The Prophet and the King: A Fable

In a certain beautiful land over the mountains and across the sea lived a wise king who ruled over a great and prosperous kingdom. The king lived in a grand palace that sat atop the eastern hills overlooking his capitol city, and every morning rosy-fingered dawn touched its marble columns before bestowing her gifts on the rest of the land. Within the palace were wonders unimaginable; exotic beasts from the southern provinces, whole rooms full of gold plundered in the northern campaigns, and an entire library filled with all of the wisdom of the eastern sages.

The king lived a happy, peaceful life, rarely needing to leave his palace for any reason. One day, however, the kings ministers came to him with a report.

“O King live forever,” the head minister said, bowing before the throne. “A prophet has come among our people and goes among them, prophesying to the poor and destitute.”

“What,” scoffed the king, “to the poor! What has a prophet to gain by offering his services to such as they?”

The king ordered his litter that he might go out and see such a paradox for himself, and was carried out into the cobblestone streets of his great city. There he saw many things; great mansions and temples, and also the destitution of the poor; cripples and blind men sat at the gates begging for alms.

At last the king saw the prophet, an old man dressed in sackcloth with long, unkempt hair. The king watched as the prophet knelt by an old beggar and whispered something into his ear. The poor man’s face broke into a wide smile as the prophet rose and walked on. Next, the prophet knelt by a blind woman and spoke into her ear. Again, the blind woman’s face broke into a brilliant smile.

“It is always like this,” the king’s minister said to him. “He speaks to those in pain and in times of trouble, and what he says brings them great joy.”

“I see,” the king said. “Invite him to the palace.”

That evening the prophet appeared before the throne of the king and bowed in deference.

“O King live forever,” the prophet said. “How may I serve you?”

“Prophesy to me,” the king said. “You will be well paid for your help.”

“I expect no payment,” the prophet said evenly. “But before I speak, let me say this: I give the same prophecy to any man who asks for it. I will give you the same fortune as I gave to the beggar and the blind woman. Do you still wish to hear it?”

The king remembered the joy on the faces of those the prophet spoke to and nodded, leaning forward eagerly.

“Very well. Hear, then, your prophecy, O King.” The prophet waved to the great palace and all of the king’s earthly belongings and looked at the king. “This, too, shall pass.”

Of Sigils

Mystical symbols have always held a fascination with the human mind, to the extent that they are an integral part of most major world religions. Consider the star and crescent of Islam, the Christian cross, or the eight-spoke wheel of the Buddha, for instance. Voodoo uses “veves”—symbols representing the loa spirits—in its rituals, believing that the placement of a veve beneath a sacrifice links the sacrifice to the loa of the veve.

A number of pagan superstitions have combined in the modern age to form the idea of a sigil—a symbol used to invoke magical power. Medieval magicians believed they could use sigils to summon specific angels or demons, while the Jewish practice of Kaballah uses them for everything from protective spells to representative names for God to the creation of healing amulets.

While the efficacy of sigils in the physical world has yet to be proven, there is another realm in which they have an undisputed power.

That realm is art. The greatest artists in human history, whether literary or visual, have used sigils to shape the thoughts and emotions of their audiences in powerful ways. There are two basic kinds of sigil: imagistic and poetic.

What about music? an observer might ask. Excellent question, and easily answered; music doesn’t need to incorporate sigils, simply because music is itself a sigil. Music shapes the subconscious from within in exactly the same way a powerful artistic sigil does. A combination of the two, in a lyrical composition or musical play, can be staggering in its effect.

Imagistic sigils are those images which are powerful in and of themselves. A red rose is an imagistic sigil, as is a craggy mountain, a thunderstorm, a sword, a skull, or a raven, to name just a few. Combinations of these images—a raven perched on a skull, say, or a red rose growing atop a mountain beneath a sky of lowering thunderheads—have a subconscious effect to all observers, no matter what his or her language and background.

Poetic sigils, on the other hand, are linguistically powerful; the sound of the word is the effective element rather than its meaning. Latin is full of poetic sigils; consider “requiem” and “veritas,” to name just a few. There is a reason so many mottos are converted into Latin; doing so gives them a sigilistic power they lack in common English. Certain combinations of words also have the effect of poetic sigils; “something wicked this way comes” and “these are the times that try men’s souls” are two famous literary examples. Poetic sigils depend heavily on the rhythm and tone of individual syllables; again, note the relationship to music.

Artists have always used sigils to great effect, but they are especially visible in literature. Poe, for example, was a master at the use of dark and ominous sigils throughout his writing—The Raven, for example, makes use of both imagistic sigils (the raven, the doorway) as well as poetic sigils (“quoth the raven: nevermore”) to great effect.

To take a more recent example, Stephen King makes heavy use of imagistic sigils in his Dark Tower series to instill the work with a sense of legend and antiquity it would not otherwise have. The book opens with a lone gunslinger crossing a barren desert; both the figure of the American-style gunslinger and a desolate desert are powerful imagistic sigils. The entire series is about a great black tower built in a field of red roses. Again, both are very powerful imagistic sigils—Tolkein also uses the dark tower sigil in his Lord of the Rings series.

Perhaps the purest use of both imagistic and poetic sigils is in the field of poetry. There have been few masters greater in this regard than the immortal T.S. Eliot; consider the following lines from The Wasteland.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Eliot uses several imagistic sigils to convey a feeling of desolation—the desert, the shadow, the dead tree, and dust—combined with a poetic structure so strong as to be a poetic sigil in and of itself. The result is the almost overpowering—and almost unexplainable—effect of reading Eliot’s work.

