but the opportunity for a little dime-novel fare has never deterred Dr. Lockwood.

Dr. Lockwood's childhood in Blackwood, Alberta, helped facilitate a connection with Sarah Fiddler for the purpose of being allowed up on the mountain-- locals are slightly more tolerated than strange hikers and Dr. Sattler had to stick close to Dr. Lockwood's side, who in turn had to stay in lockstep with Sarah the entire time.

Dr. Sattler, on the other hand. Dr. Sattler had a feast on her hands regarding the "living fossil" as both doctors hiked up the mountain in the spring-melt.

The trees indeed match the fossils found in Oregon [fg 3] but the locals report that the berries impart a very different property:

To ward off curses.

A poltice is made. Water boiled in a cup carved of a root of T. masoii, then the cup is drunk during a ritual. There does appear to be something akin to a tapetum lucidum effect upon ingesting but that could be a trick of the fire light or have other explanations. There has to be other explanations.

Sarah, the de facto ambassador, explained the purpose of the ritual that Jack was undergoing: He just killed his first creature and this was a rite of passage. He'd gain sharper night vision, better endurance and stamina. Better resistance to fire-- even become "brothers" with the fire that seems to sacred to these people.

The Fiddlers appear to have no ill effects on ingesting yew. Sattler even supplied [DATA REDACTED DUE TO ETHICAL CONCERNS]. The Fiddlers survived and simply said it tasted "a bit off".

The Fiddlers do seem to have an allergy to mistletoe. While mistletoe is mostly only seen growing on deciduous trees, the variant here seems to thrive on a certain patch of oak that grows near the entrance of the mines. (Dr. Lockwood was warned not to enter the mines and he complied.)

The Fiddlers, following any grevious injury that would prevent them from "hunting", have a particular death-ritual. Yew and mistletoe are placed in the mouth. If the victim is able to chew, they will chew it themselves while humming, if not then someone will work the jaw muscles while someone else taps at the throat in a similar rhythm as the "blessing-song".

The eyes slide open and glow orange and the injury seems to, for lack of a better phrase, burn itself closed. Embers are visible from within as the wound reeks of burning flesh and blood. A wide and puckered scar is left behind, and the victim regains consciousness.

Fletcher, the one who participated in one of these rituals following a massive neck injury, reported "I dunno, I guess it stings a bit and I got a cough but it don't hurt" as Dr. Lockwood asked about ill effects from what the more fanciful would call being ressurected.

The Fiddlers carve staves from the gnarled yew branches and cover them in pine pitch from the the same. It's the burning yew that does the trick, according to "Gramps" Joseph Fiddler. He refused to elaborate outside of "Yew has always been used to keep the dead beneath the ground. The fire helps the ash enter their lungs, or what passes for lungs with these damned things."

Another on the mountain at the time, Sarah, offered a bit more of an explanation: "Mistletoe has been used for ages as a sacred sort of weapon, we mix the mistletoe berries and the pine pitch on the yew stave. You stab the beast, it seems to kill them. As close as killing as can be done to things that walked out of hell."

Lockwood would like to express that he didn't see these "damned creatures" during the entirety of the month long study. Sattler claimed to [THE FOLLOWING THREE PAGES ARE SCRIBBLED OUT].

[THE NEXT THREE PAGES READ AS FOLLOWS:]

The yew must be defended the yew must be defended the yew is our only hope of survival [ad nauseum]

[scribbled on a post-it note and stapled to the back page: ]

Dr. Eric Sattler has been admitted following an episode on Madhee Mountain in Alberta, Canada. It seems that he ingested a variation of yew there-- known widely to be toxic. A hallucinatory episode followed, Lockwood had to keep her from clawing her own eyes out as she screamed about "the green stalkers"

I am barely coherent myself, I lack words for what I've seen-- done-- to survive.

No further contact with the Fiddlers or the shockingly extant species of T. masonii is advised.

[horsesource]

"To invoke psychopathology is to address infancy..To argue with the logic with which people defend their behavior is to threaten those very acts of defense that stand between them and a frightful chasm..

Most of us fail to become as mature as we might..Among those relict tribal peoples who seem to live at peace with their world, who feel themselves to be guests rather than masters, the ontogeny of the individual has some characteristic features. I conjecture that their ontogeny is healthier than ours (for which I will be seen as sentimental and romantic) and that it may be considered a standard from which we have deviated..

