Animals Horns Quotes

An animal?" Thorne said, and she realized he'd been waiting for her to further explain what she was seeing. "It has long legs and horns and...and it's beautiful." "Oh, good, we're back to this, then.

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

In addition to the OPEN RANGE CAUTION, there were animal signs I'd never seen before-an antelope, a cow, and cow with horns...But it worried me that, without warning, a cow with horns might be running across the interstate. And that this had happened frequently enough that they'd had to erect a sign to warn people about it.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

If one squinted into Cabeswater long enough, in the right way, one could see secrets dart between the trees. The shadows of horned animals that never appeared. The winking lights of another summer's fireflies. The rushing sound of many wings, the sound of a massive flock always out of sight. Magic.

Only when the last of the animals horns, tusks, skin and bones have been sold, will mankind realize that money can never buy back our wildlife

No Metal, No Magic. Metal makes everything techno magical.

Music frees my soul, under its spell I heal and sorrow continues to fail at keeping me enraged, caged as if a circus animal. Armed with it, ready and willing I sit to crush the horns of Baphomet.

It might be very hard to believe but with no metal and no magic there’d be no technology.

Osm – the unicorn with the multi-metal horn tipped with Osmium can do it all! He has the powers of all the metal horn unicorns. Osmium is much rarer than gold, about 1000 times, but it is only worth about ¼ the price because there are so few uses for it.

No one in the world needs a Rhino horn but a Rhino.

The war, therefore if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that the hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that is exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This--although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense--is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

Every animal with blood in its veins and horns on its head will fight when it is attacked.

When the nettle is young, the leaves make excellent greens; when it grows old it has filaments and fibers like hemp and flax. Cloth made from the nettle is as good as that made from hemp. Chopped up, the nettle is good for poultry; pounded, it is good for horned cattle. The seed of the nettle mixed with the fodder of animals gives a luster to their skin; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow dye. It makes, however, excellent hay, as it can be cut twice in a season. And what does the nettle need? very little soil, no care, no culture; except that the seeds fall as fast as they ripen, and it is difficult to gather them; that is all. If we would take a little pains, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. How much men are like the nettle! My friends, remember this, that there are no weeds, and no worthless men, there are only bad farmers.

Elk have not been seen in Switzerland for many a year. In the interests of scientific accuracy, please strike the idea of elk from your mind. If you must, think of ibexes instead, a fierce and agile type of goat with great spiraling horns. Marmots will also do in a pinch, but under no circumstances should you think of elk. No. Elk. The elkless among you may now proceed.

The fundamental defect of the female character is a lack of a sense of justice. This originates first and foremost in their want of rationality and capacity for reflexion but it is strengthened by the fact that, as the weaker sex, they are driven to rely not on force but on cunning: hence their instinctive subtlety and their ineradicable tendency to tell lies: for, as nature has equipped the lion with claws and teeth, the elephant with tusks, the wild boar with fangs, the bull with horns and the cuttlefish with ink, so it has equipped woman with the power of dissimulation as her means of attack and defence, and has transformed into this gift all the strength it has bestowed on man in the form of physical strength and the power of reasoning. Dissimulation is thus inborn in her and consequently to be found in the stupid woman almost as often as in the clever one. To make use of it at every opportunity is as natural to her as it is for an animal to employ its means of defence whenever it is attacked, and when she does so she feels that to some extent she is only exercising her rights. A completely truthful woman who does not practice dissimulation is perhaps an impossibility, which is why women see through the dissimulation of others so easily it is inadvisable to attempt it with them. – But this fundamental defect which I have said they possess, together with all that is associated with it, gives rise to falsity, unfaithfulness, treachery, ingratitude, etc. Women are guilty of perjury far more often than men. It is questionable whether they ought to be allowed to take an oath at all.

While not all elements in the Periodic Table are represented by letters of the alphabet, some in this book (Magical Elements of the Periodic Table Presented Alphabetically by the Metal Horn Unicorns), are introduced by alternate designations. For instance, Tungsten is also known as Wolfram so “W” is used as the entry for that alphabetical letter in this book. The letter “W” is also used as the atomic symbol for Tungsten in all periodic tables.

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

If one squinted in Cabeswater long enough, in the right way, one could see secrets dart between the trees. The shadows of horned animals that never appeared. The winking lights of another summer's fireflies. The rushing sound of many wings, the sound of a massive flock always out of sight. Magic.

Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me.

Unicorn. Old french, unicorne. Latin ūnicornis. Literally one horned. Unus one and cornu a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn. Visible only to those who search and trust and generally mistaken for a white mare. Unicorn.

We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.

Until humans came and made anthills out of these mountains, Diwan Sahib was saying, looking up at the langurs, the land had belonged to these monkeys, and to barking deer, nilgai, tiger, barasingha, leopards, jackals, the great horned owl, and even to cheetahs and lions. The archaeology of the wilderness consisted of these lost animals, not of ruined walls, terracotta amulets, and potsherds.

The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, — a sort of fucus or lichen in bone, — to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!

[...] In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero.” “Don’t you mean supervillain?” “Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me.

I thought she had another animal pelt lying next to her, and then I realized it was a live animal—a deer with glittering fur and silver horns, its head resting contentedly in Artemis’s lap.

How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long time, listening to the warm crackle of the flames.

Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy. As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants.

Pa never told stories like Grandpa. Or treated the barn like family. Eli knew how Grandpa’s own pa had built the barn by hand, hauling bluestone for the foundation behind a stubborn ox with horns as wide as a tractor. How the smell of the plank walls was like family and how you never washed your chore coat so the animals would smell that you were family, too.

The link between animals and words goes way back. (Did you know that our letter A began its life as a drawing of the upside-down head of a bull? The two bits at the bottom that the A stands on, those were originally horns. The pointy top bit was its face and nose.)

A gem of an island glimmered in the bright, blue sea. Here the winged and webbed, hoofed and horned, mighty and meek, all lived in peace.

