SERENDIPITY NOW

A Chronological List of Lynx to Current and Previous Updates of Serendipity

1. December 1996: Egyptian Heliopolis, Phoenician Heliopolis, Human Heliopolises, were the Zerosses from Etocretan Ziros & how much of PHANTACEA did Jim McPherson actually make up?
2. February 1997: Of Ravenscroft, Rubens, Spears of Destiny, Korantism, & Mithraism in the Nazi SS
3. May 1997: Wormwood, Fox's Millennium, & the CHI-RHO (x-p) 'Chrismon' (Monogram of Christ) as a Mithraic Labarum
4. August 1997: The Spear of Destiny, Youthful Sex, Elvis & a near Sedon-sighting
5. September 1997: Sed's Head on the Giza Plateau in Egypt for 4500 Years?
6. October 1997: The Smiling Fiend as Judge Druj
7. November 1998: Is the US military using Centauri Island for bombing practise?
8. May 1999: Is that the Moloch Sedon in Star Wars?
9. February 2000: Xuthros Hor, the Genesea & the Grand Alignment
10. October 2001: Pyrame & The Atomic Twins (Osiraq)
11. Summer 2002: Serendipitous Sightings (snaps reminiscent of PHANTACEA characters: Blind Sundown and Raven's Head; Sorciere and Granny Garuda; Wilderwitch and Wildman Dervish Furie)
12. Summer 2003: Vampires in pre-Columbian Honduras
13. Autumn 2003: The VAM not in Vampires (Maya, Mithrandruj & More on the Forgettable Devil)
14. Winter 2003/4: Bad Rhad as Ahriman (Even More on the Ever Eminently Forgettable Devil)
15. Winter 2004/5: On Blimps and Brains in Boxes
16. Summer 2005: Chernobyl Summoning Children?
17. Winter 2005/6: Snails for Cerebrus
18. Summer 2006: Did Methuselah Survive the Genesea
19. Winter 2006/7: Sedon with a Pitchfork + We'll call him Varuna
20. Summer 2007: Planetary Demotion + Silver Dragsilk + Hel's on Mars too
21. Autumn 2007: Cerebrus Now + Blasting the Cloud of Hadd + Two Apropos "Feeling Theocidal" + Assassination by Asteroid (unless it was a comet)
22. Spring 2008: The Universal Substance + A Croc - Not a Crock + Noting Theocidal Tendencies
23. Autumn 2008: Medusas I have met + Spooky, not Serendipitous (whose head is she leaning on anyhow?) + Now She's in Portugal (the All-Seeing Eye of Pyrame as Providence)
24. Spring 2009: Still searching for the secret to the Signallers' Silver
25. Summer 2009: Did Edenites or Utopians make the Antikythera Mechanism + Did Saudi's descendents slip through the Dome and take up residence in Thailand + Salamanders not just in 'Feel Theo' + Jordy's attitude to not just militaries
26. Autumn 2009: Soul in a Stone (The Celestial Superior) + Terrorist Swallows Bomb (Prince Translav's Global Menace) + An Actual Eye-Mouth in the Sky (Dark Star Sedon) alongside echoes of Ubi's Son-Shine
27. Spring 2010: Those little gods -- er, make that devils + A Harmonious Demogorgon + Sprinkles as Utopian crud
28. Summer 2010: No wonder Smiler's always smiling + A Doughnut for the Melusine Master + Hoffmann's Tomcat

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Summer 2010

I collect material for Serendipity Now. Email me or stick them in an envelope and send them to me if you've some PHANTACEA-specific ones you'd like to share. In the meantime, here's another batch:

| The Smiling Jester | Morgan Abyss as a Vouivre | Tricky Tom as a Hoffman Tail |

Did Bad Rhad Invent Bad Jokes

More to the worrisome (if it isn't serendipitous) point, did I know it when I invented him?

Here's how Pre-Theo ends:

Between-space one devil, unless it was the Devil, never imperfectly remembered – due to the fact he was never remembered period, not unless he fully manifested himself, and was perfectly forgotten the moment he vanished – pocketed his Tvasitar talisman, a panpipe. He didn’t smile in satisfaction of a movement well played.

The fiend never stopped smiling!

