I found this interesting, from the Pulse interview:
He's from a period before the corpus callosum developed and joined the two hemispheres of the human brain together, so he has an external conscience in the form of his horse. When Guilt assails him in issue 2, he experiences it as an actual monster from outside himself.
This hinges on the notion that lesser developed brains had to process complex thoughts/feelings as external forces, to make sense of them, to move them from the subconscious to the conscious mind - the idea taken to its extreme of monsters and gods being our crazy brains anthropomorphizing very difficult calculations. (ie., one of the explanations of what the Outer Church is/Archons are from the Invisibles)
Alan Moore explains the idea quite well in his annotations to From Hell (long excerpt ahead):
">One account in the Roman military logs tells how a column of troops had reached a river which they suspected was too fast and too deep for them to cross, even though the delay might add days to their march. At this point, the log records, the Great God Pan appeared, picked up one of the herald's trumpets, waded easily across the river and blew a fanfare upon reaching the opposite bank. Unsurprisingly, the soldiers took this to auger that they should cross the river, which they did in perfect safety and continued with heir march as planned.
>As Gull remarks here, medical researches seem to indicate that the corpus callosum - the strand of neural gristle that connects the twin lobes of our brain - has thickened and become more complex and efficient across the centuries. As a purely personal speculation, I would point out that in today's world, the act of crossing a busy road is similar to the problem afforded the Romans by the river. We judge, by looking and listening, how far away the approaching cars are, which way they are coming and how fast they are bearing down upon us. Somewhere in the depths of our subconscious an extremely complex calculation is performed at lightning speed, telling us how fast we need to walk in order to cross the road in safety. That message is then flashed from our unconscious right brain to our conscious left brain across the narrow causeway of gristle that connects the two.
>If we accept that in the past the connection between the two halves of the brain was less sophisticated, then presumably there would have been a different relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. Perhaps the subconscious of the Roman soldiers was perfectly capable of making lightning calculations as to the river's depth and the speed of its current, but was unable to pass it to their conscious minds in the direct manner that modern brains employ. Could it be that the visions of gods or supernatural figures that populate our histories are projections, messages from an unconscious that was at the time unable to communicate in any other way?
>Car Jung has suggested that even such comparatively modern phenomena as UFOs may be projections of what he terms the mass unconscious."
That last bit's also rather in line with Garg Margensen's other work and experiences, I would think. At any rate, an interesting bit about how divine visions of deities and monstrosities might connect with your average day to day experiences.
Nice to occasionally see the more grounded roots of headtrip sci-fi ideas. I know that in some particularly bad moments of fever I've had hallucinations that later seemed to be metaphors for things that had been troubling me emotionally. |
