Daily Archives: April 18, 2024

Top Tens – Miscellany: Top 10 Youtube (Special Mention) (3) Welcome to Night Vale

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Youtube channel banner as at 18 April 2024

 

(3) WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE (USA 2014)

 

 

“A friendly desert community, where the Sun is hot, the Moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.”

 

Surreal horror and humor podcast from 2012 (uploaded to Youtube from 2014) styled as a community radio broadcaster in an American desert town – although my familiarity with it is more from the novels, which served as my introduction to the Night Vale setting, a desert town where all conspiracy theories are real, as well as other urban myths and other surreal fantasies.

 

In other words, a fantasy and conspiracy kitchen sink setting, where the laws of time and space and nature in general don’t apply, or apply only spasmodically. The citizens of Night Value simply roll with it, accepting surreal fantasy side by side with mundane reality.

 

“The news from Lake Wobegon as seen through the eyes of Stephen King”. Alternatively, the Illuminatus Trilogy filtered through H.P. Lovecraft (well, more so than the Illuminatus Trilogy itself) and crammed into one desert town. Or the surreal dream logic of David Lynch on crack or acid flashback (or both).

 

The Sheriff’s Secret Police along with all the other government surveillance agencies and spy satellites, Old Woman Josie surrounded by angelic beings all named Erika, the Glow Cloud (all hail the Glow Cloud!), and plastic pink flamingos that warp time and space.

 

And then you have the really dangerous entities and eldritch abominations – the car salesman loping like wolves through their yards, the mysterious hooded figures in the town’s forbidden dog park, the City Council (in the council building draped nightly in black velvet) and worst of all, the Library and its most dangerous part, the fiction section filled with lies…

 

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (Special Mention) (3) Cleromancy

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The various different sided dice designed and used for Dungeons & Dragons – particularly including the iconic and definitive d20

 

 

(3) CLEROMANCY – ASTRAGALOMANCY

 

God does play dice with the universe!

Or in other words a crapshoot…

The second of my casino trinity of mancy for special mention

Strictly speaking, cleromancy is divination by casting lots, as the prefix clero- derives from the Greek root for lot – a method of divination or random selection used frequently in ancient history, not least in the Bible where it even appears to be positively endorsed as a means to divine God’s will.

However, it is used more generally as a label of convenience for divination by other means of random selection – interestingly, for which casting also tends to be used as a verb, most definitively casting a die or dice, often styled as astragalomancy (for “dice” from bones).

It can extend to similar things such as the I Ching in China. One might also extend it to numismatomancy or divination by coins, although typically one flips or tosses a coin rather than casting it in modern parlance.

As a means of divination, it has the powerful simplicity of its random mechanic, arguably the most random of any method of divination, although it still boils down to how the diviner assigns the possible outcomes.

And as a school of magic – well, perhaps it’s not so random that the other thing for which the word cast or casting is frequently used is magic, as in casting a spell or spellcasting. Or that dice are famously used as the mechanics of gameplay for magic in games such as Dungeons and Dragons.

I also like the idea of magic as inherently random in nature – what I’d like to style as entropomancy, or the archetypal tropes of chaos magic or wild magic. Powerful perhaps but potentially dangerous or tricky, prone to turning in the hand, or wand as it were – with a will of its own that is more coaxed than controlled, and with unintended consequences even at the best of times when you can shape it to your purpose.

I mean – that’s kind of the point of magic, to indeed play dice outside or with the usual rules of the universe, albeit ideally to load those same dice in your favor. Funnily enough, it seems to me that human life (and biological life in general) is the reverse – brief moments snatched from the basic entropy of the universe.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention) (3) Zen

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Free ‘divine gallery’ sample art from OldWorldGods

 

(3) ZEN

 

I believe in the god of doubt –
the sound of one hand clapping,
a tree falling in a forest,
a finger pointing at the moon,
your face before you were born,
the goose in a bottle,
and three pounds of flax.

 

Along with paganism and shamanism, the third of my holy trinity of mythic worlds – the mythos that I playfully refer to as my zen catholicism.

And along with paganism and shamanism, as much my ethos as mythos – “you wake up in the morning and the world is so beautiful you can hardly stand it”

And yes, again like paganism and shamanism, I know zen is not a mythology as such. One could even argue for it as non-mythic or anti-mythic, particularly given its non-theistic nature. (I say non-theistic – it might be described as atheistic, but zen has always struck me as having an agnostic and complete lack of concern as to the existence or effect of gods in our lives).

And yes I know it is an active contemporary religion – or more precisely a ‘school’ or sect within the contemporary (and historical) religion of Buddhism.

However, I occasionally use mythology in a broader sense, even for a religion in which the focus is practice or experience and insight into the nature of things rather than belief. And for a religion that eschews mythology (or theology), it can resemble a mythology but of Zen masters rather than gods or heroes, the pursuit of enlightenment rather than quests or battles, and parables or the proverbial mind-bending Zen koans rather than epic adventures – from its legendary origin in the Buddha’s flower sermon onwards.

My horns won’t fit through the door!

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT KOAN-TIER?)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention) (3) Principia Discordia

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That’s one trippy cover – from a 2023 reprint edition by Martino Fine Books

 

(3) PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA

 

Or how I found Goddess and what I did to Her when I Found Her.

No really, that’s the subtitle of the book. The Goddess in question is the playful goddess of chaos in classical mythology, Eris or Discordia, but as the object of the Discordian “religion”, which is either a joke disguised as a religion or a religion disguised as a joke.

The Principia Discordia is the central Discordian “religious” text – and much briefer than other such texts. Written by the pseudonymous Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, it is full of contradictions and humor:

“Is Eris true?”
“Everything is true.”
“Even false things?”
“Even false things are true.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know man, I didn’t do it.”

At the same time, as noted in its Wikipedia entry, it contains several passages which propose that there is serious intent behind the work, for example a message scrawled on page 00075: “If you think the PRINCIPIA is just a ha-ha, then go read it again.” Also, it is is quoted extensively in and shares many themes with the satirical science fiction book The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, one of my top ten SF books.

“Notable symbols in the book include the Apple of Discord, the pentagon, and the “Sacred Chao”, which resembles the Taijitu of Taoism, but the two principles depicted are “Hodge” and “Podge” rather than yin and yang, and they are represented by the apple and the pentagon, and not by dots. Saints identified include Emperor Norton, Yossarian, Don Quixote, and Bokonon. The Principia also introduces the mysterious word “fnord”, later popularized in The Illuminatus! Trilogy”.

“I can see the fnords!”

I particularly enjoy how it deems every single man, woman and child on Earth as “a genuine and authorized pope of Discordia” – even including an official pope card that may be reproduced and distributed to anyone and everyone. Or that it has five classes of saint as exemplars and models of perfection – with the lowest class of saint being for real people, deceased or otherwise, as the higher classes of saint are reserved for fictional beings, who by virtue of being fictional, are better able to reach the Discordian view of perfection. The canonization of Discordian saints was a profound influence upon myself to canonize my own saints of pagan Catholicism – and apostles of the Goddess.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GODDESS TIER)