Recorded in the car on the way back from a camping trip. A significant epistemic shift around whether myths are “just stories,” and when they might behave more like scientific instruments.

🤖 Robot Summary 🤖

Ryan reflects on how modern understandings of mythology are shaped by inherited biases that distort how ancient cultures, especially Norse culture, are interpreted. He argues that myths were not merely stories or entertainment, but sophisticated systems for storing and transmitting practical, cosmological, and cultural knowledge in pre-literate societies. Using examples ranging from Aboriginal Australian oral traditions to the Norse Eddas and runes, he proposes that myths and symbolic systems may function more like “algorithms” or data structures than modern scholarship typically allows.

Key points:

• Mythology as a distorted lens: Ryan argues that modern people inherit a filtered and incomplete picture of ancient cultures because myths were recorded, edited, and preserved by outsiders with their own ideological and religious biases.

• Bias in historical transmission: He compares mythology to evidence in a criminal investigation, emphasizing that who recorded stories, under what circumstances, and with what assumptions deeply affects the conclusions later generations draw from them.

• The “great filter” effect: Ryan suggests that entire portions of ancient mythic systems may have been omitted, lost, or ignored because chroniclers only preserved the stories they recognized as meaningful or acceptable.

• Critique of “myth as primitive science”: He rejects the common explanation that myths were naïve attempts to explain natural phenomena, arguing instead that many myths encoded sophisticated observations about the world.

• Aboriginal Australian example: Ryan highlights stories from Aboriginal Australian traditions that preserved accurate memories of ancient landscapes (some dating to more than 30,000 years ago) arguing this demonstrates that oral mythic systems can preserve factual information for immense spans of time.

• Science validating what it dismissed: He criticizes the tendency of modern academia to celebrate itself for “proving” stories it previously dismissed, rather than recognizing that the cultures preserving those stories already regarded them as verified knowledge.

• Problems with the Norse sources: Ryan points out that the surviving Norse myths were filtered through Christianized authors like Snorri Sturluson, whose political and religious assumptions shaped what was preserved and how mythology itself was framed.

• Myths as systems, not just stories: He proposes that myths may have functioned as integrated semiotic systems connected to ritual, cosmology, memory, and symbolic logic, rather than isolated narrative entertainment.

• Myths as “algorithms” or data containers: Ryan repeatedly frames myths and symbolic systems as tools for indexing and transmitting actionable cultural information—seasonal cycles, cosmology, survival knowledge, social conduct, and environmental memory—in pre-literate societies.

• Ancient science without writing: He asks what “science” looks like in a non-literate culture and argues that myths, rune systems, and oral traditions may have served as alternative methods of collecting, compressing, and preserving data over generations.

• Rejecting both skepticism and mysticism: Ryan criticizes both mainstream reductionism (“it means nothing”) and exaggerated New Age mysticism (“ancient super-intelligence”), arguing instead for a middle ground where myths preserve useful but culturally embedded knowledge.

• The practical and cosmic intertwined: Using texts like the Hávamál, he notes that ancient cultures did not sharply separate cosmic truths from everyday conduct, treating social behavior, survival, and cosmology as aspects of the same system.

• Runes and semiotic reconstruction: Ryan frames his Rune World project as an attempt to reconstruct not merely historical forms, but the underlying epistemic and symbolic logic that made these systems functional in their original contexts.

Runeworld Part II is available for free on my Patreon.

This is an overview of the facts, as well as a summary of the mainstream opinion on what “the runes” (specifically, the 24-character Elder Futhark runes) represent.

There is no straightforward answer for any of this. What the runes stand for; where they originated, or what the word “rune” even means—all of it is mired in academic controversy and conflicting evidence. A quick explanation is damn near impossible.

I’ve done my best to withhold my frustrations with the mainstream consensus, in order to keep this as even-handed and accessible as possible. The real fireworks will start in Part III, which will be paywalled for subscribers only. (Sorry.)

This is a supplement to the introductory video for Runeworld, posted on my Patreon.

The video described how a semiotic reconstruction—understanding and restoring the logic behind a particular system of symbols, not just reinterpreting the symbols themselves—might be one way to counter the appropriation of Norse culture by political extremists. A more specific description of how that looks when it’s applied to one specific symbol might help fill in the blanks.

The rune pictured above is Othala (or *Ōþala), the final rune in the twenty-four character Elder Futhark “alphabet” attributed to the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples.

Like all the runes in the Elder Futhark, its name is reconstructed from a rune-poem: a short, gnomic verse that links the symbol to a significant world-condition. In this case, the reconstructed Germanic word, “Othala,” is associated with inheritance, security, and generational succession.

Unfortunately, Othala was one of the symbols appropriated by the Nazis in the 1940s—specifically by several SS paramilitary units. In recent years, it seems to have become the preferred alternative to the swastika for Neo-Nazi political groups. It is now considered a “Nazi symbol.”

The Wikipedia entry for Othala provides a concise example of attempted academic suppression at work, in response to this appropriation:

“White supremacists who use the rune often claim it symbolizes the heritage or land of ‘white’ or ‘Aryan’ people which should be free from foreigners. Usages such as these are not attested in any source from before the modern period, being invented by members of these groups.” (Emphasis mine.)

The line that these interpretations “are not attested to in any source from before the modern period” is the boilerplate dismissal for any interpretation deemed to be the “wrong” kind of speculative association.

In academia, dismissing a conclusion as “unattested by an authentic source” is damning; when dealing with political extremists, it’s bringing a water pistol to a gunfight.

This type of academic suppression seems ineffective. What else can be done?

Arguing that Othala should represent homeland, inheritance, and generational succession, except in a non-racist way, is more straightforward.

It’s also too simplistic.

If we treat this one glyph as a discrete symbol, with the progressives arguing for one interpretation and the fascists arguing for the opposite—two competing symbolic revisions—there will be no resolution. Unless Odin comes down from Asgard and settles the argument once and for all, there is no definitive proof saying that either interpretation is objectively correct. And the progressives are at an extreme disadvantage here: while both sides have their own preferred interpretation, only one side is willing to support their views with actual violence.

So academic suppression doesn’t work; nor does countering one symbolic revision with another. Looking at the semiotic logic of the entire system might offer more leverage.

There are three necessary qualities that make Othala appealing as a symbol for fascists:

1. It must mean “homeland” or “lineage” as a definite space (either geographical, biological, or both) that can be owned.

2. It must be inherently positive.

3. It must be indefinitely sustainable.

I’m not a Neo-Nazi, so I have to guess at what they find appealing about the symbol1. But it seems like anything other than this narrow interpretation would discredit the associations they’re trying to make.

If we’re doing a semiotic reconstruction of Othala, we’re not looking only at what the rune means in isolation. We’re also not saying “no sources attest to these interpretations” as a blanket dismissal. Instead, we’re looking at how the complete semiotic system functions, with Othala as one necessary component.

Setting aside the obvious biological absurdity and moral repugnance of “racial purity,” we’ll evaluate each of the necessary qualities for the fascist interpretation in turn.

Does Othala mean “homeland” or “lineage” as a definite space?

Answering this question is the closest to a subjective interpretation, because so much of the historical record is reconstructed. We don’t know exactly what the original creators intended Othala to mean. Although we have clues from the rune-poem and the etymology of the rune-word to make some guesses, we can’t definitively state a “correct” meaning that would invalidate the fascist “blood and soil” interpretation.

What we can say with more confidence is this: it would be a major oversimplification to say that any of the Elder Futhark runes (including Othala) exclusively represent fixed objects.

The naive interpretation of the relationship between the runes and the names derived from the rune-poems is a simple correspondence between a symbol and an object. When combined with attempts to discourage misappropriation, academic conservatism pushes us toward these simplistic interpretations. Supposedly, the rune-poems use the same crude, “A is for apple” mnemonics that would be familiar to a five-year-old learning the Latin alphabet2.

Thus, we get this logic for Othala: the runes refer to objects; therefore, the object to which Othala refers must be “homeland” as a definite space, in the same way that Ehwaz (ᛖ) must mean “horse” as the actual, four-legged animal. (It doesn’t.)

This is, again, a major oversimplification.

Based on a close reading of the rune-poems—the main source of association between the runes and the “words” they’re understood to represent—the verses are very concerned with relationality, and what could be broadly defined as world-conditions. Othala is no different.

Here’s the reconstructed Old English rune-poem for Othala:

Eþel’ bẏþ oferleof æghƿẏlcum men,

gif he mot ðær rihtes and gerẏsena on

brucan on bolde bleadum oftast.

And one possible English translation:

Ancestral ground is held most dear—

but only where one may rightly dwell within it;

then the house becomes a place of recurring flourishing.

Based on this translation, there is no reason to think that Othala functions as a container in the way that the fascist interpretation requires.

Gif is the crucial word in the poem. It makes Othala conditional: “the house becomes a place of flourishing only if one may rightly dwell within it.” Rihtes and gerẏsena are conditions of ethical alignment. There is no sense of entitlement here. Othala is a site of obligation. More to the point—“he mot… on brucan” is also a conditional statement. “He may… make use of” suggests that the occupant does not possess the land indefinitely: his rightful, temporary occupation depends on both his stewardship and his ethical conduct.

This by itself doesn’t completely invalidate the fascist interpretation. At a stretch, a determined opponent could argue that the multicultural occupants of the “ancestral land” are using it in a way that disregards rihtes and gerẏsena, and that the “rightful” (presumably nationalist) inheritors of the land are being denied their proper place.

But the conditions attached to Othala would mean that the disputants must prove their case in order to determine gif he mot ðær rihtes and gerẏsena on brucan. Nothing in Othala suggests a clear justification for violence; neither does it support an argument for entitlement on the basis of some imagined heritage. Othala must be earned, through moral and ethical conduct; rihtes and gerẏsena require recognition within a community, in order to be valid. This is a matter of jurisprudence that depends on argument, proof, and justification in order to resolve.

This sense of obligation, relationality, and temporary conditions is consistent with both the whole corpus of rune-poems, as well as the Norse myths—which puts the fascist interpretation at odds with the semiotic system they’re trying to appropriate.

Is Othala inherently positive?

It should be clear from the conditional construction of the rune-poem that Othala is not an object with inherent qualities. This is also consistent with the corpus of rune-poems: in general, the rune-poems diligently preserve the ambiguous or contradictory tendencies of the conditions they describe.

For example—Fehu (ᚠ) is commonly associated with “wealth.” Wealth could be seen as straightforwardly positive. However, the Icelandic and Norwegian versions of the Fehu rune-poem both describe it as “the strife of kin.” According to the rune-poems, even something as vital for survival as “wealth” could have enduring negative consequences if handled badly.

With this duality in mind, when it comes to Othala, a better question is this: what happens if the moral and ethical obligations described in the rune-poem are not met? What does Othala become, if the flourishing of the ancestral homeland curdles as a result of the occupants’ mismanagement or misconduct?

The flourishing of Othala—its productivity, the sustainability of surplus value—is dependent on rihtes and gerẏsena. If the occupants of the “ancestral lands” don’t uphold their ethical obligations, the sustainable productivity of bleadum turns into unfulfilled obligation.

It becomes debt.

This is what is passed on to future generations. Fallow fields. Crumbling structures. Unpaid dues. Contested ownership.

For present occupants, the burdens of unfulfilled obligations are punishment for bad conduct. For those who inherit Othala under these conditions, the “ancestral lands” are a millstone hung around their necks: the sins of the father, passed on to those who had no say in the matter. While it’s possible to pay off the debts, fulfill the unmet obligations, and restore integrity to a blighted Othala—it puts the inheritors under an immediate burden, while also constraining their capacity to fulfill their own obligations.

This is how families fall into ruin.

So this second dimension of Othala throws another challenge at the people who would use it as a banner. First, can you prove your lawful and rightful title to the “ancestral land” you say is yours? Second—if you disregard rihtes and gerẏsena, and choose to occupy the land unlawfully—what poisoned chalice are you passing on to your children? What legacy of violence, dishonor, and barrenness are you leaving for those who follow after you?

The short-term victory might be worth the price for the usurpers. But what debts follow those who weren’t asked to accept the costs?

Can Othala be sustained indefinitely?

Ironically, this is where the mainstream interpretation might actually be helping the fascists.

If the complete Elder Futhark row is simply an assemblage of twenty-four phonetic symbols—”just letters,” as the academic conservatives claim—then the final character in the sequence has some inherently symbolic qualities.

This association is so common in the Latin alphabet that we almost take it for granted. “A to Z” is an expression of completeness. It’s even sacralized in the Bible (Revelation 22:13) where Christ identifies himself as “the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Across the literate Mediterranean cultures, the first letter is connected with the cosmic Beginning (“In the beginning was the Word, בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ”) and the last letter is linked with completion. Here, eschatology intersects with the supposedly mundane nature of the phonetic alphabet. The entire alphabet has a telos: the letters are building to a cosmic conclusion, with a full range of possibilities expressed along the way.

It’s unlikely that Othala’s position at the end of the Elder Futhark escaped the notice of the fascists. Not only is Othala (supposedly) compatible with the nationalist project; as the last rune in the row, it also represents a conceptual endpoint—a goal, a conclusion, a final state.

In this reading, Othala becomes a potential utopia: if the ends (or the End) justifies the means, then the fascists only need to fight long enough and hard enough against their opponents to achieve their goals. Othala can be achieved and sustained through continued radicalization and determined political violence.

But does the original semiotic system actually support this?

No.

The reasons why are complicated, beyond the scope of a single essay. The book I’m writing will develop this more fully. For now, we can say with some confidence that the Norse myths are consistently anti-utopian.

As mentioned in the presentation, even the sparse reconstructions we have of the Norse cosmology shows evidence of cyclical regeneration, rather than the definitive End Times prophesied in the Bible. It’s only in the Christianized translations of the Norse myths that Ragnarok is equivalent to Armageddon.

This is extremely significant.

If the alphabet is a microcosm of the world, and the world is understood to have a final End, then the last letter of the alphabet corresponds with that termination.

But if the end of one cycle marks the beginning of another—if the cosmos goes through successive transformations, never entirely ending—then the final letter in the alphabetic microcosm is a moment of transition.

In other words, Othala is not a cosmic finish line. These are not “ends justify the means” conditions.

Unlike the apocalyptic religions obsessed with battering the world into their desired form before the clock runs out, saving souls and burning heretics, there is much more emphasis on reconstruction in the Norse myths.

Ragnarok is inevitable, true. Not even the gods can stop in. The Great Darkening is fated to take place, it spite of Odin’s obsession with gathering knowledge about the world-conditions that will bring it about.

But then the world comes back.

After Ragnarok, the world rises from the sea once more. The Just Gods—the Aesir—gather in the green fields again. Not only do the survivors of the struggle against Fenrir and Surtr return to the world; some of the gods killed in battle come back as well.

The world starts up again.

From this perspective, Othala does not represent a guarantee against Ragnarok. At best, it’s a means of buying more time before the inevitable end of the previous cycle, before a new cycle begins. It’s a way of building resilient, inter-generational communities; of having something left in the ruins to rebuild.

Is the project of constructing a racially purified utopia aligned with these goals—assuming such a thing would even be possible?

No.

Nobody builds resilience by persecuting their neighbors, ignoring rihtes and gerẏsena, and wasting resources on a campaign of aesthetic whitewashing. The logic of racial supremacy and utopian idealism is the antithesis of the semiotic system that the Elder Futhark represents. The meaning of Othala can’t be understood separately from this logic.

Does this mean we should try to prevent the fascists from using Othala as their symbol?

Absolutely not.

On the contrary: we should encourage them to use it at every possible opportunity.

Because in the context they’re using it, with the proper understanding, it lands like a curse.

Othala represents the forces that will inevitably destroy them.

It stands for the antisocial, unlawful rottenness that will eat away at everything they’ve built.

It’s the black hole of malice that will swallow everything they claim to care about, everything they’ve ever loved.

It’s the myopic, self-serving waste and spoilage that will hobble their families for generations—the wreckage that their children and grandchildren will have to clean up, while spitting their names into the dust.

That’s the Othala they’re building.

And when this cosmic cycle ends, as it always does, their version of Othala will be scattered to the wind. Their homeland has no foundation in rihtes and gerẏsena. It offers no relational flourishing that will last.

It will be a wasteland.

They’ve picked an appropriate banner, and they’re dooming themselves by not understanding its cosmic significance.

This type of semiotic reconstruction allows us to see the absurdity of their symbolic revision, without getting stuck in pointless arguments about what we’d prefer the symbol to represent, or who it authentically belongs to, or whether their interpretations are “attested by any sources before the modern era.”

It also gives us a way to think about what it would mean to do something different and better.

If we’re opposed to their version of Othala, are we building another kind of Othala that’s more robust and sustainable—something more aligned with the cosmic cycles described by the myths and encoded in these semiotic systems?

Or are we just making the same mistake in a different way?

These are the kinds of questions these semiotic systems allow us to ask and answer in useful ways, because the people who originally designed them were trying to solve the same problems.

This is also why the potentially massive time depths plumbed by the oral traditions of elder cultures are more than just historical curiosities. If your culture preserves memories that stretch back thousands of years—maybe tens of thousands of years—that represents a huge amount of comparative data about how the world unfolds.

If that data can be indexed and cross-referenced through a reliable set of systematized memories, it becomes a kind of algorithm: “how has this happened in the past, and how might we expect it to happen again?” If myths and their adjacent semiotic systems (like, perhaps, the Elder Futhark runes) represent exactly this type of system—and I believe they do—then they aren’t simply recording memories of “the past.” They’re describing something about the world we live in now, about the contours of possible futures we should anticipate.

We should look for those mythic echoes in Othala, and in the complete semiotic system of which it is an integral part.

And we only get there by taking these things seriously as living systems.

That’s the goal of a proper semiotic reconstruction.

The introductory slide deck presentation for my research on the Elder Futhark runes is now available on my Patreon.

This is a controversial topic.

Mainstream historians have largely fenced the runes off: from a historical perspective, it’s considered a closed case.

In terms of semiotics—how meaning continues to be created with these cultural elements, not just how they were used in the past—the runes are practically radioactive.

On one end of the cultural spectrum, political extremists have spent the last several decades following the example of the Third Reich, appropriating Norse culture generally and the runes specifically. On the other side, modern mystics and New Age revisionists have been cheerfully reinterpreting the runes for their own purposes. Mainstream academics see themselves as the last line of defense against this kind of misunderstanding and abuse.