... from "Feeling Theocidal"

In the next chapter, Helena (Augusta) Somata expresses her distaste for a poor, but nevertheless thought-human, influence on her last living offspring (her first two children Constance, mother of an Attis, and Constantine, a Roman emperor, were long dead by then):

He [George Masterson] swore he’d heeded her desires and ditched Bad Rhad, as she referred to him. She was happy about that. Rhad struck Helena as a godless sybarite and, even if the Hidden Headworld’s gods were mostly fallen angel devils from one of three tribes, she had no use for godless sybarites.

Georgie had taken up with the ever-smiling panpipe-player ostensibly from Apple Isle, Sedon’s Human Eye-Isle, after Mithrant legionnaires ...

... from "Feeling Theocidal"

When he appeared in the comic books, I as commonly called him Rhadamanthys as I did either Smiler or the Smiling Fiend. Like so many of my characters, he had a mythological antecedent. In that regard here's an excerpt from an "accelerated novella" I released this summer:

Crete was by far the biggest, if not quite the closest landform to Strongyne when Midsummer blew the latter island’s heart into the sky. Approaching paradoxically, for a few hundred years before that happened devils and Utopians living on Crete, as well as Minoan humans on their third of the island, had actually managed to get along comparatively peacefully there.

Along with her much lower-born cousin Pyrame Silverstar, as the radiant Queen Tanith to Dark Sedon’s uncharacteristically smile-happy King Rhadamanthys, the Unity of Balance – having for a significant period strayed from her more customary hangouts in the Far East – claimed a large measure of credit for that. Since Master Devas tended to be tribal exclusivists, their joint success on Crete helped account for their unusually enduring friendship.)

... from "The Death's Head Hellion"

Which is an extremely long-winded lead in to a very short quote, from Classical Corner #125, as found in the July 2010 edition of Fortean Times (FT 263, if you count them by issue): "Palamedes and Rhadamanthus (sic) were said to have invented jesting." Which in turn led me to ask if I knew it when I invented him.

Sooth said, I can't answer that. As I've remarked many times: 'I'm not losing my memory, it's full.' Put perhaps more accurately, neurologically speaking, I don't intentionally suppress my memories, they just naturally compress -- all too sadly often unto extinguishments.

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Abysmal Heroine

(Double-click images in this section for enlargements of same.)

I did not conceive of "Feeling Theocidal" as Book One of 'The Thrice-Cursed Godly Glories' because it seemed like everyone who wrote in the fantasy field was doing trilogies so I better do one too. The fact of the matter is I didn't put it out until I figured I'd already written all three parts of Thrice-Cursed.

Nor did I publish "The War of the Apocalyptics" because I hadn't as yet finished revising Feel Theo's sequel. Publishing War-Pox first had always been part of the plan forward.

After all, because its, um, apocalyptic ending impacts Book Three (previewed starting here) so crucially, I couldn't very well end the trilogy without it coming out first. However, it then turned out that I couldn't end it without the Death's Head Hellion.

What happened was, when I was re-reading Book Two, a flashback character, one along the lines of the demon-human hybrid named Hecate in Feel Theo, simply wouldn't go away.

Trains keep rolling but my brain, being what it is, keeps roiling. Morgan Abyss, the Melusine Master of Weir, thusly became the afore-titled Abysmal Heroine in an until-then unscheduled first section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief".

In the late Spring of 2010 a friend wondered if I should take print publications of the phantacea Mythos to a local comicon at the end of August. I hemmed and hawed, as is my wont. I still hadn't hired a cover artist for 1000-Daze and thus wouldn't have anything new to sell. Then I had this notion of accelerated (as in chopped-down) novellas, hence:

“What’ve you done to Silverstar, piscine?”

“First, I’m a Melusine Piscine, and then only maternally. Second, it isn’t Pyrame you care about and we both know it. We also know that I’ve been, um, sharing her company of late. So I shouldn't have to tell you that the tiresome old darling remains something of the intractable, as well as inexplicable, romantic when it comes to you.

“I’m anything but of course; couldn’t be anything but or my butt wouldn’t be in this throne.”

... from "The Death's Head Hellion"

Since this is for Serendipity Now, I'll leave it to you to google up Melusine. As per the afore-mentioned July 2010 edition of Fortean Times (FT 263): "Melusine [is] the heroine ... revealed as half-woman, half-snake." Or fish, as in mermaid.