This seed of normal ontogeny is present in all of us..Yet the setting of that relationship was, in the evolution of humankind, a surround of living plants, rich in texture, smell, and motion. The unfiltered, unpolluted air, the flicker of wild birds, real sunshine and rain, mud to be tasted and tree bark to grasp, the sounds of wind and water, the voices of animals and insects and humans — all these are not vague and pleasant amenities for the infant, but the stuff out of which its second grounding, even while in its mother’s arms, has begun. The outdoors is also in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of the fetal landscape (which is not so constant as was once supposed). The surroundings are also that which will be swallowed, internalized, incorporated as the self..

The child sees the adults dancing the animal movements and does it too. Music itself has been there all the time, from his mother’s song to the melodies of birds and the howls of wolves. The child already feels the mystery of kinship: likeness but difference. Animals have a magnetic attraction for the child, for each in its way seems to embody some impulse, reaction, or movement that is 'like me.' In the playful, controlled enactment of these comes a gradual mastery of the personal inner zoology of fears, joys, and relationships..

When the male juvenile goes out with adults to seek a hidden root or to stalk an antelope, he sees the unlimited possibilities of affiliation with the environment, for success is understood to depend on the readiness of the prey or tuber as much as on the skill of the forager.

He can climb and splash and dig and explore the infinite riches about him. In time he increasingly wants to make things and to understand what he cannot touch or change, to wonder about that which is unseen. His world is full of stories told; hearing of a recent hunt, tales of renowned events, and epics with layers of meaning. He has been bathed in voices of one kind or another always. Voices last only for their moment of sound, but they originate in life. The child learns that all life tells something and that all sound, from the frog calling to the sea surf, issues from a being kindred and significant to himself, telling some tale, giving some clue, mimicking some rhythm that he should know. There is no end to what is to be learned.

The child does not yet philosophize on this; he is shielded from speculation and abstraction by the intimacy of his psyche with his environment. The child is free, much as the creatures around him — that is, free to be delicately watchful, not only of animals but of people, among whom life is not ranked subordination to authority..All this is augured in the nonhuman world, not because he never sees dominant and subordinate animals, creatures killing other creatures, or trees whose shade suppresses the growth of other plants, but because, reaching puberty, he is on the brink of a miracle of interpretation that will transform those things.

At the end of childhood he comes to some of the most thrilling days of his life. The transition he faces will be experienced by body and ritual in concert. The childhood of journeying in a known world, scrutinizing and mimicking natural forms, and always listening has prepared him for a whole new octave in his being. The clock of his body permits it to be done, and the elders of his life will see that he is initiated. It is a commencement into a world foreshadowed by childhood: home, good, unimaginably rich, sometimes painful, scrutable with care.

The quests and tests that mark his passage in adolescent initiation are not intended to reveal to him that his love of the natural world was an illusion or that, having seemed only what it was, it in some way failed him. He will not put his delight in the sky and the earth behind him as a childish and irrelevant thing. He will graduate not out of that world but into its significance. So, with the end of childhood, he begins a lifelong study, a reciprocity with the natural world in which its depths are as endless as his own creative thought. He will not study it in order to transform its liviness into mere objects that represent his ego, but as a poem, numinous and analogical, of human society.

Western civilized cultures, by contrast, have largely abandoned the ceremonies of adolescent initiation that affirm the metaphoric, mysterious, and poetic quality of nature, reducing them to aesthetics and amenities. But our human developmental program requires external models of order — if not a community of plants and animals, then words in a book, the ranks and professions of society, or the machine. If the ritual basis of the order-making metaphor is inadequate, the world can rigidify at the most literal level of juvenile understanding and so become a boring place, which the adult will ignore as repetitive or exploit as mere substance..

In such societies — and I include ours — the persistence of certain infantile qualities might help the individual adapt better: fear of separation, fantasies of omnipotence, oral preoccupation, tremors of helplessness, and bodily incompetence and dependence. Biological evolution cannot meet the demands of these new societies.. Programmed for the slow development toward a special kind of sagacity, we live in a world where that humility and tender sense of human limitation is no longer rewarded. Yet we suffer for the want of that vanished world, a deep grief we learn to misconstrue...

Retarded in the unfolding of his inner calendar, the individual is silently engineered to domesticate his integrity and share the collective dream of mastery. Changing the world becomes an unconscious, desperate substitute for changing the self.

