In honor of the Winter Solstice, a by-no-means exhaustive gallery of forms of the horned god.

Cernunnos, Celtic god of fertility, death and wild creatures, from The Gundestrup Cauldron, 1st century BC.

Pan, nature god, on a Roman memorial frieze, 1st century AD.

The Sorcerer, primal shapeshifter of the cave paintings at Trois-Frères, France, circa 13,000 BC.

Michelangelo’s “Horned Moses”—representations of Moses with horns for the most part derive from an ambiguity in the Hebrew scriptures, in which a description of Moses’ physical appearance upon returning from Mt. Sinai can be translated to suggest either horns or rays of light protruding from his head. There’s a lot of fun (mostly specious) debate, though, as to whether Michelangelo might have been intentionally acknowledging Christianity’s pagan past.

Pashupati, Lord of Animals, an incarnantion of Shiva, Indus Valley circa 2,000 BC.

Herne the Hunter, a restless ghost that has haunted Windsor Forest since the era of Shakespeare, here illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1843.

A couple of other horned gods I can think of that I don’t have pictures for:

Gwyn ap Nudd, mythical hunter from Welsh Mythology, leader of the Wild Hunt, usher of souls to the afterlife, featured in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles as Gwyn the Hunter.

Oromë, huntsman of the Valar, from Tolkien.

Anuket, the gazelle-headed Egyptian fertility goddess of the Lower Nile.

Actaeon, the hapless forester of Greek myth, who, as punishment for having stumbled upon Artemis bathing au naturel, is transformed into a stag and harried to his death by the huntress and her hounds.

And, of course, I couldn’t really have gone without letting slip a hint of geekdom.

Happy Solstice.

Wind Up Eco Media Player
(This link brought to my attention courtesy of el Nubo.)

They claim it runs for 40 minutes on one minute of cranking. Seems eminently usable. Sturdy. With a color video screen, which is more than I need. Unfortunately, it appears to be available only in the UK and Australia. You know, cause Americans are too complacent and stupid to want one. Also, like everything else that doesn’t come with an accompanying cost in fucking-up-the-earth guilt, there is a cash premium involved. It retails for £155 ~= $315.

I think if I’m saving my money I’d rather go with the laptop. Then again, I’m pretty happy just listening to the wind and the birds.

Benvenuto Cellini was a 16th Century Florentine sculptor and goldsmith, a contemporary of Michelangelo Buonaratti, a steely-handed, dead-eyed, sword-swinging, swashbuckling rake, misogynist, hothead, egomaniac, occult dabbler, holy ascetic and consummate craftsman. Or so he would have us believe.

My edition of his Autobiography was published in 1940, obviously by someone with Errol Flynn on the brain:

The book was a gift from my grandfather, a man not averse to embellishing a tall tale himself now and again—who actually had me convinced throughout much of my youth that, Cellini being my grandmother’s maiden name, Benvenuto Cellini was an ancestor of mine. My grandfather quoted from the Autobiography all the time, as often as not claiming Cellini’s wisdoms for his own—yet he also kept insisting that I read it. Eventually, I caved. “Measure twice, cut once,” my grandpa always said, so frequently that I believed these words to be inscribed upon his very soul. As I hauled bricks and mixed mortar, helping him build the chimney for my uncle’s new house: “Measure twice, cut once.” Cutting up balsawood with a razor for a seventh grade science project, or considering the layout of a chessboard: “Measure twice, cut once.” Think before you step. Words to live by.

Imagine the shock to my system when I came across these very words in the writings of the madman Benvenuto Cellini.

During the sack of Rome by the Bourbons in 1521, Cellini claims to have shouldered his way forward through hordes of fleeing cowards to more or less singlehandedly gun down the commander of the Bourbon army and save the Palace of St. Peter from certain capture. Having taken impromptu command of a battery of artillery:

I went on firing under the eyes of several cardinals and lords, who kept blessing me and giving me the heartiest encouragement. In my enthusiasm I strove to achieve the impossible; let it suffice that it was I who saved the castle that morning…

Cellini’s relationship with God and His representatives in pointy hats is bizarre and convoluted; on the one hand, his business as goldsmith and minter of coin places him in the service of a succession of corrupt, paranoid popes, bishops, and secular leaders, for whom he makes no effort to conceal his distaste. On the other, the above passage, among many others, attests to his unswerving belief in a higher power. Above, he seems not only to be taking credit for the blessing of God in guiding his aim, but at the same time heartily criticizing the earthly cowardice of the clergy. He even goes so far as to mock us, his readers, for not having had the luck and divine fortune to witness Rome’s destruction firsthand:

Night came, the enemy had entered Rome, and we who were in the castle (especially myself, who have always taken pleasure in extraordinary sights) stayed gazing on the indescribable scene of tumult and conflagration in the streets below. People who were anywhere else but where we were could not have formed the least imagination of what it was. I will not, however, set myself to describe that tragedy…

But it isn’t only the power of God in which Cellini places his faith. Not much later, having fallen in with a Sicilian necromancer-priest, he shows no hesitation in goading the priest to a demonstration of his black powers.

