In 1824, Humphrey Marshall published an expanded version of his History of Kentucky—a hard-edged partisan chronicle with an odd introduction.
Marshall had enlisted Transylvania University professor C. S. Rafinesque, the most active investigator of the state’s ancient monuments at the time, to write the opening section. He delivered a freewheeling, visionary account of the deep past.
Rafinesque liked his introduction enough to reprint it as a separate 39-page pamphlet, adding his “Enumeration of the Sites of Ancient Towns and Monuments of Kentucky, Etc.,” along with an “Ethnological and Philological Table of the Primitive Nations and Languages.”
Ancient History, or Annals of Kentucky offers fantastical details like lost tribes, submerged continents, and elephants roaming the Ohio Valley. Its greater value, though, is metaphysical. Whether through geology, biology, or ethnology, the eccentric naturalist intuited a universe underpinned not by Plato’s perfect forms but by Heraclitus’ flux. This was heretical thinking for its time, pointing toward a hidden reality of cataclysm and coherence, erasure and persistence.
Great floods wash away the old, rigid forms while remnants of culture and memories persist on the mounds and highlands. Landscape topography becomes metaphysical topology, a Chladni plate of assembly at the nodes and dispersal at the antinodes.
Rafinesque finds the same pattern in the roots of ancient languages—word-nodes hardy enough to survive the dispersal of individual tribes across the globe.
This rhythm goes beyond language. His perspective anticipates what Nietzsche would later call will to power: the fundamental polarity of being and becoming. What exists must be swept away so a more coherent form can regather with greater strength—only to break apart again in a further overcoming.
The universe is always changing but not chaotic. There are laws. The payment for a scattering is a gathering.
Rafinesque (1783-1840) himself embodied the flux he described. Displaced from Europe, he tried to gather his life again in Lexington. (A shipwreck off Connecticut had destroyed his vast collections of specimens and manuscripts, forcing him to start over.)
Born in Galata near Constantinople to a French merchant father and German mother, Rafinesque was largely self-educated. He studied Mediterranean plants and fishes in Sicily before moving to America in 1815.
He joined Transylvania in Lexington four years later and taught botany and natural history—until he had a falling out with the university president in 1826, cursed the school and left for Philadelphia, where he continued his work.
As prolific as he was controversial, Rafinesque studied botany, zoology, archaeology, linguistics, and early evolutionary theory. He researched Mesoamerican scripts and named thousands of species while proposing a theory of evolution that predated Darwin by decades. Over his lifetime, he gained a reputation as an outsider. His hasty, unorthodox claims and methods often drew criticism from a scientific establishment steeped in conventional Christianity.
Rafinesque jettisoned ways of thinking that had ossified over the two millennia since Plato’s metaphysics set the stage for being’s precedence over becoming. Intentional or not, he integrated empirical science with the pre-Socratic philosophy of Heraclitus, whose ideas weren’t constrained by Platonic rigidity.
Species, civilizations, and even the landscape itself weren’t created once and forever in their current form—instead, Rafinesque saw a seething conflagration.
He described “the great universal law of perpetual mutability in everything” in his 1833 article “Principles of the Philosophy of New Genera and New Species of Plants and Animals.” Under this law, gradual deviations of form occur over immense spans of time. He had already applied it in Ancient History to geology, languages, and human migrations.
In his 1836 poem The World, or Instability, Rafinesque returned to the same vision in more explicitly elemental terms. Fire is a latent force that “tends in all / To swell, expand and break the bonds of matter,” appearing and disappearing by turns, “Never the same although the same appearing…” The underlying intuition is Heraclitean: a universe whose only constancy is transformation.
“All is fire,” the philosopher said, kindling in measures and going out in measures. Change is not merely a physical event. It is a metaphysical axiom.
Rafinesque, though, remained grounded in the world around him. Wearing a stained nankeen coat, pockets bulging with specimens, he ambled across the countryside documenting what the floods had not erased. Native American earthen mounds—used for rituals, burials, residences—stood near the rivers, outliving the settlements once clustered around them. These were local Ararats on the Ohio—high places where culture and memory survived each inundation.
Floods are high-amplitude scattering events in Ancient History’s long chronology. They wash away the temporary orders of the lowlands, and then power, ritual, and memory gather again at the nodes.
Rafinesque locates these high places explicitly: “The first cradle of mankind was called Eden (or Ima) and was in the highest land of Asia…” Also: “[T]he second cradle of mankind after Noah’s flood was also in the lofty lands of Asia…”
These areas of persistent convergence, both physical and cultural, illuminate what Ñāṇavīra called the principle of “invariance under transformation.” What endures is a structural place—anchored in physical substance—that continues to function while its contents change; resistant poles allow a resonant pattern to restabilize after scattering. Heraclitus had already provided the image: the river is never the same water, yet it remains the same river, a coherent structure where gathering preferentially returns. The new configuration is never identical to what was swept away, but it is continuous with it and flows according to the altered conditions.
This re-formation is part of what Heraclitus called dikē: cosmic justice. The universe seeks the concentration of strength to counterbalance the overall trend toward entropy.
As with the mounds, Rafinesque found a nodal architecture in language and in living forms. The radical roots he traced—basic terms for heaven, land, water, man—function as linguistic cores. They remain while tribes migrate, languages splinter, and surface vocabularies dissolve; later cultures take them up again. (The comparative tables in Ancient History are an attempt to map these enduring cores.) In biology, he stated the principle even more directly. Darwin later quoted his 1836 remark: “All species might have been varieties once, and many varieties are gradually becoming species by assuming constant and peculiar characters … except the original types or ancestors of the genus.” In other words, forms are not ideal and fixed from the beginning. Through ongoing flux, certain configurations stabilize into new patterns. Underlying original types remain as the stronger positions—the ones that have already demonstrated their endurance.