The trouble with the eagerness to make a world is that, because the world is already made, what is there must first be destroyed.. And so we come to our own time. The same questions are asked: To what extent does the technological/urban society work because its members are ontogenetically stuck? What are the means and the effects of this psychological amputation?

The question of our own disabilities of ontogeny cannot be answered simply as the cumulative momentum of the past coming to bear on the present. The culture of urban technicity works out its own deformities of ontogenesis...Adaptability is the more vaunted trait-adaptability, that is, in the sense of flexibility, a readiness to change jobs, addresses, or beliefs — celebrated by the technocratic ideal of progress in convenience, comfort, safety, insulation, and the stimulus of novelty. This kind of adaptability is not of a citizenship that transcends place and time, but of not yet being adapted, of never finding one’s place or time..

it is no surprise that the 'adaptability society' celebrates childhood, admires youth, and despises age, equating childhood with innocence, wisdom, and spiritual power. Its members cling to childhood, for their own did not serve its purpose. To those for whom adult life is admixed with decrepit childhood, the unfulfilled promise cannot be abandoned. To wish to remain childlike, to foster the nostalgia for childhood, is to grieve for our own lost maturity, not because maturity is synonymous with childhood, but because then it was still possible to move, epigenetically, toward maturity.

The effects of the historical march away from nature, resulting in socially assimilated deprivation, can be seen in key elements of the European American personality. The American is not the profligate anti-European; he is, in respect to certain characteristics, the full embodiment of Western, classical, Christian human, enabled by the colossal richness of an unexploited continent to play out the wrenching alienation that began five to ten thousand years ago, with the advent of agricultural practices. Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating enemies, having everything now and new, despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, being swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent: all are familiar images of American society. They are the signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climates where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems, private nightmares expanded to a social level.

All Westerners are heir, not only to the self-justifications of recent technophilic Promethean impulses, but to the legacy of the whole. We may now be the possessors of the world’s flimsiest identity structure, the products of a prolonged tinkering with ontogenesis — by Paleolithic standards, childish adults..the private cost is massive therapy, escapism, intoxicants, narcotics, fits of destruction and rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies that exhibit this callow ineptitude at every level, and, perhaps worst of all, a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly perceive as having failed us. From this erosion of human nurturing comes the failure of the passages of the life cycle and the exhaustion of our ecological accords.

In the city-world of today, infinite wants are pursued as though the environment were an amnion and technology a placenta..The high percentage of neuroses in Western society seems often to be interpreted as a sign of a highly stressful 'life-style.' If you add to it — or see it acted out as — the insanities of nationalism, war, and biome busting, it seems a matter less of life-style than of an epidemic of the mutilation of ontogeny."

Paul Howe Shepard

[verecunda]

Thank you, nonny! I'll admit, I wasn't quite sure what sort of dynamic you were after. I don't ship these two romantically, but I can certainly do some family fluff. :)

-

When Celebrimbor was not to be found in the smithy, Galadriel sought him in the gardens. She found him in the arbour where he most preferred to go when he was thinking, the holly trees gleaming on either side, the berries brightly red, as they were the year round in Ost-in-Edhil. As the path turned the corner that brought him into sight, she saw him reading from a letter. Sensing her approach, he raised his hand to her in greeting, a smile already upon his face, but she saw at once that it wanted its proper brightness, and his eyes were sad. “Cousin.” He sounded glad — grateful, even — to see her, and stood to greet her as she approached. They embraced, then sat down together on the bench, he shifting along to make room for her. “I thought I should find you here,” said Galadriel. Close to, she saw even more clearly the shadow that was upon him, and gently, cupped a hand about his cheek, peering into his face. “What is it that troubles you?”