We went together to the Coliseum; and there the priest, having arrayed himself in necromancer’s robes, began to describe circles on the earth with the finest ceremonies that can be imagined. … This lasted more than an hour and a half; [at which point] several legions appeared, and the Coliseum was all full of devils. I was occupied with the precious perfumes, and when the priest perceived in what numbers they were present, he turned to me and said: “Benvenuto, ask them something.” I called on them to reunite me with my Sicilian Angelica.

An entire Coliseum full of demons, and what does he ask for? The chance to get back with yet another of his bawdy strumpets! But the demons are not so easily ordered about, and they demand that he return the next night with “a little boy of pure virginity”, apparently in order to drive him out of his mind:

…the boy, who was beneath the pentacle, shrieked out in terror that a million of the fiercest men were swarming round and threateining us. He said, moreover, that four huge giants had appeared who were striving to force their way inside the circle. Meanwhile, the necromancer, trembling with fear, kept doing his best with mild and soft persuasuions to dismiss them. … Though I was quite as frightened as the rest, I tried to show it less, and inspired them all with marvellous courage; but the truth is that I had given myself up for dead. … The boy had stuck his head between his knees, exclaiming: “This is how I will meet death, for we are certainly dead men.”

But in the end, it seems only the poor little virgin boy who is doomed, while the demons promise Cellini to reunite him with his strumpet in the space of one month. And lo and behold, a month later:

I stayed with her from even-fall until the following morning, and enjoyed such pleasure as I never had before or since; but while drinking deep of this delight, it occurred to my mind how exactly on that day the month expired, which had been propesied within the necromantic circle by the devils. So then let every man who enters into relation with those spirits weigh well the inestimable perils I have passed through!

Indeed, Benvenuto does not go unpunished—albeit for what he perceives to be unrelated sins. He spends the majority of the next fifteen years and 150 pages of his life languishing for various political crimes in a papal prison, plotting his escape, escaping only to be recaptured, dodging assassination attempts both real and imagined, lamenting his fate, watching all his teeth fall out of his head, and eventually, seeing God:

During the following night there appeared to me in dreams a marvellous being in the form of a most lovely youth, who cried, as though he wanted to reprove me: “Knowest thou who lent thee that body, which though wouldst have spoiled before its time?” I seemed to answer that I recognized all things pertaining to me as gifts from the God of nature. “So, then,” he said, “thou hast contempt for His handiwork, through this thy will to spoil it? Commit thyself unto His guidance, and lose not hope in His greatness!”

Thus does Benvenuto Cellini get Saved. He reads his bible cover to cover, composes hosannas in an ink made of brick dust and spit, and by Providence is at last Delivered from his life of swashbuckling and debauchery to a harried but peaceful middle age.

God sure is one forgiving dude.

“Measure twice, cut once.” Cellini’s entire life seems one long, convoluted contradiction of that very adage. With the exception of his achievements as a craftsman, he seems to have ignored his own advice completely. Now, granted, he pays for it in blood, venereal disease and teeth. But I spent a long time wondering what lessons my grandfather intended me to take from the fictionalized life of my not-actual-progenitor (whose hereditary sins I thankfully need not atone for, since it turns out Benvenuto Cellini outlived all his progeny). Was he actually concerned that I might become an egomaniacal debaucherous demon-worshipping lech? Did my grandfather wish he himself had been given the opportunity to learn Cellini’s lesson before doing things he would regret? Maybe he just wanted me to read about this stuff so I wouldn’t be tempted to try it.

If that’s the case, well, lesson learned. I have absolutely no intention of invoking any demons, insulting any popes, or consorting with any bawdy strumpets. On the other hand… I wouldn’t complain if I could sculpt a Perseus.

Miguel de Unamuno was a 20th century Spanish philosopher who used fiction to elucidate his philosophy. In other words, like Erin and I, he was a writer from ideas. Also his last name is a hell of a lot of fun to say.

