Review: Chasing Embers by James Bennett

I wanted to read Chasing Embers because the description sounded interesting and because I have always liked stories about dragons. I was wrong. The book is a tedious slog.

There are moments that sparkle and are exciting. I thought "now the story will get good." I was wrong. Another slog was dead ahead and was more tedious than the last slog and is the central problem with James Bennett's Chasing Embers.

Bennett writes action very well, but fails to rise above 2-dimensional characters that care about anything but fighting, chasing, and getting rid of Red Ben. At least the antagonists, for all their diversity, revel all too briefly in their brief victories -- all too brief. There is no connection to the characters, nothing that delves any deeper than a surface scratch. Why does Red Ben care about humans so much, other than the obvious carnal desire, which seems due to the lack of a female dragon to continue his line, but that is forbidden since only Red Ben among all the dragons may continue to exist in the human world. He signed the treaty that became the Lore 800 years ago when he was barely dry from is hatching. He had obviously not even hit puberty when he signed away his rights in order to keep living. Why fall for a human female when their lifespans are so short and mating so brief and fruitless? Beyond an orgasm, why does he care?

He cares.

So what?

Khadra, the human the Queen of Punt possesses in order to be corporeal, is briefly interesting, very briefly. Bennet takes a very long time getting to the point that Khadra is giving up everything so her people will live. Her sacrifice will bring the rains to her dusty lands. So what? It isn't as if there is any connection between Khadra and her mother or the land of her human birth.

Red Ben loves Rose. So what? He walked away from her because he was bound by the Lore to hide who and what he is. He cares but not enough to bare his soul -- or himself -- and that is the heart of a book that has the beginnings of a story that matters, that readers -- that this reader -- cares about. Red Ben wants to keep living and cannot if there is another dragon in the world because it is against the Lore, the same Lore that he upholds while everyone bound by the Lore breaks it with impunity and promiscuous regularity.

In the end, Chasing Embers is tedious, pointless, and less than superficial. Give it a miss until Bennett rewrites the book or finds editors that can dig deeper than toothpicks scratching granite and expecting to make a lasting mark.

Of Circuses and Men

 Lady Celia responded to my last post about my cousin, Allyson Gross, whose life and death were memorialized in a Columbus Dispatch Sunday article that included stories about two other women with heart disease who died. The point was to raise awareness of heart disease and maybe boost donations to the hear disease charities to help fund research so these women need not have died needlessly.

At any rate, my answer to Lady Celia was rather long-winded and I went off on a riff about the death of my grandson, Connor, and how his mother continues to mourn him publicly on Facebook as his and his twin Sierra's birthday nears this month. Their birthday is/was six days after mine on the 23rd. (If you're slow with the math and want to know when my birthday is, it's the 17th when I turn 61.) I also answered her question about how I have been doing since I so seldom post anything here on LJ, though I keep paying the annual fees. I could read the posts without paying the fee for having an place to post, but I've gotten into the habit since I began posting here the summer of 2002 when membership was opened to the public at large. I began with a Dead Journal account, which lies abandoned over on their site and for which I no longer pay the fees, and kept hoping someone would give me a code so I could join Live Journal.

Before I wax macabre and melancholy over Connor's death or get into another groove musing about the impact that youthful death has on us all, I think I should switch to the main focus in my life these days -- informing people that, yes, we are a hybrid species created by extra terrestrials who were space travelers here to mine gold about 450,000 or so years ago and that, yes, there is a 10th planet (or rather a 12th planet according to Zechariah Sitchin and the Sumerians who inscribed the clay tablets that formed the basis of his Earth Chronicles books and fueled an international climb to fame that Erich von Daniken screwed up when he manufactured an ancient artifact to boost his own fame and continue his campaign to inform the world that the ancient civilizations scientists and historians purport to know really did believe in and depict ancient astronauts) and it is coming our way soon. Look up Google Sky and point the viewer to the space near Orion's belt and you will see either a black rectangle or what looks like a planet speeding towards Earth across the ecliptic plane of the rest of the solar systems denizens and resembles the flying disk that is prominently featured in ancient art and carvings through the Middle East and the ancient world of Egypt and its risen and fallen civilizations.