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both. When I picked up the skulls to add to my growing collection of what Vanessa called "Bobo's smelly pile," the hooked horns fell away from each other and the story of the impalas' death struggle was undone.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, as I made my way along a narrow and steep stretch of trail, I looked up to see an enormous brown horned animal charging at me. “Moose!” I hollered, though I knew that it wasn’t a moose. In the panic of the moment, my mind couldn’t wrap around what I was seeing and a moose was the closest thing to it.

Every animal with blood in its veins and horns on its head will fight when it is attacked. How much more so will man, who carries in his breast the faculties of love and hatred, joy and anger! When he is pleased, a feeling of affection springs up within him; when angry, his poisoned sting is brought into play. That is the natural law which governs his being. . .

The Hebrew word, qeren (#H7161 קֶ֣רֶן), is a horn of a bull, or is sometimes used to describe the tusk of an elephant. The English translation here is, “might.” In either case, the business-end of either animal is the symbol of its strength. pg 41

What do people get from all that devil mumbo-jumbo anyway?” “A sense of purpose, I guess.” “They could volunteer at an animal shelter instead.” “Yes, sir. But then they wouldn’t get to have group sex while wearing goat horns or kill people for fun.

As Darwin noted, “It is certain that with almost all animals there is a struggle between the males for the possession of the female.” When males of a species battle it out directly, be it through the clashing antlers of deer, the stabbing horns of the stag beetle, the head butting of stalk-eyed flies, or the bloody battles of massive elephant seals, they win access to females by driving off competitors. Selection will favor any trait that promotes such victories so long as the increased chance of getting mates more than offsets any reduced survival. This kind of selection produces armaments: stronger weapons, larger body size, or anything that helps a male win physical contests.

Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans.

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to fine, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down in the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns...

I’d rather ride a unicorn than a unicycle. But my enemies, they could all ride a unicycle with a horn instead of a seat.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed. The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another, but though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.

There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: “The noise-producing animal.” Now there was only the nearly imperceptible murmur of his own engine. He had no need to blow the horn. There were no back-firing trucks, no snorting trains, no pounding planes overhead. In the little towns no whistles blew or bells rang or radios blared or people talked. Even if it was the peace of death, still that was a kind of peace.

as the religious conflicts that animated the seventeenth century began to recede—Christian vs. Muslim; Catholic vs. Protestant—as the filthy wealth generated by slavery and dispossession accelerated, capitalism and profit became the new god, with its curia in the basilicas of Wall Street. This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its “efficient market theory” supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star.

A cowboy is someone who loves his work. Since the hours are long—ten to fifteen hours a day—and the pay is $30 he has to. What's required of him is an odd mixture of physical vigor and maternalism. His part of the beef-raising industry is to birth and nurture calves and take care of their mothers. For the most part his work is done on horseback and in a lifetime he sees and comes to know more animals than people. The iconic myth surrounding him is built on American notions of heroism: the index of a man's value as measured in physical courage. Such ideas have perverted manliness into a self-absorbed race for cheap thrills. In a rancher's world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting spontaneously—usually on behalf of an animal or another rider. If a cow is stuck in a bog hole he throws a loop around her neck, takes his dally (a half hitch around the saddle horn), and pulls her out with horsepower. If a calf is born sick, he may take her home, warm her in front of the kitchen fire, and massage her legs until dawn. One friend, whose favorite horse was trying to swim a lake with hobbles on, dove under water and cut her legs loose with a knife, then swam her to shore, his arm around her neck lifeguard-style, and saved her from drowning. Because these incidents are usually linked to someone or something outside himself, the westerner's courage is selfless, a form of compassion.

... There was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground.

The curtain rises. A vista opens across the lake. The moon hangs low above the horizon and is reflected in the water. NINA, dressed in white, is seen seated on a great rock. NINA. All men and beasts, lions, eagles, and quails, horned stags, geese, spiders, silent fish that inhabit the waves, starfish from the sea, and creatures invisible to the eye—in one word, life—all, all life, completing the dreary round imposed upon it, has died out at last. A thousand years have passed since the earth last bore a living creature on her breast, and the unhappy moon now lights her lamp in vain. No longer are the cries of storks heard in the meadows, or the drone of beetles in the groves of limes. All is cold, cold. All is void, void, void. All is terrible, terrible—[A pause] The bodies of all living creatures have dropped to dust, and eternal matter has transformed them into stones and water and clouds; but their spirits have flowed together into one, and that great world-soul am I! In me is the spirit of the great Alexander, the spirit of Napoleon, of Caesar, of Shakespeare, and of the tiniest leech that swims. In me the consciousness of man has joined hands with the instinct of the animal; I understand all, all, all, and each life lives again in me.

As delightful as the Just So explanations are of how spots, stripes, humps and horns came to be, biology can now tell us stories about butterflies, zebras and leopards that I contend are every bit as enchanting as Kipling's fairy tales. What's more, they offer some simple, elegant truths that deepen our understanding of all animal forms, including ourselves.

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips" Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered percussion in the morning—are the morning. Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me— I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna. How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur. My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena, ecstatic devourer. O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped the amber—fast honey—from their openness— Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet- dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond— to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue— come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips, I am—strummed-song and succubus. They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book— the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel. Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays, Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray. Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera. Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle: What do I see? Hips: Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread, wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be: Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel. Bone basin bone throne bone lamp. Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery— slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit, laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God, I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth for pear upon apple upon fig. More than all that are your hips. They are a city. They are Kingdom— Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire— thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth. Beloved, your hips are the war. At night your legs, love, are boulevards leading me beggared and hungry to your candy house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late and the tables have been cleared, in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake. O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve, a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon, let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming for your dark matter. Along las calles de tus muslos I wander— follow the parade of pulse like a drum line— descend into your Plaza del Toros— hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros. Your arched hips—ay, mi torera. Down the long corridor, your wet walls lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed. I am the animal born to rush your rich red muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan, a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre Manolete—press and part you like a wound— make the crowd pounding in the grandstand of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.

