“Two-faced Janus, you who know the things that have already passed and the things to come, and who can see the grimaces behind you just as well as those before, why do they fashion you with so many eyes and why so many faces? Is it because your image teaches men to have kept an eye open all around them?”–Alciati Emblematum, Emblema XVIII

“But the Great Spy-Glass…had eyes of it upon every side of The Mighty Pyramid, and did be truly an Huge Machine”–From The Night Land

“Time-released aspirin…”–Richard C. Hoagland

 

Fear of the deep future (or the deep past) suggests a morally ambiguous universe that goes on without us. All activity within it continues without a care for human dreams or aspirations to heaven or a damning to hell. Grinding all into entropic detritus time with it’s continual unending and unforgiving forward motion invokes a sense of despair. It’s one thing that we die but, if meaning itself dies, this conjures up more complex ontological problems drowned by a simple one: that there is no meaning, the unknown rules supreme and that we exist in the deep past of some unholy future. Perhaps this is why cycles were developed by various metaphysical systems to re-direct time’s incessant march into a tomorrow of unmeaning and back into new controlled beginnings which simultaneously attempt to control the past. Rather than suffer the universe to fall away into a complete quiescence of all matter, both seen and unseen into a fathomless “Nothing”, regardless of which way time faces, we struggle with it and define our existence by the boundaries of its “nothing and all” quality. ¹⁾On this note see David Goff’s overview of Hodgson’s Night Land and Victorian era painting specifically how they relate to the perception of TimeHodgson struggles with time’s forboding in The Night Land, where love symbolizes, much like it did for Jacob Boehme, an principle that attempts to transcend the circumscribed “Ring-Pass-Not” of time’s eternal orbit and unite “nothing and all” into a coherent master-key of universal purpose. ²⁾The cosmic conceptions of Jacob Boehme, illustrated by Dionysius Freher and William Law, are crucial geometric and cosmogonic symbols. They are sources for unravelling the mysteries which are seemingly involved in the Geheime Figuren and Von Welling diagrams. In one of the diagrams by Law we read: “Outbreathed exhalation of spirit and spirit which is called time in this world.” (Emphasis mine). In Boehme’s vision, there are two outpourings, one Fierceness, another, Light. A third produced from the two is called Conflict. Truly, a  “War in Heaven”…

Time is one of the greatest symbols of the ancient mysteries and is said to be the key to the riddle of existence. Time, as perceived by intelligent beings in “three” dimensional space, is a threefold creature. Like the “Bifrons Janus”,³⁾“Janus (/ˈdʒeɪnəs/;Latin: Ianus, pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings and transitions,^[1] and thereby of gates, doors, doorways, passages and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past.” it lurks at the threshold of the year with its two faces looking into the past and the future. Yet, it has an additional third face (an unseen third of Janus?)⁴⁾See an interesting interpretation of the faces of Janus with Masonic symbols on the frontispiece of Johann Valantine Andrea’s Mythologia Christianae. see here. which meditates on the present. Each face of time has its own qualitative aspect but, of these three faces of time, the future promises a richness fulfilled for “what dreams may come” and also a particularly haunting reagent of fear; the kind of fear that William Hope Hodgson works into The Night Land and which H.P. Lovecraft invokes with his memorable “fear of the unknown” quality but using the past as the ingredient.

Humanity continues to press against such enduring riddles of essential meaning and time is the backdrop and key to unlock the palace of being. Time is supposed to right all wrongs and reveal all secrets. It is a creator and destroyer. Such motifs of time and the future are worked into in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine but more effectively Hodgson’s The Night Land and House on the Borderland.

The fascination with time is ancient and was symbolized as a deity or some kind of multi-faceted creature by many cultures. Phanes and the Lion faced Leontocephalic Kronos were images associated with it’s threefold riddle. The significance of the three fold aspect of the Cydonian “Face” monument with its bifurcated aspects⁵⁾First realized by Richard Hoagland. I also mentioned it here. As mentioned at Suburbs of Heaven before, the chimerical “Baphomet” of the Templars might be connected also.  facing two horizons and the zenith as a third “horizon” becomes potentially more clear…⁶⁾A more interesting 4th or  midnight “horizon” exists as well…

 

 

Its interesting that Wells’ machine of time was pulled into a monument by the Morlocks that Wells described as a “sphinx” as if hinting that at some level the hero of the story was an new kind of Oedipus struggling to secure an elusive secret from the silent sphinx of time. This is also why on an old edition of The Time Machine, a sphinx is pictured. ⁷⁾According to various occult mythos, within the Sphinx lies the embedded memory of the race. The symbolism of the Sphinx representing man and the rumor of “records” within that ancient edifice have the metaphysical meaning of records in us—dreams and memories looking into the nature of the soul. Hidden inside the creature that metaphorically represents man himself. This incredible symbolism appears to be represented on two worlds; on Earth and on Mars. Symbolism embracing both body and will; action and reaction.

 

 

Here is an interesting modern take on the sphinx in The Time Machine from the movie adaptation of the novel released in the year 1960. The face is that of the Morlock race.

 

 

Michel de Nostredame was said to have the key to three faced time from his inheritance of the sacred books originally written in ancient Egypt and rescued from the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem in 70 A.D. With these he is said to have opened the forward looking face of Janus.

