Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Winsor McCay was the creator of the surrealist newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, a beautiful, eye-opening classic that ran from 1905 to 1914 and has influenced me not a little. It can be had in glorious full-color reprints from los eeenternets for colossal amounts of money, or, the way I got it, from la biblioteca. A few strips are available online, like this great one from wikimedia commons. Ray Bradbury did a film adaptation in the ’90s, and there was an 8-bit Nintendo game I rented once when I was 11….

But anyway. Here, courtesy of Paul DiFillipo, is a little-known animation fragment McCay did, featuring some centaurs frolicking in a forest to tasteful piano music:

[Inferior4+1]: Winsor McCay’s Centaurs

Note the well-endowed female centaur, and then note the comment below from John Crowley about the apocryphality of said endowedness, being as how there were no female centaurs in greek myth. Woo Crowley!

Predictably, my favorite part comes around the 0:44 mark, when the strapping young male centaur heartthrob, for no apparent reason, throws a rock at a passing albatross and kills it.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

O how dearly I wish I had posted this post:

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2009/09/living-growing-architecture.html

I am going out in the backyard and starting one of these for myself right now.

So jealous!

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

At 12:00 AM (now), “Of Thinking Being and Beast” goes online at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, alongside a story called “Dragon’s-Eyes” by the significantly-better-than-me Margaret Ronald. Yah! It is a high day to be me.

A disclaimer: the centaur stories—of which there are many more, though this is the first I’ve sold—are bleak, vicious, and include not a little of the old ultra-violence in the Anthony Burgess sense. Kid friendly they are not.

This is Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur. Doesn’t he look innocent and retiring. Don’t be fooled.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I know this is kind of an odd digression from my usual pagan insanity. But something about this really gets me. The themes are all there. And the expressions on these ladies’ faces… damn.

John Everett Millais, The Vale of Rest, 1858

Millais was an English Pre-Raphaelite. You may be more familiar with his Ophelia or The Princes in the Tower.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

My ally Scott H. Andrews has put up a beauty of a placeholder for his upcoming literary fantasy web zine:

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

In honor of the Winter Solstice, a by-no-means exhaustive gallery of forms of the horned god.

Cernunnos, Celtic god of fertility, death and wild creatures, from The Gundestrup Cauldron, 1st century BC.

Pan, nature god, on a Roman memorial frieze, 1st century AD.

The Sorcerer, primal shapeshifter of the cave paintings at Trois-Frères, France, circa 13,000 BC.

Michelangelo’s “Horned Moses”—representations of Moses with horns for the most part derive from an ambiguity in the Hebrew scriptures, in which a description of Moses’ physical appearance upon returning from Mt. Sinai can be translated to suggest either horns or rays of light protruding from his head. There’s a lot of fun (mostly specious) debate, though, as to whether Michelangelo might have been intentionally acknowledging Christianity’s pagan past.

Pashupati, Lord of Animals, an incarnantion of Shiva, Indus Valley circa 2,000 BC.

Herne the Hunter, a restless ghost that has haunted Windsor Forest since the era of Shakespeare, here illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1843.

A couple of other horned gods I can think of that I don’t have pictures for:

Gwyn ap Nudd, mythical hunter from Welsh Mythology, leader of the Wild Hunt, usher of souls to the afterlife, featured in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles as Gwyn the Hunter.

Oromë, huntsman of the Valar, from Tolkien.

Anuket, the gazelle-headed Egyptian fertility goddess of the Lower Nile.

Actaeon, the hapless forester of Greek myth, who, as punishment for having stumbled upon Artemis bathing au naturel, is transformed into a stag and harried to his death by the huntress and her hounds.

And, of course, I couldn’t really have gone without letting slip a hint of geekdom.

Happy Solstice.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Mochica Headdress-Condor – This is a public image (see rules)

What an absolutely beautiful and flabbergasting thing. I’ve been staring at it awhile and I keep seeing it in new ways. The Moche were a pre-Inca Peruvian people, around 300 – 800 CE. Their pottery is amazing, and until now I have to say I preferred it to their goldwork. But this thing….

How am I to interpret this? My first inclination is to turn it sideways and read it as a condor perched atop the sun, gazing at its reflection in the sea. Then it occurs to me that the baldness and bulbosity of that angry dude’s head makes him look a lot like an Olmec head–one of those monolithic stone heads from Mexico–which sort of evokes that semi-mythical ancestor race of the Americas, the Atlanteans or whatever you want to call them. Makes me think these condors, those immense, indomitable scavengers, represent survival, that the Moche have outlasted their progenitors and at the same time preserved their craft and wisdom. Then again, it looks a lot like a Moche head too. And I keep wondering about those things that look like horns, trying to justify that they represent a rock the condor is perched on, or else some kind of headdress, and not in fact horns. But maybe they are horns. Maybe this is a figure I’m supposed to recognize, a god or demon, in which case I’m pretty much lost. The condors are obvious, but there are only a few gods that consist between cultures, and many, like the old man god/aged maize god/ancestor god, called Itzamna by the Yucatec Maya, are amorphous and archetypal enough to be unrecognizable from one incarnation to the next. Maybe it’s a man-crocodile-jaguar-bird hybrid. Stranger things have happened. The breadth and complexity of precolombian culture humbles me. I am scratching at the door.

I found my way to this piece of art, by the way, via an article fragment that seems to be all that thus far has been shared with the English-speaking press regarding a recent find in Lambayeque, Peru.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Normally I would not be propagating some inane online categorization quiz, purely for the purposes of not wasting your time, gentle reader, or my own. I also must disclaim that I know and care little for astrology and believe less. There are just too many other far more interesting and obscure newagey systems for analyzing the underlying fabric of the universe for me to waste my time worrying what month everybody was born in and whether I should hang out with them or not as a result.

The Tarot, on the other hand… well I’m not sure what it is about the Tarot, except that it’s based on these archetypal symbols. I suppose you could call them prepackaged monumental metaphor. And the great thing about it is that it can be tailored to the individual. Find an artist you love and construct an inner cosmology, and there you have it, in a tangible form you can shuffle or mark your place in books with or flick one by one across the room into a hat. Maybe this is why you find me marking all my books with Magic cards.

Anyhow, the outcome of this particular inane quiz just made me so damn psyched, just fit so well my ideal conception of myself, that I had to put it up.

You are the Hanged Man

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound.

With the Hanged Man there is often a sense of fatalism, waiting for something to happen. Or a fear of loss from a situation, rather than gain.

The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. It signifies selflessness, sacrifice and prophecy. You make yourself vulnerable and in doing so, gain illumination. You see the world differently, with almost mystical insights.

(What Tarot Card are You?)

Halfway between the Fool and the Magician.

Wishing all of you a safe, ecstatic and enlightening Autumnal Equinox.

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Saturday I drove through downtown Boston in torrential thunderstorms to drop off Justin at South Station. Made it back to my parents’ house only mildly soaked, ducked into the kitchen, and what do I find sitting on the table?

It’s the cover art for a YA urban fantasy novel called The Lightning Thief, whose content, judging by the prologue and my mom’s astute appraisal, sadly fails to live up to the quality of the illustration. A little bit shallow, a little bit derivative bandwagon-jumping, though action-packed, I’m sure. Her kids are supposed to be reading it at school. Who makes these decision, I wonder?

Anyhow, I’m content to ignore the attached work of fiction and drool over the cover. A kid with a conch shell and an orange-glowing sword wading through the flooded ruins of Manhattan–what’s not to love?

The artist is John Rocco; his gallery is here.