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This is a Native American Myth common to the more Northern parts of Canada, in which a person might become possessed by a demon - The Wendigo - which was a cannibal spirit and would force one to eat ones neighbors/husband/children...
Given the nature of the long, cold and isolated Canadian Winters, it's easy to see how it arose - and for the tribes and cultures that believed in it, it was a very real thing. A great many stories and trials concerning The Wendigo appear in the early papers, news accounts and trials of Canada.
One particular version concerns the Inuit, or Eskimo, and it warned that if you met a friend while out hunting on the ice, be careful, they might be a Wendigo...
Now, dramatically, imagine: You're a hunter, working a trapline, or looking for Seals, in the long cold Northern Winter. Perpetual evening, the sun never breaking over the horizon, the brightest it gets, a late evenings twilight. The Northern Lights, the icepack, unending in all directions. Days, Weeks on the ice, filling your sled. Isolation.
And you run into a friend, and you're glad of the company, who wouldn't be after all this time here, alone, and you talk about the hunting, the fishing, and maybe you can start a fire, and sit and talk, and he's looking at you and you're a little uncertain, maybe his hunting wasn't as successful as he said, as successful as yours, and maybe, after all, he's not the same person you knew back in the camp or village...
It's got a certain resonance and appeal...the classic cautionary tale...
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Now, topics of the Supernatural that are of interest, and I wrote the headline before I gave it any thought, and because there are a lot of related things of interest I'll be brief...
Starting with Zombies, no explaining their popularity, or there is, it's Everyman's call to the Hero's journey, the realization of the mindless disorder of society that puts him at odds with it and allows him the liberty of war. That death here is more horrific than a natural death is because there's the realization that one could become one of them, the contagion of bad or diseased thought, another mindless shopper, consumer, citizen, and the death, the reanimation of the corpse, implies a loss of spirituality - that one has fallen into a deep and dire well of materialism. There is, surprisingly, a lot in common with this contemporary myth and virtually every major religion on earth, but those are thoughts I'll let you examine for yourself...
Vampires, the Undead come back to suck the blood of the living, are a curious thing as well, popular again across all cultures and times, and to explain the myth (I'll let go the reality for the moment) - I'd start with they are the memories of the deceased, come to haunt the living. Ghosts, a similar idea, are more fleeting, harmless; Vampires are by their nature malevolent and bent on corporeal harm. Vampires might be memories of the deceased that interfere with the survivors continuing on in the world, memories of violence or abuse, or a particularly gruesome disease or death, and the ceremonies designed to prevent the reanimation of the Vampires corpse, generally involving violence, might be a way to visit upon the corpse some portion of the abuse or violence they, in life, inflicted on the living. Consider Vlad the Impaler. The reality of Vampires - prematurely buried victims of disease or illness, that might through their rising infect others, might more pragmatically explain the pains taken to lay the Vampire more permanently to rest.
And finally there are Werewolves, or any of a number of their night-crawling and shape-shifting kin, on the surface, clearly rabies, underneath however a warning to beware the savagery of otherwise normal people in the evening. People who appear, by day, to be one thing, then by the evening turn into something completely different. The personification of Mans more bestial nature.
Now these are just a few fleeting thoughts to get you started, but the prevalence of the myths across cultures suggests that they carry a value or meaning, you might interpret them differently...
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Now this is an idea that intrigues me.
Geology, we think of it as "static", the earth is the earth and that's it, rocks, minerals, gems, they're all there, we (almost) know everything, it's just a matter of finding it.
But, imagine, after the Anthropocene, the post-holocene, how in hundreds of millions of years the geology will changed. We've combined minerals and elements in thousands of new and unexpected ways, and as the continents subduct and boil beneath the oceans those combinations will give rise to hundreds, if not thousands of new and unimagined minerals. Skyscrapers of concrete and steel and filled with glass will form pegmatites lined with giant shards of quartz, included with golden and silver phantoms and rutile needles, percolating toxic hydrocarbons and fluids melted from landfills will fill them with new minerals and gems, to be recognized, excavated and mined by creatures as far from our thinking as ours is from the dinosaurs.
Which kind of excites me, as an exercise of the imagination, but for the moment I'll have to content myself with finding those gems already here, which is proving troublesome enough. Only 4 or 5 months until Summer...
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There is this recurring image, or motif, of the God and the Devil sitting down on friendly terms to bargain for souls.
Think "Spanish Train" by Chris de Burgh. Another, more popular version, is that of God and the Devil playing Chess, the stakes are the same.
Now this is a curious idea, as it somehow diminishes both the influence and omnipotence of God. Nowhere in the Christian tradition is this allowed. Other, more pagan traditions or religions offer a more balanced view of Good and Evil.
"That power I serve that wills forever evil and does forever good", by Mikhail Bulgakov, seems more in line with Christianity, the Devil is a necessary foil for God, indulged by him even, tolerated, one can imagine God sitting down to play Chess with him and gently tolerating his cheating in the understanding that he was maintaining the illusion of equals, whereas in fact by very definition he's superior.
...just some curious ideas wrapped up in that motif...
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Mine own view is that nothing happens until there's a revolution, seriously, and there must be blood. This is unpopular, and I doubt that it would change things.
A more reasonable proposition can be found here:
Link: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-to-get-rid-of-the-super-rich/
It's nice to think that other people have recognized and are thinking about the problem.




