The serendipitous article at hand comes from the same issue. Under the sub-heading of Gallic Monsters, it's entitled 'La Vouivre'. Apparently that translates as wyvern, though the article claims a vouivre is a form of Melusine.

The serpent woman ... is a guardian of treasures, underground telluric currents, and streams ... She lives under ... the Rock of La Vouivre ... on Mont Beuvray [in France's Morvan region] ... On Christmas Eve the rock moves [whereupon] she leaves, and a great treasure is revealed.

On 17 August 1955 a huge doughnut-shaped object was seen hanging over Mont Beuvray ... During the evening ... a beam of light [shone] from the sky "like a lighthouse" ... Aliens, or La Vouivre keeping an eye on her treasure?

Morvan certainly sounds like Morgan, who does admit to none other than the fearsome granddaddy of all devils, the Moloch Sedon himself, that she is half-Melusine, hence the booming Sed-Speak above.

In terms of telluric currents, well, the Hell-Well of the World, in its aspect of Absudyl-Minius, does underlay the Weirdom of Cabalarkon, where she rules as its consensus Master. That by the way, is significant. Plus, Cabalarkon holds no greater treasure than the Undying Utopian, Sed's thought-father, Cabalarkon himself, hence its name. Which, as D-Head plays out, is also significant.

As for Christmas Eve, as per Feel Theo, it's called Mithramas Eve on the Hidden Headworld. As for what Sed's doing in Cabalarkon on Mithramas Day 4824, as also per Feel Theo, he's come there to visit his Daddy Cabby. And impregnate Pyrame with little Sed-sons. And guess who's been possessing Master Morg for quite a number of years by then.

All of that said, it was the last paragraph that truly caught my eye -- and qualified the whole piece as a serendipitous sighting.

The Upper Head’s northern lights produced seemingly thousands of eyes staring down at the ground below. Over the course of the six weeks between Midsummer and Lunasa Day, Morgan Abyss, the Master of Weir, scrupulously unnoticed, must have spent hours gazing through a few mobile and truly unreal ones.

One day, a number of starry eyeholes expanded, quoit-like, overtop more than a few designated bull’s-eyes and something else – a whole gaggle of some things else – came through them.

... from "The Death's Head Hellion"

And that should do it for this session of Serendipity.

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A Murr not a Mora, but a Tomcat nevertheless

Made mention of Tomcat Tattletail a couple of times in the the Spring 2010 update of Serendipity Now. Back then I was leaning towards classifying him as a 'mora' rather than an 'iele'. Having completed my pre-publication review-cum-final-proof of the first and second sections of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief" I can now state with increasing confidence that he is in fact a ‘lutin mora’, as follows:

The likes of the Librarian might have pointed knowingly then claimed ... Tattletail was  a ‘mora’ or, arguably less accurately, an ‘iele’. Pusan and Evenstar, collectively as one, or individually as two (which they weren't right now), would have been absolutely precise.

They’d have [said] he was a ‘lutin mora’, a faerie type renowned as lovers of wine, women and song who, in their most unguarded moments, had catheads of the non-ship variety.

... from the second section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief"

Once I finally been solved that mini-mystery, I decided to act as my own librarian and start scouring my library of shots taken during various Travels for images I could use out here for Tatty Tom. Came up with quite a few actually.

While doing so, however, I was perusing the August issue of old reliable, aka the Fortean Times (FT265, if you're counting), whereupon -- and, yes, altogether serendipitously -- I came across an article on ETA Hoffmann (Fortean Traveller 71: 'The House of Hoffmann'). Hoffman is probably best known for writing the stories that became the basis for Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet and Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann.

However, he also wrote 'The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr'. I'd never heard of this particular Tomcat before so my attention was duly sparked.

In the article he's described as a feline writer who is 'a prime example of bourgeois vanity and pretentiousness'. Which might be interesting if 1000-Daze was set in the 19th Century our time instead of, at its start, a thousand years earlier in terms of the Inner Earth of Sedon's Head (4824/5 YD).

The cover for the Penguin Classics edition is reproduced here. I've taken the liberty of scanning in much the same graphic as found in the FT article. It opens with a double-click.

The double-click is a little more interesting in that there are a couple of goats and a female sphinx down towards its bottom. Aforementioned Pusan Wanderlust is often called 'Goat' when she shows up in phantacea Mythos mosaic novels whereas All of Incain also makes an appearance, briefly, in 1000-Daze (albeit with Pyrame Silverstar's silver-haired head, not Human Memory's dark-haired unit).