Yes, I believe that there are populated worlds on the planets strewn about the universe and that they have and still do visit Earth. According to Corey Goode and alien astronaut believer, David Wilcock, on Gaia.com and Cosmic Disclosure, there are numerous alien races actively involved in abductions and experiments on humans and there are civilizations undreamed of residing within this hollow planet out there among the stars somewhere near Pluto and the Kuiper belt discussing how to reveal the truth to the rest of the world and silence the forces that have actively kept humanity in the dark about their origins while running a disinformation campaign that demonizes and blackens the names of people who continue to maintain that aliens are among us. Remind you of Channing Tatum's assurances and explanations to Jupiter Jones when he saved her from aliens attempting to kidnap and/or kill her? Well, there are growing numbers of people who are willing to face the slings and arrows of outrageous detractors determined to keep the truth about who and what we are and how we came to be from us, and they are going public and giving lecture tours around the world and filming movies and documentaries and television shows every day. Men like Michael Tellinger from South Africa who are willing to put their money and their beliefs out where everyone can see them.

And it doesn't hurt that Tellinger is a handsome middle-aged man who is engaging and intelligent and a hunk.

Besides spending time researching and drooling over Michael Tellinger while learning more about my own lifelong obsession with the truth of our origins, I have been working and fuming about the draconian -- and punitive -- corporate policies that keep me off balance with slave wages and barely that, although the company is willing to make up the difference between the money they pay me and the national and state minimum wage laws just to keep the Dept of Labor from looking too closely into their business practices and their blatantly enforced and sanctioned slave wages and status. Those Indians are smart enough to know that the government will stand idly by as long as they stay a frog's hair over the legal lines as they continue to pay skilled and educated employees less than a bum makes at a day labor site digging ditches and transporting Port-a-potties. But that is another rant for another time. This rant is to introduce me to reader who've never read my posts and remind old LJ friends that I am alive and still a salty old broad getting saltier and soon a year older.

I have also taken up Chinese calligraphy (recently, like yesterday recently) and dived back into drawing and art with colored pencil while indulging my passion for baking and collecting cardboard boxes from Amazon.com. In my snowy back of beyond I continue my feud with the USPS and their dwindling services, enslaved to their draconian rules about how often I must check the cluster collection box 5 miles down the road and refusing to drive the 30 miles to the post office in Florissant proper (half a city block of auto repair shops, farm and hardware supply, dog grooming, and back yard auto repair business in the owner's garage, as well as a couple of closed down restaurants, a quick shop market in a defunct gas station, one gas stations, and a liquor store next to the market where there is a Subway shop inside the market) to pick up the location of and key to my new mailbox that the USPS so generously moved without informing me. I am a rebel to the end, though a rebel without a mailbox at present maintained by one old woman in a Range Rover who delivers to the scattered cluster boxes between here (relatively here) and the post office 30 miles away. The post mistress told me that I must pick up my mail every 2 days, which is often not possible with the weather (currently snowy and cold with impassable roads that UPS drivers haven't braved this week) and my schedule and the fact that I seldom need to go off my own property let alone 30 miles to the post office where I was T-boned a year ago by a Chevy truck passing me across a double yellow line at about 50 mph and rising without paying attention to my blinking turn signal as I slowed down to pull into the post office lot to put some mail in the box. Maybe you can see my reluctance to deal with draconian USPS, or rather local post office rules for the privilege of finding out where my new mailbox is located and obtaining keys for same.

Or not.

I'd rather go without the reams of junk mail and the occasional hard copy acknowledgement of information I've already received by email (or the rarer still letter or card from a friend) for that. All business mail and bills come to me by email so there is little motivation for me to bother with the often absent benefits of driving 5 miles to check the mail every other day, especially since I refuse to buy anything that will be delivered by post and not by UPS.

And there it is, a few snippets of information about how I'm doing these days. I work graveyard shift and usually sleep during the day, but I'm still buzzing from Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away and fantasies about the daring middle-aged man who does not fly on the trapeze but makes my whores moan louder with his intellectual banter about ancient civilizations and the truth of our prediluvial origins.

That is all. Disperse.

Myth and Fantasy? Maybe Not.