St. Augustine was preoccupied with time’s mystery ⁸⁾ See “The Confessions” of Augustine. XIV-XXII. Hodgson’s literary device through the main character “X” in The Night Land, is much like Augustine’s meditating between a deep past and a deep future in a troublesome deep present. Wrangling over what the present meant, the Bishop of Hippo elevates the mystery of the past and the future with an ever present and more mysterious now. For him, God exists in an “eternal present”. Comparatively, Zen Buddhism focuses on the eternity of now in an eternally present Present. Additionally, Augustine seems to think that we only perceive time because of memory. This is an interesting concept, for memory itself forms the core theme used to convey the vision of The Night Land with its “Memory-Dreams”. Indeed, for Augustine, the only way we know that time has any essence is in its record of the past, or “memory”. Interestingly, transhumanism argues that our very identity as personalities is only a compound of memory that makes us human—without memory we don’t exist. Of course, it must be remembered, that it is memory in Platonic “anamnesis” that awakens the souls learning. Again, for Hodgson, memory and its tenuous thread through unnumbered incarnations was the medium for the binding power of love to awaken the soul of humanity, bound and imprisoned like some Boehmean or Dantesque cosmic Lucifer , who “kept not his first estate”. Love, for Hodgson, becomes the key to achieve a sort of “escape velocity” from a prison which is circumscribed by various orbits of space-time dimensions and surrounded by the personified monsters of supreme fear and unknowing which at the “Borderlands” of final meaning and “barriers” of sentient existence conjure up the hideously enormous cosmic ritual occurring in The Night Land.⁹⁾The possible ritual like aspect to the “Watchers” will be explored later in this series.

The Night Land haunts the reader perhaps much like the Underworld or Hell haunted earlier generations of people¹⁰⁾See “William Hope Hodgson in the Underworld” by Phillip A. Ellis in the book Voices from the Borderland by Berruti, Joshi, and Gafford, Hippocampus Press (2014). who allowed their fears to become personified. Personification and the anthropomorphizing of principles, if taken literally, even if it’s a metaphorically literal interpretation, can warp the principle into a materialistic construct of one form or another and cause a tremendous amount of confusion where ideals become idols and curse us like strange astral shadows animated only by emotion. But, afterall, the quest in The Night Land is a hero’s journey.  X’s¹¹⁾It is noteworthy, that Plato’s Logos impresses itself in the form of an “X” or cross. In esoteric symbolism, the soul is crucified like Ixion upon the cross of matter. See also Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus.quest for his eternal love hearkens back to such stories as Cupid and Psyche, Hades and Persephone, or the Sumerian Inana. Indeed, X’s “Mirdath” in the future is named “Naani”. I wonder about the phoenetic relationship of Naani to the Sumerian Inana in the  story of Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld. The epic of Cupid and Psyche in the Underworld was interpreted to be a metaphorical quest to release an imprisoned soul in matter. ¹²⁾See the book The Fable of Cupid and Psyche by Thomas Taylor. Preface by Manly P. HallLike the initiatory rituals¹³⁾For more on this aspect see here. that were the source for so many of those cyclical narratives of the sun (soul) rotating through the zodiac, the main character in Night Land faces his fears and is initiated by overcoming his unholy imaginings, but also facing real soul destroying dangers. Hodgson uses a subtle descriptive style in his stories which makes the reader unable to discern whether or not some of the entites he has his characters confront are either literal or figurative. ¹⁴⁾See “Dark Mythos of the Sea” in Voices from the Borderland by Berruti, Joshi, and Gafford, Hippocampus Press (2014)  It should be mentioned, and this is crucial, that I am not here asserting that Hodgson is a mystagogue initiating us into our mythical and “anamnetic” unconscious, but the “Archetype”¹⁵⁾Dr. Carl Jung adopted the term archetype from classical sources such as the Hermetica. See The Hero with a Thousand Faces p.19, fn; Bollingen, 1968 ed. he is working with is. Indeed, it is “initiating” him. It is initiating us.  The very name “Night Land” itself suggests a world which we must “come forth by day” as suggested in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and bathe in the light outside of Plato’s cave and remember…

As mentioned in part 1 of this article series, The Night Land was written around 1905 and not published until 1912 and in many ways anticipates the feeling and sub-conscious¹⁶⁾The “-“ between the “b” and the “c” is deliberate. imagery of the types of evidence that are now thought to be associated with long lost civilizations that might have once existed on Mars; large pyramidal arcologies (probably the first arcologies described in fiction), enormous statues and other weird descriptions with hauntingly evocative Cydonian like resonance.¹⁷⁾The Cydonian “D and M” arcology seems to be a shade from some forgotten and hideously ancient “Memory-Dream” come to haunt the modern muse in the form of the “Last Redoubt” although not as tall. The D and M is about 1.5 miles high.  The Night Land even describes a thousand mile long rift very reminiscent of Valles Marinaris and an enormous miles high volcano evoking, for this reader at least, the Martian “Olympus Mons”. ¹⁸⁾The difference here is that the “mighty valley” of The Night Land is 100 miles deep as opposed to 15 miles for Valles Marinaris. Olympus Mons would be much larger than the volcano described by Hodgson. As we will argue in the anamnesis memory model, scale is not so much a factor as a totality of resonance.All of this written by Hodgson almost a century before Mariner and Viking took pictures of the Mars we know today. This, in my estimation, is significant as potential evidence for the “anamnetic imagination” model which we will continue to explore in this series.

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