beginning with:
ARK-BRUTE the LARVA
zone-chief No. 1, a human potentate related to the present author, a duck-shirted Uranian Rememberer, PULVERO, Overseer of Earth’s eastern seaboard.
ARK-BRUTE the LARVA
is called
“the nest of the aborted pupae magics” because knotted up in his lower intestine is a tightly-wound ball of sorcerer’s apprenticeships, the scraps of too many diverse magical origins.
So follows a partial list of some of these apprenticeships who possess him only partially.
1) The pre-industrial but highly technological shaman, BIG ROCK JAW.
FASCINATIONS: gaskets, spark plugs, metal heat shields: the components of machines but ONLY in isolation. He is not interested in their contemporary function. In the unearthly Totemic shapes the mechanical parts, he recalls the wondrous inventions of old Atlantis — which were not forged in metal, of course, but were cast in many of the same designs as the small moving parts of modern “machines.” The archetypal designs, or Totemic shapes, of the life forms of other planetary systems have always inspired the FORM which human inventions take; even when, as now, humans are unaware of the sources of their inspiration.
One element indispensable to all Atlantean technology is missing in the modern imagination of “machine.” And it is exactly this curious ignorance that allows such grotesque densities in contemporary technological devices — densities which, incidentally, inflame the perverse curiosity of BIG ROCK JAW.
That element is GLASS — the Lunar Eye of the Sun. For in Atlantean days scientists were (are) also magicians, and manipulated etheric and astral matter in order to affect physical matter. And their GLASS was not the glass nowadays in use, but rather the crystalized elixir spun from the intertwinings of serpents.
The magician-scientist who would obtain such issue rode on a swift horse to a clearing within a circle of oaks on midsummer’s eve. If he were blessed with the Goddess’s help he would find snakes there, rubbing wildly together, throwing off liquid globes formed from the friction of slither against slither. By their hissing the balls were flung into the air. If the magician could catch one in a cloth before it fell, he might escape with his treasure intact — for though the snakes might pursue him, he needed only to cross a running stream before they caught up with him and the prize was his.
And the SERPENT’S EGG, or GLASS, was the vital germ of every successful invention. For whatever the function, all machines required the capacity to collect and re-order astral energy in the vicinity and impress it with the magician’s vivid imagination of the work to be done.
Certain power-mongers among the magician-scientists in the latter days of Atlantis fore-shadowed contemporary technocrats in their greed to concentrate so-called “supernatural” psychic powers in the imaginations of a few knowledgeable men. These “powers” were actually very ordinary human talents. The magicians — who were often highly skilled politicians and propagandists — created the illusion that man was able to mold matter only through the mediation of metal “tools” and “machines” — instruments of a thoroughly debased technology. The very normal ability of Mind to affect matter directly thus atrophied in all but a few.
Some Atlantean magicians, for instance, though they knew the utter uselessness of genetic manipulation, had perfected it far beyond the understanding of our contemporary dabblers. And here the second “partial possession” of ARK-BRUTE the LARVA can be introduced, ANNWN.
2) ANNWN (pronounced, roughly, ahn-woon). The Welsh myth of the gift of the pig from the underworld is actually a distorted recollection of Atlantean history. The Atlantean magician ANNWN created the pig from human flesh during the course of his genetic experiments and presented it to the world as a new source of food. In great public displays he laboriously “proved” the necessity of using technical laboratory equipment and elaborate and specialized esoteric manipulations in order to alter the genetic code AND the processes by which it translates its information into the shapes of flesh. His miraculous transmutation was, of course, a cruel joke — human flesh changed into the flesh of a new beast to provide new food for human flesh.
The experiment was an apt signature for ANNWN’s life work. Welsh myth names him as the God of the underworld. And he truly unleashed the beastly nature of energies which work creatively when regulated. Drawing from his example, Atlanteans forsook the power which Mind possesses to make subtle but radical alterations in human flesh. Meanwhile, the magicians herded the untapped energy of the Mind in huge, seething concentrations — often storing it in enormous accretions of the SERPENT’S EGG — and used it to perform incredible feats of magic, usually to impress and intimidate the public further. That stored energy finally eluded their control, became a kind of rampaging mass cancer, and precipitated the buckling of the crust that swept the remnants of Atlantis below the sea.