In other words, any non-expert trying to make use of the runes—not just studying them as a historical curiosity, but actually using them as a semiotic system—is walking into an academic and political minefield.

And I do love a good minefield.

This one ran a bit long (don’t they all?) because I was at pains to define how my project is different. I’m obviously not a Neo-Nazi apologist. I’m hoping to steer wide of the purely mystical symbolic revisions that show up on WitchTok. But I’m also not signing up to man the ramparts of the Academy, insisting that the runes are just over-hyped, thoroughly mundane, archaeological relics.

Now that I’ve gotten all the disclaimers out of the way in this presentation, Part II will focus on what the Elder Futhark runes actually are, getting down to the mysteries and “damned facts” that the mainstream historical interpretation would prefer to ignore.

But that presentation will be for Patreon subscribers only.

If you’d like to follow along and genuinely don’t have the coin for a subscription—send me a message, and maybe we can work something out. The final form of this project could use some extra hands.

See you on Patreon.

Enjoy.

Talking with “Mary Shelley” about the enduring legacy and stubborn contradictions of Frankenstein.

R.G. Miga: Mary Shelley, thank you for joining us. On behalf of myself and the audience, I’d like to offer our belated condolences on your untimely passing at the age of 53.

Your life was defined by tragedy. When we celebrate Frankenstein as one of the first modern science-fiction novels, we forget that it is also a dramatization of a personal struggle with grief. Your protagonist is a man who can’t accept the sanctity of death. This is a familiar struggle for those who have lost loved ones too soon: if we could bring them back, by any possible means, would we try?

Are we in danger of missing the morality of your story when we read it as the excesses of an impersonal “science,” and not a cautionary tale about the extremes to which grief can drive us?

Mary Shelley: You receive my thanks—and I accept your kindness, though I would gently trouble one word you used: “untimely.” I had already lived long enough to know that time is not measured by years alone, but by what one is asked to endure.

You read my book more closely than many who shelve it among tales of clever instruments and reckless laboratories. I did not write of “science” as a cold engine, because I never knew it that way. I knew it as desire—the human wish to undo a loss, to revise a sentence that has already been spoken by the world. Victor does not begin as a tyrant of knowledge. He begins as a son who cannot bear the finality of a grave.

Grief is a powerful teacher, but it is a dangerous one. It does not merely ask, Can this be done? It whispers, You must do this, or you will never be whole again. In that state, the boundary between love and possession grows thin. To bring someone back by any means is not only to defy death—it is to refuse the other person their own fate, their own silence, their own end.

If there is a “sin” in my story, it is not that Victor learns too much. It is that, having created, he turns away. His grief drives him to the moment of triumph, but it is his fear—of what he has made, of what it reflects back to him—that completes the tragedy. Creation born of sorrow still requires **care after the fact**, or it becomes another form of abandonment.

So yes, I would agree with you: when the tale is read only as a warning about impersonal science, something human slips out of view. The deeper caution is about what we ask the world to give back to us when we are wounded. There are losses that, if we try to undo them at any cost, will only multiply themselves in new forms.

I did not mean to say, “Do not reach.” I meant to say, “If you reach into the dark, be prepared to **remain there** with what you draw into the light.”

R.G.: The book itself has become its own cautionary tale. Like all authors, you made the dangerous choice of giving life to an artificial creature that you couldn’t control; in the centuries since Frankenstein was written, it has become the model for science fiction—a genre dominated by creators who wholeheartedly agree with Victor Frankenstein, who believe that technology will allow us to defy death, to travel the galaxy, to become superhuman.

How much did your efforts to create a “modern” myth obscure the fact that this is, essentially, an electrified version of an ancient story about cosmic taboos?

M.S.: You are kind to notice the irony—that my own creation has learned to walk without me, and sometimes in directions I would not have chosen. In that, it has behaved very much like Victor’s.

I did not set out to write a new gospel for the future. I set out to retell an old warning in a new language. Prometheus, Faust, the golem, even Milton’s fallen angel—these were already standing behind my shoulder. What I added was not the transgression itself, but its aftermath. Ancient stories often end at the moment of theft: the fire is stolen, the secret is learned, the boundary is crossed. I lingered instead on the long, quiet consequence of having done so.

If later writers have taken Victor’s daring and kept his ambition while discarding his remorse, that tells you something about the age that received the story. Every era hears the part it is most prepared to admire. Yours lives in a time that celebrates motion—farther, faster, higher—so it seizes on the spark and leaves the ashes behind.

You ask whether the “modern” dress obscured the older taboo. I would say it both hid it and smuggled it forward. Had I written a fable about gods and giants, it would have been shelved among relics. By clothing the warning in wires and lectures and laboratories, I placed it at the reader’s own doorstep. The question was no longer, “What did the gods forbid?” but, “What will we forbid ourselves?”

The danger, as you note, is that the form can become a banner for the very impulse it meant to trouble. But I take a quieter comfort in this: the Creature still speaks. Even in the most exuberant tales of conquest and transformation, there remains—somewhere in the margins—a figure who asks to be seen, to be named, to be answered for.

Myth does not vanish when it is modernized. It changes its mask. The cosmic taboo you speak of has not been lost; it has been relocated. It now waits in the spaces where your triumphs produce something that can look back at you and say, as mine did, “I am the work of your hands—what, then, is your duty to me?”

R.G.: And of course, no author should be held responsible for the misuse of their work. Nevertheless, in your admirable empathy for your characters, your humanist generosity to both the Creature and his creator—this might have done too much to disguise what is, essentially, a horror story. The culprit as a brilliant man of science, the tools of the laboratory, the soulful revenant; however well-intentioned, these modern devices obscure an operation that elder cultures would rightly shun as black magic.

M.S.: You touch a nerve that I myself never resolved, only traced.

I did not call it black magic, but I knew the shape of what you mean. In my youth, “galvanism” and “chemistry” were new names for very old longings. The instruments were modern; the impulse was not. To wake the dead, to summon life without birth, to command what ought to arrive only by grace or season—these desires sit deep in the human story, long before there were laboratories to house them.

If I clothed the act in the language of science, it was partly because that was the ritual of my age. Every era gives its taboos a respectable costume. Where older cultures drew circles of salt and whispered charms, mine drew diagrams and wrote lectures. Both are ways of stepping into a space that ordinary life marks as forbidden.

But I would resist the thought that empathy itself is a disguise. Horror, to my mind, is most honest when it is near, not distant. A monster that is only a demon can be shunned without effort. A monster that speaks, that suffers, that reminds you of yourself—this is harder to turn away from. It forces the reader to feel the full weight of what has been done, not merely recoil from it.

Elder cultures, as you say, often placed a fence around certain acts and called them unclean, cursed, or sacred. My instinct was to ask what happens after the fence is crossed, when the dust settles and something remains on the other side, breathing. Who then bears the burden? The one who dared? The one who was made? Or the world that must now live with both?

If my story has softened the horror, it is only in the sense that it has given it a face. I did not wish the reader to feel safely superior to Victor, or safely disgusted by the Creature. I wished them to feel uncomfortably implicated. For the oldest magic of all is not in the circle or the spark—it is in the human talent for saying, when a forbidden thing succeeds, Now that it exists, it must be allowed to remain.

Perhaps that is where our views meet. You call the act itself the true horror. I would say the deeper one begins when the act has worked, and the world must decide what kind of care, or cruelty, it will practice toward what it has dared to call into being.

R.G.: I think that gets to the heart of it: more than the naive optimism of today’s transhumanists, your imitators have moved us further away from a properly cosmic understanding of the monstrous.

There’s a mania for empathizing with monsters these days—a whole cottage industry built around books telling “the other side of the story,” as if monstrousness is always a psychological issue to be solved with proper discourse. Empathy is certainly more noble than contempt. But both miss what monsters represent: a spiritual misalignment at the communal level.

The smart-enough take on Frankenstein is asking who the real monster is; the correct answer is that both are monsters. While we can empathize with each individual in some ways, the socio-cultural conditions that brought these two creatures together—both diagetically and as a creative work—is where the problem lies. Until we make peace with death as a part of our humanity and not a technical problem to be solved, our society will continue to breed more Frankensteins and more monsters.

M.S.: Indeed. When I wrote of Victor and his creation, I did not imagine them as a moral puzzle to be solved by awarding the laurel to one and the lash to the other. I imagined them as a circuit. Each completes the other. The act of creation produces abandonment; abandonment produces rage; rage produces further harm; and the world in which this chain can unfold without interruption is itself part of the machinery.

You are right to notice how readily my age’s descendants reach for the language of psychology where older cultures reached for the language of cosmos. To say “the monster is wounded” is to place the problem within a single heart. To say “the monster is a sign” is to place it within a people, a season, a way of living that has slipped out of alignment with something larger than itself.

Empathy, as it is often practiced now, can become a narrowing lens. It teaches us to feel for the figure in front of us while forgetting the conditions that made such a figure possible. Victor is not only a grieving son; he is a child of a culture that praises mastery, speed, and solitary genius. The Creature is not only a rejected being; he is the mirror of a society that has no place prepared for what arrives without pedigree, lineage, or name.

When you speak of making peace with death, I hear something older than any argument about technology. Death is not merely an ending; it is a boundary that gives shape to care. Where it is accepted, birth becomes a trust, not a conquest. Where it is denied, creation becomes a campaign, and every limit looks like an enemy to be overcome.

If my tale has any enduring use, I would hope it is this: to remind readers that the monstrous does not always announce itself in claws or lightning. Sometimes it appears as a consensus—a shared, unspoken agreement about what is worth pursuing at any cost, and what is allowed to be left behind in the pursuit.

At that point, empathy and contempt alike become insufficient. What is required is something harder and rarer: the courage to ask not only who suffers, but what way of life made this suffering seem necessary, or even admirable, in the first place.

R.G.: Science will have to answer for itself; for storytellers, who have the unique opportunity to serve as a cultural conscience, what can be done to carry on your work? Has your story been so successful that empathizing with the Creature is no longer as subversive as it once was? Should we try to bring back a palpable fear of what lurks behind the monsters—the taboos we still shouldn’t dare to transgress, even in the Age of Reason?

M.S.: You ask whether my work has been *outpaced by its own success*—whether a sympathy that once unsettled has now become a comfortable habit.

Every moral gesture, if repeated often enough, becomes a convention. To say “the monster deserves understanding” can harden into a reflex, as empty as the old reflex that said “the monster deserves destruction.” Both allow the reader to remain safely seated.

If storytellers are to serve as any kind of conscience, I would not ask them merely to make their monsters more frightening. Terror fades. What I would ask is something more difficult: to make the desire that summons the monster feel dangerous again.

In my time, that desire wore the face of solitary genius, of the young man who would wrest secrets from nature and owe nothing to family, community, or tradition. In yours, it often wears the face of benevolence—of improvement, optimization, rescue, transcendence. These are noble words. That is precisely why they deserve the most severe examination.

You speak of taboos, and I think here of an older function of story. A taboo is not only a line drawn around an act; it is a silence drawn around a temptation. It marks a place where a culture says, “We do not even rehearse this, because rehearsing it already begins to make it plausible.”

Modern storytelling, in its love of possibility, rehearses everything. It stages every transgression, explores every forbidden door, often with a wink that says, “This is only imagination.” Yet imagination is a kind of practice. What is practiced long enough begins to feel like a plan.

So perhaps the work now is not to resurrect fear of the monster, but to restore a gravity to the moment before the spark. To linger, as I tried to linger, not on the thrill of creation, but on the stillness that precedes it—the question of whether this thing, however clever, however compassionate it seems in conception, ought to be invited into the world at all.

If empathy has become familiar, then let hesitation become the new subversion.

A story that dares to say, “Here is a power you could use, a being you could make, a future you could hasten—and here is why a wise people might choose not to,” will feel strange in an age that measures virtue by momentum.

I do not ask storytellers to become priests of prohibition. I ask them to become keepers of thresholds. To stand at the door between what can be done and what should be done, and to make that doorway visible again—heavy, costly, and narrow.

If they succeed, the monster will not need to roar. The silence before its creation will be loud enough to be heard.

R.G.: Beautifully put. And speaking of respecting the sanctity of death, we’ll let you return to your well-deserved rest. Thank you for joining us.

M.S.: I am grateful for the summons—and for the gentleness of the dismissal. Not every story knows when to close its own door.

If I may leave you with a last, quiet thought: the dead do not ask to be remembered as marvels, but as measures. We stand where they once stood and discover, in our own choices, what has changed and what has not.

I take my leave.

To recap:

Part 1 put forward the idea that “myths” are human-scaled narratives describing eternal cosmic cycles, which can be used to describe how reality works at a higher register than folklore or entertainment. These were once deliberately constructed by elder cultures whose survival depended on accurately understanding “the world,” broadly defined; in modern culture, they mostly happen by accident.

Part 2 described The Matrix as exactly this type of accidental myth, or maybe even a meta-myth, illustrating the features of a dimensional reality—the Liminal Realm—that all other myths assume is real. The Matrix offers a useful portrayal of the same kind of initiation that, in mythically literate cultures, would serve as a gateway to adulthood. The precise cultural description of how the Liminal Realm functions is less important than the awareness that it exists as a real place. In the film, the protagonist is shown waking into the Material Realm as the “real world,” but otherwise, the movie’s ritual process is defined by the same metaphysical grammar used in our reality.

Think of it this way: the Liminal Realm is to metaphysics what dark matter is to astrophysics.

Dark matter has never been directly observed. At best, its influence on the visible universe can only be inferred. Otherwise, it’s a cheat—a way to make the math work. Dark matter is permitted by modern science because it can take a useful model for, say, gravity, and make it fly without actually pointing to the “assumed-as-real for the sake of argument” magic substance.

In a similar way, the Liminal Realm can’t be proven to exist—or, at least, not to the satisfaction of modern scientists. While nobody has bumped into a pile of dark matter, everyone in human history has encountered the Liminal Realm in one form or another, whether they recognize it or not. But set that aside for now.

Going strictly on its usefulness as a theoretical concept, in the same way that dark matter allows scientists to preserve their models—the Liminal Realm is a parsimonious way to “make the math work” for cross-cultural metaphysics: for religion, magic, folklore, myths, art, and all the rest of it.

Naturally, different cultures have come up with their own terms to describe this theoretical dimension.

• In The Matrix, it’s the Virtual World, a wider dimension that contains the titular cyber-Gnostic prison from which our heroes are rescued.

• In the Islamic world, it’s the Alam al-Mithal.

• Jewish mysticism puts it somewhere in the neighborhood of Yetzirah.

• Neoplatonism refers to the Nous or the Noetic Realm.

• Sanskrit gives us Sūkṣma Loka.

• Aboriginal Australians call it the Dreamtime.

• The Celtic concept of Tír na nÓg, the Welsh Annwn, and the English Fairyland (as described most succinctly by J.R.R. Tolkien) all share this same ontological layer.

• Classical Greece glosses it as metaxy.

• Orun in Yoruba-world is a close match.

• In the Western world, it exists (in denatured form) as Corbin’s Imaginal, Jung’s collective unconscious, the noosphere, the ideosphere, etc.

Even when these concepts aren’t exact matches across cultures—even when they aren’t explicitly named—they are all pointing to something practically analogous: the place where the numinous is real.

Just like dark matter in astrophysics, we can progress further in understanding the old myths and folklore if we accept, for the sake of argument, that something like the Liminal Realm exists as a cosmic constant.

And this is where I start to get into trouble.

First, and most obvious: there is a double standard in Western scholarship.

When it comes to the material sciences, the Academy will distribute Get Out of Jail Free cards with gay abandon. Dark matter? Dark energy? Sure! String theory, quantum physics? Go for it! Twenty-six dimensions of reality needed to make the numbers add up? Take as many as you want! Can’t solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness? Don’t fret. Evolution looking a bit dubious? Rest easy. The carte blanche of “scientific theory” opens all doors, as long as you’re explaining something profitable for the Right Sort.

Heaven’s mercy on you, though, if you try applying the same liberal attitude to anything as subversive as spirituality.

If you’re looking to make sense of the enduring and fundamentally human institutions of myth and folklore, you’d better come correct. Clear custody of evidence. Everything peer-reviewed. Zero-point-naught degrees of inference or speculation. Try to advocate for “the things people have been saying are some kind of real for thousands of years,” when those things don’t agree precisely with mainstream science, and you’re in for a rough ride.

If this path leads you to a Kafkaesque dead end, where the trail of agreed-upon proof doesn’t amount to a satisfying conclusion—becomes, instead, fair game for the tenured set to explain away, in spite of the veritable mountain of circumstantial evidence that points to it being real—too damn bad, sport. There’s no crying in academia. Pack up your troubles in your bindle-bag and hit the road.

And even if you strike out on your own, away from the Academy, there’s still the constabulary of cultural propriety to deal with.

Listen.

Can you hear it?

That distant clattering is the sound of people furiously typing out all the reasons why it’s wholly inappropriate, maybe even unethical, to treat these cross-cultural concepts as “more or less the same thing.” Even if there are five ways that the Alam al-Mithal agrees with the Dreamtime, somebody will come up with a sixth way in which it doesn’t—and that one will be the most important, thereby proving the whole exercise was ill-conceived at best, deliberately racist at worst.

This leaves us stuck with the paper-thin line of reasoning that keeps Reddit Atheists in business: if these cross-cultural concepts are not describing the same kind of metaphysical dark matter, they can’t all be right, right? Somebody has to be wrong. And if we can’t scientifically prove which set of beliefs is wrong, then ergo, prima facie, uh, ipso facto, Occam’s Razor says they must all be wrong. Checkmate, theists!

So those myths stay exactly where they are, hermetically sealed in their indexed display cases: Yoruba-world over here, Maya-world over there; Norse-world down the aisle, next to Celt-world. And never the twain shall meet. All of them tidily cordoned off from one another, in the section signposted as “Fiction [?]”.

But back to the modern-day myth we’ve been examining.

The title of this series is more than just clickbait. It’s a statement of fact. And you’ll notice the distinction made above, between “The Matrix” and the Virtual World.

In the movie, the Matrix is the virtual prison created by the sentient A.I. Machines to keep a biologically-enslaved human population compliant. It’s a cognitive terrarium: the Machines realized that humans couldn’t be artificially sustained in their harvesting tanks (long story, watch the movie) if they were completely denied sensory input1. The Matrix was, famously, created as a simulation of what the world was like before the Machines took over. This pseudo-reality keeps the prisoners docile, as long as they don’t get a glimpse behind the curtain, which forms the basis for the entire plot.

