The Ancient Seed Monopoly

There's kid lore in Chardon, Ohio that was passed down for generations. The lore is there is a tunnel network from Rocky Cellar, which is sandstone bedrock outcropping off Basquin Drive, up to the county courthouse about a mile away, and perhaps there is a tunnel network through all the sandstone to various places.

I think that story is a great example of how folk stories, in that case a kid folk story, encode actual information: the original detailed information is boiled off and jumbled up with generic archetypes. In that story case, a historical event, was replaced with a generic "secret tunnel" narrative. The historical event was a town official hid court records in Rocky Cellar during the war of 1812. The story also encodes the prevalent underlying sandstone bedrock in Chardon. The boring details of that original historical event got replaced with something interesting.

In some cases, historical events that are interesting in and of themselves retain their original narrative form. A good example of that is "Brady's Leap" in Kent, Ohio and the associated frontier adventure story. Since the event was cool and kick ass, the man's name and the details of the event is in the lore.

The vampire character blends together many real world concepts into a mythological character. One that I think is particularly intriguing the the element of the Hades/Persephone story that involves pomegranate seeds. Hades basically gets to keep Persephone because she ate the pomegranate arils. I read/heard many attempts to explain this element of the story.

Persephone being married to Hades is a seasonal myth. Hades is the king of the underworld, which is often equated with winter, that is the dead time of the year. To a modern person it doesn't make any sense that the king of the underworld and especially winter world would also be associated with wealth, which is the lean time of the year. Hades association with wealth spills over into the vampire myth: Dracula is even a "Count" and he lives in a castle.

The Arils component of the story involves "a deal" that Persephone broke, or was tricked into, depending on the version of the story. Why would that element of the story hang around for thousands of years?

I think that story is really about an ancient "seed monopoly" from the dawn of agriculture. I think that's also where the concept of interest comes from. This is also why "Hades" is associated with wealth, not the common interpretation that the concept was all wealth came from the underworld... which also makes no sense, unless you're talking about a mine, like a silver mine, which was another thing which was frequently monopolized.

Death and blood are at the core of the Hades/Vampire story for fairly obvious reasons... how is a monopoly built and maintained? murder and destruction.

The Book of Enoch and "The Jews"

In a previous post about the "cultural significance" of Star Wars versus the near insignificance of the movie Avatar I pointed out two narratives that permeate pop culture movies and TV shows and also the bible, which is really Star Wars + Avatar. There are basically three core narratives to discuss here:

• The Osiris Cycle, or the Demeter/Persephone Cycle (crops and winter);
• Moonman/woman and Sunman versus winterman;
• Rich people form a slave colony (Book of Enoch and Avatar, and 10,000 BC).

The Osiris cycle is "the sun" comes to Earth and is embodied in the crops like wheat or grapes, dies, and mutilated, and is reborn. In the Osiris story (there are some different versions), Osiris gets put into a tight fitting casket (wheat storage) and floated down a river (shipped). He's eventually reborn via artificial means (planted). In the grape crop based versions of the stories the plant-embodied-sun gets castrated (grapes cut off), and then torn to pieces by mad women in one case, stomped and mashed and made into wine. Jesus is wheat cult + wine cult. The violence in these stories should be regarded as looney tunes or Final Destination style cartoon violence where the character of Osiris, Jesus, or Dionysus is the personification of wheat (which used to be literally flailed by workers) or grapes.

The Demeter/Persephone/Hades version of this story is Persephone is "kidnapped" and kept in the underworld by Hades who is the wealthy king of the dead, and she is released in spring. One of the reasons Persephone is kept by Hades is she ingests Pomegranate seeds. Hades morphed into a vampire in modern times. He represents the never ending seed monopoly/finance scheme still used today.

The adventures of Moonman/woman and Sunman (the first released Star Wars movies Han/Leia and Luke) are another seasonal cycle story and the Osiris cycle provides the background. One example of that is Luke ends up hanging upside down in the ice cave on Hoth (winter planet, Luke/Sun in the south, i.e. upside down).