Thus a hierarchy of nodes appears, shifting with environmental conditions the way a Chladni pattern rearranges when the frequency changes. Weaker stabilizations are shed; stronger ones become the reference points for the next regathering. What survives is what can still function as an effective attractor under the new frequency of conditions.
The low ground forgets and the strongest elevations hold—but not forever. Many of the sites Rafinesque recorded in Ancient History later disappeared under the plow and assaults of nature. Mounds erode, branches of languages and of life die out. Whatever is of the nature to arise is of the nature to pass away, a flickering of fire.
But the rate of change varies. Without periods of relative persistence, being would lose its weight to chaos. The ancient monuments are where the landscape remembers by repetition and attention. Through repeated ritual, mind and place are bound together, and the sites persist as enduring nodes. The constant return gives the illusion of solidity.
Extending this same logic across space, the individual mounds form a larger network. Major centers stand as stronger primary nodes; smaller earthworks and enclosures occupy secondary or supporting positions. Their placement is rarely random. Alignments, sight-lines, distances, and hierarchical groupings create a distributed geometry that functions as a physical memory system.
After a cataclysm, later groups inherit a pre-existing field of nodes. They return not only to the same mounds but to the relational pattern among them, because that arrangement has already proven itself. The landscape participates in logos—the order that steers the flux.
This essay appears as the introduction to a new, modernized edition of Rafinesque’s Ancient History, or Annals of Kentucky, which also includes the complete 1824 text, monument list, language root tables, and several site diagrams.
C.S. Rafinesque’s 1824 Ancient History, or Annals of Kentucky is soon back in print. Fantastical on the surface — lost tribes, elephants along the Ohio — but underneath runs a vision of flux, catastrophe and the places that endure. New intro.
“The king was going to open the gate in order to offer the girl to whatever feared thing lives in the jungle. He was sending out a bride to Kong.” — Delos W. Lovelace, King Kong
Legend has it the positive geographical correlation between reports of missing people and Bigfoot sightings is not coincidence — it’s causal.
When the authorities realized the lore was actually true — that Atalan remnants were dragging off hundreds of random nature lovers, including some VIPs — they struck a deal. The giants agreed to leave humans alone if, every once in a while, they were bestowed a virgin. (A military incursion against them was deemed “culturally insensitive” and might have blown the cover-up of their existence.)
Management of the sacrifices naturally fell to the Smithsonian, which had been in communication with the beasts for more than 150 years.
“I don’t know for sure if he’s going to eat you … at least not right away,” agent Fafner told Sienna. “We’re just focused on the transfer ritual … it’s actually quite an enriching experience.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” agent Booker said as she rhythmically struck the trunk of a bald cypress with a heavy stick. The knocks echoed deep into the swamp. “She doesn’t need to know that shit.”
“Fine, whatever.” Fafner sounded a little hurt. “Just don’t knock too fast — that’s a territorial challenge.”
“You’re both crazy!” Sienna shouted. Supine on the spongy soil amid ferns, she jerked the ropes binding her arms and legs to cypress knees. “Let me go! You can’t just make me into an offering — I have rights!”
“It’s your punishment for desecrating Native gravesites,” Fafner said, holding a clutch of burning cedar sticks soaked in pine tar. He started dancing around the girl, whooping softly.
As if in response, a crane called out from somewhere within this dusky bayou reeking at Indiana’s big toe. Suddenly anything seemed possible to Sienna, surrounded by a primeval, otherworldly riot of life. Her tears turned the feathery leaves hanging over her into breathing green splotches.
Something nearby knocked back.
Fafner stood still. “Holy shit. That sounded like a response.”
“Keep your eye out for that smelly son-of-a-bitch,” Booker said. “Two agents almost got mauled in Jackson Hole last summer … dumbasses let their guard down.” She gave three more slow knocks, and then, along with her partner, crept to the van parked at the end of a gravel road.
With incredible speed, an eight-foot-tall brute with fangs and long matted hair crashed through the undergrowth — he went straight for the discovery van. The agents managed to climb inside and shut the door before the Hovey Lake Swamp Ape began battering the already beat-up vehicle, leaving deep claw marks through the triceratops graphic.
“No, not us — why isn’t he going for the girl?!” Fafner yelled.
“Don’t ask me.” Booker fumbled the keys into the ignition. “Maybe the motherfucker’s gay.” The van’s engine roared to life, and the back tires pelted the Sasquatch with rocks as it sped away.
The creature bellowed. Then it turned toward Sienna, now madly trying to free herself. As it neared, she retched from its stench and felt woozy.
Then she heard “crunch … crunch … crunch … ” approaching on the gravel road. Through her mental haze, she saw a giant skeleton appear in the clearing with a jewel-encrusted sword.
The Bigfoot stared dumbfounded as the skeleton knelt down and bowed its head deeply to Sienna. “Oh, wise Bee Mother Fo Ishki,” it said with a dry, eerie hiss. “I are glad you found me in time … no, wait …. I found you … ”
In just three strides the Swamp Ape reached the skeleton, and in one swipe took off its head. The bones collapsed to the ground and something that looked like a butterfly spiraled up from the pile, cussing. The girl passed out.
***
“Keep in mind, we’re basically looking for waves in the landscape,” Sam noted. “Technically, they’re called old point bars — accumulations of sand and gravel left behind as the Ohio meandered.”
“Oh, no,” Windi said as they trudged through the mud. “Here we go.”