But then, when Emmy and Teddy graduated from college, Teddy wore this dark green dress that just…Never mind. The point is that I know Teddy is pretty. Beautiful, even. But beautiful like a lion or an elk or any other large and dangerous animal. Beautiful to look at, but you didn’t want to get too close because it’d rip your throat out or trample you or spear you to death with its giant horns.

The body, then, is one's animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time, it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. No wonder man is impaled on the horns of sexual problems, why Freud saw that sex was so prominent in human life-especially in the neurotic conflicts of his patients. Sex is an inevitable component of man's confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms-symbols (freedom) and body (fate). No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers out of the body that the body-as a material thing-cannot possibly give. We try to answer the transcendent mystery of creation by experiences in one, partial, physical product of that creation. This is why the mystique of sex is so widely practiced-say, in traditional France-and at the same time is so disillusioning. It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness. If the adult reduces the problem of life to the area of sexuality, he repeats the fetishization of the child who focuses the problem of the mother upon her genitals. Sex then becomes a screen for terror, a fetishization of full consciousness about the real problem of life.

Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both - I'm quoting direct from Neil's memo here - if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in transit.

Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight’s two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.

There are simply some things that all normal people understand that you must never under any circumstances do. You mustn’t tell lies, you mustn’t steal, you mustn’t kill, and you mustn’t throw stones at birds. We all agree on that. Except maybe swans, because swans can actually be passive-aggressive little bastards. But apart from swans, you mustn’t throw stones at birds. And you mustn’t tell lies. Unless… well, sometimes you have to, of course, like when your children ask: “Why does it smell like chocolate in here? ARE YOU EATING CHOCOLATE?” But you definitely mustn’t steal or kill, we can agree on that. Well, you mustn’t kill people, anyway. And most of the time you mustn’t even kill swans, even if they are bastards, but you’re allowed to kill animals if they’ve got horns and are standing in the forest. Or if they’re bacon. But you must never kill people.

In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero.” “Don’t you mean supervillain?” “Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me.” She

It is a strange feeling to have an animal come toward you consciously seeking to kill you, his eyes open looking at you, and see the oncoming of the lowered horn that he intends to kill you with. It gives enough of a sensation so that there are always men willing to go into the capeas for the pride of having experienced it and the pleasure of having tried some bullfighting manœuvre with a real bull although the actual pleasure at the time may not be great.

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

I am as happy here as I have ever been in my life: Ted and I take a long walk each day up to the moors (It’s generally rainy, or at least overcast) and never have I loved country so! All you can see us dark hills of heather stretching toward the horizon, as if you were striding on top of the world; last night at sunset the horizontal light turned us both luminous pink as we hiked in waterproof boots in the wuthering free wind, starting up rabbits that flicked away with a white flag of tail, staring back at the black-faced, gray furred moor sheep that graze, apparently wild, and with their curling horns looking like primeval yellow-eyed druid monsters. I never thought I could like any country as well as the ocean, but these moors are really even better, with the great luminous emerald lights changing always, and the animals and wildness. Read “Wuthering Heights” again here, and really felt it this time more than ever. --from a letter to her mother Aurelia Schober Plath, written on 11 September 1956

The Pyrenean ibex, an extinct form of wild mountain goat, was brought back to life in 2009 through cloning of dna taken from skin samples. This was followed in June of 2010 by researchers at Jeju National University in Korea cloning a bull that had been dead for two years. Cloning methods are also being studied for use in bringing back Tasmanian tigers, woolly mammoths, and other extinct creatures, and in the March/April 2010 edition of the respected Archaeology magazine, a feature article by Zah Zorich (“Should We Clone Neanderthals?”) called for the resurrection via cloning of what some consider to be man’s closest extinct relative, the Neanderthals. National Geographic confirmed this possibility in its May 2009 special report, “Recipe for a Resurrection,” quoting Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, an authority on ancient dna who served as a scientific consultant for the movie Jurassic Park, saying: “I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore.… This is going to happen.

A long time ago, before the time of men, when animals and birds ruled the world, the birds saw that animals had the lion as their king and decided to choose one for themselves. The owl insisted that he alone had horns, he should be ruler. They were so afraid of his terrible horns that in the end they never chose a king for themselves. And so it was that the owl ruled through fear until one day when he was asleep as usual during the day, a little sparrow checked the 'terrible horns' and discovered that they were in fact overgrown ears." [110]

Satan, the chief devil of the Western World, was originally an angel whose duty it was to report human delinquencies to God. It was not until the Fourteenth Century that he began to be depicted as an evil deity who was part man and part animal, with goat-like horns and hooves. Before Christianity gave him the names of Satan, Lucifer, ect., the carnal side of man's nature was governed by the god which was then called Dionysus, or Pan, depicted as a satyr or faun, by the Greeks. Pan was originally the "good guy" and symbolized fertility and fecundity.

Often, when an elephant has just died, other elephants will back up to touch its carcass gently with their hind feet, then cover the body with dirt and sticks, and stand guard. (Intriguingly, elephants have done the same to the bodies of people that they either find dead or have killed. One young orphaned elephant in a South African sanctuary shrieked and moaned when it discovered the buried remains of its daily companion, a rhinoceros, that poachers had killed for its horn.) Chimpanzees, gorillas, some corvids, and dolphins also spend time with their dead, but overall, most species do not.*

Stupendous carnage was painted on the canvas, A depiction of repulsion was executed around the structure. It revealed its dark emblem by painting its sinister Red. Three intertwined bloated eyes are encrusted together, awfully deformed - the horrendous stench of decay can be smelt from it, for it exudes a sulfurous aroma of rotting animals. A torn torso of a butchered rabbit laid on the eye sockets, with all its arms, legs, and head severed off. A sludge-like, bubbling, dripping fluid oozed from the abnormally large eyes, leaving the ground deserted to rust and becoming the midst of a terrible famine. Blood Gushes from the slashes of each hideous eye, gouging out gore from the torn skin, spluttering and erupting gasping cries as it struggles in its own twisted misery of giving birth, as it was preparing to give shape-shifting life to a black-glass body, horn-like entity, unlike any childbirth you have ever witnessed. Satanic was this creature, whose muscle mass was disintegrated. All of his blood was squeezed out, forlorn and cold to the touch. The thorns on his head were intertwined into horns. A serpent's nose and wolf-like fangs were all this child had, as he had no gift of sight or hearing, he had only the smell of terror as his power.