The "rich people form a slave colony" story is the Book of Enoch and Avatar, and maybe more interestingly Stargate and 10,000 BC. The TV series "The 100" is another example of this core narrative. The "rich people" slave colony story of the book of Enoch ends up in the bible in the Cain character and his city founding. This thread is also present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who's a "nephilim" as described in the book of Enoch.

The Stargate and 10,000 BC movies depict the bible jews. I think the current concept of "jews" is a mangled, nonsense concept. The depiction of spece jews in the Stargate and 10,000 BC movies makes sense with respect to the Enoch narrative.

In Stargate the jews are the people who are contacted by people from Earth, that is, the advanced civilization. The character Skaara takes on the Enoch role. The name "Enoch" means "to train" or "initiated". In Stargate the Americans find these space jews ensalved to the Egyptians/Goauld snake people. In 10,000 BC, the white people find the first civilization people enslaved by the Atlanteans... and in that scenario the "slaves" are a rando assortment of people who are "the jews". Jews are the bamboozled slaves of an "advanced" slaver civilization rather than an ethnicity. Today an American is enmeshed in the slaver civilization system, but "American" is not an ethnicity.

Dojo Appeal

The corporate/consumer system in the United States is a soft version of military life, specifically life on a ship. Sadly, people are trained for it from the time they're a toddler. Kids get shipped off to "kindergarten" to get used to authority figures giving them orders and spending all their time on a controlled schedule inside an institutional building where their movements are controlled by institutional paperwork and orders like "hall passes". It's not even an American concept; it came from inbred Prussian lizard people.

A big component of the "midlife crisis" is the realization that life spent in this system is a waste. For many people, it's not so much a "realization", that is a conscious, well formed thought, it's more of a feeling that plays out in mute desperation and acting out. The certainty of mortality, and the corresponding preciousness of one's life collides with the absurdity of masses of people living under the thumb of a bunch of greedy cockroaches who have bamboozled the multitudes.

This realization is also why movies like They Live attain a "cult" following. It allows the audience to "externalize" this model of control, that is, the narrative of the movie allows one to be like a fish that climbs out of the fish bowl and see it for what it is.

However, once a person "can see", a possibly harsher reality is everyone now "needs" this pile of trash system because it makes almost everything including the most essential items like food and controls the distribution of everything with funny money.

That said, many of the things people do are purposely and firmly outside the corporate/consumer system. I experience one successful, very good example of that on a regular basis when I do my mountain biking hobby. I go to a public park and ride a trail that was built and maintained by volunteers who receive no compensation other than the ability to ride their bike.

After a summer storm, the trail can be impassible since it's in the woods and many branches and even whole trees or large chunks of a dying tree will fall on the trail... but they will disappear as if "by magic" over maybe a half a day. The "magic" is rando mountain bikers moving them or chopping them up. I've done it myself. A portion of the trail is only ~1200 feet away from my couch through the woods. I dragged a chainsaw over there and chopped up a log and cleared the trail because I wanted to ride the next day.

There are many other models of organization that match the mountain bike hobby and trail construction such as a dojo, which is maybe the most appealing one for free and productive people. Models like cults and religious orders maintain elements of corporate and military organizations that aren't appropriate to free men.

I never really thought about the word dojo and its inherent relationship to "the way", i.e. "do". A dojo is a place where you practice "the way" of a discipline like martial arts. The idealized dojo is organized like the mountain bike hobby, not like a corporation or military unit or public schools. If there's a hierarchy, it's a real hierarchy. The teacher is not an authority figure because of a title, but has natural authority versus a student who wants to learn "the way".

Many people have noticed this concept and tried to apply it to the tech industry or other commercial endeavors but it doesn't really work because someone is trying to get paid, which corrupts the structure and imposes a false hierarchy of "owner ship", which is the thing at the root of the corporate trash system. As observers like Jordan Maxwell pointed out, the "ship" is at the core of this thing.

