Vampires, Wizards and a Ghost!
Contents:
A person can be really good at playing the clarinet and really bad at cooking. Someone can be incredibly astute with grafting different breeds of apple trees, and have no interpersonal skills at all. A brilliant scientist might have the morals of a rabid rat. In the world of Integral Philosophy this is referred to as lines of development. You can be high in one line, medium in another and low in yet another. We're all developed to different degrees in different areas of life.
Which is perfectly natural. A person who considers themselves at the highest level in every line is either a bodhisattva, or severely deluded about themselves, a la Dwight Schrute. The latter is far more likely. I'm an arts guy. I pay attention to what's happening in the world of culture and entertainment, and what these trends reveal about us. I certainly don't feel qualified to put any sort of pin on the map of where we stand, as a culture, politically. But if we're generally at a Post-postmodern level on any of those lines on any kind of widespread basis, I'd be surprised.
If someone were to speculate that we are, I'd be very interested in reading their argument. So if we are tip-toeing toward a Post-postmodern level of understanding in the appreciation of arts and entertainment, this could signify a first poke in that direction for us altogether. And since art does well up from some deep, mysterious spring, that could be the manifestation of something bigger we could all become, nudging us forward, as art has sought to do many times in the past, opening doors, letting light fall where it never has, encouraging us to see things in a way we never have before.
And you know what? All of this love and acceptance of fantastical fiction could just be a trend that'll disappear in a few years the way gross-out comedies did. I offer this theory with no certitude at all. This is just a possibility that occurred to me when I thought about how many of my friends are nuts about True Blood and Game of Thrones but aren't into that kind of thing otherwise. Same with Harry Potter. And The Walking Dead.
And superheroes they're part of this pattern too. Mainstream bookstores sell graphic novels.
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They didn't twenty years ago. Comic book movies are bigger than ever now too. Batman and Iron Man are the two biggest box office draws - both heroes bound by the laws of physics, with no powers but their fists, feet, and the gadgets they've invented through their prowess with science and industry. And Spiderman got his powers from a genetically engineered spider.
But the science that transferred the spider's abilities to Peter Parker's body is bogus, and may as well be magic. Same with Tony Stark's arc-reactor. And Iron Man is a principal character in The Avengers , whose villain is Loki - the Norse god of mischief, who can teleport at will and withstand a beating from The Hulk with only a few minor scrapes and bruises. One of the Avengers is his brother Thor, god of thunder.
And as of this writing, the film's bounded to number three on the highest grossib movies ever list. And it's popular with pimply teenagers, office workers, artists, the night club crowd, and its cast and other creative personnel boast an astounding twelve Oscar winners and nominees. And no one's leaving the theatre believing they'll stumble upon a magic hammer or invent a self-generating mini reactor that'll power a bad-ass iron fighting suit. It's just a great way to have fun for a while.
Werewolves, WIzards, Vampires, ETC
It's a little bit of magic spice to liven up the curry of our lives. Edited by Chris Dierkes. There are some core nuggets in here that I'd like to riff on with you. Here's the first, "But the Magic Stage is harmless and totally enlivening when taken in moderate doses. The return of myth and magic, explicitly at least, in our culture is a good sign that these forms of world-relating are being healthily re-integrated. We aren't abandoning science. Actually, if anything, I believe we are seeing the parallels between science and magic.
Consider the scene in Thor when Thor himself suggests that science and magic are not discordant. Magic is merely science we do not understand yet — paralleling Arthur C. Clarke's statement that "any sufficiently advanced technology appears as magic. Then there's the idea, al a Gebser and others, that the magic structure of consciousness is parallel in many ways to the rational structure not the mental , in the emphasis on using spells, or some form of mastery over principles of nature, to affect a change in the physical environment.
Gebser uses this description negatively, saying that in the deficient, Rational era, we are mirroring the deficient stage of the Magic era: This is not a far fly from how Tolkien imagined Mordor and the destruction of the forests. The other stages are not to be despised, says the person expressing Post-postmodern consciousness, they're to be valued for what they have to offer. But I haven't studied up on it.
I agree that the magic stage offers "fun. The forces behind life are not dead or mechanistic. They are living intelligences of their own. Magic brings us back to that. A necessarily deficient part of the Rational structure of consciousness is that it dis-enchants the world. It breaks down the world into its constituent parts and fragments, or raises its own mechanisms up.