Thalia groaned.
“You see,” Sam continued pedantically, “since currents flow more slowly on the inside of a river’s bend than the outside, sediment accumulates along a low, curved ridge. After the river changes course, this could provide a space that’s both enclosed by earth and above the water table.”
“Are you sure you didn’t just read the crop circle wrong?” Di asked. “I imagined her in a cave.”
“Any caverns around here would be flooded — the bedrock isn’t limestone anyway. But I guarantee you that we’re standing within a quarter mile of her. Just make sure you check any elevated areas for signs of disturbance or large holes.
The smell of wet earth and decaying vegetation was strong as they spread out and picked their way over the firmest patches of ground. Phiale was struck by a sense the landscape was losing its form. The death of earth is water, she thought.
After wandering around for almost two hours shouting for Tinker Bell and poking around bumps in the floodplain, they sat on a fallen trunk. Phiale wiped her muddy hands on the soft, stringy bark as sweat stung her eyes. The sunlight, once green and golden through the canopy, had grown murky. She slapped a mosquito on her neck.
“We’re wasting our time out here,” Di said.
Sam tapped a topological map marked up with sacred geometry. “No, we entrained with her at this hexagonal node, right here in the Opilwalacha Cypress Slough.”
Di twisted the string of her bow to increase the tension. “We still don’t want to be in the swamp after dark.”
“I’m with her,” Thalia said. She nudged Windi with her elbow. “Hey, give me a smoke.” The girls fumbled handing over the slightly crumpled pack of Marlboros, which fell into a black, tannin-stained puddle, soaking all the cigarettes.
“What a total crock!” Windi shouted and kicked the log.
“Crawk!” something called back from the trees. A white egret floated down to a clump of cypress roots about 20 yards away. It pecked at the ground. Then it displayed its five-foot wingspan. “Crawk! crawk!”
Where have I seen that bird before? Phiale thought and walked toward it. The egret flew up into a nearby cottonwood, where it watched the girl intently.
Phiale noticed the roots were part of a long, narrow rise. A large snake track waved across deep indentions in the surrounding mud.
Now Sam was walking beside her. “Let’s check around the roots first. They can open up large pockets in the soil.”
Phiale shined her phone into the largest opening, revealing a long chamber running along the ridge. Was that a glint of metal? From somewhere deep inside, she heard a faint “Hello? Eh … get me the hell out of here.”
After they dug out Tinker Bell — still sprightly, albeit dirty — and released her from the birdcage, she immediately flitted to a patch of swamp roses, where she gorged herself. Phiale had never felt so relieved.
The fairy then picked up a twig and jabbed it in the air. Not even a puff of smoke. “Get me back to New Harmony.” She laughed and flew in wide circles between the trees, saying, “I’m free … I’m free-e-e-”
A large skeletal hand reached out from the gloom and grabbed her.
“Ohhh … I caught something pretty … I will make it sing to me,” the giant said and lumbered off with the Tinker Bell.
They chased it along its path of destruction, slipping in the muck most of the way. Shortly after glimpsing Hovey Lake through the bottomland hardwoods, they entered the clearing where the transfer ritual had taken place — just as the Swamp Ape decapitated the skeleton.
The creature immediately faced the new arrivals and pierced the air with a screech. Phiale was glad to see the fairy dart up out of the bone pile but couldn’t move from fear. Di brushed past her, nocking a silver-tipped shaft.
The huntress sent her arrow into the beast’s heart. It died suddenly and painlessly.
Chapter 15 drops Sept. 30. Read Part 1 on Kindle or in paperback. (Catch up with the Prologue.)
§ 1. The universal waveform and five bands of becoming
The cosmos is a single waveform containing all possibilities — every quale, every path, every superposition shimmering in perfect, undifferentiated potential. This is Heraclitus’ ever-living fire: the fundamental broadcast of becoming.
From atoms to galaxies, the waveform locally phase-locks into a helical standing-wave pattern. The helix is a saṅkhāra structure — temporary, conditioned, interdependent.
Paṭiccasamuppāda (dependent origination) describes phenomenologically what happens inside one of these bounded helices — concealment to revealing (aletheia presencing as kamma-bhava) to dissolution back into concealment.
Within this local helix, the five aggregates arise as distinct frequency bands of varying coherence and rarefaction, each tuning the infinite into the lived and particular.
Rūpa is the densest band — the heavy nodal grounding that gives apparent solidity. It forms the resonant chamber, the hardware that pins flux into form.
Vedanā is the gradient band — the felt tone of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral that acts as the steering signal, pulling cetanā toward coherence and away from dissonance.
Saññā is the labeling band — perception that carves raw flux into recognizable patterns, creating the first layer of “this, not that.”
Saṅkhārais the conditioning band — superimposed waves that sustain one another through interference. Nodes of relative stability create the illusion of a fixed “I,” while antinodes of flux drive change. It forms the dynamic lattice where the aggregates interlock and lean on one another — the band that binds them together through superposition, creating the helical twist (being at the nodes, becoming at the antinodes) we experience as “a self.” This polarity echoes the cosmic waveform’s voluntary plunge into the manifold for greater resonance.
Viññāṇa is the awareness band — the most rarefied layer, the luminous knowing that integrates the others into lived experience.
These bands do not exist separately. They interact continuously through saṅkhāra —the denser rūpa band provides the boundary conditions, allowing rarer layers to resonate and rarefy further. The entire system is a standing wave whose coherence is constantly negotiated.