It gave people a good feeling to believe they were special, unique, original in the cosmic scheme of things, but it was always a lie. For years I have believed that we should take the ancient mythologies as fact and see the universe and our neighborhood in the solar system in the light of ancient truths. I have researched and read and continue to do so every day, pausing briefly to consume mass quantities of popular fiction as well. Every brain needs a break, including mine. Whatever it was that stirred -- or rather bothered -- me woke me at 4 a.m. this morning and I dove into a new search. I googled NASA, Nibiru, and probes and came up with the most extraordinary information.

NASA has long claimed that Zecariah Sitchin's books based on decoding Sumerian cuneiform tablets were bogus -- at least in public, while in secret they had taken the information and had been judiciously searching the skies and our solar system for what had been written thousands of years ago. From Sitchin's first book, The 12th Planet, on NASA has paid a great deal of attention to the Sumerian tablets and circular seals and what they contained.

Since the 1990s, I have wondered how a planet bound group of civilizations could have such profound knowledge of the solar system beyond their ability to see and experience could have such detailed information about the planets, moons, and movements of those heavenly bodies without being able to see them first hand, say from the viewing port of a space ship or planet with advanced technology and science on a massive elliptical orbit around our sun. And where did those individuals only a step or two removed from the beasts get their beliefs?

God was the logical answer and I'm sure the beings who from heaven to earth came (Annunaki) seemed like gods to their primitive minds saw them as gods -- and were told they were gods. After all, if we moved beyond our planet and into the stars, landing on some earth-like planet inhabited by protohumans, would we not also call ourselves gods and exert our technological influence over them? If nothing else, to at least see the travelers as gods that should be worshiped? Worship is a heady proposition and one that is intoxicating to ego.

My search revealed photographs and articles and people who think as I do. Of course, they are also decried by the world at large as lunatics, alternative scientists, fantasist, and liars, not to mention insane, but I have found that such personal attacks, while they do move the average person to discount such ravings as insanity, are proof that what they are saying has validity and someone, usually a powerful someone, is getting nervous and must not allow such thoughts to gain traction and believers. After all, fringe scientists and archaeologists and historians should remain on the fringe, an oddity or ragged, sackcloth wearing lunatic who might possibly be delusional and that could be contagious. What would happen to a world with eyes wide open and minds no longer controlled by competing religious dogma?

Freedom.

No one wants that and certainly not the Powers That Be that have worked so long and hard to cloak the truth in mystery and allegory and lies to maintain their control over the world. As long as people are fighting and destroying each other the likelihood of the world waking up too soon is lessened.

It's time to wake up.

Let's begin with NASA's lie that Planet X/Nibiru is a hoax and Google Sky keeping a specific area of their sky map blacked out. It's not blacked out any more and NASA's claims that the term Planet X denotes something that does not exist.

I've always thought that the name for something that doesn't exist is NOTHING. Silly me.

We're already feeling the effects of Nibiru's gravitational pull on the earth with extremes in weather: tsunamis from underwater volcanic action, the explosion of the great volcano in Iceland a couple years ago that affected plane travel in Europe and dropped temperatures because of the volcanic ash in the atmosphere dampening the sun's warming rays, increased precipitation, severe winters with record snow falls, and so much more. Liberal media outlets explain it all away with global warming and increase their demands to decrease our energy requirements and dependence on fossil fuels, pointing to finite resources dwindling and the coming resource wars. A lot of the blame is being leveled at the USA because we are the greatest abuser of natural resources. The truth is that it has nothing to do with manmade abuse of natural resources and everything to do with an extra planetary body exerting its considerable gravitational force on Earth. That planet is estimated to be 7x our size. We see daily what the moon's influence on earth so imagine the influence of a planet 7x our size.

The more religious among us point to the End Times and the sins of the people, but that is the usual prophecy when cosmic forces are felt and seen on our planet. I'd say it is easier for people to believe in an angry God and Man's sins than to see things as they actually are. The truth is a big pill to swallow and we have been conditioned to believe that God/god is actually the author of all the retribution and punishment coming to us for denying the existence of God or Allah or whatever than to see ourselves as pawns in the great cosmic chess game. 