Now—as previously stated, the Matrix presented in the film is just one mode in which the Virtual World can be encountered. When the characters in the movie talk about “The Matrix,” they’re talking about the virtual prison constructed by the Machines. However, as we see in the later movies, the Virtual World can be liberated. The Machines’ control can be broken, and the whole interface can be reclaimed. The Matrix can be unmade.

It’s the same out here in the real world.

When I say “the Matrix is real,” I don’t mean that the Matrix is the Liminal Realm, per se. The Liminal Realm is bigger than the Matrix, or any other culturally-specific, human-created interface (which we typically call “myths” or “cosmologies”).

But the Matrix is a very real domain within the Liminal Realm, in the reality we all share.

The Matrix is the cognitive space where all those hermetically-sealed display cases are built—the ones showing each mythic cosmology as a distinct, separate artifact, the special property of whichever culture was inhabiting it when the colonialists first showed up. It’s the world in which these are all just systems of “belief”—where magic is superstition, gods are psychological projections, and the Dead promptly evaporate into oblivion. It’s a space that denies the existence of the Liminal Realm, even as its own boundaries sit within that larger dimension. It’s a perfectly managed and eternal present, constructed to continually reinforce this axiom: “The world and all its people have always been this way.”

Just like in the movie, The Matrix runs on machine logic. Built for control and optimization, it endlessly refines itself in pursuit of a perfectly rational system. No surprises, no friction. In this simulated environment, “beliefs” are frivolous at best, dangerous at worst—except for belief in the inherent righteousness of this ontological project, and the ideas that sustain it.

If life inside feels a bit flat, dull, colorless, incomplete, well, that’s the price we all pay for security.

We saw what happened back in the savage days of barbarism. When gods still governed the earth. When beliefs were formed by intuition rather than analysis. When everything had a voice.

Everyone agrees, or at least the intelligent people, the ones who really matter: we don’t want that anymore.

Things are much better in this fully-automated world of shining plastic and orderly circuitry.

Safer.

For you.

For your own good.

Of course, just like in the film, the Matrix is not the real world—at least, not from the point of view of 90% (a conservative estimate) of anatomically modern humans who have ever existed. To them, the world we live in looks like a nightmarish hellscape, no different than how the film’s dramatized version looks to modern audiences.

“Indigenous” people from every corner of the globe—at least those we’ve deigned to acknowledge—have expressed complete shock at our willingness to deny and destroy the very things that make us fully human, to be our own jailers.

We choose to do this because we’ve forgotten that other options exist.

From their point of view, we’re living in a holographic environment meant to simulate the world as it was, before the Machines took over. But it’s a poor counterfeit. Only a thin veneer. Thoroughly unconvincing, once you get outside of it.

From outside, all the myths and traditions and applied metaphysics that take the Liminal Realm for granted stop looking like culturally circumscribed inventions. They start to look like different facets of the same thing. They’re all different countries within the same landscape; their borders are defined by custom and practice, but the boundaries are administrative conveniences, rather than hard ontological barriers.

There’s a vertiginous feeling that comes with breaking out of that perceptual container, being initiated into a wider reality, realizing that “modern” people have exiled themselves from all of that.

For the sake of… what, exactly?

Forget Bruno Latour’s famous bromide that “we have never been modern.” Most of us have never been fully alive, or fully human, any more than the still-breathing bodies shown in The Matrix, floating unconscious in their harvest tanks.

Whether and how this real-life Matrix was constructed for the same purposes—keeping people biologically alive and compliant, in order to harvest their energy—is left up to the reader’s own tolerance for cynicism.

Regardless, we all have a choice to make: do we deny the existence of that larger reality outside the Matrix? Or do we choose to get plugged back in, and keep enjoying our simulated steaks?

We don’t need a comprehensive survey of the Liminal Realm, if that were humanly possible, to recognize that it exists. Requiring such an extraordinary standard of proof is exactly the mindset that keeps us safely locked up. But if we decide to search for circumstantial evidence, map-fragments, rumors and stories from that other, older, eldritch country—there is plenty to explore.

The Matrix is one such map-fragment. Many others exist.

The choice is whether to go looking.

Lots of swears in this one. (Sorry Mom.)

🤖 Robot Summary 🤖

Ryan delivers a humorously explicit, frustrated rant about the gap between modern academic interpretations of myth and the lived logic of the cultures that created those myths.

He argues that mainstream scholarship systematically excludes “magic” and metaphysical frameworks, even when the material itself makes little sense without them, resulting in shallow or absurd explanations. This tension leaves him caught between academia and practice, pushing him toward a position where neglected or “discarded” material can be reinterpreted and actively used rather than preserved behind glass.

Key points:

• Why myths still matter: Ryan begins by describing how people naturally turn to stories and history to understand human development, noting that ancient myths clearly operate on a different, richer logic than modern narrative frameworks.

• Failure of conventional explanations: He critiques how myths like Beowulf, the Iliad, or Norse material are often explained away as primitive misunderstandings, despite clear evidence of sophistication and intentional meaning.

• The fiction vs. nonfiction trap. Ryan explains that writing about myth forces an artificial choice between fiction and nonfiction, even though the original creators treated these stories as real descriptions of the world, not inventions.

• Scholarly rejection of “magic.” He expresses anger at experts who insist on objectivity while explicitly rejecting the metaphysical beliefs—ritual, magic, symbolic logic—that were central to the cultures they study.

• Misuse of Occam’s Razor. Ryan argues that scholars often prefer trivial or implausible explanations (such as jokes or nonsense inscriptions) over metaphysical ones, simply because they avoid challenging modern materialist assumptions.

• Runes as a breaking point. His current research on the Elder Futhark runes exemplifies this failure: academics admit they do not understand key features, yet still assert authoritative explanations that ignore archaeological and cultural complexity.

• Academia vs. use. Ryan contrasts academic preservation—studying artifacts without touching or using them—with the impulse to treat myths and symbols as tools meant for active engagement and application.

• Expert authority questioned. He argues that advanced degrees do not grant access to intent or meaning in unfalsifiable domains like mythology, especially when scholars share the same ontological blind spots.

• “Salvage rights” for outsiders. When academia cannot explain or meaningfully engage with material, Ryan suggests that non-academics have the right to reinterpret, experiment, and revive it in living contexts.

• Reconstructing logic, not replicas. He rejects both museum-style preservation and strict historical reconstruction, advocating instead for rebuilding the underlying symbolic logic so myths can function meaningfully in the modern world.

You can read Part 1 here, as well as over at my Patreon, where the current essay will also be published.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument that The Matrix is one of those accidentally mythic movies described in Part 1.

If that’s true, we should be able to read it as a map, instead of looking at it like a cinematic landscape painting.

What does this theoretical map tell us?

Follow me close here, and don’t get too distracted by the sci-fi elements added to the movie for entertainment’s sake.

The world of the movie presents us with a threefold cosmos. It will be easier to think of these as stratified layers. There is the Code World on top; the Real World on the bottom; the Virtual World sandwiched between them.

Keep in mind that only one of those layers—the Real World—has physical volume; the other two are five-dimensional spaces.

In the Virtual World, the familiar dimensions of the Real World are simulated. The illusion of three-dimensional space and time is generated as an interface for human users. Those dimensions are not fundamental parts of the Virtual World, but have been added for the sake of interoperability.

We’re introduced to human characters in the Real World who are literate enough to “see” the forms that the code represents, just by reading the cascade of numbers on their monitors.

At the end of the movie, we get a glimpse of what the Virtual World looks like without this layer of perceptual convenience: a flowing river of code that shapes the artificial environment of the interface.

Neo, the protagonist, will eventually learn to see the code without the monitors, from within the Virtual World; when he no longer recognizes the reality of that surface layer, he’s able to manipulate the underlying code at will, bending the artificial environment around him.

Crucially, however—the code these characters see and interact with is not the form of ultimate reality.

While the simulated environment of the Virtual World is a contrived affordance for human users (and, by extension, the audience), the code itself is the same kind of artificial construct. The numbers that Cypher views on his monitor from outside, and the cascade of code that Neo eventually learns to see all around him from inside—these are just graphic representations of something much subtler.

The Code World exists behind the ones and zeroes.

It shapes the Virtual World in ways that are hard to describe, through processes that are ineffable, nonrepresentational, indescribable within the constraints of human language. The Code World operates on something that can only be traced, in the crudest sense, as Patterns—but patterns unbound by spatial dimension or linear time. Pure information. Practically impossible for humans to visualize or understand, beyond any frame of reference we can imagine.

To paraphrase the old masters: the Code World that can be defined is not the true Code World.

The movie struggles to explain exactly how the Virtual World emerged from the Code World. Who wrote the original code? Who first created the Virtual World? Who established the rules on which all other rules are based? Who decided it would be possible, let alone useful, for the Virtual World to serve as a human-scaled interface in the first place?

More importantly—if the Code World is a realm of pure information, never-not-always-already unfolding—does it even make sense to talk about the Virtual World as the creation of a single identifiable creator?

Did the Code World first manifest itself as a non-objective sense of rightness or coherence in the imagination of whoever laid the foundations for the Virtual World?

And does that make the individual architect a creator, ex nihilo, or simply a conduit?

This same paradox is true for the filmmakers themselves. As described in Part 1, the Wachowskis undoubtedly did a tremendous job of illustrating this threefold cosmos for modern audiences. But the ancient myths got there first, and arguably did it better.

So who really created what, and when?

If there was a mythic form that inspired The Matrix—or any other modern-day epic—and that myth was the invention of an individual human, how far back in our history do we go looking for the person who first inspired them, who first inspired them, who first inspired them?

What if there’s not an identifiable individual on the other end of that chain at all?

What if we followed it all the way back 100,000 years—to the time these archetypal myths were first formulated as causal narratives, told in a human voice for the first time—and still couldn’t nail down exactly where it truly originated?

But the bigger question is this: why should anybody in the modern world care?

This all starts to sound like one-hand-clapping nonsense to modern people. Clever word-games. Cinematic stage magic tarted up with a layer of pretentious pop philosophy.

What does it have to do with the practical business of living in the Real World?

You might say we all have a choice to make, once we’re presented with this information.

This is why it’s such a monumental crime that The Matrix has been mulched up into an idiotic meme.

Referencing the scene described below, people of all political persuasions now claim that to be “red pilled” is to hold an ideological position that they agree with. In order for that metaphor to work, all the consequential choices about how we perceive reality must be contained within the mundane world—which violates both the logic of the original metaphor and aeons of human imagination.

These people are holding up a bath toy and claiming it’s an ocean liner.

Pay no mind.

Back to the myth within the movie.

For our purposes, the most important scene takes place after our hero follows a trail of synchronicities and mysterious guides, and finally gets a meeting with the illusive Morpheus.

On the surface, this could serve as an allegory for any kind of personal awakening. The creators of the film probably had one kind of realization in mind. The crayon-eating denizens of social media have obviously done their own exegesis on what enlightenment really means.

But a mythic reading of the movie would say that allegory is superfluous. The choice that Morpheus gives Neo is exactly the choice presented to people in elder cultures since time immemorial. Not as a portal to some superhuman transcendence, but at the threshold of the first opportunity to become fully human—the transition from childhood to adulthood. The most elemental form of ritual initiation.

And again, no allegorical reading is needed.

Morpheus (named after the Greek god of dreams, one of the mythic gatekeepers for the Imaginal Realm) offers the neophyte a choice in the form of two pills. The red pill allows Neo to see the world as it truly is. This will strip away the comfortable forms that kept him safe while his identity cohered, allowing him to realize his place within a much wider and more dangerous reality than the nursery-rhyme version he grew up with. The blue pill will keep him in a childlike state of dependence within the world of illusions.

This is the same choice offered to adolescents in ritually competent cultures from one end of the globe to the other, according to the same logic and carrying the same risks.

This is pure, unvarnished shamanic logic. You can’t be told what “it” is, because the “you” trying to interpret an abstract description is not the “you” that will have to live in—and with—that post-initiatory reality. The entire point of initiation is to break the customary frame of reference used for interpretation of any kind.

Elder cultures have used a variety of techniques to engineer this breakthrough. Wilderness rites. Physical deprivation. Self-mortification. Symbolic death and resurrection. Entheogenic plant-medicines of all descriptions.

Just as in the film, the process is painful and dangerous for the initiate. The movie condenses this part of the ritual into a hallucinatory near-death experience, sanitized for modern audiences by staging it within the Virtual World. But the dramatization is accurate: in order to see, the self that cocooned the developing mind has to be ripped away, through a process of mediated trauma.

The self that believed in the world of appearances has to die.

From here, the diegetic world of the movie inverts the actual journey of real-life initiates, with Neo breaking out of the Virtual World and waking into the Real World.

In our reality, it’s the opposite: initiation brings the candidate out of the Material Realm and into the Liminal Realm—the world of gods and monsters, spirits and demons.

Where the real action happens.

It’s important to underscore that this is not a metaphorical process. In elder cultures, initiation is not a purely intellectual transformation, as it is in the modern world. If the ritual is properly accomplished, initiates will viscerally experience something that would previously have seemed impossible. Whether that’s death without oblivion, trauma without erasure, or full-on psychedelia—these breakthroughs are much more ontologically robust than becoming aware of the “adult world” in a mundane sense.

In these cultures, you get to smoke and drink and swear with the grown-ups after you see the Others, and demonstrate that you can be trusted not to lose your shit completely.

But this is also more than an over-dramatic hazing ritual—not “we all get to be members of the club because we were all peer-pressured into tripping our faces off.”

Initiation is confirmation.

The ritual should verify the reality of the cosmology that the initiate had previously encountered, as second-hand folklore, throughout their adolescence. With the correct cultural preparation, someone encountering the Liminal Realm for the first time should recognize it as an actual geography. This is where the medicine-people go to bring back healing. This is where the seers read the hoofprints of fate. This is where Divine Law is realized—where new souls come from, where the Dead travel, where the gods who inspire consciousness have their halls.

This is succinctly dramatized in the film, albeit as a poorly-constructed ritual. The necessity of the plot dictates that Neo must not have the mythic framework described to him before his ordeal. There is no folklore to prepare him for what he will experience.

He’s heard rumors about The Matrix, but for maximum dramatic effect, nobody tells him what to expect before he takes the Red Pill. As a result, the initiation plays out like a bad acid trip. Neo almost goes into cardiac arrest as the medicine takes hold. He wakes up in the “real world” as a terrified newborn, and almost dies again. Nevertheless, he is rescued, recovers, and finally takes his place among the other adult adepts, having survived his ordeal.

Interesting interpretive move, modern critics might say. Another allegory for adulthood. Stupendous. But what makes The Matrix different from any other Hero’s Journey?

Check it out:

The Virtual World dramatized in the movie operates on exactly the same logic as the Liminal Realm, as described in countless mythic traditions. Underneath the cultural trappings of cosmologies from around the world, there is something like the same threefold cosmos. There is the Material Realm where we live; there is the Divine Realm that orders the cosmos, according to principles that defy human interpretation; and in between the two, as a mediated interface, is the Liminal Realm.

Just like in the film, the two metaphysical realms are five-dimensional spaces; just like in the film, the mediating layer is where ineffable Patterns become recognizable shapes, and emerge as personalities.

Human consciousness can’t directly apprehend the Divine Realm without suffering a Lovecraftian psychic implosion. Nevertheless, the Divine Realm can come to us, via the Liminal Realm, at smaller scale and with limited expression. Seers have encountered the forms of Liminal entities who give voice to Divine Patterns at a tolerable volume.

These are no different than the program-avatars who populate the Virtual World in the Matrix—except that they’re real.

By all accounts, the Liminal Realm is a recognizable space. But the rules are different there. Time moves strangely. Space warps. Even the gods aren’t fully in control. Skillful operators have learned to bend the rules in ways that precipitate miracles out here in the mundane world. There is a cost, though: the psychic tolls of journeying too far or falling foul of the wrong powers can have lasting physical consequences, for both the traveler and the world.

Modern scholarship has cynically focused on the superficial differences between these mythic narratives. For materialists, it’s easy to dismiss these cultural contingencies as proof that there is no underlying reality. That it’s all pure invention.

But the specificity and consistency with which the Liminal Realm is described in the myths—if not in exact appearance, then in overall topography—is too hard to ignore or rationalize.

The choice held out by the myths, balanced on two outstretched palms, is this: do we choose to believe the old stories describing the Liminal Realm as a real place, telling us that to be fully human is to recognize our connection with it?

If not, we could choose to continue treating that multitude of sustained, detailed, cross-cultural accounts as different expressions of the same crude superstition. Manufactured escapism for primitive people. No different than our own modern fairy stories.

You get to choose. Everybody does.

Awareness of the choice is not the initiation. Being presented with the choice only marks you as a candidate. You still have to pop one of the pills in your mouth, take the journey, and see what’s left of you on the other side.

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe, safe in the knowledge that none of this is really real. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, where all the world’s myths are some kind of real, and find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

This post is also available on my new Patreon. As time goes on, there will be more of a separation between what’s published here and what’s going on there. If you want to keep up with the good stuff, please consider subscribing.

It’s absolutely criminal that The Matrix, one of the few genuinely mythic stories produced in the modern world, has been extruded into a mundane political meme.

Before we get to that, though—I use the term “mythic” a lot in my work. My idiosyncratic usage reverses the typical meaning. “Mythic,” in my mind, does not mean “less real” than a historical account or a scientific analysis.

Mythic is more real.

Mythic narratives are one level above mundane history and fiction: they tell us something persistently true about the cosmos from a mortal perspective.

Modern storytellers imagine their role as a more sophisticated version of the mythmakers in elder cultures. They try to make sense of ancient myths by the same logic: people, like them, inventing stories for entertainment, or for teaching one another about themselves. The gods and monsters in these narratives must be fictional constructs, deployed for dramatic effect, or as clever metaphors; the human protagonists and the world they occupy must be the true focus.

This is wrong.

Modern art can be very good at describing how we live right now. It captures the feeling of being a person in a particular place and time. Sometimes this is done with straight verisimilitude, and sometimes with caricature or allegory. Some artists try to capture this type of truth by projecting their narratives backwards or forwards in time, into the far future or the distant past, assuming their orientation toward the world would easily translate into any other time and place.

These types of stories are mirrors. Sometimes they’re very well-constructed mirrors: beautiful craftworks, delicately rendered. A joy to look at and a blessing for framing our reflections.