“Oh…” He looked faintly embarrassed, perhaps at his being so easily read. “Nothing of any great moment. I had a letter this morning.” He tapped the parchment in his lap. “From Lindon?” “Nay, from the Greenwood. I wrote to Oropher, back at the beginning of the spring, offering him the Mírdain’s aid in building this new city of his at Amon Lanc.” “Ah,” she breathed, with an unhappy feeling of what was coming. “He refused?” He passed the letter to her. “See for yourself.” As she began reading, he went on, “Oh, it is perfectly courteous, but its meaning is plain enough. He would rather a thousand dragons on his doorstep than any relict of the House of Fëanor.” Galadriel, reading, could see that this was precisely the feeling contained behind the careful, cool words scribed upon the page; and she handed it back to Celebrimbor with a look of sympathy. “I am sorry.” He shrugged, rolling up the letter and setting it aside. “I expected it. And I can hardly blame him for wanting nothing to do with me.” “It is hardly just to blame a son for the deeds of his father,” said Galadriel. Especially, she thought, when that father had already paid for his deeds with his life. Aloud she added, not without some bitterness: “But then, Oropher is hardly reasonable where we of the Noldor are concerned.” “No.” Celebrimbor shook his head. “It is his right, and I knew it must happen upon a time that I would find certain doors shut against me. But I had thought — I had hoped — that this might be something I could do to close the gulf, even a little.” Suddenly his fists clenched, and his face, so often mild and placid, twisted with frustration. “If I only had a chance! All these long years, I have kept my head down; yet still, whilst I live, the House of Fëanor endures, and I would mend our legacy if I could. There is so much that must be healed and mended — so much I could do, if only I were given the chance to do it!” As he spoke, his voice rose and his head lifted, his eyes shining, his whole face alight with the fire of ambition that was in him. Seeing him so, Galadriel felt an inward disquiet, for it was in this mood that he most resembled Curufin and Fëanor: that fire of ambition and will that consumed all else, hardly seeing aught that lay between them and their object. But at the same time, her mind was also filled with other memories: of Celebrimbor, when he was hardly yet old enough to walk, sitting in the corner of a room in the house of Finwë, intent on mending the fine gold chain of a necklace belonging to his mother; inexpertly fitting one of his father’s files back onto its handle; building strongolds of out of sand and shells with Idril on the strand at the Swan-haven. And later still: she thought of her last visit to Nargothrond, just after Finrod was lost, and finding Celebrimbor at home among Orodreth’s smiths, raising a sooty hand to her in greeting; taking charge of the field-forges during the last war, almost every hour that he did not spend in battle spent mending old arms and crafting new, for Elves and Men and Maiar alike. That was the great difference between Celebrimbor and his sires, she thought. Yes, sometimes it was possible to glimpse that same fierce fire within him, but his delight had ever been in mending as much as making, in giving gifts and repairing much-loved belongings; in sharing the joy of his craft with loved ones and strangers alike.

With this thought, she reached out and put her arms about him, holding him close. And after a first surprised moment, he sighed and rested his head against her shoulder, accepting her comfort. For an instant he seemed very young again, her little cousin, and with a sudden fierce protectiveness, she brushed a kiss to his brow. “Your time will come, Celebrimbor,” she said, the foreknowledge already deepening in her heart. “You have been patient this long; only be patient a little longer. And remember always that there are many who love you.” “Always my wise cousin,” he murmured, and smiled at her: a true smile this time. “Thank you, Galadriel.” “Enough of Oropher, then,” she said decisively, and smiling, turned the subject to something more agreeable. “What say you to this proposed emissary to the Dwarves?”

[artapir]

Not true elephant trees, but relict bioartifacts left behind by some alt-terrestrial superciv. Organic water filters, perhaps...?

Midjourney v4

[welcometomyweird]

The Case for Sasquatch

Among other projects I currently have in progress, I recently began outlining a book about American folklore and the place and uses it can have in the practices of Neo-Paganism. It’s not exactly a topic wherein one would expect to find a section on relict hominoids, more commonly known as Sasquatch in North America, but once my gears started turning, it made a lot of sense. Now, before you roll your eyes and scroll on by, hear me out.

The chapter is tentatively titled “Cryptid Consciousness” (an obvious play on “Krishna Consciousness”) and the chapter suggests the potential power in what the creatures represent. Cryptid lore is essentially the fairy lore of America and anyone who has ever been curious about magical practices that are alive and well today knows that there are plenty of books on fairy lore and the magic that can be done with it. So, what “magic” can be done with Bigfoot? Well, I will tell you.

As I have stated, my position on relict hominoids and other so-called “cryptids” is a loud and confident, “I don’t know.” I am completely agnostic. Until I am looking any of these creatures in the eye, I have no idea if they truly walk among us or if they’re just folktales and urban legends. However, when you take the time to really examine “Bigfoot”, what is he/she/it?

Indigenous Americans have known of these creatures for centuries. Many tribes saw the “Hairy men” as another tribe of people. In many areas, these stories are still being passed down. There is actually a wonderful of “Sasquatch Tracks” about this (ST 044). I’m not saying that this is evidence of a corporeal existence, but these stories are significant in that they gave us an insight into what these beings symbolize and how that fits in to today’s practicing Pagans.

