Lynx to complete mosaic novels within the PHANTACEA Mythos whose potential covers, background information and introductory chapters are still online

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If only because I've already reprinted the foreword to “The War of the Apocalyptics”, the latest phantacea Mythos mosaic novel, I figured I better reprint the novel's afterword this time up. Reprint it, that is, as I reprinted Feel Theo's Afterword — albeit in the Anheroic Fantasy Illustrated tradition of the phantacea comic books and graphic novel.

Additionally, while it isn't a typical photo essay as such, it also gives me an opportunity to publish the remaining never-before-seen-online pages from the second issue (of a planned 15 issues) of the ill-fated phantacea Phase One project. (I published the first five last time.)

Hopefully these pages, along with a simple click to the previous set, will spur you into some serious ordering and recommending to friends.

Help build the buzz!

The War of the Apocalyptics – Author’s Afterword

I’m sure every writer of fantasy sometimes wonders if he didn’t make the whole thing up; if perhaps there is some measure of truth in what he’s written. I’m no different. That said, I feel obliged to add that some of the things I’ve come across since I first started writing the PHANTACEA Mythos cross the bounds of wonderment and enter the realm of the truly spooky.

I cited a series of examples of just that in the afterword to "Feeling Theocidal". There, to fay-say some, I remarked upon some sites with sights anyone with PHANTACEA-skewed eyeballs could see while meandering through a relatively few blocks of Mexico City.

(A photo essay revisiting that Afterword, one complete with my own photographs as well as supplementary lynx to Internet references, can be viewed here.)

As nifty as they are, though, none of them really compares to what I spotted that day in the Cairo Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.

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Sedon's Head: Inspiration or Destination?

Growing up I was accounted as having a fertile imagination. My Greek grandfather told me I had a fabulous 'phantacea', a word that simply meant imagination in his native tongue. As a teenager in the late Sixties I was regularly described as having my head in the clouds.

It got so bad I was often accused of being lost in my own headworld. Whereupon I had this inspiration: Wouldn't it be interesting if there were an actual Headworld, a place where not just me but anyone who knew how could go? That in mind I drew one up. It looked very much like the image on the left in this logo variation (also in the blue logo on the back cover the print version of War-Pox).

Double-click for a topical cutout from the phantacea graphic novel of 1990, artwork by Ian Fry

This Headworld had to have a name and, not wanting to be exclusive, I could not very well call it Jim's Headworld. So, for reasons that are still somewhat of a mystery to me, I called it Sedon's Head instead.  A number of years later, in the mid Seventies, I decided to put out my own comic book series. I called it PHANTACEA and wrote and published six issues before I ran out of patience as much as money.

Pass forward to the mid-Eighties. Around that time I sold an enormous quantity of back issues. Which of course meant I could publish more comic books. This secondary output culminated in a graphic novel, "Forever and Forty Days - The Genesis of PHANTACEA", whereupon I promptly ran out of money again. The ultimate villain in the graphic novel was this Sedon fellow. As you might have realized by now, or will as soon as you read the preview of 1000-Daze, he’s the Devil.

Not being a complete idiot I decided I would not be self-publishing any more comic books or, especially, any more graphic novels. I still had all these characters, though, and had been afflicted with the writing bug since long before I came up with Sedon's Head.

(Double-click inverted map to open a separate window with an enlarged version of the standard map of Sedon's Head, of which plenty more here.)

Along comes the Worldwide Web and, after learning hypertext markup language (HTML), mostly from a book, I launched PHANTACEA on the Web in 1996. (I upgraded that to ‘the PHANTACEA Mythos Online’ sometime in the mid-to-late 20-Naughts but nowadays refer to it almost exclusively as pH-Webworld even though it finally got its own URL in 2011: www.phantacea.info).

About that time (1996) I took to travelling farther afield during my vacations. On Crete, which claims a civilization as old as the First Dynasty of Egypt, I made what I considered a couple of intriguing and, to my mind, serendipitous discoveries.

(BTW, tradition moderately more so than legend has Ancient Egypt's first king as Menes. According to even less reliable, but much more famous, mythological sources, Crete's founder had much the same name: Minos, he of the Minotaur and the Knossos Labyrinthe. Which naturally encourages some contrarians to speculate they're the same person — a refugee from Atlantis, no doubt.)

The first of my discoveries was a hamlet or village township I drove through, but didn't know existed until I spotted the road sign, that had strong links to its Etocretan past — Etocretan (sometimes also Eteocretan – True Cretans) being the correct name for those selfsame contemporaries of early-on Pharaonic Egyptians.

(Shots of some nearby tholoi ghost or guest houses for the gods are here.)

The name of that hamlet was Ziros; this fully twenty years and more after I came up with, because Harry's rings look like big zeroes, the family name for the first two Ringleaders: father Angelo and son Dr Aristotle 'Harry' Zeross.

(Double-click the long-serving image representative of Rings 2 in order to open a separate window containing one of Verne Andru's many renditions of Harry from pH-4. There's plenty more re that Rings, who's referred to in War-Pox as Kid Ringo, here.)

The second was a cave where all sorts of Bronze Age Etocretan (circa 2000 BC) artifacts were found. I had never heard of it before either. And what was its name, you might ask and I might answer? The Sedoni Cave. Intriguingly, the other autochthonous (indigenous or native) people of Crete are referred to historically as the Cydonians (Sedonians?).

