JUNE 28, 1976

A caveat: my lens is not absolute. The below are simply assorted notes regarding the origins and execution of remnant magic throughout history, and in no particular order.

Beginning in the land of my ancestors -- there is something beautifully familiar about the story of the stone and anvil that heralds the beginning of Arthurian Britain, for it is not a sword that makes a man into a king, but rather a sword that indicates who the king was always meant to be. A relic from the reign before him, an indication of his heritage, passed down not from the hand of his father but from a stone in a church courtyard and the guidance of a wizard. It feels analogous to, if not an exact example of, that remnant magic currently practiced by remenoire.

Even some stories belonging to that Euro-centric term of "antiquity" point towards the power of the fragments of things. Some versions of the story of Jason and Medea tell of her tearing her brother apart and scattering him to the sea in order to stop her father's fleet from catching the eloping couple. A sense of honor would cause Aeëtes to gather every piece before returning home, for a proper burial dictates that a man be whole to be laid to rest. Likewise, the god Set murders and dismembers Osiris, scattering his remains throughout the kingdom (in some stories, one piece for each of the forty-two provinces of Egypt); his wife, Isis, recovers the pieces and is able to embalm and bury him properly, sending him to the afterlife where he reigns thereafter as the ruler-god of the underworld. 

Stories sing the importance of ashes, too; Hercules burnt on a pyre to cleanse him from the poison keeping him in perpetual agony, Quetzalcoatl's ashes from his own pyre rising into the sky to become the morning star, even the status of modern papal elections reported with white or black smoke from the heart of the Vatican. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we say at funerals and in poetry, to remind us that we are mortal. The pieces of things, the shattering of things, a constant reminder that no thing is truly immortal. 

Twentieth century Americans, bored with a lack of some independent, centralized culture, created their own mythical creatures from the fragments of other: the jackalope, the sasquatch, even the less creatively named "mothman", who has of late captured the imagination of many artists and writers, all are amalgamations of an assortment of creatures or else an assortment of fears, clutched close to ones blankets as the nights grow cold and dark. I have no love of such things, but they fascinate me all the same -- and the jackalope, to be frank, is a clever little bit of 1930's era capitalism, when so few things could bring joy to the hearts of men. 

I hold it all in my view: the telling of these stories, the reshaping and remembering of days long past and men who maybe never lived, even the casting of runes or the reading of tarot. I draw it close as I burn words behind the safety of my office door, with the halls of the dormitory at long last quiet, feeling deliciously alone and delightfully certain that I am precisely where I am meant to be. 

Knowing that someday this, too, will be nothing but a fragment.