What Changed?
Jan. 3rd, 2008 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7[From 3QuarksDaily]: ' What if all those occult Renaissance beliefs had been true for a while, even if they aren’t anymore? What if once upon a time alchemy worked, the world was held together by Eros, the zodiac did influence our lives, and people could communicate with angels? What if the world’s seductions had made us forget our true celestial nature? In short, what if alchemy, astrology, and Gnosticism did describe the way the universe once operated?
'If so, then something changed at the end of the 16th century. As Kraft wrote in the manuscript of his last and apparently incomplete novel—which he intended to call Aegypt—following this watershed “nothing will ever be the same.” At certain moments in history, Pierce concludes, the world arrives at a crisis, a fork in the road, the branching of the two arms of the letter Y, and then alters subtly but fundamentally, taking one line of development instead of another. At such transformation points, when everything is roiled and in flux, there exists a brief period of permeability, when nothing yet has been determined. People at such moments might even become aware of the lost past, the past abandoned. But before long the liminal time passes and there is again just one history. At Blackbury Jambs the silted Blackbury River and the faster-moving Shadow converge and two kinds of water flow “side by side for a moment, shouldering each other. Fish might swim, it seems, from one kind of river into another, as though passing through a curtain. Then the moment is gone; it is all one river.”'
Interesting article.
Of course, in much the same vein, but from the perspective of someone who Does believe in magic, as well as being able to dissect and describe it, there is the corpus of Alan Moore.
*sigh*
Two dreams last night about being afraid of things. In one case it was a Predator who was sucking the life essences out of people, to heal itself. In the second, a "Riced-Out" yellow Scion full of Vietnamese and Korean Gangsters who wanted to beat the shit out of and possibly kill me, simply for making eye contact. barricaded in a row house, with a rocket launcher and all of my weapons, still afraid to leave, because I was worried about the legal aftermath.
I don't like the implications of those. But it has very clear instructions for fixing it...
Hmph. Good Morning.
'If so, then something changed at the end of the 16th century. As Kraft wrote in the manuscript of his last and apparently incomplete novel—which he intended to call Aegypt—following this watershed “nothing will ever be the same.” At certain moments in history, Pierce concludes, the world arrives at a crisis, a fork in the road, the branching of the two arms of the letter Y, and then alters subtly but fundamentally, taking one line of development instead of another. At such transformation points, when everything is roiled and in flux, there exists a brief period of permeability, when nothing yet has been determined. People at such moments might even become aware of the lost past, the past abandoned. But before long the liminal time passes and there is again just one history. At Blackbury Jambs the silted Blackbury River and the faster-moving Shadow converge and two kinds of water flow “side by side for a moment, shouldering each other. Fish might swim, it seems, from one kind of river into another, as though passing through a curtain. Then the moment is gone; it is all one river.”'
Interesting article.
Of course, in much the same vein, but from the perspective of someone who Does believe in magic, as well as being able to dissect and describe it, there is the corpus of Alan Moore.
*sigh*
Two dreams last night about being afraid of things. In one case it was a Predator who was sucking the life essences out of people, to heal itself. In the second, a "Riced-Out" yellow Scion full of Vietnamese and Korean Gangsters who wanted to beat the shit out of and possibly kill me, simply for making eye contact. barricaded in a row house, with a rocket launcher and all of my weapons, still afraid to leave, because I was worried about the legal aftermath.
I don't like the implications of those. But it has very clear instructions for fixing it...
Hmph. Good Morning.