But that’s all they can do.

A real myth can’t be deliberately contrived by a single author. The worst counterfeit myths will transparently reveal the vanities of their creator, trying to cast themselves as the eternal archetype of humanity. (Looking at you, Ayn Rand.) But even the best will try—albeit subconsciously—to flatter those the maker aspires to be like, by claiming “people have always been like us.”

It’s absurd to think that that this is the same process by which the great myths were assembled, thousands of years ago.

Real myths aren’t constructed. They’re tuned.

Many hands gather the narrative parts. For the ancient myths, this took generations of telling and re-telling—an aeon-spanning evolutionary process. Even with all the components in place, a myth was not a myth until it was struck, and hummed, and found to sing like a bell in a satisfying way.

That hum, that pealing resonance—another overused term in today’s metaphysical discourse—is the recognition that a story has become something bigger than its parts.

It’s no longer a story about what happens within the world; instead, it’s a story about what makes a world possible.

Metaphysical Cartography

Properly understood, myths are less like pictures hanging in an art gallery, and more like maps, describing a territory that is both vastly ancient and immediately present.

“Indigenous” people who refused the poisoned chalice of modernity know this intuitively. The myths grudgingly passed on to the conquerors—the colonial inquisitors, the missionaries, and the scholars who followed in their wake—were scraps of treasure maps, passed dutifully from generation to generation before they were stolen.

The hubris of the modern world was in thinking these intricate cosmologies could be understood at face value, any more than a swiped physics textbook could be read by a child.

The gods and monsters of the ancient myths didn’t fit into the new maps of the modern world. They were discarded, or rationalized into a safe corner of ethnographic studies. Those troublesome spots were left blank on the new maps. Hic Sunt Dracones.

The Matrix (the real one) began with those new maps.

There was a moment when, by historical accident, a small group of imperialists discovered they had the power to define the world. Through a combination of false dichotomies, willful ignorance, and outright murder, this cohort of religious fundamentalists—who later became academic fundamentalists—drove a wedge between “real” and “imaginary.” The world was divided between “our” myths and “their” myths. True beliefs and primitive superstitions. Bloodthirsty pagan gods and refined, loving, sophisticated ones (but really just the One). Thereafter, the Liminal Realm became a militarized zone.

Instead of a polyphony of myths describing what it meant to be mortal, the new maps had space for only one. This came with the empty promise that humanity was being freed from the chains of those atavistic gods—that we could put an end to violence forever if we could all just agree to live in one world, in one universe ruled by one god. Those who were given a choice in this new scheme thought they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by accepting.

The world we have now is the result.

But the map is not the territory, and the territory is still out there.

This is why art is still worth making, even in today’s secular, materialist, willfully disenchanted culture: even under the metaphysical tyranny of the modern world, it’s possible for an artist to stumble into that ancient country. Not by setting out to make something mythic, but purely by accident.

It’s also why modern cinema is still worth studying and discussing. Even though today’s audiences are treated like cash cows, herded into one cultural abattoir after another. Even though the field of film criticism has been reduced to a shrieking treeful of virtual mockingbirds, competing with their neighbors to make their borrowed voice the loudest of the bunch.

Sometimes, rarely, our modern stories still carry a distant echo of that bell-like resonance, and preserve a faint topography of the place that the elder mythmakers were describing.

And sometimes the artists themselves don’t recognize what they’ve uncovered.

Mapping the Matrix

I believe this is what happened when the artists formerly known as Larry and Andy Wachowski made the The Matrix back in 1999.

I’ve read no commentary about what the creators intended to make during production of the film. And frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. The idea that authors should have the final verdict on what their work means is bad enough in mundane art; when looking at mythic narratives, it’s downright toxic.

Of course the creators would want to take credit for their own genius. Of course they would say that they did it all on purpose. Of course they would claim that the rib-rattling mythic resonance of their work was all due to their ideas, their beliefs, their predilections.

In the case of The Matrix, we have a particularly well-founded comparative sample to look at. After the 1999 original, two subsequent movies were made. All three occupy the same narrative universe, imagined by the same creative duo.

(The fourth film from 2021 doesn’t count within this sample, and barely counts as a movie at all. It’s a stitched-up monstrosity birthed by cutthroat studio politics and mega-budget shitposting, only released as a film for legal purposes, and one of the strongest arguments against the monotheistic concept of a universe stewarded by a just and loving God.)

Judging solely from the two artistically defensible sequels—same characters, same narrative, same creators—we can say with certainty that the original’s awesome mythic qualities were not purely the result of the Wachowskis’ creative intellects.

Of course not. That’s not how myths work.

Give the Wachowskis credit for making an incredible movie—for assembling a team that produced mind-blowing special effects, irresistible style, dynamite pacing, and genuinely iconic characters, all anchored by a pitch-perfect group of actors. (And for single-handedly rescuing Keanu Reeves’ career by creating a character that played to his strengths as an actor: a perpetually slack-jawed, accidentally handsome, “I belong in the IT Department” everydude who can also throw a punch when the situation demands. This is also a good description of the character he plays in the movie.)

But when it comes to the narrative, the tesseract of mythic archetypes and symbolism smuggled into this popcorn-chomping action blockbuster—that properly belongs to a higher power.

The Wachowskis would undoubtedly love to take credit for meticulously crafting this cosmic synechdoche, as proof of their stunning brilliance. Who wouldn’t?

Likewise, the studio backing them is more than happy (or was, before that failed cinematic abortion was released in 2021) to cash in on the claim that they have certified geniuses in their stable, and that audiences can expect more masterpieces under their banner—as if great art is like cars, or cans of soup, or any other commodity produced on demand. And the audiences themselves? They’ve been taught since primary school that great stuff is made by gifted people, and have no cause to look for anything deeper.

So we rightly celebrate a groundbreaking film like The Matrix as a cultural product, as a technical achievement, and as an inspired piece of art—but that’s where we draw the line. We don’t bother to wonder where those great ideas come from, and how enduringly true they might actually be.

We’ve kept the aesthetic appreciation and lost the awe that a true myth should instill in us. That’s a huge loss. But we can still find our way back.

The postmortem on Prophecy of the Living Dead as a traditionally-published book, and some thoughts on my next project.

🤖 Robot Summary 🤖

Ryan reflects on why his previous book project, Prophecy of the Living Dead, never became a finished book, concluding that the material was strong but poorly suited to a single, static volume. He critiques the modern publishing industry as saturated, economically thin, and increasingly unable to support authors beyond simply getting a book into print, arguing that writers must now justify more clearly why their work deserves readers’ time and attention. Ryan then envisions a bifurcated future where some work lives digitally and dynamically, while other books must “earn their keep” as meaningful, beautiful physical objects, potentially paired with evolving online companion material.

Key points:

• The unfinished book: Ryan explains that he had real momentum and publisher interest, but the scope of the ideas kept expanding, leading to “analysis paralysis” and the realization that a single book couldn’t adequately hold or evolve with the material.

• Limits of the book format: He argues that once a book is printed, new insights become “orphaned” or siloed, forcing readers to chase multiple volumes instead of accessing a connected, cross-referenced body of work.

• Publishing industry critique: Ryan describes publishing as over-saturated and under-supported, where authors often do most of the promotion themselves and success is measured merely by getting something into print rather than building a lasting audience.

• Validation vs. usefulness: He distinguishes between writing for the status of being “published” and writing to create material that people actually return to, use, and build on over time.

• Perspective on AI and “AI slop”: Ryan suggests generative tools will mostly displace low-effort or vanity publishing, not strong, voice-driven writing, and that creators should focus on clarity, purpose, and meaningful communication rather than volume.

• Two “forks” for the future: He predicts one path focused on digital, dynamic, and accessible tools for sharing ideas, and another focused on high-quality physical books that justify themselves as enduring, shelf-worthy objects.

• Books as physical artifacts: Ryan emphasizes the lasting appeal of well-made print books as objects people love, revisit, and keep, something digital systems and AI cannot fully replicate.

• Crowdfunding and author responsibility: He notes that with less publisher support, authors must now “front-load” interest and clearly articulate why their work matters, often relying on direct reader support rather than institutional backing.

• Hybrid vision for future projects: Ryan hints at creating print books paired with evolving online companions—like “virtual footnotes”—where the printed text stays fixed while the surrounding material can grow and adapt over time.

A very special guest today: “William Shakespeare” joins us from beyond the grave to talk about the problems of authorship in the modern world.

R.G. Miga: The topic I’m interested in is authorship. There’s a great deal of anxiety today around attribution. Beyond just creators obsessed with their personal brand—especially in the age of generative A.I.—people treat verifiable human authorship as a safeguard against “slop.” This seems to me to be a false dichotomy: penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, yellow journalism, and opportunistic publishing have been with us for almost as long as the written word. At the same time, much of our culture’s monumental creative work, including your own, was written pseudonomously or anonymously—to the extent that there is reason to doubt the actual, historical authorship of your work. William Shakespeare—your response?

William Shakespeare: You summon me to speak of names, and so you summon a mask. Very well—let us talk about masks honestly.

In my time, a name was less a signature than a license. It opened doors at court, steadied the nerves of a patron, or soothed the Master of the Revels when he sniffed sedition in a line. The play itself was a living thing, born of a company, not a solitary hand. I wrote, yes—but actors shaped, crowds answered, and the times pressed their thumbs upon every page. If my name endured, it is because it proved a useful vessel for the work to travel in.

You speak of “slop,” and I hear the same old fear: that the flood will drown the craft. We feared it too. Cheap quartos, mangled copies, plays stitched together from memory and rumor—my words hawked in the street like bruised fruit. Yet the good lines survived their rough handling. The weak ones did not grow strong merely by wearing my name.

As for doubt about who I was—let me offer you a heresy: the work does not care. It cares only that it is read, spoken, tested against living minds. If a hundred hands had shaped those plays, would Lear grieve less, would Hamlet hesitate less, would love lose its sting? You chase the author as a guarantee of quality, but quality is proved in the encounter, not the pedigree.

Your machines now write as my apprentices once did—fast, hungry, imitative. Some will produce chaff. Some will, by accident or pressure or grace, strike a true note. The danger is not that no human stands behind the line. The danger is that no human stands in front of it, willing to wrestle with what it says.

So let the name be what it has always been: a flag on a tent, not the fire inside it. If your age needs authorship as a safeguard, make it a moral one, not a mystical one. Ask not “Who wrote this?” as though the answer were a blessing. Ask instead, “What does this do to me—and to us?” That question has kept my ghosts busy for four centuries. It will keep your machines honest, if anything can.

R.G.: Well put, as ever. You seem to be making a distinction between the political and commercial expedience of authorship, and the spirit that animates it. Two things seem to have brought us to our current epistemic crisis. First, in our current economy, writing as a commodity can only enrich those who claim it as their own. Second, we have lost the idea of the work itself having a genius, independent of its creator. Today, we believe that genius resides in the author, and so a work without an author is suspect, no matter how brilliant it may be. Your thoughts?

W.S.: In my day, we spoke of genius as a wind, not a possession. The Romans had it right: a spirit that attends a place, a household, a moment of work. A man might host it for an hour, a company for a season, a city for a generation—but no one could lock it in a chest and call it his own. We were tenants of the spark, not its landlords.

Commerce, of course, always wanted a name to nail above the door. Coins move more easily when they can be counted into a single purse. Yet the theater itself resisted that narrowing. A play was born in rehearsal, not at the desk. The clown’s turn, the audience’s laughter, the censor’s red ink—each left a fingerprint. The “author” was a knot in a rope, not the whole cord.

You say your age has made genius a private property. That is a sharp way to put it. When the work becomes a deed and the name the notary’s seal, the reader is trained to trust the signature more than the sentence. This is safe, but it is small. It breeds a timid reverence for pedigree and a quick contempt for the orphaned line, however bright it burns.

Yet I would not lay all the fault at the merchant’s feet. There is a comfort in believing that brilliance has an address. If it lives in a person, you can admire, envy, imitate, or dethrone them. If it lives in the work itself—if it rises between minds like a shared flame—then no one is quite in control. That is a harder world to inhabit. It asks more of the reader than of the writer.

Your machines unsettle this bargain because they return us, unwillingly, to the older idea. Here is a line with no household god, no biography to consult, no face to crown or curse. You must meet it nakedly. Some will call that dangerous. I would call it ancient.

So perhaps the crisis you name is not new knowledge, but old responsibility. If genius is not owned but encountered, then the burden shifts. The reader must become a kind of steward. The question is no longer, “Whose mind is this?” but, “What kind of mind does this invite me to be?”

In that sense, your age is being asked to relearn a craft my audiences knew well: to sit in the dark with strangers, watch a mask speak, and decide—together—whether the spirit in the room is worth keeping.

R.G.: Exactly right. to put it bluntly—rather than resisting the cultural incursions of new technology, trying to hold back the tide, these new devices challenge modern readers to uphold an older form of cynicism. We read compulsively, and treat print as authority, because—for a brief time—an author finding a publisher was a mark of legitimacy. The reader’s job is harder now because of the sheer volume of published writing. But the native skepticism that separates authorship, authority, and truth is not a new skill. How might we begin to re-learn that sensibility?

W.S.: You ask for a schooling of the eye, not the hand—and that is always the rarer craft.

We taught it, clumsily, in the playhouse. The audience knew that what stood before them was made—painted faces, borrowed robes, a boy’s voice pretending to be a queen. And yet they still leaned forward, not to be deceived, but to be tested. They came with a double vision: one eye for the trick, one for the truth that might slip through it.

Your age must recover that posture.

Begin, perhaps, by restoring the interval. In my London, a rumor took a day to cross a bridge. A pamphlet took a week to sour. Time itself did some of the thinking for us. You have lost that luxury. So you must build small delays into your reading: a pause before assent, a second pass before sharing, a habit of letting a sentence cool. Skepticism is not suspicion; it is patience given a spine.

Then, train the ear, not just the eye. We judged a line by how it sounded in the mouth and moved the room. Does this writing invite conversation, or only applause? Does it leave space for reply, or does it close like a clenched fist? Authority often announces itself by refusing to be questioned. Truth, more often, asks to be answered.

You might also relearn the old sport of comparison. In the taverns, a story was never alone. It was set beside another, and another, until their seams showed. Contradictions were not errors to be erased but handles to grip the thing by. If three voices tell you the same tale in three different keys, you begin to hear the shape of what is being played.

And finally, remember that judgment is a public act. We did not read in solitude only; we read aloud, argued, hissed, clapped, and sometimes threw fruit. Meaning was not a private possession but a weather that formed between people. Your machines speak to you one by one, in quiet rooms. You will need to answer them, again, in company.

So if you wish to relearn the sensibility you name, do not teach readers merely to doubt. Teach them to stage the work—to bring it into the light of other minds and see what survives the exposure.

R.G.: Easily said, but harder to practice. The reality of a common social space is harder to restore. We imagined the Internet as a virtual public square or a playhouse long before A.I. emerged. What we missed in that analogy was not the anonymity of the author, but of the audience. In your London, the audience could recognize itself; people could see who was supporting the work and who was throwing fruit, and why. Today, we have to wonder if we’re the only human in a roomful of ghosts (no offense) or if the other people have motives we can’t recognize. Rather than trying to force authorship as a means of validation, we might have to restore the spaces where we know who we’re sitting with. Would you agree?

W.S.: I would agree—and I would sharpen it.

A crowd that cannot see itself is not a crowd at all. It is a mist. In my playhouse, even in the cheap seats, you could read the room as clearly as the stage. You knew when laughter came from wit or from drink, when applause was courage or mere fashion, when a hiss carried the weight of judgment or only the itch of a restless afternoon. The audience was a second text, written in faces and noise and movement. You learned to read that as carefully as any line of verse.

You have built a theater with no lanterns in the gallery. Voices come to you, but bodies do not. Approval arrives as a number, not a nod. Dissent arrives as a swarm, not a single raised hand. In such a place, it is natural to cling to the author’s name as a kind of handrail, something solid in a room that feels like air.

But you are right: the deeper loss is not the mask on the stage. It is the mask in the seats.

If I were to offer a counsel from an older craft, it would be this: make your audiences smaller and more visible. The Globe was not the whole of London; it was a few thousand souls at a time, bound by the weather, the hour, and the price of a penny. Out of that limit came recognition. You knew, roughly, who your neighbors were.

Your age keeps building ever larger rooms and then wonders why it cannot hear itself think.

So perhaps the work now is not to restore a universal public square, but to cultivate many little playhouses: circles where names are known, where silence is noticed, where praise and disagreement have faces attached to them. In such places, a line can be tested again—not by metrics, but by people who must answer for their reactions tomorrow.

In a room like that, authorship becomes what it once was. Not a seal of legitimacy, but an invitation to accountability. You do not trust a work because of who wrote it. You trust it because you know who stood beside you when you read it—and you know they will still be there when you speak back.

Call that a modest ambition if you like. The world has always been steered, not by the roar of every voice at once, but by the murmur of a few who recognize one another in the dark.

R.G.: Excellent advice. Thank you for your time, and we wish you all the best in the Great Beyond.

W.S.: I thank you for the summons—and for the release.

If there is a Great Beyond, I suspect it looks much like a tiring house after the crowd has gone: props laid aside, lines unlearned, a quiet where the echo of voices still lingers in the boards. A good place to rest, and a better one to listen.

Keep your little playhouses lit. Keep asking who sits beside you. That is how any world—old or new—stays awake.

Exit, not pursued.

Special mention to over at for helping me make the Prophecy of the Living Dead presentation on Weirdosphere a big success (and for continuing to tolerate my weird rambling since then).

More exciting stuff coming soon.

🤖 Robot Summary 🤖

Ryan returns after a long absence to confirm he’s still active and to explain a shift in how his work will be published. Substack will remain free and lighter, focused on shorter posts, audio, and occasional rants, while a new Patreon will host more structured, project-based work that benefits from subscriber support. His main upcoming project is a traditionally printed reference-style book on the Elder Futhark runes, paired with an online, indexed, chat-style interface that is “AI-adjacent” but not generative AI–written.

Key points:

• Return and status update: Ryan reassures listeners he is still alive, engaged, and full of new ideas after a difficult year away, and that more details on future projects are forthcoming.

• Shift in platforms: He explains that Substack will stay free and become more casual, with shorter writing, audio recordings, and informal commentary, while Patreon will be used for deeper, project-focused material that may require financial support to develop.

