JPAK-001
The various stories I have found and knitted together seem to all agree that the Last Princess, daughter of the Last Locust King eventually rebels against her father with the assistance of her brother the Kudavbin King (Could have been?). The various sources disagree on what happens to the brother, but most indicate that he dies as a sacrifice to buy his sister and the refugees in her care time to flee the Glass Castle (of the Crystal Castle, or the Glass Tower, so many variants!). What is very unclear is that there follows the addition of a new character in the stories: The First Hero. The First Hero is a cypher, and frustrating. Often androgynous, sometimes male and sometimes female, the stories do not agree as to gender. The First Hero is always the lover of First Mother, although clearly not always the father of the seven siblings- indeed it is rarely clear that First Hero is ever a parent to the seven siblings. More often the siblings are not the actual children of First Mother, but adopted. in either case, the source of First Hero, both the source of the mythic character and the character’s origin within the tale itself is murky.
First Mother is a pragmatic nurturing character, and First Hero seems designed as a counterpoint to First Mother and is generally portrayed as ambitious and a melodramatic and flamboyant. Symbolically, where First Mother is linked in the stories to the Weaver (normally, but not always a male figure, which is interesting and disturbing in it’s own right); First Hero is linked to the Great Serpent and the drive and ambition represented by this ouroboros-style old dragon archetype. Completing the triumvirate is the Storyteller (sometimes, but not always two characters and sometimes one character) who is apparently linked to the Firebird – itself a symbol of the concept of Mystery (with a capital M).
Story + Ambition + Mystery = What?
JPAK-002
I’ve been trapped in the real world. My eye closed to the Shadowlands. But I can feel it prodding me.
JPAK-003
I have been accumulating a disquieting collection of artifacts that scream out for an explanation. Firebird and serpent imagery in Mayan sculpures and texts that do not match traditional depictions Quetzalcoatl or other mythological entities either bird or serpent related. Rainbow serpent imagery that would look at home on a rock face in Australia showing up in old Turkic poetry. Spider gods stealing stories that are turning up in Russian Fairy Tales and not Anansi stories of West Africa.
Worse, I have begun noting depictions of what I can only describe as Grey Aliens amongst the imagery I have noted above. I feel as though Erich von Däniken or jack Kirby has drugged my tea with ayahusca. Black serpents and rainbow serpents, a great sleeping beast or priest (the translations don’t agree) a pale shepherd who may or may not be Yeshua that carpenter from Nazareth and may also be a harbinger of doom for civilizations. I have seen references to cannibal spirits and hungry ghosts and armies lead by a locust king and none of this matches any of the mythologies where I am finding it.
I am beginning to suspect that I am being tricked, the subject of an elaborate scam or hoax, a concerted deception to make Piltdown Man look amateur by comparison. But if this is real, my word, if this is real then the implications are staggering. And so I must get to the bottom of this rabbit hole and find out where it leads.
JPAK-004
It’s called the Ars Holistica, and the name is clearly a modern invention, but if the research I have found is to be believed then the book is old. Obscure references to it appear in Carter’s writings, why I was reading Carter I don’t know, the man never even graduated- a Miskatonic drop out in fact. But still references to the Ars Holistica containing an Ur Mythos for human civilization, a fairy tale that explains the origin of civilization and why civilization creates such discontent (to steal from Freud). I’d have ignored Carter’s writings had not a teaching assistant of mine seen the Tibetan Image of the Firebird in the Darkness and commented that it looked like something described in Carter’s work. My TA was right. Carter talks about the Phoenix as a universal symbol, dying and being reborn as a metaphor of storytelling, how the gods and heroes and demons die with each “and they lived happily ever after” and are born a new each time one intones the phrase “once upon a time”. It’s a clever and trite observation- not as clever as it thinks it is, but still thought provoking.