Dinosaurs dominated our planet for more than 160 million years. They evolved and changed to adopt many different lifestyles and live in every type of environment. Some ate plants, others ate meat, fish, or eggs. Some lived in forests, others in deserts or plains. Some were huge, others small. Some hunted using vicious claws and teeth, while others defended themselves with spikes, horns and armor plates. The dinosaurs were not alone - they shared the world with other reptiles that flew in the sky or swam in the seas. But it was dinosaurs that dominated in an age of reptiles that spanned nearly half the time animals have lived on land.

I trudge toward the porch, entertaining the idea of running the other way. But technically, I shouldn't be in any trouble. It wasn't my car. I'm not the one who got a ticket. Samantha Forza did. And the picture on Samantha Forza's driver's license looks a lot like Rayna. She told Officer Downing that she swerved to keep from hitting a camel, which Officer Downing graciously interpreted as a deer after she described it as "a hairy animal with four legs and a horn." Since no one formed a search party to look for either a camel or a unicorn, I figured we were in the clear. But from Mom's expression, I'm miles from clear. "Hi," I say as I reach the steps. "We'll see about that," she says, grabbing my face and shining a pen light in my eyes. I slap it away. "Really? You're checking my pupils? Really?" "Hal said you looked hazy," she says, clipping the pen back on the neckline of her scrubs. "Hal? Who's Hal?" "Hal is the paramedic who took your signature when you declined medical treatment. He radioed in to the hospital after he left you." "Oh. Well, then Hal would have noticed I was just in an accident, so I might have been a little out of it. Doesn't mean I was high." So it wasn't small-town gossip, it was small-county gossip. Good ole Hal's probably transported hundreds of patients to my mom in the ER two towns over. She scowls. "Why didn't you call me? Who is Samantha?" I sigh and push past her. There's no reason to have this conversation on the porch. She follows me into the house. "She's Galen's sister. I didn't call because I didn't have a signal on my cell. We were on a dead road." "Where was Galen? Why were you driving his car?" "He was home. We were just taking it for a drive. He didn't want to come." Technically, all these statements are true, so they sound believable when I say them. Mom snorts and secures the dead bolt on the front door. "Probably because he knows his sister is life threatening behind the wheel." "Probably.

Lincoln received one more painful reminder that he was still a target for criticism. Walking between his home and office, he noticed a group of young boys teasing an agitated stray goat. When the animal hungrily spied the taller target, it turned from the children and tried butting Lincoln instead, until he was forced to seize it by the horns in self-defense. As the youngsters watched in delight, the president-elect of the United States gave his first post-election speech—to an angry goat. He might as well have been speaking to the South when he shouted: “I didn’t bother you. It was the boys. Why don’t you go and butt the boys. I wouldn’t trouble you.

There are other noteworthy characteristics of this rock art style: Anthropomorphs without headdresses instead sport horns, or antennae, or a series of concentric circles. Also prominent in many of the figures' hands are scepters--each one an expression of something significant in the natural world. Some look like lightning bolts, some like snakes; other burst from the fingers like stalks of ricegrass. Colorado Plateau rock-art expert Polly Schaafsma has interpreted these figures as otherworldly--drawn by shamans in isolated and special locations, seemingly as part of a ceremonial retreat. Schaafsma and others believe that the style reflects a spirituality common to all hunter-gatherer societies across the globe--a way of life that appreciates the natural world and employs the use of visions to gain understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the earth. Typically, Schaafsma says, it is a spirituality that identifies strongly with animals and other aspects of nature--and one that does so with an interdependent rather than dominant perspective. To underscore the importance of art in such a culture, Schaafsma points to Aboriginal Australians, noting how, in a so-called primitive society, where forms of written and oral communication are considered (at least by our standards) to be limited, making art is "one means of defining the mystic tenets of one's faith.

I slipped my lasso from the horn of my saddle, and grasped the coil in my right hand. This time you should have seen him come! It was a business trip, sure; by his gait there was blood in his eye. I was sitting my horse at ease, and swinging the great loop of my lasso in wide circles about my head; the moment he was under way, I started for him; when the space between us had narrowed to forty feet, I sent the snaky spirals of the rope a-cleaving through the air, then darted aside and faced about and brought my trained animal to a halt with all his feet braced under him for a surge. The next moment the rope sprang taut and yanked Sir Sagramor out of the saddle! Great Scott, but there was a sensation!

This, yes this, is the animal who never was. No one ever saw one, but they loved it all the same. - Its gait, the way it carried itself, its little throat, The radiance of its quiet gaze, - all were loved. Truly, it never existed. But yet because they loved it, A very creature came to be. They always kept a space for it. And in that space, left clear and free, it readily Raised its head and thus scarcely required actually To exist. They nourished it, not with feed, But merely with the conception that it might come to be. And they bestowed such intensity upon the beast That it impelled a horn to grow forth from its brow. A single horn. It approached an unsullied maiden, all white. And it is in her silver mirror; it is in her.

In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.

Before the eyes of monks intent on meditation, what is the meaning of those ridiculous grotesques, those monstrous shapes and shapely monsters? Those sordid apes? Those lions, those centaurs, those half-human creatures, with mouths in their bellies, with single feet, ears like sails? Those spotted tigers, those fighting warriors, those hunters blowing their horns, and those many bodies with single heads and many heads with single bodies? Quadrupeds with serpents’ tails, and fish with quadrupeds’ faces, and here an animal who seems a horse in front and a ram behind, and there a horse with horns, and so on; by now it is more pleasurable for a monk to read marble than manuscript, and to admire the works of man than to meditate on the law of God. Shame! For the desire of your eyes and for your smiles!

