"The Word is not a pet. The Word is the wildness behind creation, the terror of a black hole, the atomic violence of burning hydrogen within a sun. Christ is both lion and lamb, and lions are not domesticated."

    - Madeleine l'Engle, And It Was Good


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    "The Breton wizard Merlin was said to have spoken of the child's 'wondrous and unhoped for birth' and in dark mysterious words to have hinted at disaster. The child would be a lamb, to be torn in pieces, but not to be devoured ; he was to be a raging lion too amongst his own. The Calabrian Cistercian, the Abbot Joachim of Flora, the 'Fore-runner of St. Francis, was swift to recognise in the new-born child the future Scourge of the World, the Anti-Christ who was to bring confusion in his train. The Abbot, indeed, full of prophetic fire, was said to have informed the Emperor betimes that the Empress--overlain by a demon--was pregnant, without yet knowing of her pregnancy. The Empress too had had a dream and it had been revealed to her that she was to bear the fiery brand, the torch of Italy."

    - Frederick II
    by Ernst Kantorowicz
    (p. 4)

    "While the Old Testament prophets spoke of a King to come out of the living root of Jesse, the German legends allude to a Great Emperor literally revived from the dead, like Nero redivivus. Interestingly, Nostradamus offers us a variant of this same mythic motif in the following Quatrains:

    The tree that had long been dead and withered, In one night will come to turn green again: Cronus sick King, stump-footed Prince, ...

    The world on the verge of the end-Time, Saturn will return again late ...

    From these stanzas alone, it is incontrovertible that the good Doctor was well "versed" in the symbolic language of the Grail Legend. His reputation for obscurity notwithstanding, the prophet is quite direct in his references to the Maimed King, who he rightly associates with Cronus/Saturn -- the archetypal vegetative god of the pagan pantheon."

    - In Quest of the Grail The Second Coming

    "Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

    - William Butler Yeats



    "Cat's foot iron claw
    Neuro-surgeons scream for more
    At paranoia's poison door"

    Moses Breaking the Tables by Gustave Dore

Images of animal ("cat's foot") and human experimentation, "mad scientists" and a monstrous laboratory of inhuman demonic power ("iron claw").

"Constructed in opposition to Eros, the body, the feminine, and the unconscious, the technician ego-ideal becomes a psychotic and paranoid subject, radically fragmented and unable to cope with its ultimate inability to achieve omnipotence. The fears and desires that underlie the heroic figure of the scientist-engineer have persisted into twentieth-century literature and culture. Modern science fiction has wrestled with the technician as both hero-ideal and demonic shadow of industrialized civilization."

- Promethean Desires



And here, at the outset, Peter Sinfield presents the album's basic theme: the dominance of Thinking (Logos, Science) over Feeling (Eros) and its consequences.

"C. G. Jung employs the principles of logos and eros as two of the most fundamental orientations or functions of psyche. Lewis Hyde defines eros as "the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together" including, of course, sexual love, parental love, brotherly or sisterly love, etc. Logos, by contrast, is "reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular" (Hyde xiv). Logospowers are "law, authority, competition, hierarchy, and the exercise of royal or despotic will through the courts, the police and the military" (Hyde 197) and, on a more abstract plane, science, mathematics, and their application to engineering. Logos is one of the guiding principles upon which our western concept of masculine behavior is constructed, part of the masculinist opposition of body (Woman) and mind (Man). Logos is also associated with spirit: abstractly disembodied, conceived as transcendent, beyond history, beyond individuals, pure, true. From a standpoint that privileges these things, eros, in its intimate embodied nature, is impure, untrue, bound in matter, and so an enemy of "higher" things."

- Prometheus ex Machina
The Archetypal Technician and the Masculine Fire of Logos
by James W. Maertens

"The "higher" rational qualities are believed to be far superior to the emotional and physical characteristics of our nature. We are taught to transcend our "lower animal instincts". As Gratian put it, "Man, but not woman, is made in the image of God". This also translates into the concept that the Mind, but not the Body, is made in the image of God. Spirit, but not Nature, is made in the image of God.

This belief system virtually becomes a sword that splits the human psyche in half. The entire culture becomes schizophrenic. And consciousness erupts in many strange and violent ways. War and genocide is one expression of this pathological condition. The devaluation, torture and killing of women is another. The exploitation and physical destruction of the Earth is yet another. It is all part of the same psychic dysfunction."

- The Long Road Into Night

"Our culture, according to Christopher Lasch teaches us to withdraw into ourselves when we are confronted with stressful situations. It is a vicious circle. One of the main stressors of modern society is alienation and a pervasive sense of isolation. The solution our culture offers us - to further withdraw - only exacerbates the problem.

To ethnopsychologist George Devereux, the whole USA is afflicted by what came later to be called a "schizoid disorder". C. Fred Alford enumerates the symptoms: "...withdrawal, emotional aloofness, hyporeactivity (emotional flatness), sex without emotional involvement, segmentation and partial involvement (lack of interest and commitment to things outside oneself), fixation on oral-stage issues, regression, infantilism and depersonalization."

- NPD Central


"The schizoid personality overuses his thinking function at the expense of his feeling function."

- Phillip K. Dick




In the Beginning was the Word ~ Night Sounds
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In the Beginning was the Word ~ The Laboratory


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Chapter One The Metaphysical Record In The Court Of the Crimson King In The Wake Of Poseidon Lizard The King In Yellow The Sun King Eight
The Lake Which Mirrors the Sky In the Beginning Was the Word In the Beginning was the Word...side two Eros and Strife Dark Night of the Soul...Cirkus Dark Night of the Soul...Wilderness Big Top Islands
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