What was I going to talk about? This'll teach me to write the title, then go off to do something else.
Errrr...
Oh, right. Neo-Pagans. Spleen.
Well, okay, what distracted me was a realization of my own evolution, however, let's face it, y'all don't read this thing for personal revelations about me, and those of you who do, I certainly wouldn't want to be personally revelational to. At least not in public. Maybe Monday, assuming I remember (which I won't. I mean, c'mon, unless it involves an evil scheme, I've got the attention span of a neurotic chihuahua.)
However, for your amusement, I've put in the Other Lunatics page, whose link you will see at the top. I do this because I read journals from two seperate groups of weirdos, and not only does this make for extra work, but a lot of their links are broken. So this is a glorified bookmarks page, essentially. Share and enjoy.
Anyway, Neo-Pagans.
Well, this requires backstory (those of you playing the "SBC Drinking Game" may now take your swig of beer. thank you.). Recently, I wrote a sprawling monstrosity of a story entitled Superguy2k, which was denoted mainly by the fact that it involved shameless riffing of the whole Y2k thing, three authors, and Satan Himself getting struck repeatedly about the head. For those of you who have no clue what I just said, Superguy is an old (generally) humorous list-server involving tales of woe, spandex, and people getting hit in the ear. Occasionally, it doesn't suck! I post about one thing a year to it, which distinguishes me from most of the other authors, who don't. Last year's was fairly pretentious, so I went the complete opposite this year. But, regardless, it was a thing of wackiness. It also involved many old gods.
Now, we couldn't use the Greco-Romans, the Egyptians, or most of the Norse, since, well, those guys are a staple of super-hero stories and we wouldn't want to muddy the waters. But this leaves a plethora of dieties. Among them was my personal favorite, Er(e/i)shkigal, the Assyro-Babylonian goddess of the Underworld.
Now, being the kind of person who does research on this sort of thing, looking up info on Ereshkigal involved browsing a startling number of sites with 'magick' in the title. Magic! It's magic, you fools! If you want a different word, use 'sorcery'! Nobody uses that one any more! It's all yours! Anyway, what you quickly discover is that 1) Ereshkigal is a bad-ass. 2) Nobody likes a bad-ass goddess.
Now, you get into the area of people who are way too enthusiastic about this sort of thing. Such as going off on the fact that there were ancient goddesses who were pretty bad ass, and, hmm, the prevailing western religions don't exactly have any, now do they? These are the kinds of people who enthuse about Lillith (who admittedly gets treated pretty badly in the mythos, especially since she was apparently co-opted by the Jewish mythos from the Babylonian, where her name was Lilitu).
Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, but it seems rather, well, odd. I mean, granted, Lillith is pretty much the poster girl for aggrieved revenge, but is that kind of surl the kind of message we want to be sending to our children these days?
Hmm... surl.
Well, actually, yeah, I think it is. I think the world would be a better place if, instead of grinning and bearing it, we threatened to seek revenge for the injustices of the world, pursuing our targets to eternity and beyond.
Of course, this makes Christian groups bubble with surl, picking the name of Lillith as something to enthuse about. How dare anyone sympathize with the villain! Heaven forfend!
Well, it could be worse. They could be cheerful about Lilitu's mother. Yes, you guessed it, Ereshkigal, Assyrian goddess of death! Now that would make some cool news stories. "We're now entering the second day of the 'Ereshkigal Fair', named after the Babylonian goddess of death..."
Although I can see how it wouldn't go over too well.
You could do with worse figureheads, though. I mean, on the one hand, you've got Lillith, who just sort of has to sit around and take crap from people, and on the other, you've got Ereshkigal, who doesn't take crap from anyone, and who's perfectly content to threaten to pop open a "Night of the Living Dead" on the world if anyone screws around with her. Now that's someone you can look up to.
Of course, we don't like arbitrary, surly dieties these days. If she became mass-market, she'd quickly be reduced to touchy-feeliness. So perhaps it's better to let sleeping god(desse)s lie.
Uh. There was a point to all of this, really. Can't recall what it was, though.
Well, normally at this point blibbering about Neo-Pagans would lead, by natural progression, to Neil Gaiman, poster boy of goths everywhere. Now, this is for good reason, namely because Gaiman pretty much symbolizes gothiness. He's a pretty good writer, but his pretentions, or, at the very least, the pretentions of his fans, tend to overwhelm this, in the same way that New York's bigness tends to overwhelm the coolness of the Empire State Building. Gaiman seems to be at his best when working with someone else, or in someone else's playground. Now, he wrote a Babylon Five episode that was pretty cool. And Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett (who couldn't be pretentious if he tried) was a work of genius, but...
I'd like to snark on the Sandman stuff at this point, but I won't. For one thing, I hate to rip on things when I don't have full exposure to them, because, you know, I might actually be wrong (heaven forfend!). And the Sandman graphic novels have thus far resisted all my attempts to read them, in the same way that solid concrete resists attempts to walk through it. There are several reasons for this, which I will now detail.
Firstly, it takes itself, and is taken by others, in far too serious a manner. Maybe it's just one of those things, but I'm not the kind of person who can take things that seriously. Oh, sure, I can start out seriously, but the longer I maintain that seriousness, the more likely I am to be suddenly driven into fits of hysterical laughter by the sheer pompous absurdity of it all, because, let's face it, most of what we people tend to do ends up being pompous and absurd, we just don't realize it. I mean, look at neckties, for crying out loud.
Secondly, I dunno. Perhaps I was saturated by tales of magic at an early age. Perhaps it just conflicts with the cosmology I tend to maintain for my own writing exploits (and nothing is so ruinous of reading someone else's work as being a writer yourself). Perhaps it just showed up in one role playing game too many. But I'm really not a fan of the 'mental plane'. Hm, put that way, I think the X-Men are to blame. But anyway. Call it what you will, The Dreaming, The Astral Plane, The Land of Faerie. Something about it is nails on a chalkboard. The only - and I mean the ONLY - 'land of dreams' bit that I've encountered recently that hasn't at least made me groan softly, if not simply hurl the reading material in question across the room, was in Thieves & Kings. No, that means nothing to you. Go read it, damn your eyes!
Lastly, there's what we will call the enthusiasm factor. In the group I tend to meander around, there's a point which we've discovered it's possible for us to become saturated with other people's enthusiasm, to the point where merely mentioning the thing being enthused about is enough to make us break out in hives. My personal enthusiasm saturation o' meter is pretty much maxxed out when it comes to Sandman. Damn shame, but there you go.
So, given all this, I can't really tell if the impenetrability of some of Gaiman's stuff is due to it simply being nails on a chalkboard with regards to my way of thought, too perpendicular to ever be absorbed, or wether it's because I get a case of hives every time someone pronounces the capital in Dream.
I know that all of you Gaiman fans are now wailing and gnashing your teeth. Well, don't expect me to rend my clothing (I just got this shirt for Christmas!) and smear myself with ashes or something. I mean, what kind of surly bastard would I be if you agreed with me all the time?
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