RETURNING HOME

The body petrified: an unfinished work by Michelangelo (left);
a casting from Pompeii (right)

One, now, may be reminded of the following lines from Spenser: "They crying creep out of their mothers woomb / So wailing backe go to their wofull toomb" — taken fittingly, here, from The Ruines of Time. However, the indulger of "uroboric incest," as we are told, does not wail in going back, but, rather, returns quite willingly. If so, might he also occasion to mark this return, or to signify his willingness in some other way? Might he build, or identify with certain structures that somehow represent his unusual longings? Would he empathize with certain forms that attain toward his objectives; with certain locations that embody his intentions?

What, then, of one who seeks not "incest" per se, but ouroboric annihilation? One who is not merely satisfied with cyclic return, but who wishes to slay from within the Great Mother of animacy; of swirling, churning birth-death-rebirth. One who yearns for that "ocean of pleasure" to freeze right over, or, better still, to dry up completely. Might one such as he look with dim nostalgia into the mineral indifference of a stoney riverbed — only to find, perhaps, with envious regret, the alien inanimacy of something other? Would he then find hope in something else — in a "stone" which man himself creates — and reason if he can create a stone himself, that he might, then, create of himself a stone? Would he set, at last, his peculiar work by a rushing stream, or some lapping shore, settle in for an indeterminate age, and await disintegration into everlasting changelessness? And, if so, who might this person be?

Perhaps one who penned such lines above, and also penned such lines as these:

Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd
Vpon the pillours of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:
For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.

These are, in fact, the final lines of Spenser's Faerie Queene — from the so-called "Mutabilitie Cantos," appended posthumously to his unfinished work. As a whole, this epic poem was intended to show the perfection of Arthur, in virtuous kingship, through he and his knights' allegorical questings for Gloriana, the titular Fairy Queen herself. The seemingly unrelated Cantos, however, depict a grand legal contest for universal power between God and Mutability, constancy and change, wherein the latter is judged, at last, by Mother Nature to be subservient to the former — somewhat after the Heraclitus dictum that change itself is an unfailing constant, and somewhat after a singular Christian eschatology as writ in the lines above.

We will recall Spenser and his Faerie Queene from Clarinda Park and the East Don ruin — that now expressly pointed symbol of a broken weir or dam; the thing which once controlled the water and now permits the flood. Might we then, from here, presume some deeper affinity between this particular author and the rest of our structures? There are certainly further lines to be drawn from his writings to our toponymical studies. Indeed, in the first book of The Faerie Queene alone we are met with a redolent cast of characters that includes not only our ubiquitous Arthur, but also one Queen Lucifera, a faun-begotten Sir Satyrane, the gogonesque serpent-woman Errour, and a certain figure known as Despayre who provokes all those willing into suicide. Then, of course, we have the Redcrosse Knight, who drinks of magic pools, slays a dragon in Eden, and is revealed, at last, to be St. George himself. The overall arc of the story, as well, may be seen as analogous with our ouroboric mythos; from the hero-king's gradual union with a mystical queen, to that final appeal, by way of a "Great Mother," to the cause of eternal stasis.

The Redcrosse Knight defeats Errour in William Kent's 1751 illustration to The Faerie Queene

Spenser, however, in all liklihood, was far too worldly a man to subscribe with any of our peculiar business here. Both his life and his work dealt mainly with social, political, and moralistic concerns. His fairy queen was Elizabeth I, his Arthur was England itself. His heart was for chivalry and Protestant ethics, not ouroboric incest or annihilation. Even his inertia was a divinely fated release from decay, and not some mortally enforced commitment to permanent concretion. Any followers of his would be cognizant of such facts, and thus unlikely suspects in the case of our ruins. Nevertheless, others could still make use of his prolific symbology, or make of the man a symbol himself. But this leaves him, once more, just one symbol out of many — and leaves us no closer to the source of these stones.

Pursuant to this aim, there are those, because of certain recurrent themes, who have read into Spenser leanings of a vaguely Gnostic bent. Of course, any such leanings might well tend to be vague considering the catch-all nature of this term. That said, all of the various cults, sects, and schools which have existed under the rubric of "Gnosticism," since the dawn of Christianity into the present day, typically seem to share a common intent on deliverance from what is perceived as a fallen, material world — one in which man is kept ignorant and fearful by a false deity who has eclipsed the true light of an original, hidden god, or higher form of wisdom. In their opposition to this "demiurge" and rejection of all his creation (their own mortal lives included), the Gnostics would seem to travel in uniquely ouroboric territory, somewhat related to our own. As this general state is treated by Neumann:

The picture becomes more complicated when the hero ceases to be an instrument of the gods and begins to play his own independent part as a human being; and when he finally becomes, in modern man, a battleground for suprapersonal forces, where the human ego pits itself against the deity ... The most typical example of this is the Promethean theft of fire; another is the story of Paradise as interpreted by the Gnostics. Here Jehovah is the vengeful old god, while Adam, in league with Eve and the serpent, is the hero who imparts new knowledge to mankind.

