J.K. Jackson

Not everything I write is ~especially important~ but I would say that this is what I would call “God mythology”, of which I guess I have only two, two of the Deepak Chopra novels, the “God” book, a series of vignettes from the history of religion, and his “Buddha” novel. This “God mythology” of mine is kinda the “normal” sort of mythology—the mythology of the “civilization” countries, of the established religions, and not really the “pagan” and/or Black/Indigenous countries. I once snooped around a pastor’s library and catalogued, among other things, some book that was the Bible turned into a novel—I think it was called, “The Book of God”; this would be an excellent example of “God mythology”, you know. (Incidentally I had her permission. Being Christian and pious and bookish, I supposed that cataloging the pastoral library onto LT would be a useful service. After all…. books! In retrospect, she probably thought I was weird and nerve-wracking—solitary bookish men can be a little….—and was only letting me do it to make a convert or serve her community or something, not because she was anxiously awaiting my discovery of Exactly How Many books she had, right. Which is an ironic thing to put on this site, obviously, especially given how much pleasure and perspective the site gives me, but…. Yeah. A book is a strange thing, in the end.)

But yeah, the ironic thing is that “God mythology” isn’t the kind of mythology we expect, you know: you don’t expect it to be normal. And “God” isn’t supposed to want mythology, in Abrahamic eyes: try telling your average Bible fellow that you’re reading “the Bible as a novel” instead of the NKJV or something: if you’re not a potential convert, they’ll probably want to put the squeeze on you for that…. And just mythology is what people go for, for kinda their vacation from the normal—or if you’re an occultist for your dissident religion, right. But the average person sees (paleface) pagan mythology, usually more popular than the BIPOC kind, as being as romantic as Twilight and yet almost as prestigious as the Bible, without ever once thinking it as serious of a life-guide as the latter, though sometimes they don’t want guidance, you know. And as for “purple” mythology, (all are loved, “pale or purple”, as first Aleister and then Gerald had it), this is also one of the few forms of interest gringo occasionally takes in Native society, with various degrees of alienation and exoticism from BBC Channel N (for Normal, right).

But yeah, China—FINALLY, China, WHAT A fucking waste of digital ink, right—IS kinda “God mythology”, you know: a “civilization” country, and if not the producer of a religion as prestigious as the Buddhism it received, Lao Tzu IS sometimes counted among the great sages…. Just more like the South Asians than most cultures, really, and especially when you take the apparent scarcity of goddesses and the aspect of a god basically as an inventor or government bureaucrat, you know—the Confucian god that may or may not exist, but who wants you to listen to your dad or whatever—and it does seem to be rather more similar to the Bible or Indian epics than fairy tales or the story of Cupid and Psyche, right, or whatever “original” of the myth-y romance novel you’re reading is, that Confucius and Calvin think is a little bit too…. Too much, right. Try cutting down the female cast of characters, right: we might still have a female server who pours the male sage’s water, and if it’s China she might be a goddess or something….

But now I’m gliding over to the cynical side. I do feel like God’s mythology does have value, and because I feel now that mythology is valuable—I still haven’t read even a book-length synopsis of either Hindu epic, after a moderate amount of time studying Hinduism and Indian gurus, because I thought, “abstraction first”, you know—and because ultimately you cannot really separate the mythology of God, on the one hand, and the mythology of the Goddess and the gods, on the other, right.

…. It is more like a fairy tale book—the Ten Thousand Little Stories, and not the One Grand Epic—than the mythology of any of the other great-empire races, if I can call them that…. Although if they are fairy tales, they are rather masculine ones, right: The Ten Thousand Tales of the Five Emperors, you know….

…. I find that these stories are difficult to understand, essentially for three reasons, I think: (a) first simply say the names, the most obvious example of its being a translated text full of ordinary cultural elements unfamiliar to ordinary paleface Americans, (b) it describes non-ordinary consciousness, which I don’t really understand all that ~well~, but I can kinda pick up on when it has more to do with different consciousness—ie “random nonsense” or whatever to BigAtheist332 on Threads—than what that guy would call “delightfully sexist”, you know: oh no wait—he has a problem with sexism, if mostly other people’s; it’s racism he finds delightful, right…. I guess if his were a straight politics account it would be the opposite, which is mostly the same, because either way it’s hating whatever you were gonna hate anyway, right—but yeah, it’s not too hard to separate out the gender-delusion rich passages from the nature-consciousness rich passages, at the very least, and (c) just the amount of story packed tightly into short passages, makes this book, literally quite moderately lengthed, the equivalent of a much longer book, perhaps with much larger pages and smaller type, too…. But yeah, it’s not the same long-single-story format as “The Mists of Avalon”—it’s more Collected Short Stories, than Epic Standalone Novel—but it has a similar amount of meaning to be unpacked.