Einstein saw God as a being or entity that did not play dice with the universe. In a similar vein, I see the universe as a well ordered clock, albeit a clock that creates time instead of merely measures it. Stars and planets and all matter of cosmic debris are born, live, and die with regularity. In our small corner of the universe we are born, live, and die recycling the star stuff that is the basis of our existence like a well run clock. But we are not unique. In a universe hundreds of billions of years old, it would be arrogant and ignorant of us to believe that the universe could only conceive of humanoid life once with an extinction event hanging over us like the fabled sword of Damocles.

In our fossil record and among the numerous civilizations that have come and gone there is proof of a very diverse genetic heritage that could easily explain junk DNA and why much of our DNA is in the OFF position. Extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs) are out there among the stars, but they are also here on this planet with us -- and have been for hundreds of thousands of years. They never left, instead preferring to work from the shadows and from their descendants still loyal to them and in on the secret. The information is couched in allegory and plastered over with religious writing that obscure more than they reveal while theologians and believers blithely continue to interpret the information in terms of that angry god and man's spiritual being.

The End Times are coming and the latest predictions set the date for March 26, 2016, Passover in the Jewish and Christian religions. Or is it merely the end of our childhood and the beginning of an adulthood that includes the reality of our genesis into a wider cosmic stage.  

Planet X as it appears in closeup on Google Sky. The wings are likely the atmosphere or the fire of its passage through the universe.

 

Google Sky again without the infrared enhancements. Still looks like a winged disk to me.

Which is how the ancient saw -- or rather carved it onto their monuments -- the planet. No doubt the man in the disk does not symbolize an alien astronaut but symbolic of the fact that there were people on the flying disk.

Allowing for artistic interpretation and embellishment, this does look like the same winged disk seen on Google Sky. The twin serpents the symbol of the pharaoh, anointed ruler and god of the Egyptians. Paints rather a different picture of the mythology and speculated history that archaeologists have been feeding the people since they first went to Egypt to dig in the sand.

It also puts a different face on the history we were so sure about and the history that is coming to light as the old guard died and the rogue elements of history and archaeology have their chance at the podium. NASA has been diligently searching for Planet X (that nothing) since the 1980s and have been sending out probes to gather more data. And we were told it was to get a closer look at the solar system and the planets and moons populating our neighborhood. I'm sure that was what they added to the list, but the goal is and has always been to find the planet (brown dwarf, protostar, whatever) to validate the mathematics and the unusual nature of our solar system demonstrated by its passage through the cosmic neighborhood.

As I have said previously on this very blog, we are no longer children -- or mushrooms living in the dark and raised on compost --and no longer in need of the guiding controlling hand of an omnipotent and omniscient god. It is time to claim our freedom and our heritage and see the world -- and the universe -- naked in the clear light of day -- or as much clear light as we are likely to get when Planet X passes by us and further exerts its gravitational influence on our much smaller planet.

Not the End Times of biblical prophecy but the end of darkness and the true revelation/apocalypse, both of which mean enlightenment as the scales fall from our eyes.

That is all. Disperse.

The Mythos of Frank Herbert

When my cousin by marriage, Michael Vanderboegh, told me I should read Dune by Frank Herbert, I wasn't interested. There was nothing wrong with what he told me, but I could not get interested. There were too many other things going on in my life, like adjusting to being divorced with three small boys, only one of whom was in school (first grade) and working two jobs to make ends meet. I didn't have time for books, even for the science fiction I enjoyed so much.

Books had not been a part of my life for a few years, at least since getting pregnant and having children. Babies tend to suck up all available time and energy until there is nothing left for the good stuff, like reading. Dune was off the list of available things to do. There were not enough hours in the day for reading. The only time I had to myself was in the shower, if I got it before the boys were up or after they went to sleep, and falling into a dead faint at the end of the day.

I had much more time a few years later and picked up the book at a secondhand store while trying to add to my Andre Norton collection. I happened across the book and took a glance at the back cover and first few pages. I got lucky. The book was available in hard cover, and so I bought it, took it home and found a few minutes to begin reading. I was reluctant to put the book down to cook dinner, do laundry or go to bed. I was mesmerized -- and hooked but good.

