The Fool is the King's Intelligence.

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The so called  'House of Skulls' or 'House of the Dead' at the Neolithic settlement of Çayönü (present-day Turkey).

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"When I quit The Dark Crystal it was because I’d fallen in love with Jim’s handwritten notes on what his sequel idea was. All I wanted to do, for the fans and for myself, was shoot his version of the film. But nobody gave a shit about what Jim Henson wanted."

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This blog fully supports the use of Noscript to defend your rights.

One who was dear to me:

Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the ball,
And out then came the fair Janet,
The flower among them all.

 
Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the chess,
And out then came the fair Janet,
As green as any glass.

- From the Ballad of Tam Lin 

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            In Gaelic tradition the Glaistig was a satyric ethereal female being.  Satyric in the sense that she was goat from the waist down and thus can be seen as a sort of female counterpart to the Greek satyrs and other similar beings.  Like her counterparts in the Mediterranean she could also be mischievous, malicious and capricious.  She sometimes preyed succubus/vampire-like on unsuspecting men or played tricks on passersby.  Alternatively she could be generous and carry out unselfish acts such as tending to and taking care of the young.  She was often depicted with a flowing green robe, or green in general.  She was sometimes considered ‘The Green Lady,’ a sort of counterpart to the ‘Green Man’ of folklore.  Her Faery-like nature is also tied in with her having green attributes.

 

The Mt. Tambora caldera.  Mt Tambora is an active Stratovolcano, which had a massive eruption in 1815, which led to the so called 'year without summer' in 1815 in Europe and North America. 

"The fly, my dear sir, has one striking feature: its wings are typical of the aerial powers of the psychic faculties.  The ancients did well when they typified the soul as a butterfly." 

- Renfield in Bram Stoker's Dracula Chapt. XX


Renfield:

          "He used to send in the flies when the sun was shining.  Great big fat ones with steel and sapphire on their wings; and big moths, in the night, with skull and cross-bones on their backs.'  Van Helsing nodded to him as he whispered to me unconsciously: -
        'The Acherontia atropos of the Sphinges - what you call the "Death's-head moth!""

- Dracula Chapt. XXI

Lost

Greek mythology abounds in the perennial wisdom found among the Native Americans which had been forgotten by the Western World on the rampage of an expanding capitalistic model.

That you can't eat money was not just the wisdom of the Native Americans but so it was also in Ancient Greek tradition.

King Midas turned all he touched into gold so that he could no longer eat food since as soon as he touched it, it was turned to gold.

Mithridates VI king of Pontus fed a Roman governor molten gold poured down his throat, a symbolic punishment for the governor's greed. I have heard a similar story of indigenous people in South America having done the same to a Spanish colonial governor, but have yet to confirm it.

The Roman millionaire Crassus, who without authorization greedily invaded the Middle East for it's riches was captured by the Parthians and kept in a golden cage whereby he subsequently starved to death surrounded by gold as he had always wanted to be surrounded by gold.

Contrary to the right wing mythology that the Ancient Greeks worshipped greed, (poorly adopted from Nietzsche who had been writing in an asylum for invalids on the supreme value of strength) it was the opposite.  To the Ancient Greeks greed was hubris.  A person's life wasn't to glorify themselves with riches, but to worship the gods and to make sacrifice for them.  Time and again this appears in the mythology from the Lydian ruler Croesus now a word in English for greed, to the wealthy Midas who ruled near the same gold rich region.

The progression of metals and the society they wrought to Hesiod was equated with the degradation of human existence, society and the earth.  Contrary to the modern idea that the acquisition of metals used for utilitarian purposes is a hallmark of development that marks the Old World from the new the ancients felt that the acquisition of metals merely increased human suffering and their estrangement from nature.

To the Ancient Greek historians like Herodotus to the Islamic historian Ibn Khalidun history was cyclical.  Decadence made one weak and it was this weakness caused by decadence which lead to the downfall of the powered elite and the reinvigoration by the poor, but hardy folk of the Earth.