It dispels as I mentioned in the article , which is a form of magic itself, in that it generates a world that is non-magical. This has some devastating effects on the human psyche, I believe, and may result in forms of alienation and dread towards the adult world of work and machination we are mere cogs in the machine. Magic throws a wrench in such a machine. It's compelling that some of the most influential films are magical.
These monsters have haunted our dreams and imaginations for centuries! Where does it come from? Inappropriate The list including its title or description facilitates illegal activity, or contains hate speech or ad hominem attacks on a fellow Goodreads member or author. Stevens Goodreads Author 3. Each has valuable stuff to offer.
Steven Speilberg has a long history with that. His movies took the audience, as well as the protagonist, outside of the mundane world by a sudden visitation, or compulsion, into the Magical or Imaginal Realm, breaking forth into the suburban life. Whether done via Scifi Like E. I think this is more of why magic is "fun.
It brings meaning and imagination back into our de-sacralized cosmology. Hermes is part of this old myth in Egypt where he was thought to have created a magical city, guarded by animated statues that allowed no evil-doers to enter, and magical spells that prevented the city-dwellers from doing any harm to each other. Magic can reverse the flow of rivers. It can bring a new order into the world. In many ways, the unconscious of scientific and rational culture is a form of magic.
The parallels are striking! Great article, once again! I think you really covered a lot here. Looking forward to the subsequent discussion! A point I briefly make in the article is that the science presented in comic books is basically magic. And to the fan, these unscientific explanations are enough. And Iron Man is no less of a hero than Thor.
Batman is widely considered the greatest hero of all. If you want your computer repaired, call the Geek Squad. And these interests coexist quite peacefully. The disparity is rarely, if ever, brought up. With our modernist foundation, we thirst for the magical animation that some part of us knows is there, but which has been denied and repressed. There are still movies like this - the Bourne trilogy, the recent Bond films - which are excellent, and popular - but they co-exist with Thor, Spiderman, Iron Man, the Matrix. And this disparity is rarely, if ever, noticed. I totally disagree this has nothing to do with our acceptance and being developed along some psuedo-frazierian cultural stage - this is has to do with the real lived life of individuals and how they see themselves in society and in the world - it is a projects of the fears of the unconscious that somehow although technology seems wonderful, powerful, even inevitable that it is still somehow dehumanizing us, separating us from one another and this is one of our basic needs that is being unmet - also the rising social and economic inequality in society and between societies tears away at the social contract and social bonds that ties us all together and when these ties are neglected or ignored as the rich and powerful seem to be doing in our own times - it calls into question all the rules and manners that ask us to discipline and repress the more animalistic needs we once had for the good of society and ourselves.
Scott, just wanted to say that I resonated with your comment here and wanted to let you know that I wrote a post you might be interested in, seems to cover some of the same territory you're pointing to. It was written during the same theme week that TJ wrote this one: He's on hiatus at the moment touring a new play Postsecret in the US, and also, we're still waiting for the Joomla people to update the email notification software for the 2. So I wanted to check in and let you know that, and say thanks for adding your voice here at the site.
And like I said, you might resonate with the article I linked to. Scott, there are many possible symbolic meanings in zombie and vampire stories - here's one another reader suggested: But my focus in this article isn't so much on what these figures mean, as much as the delivery method.
This assertion itself is up for dispute Why? The anxieties of the population in the 70s, 80s and 90s didn't find themselves transformed into this seemingly retrogressive stuff. And there are more lauded participants in these genres than ever before. Could be a trend, as I mention.
Vampires, Wizards and a Ghost! - Kindle edition by Leloni Tabbyra. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like. the classic monsters such as witches, vampires, ghosts, and goblins. Wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers also share similar origins to witches.
Might disappear, and in the next decade or two we'll see something else. Could be here to stay. But it'll take a much longer view from the future to say with any exactitude why this happened now, and what it means. Which is why I put forward the theory of this article so gingerly. Any further thoughts and interpretations are welcome. And by way - who is Frazier? TJ, I'm not so sure about relegating the Magical Stage to immaturity alone. I understand the childhood fantasy bit, but what about actual paranormal powers if indeed they exist.