The audience comes to an artist to be changed. The indescribable way in which a reader’s subconscious is shaped is a direct effect—like the emotions of one listening to a great symphony—by the powerful magic of artistic sigils.

The Obsolescence of Masculinity, Concluded

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on" …

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

- “If,” by Rudyard Kipling

So. Is it over? Have we been emasculated? Is there any place left in our world for the old ideals of manhood? Is the very term “manhood” obsolete in this age of feminism and political correctness?

It is tempting to think so, for believing it frees us from the responsibility to do anything about it. We can sit back on our sofas and watch the football game or daydream to the theme of Fight Club. We can abandon the pretense and allow ourselves to be used where we are placed—passive sentence structure for terminally passive lives.

If you are nodding your head in resignation, you’ve already lost.

If, instead, a spark inside you lights at the thought of passivity, then perhaps there may be hope yet. The world is still a dark and very dangerous place, though now the darkness lurks further beneath the surface and the dangers are more subtle ones. Our culture’s need for true masculinity is all the more greatly felt simply because masculinity is more rarely seen.

So what is a real man? How is a real man different from the “average guy” and his pack? Simply put, it is a matter of growth. The “average guy” is still a boy; only those who have achieved true masculinity can be classified as “men.”

A boy wishes to be strong. A man strives to become strong through physical discipline and training.

A boy wishes to be smart. A man practices intellectual discipline to broaden his mind.

A boy wishes for someone to depend upon him. A man protects the weak because they are weak, not because he needs their weakness.

A boy hates civilization for keeping him from his manhood. A man takes responsibility for his own actions and his own state and thus is a man.

A boy wants everything he sees, and defines himself by what he owns. A man’s possessions are the result of his own discipline in labor; he needs none of them.

A boy tries to “be tough” and not show his feelings, to the point of being harsh and uncaring. A man shows his feelings, but is emotionally resilient—there will be times when those around him need him to be strong, and in those times he will be immovable.

A boy wants to be tough, and does foolish things to try to prove that he is. A man doesn’t need to prove himself, but also doesn’t need comfort—if something in his life requires intense pain to achieve, he will undergo it without complaint.

A boy wants to be respected; he acts in order to gain that respect and fit in. A man does as his principles and personal desires dictate, without needing the respect of others. Interestingly enough, his lack of need for respect usually generates far more respect than the boy’s actions ever will.

A boy needs many things, and consumes them without appreciating their quality. A man appreciates the qualities and subtleties of many things, but needs none of them.

A boy acts on his whims and on the pressure of his pack; what he does, he does to impress others or to fulfill the needs of the moment. A man acts on his principles, and does not deviate from them.

A boy, upon being informed of a flaw in his character, convinces himself that the accuser is wrong and acts defensively. A man acts upon the criticism. Self-deception is lost with boyhood.

A boy wants to destroy the shackles that hold him back from manhood. A man has the courage to realize that the only thing holding him back is his own apathy.

Maybe it’s time to stop fantasizing about destroying a society that is emasculating us. Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about what “they” are doing to us, period. Maybe it’s time to start doing something ourselves. Get off the couch, turn off the television, and let go of all the things you don’t need.

Civilization is waiting.

The Obsolescence of Masculnity (Part III)

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men
who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering.
Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables;
slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing
cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy
shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history,
man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No
Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war...
our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been
raised on television to believe that one day we'd
all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But
we won't, and we're slowly learning that fact. And
we're very, very pissed off.

- Fight Club

Modern culture has lost its need for men to be men. Technology and societal infrastructures have shifted the requirements and leveled the playing field; the qualities of manliness that once made a man respected are no longer needed to live a comfortable life.

Even so, while society has eliminated the need for men to be men, the need for men to be respected as men is as strong as ever. It’s not good enough for a man to be “successful” or a “team player” or any of the other things that earn respect in society as a whole. Men need to be respected by other men as men; as tough, independent, and all of the other traits we’ve already discussed. This gets progressively more difficult as men become more and more entrenched in the corporate and modern family lifestyles, often leading to the “midlife crisis” problem so many modern Americans face.

Today’s men are fundamentally unsatisfied in a society that no longer needs them. The feeling that something is missing comes out in our daydreams; our art, our music, and our movies. We fantasize about the destruction of that which makes us obsolete with movies like Fight Club and Falling Down; what (we think) if we could simply break out of the routine and bring it all crashing down?

In Fight Club, infrastructure and consumerism are implicitly linked with emasculation; the main character starts a “fight club” that grows into a violent response to that as part of an attempt to return to masculinity through the collapse of civilization. “In the world I see,” Tyler Durden says, “you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

Falling Down’s premise is even more simple; a white-collar government worker going postal in a violent rebellion against white-collar society. Though the movie treats Michael Douglas’ character as a criminal, there is still a strong element of sympathy for him as he guns his way through his oppressively normal life in southern California.

We sit and we watch; we cheer on Project Mayhem as it tears apart a fictional civilization on our television screens as we drink our beer and hang with our pack of friends and, in the end, do nothing of consequence.

Who are we, then? Angry, obsolete members of a society that no longer needs us, shaking our fists in impotent rage even as we are left behind, we modern men bemoan the loss of true manhood even as we do nothing to get it back.

The only question left is whether the real man has any place in today’s society. We’ll try our best to address that issue in our fourth and final installment to this series.