…. It’s nice that there’s Kwan Yin (although she’s not Kwan Yin yet, I guess? where I am in the story….), so that the women have something, even if it’s kinda a Good Nurse, you know, although I do think that ‘perfection’ is just as temporary as ‘wealth and glory’ or however she put it, right. No light without darkness. Perhaps that is the way it is supposed to be. ‘Beauty and ugliness create each other’, etc., for an Asian example, or probably half a dozen lines in that Oscar Wilde play, ‘Lady Windemere’s (sp?) Fan’, for a more pop-style example…. Perhaps that that is what makes things good, is the bad; Buddhists have said things like that, too. Of course, with girls, heavy lie the expectations of asceticism, you know—it’s like the “Lion King” movie: if the girl were partying with girlfriends while the boy and his male friends were singing that song with the funny words, why, “then, things would not be right….” Though it’s of course hard to gage from the words on paper whether she was motivated by love of death, death’s purity, aversion to life’s stain; or, whether it was just legitimate business, you know—sometimes, somebody has to take care of other people’s children, and that is one of the principal concerns of governments and religions that are strong/competent/non-predatory, you know….

…. But yeah, if I didn’t have about five years’ worth of tarot and oracle decks to meditate through—more at this rate; I’m on a hiatus—I’d have to buy that Kwan Yin Oracle, right. I don’t know, but perfection…. It can work, right. (shrugs)

…. The gods make less of an impression of me, I guess, although they seem like charming fellows. I guess if I ever encounter a hostile ghost I can call upon Kuan Ti, right: he could do me a solid, scare that bugger off. 👌

…. The Three Pure Ones (Taoism):

—Yüan-shih T’ien-tsun: “He has all the power of Heaven and earth in his hands.”
—Shang Ch’ing: “He is the custodian of the sacred books…. (and) regulates the relations of the yin and yang—the two great principles of nature.”
—Lao Tzǔ: “Under various assumed names he appears as the teacher of kings and emperors, the reformer of successive generations.”

…. The gods of:

—Happiness: Fu Shên
—Riches: Chao Kung-ming
—Longevity: Shou Hsing

…. The cultural is formed out of the animal.

…. But yeah, in the old stories are not only records of questionable social choices or societal customs, but the knowledge that humans may interact with the gods, both becoming their friends, and learning their wisdom.

…. It is always curious reading folklore and myths as something other than an exercise in Victorianism and keeping the children quiet, you know. Of course, the world is a magical, wonderful place; and of course, sometimes there is misery, division, and defeat, you know.

…. And yeah, of course it has to end with Tribal Hoomi’s Tales of the Ugly Grotesque Freaks From Outside the Four Walls of [ENTER COUNTRY NAME HERE], right.

(sighs) That’s not how I would have ended it, right. I would have ended it with something romantic. The old Chinese liked their girls very polite and almost neurotically virtuous, but they did obviously have some romantic stories, you know. I would have ended with one of those, right.

…. Maybe the reason why the men of this country are generally modestly hostile and prone to lying even when they have nothing to gain, and cannot but resort to force and deceit as soon as some small problem makes it convenient—co-operation and non-trivial respect would not enter into their mind, the only question is legal force, illegal force, and when to deceive—and why they burned their way across the whole fucking continent when they got here, so that no one would have the force to oppose their implausible lies, is because men in general just…. The bulk of men, I mean: they just perceive unconsciously, deny, and act out their reptilian nature, and do so by projecting it onto the men and women of some other tribe, or some convenient fool who is “against” them in a personal dispute, right. I am not saying there would necessarily be no war in a “good” world—I cannot imagine there being no competition; perhaps even war could be made honest in time, right. Certainly there is force—veiled, legal violence—inherent in even in the most forgettable (especially to the merchant, although God knows plenty of chumps are chimps, as well as merchants, right) commercial dispute, right…. A lawyer telling you to pay up isn’t so different than losing a war, and that is part of life, right….

But the war, and politics more generally, of the current developmental stage of humanity is basically mental illness: and specifically it’s basically the mental illness of men, of the bulk of men, right.… (more)