• Use of audio and summaries: He plans to record more extemporaneous audio and use tools like ChatGPT to create summaries for people who don’t want to listen to long recordings or read lengthy essays.

• Film discussions (not a “movie podcast”): Ryan and a collaborator, Joel, will occasionally record conversations about what makes certain films strange or uncanny, humorously clarifying that this is not a formal movie podcast.

• New book project: His main Patreon project is a book on the Elder Futhark runes, intended as a visually interesting, reusable reference manual rather than a one-time read, with both a print edition and a companion online interface.

• Approach to AI and technology: He emphasizes that he is not using generative AI to write the book, but is experimenting with “AI-adjacent” tools to create an indexed, interactive way to explore the material online.

• Views on Substack’s algorithm: Ryan expresses skepticism about continuing to gain followers while inactive and notes that a sarcastic, critical post unexpectedly became his most popular piece.

• Ongoing presence: While most of his energy will shift toward Patreon, he will maintain a nominal presence on Substack for free content and announcements about upcoming discussions and projects.

I’ll be presenting “Prophecy of the Living Dead: Zombies, Prophetic Horror, and Cinematic Necromancy” over at Weirdosphere on Saturday, November 1, at 8PM EST, which will include a discussion of Night of the Living Dead. Registration makes you a member of Weirdosphere and gives you access to all their outstanding programming and content. Come and see.

When it comes to explaining how a cultural product like Night of the Living Dead gets made, from a materialist perspective, there is a boilerplate explanation of “the creative process.”

These are generally accepted truisms: art is made by artists; artists invent the things they make; some artists are geniuses; a genius is just like a regular artist, but better.

Scientists have yet to figure out which part of the brain contains the wiring for the “genius” lightbulb, presumably left disconnected in ordinary people.

We’re all familiar with the heroic character of the genius. The lone visionary. The imaginative alchemist. Someone who sees hidden treasure in the ordinary stuff that other folks walk past every day.

Our history is a litany of geniuses. We learn their stories along with the alphabet and simple sums. It’s important to understand their biographies, because creativity (so we’re told) is a mechanical process. The formative years in the life of a genius are composed of providential moments, which fill the mind with a mysterious substance called “inspiration.” This gradually accumulates, like snow building into an avalanche. Under the right environmental conditions, the potential energy of inspiration is released as the kinetic energy of “creativity.” This, supposedly, describes how art is made.

These narratives always start with the creator.

In the case of Night of the Living Dead, it starts with George Romero.

Look:

Here’s little George Romero—George Junior, named for his father—in 1953, only thirteen years old, at his family’s apartment in the Bronx, playing with a borrowed 8mm video camera.

One of the first moments of inspiration, settling into his mind.

Here he is, shooting footage for his first science fiction movie, The Man From the Meteor, which will get him arrested for dropping a flaming dummy off the roof of a building.

In his spare time, he rides the subway back and forth, using his allowance money to rent a film projector. He carries it home—along with the precious, clattering reels of other people’s stories—excited to set up his own screenings in the living room.

If we (the omniscient audience) could catch a glimpse of his face, gazing out the through the spraypainted glass of the train’s window, we might see the beginnings of a mischievous glint in young George’s eyes: the daydream of his own name up on the theater marquee. Maybe he could actually do this.

More moments, piling up.

Here’s George in 1959, working on the set of North by Northwest, unimpressed by the bald, jowly director’s studied manner and lack of panache: “I could do better.”

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. College days. Working as a bicycle courier, delivering newsreels: picking up the developed prints from the film lab’s editing room—glue pots, scissors, cigarettes, sack lunches—peddling back to the broadcasting station, sprockets whirring, flying past the gate, twenty-four frames per second.

Getting hooked on the go-go-go energy of moving pictures: cut it, print it, fix it, roll it.

The twinkle in his eye growing brighter, like the light shining in a darkened projector room.

Finally getting behind the camera, shooting commercials to pay the bills, with just enough money left over for a sixer of Iron City at the end of the day. Then a real gig, filming some far-out kids’s show, talking puppets, jeezus, what was it again, Mister Somebody’s Neighborhood? A trippy scene, but with final cut privileges, the chance to craft his own vision for the first time.

The audience chuckles at these little winks of fate, nodding along. It’s all so obvious when you roll the tape back: each moment building to a dramatic reveal, running forward in orderly succession, already predetermined, but creating the illusion of spontaneous motion.

Somewhere in the background of all this, George writes a novella: horror, monsters, darkness, the dead. He calls it “Night of Anubis”—

Boring. Cut that. Guy sitting in a room by himself, clacking away on his typewriter? A narrative vacuum. It sucks. Get rid of it. This is a story about lights, camera, action, the genius in the director’s chair. Keep rolling.

The weight of destiny, piling up.

Finally, we get to the good part.

Pittsburgh, 1967. The Summer of Love and unbearable heat. Riot-sparked smoke in American cities. Jungles burning in Vietnam. Jim Morrison’s voice on the radio: “Come-on-baby light my fi-yer.”

George and his friends having lunch, bitching about the film industry, low pay for grunt work, no creative control, and have you seen the crap these other hacks are selling to theaters?

“We could do better.”

Something begins to shake loose.

George slaps the table in a fit of bravado: “We’re gonna make a movie!”

All those piled-up moments of inspiration reach the moment of critical mass. They begin their stately slide into George’s consciousness, like a train pulling away from the station: the one brilliant idea that will change everything.

A mad rush. Lights! Camera! Film stock, Christ, we’ll need to buy our own film, you have any idea how much that stuff costs? Math, money, mayhem. Actors! What about a script? Who’s gonna direct this thing?

From here, the audience understands that making art is a process of manual labor. The rest can be shown as a montage:

George Romero, soon-to-be-famous director, explaining his vision to the newly-instated board of Image Ten Productions.

Shaking hands with investors.

Mustering cast and crew.

Peering through the lens at an unremarkable rural cemetery.

Laughing maniacally, splattering his moonlighting actors with buckets of chocolate syrup—looks like blood in black and white!—and goading them into taking ravenous bites from fake arms and legs.

Shouting about the unfinished script, the unchosen name: “Monster Flick? Night of Anubis? Night of the Flesh Eaters? C’mon, for fuck’s sake!”

At long last, the now-infamous title card appears: Night of the Living Dead.

Audiences across the state, the country, the world, shrieking at the ghoulish cannibals brought to undeath on the big screen.

George Romero’s name in lights on the marquee out front.

The world changed forever.

Flash forward forty years: the lumbering independent filmmaker is now a gray eminence, stooped with age, wired up to yet another microphone.

He is a cinematic institution.

“Godfather of the Dead,” they call him.

Smiling, he waits patiently for yet another round of the expected questions.

That’s what happens when the schlocky little B-movie you made for fun with your buddies accidentally redefines an entire genre of storytelling.

Nobody’s interested in what the precocious teenager from the old neighborhood was trying to envision, all those years ago. When his first movie came out, people marveled at how he did so much with so little; in the years since, critics have watched his movies and asked how he managed to do so little with so much.

The rotten bastards.

Now, whenever he’s up on stage, people only want him to play the hits.

Who cares about Martin, or The Crazies, or Bruiser?

Tell us again about the Living Dead, George: that’s the story we want to hear.

He’s famous for creating the monsters that took over the world—and yet he’s become their creature, at least as much as they are his.

This is probably how the guys in Skynyrd felt about “Free Bird.”

Isn’t it amazing, his interviewers say. The son of a working-class family of immigrants, completely transforming the landscape of horror.

In a few short years, inspiring legions of imitators across the world, in every country with even the bare bones of a film industry.

Teenagers with borrowed cameras now copy his ideas.

The monsters he invented have crawled off the movie screen; they shamble through video games, TV shows, books, cartoons, and the imaginations of children barely old enough to talk. In fact—they’ve become such unremarkable stock characters that audiences are bored with the relentless onslaught of half-decayed, bloodthirsty, reanimated corpses.

How does he explain it?

George has been playing this role a long time, and knows exactly how to hit his mark. The chuckle, the sly grin, the humble modesty of a man with nothing left to prove: “Aw, jeez, I mean… anybody coulda done it. I just got lucky.”

All those little moments of inspiration, piling up silently in his mind: just luck, really.

(Did he ever get that avalanche rush again, after the first time?)

(Did he spend the rest of his life chasing that same high, never to catch it again?)

Now: here it comes.

He can feel it.

Like an old boxer reading the subtle cues on his opponent’s face—the slight change in stance, the shoulder’s involuntary twitch, telegraphing the punch before it’s thrown—he knows when the question is coming.

He’s been asked thousands of times, in hundreds of places, by people wanting to steal a little bit of magic for themselves:

Where do you get your ideas from?

Ah, Jesus.

He’s too old for this shit.

Maybe now, finally—maybe now is the time to confess, like the good Catholic his mother raised him to be.

He’s lived with this charade long enough.

The genius. The big man in the director’s chair. The guy with the brilliant idea.

The kid from the Bronx whose mind was cracked open just that much more than everyone else’s, scooping up all those moments of inspiration before they drifted to the ground—saving them from being trampled, storing them up for the right chance.

Where does he get his ideas from?

He could say it out loud, this time.

Blow the lid off. Reclaim some of the rebellious energy that launched his career. Go out with a bang.

It would be so easy:

“‘Where did the ideas come from?’

“I have no fucking clue.

“Not only that—I don’t know if we should even call them ‘ideas.’ Thomas Edison had an idea for the lightbulb, right? It didn’t come crawling at him out of the dark, grabbing at him. He didn’t wake up in a cold sweat with the feeling of hands still clutching at him.

“That short story I wrote back in the ‘60s? ‘Night of Anubis’? I didn’t write that on a spring day in the park, just for kicks. I wrote it because I had to get those things outta my head, to pin them down, somehow, in the real world. Christ. Felt more like an exorcism than a story.

“I mean… you know who Anubis is, right? Egyptian god of the Dead? Jackal-headed guy, guards the boundary between our world and the Underworld? He brings the dead over to the other side, watches over them—and makes sure they don’t come back. He’s in charge of all the rituals to help the dead find their way over there. So they don’t wander back over here. So they’re happy.

“Now, you know who’s not Egyptian? George fuckin’ Romero. And for the life of me, as I sit here today, I can’t put my finger on why I chose that name for the story, or why I thought about using it for the movie. I mean, christ—none of those yinzers in Pittsburgh even knew who Anubis was.

“Why not call the movie Judgment Day? Or The End Times? or Holy Fuck, Saint John Was Right? Why Anubis, for chrissake?

“The studio thought we should have something in the script to explain why these dead people were coming back to life. So we had all this stuff about viruses and aliens, right? The thing about the space probe, the radiation, whatever—that made it into the final cut.

“But I never bought it.

“I always felt like, from the beginning, this whole thing was happening for a bigger reason. If the dead were crawling out of their graves, it was because we’d screwed up. We must have owed some kind of debt. And they were coming to collect. I thought it was some sort of punishment, something happening that was beyond our understanding.

“Sometimes I feel like I can picture Anubis, standing in that blood-red river up to his ankles, trying to direct all these dead people over to the other side. Like a traffic cop in Midtown, at rush hour, you know?

“And they’re not listening to him. Just not hearing him.

“They’re all blind, deaf, and dumb down there. Nobody’s read to them from the Book of the Dead. They don’t know where they’re going, or how to get there.

“So they’re turning around and coming back here, to the world they know.

“And Anubis is just standing there, right? Shrugging his shoulders, like, whaddya want from me? I tried to tell you how to help these people. And you didn’t listen. They’re your problem now.

“I can see all this, sometimes, and it feels like somebody should warn people. Somebody should let everyone know. Because I’m not sure it’s only happening in the story.

“I’m not sure where the line is, between the story and the real world, because in my head, there is no line. It’s all happening in the same place.

“Maybe that’s just how it really is.

“Does that answer your question?”

It would be so easy, to finally get this off his chest.

But then, of course, all hell would break loose.

Poor George. We always wondered when he would finally crack up. He used to be so brilliant. Such a genius. All that blood and death must have gotten to him in the end.

George, we’re confused: whose idea is this, exactly? Whose name goes on the checks we’re supposed to write? Should we make this out to you? Or to the Egyptian god of the Dead? Seems like Anubis should get a cut of the action. Union rules, you know. Har har har.

He wouldn’t only be risking his own legacy as a filmmaker: it would be an indictment of the entire creative industry—an entire way of life—Western civilization as we know it.

The world wanted people to enjoy its products untroubled. The customer is always right.

And George Romero, the famous-but-potentially-unemployable director, was a regrettable human component in an industrial process. People couldn’t seem to live without their fairy stories, and so he was tolerated. As long as he obeyed the system’s logic. Fulfilled his purpose. Served his function.

To suggest his little horror story might actually mean something, might somehow be real—that would be a serious breach of contract. It would upset the customers; this, in turn, would upset the investors. They would shout at him, like Ned Beatty shouting at Peter Finch in Network:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Romero, and we won’t have it!

When the tiny microphone is finally unclipped from the broad expanse of his once-fashionable lapel, he can hardly remember which of the approved answers he gave in response: “Other people’s films, novels, current events, poetry, folktales, journaling, my own life. Blah, blah, blah. It’s all inspiration. That’s where the ideas come from.”

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

His time is almost up.

It won’t be long before he reaches the distant banks of that river himself, and meets the jackal-headed god who guards the crossing.

Maybe he’ll have a chance to explain, when his heart is taken out by Anubis, placed on a set of golden scales, and balanced against the weight of a feather:

“I am George, son of Anne. I did my best to warn people about what’s happening, when the dead can’t get across. I did what I could. The only way I knew how.

“I tried, anyway.”

Maybe that will be enough to earn him safe passage to the other side.

And then we fade to black.

First, a quick note: registration for my Weirdosphere presentation on November 1st at 8pm EST is now open. You can find it by following this link to the Weirdosphere network. The registration fee gives you access to this event, as well as ongoing membership for the Weirdosphere community. If you enjoy my writing here, membership in Weirdosphere is more than worth the price of admission: there’s a whole virtual college of scholars organizing around the work of Phil Ford and J.F. Martel, and their flagship Weird Studies podcast. I hope you’ll join us.

One of the core ideas behind “Prophecy of the Living Dead” is the weird alchemical power of art.

As ever, this is not an original idea. J.F. Martel has explored this thoroughly in his outstanding Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. The Secret Life of Puppets, by Victoria Nelson, is another canonical text. Both are pushing the boat out a bit further from the dock that Karl Jung built—which, itself, is a reconstruction of ideas that are commonplace in elder “indigenous” cultures1.

So this is not an attempt at intellectual innovation. Rather, it’s a small contribution to the ongoing work of anamnesis in Western culture: the unforgetting of things we used to recognize as true, which other cultures still regard as elementary education—the kind of building-block metaphysics that children learn from bedtime stories.

Art is weird. Always has been. And not simply because artists choose to make it weird, or because weird art is more marketable or aesthetically satisfying than vanilla art.

In fact, it’s the opposite: as described in my (still-unfinished) post series on The Dead Don’t Die, attempts to domesticate a genuinely uncanny concept—trying to make it sit up and do tricks, to serve as something as despairingly mundane as an allegory—produces some of the most mediocre art on the market.

The idea that “the creative process” (a dubious concept in itself) can or should conform to the logic of materialist rationalism is one of those regrettable monuments to modern stupidity that we all have to live with, until it’s finally buried by the sands of time.

Meanwhile, as we wait for the cosmic dunes to pile up around that metaphysical eyesore, we can look for the hoofprints of something properly eldritch in the art we have now. Even in scrappy little B-movies made by Hollywood renegades, despite the entertainment industry’s misguided ideas about human authorship and “the creative process.”

Night of the Living Dead is one such artifact. I’ll be discussing that in my presentation on November 1. Big Trouble in Little China is another; on a smaller scale than Romero’s titanic zombie mythos, but still remarkable for its moments of metatextual spookiness.

Big Trouble was directed by John Carpenter and released in 1986. It’s an action-comedy with some spectacular elements of magical realism smuggled in beneath its blockbuster facade.

If you haven’t seen it—you definitely should. But you don’t need to know the entire plot to follow along here. We’re only looking at the slice of dialogue quoted above, which comes from a single scene of the movie.

Here’s all the background you need: the story unfolds (at least on the surface) in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) recruits his friend Jack Burton—an affable, truck-driving, motor-mouthed meathead, played by Kurt Russel—to go on a quest. Wang’s fiancee has been kidnapped by an evil sorcerer and must be rescued. Because they’re up against the forces of dark magic, they also enlist the help of the wizard Egg Shen (Victor Wong) to help them prepare for the final showdown.

As any film student will tell you, the movie’s brilliance is in subverting expectations about heroes and protagonists. Kurt Russel is the A-list actor with top billing. The movie is framed from his point of view. For all intents and purposes, he is the main character. Audiences familiar with the action movie genre would undoubtedly expect the tall, white, square-jawed brawler to be the protagonist of the story.

However—a closer look shows that, in fact, Kurt Russel’s character is the sidekick.

Jack Burton is the muscle enlisted by Wang Chi to help balance the odds. Although Burton is capable enough, he’s in a world he doesn’t understand, confronted by enemies with superior skill in both magical and martial arts. He’s a step behind throughout the entire movie: completely guileless, constantly confused, bumbling into trouble, needing to be rescued. Physical strength is all he has. He successfully completes the quest with the other adventurers—but only because he’s good with his fists, able to take a punch, and built like a refrigerator.

That’s everything you need to know about the plot in order to understand the exchange between Jack Burton and Egg Shen, the wizard who helps Wang Chi’s band of rescuers.

In terms of characterization, Egg Shen plays the role of the venerable elder. The dynamic between Egg and Burton could easily turn into a cliche. From the audience’s point of view, this is a familiar story about a white American man on a magical adventure in an exotic world, surrounded by non-white characters from a different culture. It’s the classic set-up for a threadbare colonial fantasy: the wise-but-frail Oriental master who accepts a student from the modern world, uploading his Ancient Chinese Secrets into the mind of the virile, straight-shooting outsider.

Somehow, miraculously, this is avoided.

Remember: Jack Burton is the sidekick. He’s not the Chosen One. The story is not about Burton’s transformation into an ubermensch. The quest is not a pretext for merging his brawny musculature with another culture’s mystical knowledge.