In the Bible you can read the story of Sodom (Sedon?) and Gomorrah, the twin cities that were apparently destroyed around the same time, circa 2000 BC. I'm reliably informed that in the Jewish Talmud there's a story about King Solomon, who reigned around 1000 BC, and another king, that of the Elementals. His name is Ashmedai (Asmodeus) but his brand of Elementals went by a suggestive term: the Shedds or Sheddim.

I looked up this story in a book called "Ancient Israel: Myths and Legends". Therein the Shedds are called ‘Shedim’. Therein also they are referred to as demons. Indeed, I've been given to understand that the word itself ('shed' in the singular) is Hebrew for demon.

Throughout PHANTACEA the Moloch Sedon (nicknamed Sed by the Legendarian and some of his fellow Lazaremists, amongst the fearless few who know of him) is just as commonly addressed as the Demon King. Apparently, hmm, a couple of other alternate spellings of his name are Sidonay and Sydonai.

(I took the accompanying image of the Shedd off the web. However, I scanned in the b/w double-click from my 1994 copy of "The Secret Teachings of All Ages" by Manly P Hall, 1901-1990. I know the artwork is by J Augustus Knapp, 1853-1938, but in my copy it's not in colour, hence the double-click. As for Hall's magnum opus, I'd like to say I read it while growing up but, hey, while a now long-lost edition was around the the house, unlike Playboy I just looked at the pictures.)

In Lebanon you can find one of the Whole Earth's earliest still extant cities. It's called Sidon (supposedly after a grandson of Noah, phantacea's Xuthros Hor, who appeared on the cover of the graphic novel).

In Egypt, in a place the Greeks called Heliopolis, or Sun City, its Pharaonic rulers practiced some sort of fertility-affirmation ritual called the Sed Ceremony. Since the Bible called that Sun City 'On', I wondered if the city was actually called 'Sed-On'. Starting to get where I'm going? There's more of course. Much more as it happens.

(Sooth said, over the years I've built up quite a collection of precisely this sort of peculiarity. An ever-enlarging webpage entitled Serendipity and phantacea contains 15 years worth, and counting, of just a few of them.)

For instance, Lebanon was once known as Phoenicia. In its Cedar Mountains, where parts of the pre-Biblical Gilgamesh Saga took place, stands one of the oldest man- or god-made structures in the world. It's called the Trilithon and it's situated in a place known as Baalbek to the locals. The Romans, and the Greeks before them, may not have called it Sedon City but they did call it Heliopolis.

Curiously, besides the Sed Ceremony, Egyptian Heliopolis is reputed to be the birthplace of the famous sunbird or phoenix. It dies in its own flames only to rise anew out of its own ashes. And where do you think the name Phoenicia came from? Could it be from the Phoenix Sunbird? Isn't a matter of could is it.

Ever heard the Greek myth of Zeus, who was born on Crete, and Europa? In it, he takes the form of a white bull and carts Europa, from whence came the name for the continent of Europe, from her birthplace to his birthplace. Thereafter they co-founded the Cretan-Grecian civilization together.

And where was this Europa from? Phoenicia, as it happens. And who was her brother, he who came looking for her? His name was Cadmus and, according to standard mythology, he brought our alphabet to Europe, hence phonetics.

For more on Phantacea and its connections to Egyptian traditions click here, here and here

I named one of my major characters, the time-tumbling Male Entity born Kadmon Heliopolis, after that Cadmus and that Heliopolis, the one in Lebanon. PHANTACEA’s version of the Biblical Adam appeared in War-Pox’s predecessor novel, “Feeling Theocidal”. As first noted in the graphic novel, which I published in 1990, for a variety of reasons I named him Alorus Ptah.

In both Feel Theo and 4-Ever & 40, I suggested that this Ptah was actually the Male Entity in his 61st lifetime. What I didn’t know in the Sixties, Seventies or Eighties, when I was formulating as well as formalizing my private mythology, but learned before I wrote ‘Feel Theo’, was that Adam Kadmon is a phrase found in the Kabbalah meaning ‘Primordial or Primal Man’.

So, just to review, in the late Sixties I call my Headworld after Sedon, a name I came up with out of the proverbial (as distinct from primordial) blue. I make him into the Devil and he becomes the main antagonist in what I now think of as 'The PHANTACEA Mythos'. I thereafter began coming across all these bizarre synchronicities; ones that, thus far on our serendipitous little journey, have led us from Phoenix to Phoenicia to phonetics and back again.

Believe me, it only gets weirder. How weird? Try this on, Trilithon!

I envisioned Sedon's Head as a place, a hidden continent, in effect the Inner Earth to our Outer Earth. Anyone who knew how could go there. One of the ways to go to this Hidden Headworld is supposed to be through the to-me-obvious doorway situated between the legs of the Egyptian Sphinx. It sits on the Giza Plateau, not far from the modern day Cairo suburb of – you guessed it – Heliopolis.

I already know this because I'm writing and publishing PHANTACEA on the Web. I'm also doing research. As part of that research I sojourn to Egypt in late September, early October 2000. (Just in time for the al-Aqsa Intifada to begin, but that’s another story for the websites.) On a wall in one of the Old Kingdom rooms of the Cairo Museum is a huge blown-up photo taken by the Egyptian air force sometime in the late Twenties or early Thirties.

And what’s that there, in what is now, and was in the 20s or 30s, a parking lot? Looks very much like a head, doesn't it? Remind you of any head in particular? Does me. Hence the other head in blue logo on the back cover of this book.

(NOTE: The original version of this article was written in 2002. A photo essay, it resides within the PHANTACEA Mythos online here.)

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That'll do for now. Until the next time, be pHantacizing you.

Oh, and in case you haven't done so already, here's a friendly reminder:

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