COMMUNICATION VIA LUNAR RELAY TO AKA MIEMBE

Habari Aka,

Today (on Terra, not Luna), May 20th, would have been the day for witnessing the Offerings of the Crown to novice Prometheans, if the custom were still as popular as once it was among members of the Promethean movement and other friends invited to witness it. Now, not even all of the Prometheans still observe the ceremony, if only because they cannot all gather annually in one place on one planet. And those who still do mark inductions with the laurel ceremony do so in complete privacy, without encouraging an audience to attend. Now that few others remember its reference and meaning, they do not favor promoting a once-social custom merely to keep tradition, nor simply to confirm the audience of their own popularity, and especially not this pseudo-coronation meant to make a different point entirely.

Taking this evolution of the practice as significant, like most of what Prometheans do publicly or do not do, it seems to me it rounds off a conscious transformation, full circle, from public to private. I say this considering the little-known origin of the ceremony. Assuming you do not know it, for as I said the reference has become more obscure, the origin lies in a symbolic appropriation and reversal of the offering of a laurel crown to the general Gaius Iulius Caesar in Rome.

Adored by many of the poorer, more uneducated inhabitants of Rome and many soldiers, Caesar had marched into the city and taken control, defeating his aristocratic rivals quickly afterward. He received titles and privileges presenting him like a demigod with power over all other Romans. Supposedly he repeatedly refused a crown wreathed in laurel — the symbol of military triumph — in front of the mob of the people. Plutarch says he refused it twice due to insufficient applause. Certainly his refusals of the laurel did not mean he renounced politics. Fearing he would drop even this pretense of refusing kingship, Brutus and other senators assassinated him in the name of liberation from a tyrant. Soon contenders fought for control in the power vacuum following Caesar's death, and his adopted heir, who therefore bore the name Caesar also, finally became emperor and controlled undisputed political power. In fact this outcome was one of the historical cases cited by Kassandra in her Contradiction of 7 AF, to demonstrate the counter-productivity of violent destabilization to alter the pattern of stable force.

Since Julius Caesar, under the Roman Emperors the name Caesar acquired the meaning of governing authority personified. An emperor or imperial politician would be called Caesar, even long after Rome fell, and the word invoked the mastery, tyranny and caprice of an exalted and feared dominator throughout the dark ages before Foundation. The word dropped out of common usage in the first century PF, except among historians. But the Offering ceremony recalls the theme of Caesar by rejecting Caesar's temptations: imperial glory, political machinations, aggrandizement, imposing hierarchy, centralizing identity, manipulating mobs, encouraging state faith, appropriating other idol worship, extorting with monopoly, dictating with authority, profiting Caesar's fortune and power on others' suffering and death, diminishing expression of all, save Caesar. In a sense the Prometheans are the order of those who killed Caesar. Even now each of them has personally killed Caesar so to speak, having briefly resurrected Caesar for the moment they hold the laurel Crown over their head, only to confirm Caesar's death with their renunciation, and incineration of the leaves. Such a commemoration reminds initiates to build upon the triumph of their predecessors.

As you likely know a number of folk legends surround the Offerings of the Crown to particular Prometheans. It became common for new Prometheans to say a few words after the ceremony of burning the wreath in the Promethean Standard, though this was never expected after an act which itself attains the solemnity of a wordless oath. Some related considerable elation, others made vows, others related wishes and hopes for the future.

This legend has since become esoteric, but most colorfully it was said that Long Dracocide saw and related a vision of a garish three-headed dragon, a huge scaly body with terrible ferocious heads with the names “I-Am-The-Many,” “I-Am-Your-God” and “I-am-Law”.

