Human societies used to be different and free. This freedom is a type of recognition of stereotypes, which we in the modern world tend not to see. Why not? I would say because our societies are ordered, as opposed to free. Stereotyping is simply observation, as CC Beck said (And God Created)

I’ve often said when we used stereotypes if you went into a hockshop there was always a Jew behind the counter.. Went into a bank, there’s an old conservative guy with a Hoover collar, he wasn’t sitting there in blue jeans and a T-shirt. And you knew where you were and you could go to the next panel and show a typical farmer with a straw hanging out of his mouth and bare feet..”

There is the psychic affinity of differences in Howard’s Outremer (Pictorial 11), but before going off to Howard I happen to have a couple of DVD’s of Nyoka, Jungle Girl the Republicseries from the 40s. Almost the entire thing is stereotypical, but at the same time they are also rattling good yarns which literally revel in differences.

Vine and elephant swinging Nyoka is practically worshipped by the natives, save the witch doctor. Drum rhythms announce the religio-culture, and the action is all spears, bows, knives. The whites are no less stereotypical, with slimy swindler, the snake-like Latimer; hero Stanton and sidekick Curly.

Tom Neal plays Stanton with a direct manner and torso to match the action; Frances Gifford as Nyoka is so straight a death-defying stunt merits a mere shrug and, “Thanks, Jack” though amply offset by lissom grace. The main point I want to make is that stereotypes apply to differences which I quite like. The snake-skinned huts of the native village are something else! Moderns take it upon themselves to dictate merit, while ignoring religio-culture and the relation between psyche and physical substance (soil, trees – see Adastra in Africa Tales of Faith 2)

Perhaps they don’t appreciate we live in a logical culture that is death to the psyche and independent roots born of strength (soil, trees). This was borne home to me while reading the mini-series X-Men/Alpha Flight  #s 1,2.

Loki lures the Alphans (along with Cyclops and Madelyn) to his kingdom of universal panaceas for all mankind. The X-Men arrive and smell a trap and it soon becomes apparent there are losers; namely those whose powers are magic start to fade. Loki has promised everything, but the inner “magic” within people, their creative core, withers. They have the ability to cure but not to dream. The story ends with a deus ex machina where the Dark Ones who hold the scales of natural justice rule that his “gift” is not freely given and received; it’s imposed and that is the trap. Where there is no freedom there is universal order or a type of sterile death.

Loki’s gambit of a “sterile perfection” to entice people is very close to the notion that you can convince with illusion. What is convincing is the electromagnetic reality (sun) of logical hygiene-machines; the “trap” is that they are a recipe for psychic and physical weakness, devoid of physical substance. While what is illusory is very convincing, a religio-culture is strong, a strength born of paradox, the cycle of life and death, the rotation of Earth in space, night and day.

Woody Johnson (Pictorial 44) is speaking the language of Bill Gates that replaces a lasting religio-culture with a sterile hygiene-culture. A religio-culture is like in India, where the social actions of people are bound to river deities and cow deities. The fact that both of these can be fairly filthy is still a sign of living strength! The activities of people and animals are interestingly poetic, as opposed to dumb and plodding.

Such was the American West when dance, fiddles, chapels, horses and riders and beasts of the field were all-a-piece. The paradoxical reality is born of the strength of lifecycles which decay and regenerate again.

Such it has ever been, until the electromagnetic illusion comes on the scene. Everything is the spawn of hygiene, or weakness, the latest being smart-machines. In Sweden, they are trialling 3D printers for chicken mince in rest homes where folk have trouble swallowing. One can extrapolate that to cordon-bleu robot-chefs who produce food hygienically in a world sterile of the feel of life’s dirt and gaiety.

The sterile order of hygienic-machines will always have the same effect of denying the natural strength that is borne of decay and regeneration. To deny it is to live in an illusory world of electromagnetic reflections that are very convincing.

The trap is sprung, the sun saps the will with convincing “facts” of acolytes. The “facts” of survival and competition that replace the physical substance of nature. We live in a reality of perspective fact that replaces the physical reality of night and day that is strong (the axis of Earth). Anatomically, the atlas is the topmost vertebra of the spine, named as it supports the globe of the head (skull). The axis or 2nd vertebra forms the joint connecting head to spine.