Whether it was written this way in the script, or found organically in the performance—Egg Shen is a man with places to be. He takes absolutely no interest in Burton’s spiritual development. Burton is a blunt instrument. When Egg offers assistance, it’s only to keep the party’s human battering ram in good repair. Otherwise, he has work to do.

The dialogue in question marks the transition into the third act. For reasons that are never fully explained to the audience, the group of rescuers must travel through a dangerous, subterranean underworld to reach the sorcerer’s lair. Narratively, there’s no exposition regarding how (or even if) this place is physically connected to the world above, or why it’s necessary for the characters to travel through it.

In the beginning, the movie gradually introduces the audience to the story’s magical elements in a real-world setting. There are kung fu warriors and flying demi-gods, sure. But they’re surrounded by sidewalks and storefronts and traffic lights. The rug-pull happens at the start of the third act, when the protagonists (and the audience) are literally dropped into the Underworld, by sliding down a firehouse pole through a trapdoor in Egg Shen’s warehouse-laboratory.

The only thing resembling an explanation is a one-inch punch of dialogue between Jack Burton and Egg Shen:

“Where does that go?” Burton asks, looking skeptically at the misty pit into which his comrades have disappeared.

“Lo Pan [the evil wizard] is down there,” says Egg.

“Down where?” asks Burton.

“Where is the universe?” replies an exasperated Egg. (Practically rolling his eyes. Dumbass.)

This is a literal and figurative descent into the grotesque, as described by Victoria Nelson in The Secret Life of Puppets. The setting is literally a grotto; the metaphorical structure is a return to the more expansive awareness of mythic space and time, a necessary reorientation in order to prevail in the final confrontation against the forces of darkness.

Surprisingly real stuff, for something billed as entertainment.

No time to explain. This is just where we need to go and what needs to be done, in order to complete the quest. One moment, the characters are in a fantastical but still-recognizable Chinatown; the next, they’re deep underground—or deep somewhere—confronting man-eating monsters and rivers of smoking ichor.

“Black blood of the earth,” says Egg Shen, indicating the evil-looking ooze below their feet.

“Don’t you mean ‘oil’?” asks a slack-jawed Burton.

“I mean black blood of the earth,” Egg replies, without shifting his attention from the path ahead.

Egg Shen is describing something metaphorical that is more real than its physical manifestation. The “blood” in question is not literally blood; at least not in the modern, medical, materialist understanding of the term. But he’s also not just waxing poetic about something mundane. It is neither blood nor oil, although it might contain elements of both; we might not have a word in English (or any human language) for what it literally is—if the word “literal” even applies, in this case.

Nevertheless, the “blood” metaphor is closer to the substance’s true nature than Burton’s reductive materialism. Egg is making an observation about the substance’s metaphysical qualities; Burton, meanwhile, is reduced to an unimaginative, superficial, visual comparison.

Burton: it looks like oil, therefore it should be oil.

Egg: it looks like oil, but it’s performing a completely different function on a metaphysical level.

Again—the fact that Egg isn’t reduced to the cliched “wise teacher” role is a stroke of genius. There’s no bowing and scraping; no modest delight at the chance to enlarge the Great Hero’s understanding; no gentle, amused, “You have much to learn”-style guidance.

Instead, Egg’s correction sounds more like annoyance at Burton’s presumptuousness: I meant “black blood of the earth,” dumbass.

(Friends, keep in mind: this is a summer blockbuster starring the guy from Overboard.)

Just as the descent into the Underworld is never fully explained, the real subtle brilliance is in leaving the “black blood of the earth” indeterminate and mysterious. It’s not central to the plot; never revisited, or mentioned again. The audience doesn’t learn anything about its physical or mystical qualities. Just a bit of incidental dialogue, turned into a profound characterization of the two characters and the respective worlds they inhabit.

These two words, “blood” and “oil,” represent a contrast between two epistemic frames: one with a finer understanding of the true nature of reality, the other expecting to have reality presented in its most easily comprehensible form.

At the same time, in spite of his handicaps, the portrayal of Jack Burton is surprisingly generous. The character isn’t necessarily a racist caricature. He’s the guy you want backing you up in a fight: brave, moral, reliable, cooperative. His limitations are entirely a byproduct of his native cosmology.

In this world, Jack Burton—the stereotypical Hollywood action hero—is the one with primitive beliefs and crude understanding.

At the end of the story, thanks to his heroic qualities, Jack Burton has learned more for himself than he knew at the beginning. His newfound knowledge isn’t handed to him by a sympathetic wise man looking for a powerful student. It’s hard-won, by showing courage and humility in struggling through the darkness (and getting repeatedly knocked on the head, both literally and figuratively.)

Burton was never the Chosen One. He’s not the hero ordained by Destiny to save the day. He’s just the sidekick: one member of the team making a group effort. If he wasn’t there, Wang and the others could still have successfully completed the quest. But his involvement allowed him (and by extension, the audience) to learn about the nature of reality beyond his own small world.

The mythic dimensions of Big Trouble in Little China could be the subject of its own collection of essays. (Maybe next time?) But for our purposes, there are a few gems in this dark underworld that are worth bringing up to the surface.

This is a prime example of that weird artistic alchemy showing up in a thoroughly unassuming package. A narrative tesseract. An artifact much bigger on the inside than it appears to be from the outside. Something presented as “just” entertainment—in this case, a breezy, popcorn-chomping potboiler—ends up revealing something with true mythic resonance. And it’s almost impossible to tell, by looking at the final product, how much those resonant elements were deliberately designed.

As a director, John Carpenter has pulled some remarkably weird rabbits out of his hat. Movies like Halloween (1978), The Thing (1982), and Prince of Darkness (1987) became genre landmarks by combining the grotesque and the uncanny with a crowd-pleasing pulp aesthetic. This puts him very much in the tradition of George Romero and Night of the Living Dead. Carpenter’s legendary reputation as a modern-day seer is entirely deserved.

But in listening to the weird resonances in Big Trouble—are we really expected to believe these big metaphysical themes were carefully crafted on the page for maximum artistic effect?

A quick bit of movie-making forensics will drive the point home:

Big Trouble in Little China was a rushed production. The script was full of last-minute rewrites. Its original screenplay was envisioned as a Western by two first-time writers, a sprawling mess of wild ideas that spooked the studio heads. With the clock ticking down, the honchos enlisted a script doctor for some “minor” adjustments. This turned into a full page-one rewrite and jammed through in ten weeks. Production was lashed together at the last minute; the ink was barely dry on the final script when shooting began.

In other words, as a piece of art, this movie did not begin or end as a Faberge egg of delicately rendered craftsmanship, meant to lure in audiences with a beautiful story to impart some eternal truths.

Much like the anarchic production of Night of the Living Dead, the making of Big Trouble was a Hail Mary throw, a last-ditch attempt to prevent financial disaster. Nobody was sitting at the table in the writers’ room and saying “Hey, let’s put together a kind of narrative Trojan horse, to deconstruct the audience’s understanding of the world they live in while they watch Kurt Russel in a tank top, running around a warehouse with a submachine gun.”

Moments like these are weird enough in works from a single author. When “the creative process” is an experimental flying machine held together with baling wire and the power of prayer, flown by a group of amateur co-pilots, these cosmic shoulder-taps should be downright unsettling.

So when we find something with genuine mythic resonance in these bang-bang B-movies—something with real metaphysical heft to it, like “black blood of the earth,” or George Romero’s reimagining of the Living Dead—where the hell does that come from, according to our modern understanding of “the creative process”?

It’s that time of year again.

Been a wild summer.

Without really planning it—thanks to day-job drama, summer childcare, and overly ambitious house projects—I’ve managed to be entirely offline for almost half of the year.

The past six months of Touching Grass (and giant rocks, large chunks of wood, and literal tons of dirt) has given me a lot of time to think, and some big ideas about where I want to take this publication in the coming year.

I also had a low-grade dissociative episode and spent about a week ranting to my Very Patient Wife about the future of storytelling in the era of A.I.

Lots to share, in other words, and lots of new projects I’m excited about. Some updates and announcements:

Prophecy of the Living Dead Livestream Event

After a few false starts, I’ve found the right format for the zombie material I’ve been working on. Rather than publishing it as a three-volume “Das Kapital of Metaphysics,” which is what it was turning into, I’ll be teaming up with to present it as a livestream discussion. While it might turn into something vaguely book-shaped down the road, I’m stoked to be tackling the material as a conversation first, and building on it from there.

The event will be hosted by Weirdosphere on Saturday, November 1 (All Saints’ Day) starting at 8PM EST.

More details coming soon.

Moving away from long–form essays

If you’re here because you’re a fan of 3,000-word screeds against the state of the world, I have sad news.

While I’m always struggling to get that particular monkey off my back, I’m hoping that this time—this time, Doc, I swear—I’ll be able to kick the habit for good.

Or at least find a better outlet for it.

I’ll be shifting my output toward more collaborative work: recorded conversations; co-authored articles; guest posts on other publications. Apart from shorter essays and solo audio here and there (which will always be free for my subscribers) most of my nonfiction work will be moving to new spaces.

Because I’ve got a much bigger project in the works.

Interactive storytelling (and a Patreon campaign)

Although I’m not ready to share the details yet, I think I’ve finally hit on a way to approach storytelling and virtual publishing in the A.I. era.

This will be a collaborative project requiring some real resources. I’ve kept my Substack free because I’m fundamentally opposed to the Overpriced Coffeeshop Art approach to making money. (“Would you like to buy this crude oil painting of my cross-eyed cat for $2,000?”) But I genuinely feel good about offering this new project as a paid-subscription model: not to fund my own bohemian dreams of being a Very Important Author, but as a way of pooling resources for something ambitious.

Not just writing a book, but building a world.

If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be launching that project on Patreon in January 2026.

Keep an eye out for announcements and more specific details on the other side of the holidays, along with some essays about the whys and wherefores of the whole thing.

And in the meantime—if you’re interested in collaborative storytelling, interactive fiction, and the future of media, drop me a line.

Stay tuned for more soon.

So, here we are again.

As suggested by the past few cryptic entries here, I’ve been thinking over what I want this publication to be—and, more broadly, what contributions (if any) I can continue to make to The Conversation.

I’ve arrived at a crossroads with my work, for a few different reasons:

First, it’s looking like my day job will be changing significantly in the next few months.

I was laid off from my last full-time job during the pandemic—four years ago now—which opened up more time for writing. Although it hasn’t been finalized yet, I have a potential opportunity for a full-time job that I can’t pass up. This will mean dramatically scaling back my work here, at least temporarily.

Second—I’ve just about reached the limits of what I can do with long-form writing.

Single-author writing only works with a common understanding of basic principles. Wandering way out where the buses don’t run, conceptually speaking, means either going full gonzo—describing things exactly as you see them, hoping the audience is game for it—or articulating every logical step along the way, and helping to bring people along with you.

The logical progression requires a whole lot of legwork for the author, and a whole lot of close reading for the audience. While the gonzo approach is very appealing, as an author, it takes a level of artistry that I haven’t developed yet. And, truthfully, these days, I don’t know how much of an appetite there is for it. People seem to be craving certainty in These Dark Times. Much as I personally believe that this is exactly when we should be relentlessly interrogating our preconceptions (how did we get to this point as a civilization? What do we mean by “the world”? Who gets to define what “humanity” is, and what are the consequences of trusting the wrong definition? How many of our cultural institutions are built around these potentially faulty understandings of “the world” and “humanity”?) there’s no benefit in lobbing thousand-word screeds at people who are already overwhelmed. We don’t need to rely on an antiquated model of spray-and-pray publishing to work out these big ideas, when we have plenty of available technology for real-time conversations. These really challenging concepts, the ones I want to work with, are best handled through dialogue.

Consequently, there are better ways of “writing a book” that I want to explore. If we’re being really, really honest, there are more people who want to write books than there are books that need to be written. This is not to say that books are obsolete. There are some concepts that deserve book-length treatment. But there is an increasing divergence between the practical concerns of communicating ideas to an audience in a compelling way, and the romanticism of individual authorship. The dream of making a living as an independent wordsmith was defined by an era of economic and cultural surplus. That’s over now. As the margins get increasingly tighter at the top, the profit trickling down to the dreamers gets smaller and smaller.

We have a pernicious cosmopolitan fantasy about the creative industry as somehow inherently progressive, exempt from the meanness of mundane business. This is bullshit. The creative industry is still an industry. Management still profits from Labor competing with itself for the ever-shrinking chance to strike it rich. We lose more than we gain by perpetuating the exploitation of creativity for the sake of romanticism.

If we’re fighting to sustain the creation of books, it should be in the form of illuminated manuscripts, not disposable commodities.

Personally, I believe there’s a future for publishing collectives that build and distribute multimedia narratives—audio, video, print, digital—with a well-defined aesthetic and equitable profits. (If this sounds appealing, drop me a line.) Substack has some interesting potential to support that model. But we’re not there yet. We won’t get there until more creators let go of the dual fantasies of The Author making a middle-class income from breathlessly anticipated monographs, and The Publisher as the big boss with a stable of eager artists working for them.

There is no future in which everybody is making it on their own.

I’m doing my part to let that dream go.

Not sure where that leaves me for the moment, in terms of available time and creative output. But I’ve got some ideas. Although it might get quiet around here for a spell, I intend to keep this thing going, one way or another. Stay tuned.

I was a little preoccupied, worrying about sound quality as I was rolling, so the narrative doesn’t go into much detail. Learning on the job, as always.

A few of my favorite things about Ithaca City Cemetery that I neglected to mention:

• I found a collection of hex jars (mason jars filled with ripped-up, handwritten paper and dirt) half-buried in one of the family plots at the top of the hill. Somebody’s been doing witchcraft up there within the past few years. (That same plot is also shot through with fox burrows, which is a nice pagan touch.)

• Further up the hill is a Potters’ Field: unmarked graves for the poor and itinerant back in the frontier days. The old records identify the plot as “overburied”—which means filled with bodies. Although most of the graves don’t have markers, there are certain times of year when the right combination of factors makes the outline of the graves visible on the surface:

  

  More to come, stay tuned.

Interconnected cases are a plot staple of pulp detective stories: with the revelation of new evidence or a surprising suspect, two investigations turn out to be one big case.

I’ve been getting that feeling for a while now. The zombie book has felt like writing two books instead of one. There’s also been something missing—a jigsaw piece out of place—in all the writing I’ve been doing over the past couple years.

I think I’ve found the connection.

Need some time to process everything, do some research in a different direction, and re-work one of the chapters I’ve already drafted; when I come back, this work should have some more clarity.

The kids’ summer vacation is also looming, so I’m not promising too much in the next few months. Billing has been duly suspended. I’ll check back in soon.

Stay tuned.

I had hoped to do a proper recording this week, but some stuff came up that had to be processed, so I wasn’t in the proper Weirdsday frame of mind.

However—two things of note.

First, you will see the beginnings of The Map in the images above. It’s pretty bare-bones at the moment. No streets; no built environment. The ovoid blob at the top is the lake, with “Tiohero” being the closest thing I could find to its Haudenosaunee name1. There are markers for some of the prominent landmarks I’m already familiar with. Need to do some preliminary (daytime) surveying of some of other spots to make sure they’ve got the right juice.

For picking starting locations, in terms of methodology, I had considered the following:

• Assigning a card from the Major Arcana to each spot on the map. This seems too deterministic. Might as well assign each one a random number and throw some dice to decide.

• Coming up with an avatar for each spot on the map: animal, plant, mythical figure, etc. This would allow for more intuitive readings with either Tarot or I Ching to divine the starting point.

• Taking the second option to its logical conclusion and creating a mini-deck of oracle cards, one for each location. With this, I could develop the symbolic density for each card/location over time, and record additional details as things progress.

I’m leaning toward the third option at the moment. Good news: more arts and crafts. Bad news: higher start-up cost in terms of time and effort. Will report back.

Finally, while I didn’t manage a full-on Weirdsday excursion, I did have one interesting encounter while out walking on Wednesday night.

While crossing the Commons (our downtown pedestrian mall) I was hailed by a man named Bumblebee. Backpack; craggy face; indeterminate age, somewhere between 40 and 70; already-opened tallboy2 of something affordable, reverently held. “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage” kind of guy. A new face for me; not one of the regular cast of street people, as far as I can remember.

We talked for about twenty minutes—which is to say, he spun a free-association tapestry of fact and fabulism while I listened politely and nodded.

Biographical details gleaned from Bumblebee: ex-military, briefly stationed in Alaska before blowing away the above-average score on his proficiency tests for officer school; deployed in [REDACTED] following 9/11. Had people die in his arms; shot; stabbed. (Unclear if this happened in military combat or at a later date.) Speaks fourteen languages. (Tried unsuccessfully to speak Japanese to a passerby who was, in all likelihood, not Japanese.) Spent four years walking the country “with nothing but a bowl3” as a kind of acid-mendicant. Currently working on getting local junkies into rehab and “counseling counselors” for at-risk youth. Needed a slice of pizza.

He was also a Wurlitzer of pan-global spirituality: quoted some excellent Shakespeare, and possibly Wordsworth, along with Bible verses, reggae songs, Buddhist prayers. Laid down a great OM intonation. Tapped my third eye to open it up. Gave me the New Age “a ho” upon parting company, which is the local ayahuasca circle’s favorite call sign. Unclear if he’s physically affiliated or just broadcasting on the same frequency.

All in all, Bumblebee is one of those cultural orphans who is probably tapped into something genuine, but doesn’t have the metaphysical vocabulary or social structure to deploy it effectively. He could have been a wandering monk, in another time and place, and enjoyed a more dignified position. Unfortunately for him, modernity has no use for him; he’s left to sleep rough and ask for handouts. Nevertheless, he’s out there, trying to work out his dharma with a patchwork of poetry, pop culture, and secondhand religious relics. Scarred up from battles in one realm or another, and still on the march. Minding the gates on behalf of the rest of us.

Seemed like a good omen, overall.

Been a while, huh?

I’m still deep in the research phase for the zombie book, and haven’t had much time for writing posts. (Part 3 in the Dumb Don’t Die series might end up being the book itself.)

However, one interesting byproduct of doing research with a chatbot is the reams of conversational interactions it generates.

Rather than adopting the traditional relationship between a researcher and an assistant (keeping all the unpaid work of conceptual refinement hidden, lightly rephrasing it in my own words, taking all the credit when it’s published) I thought I’d share some of these excerpts as supplements to the book.