This specifically appears as an inversion of the expected biblical "red king" motif in which the serpent would be the antagonistic element of the quartet — just as Satan/Lucifer would presumably serve this role against Jesus, Mary, and God in the Gospel version of this archetype. Indeed, Lucifer, in the looking-glass view of the Gnostics, is often cited by name as the saviour of man; messenger of the hidden god, if not this god himself. As symbolized by the mysterious figure of Abraxas, he is the serpent-legged warrior who stands beyond good and evil, life and death. Alongside this hero the Gnostics wage war on vitality — on the earthly, the temporal, the carnal, the animate; to the point of condemning procreation itself so as not to further populate a deceptive, sinful world. Yet all of this is not to say that the Gnostics would have truck with any of our absolute inanimacy. As Neumann notes:

In Gnosticism, the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side; whereas uroboric salvation through the Great Mother demands the abandonment of the conscious principle and a homecoming to the unconscious.

As much might be said of those elder "Gnostics" further to the east — those Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains who aspire toward enigmatic states of moksha or nirvana wherein one attains release from endless rebirth by way of some conscious enlightenment. Certain teachings and practices of their more hard-line adherents would seem, nonetheless, to align them closer to our own preoccupations than not. One will often hear, for example, tales of the ascetic saddhu who, in search of liberation, has stood motionless in one spot for not hours, but years; who has had himself buried, or been left up a tree, maintaining some form of physical inertia to the point of irreversible atrophy. Such acts prefigure the Christian tradition of self-mortifying hermits who imposed on themselves similar ordeals. Here we might speak of St. Thalelaeus who allegedly imprisoned himself for 10 years in a cage hardly bigger than himself, or, then, of the famed Stylites who, apropos of our current research, stranded themselves atop ruined pillars in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. But these were all means to quite other ends, committed either to aid in the contemplation of Christ, or in penance for sins of their own. To the Indian ascetic, though, such cessation of activity is all to the plan of a much greater cessation, enacted to stem the accumulation of karma which keeps one in the grips of eternal samsara, the wheel of unending reincarnation.

A 6th century Syrian plaque depicting the Stylite St. Simeon harassed by a serpent (left);
Buddha in meditation upon the great snake Naga, from a 14th century Thai carving (right)

The Jains, in particular, seem rigorously impelled toward this goal, appearing prepossessed more than any with the cause of inanimacy. To them, the woes of the world and the tragedy of life are not, as the Gnostics contend, due to the actions of some fraudulent deity, but, rather, they are due to action itself. As Paul Dundas writes in his study of The Jains, "action, whether done, caused or condoned by oneself, brings about rebirth, and the world is in a state of suffering caused by the actions of ignorant people." Here one is not concerned with "good" actions or "bad" (as is the case with most karmic religions), but all and any actions of any type or purpose. This flight from animacy, however, does not necessarily conclude in total azoic inertia. Instead, it concludes in some existence "about which," as the Acaranga Sutra (one of the earliest Jain texts) professes, "no statements of mundane knowledge can be made and which the mind cannot fathom," yet can still be positively construed as "having knowledge and sentience." Dundas, for his part, manages to cobble from various sources a somewhat more detailed account of this deliverance into moksha:

The jiva [soul] becomes free from its body and the occluding force of karma. It then rises through innate capability in one instant, without coming into contact with any of the entities which permeate the loka [material world], to the realm of the siddhas, the liberated jivas at the top of the universe where it will exist perpetually without any further rebirth in a disembodied and genderless state of perfect joy, energy, consciousness and knowledge.