Dr. Armitage knew about Carter’s writing and was able to point me to the research of one Dr. Wilmarth, a Folklorist of some note who taught at Miskatonic during the 1930s. Wilmarth had several theories about the origins of civilization, and many of them confirm my worst fears about the “chariots of the Gods” nature of this research, but much of it suggests something more interesting than mere ancient aliens. Wilmarth suggests that recurring mythological symbols point towards convergent elements in early neolithic agricultural civilizations. The idea, so far as Wilmarth takes it, is that the common folkloric elements that the Ars Holistica documents are mythological representations of challenges and problems, solutions and laws and common new ideas and technologies that arose from the neolithic. It’s a reasonable argument, and substantially more archaeology that folklore, but still intriguing. Of course, that doesn’t explain why what I am seeing contradicts existing archaeological consensus.
I continue to pursue this avenue of thinking, but do so publicly proclaiming that it must be a hoax and that it is the University’s obligation to expose and discredit it before it grows into an urban mytho on par with the Necronomicon. Of course, Armitage still insists the Necronomicon is a genuine document- I have nothing to say to the old fossil in that regard. If the Necronomicon is genuine then I don’t know what’s real anymore. of course is the Ars Holistica is real, and if it really does predate Sumeria as Carter insists, then I really don’t know what’s real anymore.
JPAK-00
A student has heard of my research and gifted me a hardbound copy of ‘The Great God Pan’ by Arthur Machen along with a self published edition of the Veblen translation of the Xanthu Tablets. The Veblen translation is almost certainly wrong on nearly every line, although Veblens skill at poetic meter makes reading his translation much less painful.
“The Great God Pan” is a frightening work of fiction from 1894 about a god being let into a woman’s mind through brain surgery and thereby impregnating her. I am unsettled even now, despite having finished the novella two weeks earlier. I have been having nightmares in which the mythical gods and demons of the Ars Holistica taunt me and point out that I have let them in and now they live in my head, immortal, reborn like the phoenix whenever I remember their stories.
I have been relying upon medicinal sleep aids to sleep these last two weeks.
JPAK-00
Tibet. Of course Tibet. If this were the seventies I suppose the Ars Holistica would be bouncing around India. This research policy is beginning to stink of Timothy Leary and Rupert Sheldrake and other ridiculous new age woo. Nonetheless a copy of the Epic of King Gesar has surfaced that a colleague of mine at the Ider University in Ulaanbaatar has looked at and indicated includes passages not typical to the epic that she thinks match the fragmented bits of text I have been circulating lately. Of course getting into Tibet to look at the text will be difficult. It wasn’t unearthed. It was discovered amidst a pile of sutras at Katok Monastery- on of the Six Mother Monasteries. The political challenges are obvious. Nonetheless…
གེ་སར་རྒྱལ་པོ
JPAK-00
Assembling a team to travel to Tibet was the easy part. Getting permission to travel to Tibet, both from the University and from the Chinese government. Our request to enter as scholars and not tourists was declined, although how or why was unclear. In particular my own body of work has prevented the University from securing me even the Chinese visas and Tibet Tourism Bureau Permits that the rest of the team secured.
So, it appears that I will not be traveling to Tibet to peruse the scrolls that may or may not be a Tibetan translation of a Mongolian text which may or may not be this semi-mythical possibly fictional Ars Holistica. Constantin has been placed in charge of the team in my absence, although they will coordinate with me electronically- subject of course to the supervision and surveillance of the government and the secret policy of the Chinese Communist Party.
JPAK-00
The team will depart December 24th, just in time to ruin everyone’s Christmas dinners. I’m apparently a monstrous academic according to Constantin’s wife, but I endure and I know Con agrees with me.
JPAK-00
First communication from the team to confirm arrival in Tibet! We have begun!
JPAK-00
Constantin Zamfir, my friend, isn’t recovering from whatever happened in Tibet. His story doesn’t make sense and we can’t get any kind of response from the Chinese government. As far as they’re concerned nothing happened, the existence of the team in Tibet has been entirely denied by the Chinese Government, as far as all official governmental records are concerned- our research team never left North America. I suppose I should be grateful that I wasn’t with them.
Con didn’t return empty handed though. Initially he insisted that ‘his brain was leaking’, but through several long and personally painful interviews I’ve discovered what he did. Con is a consummate practitioner of the Art of Memory. He’s memorized the scroll! Word for Word, he’s committed to memory the whole thing!