The sweep of plot, characters and worlds took my breath away and the story was a real page turner, despite its deceptive size. I recognized many of the so-called ancient words drawn from Greek, Italian and Muslim origins, but that wasn't the real draw for me. It was the scope of the plots and stories that intertwined, leaving me hungry for more without ever feeling lost. That was artistry. That was good writing and I couldn't wait for the next book and the ones after that.

I did read some of Herbert's short story collections, and they were good, but it was with Dune that he reached his true calling as a storyteller. I go back and read Dune and the rest of the books from time to time, and I have read several of Herbert's son Brian's additions to the mythology and history of the worlds and people, answering questions about their origins and the beginnings of feuds, how the navigators evolved and where the whole thing was going in terms of religion and history. One thing I learned from Herbert, even though I knew it already, was that everything dies. Every religion, every system and every civilization reaches a pinnacle and is replaced by something new, something born from seeds planted long ago. About the only thing that lasted in Herbert's vision was Judaism.

Catholocism had evolved and become a breeding and martial arts program that, in concert with melange, the spice that extends and enhances life, created super beings, like Paul Muadib Atreides, Leto III the God Emperor and eventually an entire race of Atreides spawned humans who were no longer visible in the minds of those that could track every being in the universe. Islam became an entrenched society of people devoted to the violence of war and the protection of every drop of water on Arrakis (Dune) so that the planet would one day be carved up between rivers, lakes and seas between which ran grassy plains where cities and towns careless of water would spring up. Leto III made that possible with his breeding program and his reign of over three thousand years.

In one small part of the universe there were hidden pockets of Jews still practicing the ancient rites of their religion waiting for God as the chosen people. That did not change, and there is still the question of what Frank Herbert believed and saw for the future of mankind.

The stories and layers that came after Dune were the icing on a very rich cake that lingers still on the mind and in the heart. Few stories like that come along. It's no wonder the book has been made into a movie and a mini-series, each done by different directors that add more pieces to the puzzle. From the elegant and regal Dune of David Lynch's vision to the Sci-Fi TV mini-series directed by John Harrison, which is closer to what Herbert envisioned, except with the navigators, Frank Herbert's dreams live and continue to evolve. The scope is awe inspiring and the story a small tale of what happens when religion and ambition take precedence in government and commerce.

Some books remain long after the last page is read and call to the reader to return and look a little deeper, find a little more. It is all there between the pages, waiting for a new perspective and new eyes fresh from the cauldron of time and experience. Dune is still one of my favorite books and doubtless always will be.

Beyond the stars into the minds of the gods

What subject you like to become more knowledgeable about, and why?

Astronomy.

The Greeks had a very intricate and complex mythology that I think we have mistaken for religion. It is religion in a sense, but it was so much more. The story of Zeus defeating his father with the Titans, the birth of his children, especially Athena who sprang from his head and Bacchus who was born from his thigh, sound less like religion than astronomy. It sounds like the birth of the universe and the various galaxies.

By learning more about astronomy I would be able to get a better idea of how Greek mythology fits into the cosmos and where the various galaxies, planets and stars that coincide with the events in mythology would likely be and maybe change the way we view, not only the Greeks, but all ancient mythologies. To see these advanced civilizations of the ancient world as somehow less than we are now with our technology is to ignore the proof of what they were and what they still have to teach us about the cosmos and about our own world and its place in the universe. They knew so much more than we do with our atom smashers and colliders and fiberoptic connections as has been amply shown in some of the devices that have come to light that we cannot equal or master.

Astronomy for me is the first step toward understanding so much more, a leap into the vastness of the universe and revision of all we think we know.

That is all. Disperse.

Unquiet and insistent history

This has been a strange weekend, but that happens sometimes. I watched all of the Friday the 13th, the series, I received (Netflix skipped over the last disc) and One Night with the King with Luke Goss and Tiffany Dupont (excellent movie) and had to download the theme song, which I've been singing since last night. This morning I woke up at the usually early plumber's crack of dawn, checked email and then dove into Secrets of the Dead: Amazon Warrior Women and was instantly intrigued. I even quit multi-tasking. It's a great archaeological find and one that everyone with an interest in history, science and archaeology should see.

