© Marvel (Kitty Pryde in X-Men Gold)

I don’t know if it’s occurred to anyone that, if all the preceding has a bias against the electromagnetic world, I am forming that bias through my brain which is, of course, electrochemical? All the information in the nervous system is purely electrical (strictly electrochemical, but that’s a technical point since nothing happens without electricity).

This takes us back to phenomenology (Pictorial 21) or “what is the source of data that is transmitted by electro-impulses?” You recall in Dark Star the bomb is semi-convinced by Doolittle that it  cannot know the source? Yeah, but a bomb is not organic matter. If “they” tell us all we are is electrical impulses then – yes – we are phenomenologically fucked, to coin a phrase.

It comes down to the body because the body has proportions and we can sense its beauty. Now, you can say all senses are electrochemical, but that still doesn’t tell you where the proportions come from – why don’t we see ugly, deformed things? The answer has to be that there are a priori things that are nothing to do with senses (which are just information).

We do not live on the sun, we live on earth, and taking a medievalist perspective to these things may not be such a bad idea. The nervous system comprises spinal cord, autonomic and central and – of those – the modern world is vastly centralised. This despite the fact we drink, eat, sing, breath, sleep, have sex autonomically, without thought. All our autonomic acts have a perfection that is completely outside of logical thought and to do with balance, and rhythm, counter-rhythms.

In that way we survive so this is the world we should get back to. The physically active, adventurer/hunter, priest/priestess, king/queen, villagers and farmers, livestock and harvest, festivals and mooncycles.

That world is essentially the one of time and space that a logical world doesn’t have since it is the one of the sun (electromagnetism) where everything is relative, taking Relativity to be just a mirror-image of Faraday (see passim.)

Our bodies are constructed of time and space, and we experience them proportionately. Taking a medievalist perspective (Hildergard, prev), the body is the microcosm to the macrocosm (Greek-derived herbalism). If Relativity is a mirror-image, then it is derived from electricity (the sun). If our societies were electrical – and we ourselves were electrical impulses – we could not phenomenologically know our source.

Yes, because we would then not be in our bodies, we would be in our electrochemical minds. The body is an absolute by virtue of its proportions. What this suggests is that most modern physics is an invention of the sun that has been wrongly applied universally. Do you follow where this is going?

The ego takes information from its own head, which is logical (verifiable facts), and where everything is relative (electrochemical). It takes everything outside of the body, which is an absolute.

In order to cut off the ego, we need to get back to our own bodies, so that we are able to be both psychically bonded and physically alluring – which is what I tend to call society (Pictorial 29). For an idea of what a society based on the body is like, take fin de siècle Paris. There was a recent exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters (and contemporaries), and Mark Hudson (DT) writes

..the great fin de siècle capital of pleasure with its massive sex industry and love of technical innovation, embodied in the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries.

I don’t really go along with that phrase; people have to make a living and there’s a difference between an industry and a society – the demi monde. A society based on the body is Dionysian, animalistic with a throbbing heart of dance, music and gay moves (not that different to ’77 Santana basically). That’s the difference with our sex-industry, which is genitalia. This is a society of expressive bodies (with heads attached, supported by necks, natch.)


Of these two pictures, Lautrec’s is fabulously cartoony – you almost could imagine Mickey Mouse! The male dancer in foreground is in shadow, while La Goulue is in bright light from the left. The other painting by Scottish colorist JD Fergusson of La Terrace Café d’Harcourt also has a yellow lamp.  While both pictures have electric lights, you could say candle-light would work equally well, so they’re not really neon societies like, say Times Square.

I’m not saying electricity per se causes the downfall of a society as in these pictures that’s clearly not the case. Our bodies have e-, eels and other animals generate current. It’s the ubiquity of order (Apollo) that is essentially electrical that dislocates head from body.

After all, Times Square was a vibrant playground in days of yore. Along comes the ubiquitous head of Apollonian order, and all that vanishes (plus it’s now digitized, not neon.) The body is content (Dionysus), the head is appearance (Apollo) so we are back with the mask of the man-serpent from Conan #7 (Hyborian Bridge 23)


© Marvel

The head is not physical, it is appearance; what is physical is the proportionate head attached by what the French call la gorge – appetites and bodily cavities. Without the physical, there can be no spirit – since the physical is content. The head is just the calm insanity that may appear “in control” (Putin, Macron & Co).

What seems to have happened in physics (science) is that it is now not physical – it’s ego. The ego is electrochemical and therefore relative. In order to become spiritual beings we need the absolute of body.

