Usagi

All governments at this time needed money even more urgently than usual, and for the Rothschilds it was for a time a question of naming their own terms and picking and choosing among their possible debtors. The nobility of Prussia and Austria were equally in need; so that both the Viennese and Frankfort branches of the firm were also able to build up a lucrative business in making private loans.

The usual suspects. Debt and death. The scam laid out in a notshall. The branches have also branched. The names have changed. The dreaded lenders have now fused with what remains of the old nobility. By now this story, cosmetic and anodyne, is spoken openly everywhere. It explains, but explains mostly to obscure. It advances deeper agendas, darker intentions. Sculptors of belief, purchased with thin air. False piety to the moon.

Her principal error was that she confused these night travellers with the later "witches", and party by manipulating the texts, she constructed a "cult of Diana" which, if at all, existed only in the imagination of some inquisitors and demonologists.

The onion stripped of another layer of skin. The willful manipulation of texts. Change one letter and you will alter reality. Down through the memory hole. Whole new histories created, pre-histories, post-histories, alt-histories. A culture ensnared in the imagination of demonologists. Manufactured religions marketed as "Tradition," producing in actual life precisely what once only existed in design. Pseudo-initiation. Anti-poetry.

Long since great wits have left the stage
Unto the drollers of the age,
And noble numbers with good sense
Are like good works, grown an offense.
While much of verse (worse than old story,)
Speaks but Jack-Pudding, or John-Dory.
Such trash-admirers made us poor,
And pies turned poets out of door.

Stageless wits and homeless poets beg on the sidewalks and rummage through the dumpsters. But we are entertained. It is we who feed on trash. Drolling and pudding. An endless stream of delusion and distraction. Indebted, deceived, dull, we prefer formula fictions and sawdust pablum to the howling void. Symbols that are not symbols. Worse verse.   

Symbols must be true from top to bottom. But the interpretation of the symbols must rest, degree after degree, in the higher, responsible, conscious classes. To those who cannot divest themselves again of mental consciousness and definite idea, mentality and ideas are death, nails through their hands and feet.

Class enters here again. And interpretation. But both of these remain dubious. Neither plutocrat nor expert acts or speaks without being somewhat conscious of the pasteboard mask they act or speak through. Yet the vagabond rhymers do know the symbols. They have no cult or set tradition, with their eyes and their words they are marked by each other. They worship outside. 

Once fairly uprooted from his native Thracian soil, it was easy to plant Dionysos anywhere and everywhere wherever went his worshippers. His homeless splendour grows and grows till by the time of Diodorus his birthplace is completely apocryphal.

Dionysos the Crucified, god of homelessness and sense-derangement, true brother-lover of the moon. Even the apocryphal, whether manufactured or organic, can be a source of the ecstatic. Outside, where none is the number, every place is the centre. True Empire is located here. The time and place of the Incarnation can only be at the heart of the labyrinth.

That day the Yellow Emperor showed his palace to the poet. Little by little, step by step, they left behind, in long procession, the first westward-facing terraces which, like the jagged hemicycles of an almost unbounded amphitheater, stepped down into a paradise, a garden whose mental mirrors and intertwined hedges of juniper were a prefiguration of the labyrinth. 

Mental mirrors and juniper hedges mark a path further and further into the Thracian wild. Debt is impossible in this garden. How can anyone owe anything to anyone? Death is meaningless. Who dies? Who was born? There is no birthplace. The scams and shams and hams are all transmuted now. The show is about to begin at the theater of memory.