How much this contributed to his mental state I don’t know, and of course question of the accuracy of his memory does arise given his current mental state. But I have nonetheless been diligently copying down what he memorized at great personal cost. What else can I do? With luck being allowed to consciously forget the Ars Holistica might even help my friend recover somewhat. He does seem noticeably more at ease with each transcription session.
Of course he memorized it is Tibetan, and that complicates matters- thankfully Con’s talent for languages includes Tibetan.
JPAK-00
Interview conducted by Professor Anita Kane with Constantin Zamfir
Location: Vladimir Szandor Sanitarium, Arkham, Massachusetts
Kane: Okay Con, the machine is running. How are you feeling?
Zamfir: The food is lousy and nobody listens. Their minds don’t stop judging you. Their faces are checklists of disbelief. They don’t even try to pretend.
Kane: What happened in Tibet? Nobody will tell me. Nobody else is lucid, and nobody wanted me to talk to you.
Zamfir: It wasn’t obscure, we both knew that. Garuda, the Me byi karmo, fenghuang and the zhe que. But that’s not the problem. The Tulpa is the problem.
Kane: A thoughtform? What do you mean Con?
Zamfir: The showed me the way. The monks I mean. They showed me how to form a tulpa. Told me that the purpose of the tulpa was to transcend it. But I have a scientist’s mind, not a mystic’s. My skepticism was what trapped me.
Kane: I don’t understand, the tulpa is a meditation techqique. A Way of visualizing aspects of your personality as separate from yourself. What does this have to do with the expedition.
Zamfir: That was my error too. I summoned minor spirits and gods from my studies and talked with them easily. I thought I was talking with my subconscious. But I wasn’t. Because the tulpa aren’t from my subconscious, they just lived there.
Kane: Of course they’re from your subconscious Con. Where else would you conjure them from?
Zamfir: They lived in my consciousness, in my mind. Anita, they aren’t creatures of my mind, they’re creatures of the stories. I carried the stories around in my mind and they lived in the stories.
Kane: So?
Zamfir: And then I learned how to form a tulpa, and what did that do? It set them free.
Kane: These things are still fictional Con. However you define them, creature of your subconscious or creature of a story, they are still fictional.
Zamfir: That doesn’t make them any less real Anita. That’s like saying a shark can’t kill you because it’s aquatic. Don’t go in the water and you’re safe of course. But the water for gods and demons is the story and we humans swim neck deep in stories every day. And I let them out. I let it out.
Kane: It? Wait, what is ‘it’ Con? What did you conjure?
Zamfir: I think they used a psychelic to enhanve the effect, but maybe not. It’s hard to piece things back together. I used to think I could see reality. But I can’t. Did you know I have protanopia? Color blindness along the green – yellow – red side of things, and I still thought I was seeing the real world. It was staring me in the face that everything was a construct of my mind, my mind my poor broken frail little human mind.
Kane: what did you conjure?
Zamfir: I didn’t conjure it Anita, I set it free and I couldn’t handle what it showed me.
Kane: What did you conjure?
Zamfir: what were we after Anita? I freed the phoenix, in the form we’ve been chasing- as Mystery with a capital M. And it wanted to thank me. Do you know what a being that embodies Mystery shows you when it wants to thank you?
* prolonged silence *
Zamfir: It shows you what’s past the veil. It shows you what lies beyond your understanding. Mystery can’t enlighten you Anita, because it’s a mystery. It can’t show you answers. When mystery pulls back the curtain you realize the futility, you charge into the unknown trying to unravel it, but what happens? What does it show you? It shows you Mystery.
– TEXT MISSING FROM DOCUMENT –
Kane: Con, listen to me. The stuff you conjured with the tulpa meditation, or freed, I don’t care. These things are part of your stories, your mind. You said that you freed them, then cage them again.
Zamfir: My mind is broken Anita. I can’t lock a broken door, what would be the point?
Kane: You would get out of this horrible sanitarium, you would get out of that straight jacket, you would get real food and people who don’t think you’re crazy.
Zamfir: The food might be better, but nothing else would change. Mystery showed me everything remember? There is nowhere in this world that isn’t a prison, the story is crazy and I’ve been crazy my whole life, only now I know it.
