Secret Histories

Powers: Secret Histories is of course the title of John Berlyne's most excellent bibliography of Tim Powers's complete works. It is hard to get copies these days, so if you find one, hang on to it.

The whole idea of secret histories seems to date back at least to the Secret History of the 6th-century historian Procopius, a rather explicit account of the reign of Justinian Imperator. Procopius was, by accident of history, the last major historian of the ancient world.

Last night I sat in the lofty atmosphere of a rooftop reunion and absorbed the details of more secret history. We live in an age of hugely entangled information networks. So, once it is known that a certain history exists, it becomes hard to keep it secret. And that is what has happened to a specific secret history that has lain hidden in the depths of a certain scholastic institution.

It appears that some possibilities of human behaviour seem so at odds with conservative ideas of human behaviour that they become unbelievable. This is not an indictment of what liberals call a 'conservative mindset'. Rather, it is a fact that human thinking is inherently conservative. When things happen to challenge those conceptions, cognitive dissonance is produced; when that is resolved, learning occurs.

So it is with secret histories. From morning to night, I learnt many things which fit well with my own carefully compiled institutional history. The term 'principal researcher' has taken on a new meaning, these days.

But some will argue, why keep secret histories? Why not just bury the facts or expose them all?

The thing about deadly facts (such as how to make a doomsday device) is that to keep them safe but not forgotten is better than to have them forgotten and accidentally misused, or to have them widely disseminated and deliberately abused.

The behaviours of individuals may taint an institution, but that should not always detract significantly from the reputation of that institution. As a wise man once said, "All houses have privies, but that does not make the houses privies."

We keep the secret places secret and honoured, because that is what some things are meant to be. By analogy with the human body, most humans do not insist that there are only two states of being: fully covered or fully exposed. Most of us resort to partial coverings, and many of us cover up the same places.

Now all that remains to be done is to clear up the mess that has been left behind. Of which, more will be made clear in the days ahead.

The Greater Trumps: (25) The Moon

Above all things beams the Moon. No innocent face this, but a face both wise and winsome, half in darkness and half in light. Twin pillars frame a gateway beneath it, and a river, its tide both rising and falling, runs through it. At the edge of vision, wolves howl, and odd creatures respond in their own peculiar ways. Everything is secret, and yet everything is seen; everything is possible, and yet everything seems impossible. This is the secret of the White Goddess.

Whether Selene, Diana, or Artemis, the moon in its phases has often been a symbol of fortune and of womanhood. But it would be unwise to see it as unrestrained and random fortune. Rather, just as womanhood is the source of birth, and the moon goes through both waxing and waning phases, the moon is generative and cyclical. You can ride it towards insanity or genius. In this light, the Moon therefore stands for Delusion (Deception?) or the creative productivity of the unfettered Mind.

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When I think of the Moon, I am irresistably drawn to the nightmare quality of Robert Graves's scholarship. In his odd anthropological opus, The White Goddess, he sculpts an image of mankind's religious history that is unsettling, and perhaps a little deranged. But oddly enough, I am drawn also to Khonsu, the Egyptian power of the Moon. Unusually, he is male, a god of knowledge and time. He was also a power of healing, and of madness. I think of Khonsu because, quite often, people tend to think of men as sane, stable and boring - hysteria, for example, comes from the Greek hystera, which means womb. But Khonsu shows that a male power can be pretty odd too.

Dylan Thomas was one for the odd visions. Here he is, in an excerpt from I See The Boys Of Summer:

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon - and midnight as she blows.

It's hard to imagine that he could say more about the moon. But he did. You'll have to see for yourself.