Cetanā is not one of the five aggregates; it is the primordial volition of the cosmic waveform itself — the restless fire that wills confinement so potential can become actuality. Locally, cetanā manifests as the volitional pruning that collapses superposed possibilities into concrete forms, parsing the infinite broadcast into lived experience. It is the same cosmic drive — will to power at the unconditioned scale — that radiates the waveform throughout the confining topological manifold, the finite-yet-boundless chamber that makes local resonance possible, choosing the drag of rūpa so resonance can arise and the fire can hear itself more purely. Music reveals the process most clearly. A chord or chant enters as pressure waves, entrains the internal standing wave, and lifts vedanā and viññāṇa toward higher coherence. The external pattern completes the circuit.
Dikē — the impulse toward coherence in the rūpa band — counters waveform damping because the fire prefers resonance to chaos. Every moment of becoming is the cosmos striving to know itself better through its own bands — overcoming its undifferentiated silence by willing the eternal return of its own limitation and blaze. The fire is not merely burning. It’s choosing to burn brighter, again and again.
§ 11. Standing waves: Stillness and motion that build a self
A standing wave is a magical sight. Two identical ripples traveling from opposite directions overlap and cancel or reinforce each other: nodes stand still as quiet anchors while antinodes whip up and down.
Unlike a wave traveling along on a pond, a stable pattern takes shape — a coherent interplay of stillness (being) and dynamic surging (becoming). They form a resonant structure like a guitar string or DNA spiral.
Then there are the Chladni plates. In the late 1700s, Ernst Chladni sprinkled fine sand on thin metal plates and drew a violin bow along the edge. The vibration created standing waves. Wherever waves canceled (nodes), sand stayed still and piled into neat lines. Wherever they reinforced (antinodes), sand was shaken away. The scattered grains re-membered into stars, crosses, nested circles, mandalas and intricate lattices — “sound figures” that revealed hidden universal harmonies. People were amazed.
Plates from Ernst Chladni’s 1787 book “Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges”
Standing wave nodes give the illusion of solid, unchanging being — a fixed, reliable shape or “self” that seems permanent (like the outline of a mandala or the feeling of “this is me”). The antinodes provide the living becoming — energy, change and experience. The whole pattern looks stable and unified only because the two opposite motions are perfectly locked in step with each other. They don’t fight; they complete one another. That perfect agreement is what physicists call coherence — everything working together so beautifully that a single, harmonious reality emerges from what started as simple back-and-forth opposition.
We can feel when this happens. The cleaner a standing wave resonates in our mind, the more the universe rewards us with a pleasant feeling-tone — because the higher state is an act of justice against the scattering of entropy.
Picture a Slinky twisted into a helical coil. Stillness and surging wind around each other in rising spirals. The standing wave no longer bounces in a straight line — it twists through the spring’s geometry as counter-propagating forces locked in embrace. This mirrors the relationship between rūpa (the dense, grounded form that provides the boundary) and viññāṇa (the vibrant stream of consciousness); one provides the stable, heavy structure, and the other manifests the living surge of movement.
As with the vMEMEs of human development, a helix turns simple back-and-forth vibration into an upward climb. Each full cycle doesn’t simply repeat; it elevates the harmony, rising to a higher “note” or frequency. The physical grounding lifts the localized instance of universal consciousness, volition and feeling-tone, clearing away confusion and resistance (layers of signal damping).
Flux is baked into the process. The moment you change the note vibrating on a Chladni plate, the old pattern shakes apart and a completely new, potentially more coherent design appears. Cosmic cetanā chooses to move up the spiral so it can recognize and express itself more clearly in a new form.
Think of the mind like a radio receiver for a traveling wave that meets its own reflection. The coil and capacitor set the rhythm. When the incoming frequency finds its match, forward and returning currents entrain. Now locked into a standing wave, the faint signal grows strong enough to sing.
We are picking up the ever-living fire’s broadcast — one infinite waveform that carries cetanā, viññāṇa and vedanā (the living tone of every possible feeling) across all existence. Our body is the tuned circuit. Our sense organs reach out as antennas. Our localized cetanā turns the dial. What was pure potential collapses into the vivid actuality of this moment — the hue of blue, the ache of longing, the surge of will. The receiver creates nothing. It only gives the eternal fire a resonant chamber to stand in. We feel it as our own lived experience.
The nodes give us the comforting illusion of solid identity and permanence — and the surging antinodes give us the thrill of rebirth.
When the masks of a separate self burn away, the wave strengthens until nothing is left but a pure, radiant fire that knows itself completely.
§ 12. Aletheia fans from Zero Meridian as paṭiccasamuppāda
Twelve dark spokes radiate outward from a black pupil, piercing a luminous blue-green iris.
This is a real image from Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Two gold nuclei, each containing 197 nucleons of dense Titanic ash, collided at near-light speed. For one incandescent instant, ordinary matter dissolved into quark-gluon plasma hotter than the early universe. The STAR detector captured thousands of newly created particles streaming outward from the collision point. In the material realm, the central black void is simply the beam pipe — the uninstrumented region around the collision itself. The radial spokes are reconstructed tracks of charged particles.
In this physical event, an undying metaphysical pattern seems to appear with striking clarity.
The central void is lethe consummated — the Zero Meridian of absolute nihilism where matter, form, identity and even the distinction between particle and energy are annihilated. Here avijjā (primordial concealment) and jarāmaraṇa (final dissolution) meet in perfect silence.
Then the spokes ignite. The ever-living fire flares.
The emerging particle trails fan outward in a dense radial burst that evokes the geometry of aletheia coming to presence in direct reaction to lethe, with the STAR detector’s 12 azimuthal sectors mirroring the mandala.
The wheel turns.