Such is clearly not the mineral inanimacy — the ouroboric annihilation — as envisioned for any theorized claimants to our local set of ruins. Instead, these Gnostics, Jains, and ascetic Christians are all engaged in what Neumann would deem "heroic incest," a return to the womb so as to transcend it; a baptismal rebirth into a higher plane of consciousness. Yet we, of course, seek those who wish neither to heighten the conscious aspect, nor return to the unconscious realm, but, rather, those who wish to remove consciousness from the equation all together. That said, it is still interesting to note that each of these close correlates seem to arrive from a shared Indo-European lineage, with its distant echoes of grammatical animacy — the oriental branch rising, in part, out of the Aryan Vedic traditions of northern India, and the occidental branch arising mainly from the over-arching Hellenistic and Byzantine milieu of the Near East during the Common Era's first few centuries. If we now consider a more direct line between language and the etiology of our subject, it suddenly occurs that we may, all along, have been casting our net rather too far and wide. Recalling the animate/inanimate gender division of the Anishaanabe dialects native to this area, could it be that the true roots of this phenomena have been right under our noses this entire time?

Looking back to our investigation of the South Humber obelisks, we might now summon that moose-antler comb found at Thunderbird Mound, just upstream from this site, described as depicting "a panther with a rattlesnake tail, transforming into a bear and then into a human shape." Putting aside the fact that this artifact was unearthed from an Iroquoian burial mound (Iroquoian having only vague linguistic ties to animacy), it is thought that the figure upon it, at least in part, represents the mythological Anishaanabe entity, Mishipeshu; antagonist of countless tales told by First Nations peoples across the Great Lakes region. As we read of Mishipeshu in The Canadian Encyclopedia:

This fantastic dragon-like animal resembles a feline with horns, symbols of his power. It has palmed paws that enable him to swim fast, and his back and tail are covered with scales [it is sometimes said that the horns and scales of Mishipeshu are made of pure copper, and most Indigenous populations in the Great Lakes see those aquatic monsters as the guardians of this metal]. Mishipeshu lives in the depths of big lakes. Although he has a feline shape and is an amphibian, he is always described as a reptile.

Thunderbird Mound artifact

Here we will note of this chimerical beast a slight resemblance to the aforementioned Tutu — Egyptian god of sleep and death, who was depicted as a sphinx with a serpent for a tail — as well as to the original Lycian Chimera, being lion-serpent-and-goat in one, later slain by doomed Bellerophon astride familiar Pegasus. This odd feline-reptilian-aquatic composition is not, in fact, all that uncommon, but rather seems to serve as a template for much of the world's dragon mythology. Julian Franklyn, in his compendious 1960 work Shield and Crest, expounds upon the dragon's heraldic and historic significance, while recapitulating many of the denotative observations we have already made regarding this creature:

The dragon was primarily a personification of the life-giving-and-destroying power of water ... He is the water-god and the sun-god, and is himself symbolic of both good and evil, a dichotomy he shares with the dragon-slayer, as well as with the weapon of slaughter. The dragon, as conceived in Egyptian myth, is both Osiris and his enemy Set. He is also the Great Mother and the lioness, combining opposite attributes in one form; hence, in the earliest pictorial representation of the dragon, which is to be seen on a cylinder-seal from Susa, he is drawn as a compound of eagle in the forepart and lion in the hindpart.

We might now give some further consideration to those alchemical and astrological connections between lions and our "red king." Then, with respect to the last detail above, we should also note that Susa (originally Shush, or Shushun) was the capital city of the Elamites (a culture roughly contemporary with the nearby ancient Sumerians, which developed around the northern end of the Persian Gulf) who, along with the Sumerians and Anishaanabe, spoke a language defined by its use of grammatical animacy. We mention this because the Sumerians, and their Mesopotamian descendents, had their own equally established tradition of dragons (recalling, of course, Tiamat and Labbu) — with one in particular, by the name of Mushhushshu, drawing special attention here.

This dragon was most notably represented by the Babylonians on Nebuchadnezzar II's famed Ishtar Gate, appearing somewhat as an opposite of the bizarre Susa beast, having a feline forepart, an aquiline hindpart, and the head and tail of a serpent. What most catches the eye, however, is the strained yet striking phonological resemblance between Shush (Susa), Mushhushshu, and Mishipeshu. While the latter is conventionally translated as "great lynx" or "panther," and the former is seemingly locked in a cyclical etymology with a tutelary god called Inshushinak (a satyr, or minotaur-like figure, unhelpfully translated by scholars as simply "lord of Shush"), we will note of "Mushhushshu" that this name likely derives from the Sumerian muš + ḫ(r)usu, meaning "red snake." We will then note the symbolic association of Mushhushshu with Marduk (linchpin of our Mesopotamian "red king" trilogy), coming by way of the local Sumerian god Tišpak, whom Marduk replaced in his homeland of Eshnunna following the Babylonian conquest this area (an area, it should be observed, which was previously under control of the Elamites) — and whom Lurker also contends was possibly "taken over by the Hurrian weather-god Tešub" (otherwise known as our Hittite Tarhund).