Strictly speaking, nothing Unamuno wrote can quite be classified as genre, but the fact that so much of his fiction takes the form of parable, engaging its ideas with such inexorable passion as to alter the world-view of the reader, to my mind makes it kindred with the political idea-SF of people like Heinlein and Le Guin as well as with the surrealism of Kafka and certain aspects of proto-magic-realist writers like Borges and Bioy Casares.

Unamuno was a rationalist, an individualist and an optimist, someone who believed in the transformative power of conviction without actually accepting as his own any proscribed conviction—be it religious, political or philosophical. His prose often gives the effect of immersion in a mind so eloquently preoccupied, even obsessed, by the ideas of the story, that any external element of the world in which this mind exists can come only as a distant rapping at a windowpane, evocative of some new iteration of thought. His stories take the form of assaults against dogma, yet his characters seem to end as much destroyed by that dogma as they are triumphant over it—managing to leave me feeling bleak and reassured at the same time. I can’t tell anymore if Unamuno’s world-view naturally coincides with my own, or if his eloquence has altered my view to match his. Either way, there’s something here to be learned.

I earn my living as conscientiously as I can, and, once my living is made, I do with my life what I want, and not what these louts want me to do. You can’t imagine what profound misery of a moral sort there is in the attempt, which so many people make, to confine everybody to a specialty. For my part, I find a tremendous advantage in living from one activity and for another…. You probably don’t need to be reminded of Schopenhauer’s justified denunciation of professional philosophers and busybodies.

—from “The Madness of Doctor Montarco”, in which the title character works for a living as a doctor healing the sick, but works for himself as a writer of fiction, and is driven mad by the expectations of society.

Would that I had never lived! I say with Cain. Why was I created? Why must I live? What I do not understand is why Cain did not choose suicide. That would have been the most noble beginning for the human race. But then, why didn’t Adam and Eve kill themselves after the fall and before they gave birth to children? Ah, perhaps because Jehovah would have created other beings such as they, another Cain and another Abel? Isn’t this same tragedy perhaps repeated in other worlds, up there among the stars?
Perhaps the tragedy has been performed elsewhere, the first-night performance on earth not having quite sufficed. Was it opening night, after all?

—from Abel Sanchez, a retelling of the Cain and Able parable, in which Cain is redeemed.

As we reached the section “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh and life everlasting,” the voice of Don Manuel was submerged, drowned in the voice of the populace as in a lake. In truth, he was silent. And I could hear the bells of that city which is said hereabouts to be at the bottom of the lake—bells which are also said to be audible on Midsummer’s Night—the bells of the city which is submerged in the spiritual lake of our populace; I was hearing the voice of our dead, resurrected in us by the communion of saints. Later whan I had learned the secret of our saint, I understood that it was as if a caravan crossing the desert lost its leader as they approached the goal of their trek, whereupon his people lifted him on their shoulders to bring his lifeless body into the promised land.

—from “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr”, in which a selfless priest receives beatification in spite of the fact that he has no faith.

With the kind participation of some wonderful writers, I have cobbled together a podcast of the INTERFICTIONS story teasers that were performed aloud at Readercon 18.

The December episode, featuring “Pallas at Noon” by Joy Marchand, is the last of them. Further story teasers shall have to wait until I attend another reading!

Subscribe using RSS

Or use your RSS reader’s subscribe feature to add the following URL: http://mossyskull.com/podcasts/interfictionspodcasts.xml

To subscribe with iTunes, choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and paste in the above URL, or click below to visit the INTERFICTIONS Podcast page at the iTunes Store:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=263967559

Links to the MP3s podcast thus far (right-click to download):
“Pallas at Noon” – Joy Marchand (5.5 Mb)
“The Utter Proximity of God” – Michael J. DeLuca (7.0 Mb)
“Hunger” – Vandana Singh (7.5 Mb)
“Black Feather” – K. Tempest Bradford (8.4 Mb)
“A Dirge for Prester John” – Catherynne M. Valente (7.9 Mb)

Enjoy!

It’s too late already–but I’ve been trying to imprint winter on my consciousness, building memories for when it doesn’t happen anymore. Wind digging into my cheeks, snapping the tail of my scarf like a whip. The delicate balance between the layers of wool I’m wearing, the chill outside, and the body heat expended walking through snow. I’ve had cross country skis on my Christmas wish list for three years now. Next year, I’ll take them off–they won’t be worth having anymore.