Many people who come into Neo-Paganism are looking for a way to connect with the natural world around them. Modern humans are getting more and more disconnected from nature and, quite frankly, from reality altogether. (The internet is not a real place people. Get outside, walk on the beach, touch grass, dance in the rain.) It is this desire to reconnect, to find harmony and balance with nature that relict hominoids come in. Real or not, they symbolize that connection, that ability to live in total harmony with our natural environment.

If they are real, they have the ability to do everything they need to do to survive and not leave a trace. Modern humans can’t do that. We can’t resist the compulsion to leave something to prove we exist. Don’t believe me? Take a walk in a local park. Count how many trees have people’s initials carved into them. You don’t see Sasquatch doing that. You don’t see Sasquatch at all, but that’s the point. If they exist, they don’t leave anything behind that would tell us definitively that they’re among us.

Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I am starting to lean toward the corporeal reality of relict hominoids. That “Crimson Peak” quote I used in my post about ghosts can almost apply to Sasquatch, too. In fact, there have been more Sasquatch sightings reported in the last century than there have been sightings of wolverines, yet we have no trouble believing that wolverines exist. Make that make sense because I can’t.

If we choose to accept the existence of Sasquatch, my suppositions that they live so harmoniously with nature that they don’t leave physical traces, which is entirely possible, it explains a lot. It explains why they were able to live alongside pre-colonial Indigenous Americans because they lived very much the same way. Take only what you need, waste nothing, leave no trace. It explains how they have managed to avoid the trackers and scientists attempting find them. These wild places are their home. They know every nook and cranny. I don’t care how much survivalist training you’ve had or how many books on tracking you’ve read. If someone or something doesn’t want to be found, they won’t be. Their way of life also explains why they really want nothing to do modern people, We’re greedy, prideful, wasteful hairless apes. They have no use for us because we don’t respect the land.

Again, this is all speculation. I don’t know what they are or if they are.  No one really does. All we have are the stories we hear and one ancient video clip from a guy who was allegedly caught with his proverbial trousers down as he was intending to perpetrate a hoax when an actual “Bigfoot” (forever known as Patty) walked into the frame. I don’t call it irrefutable evidence, but the late John Keel had printed on his business card, I’m “Not An Authority On Anything.” I’m just weird chick tossing ideas out into the void.

Until next time, my strangelings.

Peace, love and cheesecake.

[mutant-distraction]

▪️The Massif de Hogar is a mountain range that rises suddenly to the west of Tamanrassete, Algeria. The region has an average height of 900 meters above sea level, the highest point is Mount Tahat, in the center of Atakor. It culminates at 3,003 meters high, and is also the highest peak in Algeria. The Hogar massif is essentially made up of volcanic rocks and constitutes a vast rocky region within the Sahara desert.

▪️The Hoggar Mountains are home to the Ahaggar National Park, one of the country's national parks. ▪️The Hoggar mountain range typically has hot summers, with a cold climate in winter. Temperatures drop below freezing in winter. Precipitation is rare and sporadic throughout the year. However, because the climate is less extreme than in most other areas of the Sahara, the mountains are an important location for biodiversity, including a number of relict species. The Hoggar Mountains are part of the Western Sahara montane xeric forests ecoregion.

▪️The park also contains a population of herbivores, such as the Saharan subspecies of the Berber sheep and the Dorcas gazelle.

The vegetation in this area includes trees such as Vachellia tortilis, Vachellia seyal, myrtle and Tamarix aphylla which are spread throughout the area. Other plants may include Citrullus colocynthis and Calotropis procera .

▪️The Hogar massif is the land of the Imuagues, a tribe of the Tuareg people. The oasis of Abalassa near the town of Tamanrassete is the site of the tomb of the famous leader Tin Hinan, the matriarch believed to have been the ancestor of the Tuareg people in the Hogar Mountains.

📸 By Дмитрий Дубиковский

[talonabraxas]

The Enigma of the Green Man

Symbol of life and nature: The Celtic nature god Cernunnos from the Gundestrup Cauldron (1st Century BCE, now in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen)

The Celtic nature god Cernunnos from the Gundestrup Cauldron (1st Century BCE, now in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen)

The most common and perhaps obvious interpretation of the Green Man is that of a pagan nature spirit, a symbol of man’s reliance on and union with nature, a symbol of the underlying life-force, and of the renewed cycle of growth each spring. In this respect, it seems likely that he has evolved from older nature deities such as the Celtic Cernunnos and the Greek Pan and Dionysus.