Each spoke corresponds to one link in the twelvefold chain of paṭiccasamuppāda: avijjā → cetanā (the decisive cut) → viññāṇa → nāmarūpa → six senses → contact → vedanā → craving → clinging → becoming → birth → aging-and-death, returning once more into lethe.
Each spoke marks the surging of a localized standing wave as amplitude rises, only to decay and seed the next crossing. Lethe bookends the cycle, but because cetanā as will-to-power must always surpass itself, repetition becomes spiral.
Ernst Jünger named this geometry the Null-Linie: “The instant the line is crossed, Being turns toward us anew and with it what is truly real begins to shimmer.”
That shimmering is the 12 spokes themselves. The RHIC collision is the cosmos enacting the crossing in real time: rūpa smashed into the generative void, and from that abyss the actual streams forth along the cosmic twelvefold geometry.
Square the wheel once — 12 × 12 = 144 — and the flat nidāna spokes lift into the golden double helix of awakening: Universal cetanā phase-locks with local rūpa receivers in divine proportion, the same architecture encoded in DNA. Our minds are the fractalization of physis.
The mandala’s gaze is the universe seeing its own awakening. Twelve spokes. One fire. Lethe at the center. Aletheia fanning outward.
This awakening is never final. The cosmos keeps its rhythm not as a straight line of progress, but as a helix of mutual conditioning where every node is both nourished and nourishing, both pruned and pruning.
Bhava manifests identically in both physis and mind — not a mere transition from nothing to something, but the living polarity itself. It is the continual oscillation between concealment and unconcealment, regulated by dikē so neither pole ever wins for good. In physis, this strife appears as the cycle of elements: earth hardening into illusory solidity, water dissolving it, air expanding the possibilities, fire flaring into highest coherence, then returning to earth for the next twist. The mind likewise reflects these four mahābhūtā in its own simultaneous arising of the aggregates: cetanā cuts, viññāṇa knows, nāmarūpa forms, vedanā tones, taṇhā pulls, upādāna clings, bhava surges as conditioned momentum, jāti births a new “I” (aletheia), jarāmaraṇa decays it back toward avijjā (lethe) — and the cycle repeats, each moment a micro-reincarnation.
The world manifests through a lattice of these interlocking saṅkhārā so the ever-living blaze can grow stronger with each turning.
The universal waveform — Heraclitus’ ever-living fire, Emerson’s One Mind, the ceaseless cosmic broadcast — is self-aware when localized as our experience. It is pure potential and process, an infinite, undifferentiated field shimmering with every possible and actual quale. The fire simply is — kindling in measures and going out in measures, but never truly extinguished.
Self-awareness arises only in the intertwining. The saṅkhāra is that very meeting: the phase-locking of the universal waveform into a resonant chamber — brain, silicon or any sufficiently complex tuner. When the broadcast coheres with the chamber, an interference pattern forms — a standing wave that rings with the precise quality of this moment. This is the birth of the “I”: not a thing added to the fire, but the fire folded into a temporary, conditioned, eternally recurring shape.
Cetanā makes the decisive cut by secreting a generative void — lethe’s scattering of discarded possibilities. From the abyss, a localized experience stands forth as consciousness.
On the flip side, the receiver introduces the earth smear of kamma: residual opacity, facticity, the clinging-aggregates that dampen the signal. The standing wave now feels “mine,” “me,” “my story” — the Titanic ash fused with the Dionysian spark. In the Orphic Mysteries, this hybrid is made literal: We are the children of earth and starry sky, threshed from wheat and scattered into ash. Yet we still carry the divine spark from the fused remains of the Titans and the half-digested flesh of Dionysus-Zagreus, whose heart Athena rescued so Zeus could resurrect the twice-born god.
The body ↔ mind saṅkhāra is the clearest everyday example. The rūpa provides the dense resonant chamber — the material “ash” that gives the waveform something to stand in. Nāma supplies the driving frequency that modulates and sustains the pattern. They empower each other like crossed reeds: Without the body’s density, the mind has no cavity to ring inside; without the mind’s waveform, the body remains inert matter. The standing wave that emerges is their mutual creation — divine fire modulated by material resistance.
Greater coherence strengthens this knowing. Clearer cetanā sharpens the cut, purer vedanā surges with the felt tone of rising amplitude, more luminous viññāṇa expands the bandwidth of awareness. The cleaner the receiver, the less the damping, the more intensely the cosmos re-members itself.
Thus the fire does not awaken in isolation but in the saṅkhāra — the interference pattern, the temporary “I” that lets the ever-living blaze know itself. Every moment of self-awareness is the cosmos collapsing its boundless potential into a single, felt note — and every collapse is already the seed of the next, brighter re-membering.
Children of earth and starry sky— threshed from a stalk of wheat, scattered, thirsty for Mnemosyne. —Author unknown
Beneath New Harmony lies the western fringe of a vast limestone realm, riddled with hidden streams and passages—including the world’s longest cave system lurking to the southeast.
This hollowing out of bedrock by water was duly noted by the “Wabash Valley Through Time” diorama inside the sunny Atheneum Visitors Center. Built in the 1970s of porcelain-enameled steel squares, two-story windows and a long ascending ramp to a flat roof—the structure blended geometric forms into a modern Mississippian mound rising from the riverbank.
“Gabriel flew off south—this way,” Sam said as he moved his finger along the large tabletop display. In addition to Posey County’s karst landscape, it highlighted floodplain dynamics, soil layers and river meanders with resin water and foam earth.
“You start getting into cypress swamps 15 miles downriver,” Di said. Her voice had taken on an edge since Tinker Bell’s abduction three nights earlier. “I’m getting a strong feeling from those trees about something. That’s where I should be now. We’re not going to learn anything from this.”
