Essential Classics: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

You should only read this book if you either write stories or read them.

Joseph Campbell explains why all stories and all heroes are really the same hero in the same story.  Gilgamesh is Frodo Baggins is Odysseus is Luke Skywalker.  Essential reading for people.

Crows and Sheep

            Cal shook his head.  “Well, then what is it?  I mean, if Luther’s wrong, then what is the ‘burst of energy’ that pops outta the Firstborn when they die?”

            Thalanes shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I don’t think anyone really does.  I don’t think anyone really can.”

            “The Memphites think that a person has five parts,” Sarah said.  She was happy for every opportunity to show that she knew what she was talking about, as much as the monk did.  “There’s the body, and the shadow, and the name, and two things that don’t make a lot of sense from a Christian perspective, the ka and the ba.”

            “Crows and sheep,” Cal muttered.  “What’s a ka and a ba?”

            “It’s hard to say,” Sarah said, hiding her ignorance behind a claim of difficulty.  “They’re both kind of like the soul, as we know it.”

            “Two souls?” Cal asked.  “You’re right, that don’t sound Christian.”

            “No?” Thalanes pushed.  “But Paul says to the Thessalonians ‘I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless.’  That’s psyche and pneuma in Greek, two different things.  He uses the same words again in chapter four of the Epistle to the Hebrews, psyche and pneuma, ‘the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow.’  St. Jerome translates them as spiritus and anima.  Doesn’t that sound to you like a person has two invisible parts, a soul and a spirit?  Do you think Paul wasn’t a good Christian?”

            “You’re askin’ the wrong feller,” Calvin said, retreating into a shrug.  “I’m jest a poor cattle rustler, and I don’t have the answers.”

            “I’m just a poor monk,” Thalanes agreed, “and I don’t have any of the answers, either.  But I hope that St. Paul is right, and that you’re right, too, Cal.  I hope that when I die, my ka or my pneuma will explode in a burst of energy, and my psyche or my ba will go to Heaven.”

            “What if you’re wrong?” Sarah asked him.  “Aren’t you kind of gambling your salvation on a guess?”

            “Don’t we all do that, all the time?” Thalanes countered.  “Do we have any other choice?”

Base Twelve

            “Well, that explains all the crazy acorn nonsense,” Andy mused in his antsy way.  “I always heard the Kings of Cahokia was wizards, and they don’t know how to count to eleven.”

“Thirteen, you mean,” Sarah told him.

“Do I?” Young Andy was confused.  “All I recollect is as they count in twelves, not in tens.”

“That don’t seem right,” Calvin said.  “A man’s got twelve fingers, in Nashville and in the Ohio both.”

“True,” Thalanes admitted.  “The question is, because man has ten fingers, should he look around him and force everything else into systems counted by ten?  Or should he look for order in the world around him, and number things as God has numbered them in the cosmos… for instance, by twelves?”

“It’s man as has dominion over the beasts,” Sarah grumbled.  “If horses could count, I reckon maybe they’d do it by fours.”

“Twelve houses of the zodiac,” the monk pointed out.  “Twelve points of the compass.  Twelve months of the year.”

“Months are made up,” Sarah said.  “They could jest as easily be ten, or thirty, or two, or no months at all.  Same for points of the compass.”

“Twelve cycles of the moon to each cycle of the sun, then.”

“Not exactly.”

“Anyway, that ain’t the way I heard the story,” Cal observed.

A Vision of Death

            The worm succumbed first, shriveling and fallen from the apple to be lost on the garden floor.  As the worm died, the apple was already rotting away, and Ezekiel thought he could actually smell the pungent cidery odor of the withering fruit.  That odor thickened and darkened, and Ezekiel was assailed all about by the cloying stench of decay.  The green leaves of the trees in the Garden turned red, yellow and brown, and the whole scene was suddenly autumnal and tinged blue with a chilly wind, harbinger of a bad winter.

            “Stop this,” Ezekiel muttered. 

            There was no answer.

“Please,” he pleaded again.  “I know what happens.”

Eve-Lucy and Adam-Ezekiel went together.  His nose and ears grew longer in a bearded face, his chest sank and became hollow, his belly bulged out and fell, the fine muscles of his arms and legs died to nothing.  Her breasts withered and drooped, the flesh around her eyes sank and became dark; Ezekiel whimpered to see the change.  Both lost their teeth and their hair and the gleam in their eyes.

            “Stop this, I beg you,” Ezekiel said, louder this time.  His own years weighed heavy on him and he felt death approaching him inexorably on the road, a dark presence growing darker and closer by the moment, but Lucy’s rose above and behind him black and furious, a great inexorable angel of destruction and loss.  He tried to turn his head to look at his merciless instructor, to learn who would want to pierce his soul with such withering knowledge and memories, but his gaze was transfixed to the pictures, and he could not move.

            Green had returned to the leaves in the Garden, and then autumn again, and then spring, and Adam-Ezekiel and Eve-Lucy still aged.  Eve-Lucy succumbed first, but only by a hair’s breadth, and both the first parents of mankind died in the same horrible way under Ezekiel’s unwilling, flinching gaze; they shrank and shriveled and the flesh fell from their bones until they collapsed, dead puddles of bone and corruption in a garden that flashed repeatedly from green to orange and back again.

Jorma Kaukonen

Isn't dead.  But like Jansch, he's a great songwriter and a fingerpicker.  Here he is with his classic "Genesis", from his debut solo album Quah.

Bert Jansch

Died this week.

Websterism

            “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said to Roxie, pointing to the row of squiggles over the top of the bay door.  “What language is that?  It’s everywhere in this Kingdom, but I haven’t heard a language spoken other than English and Mexican.”

            She chuckled slyly.  “Why, Dick,” she said, “I’m surprised to see you so easily stumped.  That’s perfectly good English.  It says Koyle Mining Corporation.”

            Burton squinted at the letters.  “It’s a cipher, then,” he guessed.  “You’ve taken as a nation to writing in code.  It’s like the tangled streets of a medieval city, a deliberate device to keep outsiders out.”

            “On the contrary,” she told him, “it’s a system to make writing the English language simpler.”

            “Simpler!” he snorted.  “Some of us find the Latin characters simple enough.”

            “Yes?” she asked innocently.  “How do you write the sound fffff?”

            “Eff,” he retorted, then caught himself.  “Or pee-aitch.”

            “Or?”

            He thought, feeling that he was being baited.  “Double-eff.”

            “And what sound does gee-aitch make?” she pressed him.

            “Dammit, woman,” he rumbled, “what’s your point?”

            “The point,” she explained, gesturing at the row of characters that allegedly identified the owners of the mine, “is that those characters are the Deseret Alphabet.  They are used to write English, in a manner that is simple, logical and consistent.”

            “Once you know the damned code,” Burton growled.

            “Yes,” she agreed, “once you know the alphabet.”

            “I did not know you Mormons went in for Websterism,” Burton rumbled.

            The steam-truck rumbled up out of the trees and clattered to a puffing halt in front of the big door.

            “Oh, we are reformers, all right,” she told him.  “But that is the least of our surprises.”