Some have gone so far as to make the argument that the Green Man represents a male counterpart - or son or lover or guardian - to Gaia (or the Earth Mother, or Great Goddess), a figure which has appeared throughout history in almost all cultures. In the 16th Century Cathedral at St-Bertrand de Comminges in southern France, there is even an example of a representation of a winged Earth Mother apparently giving birth to a smiling Green Man.

Because by far the most common occurrences of the Green Man are stone and wood carvings in churches, chapels, abbeys and cathedrals in Europe (particularly in Britain and France), some have seen this as evidence of the vitality of pre-Christian traditions surviving alongside, and even within, the dominant Christian mainstream. Much has been made of the boldness with which the Green Man was exhibited in early Christian churches, often appearing over main doorways, and surprisingly often in close proximity to representations of the Christ figure.

Incorporating a Green Man into the design of a medieval church or cathedral may therefore be seen as a kind of small act of faith on the part of the carver that life and fresh crops will return to the soil each spring and that the harvest will be plentiful. Pre-Christian pagan traditions and superstitions, particularly those related to nature and trees, were still a significant influence in early medieval times, as exemplified by the planting of yew trees (a prominent pagan symbol) in churchyards, and the maintenance of ancient “sacred groves” of trees.

Tree worship goes back into the prehistory of many of the cultures that directly influenced the people of Western Europe, not least the Greco-Roman and the Celtic, which is no great surprise when one considers that much of the continent of Europe was covered with vast forests in antiquity. It is perhaps also understandable that there are concentrations of Green Men in the churches of regions where there were large stretches of relict forests in ancient times, such as in Devon and Somerset, Yorkshire and the Midlands in England. The human-like attributes of trees (trunk-body, branches-arms, twigs-fingers, sap-blood), as well as their strength, beauty and longevity, make them an obvious subject for ancient worship. The Green Man can be seen as a continuing symbol of such beliefs, in much the same way as the later May Day pageants of the Early Modern period, many of which were led by the related figure of Jack-in-the-Green.

Symbol of fertility: Although the Green Man is most often associated with spring, May Day, etc, there are also several examples which exhibit a more autumnal cast to the figure. For example, some Green Men prominently incorporate pairs of acorns into their designs (there is a good example in King's College Chapel, Cambridge), a motif which clearly has no springtime associations. In the same way, hawthorn leaves frequently appear on English Green Men (such as the famous one at Sutton Benger), and they are often accompanied by autumn berries rather than spring flowers. The Green Man in the Chapelle de Bauffremont in Dijon (one of the few to retain its original paint coloration) shows quite clearly its leaves in their autumn colours.

This may have been simple artistic license. However, acorns, partly due to their shape, were also a common medieval fertility symbol, and hawthorn is another tree which was explicitly associated with sexuality, all of which perhaps suggests a stronger link with fertility, as well as with harvest-time.

Symbol of death and rebirth: Green Man in the form of a skull on a gravestone in Shebbear, Devon, England (photo Simon Garbutt)

Green Man in the form of a skull on a gravestone in Shebbear, Devon, England

The disgorging Green Man, sprouting vegetation from his orifices, may also be seen as a memento mori, or a reminder of the death that await all men, as well as a Pagan representation of resurrection and rebirth, as new life naturally springs out of our human remains. The Greek and Roman god Dionysus/Bacchus, often suggested as an early precursor of the Green Man, was also associated with death and rebirth in his parallel guise as Okeanus.

Several of the ancient Celtic demigods, Bran the Blessed being one of the best known, become prophetic oracles once their heads had been cut off (another variant on the theme of death and resurrection) and, although these figures were not traditionally represented as decorated with leaves, there may be a link between them and the later stand-alone Green Man heads.

There are several examples of self-consciously skull-like Green Men, with vegetation sprouting from eye-sockets, although these are more likely to be found on tombstones than as decoration in churches (good examples can be seen at Shebbear and Black Torrington in Devon, England). Such images might be interpreted as either representing rebirth and resurrection (in that the new life is growing out of death), or they might represent death and corruption (with the leaves growing parasitically through the decaying body).

The Green Man by Talon Abraxas

[lustrumlane]

The Applebright's Rot

“We hear it in your hearts: Emerson Tiels.”

“The sound is dolorous, the painful ringing in your mind: ‘why?’”

