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| I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought |
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Here's the text of our first guest hosting of the Insane Signals podcast:The two very oldest books of horror are likely far more ancient than you might guess, and they offer a way to appreciate all horror films from a new perspective. These two books are haunted by terrifying slasher entities armed with blades, who cut throats and sever heads, live among snakes, and feast and dance in blood. There are also monsters who devour hearts, corpses, and souls. Let's not forget the executioner whose noose drags people along as their intestines are extracted, their brains are licked, and their bones are gnawed ... all before they are hacked repeatedly.Just how old are these books of terror with sinister casts of demonic monstrosities? Did you guess thousands of years BC? Yes, the books in question are the books of the dead from Egypt and Tibet. They offer hallucinatory reads, but can it be true that they color all horror in their wake? Well, they present the afterlife in all its gory details, but they also invite us to understand life, too, as a similarly fantastical journey. The Tibetan version most clearly states that the forbidding adventure through the hereafter is in fact no different than other illusory states of consciousness such as dreaming and waking. Indeed, all states of existence are seen by Buddhism as in-between or Bardo-states. We close our eyes and dream little movies, we open our eyes and seem to live different movies, we die and experience another movie on the way to either reincarnating or transcending to an unknown realm.So if within the movie of our life we're watching a film on the silver screen, we might try to interpret the characters from the get-go as having recently deceased, their stories inviting us to travel with them through the hellish afterworld as they battle the fears and demons engendered by their past sins or bad decisions. Applying such a perspective, we can re-interpret favorite films to discover additional significances. Let's take three quick examples, starting with The Lost Boys, of 1987. A mom and her two sons make a move after a divorce, presumably dying in a car accident. They find themselves arriving at the otherworldly, otherwise non-existent city of Santa Carla to reunite with an aged grandpa who specializes in grotesque taxidermy. He greets them by playing dead, as if rather broadly hinting that his family has moved to a necropolis. Santa Carla is a realm of illusions. Within the underground lair of the vampires, maggots are sometimes takeout rice, worms shift into noodles, and wine is also blood. The boardwalk's merry-go-round rotates like the Buddhist wheel of attachment, ignorance, anger, and desire. But, filtered through the books of the dead, the message is uplifting, as predeceased loved ones can help us to overcome the shadows that precede us. Now also consider The Cabin in the Woods, from 2011. The two surviving protagonists finally come to terms with the end of the world, deciding that humanity doesn't deserve endless cycles of ritual murder. Seen from the angle of the books of the dead, the protagonists lost their lives before the film even started, so their final realization isn't actually about the imminent end of world since their world had already ended with their own deaths. Instead, we can view their final realization as consciousness of their own demise and having finally let go of the negative beliefs that sought to keep them attached to lost illusions. Only by the very end of the film have the characters integrated their own darkness and found themselves ready to begin afresh with no old baggage. Instead of a brutally dark, apocalyptic nightmare, the film becomes a documentary of sorts about damned souls extricating themselves from the existential circle of suffering.Finally, Dario Argento's Suspiria of 1977 can be newly understood as one freshly dead ballet dancer's escape from a netherworld of maggots, covens of human-sacrificing witches, throat-ripping dogs, electrical storms, and ambuscades of razor-wire and glass shards. Considering her as being dead from moment one, even the film's opening with her uncanny exit from the airport begins to make a new sort of sense. Everyone she encounters is an unsettling resident of the Bardo, either a fellow wandering spirit or a karmic hellion. Only by consuming the entire ballet school in flames can the protagonist transcend that Bardo. It's as if she had recited the Egyptian Book of the Dead's spell for being transformed into a living soul and not entering into the place of execution. I'll recite that spell at the end of this piece, in case you could use it.Argento's films, like those of David Lynch, are commonly described as dreams. Ingmar Bergman, director of the psychological horror film Hour of the Wolf, even proclaimed that "All my films are dreams." If the ancient wisdom of the books of the dead is correct, all of life is in fact a sort of hallucination, just as all of death is. Waking life is no realer than the world of the dreamtime or of dying. The great researcher of all things weird, Charles Fort, believed in a ghost world, only he decided that waking existence is wholly peopled by phantoms. The also-great science fictionalist Philp K. Dick came to a similar conclusion in his Exegesis, that we are the dead but don't know it, cyclically living in a simulated, purgatorial world until we manage to enact enough good decisions to trigger off an intervention from a divinity or our own higher selves. Dick wrote, "We have for a long time been dying brains/souls slipping lower and lower through the realms, but the punishment of reliving this bottom-realm life is also an opportunity to add new good karma and break the vicious cycle of otherwise endless reliving of a portion of our former life. ... We must change the 'groove' for the better or just keep coming back, not remembering, not re-ascending."For those with faith in ancient Egyptian magic, here's the spell for never perishing as translated by Raymond Faulkner:"I am the soul of Ra who issued from the Abyss, that soul of the god who created authority. Wrong-doing is my detestation, and I will not see it; I think about righteousness, and I live by it; I am Authority which will never perish in this my name of 'Soul.' I came into being of myself with the Primordial Water in this my name of Khepri, and I come into being in it daily. I am the Lord of Light; death is my detestation, and I will not enter into the place of execution of the Netherworld. It is I who cause Osiris to be a spirit, and I have made content those who are in his suite... I am Nun, and the doers of wrong cannot harm me. I am the eldest of the primeval gods, the soul of souls of the eternal gods; my body is everlasting, my shape is eternity, Lord of Years, Ruler of Everlasting. I am he who created darkness and who made his seat in the limits of the sky. I desire to reach their limits, and I walk afoot; I go ahead with my staff; I cross the firmament. I drive away the hidden snakes which are upon my march to the Lord of the Two Regions. I am the soul of the souls of the eternal gods; my body is everlasting. I am he who is on high, Lord of Tatjebu; I am young in my city, I am boyish in the field, and such is my name, for my name will not perish. I am the soul who created the Abyss, who made his seat in the realm of the dead. My nest will not be seen, my egg will not be broken; I have got rid of my ills; I have seen my father, the Lord of the Evening, and whose body it is which is in Heliopolis; I govern those who are in the dusk upon the western Mound of the Ibis."What more is there to say? I am Prof. Oddfellow, whose name will not perish. Check out my "Priceless Spectacles" column in the free House of Scream magazine at HouseofScream.com. And see me in glorious monochrome in the long-running series Prof. Oddfellow's Penetralia and Grave Mood Rings, on Roku, Youtube, MysteryArts.com, and in the House of Scream Studios horror specials.
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