Demons, Daemons,
A Face on Mars.

By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company

The salamanders, tempestuous beings of the fire, are exceptionally wiggly at Cricket Song tonight. From the glass chambers and waxy cylinders which contain them, they let loose a hot, writhing dance upon the surfaces of the night, an orange tango on the polished walnut, the swift bolero of an Elemental on the painted gypsum.

They must be excited by the heated psychic energies of the moment. Mystery and possibility engulf the citadel as midnight approaches. The dog Buck, fierce and loyal, patrols the perimeter to fend off the prowling Chupacabras. Traces of chemtrail and contrail drift across the moonlit western sky.

Someone tells me that water pipes have been detected on the surface of Mars. They can be seen close-by the thousand-foot-high face of Cydonia, an artificial structure raised by a long-lost race to remind the Universe of the frailty of life.

Those were mysteries enough, but what set the fire a raging was news from Down Under that George Bush is a reptilian shape shifter, a member of the ancient serpent race which rules much of Earth under guise of human form. Hearing this startling revelation, I quickly decided I would vote for Gore or Nader. Then I heard that Gore may be one of them, too.

'Time and Space Died Yesterday'.
The salamander spirits who indwell the flames of Cricket Song's hundred candles, though invisible at the core, are more apparent to me than the face of Cydonia through the lenses of NASA spacecraft, more immanent than Buck's rival Chupacabras along the fence row, and more proximate than the reptilian-human hybrids of Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Plantagenets, and other blue-blood Illuminated Ones who surely must own us all.

"We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?" F. T. Marinetti wrote as Point Eight of the Manifesto of Futurism (1909). "Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed."

How fast can you clock the gigahertz machine? Do you think the salamanders, dancing in their cups, are aware of the fear they once engendered?

Time and again, one or another of the orthodox manifestations of the Church go forth to address the people and expose an ominous threat to the clergy's perceived hegemony o'er the souls of the masses. When the Prophet's message of love is insufficient, institutionalized hate will do just as well. Pointing out the bogey man, admonishing the flock to slay her, is a proven tactic of the Ecclesia's will to power.

Watch the mature corn stalks as they weave and sway in the wind. It may not be the wind at all, but rather the rustling of a demon, the menacing and hidden presence of the blood-thirsting Corn Mother, a lurking slayer of any child who might wander among the greening ears.

Fire, Earthy Gnomes, Mermaids, and Airy Sprites.
In another age the threat to God's Only Church was personified by the salamanders and their three families of associates, the gnomes, the undines, and the sylphs. These were the pagan Elementals, spiritual rivals to the Father and Son, the esteemed Nature spirits of fire, earth, water, and air.

"The Christian Church gathered all the elemental entities together under the title of demon," Manly P. Hall wrote in a private edition of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, a survey of the mystic and the arcane, which was given to me by Lee Wiggins in Spring of 1968. "This is a misnomer with far-reaching consequences, for to the average mind the word demon means an evil thing, and the Nature spirits are essentially no more malevolent than are the minerals, plants, and animals. Many of the early Church Fathers asserted that they had met and debated with the elementals."

If the teachings, rituals, and creeds of the dominant church were powerful enough to satisfy the spiritual hunger of the People, then priests, ministers and imams would not need the next dangerous demon as fodder to shore up the foundation of the temple. Queer cartoon characters and supernatural wizards of children's books, the objects of so much righteous fear today, are mirror images of the demonizd satyrs, fairies, fauns, and mermaids.

It is also curious how the concept of demon has taken an entirely new bearing during the past decade. Inventive technical wizards of the computer generation decided to co-opt the word into their lingo. The daemon of Socrates, the divine voice which spake to him about virtue and justice, now exists as a metaphor for certain hidden functions of operating systems software.

No Need to Know a Daemon Is Lurking.
Greek contemporaries of Socrates also "gave the name daemon to some of the Elementals, especially those of the higher orders, and worshipped them," Mr. Hall wrote. Now the Geeks see it as an acronym, Disk And Execution MONitor. This daemon is "a program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant, waiting for some condition to occur," according to FOLDOC, the Free OnLine Dictionary Of Computing. "The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking, though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon."

Demon, which the common language of the day looks upon as merely an alternative spelling, is invoked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to FOLDOC, as a distinct and separate entity from the Greek form of the word. "At MIT they use 'demon' for part of a program and 'daemon' for an operating system process. The words seem to have distinct connotations."

Some of the daemon salamanders, who a few hours ago danced with so much zeal to the psychic melodies of Cricket Song, have fallen asleep now. Others have dissipated in the mysterious heap of ash that remains after the dance is done.

Skeptics say the face at Cydonia is nothing more than an oddly shaped 1,000-foot mesa on the lifeless surface of Mars, a trick of light and shadow. If not an illusion, then the Cydonia monument must be the most profound, dogma-shattering discovery of my lifetime. The prevailing dogma, dismal failure that it is, needs to be shattered by something.

How many, if any among us, need a revelation? Are there enough souls in need to induce a mass revelation? How necessary to anyone but the reptilians and the clerics is the Theory of Necessary Fictions?

To Sing the Tides of Revolution.
Marinetti, Point Eleven: "We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd."

In the fatness and gluttony of the land, where the chicken in every pot is devoured in front of three television sets in every abode, a revolution seems most unlikely. Violent revolution in the United States of America, the United Union of Europe? Ha! Try to even talk about it in the USA and They shall hunt you down, kill you dead, bury your heart on the grotto floor.

Marinetti and his Futurist pals became theoretical fascists in the Nineteen-Teens, laying an intellectual groundwork for the warbird demagogues and necrophilic tyrants of Germany and Italy to build upon. The kernels of the many manifestos soured and became heady political ensilage, which the dictators fed to their minions. After a time, the intoxicated minions were lead into firestorms of a Great Destruction.

Here in the past-midnight quiet of Cricket Song, a few salamanders remain awake and burning. They are not so frenetic now. They glow and waltz. They negotiate with the Ether for the privilege of remaining hidden.

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