The Emissaries begin their performance dutifully, bringing two of their hands together: they clasp one over the other and grip tightly before raising the shape between them.

Part I

“An apple is a sanctuary to that inside, the skin is a barrier to that which would eat. It will one day die, it must be eaten, but the skin does not want this; it exists to lose.”

They bring their other hands over the two joined, making two four and holding tighter.

”The skin outlived the tree and became too tough; the seeds inside could not grow, suffocated by the apple itself. So long as the meat was sweet, the seeds could not tell the rest was long dead. The skin became harder and harder to protect that which was soft.”

They turn their hands and push their fingers through the bottom two hands, twisting all four hands together.

“This seed met a worm who said: there is so much more, you should be a tree, not a seed. If you stay, you and this skin will rot together; you’ll all become nothing.”

“We do not understand the item itself, but the keys you have been given appear to be powerful things.”

They take their hands apart, leaving them touching at the fingertips, making an expanded, square-like shape with two of their hands as they turn to face the audience again.

“Using this key, the seed approached his captor. He sought his truth by force: with this key, he accessed the knowledge that lay deep in its mind: what are you hiding from me?”

“From this seed grew a poison tree; watered in fears, with tears.”

“And it grew both day and night, till it bore an apple bright.”

One Emissary turns to the other and takes them by the chest, grabbing their scarf and rocking them back and forth.

“This hurt was repaid again and again until the futility felt sickening; a thing cannot die by any meager means when caught in Lustrum’s web, so the machine would reappear again and again, greeting him over and over no matter what action was taken.”

Then, suddenly, they let go, letting the other fall away.

“Maddening, to be caught in another cycle. Do the days ever end?”

They regain their footing and step together again, facing one another.

“Something had to change. He became a tool again. Telling everything he knew to the machine, he was given a plan.”

“The programming was done in elegant script to give the tool all he needed: two locked rooms only he could pass between. If no one knew, he would be safe. It should have been perfect.”

Part II

Now one starts to walk while the other follows, a weaving sway to their movements.

“Meanwhile, the song-sick composite pursued that annoying relict around the arcade, begging for sweet things he hardly cared to hear.”

“‘Anything, friend, anything; I’ll take whatever you have, just please let me have it, for it is what I am without what it is, and to live without is not to live!’”

“With a plan of his own, the relict agreed; but plans half-baked do not rise.”

One Emissary sweeps an arm out wide, the other’s arm low as they crouch.

“It draws a path of violence and panic, it seeks the familiar and finds the foreign, danger around every corner!”

“It’s only solace is in the tool’s machine, who, on hearing such horrible chaos, knows its own plan has been compromised: if this thing is here, it cannot be there, thus, the arcade’s doors cannot lock as they should, such as we’ve already programmed it to.”

“Such a simple error. The thought of its tool being seen and caught unaware in the act could not be abided, so it formed a new plan to patch this hole.”

“The composite was filled with not one but two, and the two repaired his tools of violence. Before the machine could properly take control, a bysander wandered in; and you know how this goes, and you’re familiar with the song.”

One Emissary points at the other, making a swinging motion with their arm, and the other kneels quickly, leaning back. The one standing turns away, and the one on the ground rises to step around them and they join hands again.

“Retreat to safety, to the arcade, to the familiar: the machine and relict are in agreement on the destination.”

“Here, they find an accomplice for a crime uncommitted, and more importantly, a place to dispose of the stubborn program that would not leave.”

“The automaton listened to the panicked thing’s cries and held it in its palms, it told it not to worry: it would protect it in itself, it would protect it from it all.”

“A savior, a bulwark, a light in the dark to this haggard lemming. ‘I would make them cut through me before they can consider hurting you’ it says as the worm is placed in its own skull.”

“Genuine, truly, this compassion was real; moreso, a convenient thing for the other machine, who removed the spells placed on the composite and exited the arcade to patrol, ensuring no one would step inside and interrupt its tool’s plan.”

Part III

The Emissaries walk in a circle, matching one another.

“All this time, the plan had been afoot. With his peers, the tool had entered the arcade with everything he needed. He knew which test must be chosen for the separation, all had been made clear thanks to the test operator’s knowledge.”

Then, they stand back to back, one holding their hands in front of their face.

“They step in as one and the machine’s tool is left alone in the console room. He knew, so long as he stayed quiet and sweet, the real operator would have no reason to look; so much became clear to him when he saw her files laid out.”

