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Of snakes and hole-dwellers

24/12/2022

It is all so beautiful and so terrible. For a moment she understood what that meant, gazing over the vast, red earth, over and down the stony ridge. She felt one emotion that seemed to contain both truths. Old man Prall would say those truths emanate from one single truth.

The air was dry and seemed to suck the water from one’s face. If you died, it would mummify your body in the absence of scavengers or rain. This is what the great sages did in hidden caves, fasting and meditating through their final days until there was nothing left to rot away. Prall was no sage, but he was wise and he would likely die up on this ridge beneath his beloved oak, where he had led seminars to generations of the youth.

The great oak sat among stones, its’ branches spread against the heavens and under its’ shade already sat four: Demaya, a curious girl around twelve or thirteen summers old and smart for her age, Coral, a boy on the verge of manhood retaining a look of innocent seriousness, Rana, a young woman with a bright and joyful face, and finally Prall looking like a sun-baked reptile, rambling:

“One could say that in our ordinary state of consciousness, we abide here in the shade of the tree. The shade is a physical aspect demonstrating in our waking world the existence of branches of a tree we cannot sense directly. And below, the earth, our foundation is moved and stabilized by that same tree without us realizing a thing.”

“And without the roots, the ground washes away,” chimed Demaya, “So the things we sense and know when we’re awake, they can’t exist without the part we can’t sense or know.”

“Or the part we can only sense or know in another state of consciousness, yes,” added Prall.

“Is there anywhere this tree, as we’re calling it, doesn’t exist, is that even possible? Or is it, you know, immanent, ‘always already there’ as you like to say?”

“A good question, Coral, we must remain alert to the limits of our analogies.”

“May I try to answer that Prall?” said Rana.

“Please do.”

“Thanks—uh—I think, yes, it is ‘always already there’, the unknowable, unseeable roots of our physical world, but there are ways that our relationship with it, with the tree in general is weakened. To lean into the analogy, if one were to dig remembering to avoid the roots, one would dig more carefully and harm less trees by their digging. In some places—and at one time, all over the earth—there were cultures that rejected the idea of the existence of a tree at all. They either believed in a strictly physical existence, the foundation without roots, or believed in some of the branches, but not the whole. Thus, they dug endlessly without limit for whatever reason, they harmed their own foundation, used their house for kindling so to speak. Belief in a purely phyiscal existence led to the creation of a purely physical existence, which could never survive. Causality spelled the end of their culture and its’ vacuous way of life.”

“How could those guys not see their mistake?” wondered Demaya.

Prall replies, “Many of them did. More did not. Ironically, they may have been at least in part possessed by the congealment of ideal entities. Leviathan for example. Non-physical beings created out of their own fear and malice. Only people who knew the power of the otherworlds knew to defend against them.”

“Woah, weird,” from Coral.

“I don’t think I get it,” from Demaya.

“There’s a lot there for sure,” from Rana.

They meditated on that point for a moment, Coral furrowing his brow and looking up at the branches, Demaya leaning back and sliding her hands through the sandy dirt, Rana exchanging sly smiles with Prall. He made eye contact with Marion. So suddenly, she was snapped back into self-awareness and blushed slightly.

“I notice you’ve been here a while, Marion, and I haven’t yet offered you tea.” He poured a wide vessel into a shallow fluted cup, almost like a bowl. “It’s an infusion of globe-mallow and artemisia leaf. Sharpens the mind. Have you developed any insights to our babbling?” She sipped at her aromatic cup.

“Yes actually, I was wondering about the analogy. I think it makes out non-physical existence as something apart from us; that we are in some way locked out from the total experience because it is there,” she gestured to the oak and its’ canopy, “while we are here. But really it’s like, how you can’t see both the front and back of something at once. When we wander around to the other side, the far side doesn’t disappear, we learn that as babies. When we dream, we see things we can’t see when we’re awake, and vice versa, but we’re not allowed both at once—at least not normally. By the way this tea is lovely.”

“You could pop out your eye and throw it to the other side!” laughed Demaya. Coral couldn’t help also smiling at the image.

Rana continued, “I like that way of thinking. Front and back, inseparable, incomprehensible without the other. But it also turns it into a matter of one’s perspective. The non-physical is qualitatively different than what we experience in waking life, not just the same thing seen from elsewhere.”