That may appear just coincidence, but all these are symbolic of athletic strength, as opposed to the head detached from Earthly reality. You might say a skeleton is a symbol of death that gives us life! The ideal of anatomical proportion took on in the High Medieval an aspect of sacred geometry (Chartres)



According to Kidson, medieval innovation in proportions were usually pragmatic exercises to solve design problems, such as Milan’s vast perpendicular Gothic cathedral

This has the feel of how organic design might work were it not for the “facts” of survival and competition. In other words, when the physical substance is taken into account, the design is proportionate. Do you see where this is heading?

Because we live in a perspective reality (of the head), the “facts” of survival and competition replace physical substance, ie proportion. In medieval times – or the High Medieval 13th and 14th centuries – there was almost a religion of proportionality.

But it tended to be pragmatic, and probably usually a result of anonymous builders and craftsmen. So, where there is no competition, there is a sort of empirical tradition of proportion. Darwin, when he’s talking about competition, is talking about a world that has a very powerful axis, a sort of universal joint, that gives it a cosmic sense of proportion.

Basically, there is no abstract competition – it’s a figment of modernist acolytes. There may be competition in the context of universal proportionality – that’s a different matter. Because of this confusion, Darwinism has replaced the cosmic reality with a figment of abstract competition.

Because this takes place in a perspective world (of vanishing point, the sun or electromagnetism) it is a very convincing illusion (reflection). Acolytes attach their heads to this reality at the expense of all proportionality.

So, the High Medieval is a definite counter to Darwin, or principally his acolytes of the head. The soaring anatomical grace of medieval gothic is a testament to physical power allied to the psyche. You could say the tradition is visible in art-deco New York skyscrapers!


Gargoyles

So, universal proportion is something primitive and powerful that all God’s creatures are exposed to as the Earth turns. What is therefore lacking in Man’s abstract competition is a cosmic sense of proportion as Earth faces first one way then the other.

Instead of a parallel reality of perspective that faces the vanishing point of technique (convincing illusion, “speed”) we are in a paradoxical world of opposed forces that cannot be reconciled (see CL Moore). A perspective reality (of the head) replaces physical substance (proportion), and High Gothic cathedrals are a very good indicator of this because they were built by pragmatic craftsmen, not competitors, a sort of empirical tradition of proportion. Because Man then lived in the cosmos he could not indulge in abstract competition and was caught up with pragmatic design solutions of universal proportionality.

So, where there is NO competition Man is cosmically aware because the “facts” of competition replace physical substance. The primitive reality is that the Earth turns, and we are no more competitive, but members of a cosmic wheel that hunts, that decays, that returns to the Earth.

The reality is that content is not the factual perspective of a competitive world, but the physical and psychic proportionality of all things, from the stars above to the worms below. Free of competition, pragmatism comes into its own.

Free of competition, pragmatism is a response to universal proportionality. The sense of universality is lacking in a competitive world that is detached from physical substance where the Earth is like nothing so much as that proposed by Flat Earthers who insist space is a useful fiction! These people who inhabit a highly convincing perspective reality/fantasy – ironically served by satellite arrays – seem to have a tendency to assume all things are in straight line perspective, so they go for a flat disc-shaped Earth surmounted by a demsiphere of sun and moon etc. If they can visualise it perspectivally that makes it ok.

It seems to make the point that, in a convincing world of perspective reality, fact becomes fiction because all is illusion, all is weak and all is hygiene. When the Earth turns (again) Man is the hunter who runs “through the night into the day”, blood-soiled and athletic of foot, swinging a carcass from mighty thews.

The hunter guts his trophy and they are (both) in a cyclical reality of death and regeneration, of the strong and proportionate physique, the lusty throat that sings in praise. If you visualise the Puritan settlements of yore (“Indian Summer” Alternates 7) the difference with our own time is that they are in the cosmos of universal proportionality where pragmatic solutions hold sway, and there is no abstract competition.

Competition which takes place in primitive surroundings is one with the cosmos, and there is a ritualistic element to it that gave us the frontier cowboy, symbol of death from a hip-holster. Frontier towns, because they were free and had a cosmic sense of balance, were noted for their sense of solidarity.

It’s only when Man no longer has the trappings of a physical universe where there is a free living to be had from the soil, that the demon of competition is let loose in an illusory yet convincing universe of the disproportionate head. This universe is ordered by the inventions of Man which replace the freedom of living by nature’s laws. It’s only when there is no competition that pragmatic Man can live freely and lustily.