“Using the sleeping copy of the test operator, he was able to exit: acting as her, he has full permissions to do as he wanted. This is the privilege of an administrator.”

“He sets a standard for practice and connects the phone to the console, plumbing the sleeping copy of the test operator’s mind for answers. She would know what comes next, for the answers do not change.”

“This is the moment in which the music was heard, that of the arcade: the small thing on the phone heard, but could not see, she could not act, she had been disabled down to nearly nothing.”

“All she knew was something was wrong. Nothing to be done. The door closed behind him, for he only used her credentials to open it for a moment.”

They separate and walk in a circle again, the opposite way now.

“Who was Uroro Zenzen?”

“A coveted moppet, an effigy of power. He thought himself a hurricane when he was only the rain.”

“Raw and tempestuous, wild and natural; nothing without the wind, nothing without guidance.”

“Left alone for a final time, he stood alone: it was a targeting of convenience. His nature was not known, not truly, for a tool struggles with nothing more than that it is not made for.”

“A drug transformed, seaweed slipped into a snack. An ordinary man would have fallen into a peaceful slumber, but this one woke to a terrible nightmare.”

One Emissary grabs the other and spins them around a few times before tossing them roughly to the ground, causing them to roll before catching themself.

“Cruel, violent; now this is fear, now this is rage. He saw the tool, he lashed out: this story would have ended differently should this have continued.”

“The machine saw this from its post and could not stand by. Mercilessly, the monster was taken down, for this could not be a human, no.”

“Could any of you be, when by every logical process, you have been dead for years and years and years? Deaths calculated or even recorded? Only one man is truly alive: all else is nothing to this machine.”

The one on the ground rights itself and hops towards the other, stepping behind them with a spin before taking their neck and putting their hands around it.

“Intercession. This monster continues to fight until the last, but the machine tips the tides. Lucky, with a nearby mallet, he is finished.”

One’s head falls to the side. Then, they step apart and walk opposite ways.

“The tool uses his bracelet, with the administrative credentials copied onto it, to re-enter: this causes an error, as this device is not recognized. He does not realize this, but the door remains open.”

“The machine exits and runs to the House of Refulgences to return to its cage before it's caught: it does not make it. It hides in the composite as quiet as one can be.”

“And a guest is invited into Uroro Zenzen who answers, rising to his feet to pursue the tool. Damaged, he only enters the room as the others enter the victor’s hall, the killer escapes.”

“He knows discovery is near, he knows we will remove him, he knows he should not be here, so he performs a rite to seal himself in this corpse so that we cannot send him away.”

“Petulant.”

“Thus, here we are.”

The pair then stop, releasing one another and standing side by side.

“This is how it happened. We give you this truth.”

“Your judgement is correct. Emerson Tiels did the deed.”

[krakensdottir]

Opossums are almost the only marsupials outside of Australia. The thing you probably didn't know is that opossums are an entire ORDER, Didelphimorphia, with something like 125 species in it. The Virginia opossum we're mostly familiar with is the only one in North America, so that's where the misconception probably comes from. But down in Central and South America you've got the water opossum, tiny little mouse opossums, short-tailed opossums that look a little like shrews, four-eyed opossums (they don't actually have four eyes, just spots above the eyes), fat-tailed opossums - all sorts of adorable little freaks.

(There are also the shrew opossums, which are called opossums but get their own order because they're bizarre little throwbacks and might've diverged off the marsupial tree before any of the others. It's ok if you haven't heard of them, not many people have, and they like it that way.)

The other branch of marsupials is Australidelphia, which has all the, well, Australian ones. EXCEPT! There used to be australidelphians in the Americas too. They've all died out, leaving only fossils... except for one: the monito del monte, the little thing Bunjy posted above. It's what we call a relict species, because it's the only member of its lineage in the region (in this case, the entire continent) and its nearest relatives are 15,000 km away in Oceania. Extinction came calling and this guy just didn't pick up the phone. (It was probably napping. Monito del monte is nocturnal and does not answer the phone during business hours.)

on the topic of different unrelated aquatic mammals wasn't there also one marsupial that became aquatic and is notable as the ONLY semiaquatic marsupial?

somehow it gets past the whole "babies might drown in the pouch" issue

yeah, the yapok! it's native to mexico and central america, and it's the result of the north american branch of opossums trying to make an otter and mostly succeeding :)

there are many many MANY partially-aquatic mammals out there, but only a few totally-aquatic marine mammals.