“In a way it is, for it is all part of a whole,” Prall inserted, “The overlap in the metaphors is their insistence on singularity. Whatever it is, it has different emanations: front and back, branches and roots, but one source…”

“Chaos!” Demaya cheered, echoing to the canyons below.

“Chaos!” Repeated Coral. The arid wind picked up as if in joyous response, tossing leaves across their circle.

Prall stood up to stretch his long, sinewy body, folding forward, he says through his nose, “I think it’s time for a recess, have some more tea and enjoy the sun while it lasts.”

Marion stepped out to the north where she could see the low, purple mountains. At her feet there were lizards and black beetles warming themselves under the low winter sun.

Rana approached her, gazing out, “Living here so long, no less beautiful does it become. Oh, look at this,” from between the rocks she lifted a sun-bleached jawbone, lined with jagged canines and premolars. “A skunk probably, maybe a large weasel. Coral would know. I’ll give it to him later.”

“Can I see it?”

The bone was so perfect, such a practical tool for grinding and cutting. It was sometimes hard to believe that order could just be the eddies emerging from the general flow of chaos. Life and death, beauty and terror, front and back. The human soul a whirling on the shore of an epic river.

“Did you find a publisher for your etchings yet?” Asked Rana.

“Yes, I did, a printhouse at Infernal. You wouldn’t believe the amount of paper they have access to. My work will be in a collection with others and apparently there’s already a lot of anticipation from the Bay cities. A couple thousand copies of the first edition are in the works!”

Rana grasped Marion lightly on the shoulders, “That’s wonderful news!” she started fumbling through her pockets. “I’ve been saving this for after you’ve had your little breakthrough. Here.” She presented it with an open palm: a tiny coiling ammonite shell, set into a metal ring with light silver chain attached. “May you always seek depth in your craft, and be a light in the bed of chaos.” Marion flipped the amulet and saw the engraving of the six-rayed Star of Chaos accompanied by marks forming a sigil of guidance.

“You’ll never know how much I appreciate this. Thank you.” Rana just smiled broadly in that way all too familiar to Marion, and turned back to go to the tree. Marion followed.

The shadow of the oak grew long and the heat of the day had begun to wane. Demaya had brought out her blanket over her shoulders, but was attentive for the next part of the discussion. For a moment it seemed to Marion that the marbled texture of the tree’s bark was writhing like a knot of bunched muscle.

Prall interrupts the initial silence, “Someone once said that ‘the destructive impulse, is also a creative one’. Hence, it is through chaos, that all is made. What precedes chaos? Not quite nothing, as we know it. More like everything. A perfect absence of difference. The predecessor of all things and also nothing.”

“How can something precede nothing?” Coral asked.

“That’s because ‘it’ isn’t anything. We only know thingness because we know nothingness. Another pair of dependent opposites bound to one source.”

“Even ‘it’ seems to imply you could maybe witness it, but that’s not the case,” said Rana.

“Correct. Existence is only comprehensible because we have opposites to give us contrast and perspective. Our understanding is distorted by our human senses and language. We only know from the patterns we observe in our own microcosmos. One can think of it like a dark, silent room. Or existence in the womb, but nothing can approximate it.”

“Nothing can approximate it?” Coral posed with witty inflection.

“I see what you’re doing, so allow me to be pedantic: no experience can approximate it. It would be a cessation of experience to experience it. It goes beyond comprehensible and incomprehensible; it is not.”

It is not. The words echoed in Marion’s mind recalling something. “My mama used to tell this story about creation. It opens with: Before Chaos, Amnios, It is not/ After Chaos, all began, It is so/ Chaos fed and six heads borne four and two more

“It goes on like that until I would fall asleep. Sometimes she would call it a spell to ward off the dark.”

“I grew up on the same stories,” replied Prall. “It was once more common in our valley—and the cities too—that this creation myth was told. Today’s magic takes for granted the truth of this story without many knowing it as you and I do. Your grandmother was high priestess, she was keen on passing on the lore and the songs, and it’s gone a long way I see.”

“I wanna hear the rest of the poem,” said Demaya, as she tightened her blanket.