Tišpak seemingly gained his association with Mushhushshu through inheritance from an even older god, Ninazu, and/or by slaying this dragon in an early version of the myth of Labbu (who's name, we have been remiss in mentioning, may very well come from the Old Akkadian word for "lion"), although in some texts he is found declining to slay this beast, leaving the obligation to another unnamed god (and thus leaving the way clear for later tales of Marduk and Tiamat). All three would then gain association with Shush and Inshushinak by way of the direct cultural/political influence detailed above, as well as a potentially shared iconography, noting a certain recurrent Elamite motif of an unidentified deity (possibly Inshushinak) who dons a horned crown, wields water from a magic sceptor, and sits upon a coiled serpent throne (recalling, now, the horned crown of Enlil, unleasher of the great flood, creator of the serpent Labbu and, by some accounts, father of Ninazu as well). But here, again, we are trolling our net along rather distant shores.

Four feline dragons: Tutu (top left), Chimera (top right),
Mushhushshu (bottom left), and Mishipeshu (bottom right)

Having thus attempted the case for a Shush-Mushhushshu correlation, as we return to the shores of Lake Ontario we now assume the much more difficult task of establishing a Mushhushshu-Mishipeshu connection. Whereas the Elamites and Sumerians were separated by only the Tigris River (and, as such, were often not separate at all), both are separated from the Anishaanabe by two continents and an ocean — and then by how many ages?

One is tempted, here, to invoke various fringe theories of far-flung prehistoric contacts and improbable reverse-migrations; or, then, of common global roots in some lost Atlantean diaspora (though such tales of a sunken world agree with certain themes already discussed, thinking here of Donn's Atlantic abode, Tech Duinn, or another episode involving Midas and Silenos, wherein the latter tells of a hidden land inhabited by the mysterious "Meropes"). One is, perhaps, most tempted to cite the controversial Walam Olum, or "Red Record," an allegedly ancient birch-bark document which tells of the exodus of the Algonquian Lenni Lenape people (ancestors of the Anishaanabe) into North America from Eurasia roughly 3,600 years ago (thus allowing for a possible chronological alignment with either the Sumerians or the Elamites), and which also involves the extraordinary tale of a serpent and a flood — but which is, almost certainly, a 19th century hoax created by the eccentric French-American polymath Constantine Rafinesque. Still, it is interesting to compare such postulations with further descriptions of Mishipeshu from The Canadian Encyclopedia:

He is feared by all Ojibwa because he is the cause of waves, rapids and whirlpools, and he even breaks the ice in winter, thus claiming numerous victims. In the area of Churchill River, there used to be a game called 'Mishipeshu' that symbolized this being's drowning power. A child, randomly selected, held the role of the aquatic monster; he had to catch his friends and throw them into the water ... Although the most important enemy of the Mishipeshu and other underworld reptiles was the Thunderbird, these also had to face the destruction programmed by Nanabozo in the myth that tells how the world was destroyed by a catastrophic flood.

Here, again, we entertain notions of drowning and floods, Maelstrom-like whirlpools and mock child sacrifice. Intriguing, then, that our artifact (still assuming it depicts Mishipeshu) would be found at "Teiaiagon" which "crosses the stream." Even more so that it was unearthed at one "Thunderbird Mound," a site named for the mortal enemy of this monstrous beast. We must then consider this Thunderbird (who, as the name implies, assumes the attributes and functions of lightening and storms) in relation to the various other dragon-fighting storm-gods of our conglomerate "red king" — Marduk and Tarhund (Tešub/Tišpak) being not least among them. Here we also seem to have a faint linguistic affinity between Nanabozo (Promethean trickster-hero of the Anishaanabe, patron of the medicine man), and Ninazu (the Sumerian underworld god of healing, whose name, by Lurker, means "master physician"). Any further connections, however, would still leave us with that cultural crossing of half the world to account for.