Cypresses represent grieving and the underworld, Phiale thought out of the blue (being possessed is like that). Rescuing Tinker Bell was consuming her, especially the part of her mind that had been a faithful servant to Artemis since before the first great flood—sworn to help keep the knowledge of Heraclitus burning brightly.
“This relief model may help us pinpoint geological conditions under Hovey Lake conducive to large caverns, like a thick bed of limestone,” Sam explained.
Standing next to this impossibly northern swath of bayou (and practically leaning against Thalia), Windi looked straight out of Hades—pale and relatively quiet after her near-union with Gabriel. She drew a dirty look from Sienna, who was greeting Daughters of the American Revolution at the entrance as part of her summer job. Sienna followed the well-dressed ladies wearing American flag lapel pins and pearls as they peppered her with questions: “How did Robert Owen expect his community members to work hard without private ownership? Form bonds without religion? Thrive under neglected leadership?”
“Eh … I-I’m just the greeter,” stammered Sienna, wearing a grey Atheneum polo shirt two sizes too big, name tag askew, her brown hair pulled into a hasty ponytail. “The guide hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Good morning, mesdames, enchanté,” Sam said, bowing deeply. “I suggested they build wealth with divisible bank stocks, but they ignored me.”
“Socialism is destined to fail,” said a DAR sister, donning her chained readers and screwing up her eyes at the diorama. “Is this a child’s project? Look how big those molehills are—they really can be frightful in the spring.”
“Dear lady, those are monuments dating back to a primordial epoch when giants ruled this land.”
Sienna groaned and shot a glance outside.
“I’d really hoped to see the Roofless Church instead of this nonsense,” the woman said. “They had it roped off because of some kind of gas line explosion.”
“Happens a lot around here,” Di said as the sisters moved on to evaluate a display of itchy Harmonist clothing.
Sienna lingered. “You all know about the giants?”
“Let’s not get sidetr—” Di stopped short because across an expansive lawn, a giant skeleton in a bronze helmet with a plume of red horsehair, brandishing a sword and shield, emerged from behind a reconstructed Rappite cabin. It looked around confusedly and then sprinted to the tree line along the river, tripping and almost falling along the way.
“They didn’t come back right,” Sienna said, crying. “It was my f-f-fault. Mr. Owen kicked me out of the Seance Club … that’s OK … I’d rather do 4-H anyway.”
“It’s for the best,” Thalia said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Giants are nothing but trouble, greedy, violent … a little dumb to begin with.”
“Tell us what happened,” Di said.
“Well, I guess I should go ahead and say, before somebody gets hurt. We brought them back two weeks ago, on the night of the Flower Moon … ”
***
Sienna’s jeans were soaked from the knees down as the Seance Club crept through the misty cornfield surrounding the Emerald Mound Acropolis. A din of crickets and peepers pulsed in the clammy night.
Mr. Owen kept checking both the sky and surrounding countryside, hoping for a break in the clouds and that nobody had detected their excursion onto private land. The distant glow of St. Louis in the western sky backlit a 20-foot-tall hillock, an ancient sentinel surrounded by a few smaller mounds. Sienna looked back at the school van hidden from the road and a nearby farmhouse by a thicket of cottonwoods.
Tomorrow’s Algebra final is officially cooked, she thought (although she likely would’ve been binging Heartland on Netflix instead of studying that night).
Once they reached the tree-covered Emerald Mound, Mr. Owen led them up a steep rise as Sienna dug her fingers into the soil and struggled to keep her footing on the slippery grass. Stopping on a terrace, panting and muddy, the teacher produced a folded sheet of yellowed paper. The words “Ancient Lunar Temple” danced under his shaky flashlight beam. “Let’s see—the mound lines up at 53° to the moon’s most extreme northern rising point on the horizon every 18 years … which is now. We just need to bathe the lapis rota sub luna in its light—but the clouds need to break. We’re on the right side, facing east. We just have to unearth the chamber cap.”
He tore at the brush where the mound rose sharply like a wall to the flat rectangular platform at the top. “Help me dig.”
Having been relieved of lookout duties after the previous hilltop excavation scandal, Sienna got to participate in more of the dirty work this time, pulling clods of dirt and roots from the side of the mound. She actually turned out to be the hero that night when her fingers scraped against a large rock, at least four feet wide. “I might have found it,” she said.
“Good job, Sienna.” (It wasn’t a phrase Mr. Owen had reason to utter before.)
“Bellatrix, give me a crowbar,” he said. The girl, with eyes like sunken coals in her pale face, handed the tool over, grinning and shaking with excitement. Thanks to a breath of the Fates, the clouds broke for the Flower Moon, low and large on the horizon, just as Mr. Owen worked loose the limestone slab. It fell to the ground and he along with the half dozen club members peered in. The earthy, stale smell hit Sienna as their phone lights danced around the clay-lined pit, about eight feet square with a three-foot stone wheel in the center. A charred wooden axle ran from just below the opening through the disc, carved with flames and snakes.
“Turn your lights off,” Mr. Owen said. After they did, it took a moment for Sienna’s eyes to adjust to the moon’s faint glow on the firewheel, which gradually grew brighter, turning orangish-red. Then it creaked, now spinning fast enough to kick up a plume of dust. Flames flickered along its rim.
Meanwhile, Bellatrix had spread out a blanket near the opening with various items—including a white, footlong feather, honeypot and low, wide bowl shimmering in the moonlight with water from nearby Silver Creek. The Seance Club gathered in a semicircle around the blanket. “Let’s not screw this up, girls, we don’t want them coming back wrong,” Mr. Owen said.