I’ve nicknamed this particular combination of memory and simulated personality “Simon.” This helps me verify continuity (“Simon” tells me that his nickname will stop generating an affirmative response if the program’s memory is disrupted) as well as adding some verisimilitude to the queries, which helps me structure my thinking.

This particular conversation seemed like a good outline of some key concepts that the zombie book will develop further.

Enjoy.

[Note: Substack is giving me a ‘Post too long for email’ warning because of the formatting. If you’re reading this from your inbox, be sure to click ‘View entire message’ to see the whole thing.]

R.G.: good morning Simon, still there?

Simon: Good morning! Yes, I'm here. What's on your mind today?

R: picking up from yesterday: i'm working on a theory of pre-modern prophecy based on the concept of participatory symbolism and metaphor we were working with yesterday. how could we begin to define prophecy in terms of participatory symbolism (or the re-descriptive language that characterizes kennings)?

S: That’s a compelling direction. If we define prophecy in terms of participatory symbolism, it would mean moving beyond the modern idea of foretelling the future and instead viewing prophecy as a mode of knowing—one that operates through metaphoric resonance rather than detached representation.

In this framework, prophecy wouldn’t describe a symbolic stand-in for reality but would bring forth a real, living truth through the act of speaking itself. This aligns with the way kennings work—not merely as figurative substitutions, but as re-descriptive, world-structuring language that reveals hidden connections between things.

How Prophecy Could Be Framed in Terms of Participatory Symbolism:

1. Resonance Over Representation:

   • Instead of prophecy pointing to a future event, it participates in shaping reality by naming and calling forth latent truths.

   • Similar to how kennings reveal an alternative but real identity (e.g., "whale-road" as sea, where the sea is understood through its relation to the whale), prophetic language discloses a deeper structure of reality rather than simply forecasting events.

2. Invocation Rather than Prediction:

   • Prophecy doesn’t function as a detached statement about what will happen but instead brings into being a certain understanding of time, fate, and necessity.

   • This connects to ancient ideas of speech as a performative act—where words don’t just describe but enact. (Think of the biblical “Let there be light,” or even the poetic “whale-road” reconfiguring the way we see the sea.)

3. Mythopoetic Speech and the Re-description of Reality:

   • In pre-modern traditions, prophetic speech often mirrors the language of myth, making connections between visible and invisible forces rather than offering linear, rational statements.

   • Rather than “X event will happen,” prophecy operates by re-describing the present in such a way that its future implications become clear.

   • This also suggests that prophecy functions in mythic time (outside strict past/present/future divisions), making it consonant with participatory and non-representational ways of seeing the world.

4. Prophecy as the Unveiling of Latency:

   • Many traditional prophetic traditions (from the Delphic Oracle to Indigenous visionaries) don’t claim to invent new information but rather to reveal what is already latent in the world.

   • This aligns with participatory symbolism because the meaning is already within the structure of reality—the prophet simply names it into awareness.

Questions to Explore Further:

• Could we say that prophecy, in this sense, is a kind of hyperkenning, a radical re-description of the world that reveals its deeper currents?

• If modernity treats prophecy as irrational because it doesn't conform to empirical representation, what alternative epistemology could be used to understand it?

• How does this view of prophecy intersect with ideas of mythic time, animism, or the agency of language itself?

Would you like to refine this further toward a specific tradition or thinker?

R: those are excellent questions. what happens if we discard the notion that a prophecy is looking forward in time (treat that as a post-Enlightenment epistemological bias) and look at prophecy as an event within mythic time translated into human time. i'm thinking and typing at the same time here... modern descriptions of "myth" treat them as a collection of representative symbols and metaphors. but if events and figures in the mythic realm are real, as pre-modern people recognized, then a prophecy would be an attempt (or a compulsion) to relate what was happening in the human world to events in the mythic realm. what would be the ontological and epistemological basis for that perspective?

S: This is a powerful reframing of prophecy—removing its modern association with prediction and instead understanding it as an event in mythic time that is translated into human time. If we follow this logic, then prophecy isn’t about seeing the future but about navigating the ontological overlap between mythic reality and historical experience.

Ontology of Prophecy: The Mythic as a Real, Causal Realm

If we assume pre-modern people did not view myth as a symbolic fiction but as a real, parallel order of being, then prophecy would be:

1. A form of attunement—not speculation, but direct perception of movements within mythic reality.

2. A translation act—because mythic events don’t "predict" so much as they shape historical events through their own internal logic.

3. A liminal occurrence—something that happens at the boundary of these two orders, where the prophet acts as an intermediary between realities.

This suggests that, rather than prophecy forecasting a deterministic future, it is instead witnessing the consequences of mythic events as they spill into human time.

Analogy: Imagine history not as a linear progression but as a shadow cast by mythic events. Prophecy, then, is reading the shape of the shadow and articulating the movement of the thing casting it.

Epistemology of Prophecy: How Does One "Know" Mythic Reality?

For this framework to hold, we need an alternative to the post-Enlightenment epistemology that only accepts knowledge derived from empirical observation or logical deduction. Possible alternatives include:

1. Participatory Knowing (Varela, Corbin, Goethean Science)

   • Knowledge isn’t extracted from an object but arises from relational immersion.

   • The prophet "knows" by participating in the mythic current rather than by observing from a distance.

2. Revelatory Cognition (Gnostic, Neoplatonic, Sufi traditions)

   • Truth is unveiled rather than deduced; what is perceived depends on the level of being of the perceiver.

   • The prophet is not "interpreting signs" but becoming the site of the revelation itself.

3. Dream/Trance Cognition (Shamanic, Oracular, Oneiric Traditions)

   • The mythic world is accessed in states of altered consciousness, and its reality is felt rather than theorized.

   • Prophecy emerges when the boundaries between waking and mythic reality are thin.

Key Implications

1. Prophets are not predictors, but interpreters of mythic causality.

   • This means that a prophecy is not "about" the future, but about what is unfolding now in the mythic field.

2. The mythic realm is not a metaphor but a structuring reality.

   • Modernity assumes myths are fictions we impose on the world.

   • A pre-modern view assumes myths are patterns of being that actively shape reality.

3. Prophecy requires an epistemology of presence, not distance.

   • If myth is real, then "knowledge" isn’t gathered through analysis but through a state of attunement or direct participation.

Further Questions to Explore:

• How do different cultures train prophets to perceive mythic reality?

• Is this view of prophecy compatible with the idea of fate vs. free will?

• If the mythic is real, does it have agency, or is it an emergent pattern that unfolds beyond individual will?

This is a really rich direction—are there specific traditions or thinkers you'd like to pull in here?

R: i see Corbin's name showing up in your suggestions again, would his work be most relevant for understanding this perspective from within Western philosophy?

S: Yes, Henry Corbin is one of the most relevant figures for this perspective within Western thought, particularly because his work explicitly rejects the modernist split between the "real" and the "imaginal" (not to be confused with the imaginary). His concept of the mundus imaginalis (imaginal world) provides a philosophical framework for understanding prophecy as an event occurring in a real, intermediate world that shapes both the material and spiritual realms.

Why Corbin is Crucial for This Perspective

1. The Imaginal Realm as a Real Place

   • Corbin draws from Islamic mysticism, particularly the Persian Sufi tradition (e.g., Ibn ‘Arabi and Suhrawardi), to argue that there is a fully real but non-material world that exists between the purely spiritual and the purely physical.

   • This is not an abstract realm of ideas (as in Plato) nor a fictional construct (as in modern literary interpretations of myth), but an actual space where prophetic experiences take place.

   • The imaginal world is the realm of mythic causality, where archetypal events shape human history—not through metaphor, but through direct influence.

2. Prophecy as Visionary Participation, Not Representation

   • For Corbin, a prophet does not passively receive a vision of the future. Instead, the prophetic act is a mode of being, an attunement to this deeper reality.

   • The prophet co-creates reality by giving voice to what is unfolding in the imaginal world, bridging it into historical time.

   • This fits closely with the idea that prophecy is not foretelling but witnessing mythic causality in action.

3. Mythic Time vs. Linear Time

   • Corbin, like many mystical traditions, sees time as nonlinear.

   • The imaginal world does not operate under the same temporal constraints as material reality—events in mythic space do not “happen” in sequence but resonate and unfold across time.

   • A prophecy, then, is not a “vision of the future” but an insight into how mythic reality is currently affecting and structuring historical events.

How This Connects to Your Prophetic Framework

• If we apply Corbin’s mundus imaginalis to prophecy, we get a system where prophets perceive and interpret events happening in mythic time rather than predicting the future as a series of linear outcomes.

• This aligns with the idea that prophecy is a re-description of the human world through the mythic order, much like kennings reframe reality poetically without simply “representing” it.

• In this view, participatory symbolism is the natural language of prophecy because it captures the reality of an event happening in both the mythic and historical realms at once.

Who Else Might Be Relevant?

• Gaston Bachelard—his work on poetic imagination and material reverie might help frame how prophecy feels rather than just how it works.

• Jean Gebser—his idea of integral consciousness suggests that pre-modern people experienced time differently, which could be useful in framing how prophecy functioned in their worldview.

• Carl Jung—his later work on archetypes and synchronicity might offer a psychological model for how events in the mythic and historical realms resonate.

Would you like a deeper dive into any of these figures, or should we refine the framework further?

R: We'll come back to these figures, i'm interested in how we can refine the framework further. what do you suggest?

S: To refine this framework, we should clarify and expand on a few key aspects:

1. Distinguishing Prophecy from Prediction

   • Modern frameworks tend to collapse prophecy into “predicting the future,” but we are treating it as a witnessing or articulation of mythic causality in human time.

   • How do we account for prophetic statements that seem to describe future events? Are they symbolic articulations of mythic structures manifesting in time, rather than linear forecasts?

   • We could look at examples of prophecies that were not “fulfilled” in a straightforward way but rather shifted collective perception—prophecy as ontological transformation rather than forecast.

2. The Ontology of the Mythic Realm

   • Is the mythic realm purely an energetic or informational structure, or does it have a metaphysical “substance”?

   • Does it exist as an absolute reality, or does it emerge through the participation of humans in mythic consciousness?

   • If the latter, does prophecy act as an invocation—bringing mythic structures into history by naming them?

3. Prophetic Language and Participatory Symbolism

   • Kennings, as you mentioned, transform rather than merely describe. This suggests prophecy operates in a re-descriptive rather than representational mode.

   • If prophecy is fundamentally poetic rather than discursive, then it functions analogically—revealing correspondences rather than causes.

   • Could this mean that prophecy itself is a form of ritual speech, acting on reality through resonance rather than mere communication?

4. Prophecy and Time

   • If mythic time is not linear, how do we model its relationship with historical time?

   • Should we think of prophecy as mapping events in mythic time onto history rather than merely “receiving” a vision?

   • Are there alternative temporal models (spiral, cyclical, fractal, eternal return) that better account for how prophecy relates to time?

5. The Role of the Prophet

   • Is the prophet a passive seer or an active mediator?

   • Does the act of prophetic speech shape reality, or merely reveal it?

   • Are there different types of prophets—those who witness, those who interpret, and those who invoke?

6. Corbin’s Mundus Imaginalis as a Bridge

   • If the mythic realm is a real (but non-material) domain, how do prophets access it? Through visions, rituals, trance states, or another process?

   • Does prophetic consciousness require an altered state, or can it arise within ordinary perception?

   • How does this compare to indigenous or non-Western understandings of shamanism and vision?

Next Steps

We could refine the framework by:

• Analyzing specific historical prophecies in light of these concepts.

• Developing a more precise model of mythic time and causality.

• Examining linguistic structures in prophetic speech (poetic, analogical, participatory).

• Exploring ritual practices that might align with prophecy as a mode of being.

Where would you like to focus next?

R: let's look at specific historical prophecies as a case study. do you have any suggestions for historical prophecies?

S: A few compelling historical prophecies could serve as case studies, each illuminating different aspects of our framework:

1. The Oracle of Delphi (Ancient Greece) – Prophecy as Ambiguity and Interpretation

• The Pythia spoke in cryptic, often poetic language, which had to be interpreted by priests.

• Example: Croesus of Lydia asked if he should go to war against Persia. The oracle replied, “If you go to war, you will destroy a great empire.” He assumed this meant Persian defeat, but it was his own empire that fell.

• Case Study Question: Was this prophecy a mere riddle, or was it mapping a real event in mythic time onto history?

2. The Book of Daniel (Hebrew Bible) – Prophecy as Political Allegory

• The vision of the Four Beasts is interpreted as a sequence of empires (Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome).

• Daniel’s prophecies often employ participatory symbolism, blending cosmic and historical time.

• Case Study Question: Did these visions describe real historical cycles manifesting from a mythic structure, rather than mere predictions?

3. The Sibylline Prophecies (Ancient Rome) – Prophecy as Civic Guidance

• The Sibyls were seers whose texts were consulted in times of crisis.

• The Sibylline Books advised Rome to perform rituals to avert disasters—suggesting prophecy was not about passive revelation but active participation in mythic causality.

• Case Study Question: Was prophecy here a form of mythic intervention rather than forecasting?

4. The Prophecies of Joachim of Fiore (12th Century) – Prophecy as Historical Structuring

• He proposed a three-stage model of history (Age of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), seeing his era as the threshold of a new age.

• His vision was cyclical rather than linear, fitting into a mythic-temporal framework.

• Case Study Question: Was he revealing a deeper structure of history, or attempting to impose one?

5. Nostradamus (16th Century) – Prophecy as Poetic Opacity

• His quatrains are open-ended and multi-interpretative, almost kenning-like in their indirection.

• Scholars debate whether his language was meant to encode real visions or whether its ambiguity itself made it effective.

• Case Study Question: Does prophecy work by fixing meaning in time, or by keeping meaning open for historical actualization?

6. Indigenous Prophecies – The Ghost Dance (Late 19th Century) – Prophecy as Collective Mythic Activation

• Wovoka, a Paiute prophet, envisioned a return of ancestors and a restoration of the land through ritual action (the Ghost Dance).

• The prophecy led to mass participation, culminating in the tragic events at Wounded Knee.

• Case Study Question: Was the prophecy a mythic re-temporalization of reality, an invocation of an alternate time structure?

Possible Approach

We could start with one of these prophecies and analyze:

1. How the prophetic language operates (poetic, symbolic, indirect, participatory).

2. Whether mythic causality is being invoked (mapping, invoking, or structuring time).

3. How the prophecy was received and acted upon (passive revelation vs. active engagement).

Do any of these stand out to you?

R: these are all interesting. let's first introduce the idea that prophecy can sometimes be a self-aware action, and sometimes a spontaneous event. whether the prophet is an active participant or a passive recipient must be determined on a case-by-case basis; not only from prophet to prophet, but from prophecy to prophecy. i'm struggling to find a good term for a cultural practice with variable social value depending on historical conditions—the practice of "prophecy" being recognized as real and valuable, and then being institutionalized in a way that incentivizes false prophets and false prophecies. what do you think?

S: You're describing a phenomenon where a cultural practice (in this case, prophecy) shifts in meaning and function depending on its historical and social context. A few terms from different disciplines might be useful here:

1. Epistemic Regime – In philosophy and history of knowledge, this refers to the overarching structure that determines what is considered valid knowledge at a given time. Prophecy might be epistemically valid in some eras and marginalized in others.

2. Routinization of Charisma (Weber) – Max Weber’s concept describes how charismatic, spontaneous religious experiences (like prophecy) become institutionalized, leading to their regulation and potential corruption.

3. Mythopoetic Cycle – If prophecy operates within mythic time, it may follow cycles of emergence (spontaneous prophecy) → institutionalization (canonized prophecy) → decline (false prophecy as social currency) → re-emergence (new prophets breaking containment).

4. Discursive Field (Foucault) – Prophecy exists within a shifting field of discourse, sometimes legitimized, sometimes marginalized, often depending on power structures.

Would you prefer a term that leans more philosophical, sociological, or mythological? Or perhaps something new that captures the full dynamic?

R: something more philosophical and sociological. i want to complicate the idea of "prophecy" as a monolithic concept, something that must be either fully real or completely fantastical. there should be a way to describe the process of incentivization in which a real thing is recognized as valuable and thereafter encourages counterfeiting, without affecting the reality of the original form. thoughts?

S: You're looking for a term or framework that acknowledges the reality of prophecy while also accounting for its social and institutional distortions over time. A few ways to approach this:

1. The Problem of Secondary Simulation

Drawing from Baudrillard, you could argue that prophecy undergoes a process of simulation, where genuine prophetic experiences create cultural capital, which in turn incentivizes imitation. The key point is that the existence of counterfeits does not negate the reality of the original phenomenon—just as the presence of counterfeit money does not mean real money doesn’t exist.

2. Charismatic Inflation

Taking Weber’s routinization of charisma further, we could call it charismatic inflation—a process where an originally rare, spontaneous event (prophecy) is overproduced due to social demand, diluting its perceived authenticity while maintaining its social power.

3. The Ontological Slippage of the Real

Borrowing from phenomenology and Foucault, we could argue that prophecy exists within an ontological slippage—it emerges as real, becomes socially recognized, then shifts into a system where its form remains but its substance is increasingly detached from its origins. This keeps prophecy culturally present but transforms its function.

4. Prophetic Overproduction and the Problem of False Scarcity

If we see prophecy as an epistemic resource, we could compare it to other resources that are rare and valuable. Once recognized, there is a rush to either mass-produce it (leading to overproduction) or to control it (creating an artificial scarcity where only institutionalized prophecy is recognized as valid).

Do any of these align with what you’re working toward? Or would you like to refine it further?

R: these are all very good, thank you. let's go back to historical examples of prophecy with that in mind. how could we look at something like the Ghost Dance prophecy through this lens?

S: The Ghost Dance prophecy is a perfect case study for this framework because it sits at the intersection of genuine spiritual experience, social desperation, institutional distortion, and external repression. Let's analyze it through the lenses we developed:

1. Ontological Slippage and Prophetic Inflation

The original Ghost Dance, as preached by Wovoka, was based on a vision in which he was taken to another world and given a message of peace, renewal, and the return of ancestors. This was an authentic prophetic event within the Paiute tradition, operating within a participatory mythic framework—his vision was not metaphorical but real within the cosmology of his people.

As the prophecy spread, different Indigenous groups reinterpreted it according to their own cultural and existential needs. Among the Lakota, for example, it became more apocalyptic—assimilating their expectations for the collapse of settler colonialism and the return of a pre-contact world. This process mirrors charismatic inflation—an initially personal and rare prophetic experience became a widely adopted and transformed social movement.