You'll note the quill in both. Now note this:

According to some demonologists ieles (as opposed to the Danq’s dancing leles) are forever scrawny, cat-like horrors nevertheless cursed with an insatiable thirst for blood. As a fairy changeling, Tomcat Tattletail probably wasn’t an iele. He might have been a ‘mora’, however. They had somewhat similar traits and he did sometimes claimed that his devic half-mother was Wintry Moira, Dame Chance.

What definitely was true that was moras were living nightmares. Nonetheless, regardless of whatever sort of faerie-fart he might be, his name probably should have been Tommy Trouble.

Just as unluckily, what it likely was originally was Rumour of Lazareme.

... from the second section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief"

And that makes this a thoroughly worthy entry for Serendipity Now.

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Spring 2010

| Those darn little gods -- er, make that devils | A different take on Demogorgon | Perhaps the modest beginning of a Utopian-style elixir of longevity |

Devil does mean god after all

I've made mention of this issue many times previously out here in Cyberia. In no particular order, a sample of them can be found here, here, and here.

So I'm trolling through my personal library looking for the name of Cat Creatures such as Tomcat Tattletail, Harmony's capricious heartthrob throughout the first two sections of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief" and there it is ...

But first, how about some tittle-tattle re Tattletail:

Harmony ... was fairly-fairy-fond of fay-saying; had even fallen under the spell of a few faerie farts over the millennia: the to-her-eyes Lazareme-lookalike, Tomcat Tattletail, being the most seductively as well as smilingly repetitive of them.

Had that really been the catty as well as cunning trickster sidling up to them perchance to steal a kiss come midnight? And a lot more than that afterwards, not that it’d be theft by then. Talk about pheromones, he must be part satyr. Come to think of it, he did play panpipes almost as well as he played her.

In a way she could hardly wait. Then she could barely move.

... from "The Death's Head Hellion", the first section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief"

And if any of that reminds you of a certain ever smiling fiend who featured so prominently throughout 1000-Daze's prequel, "Feeling Theocidal", score one for yourself. (Well, I'll grant you a temptingly tentative one anyhow.)

The book I pulled out is "The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Fairies" (Paper Tiger, 2002). It's written by Anna Franklin and illustrated by Paul Mason and Helen Field. The definition I chanced upon was for 'devil'. Here's part of a spiel contained within it:

The term 'devil' actually means 'little god'. It is often the practise of a new religion to demonize the gods of the old, rival religion. Early Christians denounced the gods and spirits of the old Pagan religions as baneful and identified the old Pagan gods as devils.

I say 'duh' to that, though it as often comes out as: "Hear, hear!"

BTW, the kind of cat creature I was looking for was an 'iele'. However, the more I discover about ieles, the less convinced I am that Tomcat's one. Nowadays I'm leaning towards 'mora' partly, if perchance not primarily, because he claims his devic half-mother is Wintry Moira, Lazareme's Dame Chance. Of course, as one of his presumed deviant brothers says during the course of 1000-Daze re Tom: “And you’d believe a guy whose last name is tattletale even if he spells it, in Sedon Speak, Tattletail?”

Myself, besides the legends that they often appear as cats, another reason I like mora is because it and related words in German and Slavic tongues mean nightmare.

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Harmony as a Demogorgon Type

Here's some solid, albeit abridged, um, stuff from Feel Theo:

To state the startling, it turned out tee-tees weren't alone when it came to recollecting Demogorgon’s name. Adepts in secret societies or enlightened faiths on both sides of the Dome did as well. Yet, due to a superstitious dread that saying it aloud would bring death or disaster to the speaker, his or her family, friends or cronies, they too referred to it as the Unnameable.

Rather, they had.

Earlier this century, the Dome’s 44th, Pyrame discovered that tantalizing tidbit. When she told it to the Tethys deviant’s then-incarnation, he took All’s tongue-tug through the Dome and not only verified it; he scanned a copy of the manuscript into his quill and brought it back.

The treatise’s writer and publisher was a certain Lactantius. A nearly exact contemporary of Constantine the Great, who became his patron, this Lactantius claimed to be Christian. ... At any rate, there it was: Demogorgon’s name spelled out for anyone to read.