The treetops swayed high above the mists along the edge of the forest known as Wynne Holt. Five boys, all in their twelfth year, lay on their stomachs peering through the grasses of the headland near The Point. They watched as the cloaked Creature, the Ge-sceaft, wandered through the shifting fog that intermittently smothered the field ahead of them. Its shadow faded and resurfaced as it roamed through the grasses; and at times, eerie noises-- almost like singing-- drifted to the edge of the cliff from where they watched. Angus, the oldest and brawniest of the lads, began telling tales that terrified and delighted the others. “It has horns, it does. That’s why it wears the hood so far over its face. The horns aren’t at the back; they’re near the front, and it uses them to tear up its food like an animal uses claws and fangs.” “What does it eat?” The other boys turned

Two seconds went by before I got a response. Lenny: The offer stands, bish. Lenny: You’re the best person I know, fyi. I smiled down at my phone. Me: I love you too Lenny: [eye rolling emoji] Lenny: I was texting you because Grandpa G is making margaritas and he was asking where you were. Me: Tell him I love him. Lenny: I will. You find Rip? Me: I’m watching him. Lenny: Stalker Me: He’s standing in front of me, I can’t help it. Lenny: Pretty sure that’s what every stalker thinks. I chanced another glance at the man and held back a sigh. Me: Sometimes I don’t understand why him. Lenny: Because he looks like he’s been in jail and that’s about as far away from what every jackass you’ve ever dated looks like? Lenny: Grandpa G says he loves you too and to come over and bring the girl with you if she’s around. I didn’t tell him you’re at the bar, otherwise he’d want to invite himself. You know how that man gets in public. I almost laughed at the first comment and definitely laughed at the second one. Rip did look like he’d done time. That was unfair, but it was the truth. For all I knew, he probably had. Then again, I was probably judging him by a face he had no say in. For all I knew, he had a marshmallow heart and rescued and rehabilitated small animals when he wasn’t at work. Deep down, he might have a caring and loving disposition that he only shared around very few people—people who had won his trust. You never knew. The idea of that put a small smile on my face and kept it there as I typed a message back, leaving the first comment alone. Me: I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, but if I leave soon, I’ll drop by. Tell Grandpa G that the girl is working tonight. You’re all coming for the graduation, right? Lenny: Yes. I’m legit ready to cry this Saturday. Lenny: I’ve got the blow horn ready by the way. TOOT TOOT, bish. She wasn’t the only one preparing herself to cry this weekend, and that made me happy for some reason.

Hi, Georgie,” it said. George blinked and looked again. He could barely credit what he saw; it was like something from a made-up story, or a movie where you know the animals will talk and dance. If he had been ten years older, he would not have believed what he was seeing, but he was not sixteen. He was six. There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing. It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?—George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings—Buffalo Bob was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell. The clown held a bunch of balloons, all colors, like gorgeous ripe fruit in one hand. In the other he held George’s newspaper boat. “Want your boat, Georgie?” The clown smiled.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. Oh my god, said the sergeant.

Die Nützlichkeitslehrer würden glauben, ihren Gott zu verlieren, wenn sie nicht den anbeten sollen, der dem Ochsen die Hörner gab, damit er sich verteidige. Mir aber möge man erlauben, daß ich den verehre, der in dem Reichtum seiner Schöpfung so groß war, nach tausendfältigen Pflanzen noch eine zu machen, worin alle übrigen enthalten, und nach tausendfältigen Tieren ein Wesen, das sie alle enthält: den Menschen. Man verehre ferner den, der dem Vieh sein Futter gibt und dem Menschen Speise und Trank, so viel er genießen mag; ich aber bete den an, der eine solche Produktionskraft in die Welt gelegt hat, daß, wenn nur der millionteste Teil davon ins Leben tritt, die Welt von Geschöpfen wimmelt, so daß Krieg, Pest, Wasser und Brand ihr nichts anzuhaben vermögen. Das ist mein Gott! The teachers of utility would think that they lost their God if they did not worship Him who gave the ox horns to defend itself. But I hope I may be allowed to worship Him who, in the abundance of His creation, was great enough, after making a thousand kinds of plants, to make one more, in which all the rest should be comprised; and after a thousand kinds of animals, a being which comprises them all—a man. Let people serve Him who gives to the beast his fodder, and to man meat and drink as much as he can enjoy. But I worship Him who has infused into the world such a power of production, that, when only the millionth part of it comes out into life, the world swarms with creatures to such a degree that war, pestilence, fire, and water cannot prevail against them. That is my God!

The central ceremony of Ritual Witchcraft was the so-called "Sabbath" - a word of unknown origin having no relation to its Hebrew homonym. Sabbaths were celebrated four times a year - on Candlemass Day, February 2nd, on Rood Mass Day, May 1st, on Lammas Day, August 1st, and on the eve of All Hallows, October 31st. These were great festivals, often attended by hundreds of devotees, who came from considerable distances. Between Sabbaths there were weekly "Esbats" from small congregations in the village where the ancient religion was still practiced. At all high Sabbaths the devil himself was invariably present, in the person of some man who had inherited, or otherwise acquired, the honor of being the incarnation of the two-faced god of the Dianic cult. The worshipers paid homage to the god by kissing his reverse face - a mask worn, beneath an animal's tail, on the devil's backside. There was then, for some at least of the female devotees, a ritual copulation with the god, who was equipped for this purpose with an artificial phallus of horn or metal. This ceremony was followed by a picnic (for the Sabbaths were celebrated out of doors, near sacred trees or stones), by dancing and finally by a promiscuous sexual orgy that had, no doubt, originally been a magical operation for increasing the fertility of the animals on which primitive hunters and herdsmen depend for their livelihood. The prevailing atmosphere at the Sabbaths was one of good fellowship and mindless, animal joy. When captured and brought to trial, many of the who had taken part in the Sabbath resolutely refused, even under torture, even at the stake, to abjure the religion which had brought them so much happiness.

