Posts Tagged ‘Fiction’

The Two of Harvesters

BY: Mark

I attended Foolscap, an intimate conversation-driven Science Fiction and Fantasy convention, this weekend. After my panel on Saturday, I took a spin through the art gallery and discovered Egypt Urnash’s Tarot illustrations. Her illustrations are reminiscent of work done by Studio Foglio, but clearly their own style when you examine them more closely. Her tarot deck–the Silicon Dawn Tarot–is both tongue-in-cheek as well as being very modern in its interpretations of the cards.

The one that really caught my eye was her rendition of the Two of Swords.

[image from Egypt Urnash's tarot collection]

Reminds me of Susan Delgado, in a way.

I’m a big fan of the Two of Swords; in fact, she figured heavily in Psychobabel, the unwritten resolution to The Potemkin Mosaic. One of the things that was going to crop up in Psychobabel was pieces of something called The Blackleaf Tarot. And . . . [rummaging around on his hard drive] . . . here is the only extant piece there is . . .

The Two of Harvesters

She sits on a sea-soaked plain. The sky is the color of ash, and the horizon is a weak gash separating the dead heaven from the ruined earth. She is wearing robes of white fur, streaked and matted with blood. Unlike her sisters, her head is not shaved, though her hair is short. Where the sacred geometries are tattooed on her skull, the hair is white. At the open throat of her robes, you can see hints of the other tattoo she has, the octopus that clings to the base of her neck, its tentacles draped across her shoulders and around her throat. 



She has seen the sun of many dreams and her face and arms are dark, and the color of her markings–the whorls and angles–has been bleached away. A band of yellow gauze, stained by the fingerprints of her bloody-handed Queen, is tied across her eyes. She has been captured in this portrait with the hint of a smile, as if she knows you are looking at her. 



Held across her chest–their tips pointing upward, their handles touching over her navel–are her blades. They are triangular, sharp on three edges, and their intent is to cut, not to slice. She is the Two of Harvesters; she is the one who wants to bleed you.

Not Entirely About Baphomet

BY: admin

There used to be a show called Creature Features. My memory of it was that it ran on Saturday afternoons, and I’m not sure why this sort of thing was on during the day as the content seemed inappropriate for young impressionable minds (read mine). I would swear that my memory is faulty, but Wikipedia reports that it did run on Saturdays, alternating with Kung Fu Theater, so there you go. Saturdays, after cartoons, the kids get a dose of old school horror. (Though, I wonder if it was Creature Double Feature.)

Anyway, the only episode I have any real recollection of involved a mad scientist and a head in a jar. An evil head, badly burned, with its jaw wired shut, complete with a malevolent stare and an ominous soundtrack. All it could do was stare, but it did so with such malice and evil intent that, well, thirty-years plus later I still remember it. (And the head got out, it seems, or it influenced the mad scientist’s assistant enough that he burned the lab down. And there’s something about the monster, with its head attached, attacking people on a boat, and I don’t recall if this is pre- or post- jar time.)

It’s funny how these things stick in your head and then percolate up the surface later and you may not consciously realize where they came from. Witness “The Reading” dream from The Potemkin Mosaic where Harry is nothing more than a head and a spine in a jar.

So, yes, floating heads. Heads in jars. Apparitions.

Gustave Moreau’s picture of Salomé encountering the floating head of John the Baptist is another one of those images burned in my head. After he died in the late 19th century, his Parisian apartment was turned into a museum. They’ve kept a few of the room as they were, artfully and artificially arranged so as to provide educational opportunities for modern visitors as they file through. The real treasures are in the back where you can paw through rack after rack of Moreau’s art. Moreau liked to paint mythological scenes in fairly classical style, but then he came back and layered on the ornamentation. Layers and layers of it. In the case of John’s floating head, it’s a layer of pale line art. A ghost map of etheric symbolism.

Trust me. When you see the physical painting, you’re going to start trying to get a better angle on it to see the other layer.

Another hop. Grant Morrison, in the first volume of The Invisibles, posits that the Templar treasure was the head of John the Baptist. It spewed an unending stream of glossalalia, and as Robin pointed out to the agents of the Adversary, what the head was saying was nonsense because it meant everything to anyone. Whatever you thought it was saying was true, because the sounds coming from its lips had no meaning until they reached your ear.

When you look at the lines on Moreau’s painting, what you see may be nothing like what I see.

Hop again. Tim Powers, in Three Days to Never, has a magic bus that is guided by the prophetic head of Baphomet. Powers is one of our secret historians, a writer who adheres to the known facts as much as possible and who discovers all manner of strange and wondrous ways to link the underlying inconsistencies together. Three Days to Never concerns Charlie Chaplain, Albert Einstein, time travel, and a precognitive head on a bus. Plus other things, as all Powers novels do.

In fact, I think I’ve distracted myself by realizing I need to re-read The Invisibles and Three Days to Never that I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say about Baphomet in the first place.