... from "Feeling Theocidal"

With or without the Moloch Sedon’s tacit approval, if Harmony much more so than their father hadn’t been around to balance off her brood brothers, her Age (aka Panharmonium) – and by extension Lazareme’s with it – never would have flourished as fruitfully as it had to date (the 21st of Azky, 5456 YD). In truth, her two immediate brothers were so surpassingly powerful many feared not even Sedon had the clout required to cathonitize them should their rage reach the point they went at each other unrestrained.

That happened, the Hidden Headworld itself might be terminally endangered. That apprehended, the mere fact they were seen together in Kanin City, let alone seen smiling amidst the same company, was an occurrence noteworthy for its close-to-unprecedented matchlessness. It must have struck the ceremony’s onlookers as a pure wonderment they could glance at each other without drawing weapons and spilling blood.

Yet, significantly as well as – especially in retrospect – suspiciously, heads didn’t instantly fly. Not only that, Harmony being otherwise occupied, they did it again. Then they smiled at each other. The collective whoosh of relief (from the crowd assembled that day in Kanin City) must have seemed, if not necessarily sounded, cyclonic.

... from the first section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief"

And who were Harmony's brother Unities? Right. Further to that, check out this definition of Demogorgon as found in the same book referred to above.

A mysterious being that lives in the Himalayas ... his origins are obscure. ... Conrad de Mare's Repetorium of 1273 called him the earliest deity of mythology. He is said to have resolved chaos into order.

Harmony probably wouldn't want one brother to resolve into the other. Although she'd never admit it, especially not to either of them, she probably wouldn't have minded if one or the other, preferably both, resolved, dissolved or devolved unto nothingness, however. Then again, as Lightning Lord Yajur, Sparky to his friends (of whom he has virtually none) and who appears on the front cover of pH-3 (and reused here, poking out from behind Abe's trident), observes to no one in particular later on in 1000-Daze:

Today though, Sparky knew because she’d far-spoken as much to him earlier, she [Harmony] was a thousand miles to the northwest, visiting the Weirdom of Kanin City. Which, her being there, was most of the reason he’d deigned to come here [to the Dinq, Doing, Danq Cavern Tavern, which gets a fair amount of ink in 1000-Daze]. He would much rather run her through than run into her at the Danq – or anywhere else, for that matter.

Harmony was all that kept Order from crushing Chaos.

... from the second section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief"

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Sprinkles hint at Tethys-despised Utopian Swill

As in "Feeling Theocidal", the Legendarian appears throughout "The 1000 Days of Disbelief". In his case, that means a number of Legendarians appears. It means the same in her case. (Be a ghost and have a boo here if that statement confuses you.)

Here's one thing the Legendarian, in any era and of either sex, has always said one way or another:

That time, as was the case most times, what drove him or her south was the inability of the Weirdom’s remnant of First Weir World’s Mother Machine to program into itself simple, earthly instructions. Even though Utopians boasted beer, ale and suchlike suds resulted from their originally otherworldly recipes, it spewed out piss-poor pilsners, emphasis on spew.

... from the second section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief"

He isn't alone of his assessment of the swill that came out of the nowadays long earthbound Utopians' replication units, which were leftovers from the many multiple millennia pre-Earth when Utopians, in their millennial or generational ships, chased the Sedonshem throughout the cosmos. Neither, as the case may be, is she.

She [Master Morgan Abyss] also hated the crap Utopian replication units produced in terms of clothing as much she did the crud they did for eating – what kept the wing-nuts of Weir thriving long into their second, third and sometimes even fourth or fifth centuries of life.

... from "The Death's Head Hellion", the first section of "The 1000 Days of Disbelief"

Which brings me to this little tidbit extracted from the Vancouver Sun newspaper on the 15th of March 2010. It seems the University of Toronto developed the Sprinkles brand of micronutrients at an unspecified time presumably not so very long ago. It further seems that they aren't so much an elixir of longevity as a method of allowing infants and young children to survive long enough that they might benefit from one once it's perfected (or cribbed from the Weirdom of Cabalarkon, as the case may be).

Sprinkles and other micronutrient powders [are] distributed by the UN [in Africa and other parts of the developing world]. Shake them over cooked maize or corn meal, and they won't change the colour or taste of the food, but they will add a potent boost of iron and essential vitamins to prevent anaemia, the most common nutrient deficiency.

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