Complexity of the Information Dimension

This past weekend I went for a bike ride on Butternut Road from Munson over to Burton. It was a perfect, bright, sunny and windy day and that road is picturesque. It goes through a handful of river valleys. The Chagrin, the West Branch of the Cuyahoga, and the East Branch of the Cuyahoga and has lumpy, rolling hills and open grassy fields with horses and other farm animals all along the way.

I'm on a geology kick lately and "see" the glacial deposition, which geologists gave a bunch of names like Kames, Hummocky Moraines and the like. That route passes over several different such regions, which are complex there because the road passes over three sandstone highlands. One of them even has a name "Maple Hill" which is Auburn Road near Cedar and Butternut.

The "experience" of riding combines with the maps I've been looking at for a couple of weeks to generate a new combination of observations in my mind, and my mind only, that is in the "information dimension" where my personal Thomas Anderson character exists. I have an understanding of the difference in elevation of the Cuyahoga Formation and the Sharon Conglomerate sandstone highlands and how that's filled in with glacial till because of the effort involved to climb various hills, or drop down various descents.

The (abrigded) etymology of "experience" is instructive here, it's "ex" (out of) "peritus" (testing). Also "expert", which is someone who had experiences basically. "Experiential" learning is much deeper than mere symbolic learning, which is basically a huge waste of time. It's wild that almost the whole population of a country like the USA flushes away their prime growing and learning years soaking in a soup of disconnected factoids preached by teachers who similarly don't "know" anything.

It makes sense that culture would go hog wild on these dumb fuck LLMs. The emphasis on a jumble of pure symbolic nonsense with zero experience goes hand in hand with rote "learning" and assemblies of facts. All the "actual" knowledge, like all the nutrition is in the experience not the words. That huge sea of information is not available to machines, it can barely be shared from human to human.

Anyway, this takes my back to an immense divide between "experts" and "dilettantes" and poseurs. The expert lives in the deep complexity of the information dimension. The dilettante lives "off the cuff" and on whims. I think the US ruling class is very toxic poseurs. I'm sure there's a bunch of such people, like CEOs saying things like, "What does the AI say about it?" in meetings all the time now.

The vacuum/negative space this black hole of foolishness is creating might give birth to another wisdom tradition in the US.

"The Way"

I recently watched a YouTube video about the vast cultural impact of Star Wars versus the zero cultural impact of the movie Avatar which was also a "mega blockbuster hit movie". The "Star Wars" topic is one of the things that got me started on the initial concept of this blog, which is humanity's mind model is inextricably bound up with mythology. Why is Star Wars a cultural icon while Avatar is not?

Star Wars is literally star wars which is the basis of a lot of mythological systems. I wrote a bunch of posts on this topic, but this one is a good summary. I'll jot down a few really obvious highlights. Millenium Falcon = the moon. X-Wing fighter looks like an erect penis. Luke literally shoots his load into the "death star". Rebels = solar imagery. The Empire is the world of the dead, that is, the Winter and last years sun and hoarded wealth, like the greek god Pluto, who's also a vampire. Luke (light) and Han are Horus. Princess Leia is Isis. Vader is Osiris/the constellation Orion. Every year the Rebels, the Sun, overthrows the Empire (the winter) and there's a big Ewok Party--Summer.

Avatar is possibly based on another old myth, but it's a less well known myth. It might be a twist on the Book of Enoch story or the story of the Nephilim which is also the basis of the Stargate SG-1 story, which is also the Atlantis story told by Plato, which is shown in bits and pieces in the movie 10,000 BC and is also in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica. That story is an advanced civilization came to prehistoric Earth and basically "engineered" humanity. In the book of Enoch, for example, the "watchers" teach humans "civilization". The nephilim enslave humanity, as in Avatar, an evil corporation sends an imposter to dupe the blue aliens.

For whatever reason, this story is not as widely known or celebrated, and all these entertainment products have niche fandoms, or no fandom, like Avatar, which was, ironically just corporate entertainment slop compared to Star Wars which was based on "The Contendings of Horus and Set" and "The Osiris Cycle", which are arguably products of the Nephilim. That is, the "seasonal religion" is a scam that's been used to enslave humanity for 1000s of years.