3,500 flying foxes died in Australia when temperatures spiked to 107 degrees in 2002, according to a recent study cited by this alarmist AP article. Sigh. Do we really need to be alarmist about this–given how bad things actually are?

“Our recompense is in words.”
– Hurricane, Sudden Thunderbolt, Newborn Thunderbolt and Heart of Sky, upon the creation of humans. The Popol Vuh

Reading the non-fictions of Jorge Luis Borges is eerily like reading a blog, despite the fact that the one I’m in the middle of was written in 1932. Like most of his writing, none of these articles get much longer than one or two thousand words. His virtuosity is apparent as always, but the indulgence he allows himself in traversing his vast and esoteric interests, without the enforced structural rigidity of narrative, makes these essays feel like things hammered out in an hour before breakfast and thrown slapdash before the public eye—complete with citations from the five most relevant translations of whatever work upon which he has happened to turn the ponderous focus of his wit. It’s reassuring, in one sense, to see how much the process of human cognition has remained the same from one lifetime to the next, in spite of all this technological fragmentation of focus. On the other hand, the astounding subtlety and unity of purpose in these essays is a humbling reminder of his genius.

Actually, I picked up the Selected Non-fictions hoping that, given how so much of Borges’ fiction carries that dumbfounding air of truth (and at times even presents truth as fiction), the writing he chose to present as fact would operate in similar fashion, perhaps akin to the “non-fiction” of Castaneda. Thus far at least, such is not the case. The non-fictions reveal an entirely different side of Borges, featuring new ideas and profundities, and presenting a new set of tools for understanding Borges as fantasist.

As a young man, Borges seems to have perceived a shockingly clear distinction between reality and fiction—shocking given the grand effort he devoted as an older man to blurring that line, not only in his fiction, but in his public persona. In “Narrative Art and Magic”, he argues that the creation of narrative fiction must be approached as an act of magic, and more specifically, of prophecy. In an example from William Morris’ neoclassical epic, The Life and Death of Jason, he references several moments, prior to the arrival upon the scene of the wise centaur Chiron, in which Morris obliquely prefigures or foreshadows the appearance of this fantastical being, in order, Borges claims, to prepare the reader to accept as fact a figure otherwise inadmissible to reality.

“Chiron appears. We are told that he was a mighty horse, once roan but now almost white, with long grey locks on his head and a wreath of oak leaves where man was joined to beast. The slave falls to his knees. We note, in passing, that Morris need not impart to the reader his image of the centaur, nor even invite us to have our own. What is required is that we believe in his words, as we do the real world.”

–Borges, “Narrative Art and Magic”

In one sense, he’s talking about a concept familiar to most genre writers: the necessity of maintaining a willing suspension of disbelief in the reader. What’s unusual is that Borges presents this process as a form of magic. In applying this principle, he makes no distinction between mimetic and fantastic fiction; his examples come from Melville, Chesterton and Joyce as well as Morris and Poe. And perhaps most surprising to me is the fact that he takes his working definition of magic from James Frazer’s Golden Bough:

“This ancient procedure, or ambition, has been reduced by Frazer to a convenient general law, the law of sympathy, which assumes that ‘things act on each other at a distance’ through a secret sympathy, either because their form is similar (imitative or homeopathic magic) or because of a previous physical contact (contagious magic).”

According to Frazer, all ‘magic’ is a form of narrative. The dawn of magic is coeval with the dawn of cognition—indeed, in a sense they are one and the same. The first cro-magnon who painted a deer on the wall of a cave, in drawing a connection between the shape made out of dye and the flesh-and-blood creature, was performing magic. Borges extends this definition to argue that all narrative is magic, that every writer of fiction is a shaman-sorcerer—or else he isn’t doing his job.

Thought about in this light, Borges’ later efforts to conflate the real Borges with the incarnations of him featured in fictions such as “The Other” and “August 25th, 1983″ don’t seem so discrepant after all. Likewise, the discrepancy between his fiction and non-fiction, at least insofar as the non-fiction concerns itself, not with narrative, but the theory of narrative, no longer presents a contradiction.

“I have described two causal procedures: the natural or incessant result of endless, uncontrollable causes and effects; and magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy. In the novel, I think the only possible integrity lies in the latter. Let the former be left to psychological simulations.”

For someone like me, a born rationalist, for whom the belief in magic can never be more or less than a transcendent, gripping self-delusion, it is incredibly reassuring to learn that Borges himself, in some fundamental place beneath the labyrinth of fictions that composed him, was also a rational man.

For me, this may be the kernel at the core of magic realism.