I just don't get the myopic misanthropes that have populated the sciences for generations (can't say centuries because this seems to be peculiarly modern in nature). Historians and scientists look at the past from a lofty pinnacle without ever once considering that what they call mythology and fiction are nothing less than the truth. Didn't Heinrich Schliemann burst that bubble when he used Homer's Iliad to find Troy? Evidently, the scientific and historic communities don't read their memos.

What arrogance to think that man has reached the zenith of human development and achievement with their technological marvels without considering what was written millennia ago -- a lot of millennia ago. The Sumerians knew more about the makeup of our solar system over 7000 years ago than NASA and its predecessors have discovered in the past fifty years. Although no one has been able to identify who Homer actually was or whether he was a construct, his stories have been handed down intact for thousands of years and everything he wrote appears to be true. And now the stories about the Amazons (Homer wrote about an Amazon warrior in the Iliad) are proving to be true and there is DNA evidence to show that their descendants continue to live a nomadic life. Guess Herodotus told more than fairy tales and confabulated facts after all. What's next? Is it possible Plato got it right when he wrote about Atlantis and the scientists tagged the wrong place in choose Thera for Atlantis by scaling everything down? Arrogance, plain and simple!

Historians and scientists discount anything that seems like a fairy tale and call it mythology when it may well be historical fact handed down, the names changes to fit the dialects and countries where the stories were carried. There are griots, living genealogies, throughout Africa who carry the names and wars and places of generations of history in oral tradition, and they're not just names, but the deeds and lives that connect to modern people. Alex Haley found that out for himself when he went looking for the origins of Kunta Kinte's tales of bolongs, family and a gold hunt that made it possible for his mother to wear a cow on her head. We may well find that the stories we call mythology are not prehistoric men creating tales out of the world around them to tell around the campfire in the night, but based in fact.

Modern men may have reached a zenith, but not the zenith. Civilizations and risen and succumbed to the weight of their own arrogance and decadence over and over throughout the history of this planet and just because we cannot find proof of their existence, doesn't mean they didn't exist. It could well be we are looking in the wrong place or these people lived such green lives that their remains are shrouded in the very makeup of this world.

One thing that intrigues me most about the PBS special is that no one mentioned the Siberian Ice Maiden. Her clothing and grave goods point to a women of wealth and position. She had a high peaked hat and was buried with six horses. Her clothing and her soft leather boots are very similar to those worn by the Amazons found in kurgans throughout the steppes in Eurasia. The fierce warrior women written about by Homer and Herodotus and ascribed to myth by historians did exist and the DNA and their own bodies and grave goods prove they were much taller than the norm 2500 years ago. What else might we find if we open our eyes and take off the academic blinders to embrace mythology and legends as truth?

There are several cults of warrior women throughout history, women who defied tradition and took up arms and fought against and side by side with men. They are not myth nor are they some feminine longing for control over one's life and the freedom to be more than chattel and property. They were real and now they are fact.

As for me, I am off on another bug hunt. I feel stories deep down bubbling toward the surface. They are a bare glimmer, but it won't be long before they step fully armed and realized into the light not like Athena from Zeus who had swallowed her pregnant Titan mother in order to prevent her birth because it was prophesied that any child born of Metis, Athena's Titan mother, would be greater than her father Zeus.

Pride and Prejudice

And I don't mean the books by Jane Austen either. I'm talking about the pride and prejudice that skews historians' and scientists' views.

I used to get a lot of flak from the entrenched historians and scientists that refused to believe in the theory of diffusion as the reason behind why there are pyramids (for instance) all around the world; they stood four-square behind the theory of parallel development and consider stories about Mu or Atlantis or Egyptians and Phoenicians traveling the entire world and bringing cultures from one place to another and yet the more we uncover the more wrong historians and scientists turn out to be. For instance, Mystery Hill, the American Stonehenge, is rife with hieroglyphs that have been traced back to the sea-faring Phoenicians and there are Celtic symbols and petroglyphs in southeastern Colorado that predate the Spanish conquistadores. The most recent information coming to light proves that crops grown in South American 10,000 years ago are similar, and even the same species, as crops grown in Mesopotamia, which is considered the cradle of agrarian civilization. Now isn't that strange?