"Star Wars" also includes "the force" mythology, but in true Nephilim style corrupted it with the concept of "royal blood", which is the Nephilim/fallen angels myth. That is, "the force" is only available via biological and hereditary juju called "mitichlorians" or whatever. That's all a sort of grotesque corruption of concepts in Daoism. "The Force" = "The Way".

The depiction of "the daoist" comes and goes in entertainment products. I think corporations are not eager to promote it, nor are corporate types who are the people who make hollywood slop now. A classic example of this is Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu. The "Caine" surname and his origin story is drawn from the Nephilim story yet again (in the lore, it's the biblical Cain), but it doesn't fit the rest of the concepts in Kung Fu, nor the Shaolin Monk concept. Another similar, and corrupted example is the Ranger Aragon from Lord of the Rings who's the "secret king", but a ranger. The TV series the Incredible Hulk is yet another one where a wandering stranger goes around the world solving problems "outside the system". Of course Yoda and the Jedis are supposed to be Shaolin Monks who have a sort of stand-offish relationship with "the system" and have their own concerns about "maintaining balance" which is independent of the government's agendas.

"The Way" is the only way, so it necessarily supercedes religion, which is a pack of lies, and politics, which is also a pile of fraud and lies, and it really trumps all similar nonsense, like consumerism, or work anxiety, corporations, etc... It asserts itself in times of extreme madness, like in classical Athens during peak empire, or in ancient Rome in the form of stoicism, or now in the US where the "ruling class" is being revealed as utter trash.

Authentic Folklore/Imposed Folklore

I wrote a couple of posts about "kid knowledge", which I think is a great example of "authentic" folklore in the western world. A couple of examples of kid folklore from Chardon, Ohio are: 1) the story of the Melonheads; 2) the idea that there is a tunnel network connecting the high school, the court house and "Rocky Cellar" which is a sandstone bedrock outcrop off of Basquin Drive in Chardon.

The kid knowledge is "authentic" because it was generated by rando kids or adults over time and was handed down kid to kid through the generations. The "tunnel" story is almost certainly a jumbled up version of what was more or less an adventure story from the War of 1812, which was coincident with the founding of Ohio and Geauga County. An early county official stashed documents in Rocky Cellar to keep them safe from the British and Indian mercenaries of the British. Eventually that turned into a "tunnel to the courthouse".

The melonhead story is just a monster story, maybe about kids with hydrocephalus who lived near Wisner Road in Chardon, Township. It got embellished over the years to become a fantastical tale of a "mad scientist" run amok who was then destroyed by his creation, which is just a jumble of horror movie tropes.

Kids are motivated to tell and listen to stories for entertainment purposes, so the stories are lean on facts and more about being "cool" or interesting exercises of imagination. They also draw upon well worn story tropes and archetypes. I am guessing there is very little "kid knowledge" left of that kind. Instead it's turned into memes and funny stories and images on the Internet. 

I think the contemporary source of authentic folklore, or authentic human expression is the Internet, and specifically things like youtube videos made by actual randos, rather than astroturfed imitations of that generated by "ruling class" agents. Youtube is currently, far and away, the most watched entertainment medium.

 

The entire corporate entertainment industry is often a version of astroturf "folk lore" creation. The news is a version of that. PBS, NPR, etc... are just more versions of that. Essentially it's all a sales pitch from the "ruling class" about virtually every topic and is mainly meant to shape public opinion, or impose mind models that favor the ruling class or at the very least just impose their rando religious opinions on myriad topics.

Let's take the topic of "race relations" as an example. In the 70s and 80s, there was a constant drumbeat of government and "ruling class" propaganda about black and white race relations in the US, and a big effort to get white people to think "racism" was absolutely the worst sin and that anyone who had a racist opinion was absolute trash. I think that social engineering effort peaked in the 1990s with Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central, which was a huge hit and which treated the topic comedically and nonchalantly.

The main thrust of that propaganda isn't that "race relations" can be fixed or solved, it's actually that black people need the government to propagandize white people and "manage" the two groups, just as the blacks need the government for welfare, public housing, police at their beaches, their pools, and high school football games, etc...