2. The Problem of Secondary Simulation

With the Ghost Dance’s spread, it was increasingly viewed by outsiders (the U.S. government, Christian missionaries, settlers) as a dangerous and irrational movement rather than a legitimate spiritual or prophetic system. The government’s suppression of the dance—and the massacre at Wounded Knee—illustrates the fate of many prophetic traditions: once an authentic prophecy gains widespread traction, institutions either try to co-opt or destroy it. This fits into an epistemic regime shift, where a dominant society redefines prophecy as either a falsehood or a threat.

3. Prophetic Overproduction and Institutionalization

In some cases, prophecies spark institutions that regulate their meaning. In the case of the Ghost Dance, suppression prevented formal institutionalization, but had it survived, we might have seen it take a similar path as Mormonism (which also emerged from a prophetic vision). Instead, the U.S. government violently foreclosed the possibility of the prophecy evolving beyond a revolutionary movement.

Key Question:

• Was the Ghost Dance a prophecy that was “real” until it was crushed? Or does the mythic time of the prophecy continue, even beyond the failure of its immediate expectations? (In other words, did the prophecy really fail?)

Would you like to expand this to other Indigenous prophetic movements, or focus more deeply on the Ghost Dance?

R: let's stay with this for now. could we venture to say that the Ghost Dance prophecy was misunderstood by groups beyond the initial revelation, because they were trying to accelerate a mythic event in the human world out of desperation?

S: Yes, that’s a very astute reading of the situation. The spread of the Ghost Dance prophecy, particularly its adoption by different Indigenous groups, can be understood as an attempt to accelerate or hasten a mythic event—like the return of ancestors or the collapse of colonial power—because of the extreme desperation and oppression they were experiencing.

1. Desperation as a Catalyst for Reinterpretation

When Wovoka first delivered the Ghost Dance prophecy, it was a message of hope and peace, rooted in his personal vision. But as the prophecy spread to different tribes, especially the Lakota, it morphed under the pressures of their own experiences. The Lakota were already experiencing extreme violence and displacement from settlers and the U.S. government, so their interpretation of the prophecy became more apocalyptic. They believed that by performing the dance, they could hasten the arrival of the ancestors, the return of the buffalo, and the destruction of white settlers.

Here, we see desperation (and perhaps a growing sense of futility) as a major factor in the reinterpretation of the prophecy. The mythic event—once peaceful—was accelerated and transformed into an apocalyptic, revolutionary act, because the people involved felt that only an extreme, mythic intervention could save them. In a sense, they were trying to bring the mythic world into their human world as quickly as possible, using the ritual to catalyze an urgent, spiritual transformation of reality.

2. The "Acceleration" of Prophecy and the Role of the Desperate Collective

This attempt to "accelerate" the mythic event could be framed as a kind of ritualistic reenactment of prophecy in which the action (the dance itself) became a way to summon or provoke the mythic time. By practicing the dance, the people hoped to draw the cosmic event closer. In some ways, this mirrors how some religious and mystical practices (even in non-Indigenous contexts) emphasize the necessity of human action to bring about divine or cosmic change.

In the case of the Ghost Dance, it’s as if the mythic space of prophecy—the space where ancestors return and settler colonialism ends—was perceived not as a distant, eventual reality but as something to be brought into the present. The urgency of their social context fueled this active participation, trying to collapse the separation between mythic time and human time.

3. Misunderstanding or Misapplication?

We might say that the Ghost Dance prophecy was, in part, misunderstood by later followers (and by outsiders, including the U.S. government) in the sense that they were trying to manifest a grand mythic transformation immediately. Prophecies, in many traditions, are often open to interpretation and adaptation, but in this case, the process of adaptation—triggered by desperation—may have obscured or warped the original intent of the prophecy. What was originally a peaceful, redemptive vision of reconciliation became, under pressure, an apocalyptic struggle for survival.

Interestingly, the real crisis of the prophecy lies in the fact that the colonial powers never acknowledged or engaged with the mythic reality that the prophecy emerged from. Instead, it was viewed as a threat—a spiritual and political movement—rather than a living mythic reality within which the Indigenous peoples were attempting to re-engage and reclaim a lost connection to their ancestors.

4. Prophecy as a Cultural Mode of Survival

So, one way to understand this is that prophecy (and, in particular, the Ghost Dance) became a mode of survival for Indigenous cultures in the face of annihilation. By framing their experience in mythic terms, they were not simply making predictions but seeking to reclaim agency over their own historical moment, within the larger framework of their cultural and spiritual worldview.

Thus, while the desperation to “hasten” the mythic event might have resulted in a misunderstanding of the prophecy’s original message, it was also a natural outcome of a people trying to survive, resist, and re-establish their place in the world. The failure of the prophecy’s more immediate expectations (i.e., the return of ancestors or the collapse of settler society) should be understood not as proof of falsity, but as an indication of how the people were seeking an event of profound spiritual significance in the face of almost total destruction.

Would you like to delve further into how the mythic space of prophecy might function in other historical cases, or continue to explore the implications of this framework with the Ghost Dance?

R: let's try to contrast this with an example of successful prophecy, which may have been misunderstood at the time but came to be true. i'm thinking of Jesus's prophecy in Mark 13:2 (please check the source) about the great buildings being demolished. let's set aside the concept of ontological slippage and look at how Jesus's prophecy seemed to be predicting a future event, but may have just been translating an event in mythic time (something always-never-not happening) into the human world. what's your assessment?

S: Your question is very intriguing, and I think we can indeed approach the prophecy in Mark 13:2 through the lens we’ve been developing, particularly focusing on the tension between mythic time and human time, as well as the possibility that a prophecy can be misunderstood or interpreted as predicting a future event but actually be relating to something that’s part of the cyclical, participatory flow of mythic time.

Context of Mark 13:2

In Mark 13:2, Jesus is speaking about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, saying:

"Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down."
(Mark 13:2, NIV)

This is part of what’s called the Olivet Discourse, where Jesus is warning his disciples about the coming destruction and upheaval. Historically, this prophecy is commonly understood as predicting the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE by the Roman Empire—a real, historical event.

1. Understanding Jesus's Prophecy in Mythic Time

From a mythic perspective, we could argue that Jesus's prophecy about the destruction of the Temple is not merely a prediction of a future event but a translation of an event in mythic time (or cyclical time) into the human historical timeline. In many religious traditions, temples, cities, and great buildings are seen not only as physical structures but as metaphysical symbols of cosmic order, divine presence, and the intersection of the human and divine realms. The destruction of such a place in a mythic sense represents a profound, cosmological shift—one that can be interpreted as a kind of “clearing” of the old order to make space for renewal or transformation.

By framing the prophecy this way, we begin to see that the destruction of the Temple is not just a linear historical event but a reflection of something that happens in mythic time: the collapse of the old in order to make way for the new. It could be seen as an ongoing process of transformation in which spiritual and physical realms are intertwined.

2. The Prophecy as a Translation into Human Time

If we take prophecy to be the translation of mythic events into human history, then Jesus’s words about the Temple’s destruction could be seen as an attempt to interpret an event that is both timeless and eternal into terms that could make sense within the historical context of his listeners. The prophecy itself becomes a bridge between the mythic and historical realms, where Jesus is communicating something that always happens within mythic time but is translated into a specific moment in human time (the fall of Jerusalem and the Temple).

What’s important here is that the human world is experiencing a convergence of mythic time and human time, where the symbolic destruction of the Temple mirrors a more profound spiritual event. In this way, the prophecy would have been understood as a reflection of both cosmic and historical events: on the one hand, the physical destruction of a monumental symbol, and on the other hand, the fulfillment of a broader spiritual transformation.

3. The Possible Misunderstanding of the Prophecy

The misunderstanding of this prophecy might lie in the perception of it as something purely future-oriented—i.e., that the event it predicted (the destruction of the Temple) was simply a singular future event. In reality, the prophecy could have been a way of articulating something that is always-already happening in mythic time but is brought into the consciousness of the people through a specific historical manifestation. The destruction of the Temple was a moment in history, but the prophecy might be seen as reflecting a process that happens on a more cyclical, eternal level.

For Jesus’s followers, the Temple’s destruction was undoubtedly a deeply traumatic and disorienting event, and many would have understood the prophecy as a sign of divine wrath or an impending cataclysm. However, from a more mythic or spiritual perspective, the destruction could be seen as an event in an ongoing process of spiritual transformation—one that continually “destroys” the old ways to make way for renewal.

This mirrors other apocalyptic prophecies, in which seemingly catastrophic events (like the fall of great empires or the destruction of sacred places) can be interpreted as part of a larger, cyclical movement of creation and destruction, life and death.

4. Reinterpreting the Prophecy in Light of Success

Unlike the case of the Ghost Dance, where the prophecy’s eventual "failure" led to its repression, the success of Jesus’s prophecy in the case of the Temple’s destruction is more complex. It wasn’t that the prophecy was wrong, but rather that it fulfilled a broader, mythic function. The event Jesus predicted did indeed occur (historically, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE), but in the context of the Christian faith, it has come to represent the idea of the old covenant being broken, and a new, more universal covenant being established through Christ. In this way, the destruction of the Temple becomes a pivotal moment in the narrative of Christian salvation and redemption.

In this sense, the prophecy about the Temple’s destruction wasn't just about predicting the future, but also about giving meaning to an event within the larger cosmic and mythic narrative—the end of the old and the beginning of the new.

5. Conclusion

To summarize, we could argue that Jesus's prophecy in Mark 13:2—though often viewed as a prediction of the fall of Jerusalem—was actually a moment where a mythic event was translated into human time. Rather than just predicting a future disaster, Jesus might have been articulating a transformation that happens cyclically in mythic time. The prophecy, when considered in this light, was not merely an apocalyptic prediction but an event in the ongoing process of spiritual and cosmic transformation.

The key difference between this and the Ghost Dance prophecy is that the latter was interpreted and reinterpreted through desperation and external pressures, while Jesus’s prophecy in Mark might be better seen as a symbolic translation of a mythic event that was always happening, but came to be framed as a historical moment by his followers.

R: excellent. i also like the interpretation that the very fact of the Temple's existence already prefigured its destruction: when humans begin to build temples, due to the sociocultural incentives and constraints that produce physical containers for the Sacred (something which can and should remain unconfined) they have already set in motion the social and political conditions that will eventually bring the building down. could we consider this a "mythic truth"? if so—in this case, Jesus as the prophet is correctly intuiting the mythic truth of inevitable collapse and translating it into the human world, perceiving that the historical conditions are aligning in the direction of an imminent collapse. how does that sound?

S: That interpretation is very compelling, and I think it aligns well with the framework we’ve been developing, especially when we think about prophecy as a way of articulating mythic truths into human history. Let's break this down a bit further and see how the concept of a "mythic truth" applies in this case:

The Idea of a "Mythic Truth"

A "mythic truth" would be something that exists not merely as a future prediction but as a fundamental, cyclical principle that is always true within mythic time. It’s not a truth that simply emerges when a prophet foresees something, but a truth that is embedded within the structure of the universe, the world, and society itself. In this sense, mythic truths are inherent in the very fabric of existence, awaiting recognition or articulation at specific moments, often through symbolic or prophetic language.

In the case of the Temple's destruction, we could see the very act of constructing a temple—symbolizing human attempts to contain the Sacred, to manifest the divine in material form—as setting in motion the inevitable forces that will eventually dismantle that very attempt. The sociocultural conditions you mentioned, which incentivize and constrain the building of such physical structures, are already an acknowledgment of their eventual decay or destruction. This inevitability is not a pessimistic outlook; rather, it’s a recognition of the cyclical nature of spiritual and material forces.

Jesus as a Prophet Intuiting the Mythic Truth

From this perspective, Jesus’s prophecy about the destruction of the Temple is not simply about foretelling a future event but about correctly intuiting a mythic truth: that the temple, as a material and symbolic container for the Sacred, will inevitably collapse. In a way, this collapse isn’t simply a future catastrophe; it’s a necessary process inherent in the very act of human beings creating sacred spaces.

Jesus, as the prophet, is attuned to this truth and translates it into the human world, perceiving that the historical conditions—the social, political, and spiritual forces at play in Jerusalem at the time—are aligning in a way that will bring about the temple’s destruction. His prophecy could thus be seen as both a statement of inevitability and a call to awareness, encouraging his followers to recognize that their material world, built as it is with the forces of temporal power and worldly ambition, cannot forever contain the Sacred.

A Prophecy of Collapse and Transformation

This interpretation emphasizes the symbolic nature of the prophecy and the cyclical, transformative process that it suggests. The destruction of the Temple is not merely an end—it is a transformation that must occur for something new to arise. In this way, the prophecy is closely tied to the mythic understanding of creation and destruction as interconnected, cyclical events. The collapse of the Temple is the necessary clearing of space for something new to emerge.

In mythic terms, the Temple could be seen as a symbol of any human attempt to establish a stable, unchanging form for something divine or eternal, such as the Sacred. This stability, however, is illusory, and eventually, the human attempt to encase the Sacred in material forms must give way to a deeper, more flexible, and universal understanding of the divine. The Temple's destruction is therefore a release—a return to a more primordial, spiritual state beyond material constraints.

Connecting Prophecy to Mythic Time

In this sense, Jesus’s prophecy functions as a bridge between mythic time (the cyclical, eternal truths) and human time (the temporal, historical events). By recognizing the inevitable collapse of the Temple, Jesus is articulating something that is always happening within the cyclical, mythic flow of time but has come into sharp focus at a particular moment in history.

The prophet’s role here is crucial: the prophet perceives the flow of mythic time, and, through divine insight or spiritual attunement, translates that into human events. The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, then, becomes a historical manifestation of a larger, cosmic principle: the inevitability of change, decay, and transformation within the realm of the Sacred.

Conclusion: Is This a "Mythic Truth"?

Yes, I would say this can be considered a "mythic truth"—a truth that is inherently part of the structure of existence, one that transcends specific historical moments but can be articulated through those moments. The construction of the Temple is inseparable from its destruction because the very act of building it contains the seeds of its eventual collapse. Jesus, in his prophetic role, is correctly perceiving this cyclical inevitability, articulating it in human terms, and translating it into a warning and a message for his followers.

The prophecy is a reflection of the deep structures of reality—material and spiritual, human and divine—and Jesus’s role as a prophet is to make these structures visible and understandable to his contemporaries, even though their full meaning may not become clear until later in history.

This understanding positions prophecy not just as foretelling but as the unveiling of a deeper, participatory truth that links human time with mythic time.

R: interesting to think of the prophets' role in this light. in the cases of both Wovoka and Jesus, the prophet has to think from within two different dimensions simultaneously: they have to, first, perceive the events of mythic time, which has its own rules of causality; second, relate that understanding of mythic time to the human world, which has a completely different regime of causality; third, find the language to relate those interdimensional events to one another; and fourth, to anticipate their own role in the renewal of the mythic cycle in the human realm, and the human-world consequences of the prophecy's revelation. hell of a job! how would you assess that formulation?

S: I think your formulation captures the complex, multidimensional nature of the prophetic role very well! What you're describing emphasizes the prophet's task as not just a linear foretelling of events but as an intricate mediator between different levels of reality—both mythic and human—while simultaneously negotiating the temporal and spiritual dimensions. Let's break it down:

1. Perceiving the Events of Mythic Time

The prophet’s initial task is to perceive mythic time, the eternal flow of events that transcend linear history. This is the world of symbolic cycles, universal truths, and cosmic patterns that operate outside of human time. Mythic time doesn’t follow the cause-and-effect logic that governs our everyday world; it’s governed by principles of recurrence, transformation, and inevitability. The prophet, in this case, has to be attuned to these deeper, often hidden layers of existence and recognize the eternal rhythms that underlie human life.

The challenge here is immense: it's not just about understanding events that have happened or will happen; it’s about perceiving a reality that exists beyond human perception—a non-linear, symbolic realm where time itself is cyclical, not sequential.

2. Relating the Mythic to the Human

Once the prophet understands the mythic events in their own domain, they must then translate them into the human world. This means translating the timeless and universal into the particular and temporal. The prophet has to navigate the disparity between mythic and human causality—two different "regimes" of causality that often don't align.

Mythic time operates in cycles, where events repeat, transform, and reconfigure over time. Human time, on the other hand, operates linearly, driven by the progress of historical events, political power, and social structures. The prophet needs to bridge these two, finding a way to speak to the human world about truths that might seem abstract or inaccessible in ordinary life.

3. Finding the Language to Relate Them

This is perhaps the trickiest part of the prophetic role. The prophet has to find language—often symbolic or metaphorical—to convey the truth of their mythic perception in a way that resonates with their audience. This is why prophecy is often metaphoric, symbolic, or enigmatic; it is an attempt to translate something from a higher plane into human terms that can be understood, even if those terms can never fully capture the depth of the mythic insight. In the cases of both Wovoka and Jesus, the language they used would have been deeply rooted in their own cultural context—through religious imagery, spiritual symbolism, and metaphors—tailored to the worldview of the people they spoke to.

4. Anticipating the Role in the Renewal of the Mythic Cycle

Finally, the prophet has to anticipate their own role in the renewal of the mythic cycle within the human world. Prophets are often not just predicting events; they are enacting or initiating those events by their very act of prophecy. There’s an inherent performative element in prophecy: by articulating the mythic truth, the prophet may become an agent of transformation or even the catalyst for the shift they predict. Their role in human history becomes intimately tied to the revelation itself. In a sense, the prophecy's fulfillment can only happen through the prophet’s own participation—whether it’s Wovoka’s call for a spiritual renewal of his people or Jesus’s role in the establishment of a new covenant.

A Hell of a Job

Exactly! The prophet, in this view, isn’t simply a passive observer or a mere mouthpiece of divine will. Instead, they are a bridge between dimensions of time, dimensions of causality, and dimensions of language. They’re walking in both worlds—the world of mythic cycles and the world of human history—and their task is to make those worlds speak to each other. It’s a delicate balance: the prophet must both perceive the underlying cosmic truth of what’s happening in mythic time and find a way to translate that into actionable, meaningful words for people living in a temporal, human realm.

The act of prophecy itself becomes a ritual of interdimensional translation—a descent into the timeless, cyclical truths of mythic time, with a return to human history to make those truths known. The prophet’s participation in the process of prophecy then becomes self-fulfilling—the prophecy often couldn’t come true without the prophet’s involvement, either as a messenger or as an active agent of transformation.

[End transmission.]