In Santana’s Abraxas this is quite well delineated, both musically and in the album cover “The Annunciation”. The naked black beauty is counterpointed by a white maiden floating on the drums, who may be an angel. Watching ’77 Santana in performance is quite an uplifting experience, the absolute counter to the current US president. Hips, hands, bongos and shoulders sway and gyrate, the drummer is white, the singer is black, Carlos Spanish, an invigorating smorgasbord of Mexican society fused with Californian influence.

This reminds me somewhat of Los Bros Hernandez of Love and Rockets  who are both Mexican and very US influenced (Archie comics). This is what society is; from the physical allure comes some sort of spiritual strength that endures. Without the physical allure, all is as naught. Nothing save the head spouting endless banalities born of the dollar – the wormdollar of little worth in a logical world, of the ego.

You know the quote at top of Hyborian Bridge 24? I think the point I was making was that physics is supposed to be absolute knowledge – that there is nothing relative in it. Strumia made the point that it was invented by men (not women) so, are men absolute as opposed to women? For a start, men also make good action cartoonists owing to their mechanical bent (I like women artists, natch, they’re just different.) The establishment would have you think men and women are the same – like androgynous robots.

I think exactly the opposite, but it goes without saying the media are as one with the establishment. Zoe Strimpel (DT) had this on “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of  Scholarship”

. .the idea that all phenomena are social constructs that pit the powerful (white, privileged, Western male) against the “marginalised”.

She was reporting on a hoax perpetrated on academia, and concluded

Beyond academia, the hoax has been met with glee; within, with fury and disdain. Sadly, those the study most needs to reach are also inevitably the deafest to its arguments.

By this she means those within academia – like Alessandro Strumia – who are not tout a fait d’accord with their colleagues that physics and science are absolute and not tainted by “moral relativism”.

Once any idea of relativism gets around, Amerindian tribes, Andean shamans, oriental herbalists may get the idea their ideas are just as good! It’s not just that they’re as good, they areabsolute because they are not inventions of abstract reason. They are empirical studies of nature (Tales of Faith 10). Abstract reason tends to enter a logical maze of the mind where everything is relative – and this is the lie of modern physics.

The only absolute is the microcosm because it is entirely proportionate; everything else is disproportionate. For example, Rome came up against internal contradictions of its own vanity and universalism – despite all their local shrines and what could be called moral relativism (hybrid-cultures see Sulis Minerva Weird 11).

The emperors, it strikes one, may have had a fair notion that things are relative unless they’re absolute, and the only absolute was the city of Rome itself, alongside pagan deities of earth, air, water, fire.

So, how is it we have now got to the situation where everything is absolute and nothing is relative in the domain of science – especially physics? The answer has got to be that our societies are no longer of the body (heroism) but of the mind (reason, ego). The mind is electrochemical, and therefore relative (disproportionate).. but the ego is convinced by verifiable facts (of the logical mind).

Everything is topsy-turvy because of this. The ego is convinced by its own logic. This makes it a counterpart to Hyborian sorcerers, who tend to be opposed by the more microcosmic city-states.  Do you see where this is going? Without the microcosm, everything is relative, but to the disproportionate head it is utterly convincing (verifiable facts), and therefore absolute!

This is why we live in the world of the supreme sorcerer (Einstein), where Relativity is considered an absolute. The counter to this insane, topsy-turvy world is in the city-state. This is defined as a stronghold where the expressive human body has power and resources. It is a microcosm owing to its being surrounded by fertile terrain, twining rivers, tumbledown towers, horses-and-carts, eagles on the wing. It has beauty and goodness in abundance.

The head is attached to the proportionate body, and is then attracted to beauty and goodness (philosophy, religion, aesthetics), and aware of good and evil. This gives quite a good intro to the Hyborian kingdoms and, a query: why do you think Socrates was given hemlock by the Athenian elders? Because he went against their proportionate, heroic society of fisherfolk, farmers, tradesmen, courtiers, dogs and donkeys.

Socrates was no sorcerer, just a man up against the microcosm. In our own day, the supreme sorcerer says there is no microcosm because the relative (electrochemical head) is now an absolute. Lies, flattering the ego in a relative world of verifiable facts – sincere, persuasive, convincing (like Satan).

Our proportionate bodies build cities of heroic grandeur that echo nature’s beauty and goodness.

“Florence is the centre of the world. And San Marco is the centre of Florence”


Fra Angelico, Convent of San Marco, Florence