The mythologist and storyteller Abourdin Couzentsin recounts the tale in crescendo:

Again and again the heads chanted their names and the people about Long were transfixed by these menacing things, weaving back and forth as they were, hypnotically, while the body crashed about and the clawed feet crushed children beneath them. Each tiny scale reflected the face of an onlooker like an armor mirror, flashing when the beast shifted. The entranced people began sacrificing themselves to placate the still rampaging beast, bloodily chewed and gulped down over and over again until the chimera’s tough skin became striped with crimson. Long too was transfixed by the grotesque beast's noise and majesty, although more still in horror. For he continued to watch the self-sacrificers as time ran ahead through centuries and centuries in a rush, the days and nights changing with every breath and then the years with every blink of his eyes, while he grew a white beard but never succumbed himself though the people about him carried on through the generations living and dying dominated by the dragon, and the beast remained ageless and insatiable in age after age. In his vision he started awake as if from a dream hearing the word “now” ringing in his ears, donned shining armor and lance, mounted a playful, beautiful and gracious dragon named Fu (Luck) — this good fortune, it seemed, had been resting nearby awaiting him but he had failed to notice this creature, before — and he slew the first beast with a great effort, despite, curiously, the protests of many of the people, especially those already in the dragon’s jaws who even tried to fend him off as he swooped close to spear the heads, riding as he was in great leisurely curves through the sky.

Possibly this was a coeval dream which later became conflated with the ceremony itself, or possibly a legend acquired since Long’s time. Without any information to the contrary, biographers have presumed the vision inspired Long's Promethean name Dracocide. Seemingly, a reasonable provisional hypothesis. And yet, I have found no particular evidence of this in the Archives so far, and no explicit account of the vision at all. Although, the ceremony was not yet a publically noted event at that time, and was customarily attended in private by all the other Prometheans, so maybe they had little reason to record the experience in order to share it. Long did choose the name "Dracocide" around that time, evidently, because it appears in use shortly afterward. Another minor mystery without closure, except —

I did find in these Archives accounts of the exact wording of a remark the day after Long's ceremony, with corroboration from several datartifacts (emails among some puzzled listeners). Asked by a well-wisher about the previous day, Long would only give a short reply. According to them, he apparently said: "I know the dragon I must overcome."

This spare evidence at least corroborates some special reason for the name Dracocide. However, as I pointed out to others here, if we are to act as strict researchers we should remain unsure whether he was referring to the experience that became a folk tale. And we should not assume that he experienced such a dramatic moment of clarity, besides. He might have envisioned something quite different, or had no sublime perception at all on the occasion. Disciplined scientists cannot allow themselves too much extrapolation. We must evaluate even the speculatory hypotheses we propose in light of available evidence, even though as imaginative beings (humans and SILs alike) we feel attracted to filling open gaps in our knowledge with ready mythology, memetic models, or our own creative fancies, any of which might prove intuitive.

The frustration and the joy of contributing to history comes from the feat of puzzling only over remnants. Sometimes, we do not have enough information to compose any responsible theories. But here at least we are the beneficiaries of a selection process. On Luna, we are fortunate that clues were sealed and kept safe for us to find, providing far more than entropy and decay usually leave to those digging into Terra's considerable past. We have Archives far less haphazard than most yields of archaeology. Some record may yet link Long’s Promethean calling depicted in the vision, and the suggestion of Long himself.

It would seem that the heads of the dragon Long fights roughly correspond to the Three Scourges of Humanity, in a metaphor stressing their close interrelation. But we here remain sure their categorization as the most infectious and widespread diseases plaguing human psychology in the Old World precedes his time, and could not date from his supposed vision. So, we expect to find no corroboration of the legend by following that link. In fact it is possible the legend of the dragon was imagined only following the idea of the Scourges ramifying throughout cultural subconsciousness. But the question of origin may not matter to the significance of the myth, unless the value of a legend depends on its literal basis in fact rather than its meaning to those who create and retell it as inspiration. Those who struggled to change the latter dark ages or just cope with the problems of the day in luminous articulation had great need of the power of myth. The Promethean mythos arose. We may know no more than this.

Interestingly “mounting the dragon” was a Chinese expression synonymous with dying because they carried the dead to celestial realms. This significance of this, if any, remains unclear. The image suggests a personal sacrifice by Long, although a very different order from the sacrifices to the dragon. If he made some sacrifice afterward which was incorporated into the legend's imagery in retrospect, I would expect to find some mention of it. Historians have not discovered any account of Long’s death, and we have found nothing here so far. I suspect that death in this case does not mean literal demise, although it certainly could refer to a willingness to die for a conviction if need be, to achieve a goal. If it is a metaphor, how does it relate to the metaphor of killing, if it does? Killing, and dying. Vivid metaphors in a life-affirming story.

Kwa heri,
ADITI