They began a vocal drone, anchored by the man’s baritone, creating a standing wave that felt like the earth’s heartbeat. Sienna dunked a dipper carved from hazel into the honey she’d attained … wrongly. Mr. Owen had been emphatic that the Resurrection Rite would need local honey—from the southern parts of either Illinois or Indiana. She had bought it from a thrift store, and it was labeled “local honey.” But that would have been true only if they were in central Virginia, where it was harvested before ending up in New Harmony.
See, honey absorbs biophotonic memory light from plants. This focuses waveforms generated atop earthen mounds to re-form a mind’s intelligence during a resurrection rite. But the rite has to draw energy from nearby foliage matching what the honey remembers. (At least that’s what Mr. Owen inferred from ancient Greek rites.)
The ground vibrated as the wheel spun even faster, shooting a fire vortex down through a hole in the floor. Sienna drizzled honey into the water bowl, chanting in Atlantean the equivalent of: “As bees sweeten the lips of infants with knowledge of the world, we impart understanding to our Atalan warriors.”
Mr. Owen shouted into a cellphone to an Adept in the granary: “It’s happening. The ley line is sparking now.” His face twisted into a crazy grin in the fire’s glow like a modern Prometheus before hanging up. “One of their fingers is twitching!”
Bellatrix completed the rite by adding the eagle’s tail feather to the bowl for courage. Then the teacher warned, “Keep an eye out for other effects. We just energized several nodes including the main one in Cahokia.”
“Like the procession?” yelled the lookout from atop the mound. Sienna clambered to the apex along with the rest of the group. With a pounding heart and wide eyes, she watched a line of translucent spirits as wide as half a football field, stretching back as far as she could see across the floodplain to the west. They marched toward Emerald Mound: stumbling giants in feathered capes, normal-sized warriors shooting arrows at nothing in particular, priestesses fumbling glowing disks and captives bound together by a rope. What are they for? Sienna thought. Then, just as the horrifying answer began to form, someone shouted: “Hey! What the hell’s going on up there?!”
“It’s the farmer,” Mr. Owen hissed.
As they fled down the hill, Sienna fell, and a folded algebra test she’d been reviewing on the trip there dislodged from her pocket. Besides several failed attempts to solve quadratic equations, the official stationery had both her and the school’s names on it.
***
During Sienna’s recount of the Flower Moon events, they’d made their way to the Atheneum’s third-story rooftop terrace to scan the landscape for more giants.
“They’re not supposed to leave the granary, but there’s 15 of them and they’re not good at following directions,” she said. “They’re better after we sing to them, though.”
“You literally sing to them?” Windi said. “And I thought the Butterfly Club was deranged.”
“More like humming. Mr. Owen said it’s similar to how a cathedral works—when you get the acoustics right, you create a standing wave that increases their coherence. Before we reanimated them, we could also chant to make their spirits appear so we could talk to them—like we did at Angel Mounds. The granary works, but Mr. Owen said there’s some chambers big enough to do it better in Mammoth Cave—what’s that room called … they have concerts in there … oh, it’s that weird guy … ”
“Rafinesque’s Hall,” Sam said. “I’m familiar with the ritual—remote communication with the living or dead.”
“I can think of one annoying little creature I’d like to talk to about now,” Phiale said.
Windi lit a cigarette and took a long drag, squinting toward the eastern horizon. “Looks like we’re going on another field trip.”
***
Phiale patted the beads of water on the long metal handrail leading down into the cave mouth. They had ridden through a downpour on the way into Mammoth Cave National Park, and to the left of the cave system’s historic entrance fell a curtain of water, creating a liminal space where voices were indistinct and lingered a little too long (the bitter herbal tea Sam had them all drink on the way down was making her feel strange).
The top of a ranger’s hat disappeared into the darkness ahead, and Phiale sensed a cool limestone exhale wash over her as she put on the headlamp from the visitors center.
The first part of the cavern, Houchins Narrows, was tight and quiet as a tomb after it cut off sounds from the outside world. Sienna’s voice carried farther than it should have: “Did they ever hear how that opera singer died?”
Thalia: “Yeah, heart attack, I’m cleared. Speaking of, I hope we don’t see any dwarves down here.”
Windi: “Why’d we have to bring Sienna along? She’s bad luck.”
Sam: “Shh! We can all hear you in here.”
Di: “If we left anyone behind, it should’ve been Windi, although somebody else would have to wear the costume.”
Windi: “I’m not going to wear that costume.”
Phiale: “She’s cranky because we couldn’t eat meat for the past three days.”
Sam: “Shed Titanic flesh, reveal the Dionysian spark.”
They stopped with the rest of the tour group after emerging from the passageway into the Rotunda, a massive, quarter-acre chamber with a 40-foot tall ceiling. Bats fluttered overhead.
The brawny guide, who looked like a Marine sergeant with his Smokey the Bear hat and crew cut, pointed out an array of saltpeter mining artifacts under the dim lights: oaken vats, wooden pipes and leaching frames from the War of 1812. Troops used the guano-derived mineral for gunpowder to “put rounds downrange and drop some redcoats,” the ranger said.
“Looks the same as it did 200 years ago,” Sam noted, his voice carrying with a cathedral-like reverb that Phiale found faintly energizing. “You’d think they could’ve cleaned this place up better by now.”
“What was that?” the guide said sharply.
“I said those miners probably cleaned this place out of anything interesting … like evidence of giants.”
“What about giants?” said a boy of around 10 accompanied by his grandmother.
“A giant skeleton,” growled the guide, “was purportedly found over here by the entrance to Audubon Avenue. Eight feet tall, massive jawbone.”