In the early 2000s through today, though, lefty political people got extremely aggressive about the subject, so even the entertainment propaganda got extremely heavy handed and the concept of "DEI" started to show up all over the place. The concept shifted from the 70s/80s notion of "white and black people should learn to get along" to "white people are bad", which is also part of the management pitch.

That propaganda ran headlong into the Internet and youtube, which casually crushed it for a large segment of the white audience. White lefty women and men are the only people who are still onboard with the ruling class propaganda from the 70s to the early 2000s about black people, and in many cases, those white shitlibs live in a world of total nonsense and severe cognitive dissonance. For example, they live in extremely white areas, but imagine that somehow a "diverse" neighborhood is preferable, until they drive through black Cleveland, Ohio, and lock their car doors and drive as fast as possible to get back to their own civilization.

Anyway, I think it's not possible to keep imposing folklore on people. Eventually they notice it's fake garbage, which would probably indicate that all respect for "the ruling class" and their opinions is being lost.

Being "Wrong"/Bad Mind Models

I had an "earth science" class in 8th grade. It was an unusual class and maybe was some kind of educational experiment in our school district. It had two teachers and it culminated in a multi-day field trip to Kelly's Island in Lake Erie. We visited the glacial grooves there. I maintained an on again/off again interest in local geology ever since.

The glacial grooves at Kelly's Island are pretty impressive. It's obvious they were formed by an immense force scraping rocks and boulders along the exposed limestone. The force was provided by the slow motion flow of the laurentide ice sheet. For many years after the class, I had an opinion that the glacier ice was "miles thick" and uniformly deep. I thought it looked something like this painting at the boundary, but this concept was a "scientific" version of folklore.

In my hometown area where there is exposed bedrock there are no glacial grooves. Also there's significant accumulation of glacial till here; it's tens to hundreds of feet thick (in old river valleys). The mental model of miles-thick ice scouring the bedrock here doesn't jibe with that.

Images of the present day Greenland ice sheet shows it tapers down significantly at the edges, so maybe it's ~20 feet thick, plus it's all dirty and gray and it rides on a layer of rocks and ground up rock powder. Also it's shape and thickness seems to be significantly affected by underlying bedrock and land elevation.

This photo, below, from Greenland of the Isunnguata Sermia glacier is probably a good approximation for what the glacial times were like here in my neighborhood, which is on a terminal moraine from 14,000 years ago. Maybe there was more vegetation here at the time, like hemlock forests and grasslands since we're much farther south than Greenland.

So if I were living 14,000 years ago, the view from my current property would have been something like that. Maybe tens of feet of ice off to the north stretching on for endless miles into Canada. The southern side of the glacier was probably filled with streams and holes and lakes in the summer season.

A bunch of glacial till would be stacked up all over the place with new grass, weeds, and trees quickly taking over, and there would be lakes and rivers everywhere supplied by melt water. In fact, there was a lake just to the north of my property which eventually emptied out via what's currently Big Creek.

Anyway, I think most of the mind-models people have are low fidelity like my 8th grade glacier model. The folklore mind model of Ohio ice age geology is a pretty interesting one to think about. It shares some common traits with kid lore I learned in the late 1970s/early 1980s in Chardon, Ohio.

There's an "official"/technical and highly detailed version of Ohio ice age geology which is constantly updated by PhD students and geology researchers, plus a slow, steady stream of information comes from water well drilling companies into ODNR databases. This technical/detailed information ends up in maps, reports, whitepapers, etc... Some geology professors in Ohio will understand and have a significant amount of that info at their fingertips.

A popularized, shortened version ends up in text books. Middle school teachers will grasp some subsection of facts, and jumble and mix up other concepts as they convey that info to students. It turns into a narrative that borrows core elements from fictional stories, and get exaggerated and peppered with interesting concepts like "miles thick ice", which is way more interesting than a pile of dirty snow that ebbs and flows like a super slow motion waves on the beach.