It’s the difference between the City of London and the old crumbling facades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the Cold War (ditto Cuba) where decaying yet vivacious dynasties dreamt their dreams of lost grandeur, where the free-expression of communal-identity lived with primitive cycles of dynastic regeneration. A primitive order always has the crumbling aspect of laissez-faire grandeur, being at one with a cosmic sense of death and rebirth.

Primitive orders have a pragmatic sense of physicality that maintains the purity of environmental decadence, whereas competition destroys the environment. There is no progress in a vacuum, and the competitive order is essentially illusory (a reflection of electromagnetism).

In the primitive sense you depend on your cycles in the environment for game, crops, the harvest, harvest moon and dance (Dionysus). The more you compete the less you are in a world of primitive absolutes – day/night, life/death, regeneration and the hunt.

Competition is not progressive in the slightest if you were to go back to the ancient Olympiad. Wrestling, the discus, running..all pragmatic pursuits. Again, if you take Nyoka, hero and heroine and slimy rat are slugging it out with not a lot of progress! OK, they have the “devil bird” and Stanton makes the patronising comment that, “Only a white man could have figured out” how to machine-tool a blow-dart for precession killing. But the plot of diamond rustling is essentially primitive and romantic; and the tribal competition is far from abstract, taking place amidst jungle animals and ancient rivers.

That reminds me, the river Ilissos of ancient Athens is going to be excavated, and will run once more through the city of noble minds. Just be thankful Athens is still stuck in the mire! The peripatetic Socrates was quoted by Plato,

Let us take our ease by the banks of the Ilissos, there to converse under limpid branches

The civilized of mind and body take their ease in an idyll of wilderness. The primitive has ancient meaning that is borne of carrion and blood and wholesome dirt. This is why one can say that fairy tales have more to say than a sterile culture of brain addled facts.

This was brought home to me by the fairly brutal and bloody Power Pack arc featuring Katie power as a reluctant saviour


Power Pack #24 © Marvel



The use of a child of fire against a blood crazed dragon (Jakal) whose limb is seared is up there with Clair Noto (“Red Lace”)


#23

The primitive honesty of a fairy-tale world is like the antidote to our sterile land that has not the murmur of decadent power. Katie cries for her bloodied enemy and for her lost innocence. They say fairy-tales are lies but they are psychic and physical truth, whereas we are told a string of slippery lies.

Chief among these is the denial of the cycle of rugged life and red-handed slaughter on the prairies of the west and meatyards of the east. The dirt and dust and sweat of honest toil are replaced by sterile and static hygiene-machines that breed weakness. Not just in beasts; men are made weak by the blatant lies that deny the age-old eco-culture of the open plains of America. The wholesomeness of dirt and dust is denied and therefore the tangled strength of grassland that breeds strength in herds and men. Strength borne of honest dirt rather than dishonest dollar, since exposure to microbes breeds resistance (Pictorial 14,21).

Only strength can conquer weakness; dirt is cleansed by the rich loam of fertile grasslands. The lie of hygiene is being sold to us humans almost as fast as to the beasts of the (Petri-)fields. It’s the false Apollo of logic wheeled out by mouthpieces of lobbies, the like of Woody” Johnson. It’s no wonder so many distrust “facts” when there are two types: the cyclical variety of grassfed beef; and the linear variety of beef monoculture lots.

“Woody” would say the latter was scientific and, yes, like a lot of science they occupy the same parallel reality of fact/fiction that has not the balance and proportion of the Earth as it whirls. They are in a parallel system where fact becomes fiction, of Mars not Earth.

Grassfed beef still accounts for a very significant proportion of all American beef (sponsored by AGA) and it is traditional pasture, only feeding grain as a “top up”. Hay is the staple fodder for beef, and you are in a cyclical situation of roaming herds that fertilize prairie. What that means is that you are in an area where dirt is cleansed by the strength of grassland, pathogens are eradicated. The Earth’s rotation has a cosmic sense of proportion.

This is the style of living that beef herds traditionally enjoy. I mean, you’re talking about ambling around grazing, lowing balefully as dusk falls across misty grass again, and it suits their stomach and overall physiological behaviour. Grain-fed beef develop acidity and the inevitable methane. Apart from the overall weakness of the system, this is an actual fact that maybe Woody wasn’t fed? The word bullshit springs to mind.