[MD] woods

[MarshaV]

At 02:38 PM 1/15/2009, you wrote:
>Quick one: WHO IS THIS GUY?

"In a society that thoroughly distrusts authority 
of any sort, he had native personal magnetism 
that singled him out in any group. In a society 
that exalts moderation and the easiest way, he 
was turbulent and could act violently upon 
occasion. In a society that praises a pliant 
personality that 'talks lots' ­ that is, that 
chatters in a friendly fashion ­ he was scornful 
and aloof. Zuni's only reaction to such 
personalities is to brand them as witches. He was 
said to have been peering through a window from 
outside, and this is a sure mark of a witch. At 
any rate he got drunk one day and boasted that 
they could not kill him. He was taken before the 
war priests who hung him by his thumbs from the 
rafters till he should confess to his witchcraft. 
This is the usual procedure in a charge of 
witchcraft. However he dispatched a messenger to 
the government troops. When they came his 
shoulders were already crippled for life, and the 
officer of the law was left with no recourse but 
to imprison the war priests who had been 
responsible for the enormity. One of these war 
priests was probably the most respected and 
important in recent Zuni history and when he 
returned after imprisonment in the state 
penitentiary he never resumed his priestly 
offices. He regarded his power as broken. It was 
a revenge that is probably unique in Zuni 
history. It involved, of course, a challenge to 
the priesthoods, against whom the witch by his act openly aligned himself.

The course of his life in the forty years that 
followed this defiance was not, however, what we 
might easily predict. A witch is not barred from 
his membership in cult groups because he has been 
condemned, and the way to recognition lay through 
such activity. He possessed a remarkable verbal 
memory and a sweet singing voice. He learned 
unbelievable stores of mythology, of esoteric 
ritual, of cult songs. Many hundreds of pages of 
stories and ritual poetry were taken down from 
his dictation before he died, and he regarded his 
songs as much more extensive. He became 
indispensable in ceremonial life and before he 
died was the governor of Zuni. The congenital 
bent of his personality threw him into 
irreconcilable conflict with his society, and he 
solved his dilemma by turning an incidental 
talent to account. As we might well expect, he 
was not a happy man. As governor of Zuni and high 
in his cult groups, a marked man in his 
community, he was obsessed by death. He was a 
cheated man in the midst of a mildly happy populace.

It is easy to imagine the life he might have 
lived among the Plains Indians where every 
institution favoured the traits that were native 
to him. The personal authority, the turbulence, 
the scorn, would all have been honoured in the 
career he could have made his own. The 
unhappiness that was inseparable from his 
temperament as a successful priest and governor 
of Zuni would have had no place as a war chief of 
the Cheyenne; it was not a function of the traits 
of his native endowment but of the standards of 
the culture in which he found no outlet for his native responses.

When Phaedrus first read this passage he felt a 
kind of eerie feeling - a feeling he might have 
had if he had passed in front of a strange mirror 
and suddenly seen a reflection of someone he'd 
never expected to see. It was the same feeling he 
got at the peyote meeting. This Zuni Indian was 
not exactly someone else. "

        (LILA, Chapter 10)




>And why are we even talking to this troll?
>
>The rest of us are thinking individuals. Anyone can see how stupid it is.
>I don't care about the guy with the sign on the 
>street saying people are trying to assassinate 
>him because he is a descendant of the old kings, 
>and now I know to react to this guy woods the same way.
>
>
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The Universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in 
which each is a reflection of all the others in a 
fantastic, interrelated harmony without end.
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