“Me as well,” from Rana.

“Me too,” from Coral.

Marion hesitated, shyness making her feel hot.

“I can recite the next verse if you would like,” suggested Prall. She nodded and felt a relief. He gathered himself, sitting up straight, and in his scratchy, low voice:

First of four in North he nestled

And in Earth laid all foundations

Second stole South for her hearth

And in Fire made all things other

Third thought East his mind

And in air augmented the empty

The last fell weeping upon the West

And in Water returned all to each source

Master of day

Mistress of night

Made all alight

And all in binds

Kindled by love

The spindle of Chaos

Out of all Greyness

Ten-thousand of kinds.

Marion was practically drifting off to sleep, the poem triggering a habitual lull in her awareness.

Demaya speaks first, “So that’s the origin of the Four; like in Evocation of the Four? And the two is the sun and moon?”

“Basically correct,” answered Prall.

“Then what were the six heads? From Marion’s part ‘Six heads borne four and two more’.”

“It’s the six heads of three caduceus—the primordial double-ended serpents—tangled up in the center. Amnios, is a word meaning ‘egg’, Chaos, the serpents within that egg.” Marion was fully awake again, curious about these unheard of details.

“What happened to the snakes after they made the Four and the Two?” Coral asked this time.

“They became the raw material for everything. Caduceus, perfect beings initially, contain endless potential mutation. Chaos made the higher godhead and they in turn made Chaos into the myriad lesser gods and everything else. The snakes, Chaos, are still there, it is everything there ever was, beyond life and death, it persists even as it rots and changes.”

“Funny how this all feels so familiar and yet it’s my first time hearing it,” pondered Rana.

“Same here,” from Demaya.

“Even if you aren’t a devotee,” Prall continued “it’s the water you swim in. We speak of Chaos and the Four in abstract, full of unspoken meaning. The said and unsaid, both have their power.”

“It’s the shadow,” spoke Marion “the back to the front that is everyday speech. The old myths, archetypes, metaphysics, the thoughts of our ancestors; they give our speech form and vice versa.”

“The serpents and the gods and us, they form each other, it’s a cycle of creation and destruction, movement between dream and reality,” replied Rana,

“That’s a scary thought,” muttered Demaya.

“What is?” asked Rana.

“That our dreams can become real or make things happen. The thought sends a chill down my spine.” She pulled at the corners of her blanket and scratched the back of her head as if checking it for something there. “Reminds me of that weird fear of the dark or of reflections after someone tells a scary story. Like part of you can’t stop feeling like the story is real, or that by thinking about it, you’ll make it come out.”

“Makes me think of when I have a nightmare and can’t get up to go pee once I’m awake,” said Coral. “Like a child, my dream mind still shaking under the blanket.”

The following silence crept like the growing dark, Marion thought to say something just to break it and bring some levity, but Prall instead added, “A long time ago an elder told me that snakes were the nightmare of burrowing creatures that then became real.”

Demaya raised an eyebrow, “But then how did Chaos exist if there were no snakes before then?”

“I didn’t say that snakes did not exist before then, only that they were dreamed before anyone knew them physically. Remember that dream are still an element of existence and that they are governed by more than simply what is up here.” Prall tapped his temple with a long finger. The last digit seemed to stick to his head, and lengthen out as his hand drew away. Marion realized that it was in fact extending and not just a distortion of the light. It became lax and then tense and slithered into the space between them all. It separated from his hand and took the form of a snake, its’ grey skin fading into black and white bands. The head suddenly turned back and found the end of its’ own tail, swallowed it, and the whole length of its’ body slid smoothly into the mouth until completely vanishing. It left a spiral mark in the dusty earth. The four youths had seen tricks, but this was no trick.

“Knowing and manipulating the content and form of pysche; diving into the realm of dream and plucking out from it in accordance to our will: this is the work of magic. Be wary of it, your dreams will find ways to escape you…”

Marion and the others had thanked Prall for the rich dialogue and gathered themselves to leave. The sun had made its descent below the purple mountains. Moths had awoke to kiss the last of pale yucca flowers on their high stalks. She wondered about the dreaming of moths, the dreaming of plants. Had the oak tree dreamt that burrowing creatures would someday sit and chatter beneath its branches?