God save Amaracu

Well, we can hope. Won't happen, though.

But on Amaracu anyway. I've been thinking about the Kennewick Man, although I don't know much about it. From what I gather the basic story is that a skull came to light, very probably not of redskin origin, and the reds decided they wanted to destroy it for "religious" reasons. I can understand it. They must be paranoid, after all that mistreatment at the hands of the slightly-less-native Americans, so they want to destroy any evidence that they are only the Second Peoples. Personally, I don't see why it's important. They were there before the current majority, if we're to take precedence as virtue. I don't even agree that being somewhere first gives you any great right to a place. Then again, I don't want the Welsh making a comeback.

There's somewhere else this comes out: South Africa. The current black majority of Bantus is far from being the original population of that land. They weren't even there ahead of the white folks. When the first Portugoose rounded the cape that region was only occupied by Khoisan hunter-gatherers. Only after they adopted some European crops could the Bantus sweep in and dispossess, enslave and massacre the little savages that made up the native population, a small band of men who hunt not with their primitive spears but by running after their prey until the prey dies of exhaustion. Or they do. No match for negroids, though.

Don't say I told you, though. They don't want it getting out. They think racists will use it against them. Maybe they're right, but we can't be denying the truth just to quiet racists. The former peoples of lands will just have to accept the new order. Mind you, we should probably stop these wholesale repopulations. The Welsh, Basques, Lapps, Tuaregs, Copts and Khoisan are stuffed, but it's not too late for the Uighers.

But there are people out there destroying evidence for less laudable reasons. Or, I suppose, the same reason. A will not to believe. It cannot exist, so I will make it not exist. The Smithsonian, for example, who supposedly run regular cruises into the ocean to dump artefacts they don't like the implication of into the murky blue depths. As with the paranormal. They claim the moral high ground, the name empiricist, the superiority of their epistemology, but in reality they only see what they want to see. It's like the right-wing economists who set up a the so-called Nobel Prize for economics without any input from the Nobel Foundation, as a mutual back-patting club. It's a bit of a pattern: deny the facts and their implications while claiming a monopoly on all knowledge and reason.

Fictional Interpretation

This isn't something I've really gone into before but the interpretation of myth (which I generally accept as at least partly real) and fiction interests me.

Of course it often tells you more about other things than the fiction, that's the point. The various interpretations of the Robin Hood mythos, for example, reflect their time. The Norman Yoke got an outing and he was provided with a cause: fighting for natives against incomers, most recently in the 90s film "Robin Hood" starring Uma Thurman. I suppose that follows on from above, although that wasn't the intention. He's then painted as a sylvaticus, a woodsman gone off into the forest a la HerewarD "The Wake" to set himself up in opposition to the Normans.

Then the romantic movement came in, which gave us the Robin as dispossesed nobleman meme. Obviously this appealed to noblemen rather than the common folk. The oldest tales invariably refer to him as a yeoman, a good English thing to be, although something that causes problems for the experts who argue over whether a yeoman would be an independent man, a sort of large-scale super-peasant, or a rank of servant in a noble household. It was both, it was many other things. A large tenant farmer, small landowner, ship-owner, servant of appropriate rank, shop-keeper, forester, soldier, anyone could be a yeoman. It was like the Old English term thegn in that respect, a thegn could be anyone. You could become one by war, by landowning, by inheritance, by sailing your ship on three trading voyages. We are a nation of shopkeepers, after all.

Then there's the Scottish angle, a derivation of the Earl of Huntingdon idea. Also links in to the similar stories of Gamelyn and William of Cloudesly which are set further up Scotland way. Scotland was essentially an English state long before then. The little Gaelic invasion of dal Riada and the Welshmen of Rheged had been overtaken. Early on the men of Bernicia had occupied Lothian, although they never made it further. Even in the eleventh century Earl Siward went north to eliminate McBeth and replace him with a more pro-English candidate. After 1066 the men of Bernician Lothian were added to by Anglo-Saxon exiles, no doubt mostly from the ruling class and no doubt in large numbers given the thousands who made it to Constantinople so much further away.

As I say, he and his gang were merely "yeomen good", a thief, a forester, a gang-leader and the son of a miller (a wealthy profession), later joined by a shepherdess (the long-forgotten Clorinda) and a friar with his big gang of dogs. In other words, a decent middling sort of bunch, no-one from the extremes of society.

There's a TV version of Robin Hood on the Beeb now. It fits the modern trends perfectly, a girly Robin, a manly Marian, lots of super-intelligence Muslims and the Crusades in the background, like the 90s film "Robin Hood", not starring Uma Thurman, in which Samuel L Jackson introduces the Caesarian and gunpowder into Christendom. Well, the BBC hasn't got such a big budget so there's less explosions and some Arab woman working wonders with her knowledge of the herbal lore of English woodland plants. Crusades in the background. Lots of Muslims passing through, more than you'd expect in thirteenth century Nottinghamshire, certainly, introducing the savage native to steel, gunpowder, medicine and carrier pigeons, and so it goes on.

I prefer fiction that's a bit more realistic. I don't know who benefits fron fictionalisation, but it's not for me to say.

Spock in Star Trek. Was he a reference to Dr Spock, child mind control expert? An Englishman in a Cold War Allegory? Or a Jew in the same thing, as Nimoy thinks? I don't know. I notice a spate of Jungian archetypes in sci-fi. Sliders and Stargate SG-1, for example. The anima, the wise-old-man and the inscrutable savage. Well, they've both got an active woman with what I believe they call "moxy", that's the anima to a T. There's the clever one, a professor in one and a man with glasses in the other. Then there's the savage, these being American programmes that's the black bloke.

Yes, I prefer realistic fiction. Something where you can't trust anyone. Look at the McLibel trial. Half of the members of the Greenpeace group at some of their meetings were spies for McDonalds. They even spied on their spies and used honey traps to entice people to give information. That's nothing to do with the government, but they got information from Special Branch (who settled with the victims out of court). The Karen Silkwood case, they poisoned her with radioactive gases.

Then there's the Vril-ya in the famous Bulwer-Lytton book. They were sexist, I remember writing a tremendously long Usenet post (or cutting and pasting one, anyway) about their matriarchal ways. I've spotted numerous realistic elements of that book, such as the super-beings not flapping their wings in flight, similar to mothman.

I continue my feud with Fortean Times

I can't help thinking that this is a very one sided feud, in that I keep giving them money for their magazine. You may remember that I had a falling out with them over their ignorance of the work of one Dr Igor Smirnoff.

This issue of the esteemed organ was dedicated to the notorious follower of the left-hand path Aleister Crowley. I had intended to send another vitriolic e-mail to them, but I now realise I didn't not who wrote the article and other salient details, so I won't bother. I'll tell you this, though, they defend his "philosophy" as "agency and self-responsibility"!

We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.
-- Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley

The author claimed to be "both and academic and magician", well I'm not suprised. Both require closed minds and the aceptance of authoritarianism.

He then lists a number of things, such as alcoholism, that tend to plague those who dabble in the dark side. These, he says "cannot be Aleister's fault", because they are merely imperfect followers of his perfect philosophy. I suppose I hardly need point out that he died a smack addict in a Hastings doss-house.