Leaving, then, the logistical and geographic problems of this matter aside, let us simply recall the "red snake" aspect of Mushhushshu's Sumerian name, while noting once more the horns and scales of Mishipeshu which are "made of pure copper," that most golden-red of all the metals. Here we might observe that the Thunderbird Mound artifact was found alongside of a copper pot, adding that copper is linked through both astrology and alchemy to the planet Venus (hence to Lucifer, hence to Ishtar, hence to Marduk and Mushhushshu). We'll note also that the stone Hittite sea-monster Ullikummi was, according to Gurney, defeated by Tarhund in part by the use of a magical copper knife. This particular tale may, in fact, be read as somewhat historically symbolic (whether this was intentional or not), metaphorically representing the passage of the Neolithic "Stone Age" into the Chalcolithic, or "Copper Age" — the period running roughly between 3,500 and 1,500 BC which, while somewhat overlapping/conflating with the "Bronze Age" (bronze, of course, being a copper alloy), marks the birth of modern civilization through the wide-spread discovery/implementation of metallurgy. This discovery, as it happens, then relates to that of concrete, both of which Courland has emerging from the invention of those lime kilns mentioned earlier:

It is no coincidence that fired ceramics make an appearance soon after the invention of the limekiln ... Ceramic technology was quickly followed by metallurgy ... Since copper metallurgy arose after the invention of lime and ceramic kilns, it seems probable that the copper was put into a kiln to make it easier to work with.

And so, in this way, it was concrete that gave birth to copper smelting, that then gave birth to the modern world. Did it also, then, birth Mishipeshu and Mushhushshu, Chaoskampf and the "red king," words of animacy and thoughts of the inanimate? We'll note that it was during the dawn of the Chalcolithic that the first writing appears, in Sumerian and Elamite. It was then, during the close of this period, that the Anishaanabe (or their Algonquian ancestors) began to impede on the lands of the "Old Copper Complex," a mysterious copper-mining civilization which encompassed the Great Lakes and ran roughly concurrent with both Sumer and Elam. It was also somewhere in the midst of this era that the melding of copper with tin resulted in the eponymous material of the aforementioned Bronze Age — leading directly to subsequent alloys and eras, most notably that which arose from the ensuing Iron Age: our mighty, reinforcing steel. In such fashion, these developments represent a millennia-long form of ouroboric return, as the tawny "red king" of copper arrives out of concrete, through the flaming red fire of lime kiln metallurgy, only to find its way back into concrete again as the rusty "red king" of steel rebar.

Stoking the fire and returning to water; detail from the Splendor Solis

Pointedly, it was the large-scale production of these new materials, particularly in the Old World, that led to the hyper-animate urban/industrial society which replaced early man's traditional nomadic/agricultural lifestyle. One can almost imagine the noise and clamour of their primeval foundries keeping those first Mesopotamian gods from their divine slumber, and thus serving as the catalyst for Jacobsen's theomachy of motion versus rest. One might also imagine some who, being dissatisfied with this march into unchallenged modernity, could sympathize with they who sent dragons and floods to return everything back to its natural, inanimate state — or who, likewise, might personify such technological progress as a copper-scaled beast that would drag mankind down in its watery lair, to drown us in the darkest depths of some existential abyss. In this light, perhaps, the embedding of fabricated metal into concrete was not always meant for the purpose of mere structural reinforcement, but, rather, in certain symbolic cases, represents the burial or entombment of this material (and all that it stands for) back in the substance from whence it originally came — the "red king," as such, sent to sleep in the mountain; devoured by the lion; devoured by his parent; subsumed by the whole.

The question still remains, however: can we put a name to any who might enact this process — can we affix any definite I.D. to our hypothetical ruin-tenders? Are we to seriously entertain some continuous transfer of animacy-based traditions from Mesopotamia to Toronto?; from the Sumerians or the Elamites, to the Old Copper Complex, to the Anishaanabe and the Iroquois, the French and the British, then finally to us in the present day? Or, shall we reconsider some other aforementioned route, through Egypt, India, or Anatolia; via the Greeks, the Norse, or the Celts; then, by some way, through Yorkshire, or elsewhere? Or, will it simply suffice to find someone familiar enough with this vast, intercultural web of symbolic reference to make use of it towards their own particular ends? Someone familiar enough as we ourselves are now? ...And, if that someone could now be us, could that someone not also be pretty much anyone?

Well, perhaps not quite anyone. Holding fast to the course of our speculations, such a person or group would, at least, require the ability to raise or maintain structures in toponymically significant areas of the city — or, conversely, have the authority to place significant toponyms in the area of pre-existing structures. Returning to our introductory discussion of the status of concrete across Toronto, might it not best serve our hypothetical suspects to have the power to accomplish both? If so, such power points directly to municipal government. But to what specific element of the government might we attribute these doings?