I never could understand how a might sea-faring nation like the Phoenicians would limit themselves to the Mediterranean when artifacts from their civilizations are found all over the world or how they could have missed the great land masses of the Americas and Antarctica, among others. It's impossible that mankind, being the curious and adventurous type, would stop traveling over the next hill because it was too far away.

Too often, scientists and historians take their modern prejudices and ideas and push them off onto earlier civilizations and call it understanding the primitive societies, societies that rivaled our own with technological marvels we still have not been able to duplicate or explain. One such example is the belief that Hatchepsut, the God King of Egypt, and a Pharaoh in her own right, was murdered by her stepson, Tuthmoses III, because he chafed her under her rule. Looks like the Egyptologists and historians were wrong again. Hatchepsut has been discovered and her mummy shows that she died of natural causes -- if you can call an abscessed tooth on top of diabetes natural. She was 50 years old and she was not murdered, as has been written. The fact that most Egyptologists, and those who fabricated the story of Tuthmoses III's assassination of his stepmother, wrote that Tuthmoses III wanted Hatchepsut dead because she was a woman who had no right to rule or control him says more about the Egyptologists' male chauvinism and their personal issues than it does about the truth of history. Scientists and historians continue to look down on the past with a jaundiced eye and have missed seeing the truth beauty and grandeur of a world not caught up in the need to denigrate and belittle powerful women or the mythologies that have become little more than a way to prove ancient civilizations were simple and unsophisticated.

It looks as though mythology has more to offer than quaint and simple stories about gods and goddesses and their involvement with mortals and more about how the Universe was created. Mythology is religion, but only on the surface; religion was a way devised to keep the information intact for future generations. What mythology is really about astronomy and the beginnings of the Universe. I can't understand how all those scientists and historians missed what was right in front of them -- like diffusion and globe sailing Phoenicians and the Creation of All. Guess pride and prejudice blinded them and got in their way.

That is all. Disperse.

A little Saturday night ramble

I'm way ahead of schedule on NaNoWriMo and have finished the books I planned to review this week so my mind has been flitting around like a butterfly and keeps landing on the same subject: vampires. I know. It's pretty much a given that vampires are in now and will be out later and will come around and be popular again in a year or two -- or do they ever really go out of style? I blame my ruminations on Ray Bradbury and reading his short stories (I got a new book: One More For the Road), which always send my mind following thoughts of all kinds, and we're back to vampires again.

Part of this is also due to the new prime time vampire show, Moonlight. The two stars aren't even American, but they do great American accents (Sophia Myles is British and Alex O'Loughlin is Australian) and they are very nice to watch. Sophia isn't a stick insect and Alex is delectable.

The show also has *gasp* an American playing Josef Kostantin who is a very young (25) vampire over 400 years old who is the dark force in the show, except that he does have morals and rules and is very adamant about keeping a low profile -- or as low a profile as a multi-billionaire vampire who loves fast cars and beautiful women can have. He is also Mick St. John's friend and employer on occasion (Alex O'Loughlin). There is also the lovely and bloody-minded Coraline (Mick's ex-wife who was killed in a fire -- Alex killed her for kidnapping and trying to turn Beth (Sophia Myles) when she was a child) who is a dyed-in-the-wool evil vamp, in all senses of the word. The actress playing Coraline is also American, and until last night was seen only in flashback. Okay, back to the subject that has been on my mind -- vampires.

It occurred to me when Josef asked Mick when he was going to stop hating himself and wanting to be human again that there is definitely something wrong in the ocean city (LA) and everywhere you look where there are vampires. They are either demons with souls who dream of being human after a centuries-long run and hate who they are or romantic demons doomed without the love of a human woman to rescue them from hell and despair. What's up with that? There's also the whole afraid of crucifixes but not other religious symbols, but that's a whole other subject for another time. Considering humans are writing about vampires, I guess there is no other way to see them except as fiends, demons and evil with a hidden potential for good as long as they loathe who and what they are.

I get the whole killing and feeding on humans angle and how that can be disturbing, but in a very real sense isn't that what humans do to animals? Okay, most humans are not comfortable with the idea of being nothing more than an animal to feed another species, but I'm sure elands and zebras don't particularly care for being chased, killed and eaten by lions and hyenas and jackals either. It's all a matter of perspective (where have I heard that phrase before...?).