Within our own species we have great variation between these two reactions. One man may beat his life away in furious assault on the barrier, where another simply waits for the tide to pick him up. Such variation is also observable among the higher vertebrates, particularly among domestic animals. It would be strange if it were not also true of the lower vertebrates, among the individualistic ones anyway. A fish, like the tuna or the sardine, which lives in a school, would be less likely to vary than this lonely horned shark, for the school would impose a discipline of speed and uniformity, and those individuals which would not or could not meet the school’s requirements would be killed or lost or left behind. The overfast would be eliminated by the school as readily as the over-slow, until a standard somewhere between the fast and slow had been attained. Not intending a pun, we might note that our schools have to some extent the same tendency. A Harvard man, a Yale man, a Stanford man—that is, the ideal—is as easily recognized as a tuna, and he has, by a process of elimination, survived the tests against idiocy and brilliance. Even in physical matters the standard is maintained until it is impossible, from speech, clothing, haircuts, posture, or state of mind, to tell one of these units of his school from another. In this connection it would be interesting to know whether the general collectivization of human society might not have the same effect. Factory mass production, for example, requires that every man conform to the tempo of the whole. The slow must be speeded up or eliminated, the fast slowed down. In a thoroughly collectivized state, mediocre efficiency might be very great, but only through the complete elimination of the swift, the clever, and the intelligent, as well as the incompetent. Truly collective man might in fact abandon his versatility. Among school animals there is little defense technique except headlong flight. Such species depend for survival chiefly on tremendous reproduction. The great loss of eggs and young to predators is the safety of the school, for it depends for its existence on the law of probability that out of a great many which start some will finish. It is interesting and probably not at all important to note that when a human state is attempting collectivization, one of the first steps is a frantic call by the leaders for an increased birth rate—replacement parts in a shoddy and mediocre machine.

The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary in a way that is hard to appreciate today, now that its discoveries have become second nature to most of us. The historian David Wootton reminds us of the understanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution in 1600: He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any in England—he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. . . . He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7 A century and a third later, an educated descendant of this Englishman would believe none of these things. It was an escape not just from ignorance but from terror. The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the Middle Ages “the belief that an external force controlled daily life contributed to a kind of collective paranoia”: Rainstorms, thunder, lightning, wind gusts, solar or lunar eclipses, cold snaps, heat waves, dry spells, and earthquakes alike were considered signs and signals of God’s displeasure. As a result, the “hobgoblins of fear” inhabited every realm of life. The sea became a satanic realm, and forests were populated with beasts of prey, ogres, witches, demons, and very real thieves and cutthroats. . . . After dark, too, the world was filled with omens portending dangers of every sort: comets, meteors, shooting stars, lunar eclipses, the howls of wild animals.8 To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. That knowledge includes an understanding of ourselves.

I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once, I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key…Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers. And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from outer space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes, I will think two maple keys. If I am maple key falling, at least I can twirl. Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It’s no self-conscious, so apparently moral, simple to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. Ezekiel excoriates false prophets who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock- more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

midday on Sunday. The men had milked the cows in the early morning and then had gone out rabbiting, without bothering to feed the animals. When Mr. Jones got back he immediately went to sleep on the drawing-room sofa with the News of the World over his face, so that when evening came, the animals were still unfed. At last they could stand it no longer. One of the cows broke in the door of the store-shed with her horn and all the animals began to help themselves from the bins. It was just then that Mr. Jones woke up. The next moment he and his four men were in the store-shed with whips in their hands, lashing out in all directions. This was more than the hungry animals could bear. With one accord, though nothing of the kind had been planned beforehand, they flung themselves upon their tormentors. Jones and his men suddenly found themselves being butted and kicked from all sides. The situation was quite out of their control. They had never seen animals behave like this before, and this sudden uprising of creatures whom they were used to thrashing and maltreating just as they chose, frightened them almost out of their wits. After only a moment or two they gave up trying to defend themselves and took to their heels. A minute later all five of them were in full flight down the cart-track that led to the main road, with the animals pursuing them in triumph. Mrs. Jones looked out of the bedroom window, saw what was happening, hurriedly flung a few possessions into a carpet bag, and slipped out of the farm by another way. Moses sprang off his perch and flapped after her, croaking loudly. Meanwhile the animals had chased Jones and his men out on to the road and slammed the five-barred gate behind them. And so, almost before they knew what was happening, the Rebellion had been successfully carried through: Jones was expelled, and the Manor Farm was theirs.

I’ve got this great idea. Let’s shut down the food factories. Let’s replace the food they make by catching some wild animals—aurochs, wild boar, jungle fowl, and a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia would do—modifying them drastically and breeding them in stupendous numbers. Let’s separate the young from their mothers, castrate them, dock their tails, clip their beaks, teeth, and horns without anesthesia, herd them into barns and cages, subject them to extreme boredom and sensory deprivation for their short, distressing lives,[88] then corral them into giant factories where we stun them, cut their throats, skin, pluck, and hack their bloody flesh into chunks that you, the lucky customer, will want to eat (oh yes you will!). I’ve done the sums—we’d need to slaughter only 75 billion animals a year.[89] “Let’s kill the baby aurochs, extract a chemical from the lining of their fourth stomachs and mix it with milk from lactating mothers of the same species, to create a wobbly mass of fat and protein. We’ll stir in some live bacteria to digest this mass, then let their excrements sit till they go hard and yellow and start to stink. You’re really going to want this! “Let’s fell the forests, drain the wetlands, seize the wild grasslands, expel the indigenous people, kill the large predators, exclude the wild herbivores, trigger the global collapse of wildlife, climate breakdown, and the destruction of the habitable planet. Let’s fence most of this land for our captive animals to graze, and plant the rest with crops to make them fat. Let’s spray the crops with biocidal toxins and minerals that’ll leach into the soil and water. Let’s divert the rivers and drain the aquifers. Let’s pour billions of tons of shit into the sea. Let’s trigger repeated plagues, transmitted to humans by the animals we’ve captured, and destroy the efficacy of our most important medicines. “Sure, it will trash everything after a while, but think of the fun we’ll have. Come on, you know you want this.” I hope you would run this scoundrel out of town.