Might the Magical also manifest in a line of development? If one's mind created an experience of talking to Apollo in a magic ritual, why is a creation of our mind "not real". And, maybe "the Universe", "God", whatever used our imagination to communicate with us? I've not come to any conclusions on the matter myself, maybe it is all wishful thinking. But, the existence of the world at all seems impossible, and a lot crazier than Daimons. However, technology is bad enough as it is. Can you imagine a Red level person with a real Wizards wand? I share your enjoyment of comics etc..
Don - great points. Rupert Sheldrake has been doing scientific research on telepathy for years, something I wrote a brief bit about elsewhere: A great deal of what we consider science today would have seemed sorcery or superstition to people a few hundred years ago. That statement will certainly be made again a few hundred years from now if we don't self-destruct. And there will be other elements that will remain manifestations of the imagination, and nothing more.
But they still have value. The imagination is a wonderfully enlivening thing. And I've been performing a one man show about my experiences doing ayahuasca, and if I've ever had a magical experience, that would be it. There is hard scientific research being done on it, and perhaps they'll be able to explain its various effects, but maybe not.
On the retreat in which I did it, I chose to go along with the shamans' explanation that the plant has a spiritual consciousness, which is aware of you, and chooses to give you a specific experience based on what you need, right now. And each person has a different experience every time they do it. Is there anything to that? But the transformative effects of that ceremony are still playing out in my life, so it would be foolish of me to dismiss those shamans' beliefs as childishness.
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Written by Chris Dierkes. A review of Integral Relationships: The Haitians kept slaves and treated them with extreme brutality. Slaves would consider death a blissful end to being subjugated and often commit suicide. People believed any slave who took his or her own life would be condemned to walk the slave plantations forever, trapped in the physical body.
The current pop-culture representation of a brain-eating mindless rotting corpse is quite a different version. Witches are one of the oldest source of terror that keeps us up at night. In modern culture, they are often portrayed as old hags that fly on a broomstick, cast powerful spells, and sometimes worship the devil. Wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers also share similar origins to witches.
Wicca and magic ties the origin stories of all these monsters. As traditional tales of terror took on a more futuristic approach in science fiction, a new monster was born, the sinister evil robot that wants to kill its creators.
You might be thinking of HAL from A Space Odyssey, or perhaps Skynet. Killer robots go back further than that; the most famous example is that of Talos, a metal automaton that protected the ancient Greek island of Crete. The modern version of killer robots hell-bent on destroying humans, first appeared in a play by Karel Capek called R.
The Origins Of 10 Scariest Halloween Monsters: Zombies, Ghosts And Vampires, Oh My!
These robots were not strictly machines, but humanoids that end up exterminating the human race! The idea of otherworldly beings visiting us has been a central plot point of ancient myths and modern tales. A lot of people believe aliens exist and visit this planet often. The iconic image of the short humanoid grey-green alien depicted in popular culture can be traced back to a fake alien autopsy video released after the Roswell incident. Science fiction authors such as H. G Wells and Asimov have long written about benevolent and sinister alien beings, a concept that remains mind-bogglingly fascinating to us.
Before they were tamed and turned into sparkly angst-ridden teenage versions by the Twilight series, vampires were gruesome terrifying beings that haunted the dark recesses of our minds. The origin of the myths of these undead immortal creatures is most likely the cases of premature burials. The modern version of this monster is a charming and powerful being with enormous physical powers. The idea of a human-wolf hybrid goes back to ancient Germanic times. The people adhered to pagan beliefs that considered gifted warriors as wolves of the gods.
These wolf-men stories morphed over time into the modern versions of a man that turns into a rabid wolf during the full moon. There is something unfathomable about a face hiding behind that mask of makeup. Originally, clowns were meant to be similar to court jesters, lovable fools that merely entertained. However, recent pop culture has turned them into something quite disturbing.
The first creepy murderous clown appeared in the Italian soap opera, Pagliacci. The recent clown sightings have maxed out the creepiness level of clowns. As if having John Wayne Gacy in the history books was not enough, better keep an eye out for creepy clowns while trick or treating this year. The Grim Reaper is the so-called bringer of death, a being that haunts the physical plane looking for souls to collect and delivers them to the metaphysical realms. The modern image of the Grim Reaper you see in books and movies is a skeleton swathed in a black robe, holding a scythe.
This tool is used to reap the souls that are destined to die. This imagery holds a close association with the state of Europe during the black plague. The black garb of the Grim Reaper represents the plague; the scythe is used to strike down multiple people in one blow, as the plague was wont to do.