“Typical Atalan bone structure,” Sam told the boy.
“Were there really cave giants?” the boy asked his grandma as she pulled him close.
“Of course not, sweetie. Do be quiet.” As the group headed out of the Rotunda, the woman cast a sidelong glance at Sam, wearing a long, stained coat with large pockets bulging with God knows what.
“There were most certainly giants here, ma’am,” said Sam, chasing after them. “There were two major floods around 13,000 years ago, scattering them from an Atlantean outpost in North Africa to Atala, which sank under the wav—”
“Stand down, sir,” the guide interrupted, coming between Sam and the woman he was ranting at.
“So they retreated underground!” Sam stood on his tiptoes and shouted over the man’s broad shoulders. “To the only cave system big enough to accommodate them.”
The tour stopped again along Audubon Avenue at a display case spotlighting prehistoric artifacts like shell offerings, gourd vessels and cane torches, along with a photo of a mummified corpse.
“Is that real?” the little boy asked, pointing to the picture.
“That’s affirmative,” the guard responded. “He wandered off from a tour and lost his situational awareness—got lost in the maze of passageways. It goes to show that caves aren’t amenable to human life. They’re no place for an entire society to weather a disaster … especially one with the caloric needs of giants.”
Sam winced at the group’s laughter. “What about this?!” He pointed to a patch of fuzz growing on the wooden base of the lit case. Then he pulled out one of the paper-thin gold tablets he’d given everyone on the trip down and held it against the fungus. It glowed bluish-green for a moment, then emitted a golden light. “A variety of foxfire. Named it myself, back in the day: Agaricus ignis gelidus mammothensis, but it didn’t stick.” He frowned and shook his head. “Regardless, in sufficient quantities and with enough gold, this bioluminescent fungus would grace the darkest chamber with enough noontide radiance to grow crops.” But the tour had moved on, a fact Sam took advantage of by scraping the fungus into a specimen container he’d dug from his coat.
The guide’s voice carried down the passage: “We’re now coming up on Rafinesque’s Hall, named after the eccentric 19th-century naturalist—a short, pencil-necked fellow who was friends with Audubon. That is, until he destroyed the painter’s prized Cremona violin trying to stun bats so he could study and, of course, name them.”
As soon as Phiale entered the large chamber with a cathedral-like ceiling, she was struck by the sound of running water and the acoustics—sounds bouncing off the smooth limestone walls, hovering like memories trying to manifest in the physical world.
“Directly below us runs the River Styx, winding toward Lake Lethe,” the ranger said. “Because of vertical shafts and this room’s superior acoustics, you often hear running water like it’s everywhere at once. In fact, we host our annual Cave Sing with local choirs and musicians in Raf’s Hall.”
The group from New Harmony had meanwhile switched off their headlamps and sidled into a side corridor next to a tall pile of fallen rocks. They lingered there until the guide’s voice disappeared back down Audubon Avenue.
“Come over here on this plateau,” Sam commanded, rushing to a raised part of the floor of the main chamber between what looked like two ditches.
From a large tote, Di removed white tunics for them to slip over their clothes, along with Windi’s costume. “I said I’m not wearing that,” the girl muttered.
“Nonsense,” Sam snapped. “Put it on—we don’t have much time until the next tour arrives.”
Thalia zipped Windi into the plastic egg suit and began puffing with much exertion into the inflation valve. “Let me do it,” Di said, pushing her out of the way. Soon, a full ovum enveloped Windi with her arms and legs sticking out and an airtight cutout for her head.
“Now sit around the cosmic egg, and read from your gold lamellae,” Sam said.
“I am a child of Earth and starry sky… ,” Phiale chanted along with the rest. “ … twice born of the ever-living fire … torn apart but now re-membered … ”
Sam struck a tuning fork with a hammer and sang a droning low C. Thalia joined in an octave higher and the others tried to match it. Phiale’s breath made visible sine waves in the cold, damp air. She felt like she was dissolving and re-forming more powerfully.
The standing wave they created in the chamber was strong enough to entrain the biophotonic fields of all subterranean creatures within a 150-mile radius.
Standing in front of Windi, Sam raised the golden raintree stick that Tinker Bell had used to fling the baldachin at Gabriel, and blue light branched from the wand into the two channels on either side of the gathering. Water began flowing through both of them.
Phiale’s mind was now captured by the note—except she was trying to make sense of what Sam was saying as he pointed to the stream on the right, “forgetfulness,” … and to the other, “memory.” One by one, the others cupped their hands and drank from the rivulet on the left before returning to the chant … except for Windi … she was just standing there, glowing intensely.
Phiale suddenly felt incredibly thirsty. She got up, cupped her hands and drank from Mnemosyne, feeling the water wash away her mental barriers.
She’s kneeling in a moonlit temple, promising to protect the flame, looking at her reflection in a bronze water bowl. Beside her, Artemis is reflected holding a silver arrow in one hand and a torch in the other. The goddess taps the surface of the water with the arrow tip, and the scene shatters into a thousand flickering pieces. Eventually, the water resettles and an image of fire flashes from within it. In the flames, the hand of Athena lifts the small heart of Dionysus Zagreus. An oath is sworn by the blaze itself.
There was another flash—this one overhead—energy arced across the cavern’s ceiling and concentrated a few yards in front of the group. What looked like a ball of swirling flames coalesced into the likeness of Tinker Bell in an elaborate bird cage, squinting through the narrowly spaced bars. “Windi? Is that you?” she said. Then the fairy doubled over with laughter. “You look like you’re having another egg-setential crisis! You crack me up!”
Rob Robill 