In the Old Testament, Aaron the High Priest represented all of the children of Israel. Therefore as a representative of the entire nation of Israel, the High Priest transferred all their sins by laying both his hands on the head of a goat, and by drawing the blood of the animal by slitting its throat, and then putting its blood on the four horns of the altar of burnt offering. He thus offered the sin offering of the Day of Atonement before God on behalf of all the people. In the New Testament, it was none other than John the Baptist who was the representative

determinative merychippus. When this learned tyrant ended his excavations, men knew that in ages past the land of Colorado had been shared by gigantic dinosaurs beyond their imagining, and bison with unbelievable horns, and titanotheres and animals not yet visualized, and men became aware of the fact that the earth which they had been assuming was theirs had always belonged to other creatures, too.

Of an August day in Paris the choice hour is from six to seven in the evening. The choice promenade is the Seine between the Pont Alexandre III and the Pont de l'Archevêché. If one walks down the quays of the Rive Gauche toward Notre-Dame first, and then turns back on the Rive Droite, he has the full glory of the setting sun before him and reaches the Place de la Concorde just in time to get a glimpse up the Champs Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe as the last light of day is disappearing. I am not yet old enough to have taken this walk a thousand times, but when I have I am sure that it will present the same fascination, the same stirring of soul, the same exaltation that it does to-day. Choose, if you will, your August sunset at the seashore or in the mountains. There you have nature unspoiled, you say. But is there not a revelation of God through animate as well as inanimate creation? If we can have the sun going down on both at the same time, why not? Notre-Dame may be surpassed by other churches, even in France. But Notre-Dame, in its setting on the island that Is the heart and center of this city, historically and architecturally that high water mark of human endeavor, cannot be surpassed. Standing on the bridge between the Morgue and the Ile St-Louis, and looking towards the setting sun, one sees the most perfect blending of the creation of God and the creation of the creatures of God that the world affords. And it is not because I have not seen the sunset from the Acropolis, from the Janiculum, from the Golden Horn, and from the steps of El Akbar, that I make this statement. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Cairo- these have been, but Paris is.

The next stage is a hornfels, a thoroughly recrystallized rock, so named after its supposed resemblance to animal horn. Hornfels has one rather unexpected quality—when suitably shaped, it can produce beautiful musical notes when struck. Indeed, it took central place in an extraordinary narrative of the English Lake District. An eccentric 18th-century inventor, Peter Crosthwaite—a fighter against Malay pirates in his youth and, later in life, the founder of a museum in the town of Keswick—built a kind of xylophone using hornfels from the local Skiddaw mountain. Half a century later, the Keswick stone-maker and musician Joseph Richardson determined to top Crosthwaite’s achievement, and almost ruined his family financially by building an even bigger instrument, which would produce a larger range of musical notes. Once built, though, it was indeed a sensation. Richardson toured England for three years with his sons, playing Handel, Mozart, and dance tunes on his rock creation—though at times restraining the power of the instrument so it would not shatter concert hall windows. Queen Victoria liked the performances so much that she requested extra concerts (although reports from the time do suggest that she was not amused at its imitation of Alpine bells). The harmonious hornfels ‘lithophones’ may still be seen in the Keswick museum—and are to this day occasionally taken on musical tour.

It is easy to smile at the bull you know is chained. When you realise of a sudden the chain is off, and its horns towards you, and its hoof scraping at the dust, the bull looks an entirely different animal.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tacked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' eats and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daublings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Along with such worthies as Almond L. Bliss, Archimedes Stevenson, Alton F. Pratt, Dusenberry J. Furman, and Deacon Ransom Todd, he was one of several hundred individuals profiled in the 1888 commemorative volume Portrait and Biographical Album of Lenawee County, Mich. That publication extoled him as a “valuable citizen” who had become known throughout the locality as a stock breeder, first of short-horn cattle, later of Shropshire fine-wool sheep and Poland-China hogs. His prize bull, Garfield—a “fine, well-proportioned animal”—was the envy of neighboring farmers.3 In addition to his business pursuits, he served in a number of official capacities, including township drain commissioner. He was a pillar of his church, St. Dominic in the township of Clinton.4

You saw what I’ve done, Mom!!” bragged the child. “What was that creature anyway?!” “It was a snake, a venomous one, the Arabian-horned viper,” replied the mother, shaking in fear from what just happened. “You were lucky it was a young one,” “A snake, huh?!! Well, he got what he deserved,” said the fawn. “You called me brave and hero, so will you name me Shuja’ or Batal ?” “Neither,” said the mother, pulling her son into a hug, “I’ll call you Nader,” Nader means rare, one of a kind.

Hunt asked, “You really have to moderate petty fights like that?” Ruhn ran a hand down the hilt of the Starsword. “Why not?” “You’re a prince.” “I don’t understand why you make that sound like an insult,” Ruhn growled. Hunt said, “Why not do … bigger shit?” Bryce answered for him. “Because his daddy is scared of him.” Ruhn shot her a warning look. “He outranks me power-wise and title-wise.” “And yet he made sure to get you under his thumb as early as possible—as if you were some sort of animal to be tamed.” She said the words mildly, but Ruhn tensed. “It was going well,” Ruhn said tightly, “until you came along.” Hunt braced himself for the brewing storm. Bryce said, “He was alive the last time a Starborn Prince appeared, you know. You ever ask what happened to him? Why he died before he made the Drop?” Ruhn paled. “Don’t be stupid. That was an accident during his Ordeal.” Hunt kept his face neutral, but Bryce just leaned back in her chair. “If you say so.” “You still believe this shit you tried to sell me as a kid?” She crossed her arms. “I wanted your eyes open to what he really is before it was too late for you, too.” Ruhn blinked, but straightened, shaking his head as he rose from the table. “Trust me, Bryce, I’ve known for a while what he is. I had to fucking live with him.” Ruhn nodded toward the messy table. “If I hear anything new about the Horn or this synthetic healing magic, I’ll let you know.” He met Hunt’s stare and added, “Be careful.” Hunt gave him a half smile that told the prince he knew exactly what that be careful was about. And didn’t give a shit.

Out on the Safaris, I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.