Kane: You can’t be crazy if you know you’re crazy.
Zamfir: That’s just Joseph Heller trying to be witty. Of course you can. We all live in stories, and the story that’s been playing in our head is so intensely crazy that I can’t play along any more. I’ve been shown how mad I am, and I can’t go back.
Kane: What are you telling me Con? Make me understand. You’re being far too vague.
Zamfir: I don’t want you to understand. You’re happier not knowing.
Kane: Ignorance is bliss?
Zamfir: *Sighs* Ignorance is bliss, but if you know that much then you’re out of luck. I’m sorry Anita.
– TEXT MISSING FROM DOCUMENT –
Zamfir: You should drop the research Anita, leave it be. You’re happier not knowing.
Kane: This is not Lovecraft Zamfir, these things are figments of the sparks from our campfires. We made them. They didn’t make us, and they certainly can’t hurt us.
Zamfir: Do I look unhurt Anita? Did you know that light only exists within darkness? Did you know that Mystery cannot exist without knowledge?
Kane: What are you talking about now Con?
Zamfir: You can’t wonder without knowing enough to know that there are things you don’t know. Curiosity requires awareness. Mystery requires information. I couldn’t free Mystery alone. I let them all out. Every thread we’ve been following in this Joseph Campbell mess. I let them all out. And once Mystery had broken my mind, the Weaver filled it up with stories. They infected me Anita, I’m contagious.
Kane: Mental illness isn’t contagious?
Zamfir: And yet here you are listening to me relate the revelations that drove me mad. Doesn’t that strike you as risky?
Kane: You told me yourself that they drugged you.
Zamfir: I said that they might have drugged me. This might just be my own mind working on concepts too big for me to handle. I don’t know Anita. My brain’s leaking.
JPAK-00
Humans think in stories. We have covered this in enough depth I think. Gods live within the Shadowlands, both within the minds of individual humans and within the collective stories we tell, the cultural memory humans share when they build communities and tribes, religions and nations and other such things. But a strange thing happens as a result. Within the stories live gods, such as the Weaver, who keep the stories for the humans within whose mind the Weaver lives. Don’t think on this too closely, the recursion is painful to consider.
– TEXT MISSING FROM DOCUMENT –
Gods are made of and from stories, and so they have a vested interest in keeping the stories, and their stories in particular safe. Remember Yahweh in his first commandment (and many other tiresome speeches)? Remember this skygod proclaiming how jealous he was to prophet after prophet, shepherd and prince and priest alike? That’s because if the people forget him, if they give space to other gods, Yahweh is diminished. Yahweh’s story has been muddied by retellings (and rewritings of his own), but evidence suggests that he did not always rule alone. But Yahweh is jealous and sought to share none of his worshipers’ attention, and he fellow gods (including his wife) are now footnotes in text books, or lost to history save for vague references if they survive at all.
– TEXT MISSING FROM DOCUMENT –
But Gods also keep our stories, and story gods (such as the Weaver, or variations like Anansi) tend not to have a problem keeping the tales of other gods. These gods serve their worshipers by linking to the stories and values and ideologies that culture values and venerates. These gods make the values and taboos understandable and accessible and easily remembered.
– TEXT MISSING FROM DOCUMENT –
The Shadowlands is not real. It’s inhabitants are figments. But that does not mean they are not useful. A Magician is a con artist, but that does not mean the Illusionist cannot effect the world through those illusions.
JPAK-00
Of course the thing had to be in Tibetan.
My Tibetan is lousy and so several other translators have been assisting me in the transcription – borrowed from other Universities. The strangest discovery thus far is that the document appears to be a much more recent translation than previously thought, as the grammar and syntax suggest the book was translated from a European language- perhaps English or German. This suggests that the version we have here did not migrate to Tibet early in the history of the Ars Holistica, but was a more recent addition to the Monastery’s collection, perhaps in the last five hundred years or so across the Silk Road. We do have a name attached to this document, although it is unclear if the name is a translator, an editor or a supposed original author.
This work is attributed to one Dahlia Crowe.
The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind.
– Alan Moore
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 