Category Archives: Archetypal Anamnesis

Dwellers on the Threshold: The “Night Land” and the “Anamnesic Imagination” Part 2–Janus and Time.

 

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Alciati Emblematum, Emblema XVIII

“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. Continue reading Dwellers on the Threshold: The “Night Land” and the “Anamnesic Imagination” Part 2–Janus and Time.

DWELLERS ON THE THRESHOLD: THE “NIGHT LAND” AND THE “ANAMNESIC IMAGINATION” Part 1

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“The Lesser Redoubt”. Artwork by Steven E. Fabian. Published in “The Dream of X”

 

138 years ago today, a person was born who would make a significant, if not seminal, contribution to the so-called “weird” tale. That person was William Hope Hodgson. In this series of articles we will examine some of the inspirations and influences in his works, specifically, the one work which is considered his flawed but darkly brilliant “masterpiece”, “The Night Land” which I was fortunate to have first read in 1990 and realized, even then, the sub-conscious connections with the planet Mars and the mysterious landscapes of Cydonia. Continue reading DWELLERS ON THE THRESHOLD: THE “NIGHT LAND” AND THE “ANAMNESIC IMAGINATION” Part 1

Ragnarök, Lucifer and the War in Heaven Part 2: Dante’s Lucifer and the Mesopotamian Nergal

CORNELIS GALLE'S ENGRAVING OF DANTES LUCIFER
CORNELIS GALLE’S LUCIFER FROM SAN FRANCISCO FINE ARTS MUSEUM

“Now mark how vast must be the whole of him

To be in scale with parts of such proportions!

If he was once as fair as now he ‘s foul

Yet lifted up his brows against his Maker,

Well should all tribulation come from him:

And what a monster he appeared to me

When I perceived three faces on his head!

The one in front was of a crimson hue…”

From Dante’s Inferno, L.G. White Translation

What in the medieval Hell is going on here!? Is this simply a political satire or an Anti-Trinity of the Godhead as is generally assumed by scholars? Is Dante rather describing a private nightmare he had of the “evil one”? Is he describing something he is under duress or mandate to describe akin to the three faced Baphomet of the Templars? Continue reading Ragnarök, Lucifer and the War in Heaven Part 2: Dante’s Lucifer and the Mesopotamian Nergal