The beat of things, their steady direction, had dissolved into nothing–this room wasn't happening then, it isn't happening now; maybe it's a dream of what's going to happen or what will happen never. The sound of her own voice injures her like a shock of electricity through her ears, but screaming herself to hoarse exhaustion is the only reprieve from breathing. She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel. He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth. He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos. His face kept changing. His voice will come from far off, like a train's. His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly–the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly–and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now. The angel who says "It's time." "Is it time?" she asked. "Does it hurt?" He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen. "Oh babe." The angel starts to cry. "You can't imagine," he said.

He was a skinny, mop-haired boy up from San Marcos with haunted eyes. He wooed her with strange animal facts. The Texas horned lizard, he said, shoots blood out of its eyes when threatened, up to five feet. He was a fount of facts like these. Did you know, he would say, that when the hairy frog is attacked, it breaks its own toe bones and forces them through its skin to make claws?

Then the guy in the car behind me laid on his horn as I paused at a Yield sign to merge with traffic. I looked up, and in the rearview mirror I could see a younger man in a red truck getting very animated because I wasn’t moving fast enough for him. “The sign says ‘yield,’ not ‘forge ahead with total disregard for human life,’” I yelled at the rearview.

The food situation grew worse. Stocks of grain were dwindling. Prostitution spread to pay for hunger. Hooves and horns and bones were ground into osseine for soup. Animals from the zoo were sold for slaughter. The chefs of Paris cooked buffaloes and zebras, yaks and reindeer, wapitis and Bengal stags, wolves and kangaroos, and when there was nothing left-Castor and Pollux, the elephants.

As to Orphism, it soon blended with the worship of the god Dionysus, who originated in Thrace, and who was worshipped there in the form of a bull. Dionysus was quickly accepted in seventh-century Greece, because he was exactly what the Greeks needed to complete their pantheon of gods; under the name Bacchus he became the god of wine, and his symbol was sometimes an enormous phallus. Frazer speaks of Thracian rites involving wild dances, thrilling music and tipsy excess, and notes that such goings-on were foreign to the clear rational nature of the Greeks. But the religion still spread like wildfire throughout Greece, especially among women—indicating, perhaps, a revolt against civilisation. It became a religion of orgies; women worked themselves into a frenzy and rushed about the hills, tearing to pieces any living creature they found. Euripides’ play The Bacchae tells how King Pentheus, who opposed the religion of Bacchus, was torn to pieces by a crowd of women, which included his mother and sisters, all in ‘Bacchic frenzy.’ In their ecstasy the worshippers of Bacchus became animals, and behaved like animals, killing living creatures and eating them raw. The profound significance of all this was recognised by the philosopher Nietzsche, who declared himself a disciple of the god Dionysus. He spoke of the ‘blissful ecstasy that rises from the innermost depths of man,’ dissolving his sense of personality: in short, the sexual or magical ecstasy. He saw Dionysus as a fundamental principle of human existence; man’s need to throw off his personality, to burst the dream-bubble that surrounds him and to experience total, ecstatic affirmation of everything. In this sense, Dionysus is fundamentally the god, or patron saint, of magic. The spirit of Dionysus pervades all magic, especially the black magic of the later witch cults, with their orgiastic witch’s sabbaths so like the orgies of Dionysus’s female worshippers, even to the use of goats, the animal sacred to Dionysus. (Is it not also significant that Dionysus is a horned god, like the Christian devil?) The ‘scent of truth’ that made Ouspensky prefer books on magic to the ‘hard facts’ of daily journalism is the scent of Dionysian freedom, man’s sudden absurd glimpse of his godlike potentialities. It is also true that the spirit of Dionysus, pushed to new extremes through frustration and egomania, permeates the work of De Sade. As Philip Vellacot remarks of Dionysus in his introduction to The Bacchae: ‘But, though in the first half of the play there is some room for sympathy with Dionysus, this sympathy steadily diminishes until at the end of the play, his inhuman cruelty inspires nothing but horror.’ But this misses the point about Dionysus—that sympathy is hardly an emotion he would appreciate. He descends like a storm wind, scattering all human emotion.

Who were these people who were Nico's friends at that club? It seemed like an Italian-Spanish coffeeshop. I'm not sure, it was quite far from downtown in a pretty hidden location. I don't remember the name of the club or the street, but if I drive from Urgell I can find it. I took a few pictures outside the reception area while we were waiting outside with Adam to be allowed to enter after being registered as club members. They took our entry into the almost empty private club very seriously, unlike my girlfriend selling weed in their dispensary at age 20, when I just gave her a job elsewhere. The pictures I took were of two skateboards hanging on the wall next to each other. They were spray-painted with smiling devilish faces, the comedy and tragedy masks. („Sock and buskin: The sock and buskin are two ancient symbols of comedy and tragedy. In ancient Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin (Latin cothurnus). The actors with comedic roles wore only a thin-soled shoe called a sock (Latin soccus).” – Source: Wikipedia) There was another skateboard hanging on the wall, showing the devil smiling with his eyes and teeth and horns only visible in the darkness of the artwork. I doubt they were Italians – they were rather Spaniards – but I never really met anyone else from there besides Nico and Carulo. But I trusted Carulo; he was different. Carulo was a known person in Catalonia. He was known to be the person who was sitting in the Catalan Parliament and rolled a joint and lit it up, smoking during a session as a protest against the law prohibiting marijuana growing and smoking in Spain. Nico told me when he introduced me to Carulo in the summer of 2013, almost a year earlier: “This is the guy you can thank for being able to smoke freely in Catalonia without the police bothering you. Tomas, meet Carulo.” He never really ordered from me if I had met him before. He had no traffic; his growshop was always closed. He was only smoking inside with his younger brother, who was always walking his bull terrier. Their white Bull Terrier was female, half the size of Chico, but she was kind of crazy; you could see in her eyes that she was not normal; she had mental issues. At least, looking into Carulo's eyes and his brother's eyes, I recognized the similar illness in their dog's eyes. In 2014, it had been over four years since I had been working with dogs in my secondary job interpreting Italian and travelling every fifth weekend. Additionally, Huns came to Europe with their animals, including their dogs. There are at least nine unique Hungarian dog breeds.