Despite seeing vampires as more of a religious construct designed to bring people fleeing back to church (in the Xian sense) to save them from damnation, and the idea that a soul can be lost, sold or bartered, vampires are just another species, another step on the food chain, predators who prey on humans to keep the population down -- and to give lonely women a visceral thrill. Vampires are a symbol of wish fulfillment, a chance to live beyond the short years granted us by nature (and degradation of the genetic code) and be more in the world than we as human with our blunted senses can be. Vampires are beyond the usual constraints of work, responsibility, duty and the humdrum everyday life. They are rebels that don't have to apologize for being different, except if a vampire longs to be human again, taste a steak and eat French fries, and get off a perpetual liquid diet (that alone is enough to make a vampire want to be human -- or at least bite something someone), to sink their teeth into something solid that just happens to be a human. Of course, rats, puppies and kittens are also on the menu when times are tough or food is scarce.

Vampires are another evolutionary step in Nature's whimsical --and possibly darker -- plan. After all, Nature created the platypus. Like so much of history that historians and archaeologists and scientists will remake in their own image, vampires are cursed, not with the loss of a soul or providing housing for a demon, but with humanity's idea of them as fiends and romantic figures that but for the want of love and a soul would be better, would be human. And yet we long for their powers to see more clearly, feel more deeply, experience the world more fully and be above and outside human laws, to be able to ignore Death's touch (unless there's a stake, fire or loss of head involved) and to remain ever young drinking from Countess Bathory's bloody Fountain of Youth while sneering at Time. It's no wonder we paint vampires in such clashing colors since we cannot reconcile our own feelings of love and hate.

Are vampires Nature's agents preying on humans to keep our numbers in check? Are we any better than the government being paid to decimate and eradicate the only check on over population, like the planned hunt of gray wolves in the northern Rockies? Do we need, and would we accept, vampires as another species instead of cursed agents of evil? Or do we need to see ourselves in a more honest and realistic light?

Serendipity

I am constantly amazed about how a chance comment or meeting can result in finding something you've looked for or just a new friendship.

As part of my Monday morning ritual, I read the posts about alternatives religions on About.com and today there was a link to an article about the Kabbalistic symbology in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The rabbi writing the article pointed to the last part of Indy's journey when he must pass three tests to get to the cup of Christ (holy grail) to save his father's life. The rabbi had it almost right, but he mixed up the first trial with scenes from the first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy has to race for his life as darts/arrows fly out of the walls. I emailed the rabbi and explained the first trial in Last Crusade was flashing blades that Indy avoided when he knelt. The rabbi immediately emailed back and we began discussing Joseph Campbell's treatise on the Hero's Journey and how Indiana Jones, and indeed Star Wars, is based on that concept.

That discussion led to Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey and then The Tree of Life in Kabbalistic tradition to Tree of Life in Native American culture to Yggdrasil (the World Tree) of Norse mythology to something I have researched for years -- the serpent as a messenger/go-between man and deity, which is also symbolized in Norse mythology as the Midgard Serpent. That's when he told me about a little known Midrash, or commentary on the Tankh/Torah where the serpent is a messenger from Yahweh to Adam and Eve who urges them to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that they might leave Eden and "begin the spirit quest that would become humankind." I find that interpretation of what Xians call "Original Sin" more in line with what I've learned from studying other mythologies and religions. Even the Mormons (LDS) believe that Adam and Eve had to disobey in order to become the progenitors of mankind. I may just be closer to writing that book after all. I've been stumped by the Xian interpretation for years and couldn't reconcile that with the premise that all beliefs/religions use the serpent as a symbol of wisdom and a conduit/messenger between man and deity. But I digress...

At any rate, I would not have had the chance to exchange ideas with the rabbi or get another piece to a puzzle I've been working for years had it not been for that one mistake in his article. I'm glad I'm a curious person. They say curiosity killed the cat, but they always forget that satisfaction brought it back. No wonder a cat has nine lives, especially if the cat is as curious about everything as I. Then again, I'd need more than nine lives, maybe that's what reincarnation is all about. Ya think?

That is all. Disperse.