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When I was watching I did get the feeling the stork was Thoth.
Yesss!! Trust your feelings, lad!!
I mean, dear God, do you know how much shit they put me through before I was deemed worthy of the revelation that Mr. Stork was “really” an allusion not to the Bird Bennu but to the Ibis?
…In the Egyptian story, Thoth looks out for his sister’s kid.
…And in the Greek accounts, Hermes often plays a role analogous to that of Mr. Stork. He takes charge of several of Apollo’s children at their birth; when Dionysus is miraculously born, it’s Hermes who carries the child to Orchomenus and delivers him into the hands of Ino; and after Pan’s mommy runs screaming from the monstrosity she’s just brought into the world, it’s Hermes who wraps the reject infant up warm and flies him off to Olympus, where the gods are delighted by the kid’s novelty.
Thoth/ Hermes/ Mr. Stork is the initiator.
(Funny… the Big Crime that magicians and witches have been accused of down through the years, over and over again, is cruelty to children. From the cannibal lady in “Hansel and Gretel” – to Crowley’s slaughter of the innocents in the Brit tabloids – to the Satanic Panic of the late twentieth century – a distinguishing feature of the magician in popular myth is that he or she will cheerfully abuse and murder children. Even when the “good” magician pops up in our stories, it can seem like he’s treated primarily in terms of his relationship with – and opposition to – all those other evil ones [“five points deducted from Slytherin for ritual child sacrifice”].
(Within the Western occult tradition, on the other hand, it appears that a distinguishing feature of the archetype of the magician – one of his characteristic functions, in fact – is that he looks out for the kids.
(Same goes for the archetype of the sorceress/ high priestess, queen of the witches Isis; though that doesn’t surprise me as much for some reason.
(Don’t know what any of this means. Your comments welcome. Maybe this is a question for the Magick forum?)
Re: why an elephant? I’m not sure I can give you a full answer to that one. I left the Seekrit Klub-howse before I got that far. But I feel that it’s at least partly because the elephant that learns to fly – like the alchemical “shit into gold” or “ice into fire” – serves as an apposite metaphor for the Great Work (“I been done seen near ‘bout everythin’…when I see an elephant fly...!") And is an expression of a particular kind of “crazy” optimism… Even when things seem utterly dark and hopeless, and you’re at the bottom of the worst kind of gravity well, and it seems like all that’s left to do is collapse into despair and apathy, the Initiate will gamble that “maybe the damned elephant can fly!”
The investigations of one element within The Company might throw some light on the pachyderm-Horus connection (although, to complicate matters, this element actually tended [tends?] to consider Dumbo as being a representative of Set – something to do with Dumbo’s pschent being all white, or something). Anyway…this study group consisted of a number of members who were interested in a story about one of Buddha’s adventures. At first glance it just seems like your common-or-garden “miracles of the saints”/ “our guy defeats the baddies” type yarn. One of Buddha’s enemies, his cousin Devadatta, gets an elephant drunk and then sets it free in the streets as B is strolling through town. The elephant goes mad, trampling on carriages and passers-by, smashing houses, spreading panic, and is about to kill a little girl crossing the road when B commands it to stop, whereupon it kneels down before him.
Now, the study group, informed by their understanding of the “pink elephants” sequence in Dumbo, eventually came to treat the Buddha story not as a simple morality-tale but rather as a description of a particular magical/ psychological/ alchemical operation – the details of the operation being encoded in the narrative, not unlike the idiom used by the old alchemical texts.
The members of this “antinomian” study group identified themselves with Devadatta, and interpreted the introduction of the drunken elephant to the city streets as referring to the introduction of a “dis-ordering” agent into the repressive, stagnating “natural order” or status quo. This preliminary chaos was necessary, they believed, before one could hear “the voice of the Buddha”.
While they styled themselves as “antinomian” and “LHP”, it would be inaccurate to suggest they read the story in terms of Devadatta vs. Buddha – rather, each element of the story was considered in pragmatic, practical terms, as a stage in the “alchemical process”. That process was treated and applied in various arenas, from the personal to political. (I should add that, unlike many within the order, they rejected the more literal interpretation of these stories, believing that the use of drugs was incompatible with true self-evolution). They also dabbled in a more cynical interpretation of these stories as a kind of “how to brainwash people” text.
I remember a hand-made Tarot card that a member of the study group showed to me once (this was not one of the “official” cards that were sometimes used in initiation ceremonies in the order as a whole). The card, a version of the traditional “Lightning-Struck Tower”, portrayed instead a pink elephant crashing through a city, demolishing buildings. I remember admiring the colours on the card, and how the pink of the drunken elephant complemented the martial red colour-scheme used by the artist.
Atu XVI – “The Tower” – is, of course, the major arcanum belonging to the war gods, including Horus. |
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