Of course there was a difference between the thinking of the Classical Greeks and the Homeric Greeks to the Classical Greeks the Homeric Greeks led to the Dark Ages in later thinking and their heroes were often portrayed as flawed greedy individuals who kept power among themselves and whose hubris led to their downfall.  There are at least three elements in this change of attitudes among many of the classical Greeks.  First there was the collapse of Mycenaean civilization of the Hellenic mainland, which ushered in the period referred to as 'The Greek Dark Ages.'  Second there is an axial/Democratic development, but there is another strata one finds increasingly present, the Ancient wisdom of the Aegean and it's worship of Gaia prior to the Goddesses' subjugation, and to the abduction of her daughter and subsequent worship of Plutus that our society still worships today.

 

Sidjoara Mud Volcano, Indonesia 

Darvaza Gas Crater aka 'The Door to Hell'

It is said that Native Americans considered the stones of the earth to be the spine of the earth, which held it together and that extracting rocks from the earth was the equivalent to removing the earth's spine.  It is also said that the use of mining and cultivation by the Europeans was regarded in horror by the indigenous as they saw it as the defilement of the Sacred Mother Earth.  As is often the case such ideas have a perennial appeal. This wisdom too was understood by the Ancient Greeks. As is so often the case these ideas were however forgotten in the occident, which came to valued monetization above all else, a far cry from an antiquity which equated excessive accumulation of wealth with greed, hubris, and folly.

In Ancient Greek tradition Deucalion was the son of the creator of humanity Prometheus 'forethought.'  Deucalion's wife Pyrrha was the daughter of Prometheus' brother Epimethius 'after thought,'  and she was the daughter of Pandora who had been fashioned by Prometheus.

Paralleling the story of Noah, the sky god upset with humanity and it's baseness inundated the world with a great flood of water.  The only ones judged worthy of survival due to their observance of the divine, lack of hubris and innocence, were the consorts Deucalion and Pyrrha.  The worthy couple were saved by floating on the waters in a boat.  They then consulted an Oracle as to what they should do afterward.  The Oracle instructed them to cast over their shoulder a bone of their "Great Mother."  They would discover that their "Great Mother" referred to by the Oracle was the Earth and her bones were the stones scattered over the surface of the Earth.  Obediently following the will of their Goddess the couple cast the stones behind their shoulders.  Those cast by Deucalion turned into the men, and those by Pyrrha into women.

When the Musics Over.

 

The Death's Head Hawk Moth

Associated with death due to skull like appearances on it's thorax and it's strange ability to let out a shrieking sound, while creating visual signals designed to inspire fear, it was held in terror by the superstitious.  The death's head hawk moth inspired a work of art by Salvador Dali, which would appear in a famous cinematic cover art.  It's bee-like colours are no accident.  The moth sometimes utilizes this characteristic to raid bee hives, or to covertly infiltrate them in order to steal honey.  John Keats included the Death's Head Hawk Moth in his Ode on Melancholy, as a sort of morbid inverse to the Psyche of the Ancient Greeks.  To the Ancient Greeks the Psyche 'soul or mind' was equated with a butterfly, which was released from a person's body when one died.  Suitably it sometimes lays it's eggs on Solanaceous plants.  Linnaean classifications for the different varieties of the species are based around the theme of Fate and Death in Greek Mythology, the names adopted referring to the Fates (e.g. Atropos who severed the mortal thread with shears at the time of death) or to elements surrounding the journey to underworld e.g the waterways Acheron and Styx.  In a sense these two act as an inverse to the journey of the psyche after death to the land below as opposed to the sky above.  The Death's Head Hawk Moth can be seen to represent the death of the psyche.

Photo of Acherontia Atropos from Wikipedia

Solanum Dulcamara aka 'Bittersweet Nightshade.'

Thanatos Vincit Omnia

Sokushinbutsu

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Maska

Richard Teschner The Uninvolved (1916)
Via

Brings back memories playing this game with a strobe light.

Malice in Wonderland

Meanwhile back in France...