ICONOCLAST, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."
-- Ambrose Bierce

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Matriarchy???

Of course, the real problem is not to be found in any gendered prefix, a mere qualifier of an otherwise stable entity or process, but in the root itself which in this case is the unqualified arch. Back when arch and vault were synonyms of the heavens and not the cover for a tit-for-tat proposition, when folks said "The sky is falling!" they were speaking of snow and the impending onset of winter. Little did they know the protracted global severity which was to follow, even into warmer climes, and that is when the word came to refer to the dick who captained the boat.

So much myth and legend from the West, which means as well "almost by definition" – it is that colloquialised – suggests that the patriarchs emerged in an effort to end matriarchal society. That is, it was a reactionary defense mechanism by the repressed or gelded menfolk who only wanted to raise their own children uncorrupted by guilish female influence: the girls. Even if womb envy is considered a motive force, in fact one anthropologist thinks the mess started with the sex strike by the lady-folk to exert control over the bigger boys, then we should expect the iron age machismiocracy would occur as chthonic, in situ or autonomous uprising (an erection of sorts) from region to region in the form of spontaneous revolution wherever matriarchy prevailed in a very Morgan-Marxesque predictable or tit-for-tat linear progression.

But our own well-coloured histories don't even suggest this. For the most part, the so-called matrifocal neolithic cultures were annihilated not from within but from without, in every case by already formed patriarchal states. No military empire spreads for altruistic motives of liberation – no matter the rationalisations (discrediting excuses representing the immorality of barbarians) given to the folks back home like "they hate us for our freedom, those godless heathen, necrophilic baby-eaters". In fact, it was St. Francis Scott Free, D.O.O.M. (Druidic Order of Marianettes), inventor of colostoscopy who first replied "look in the mirror, asshole!"

I wouldn't say matriarchy has never occured. That would be sexist or misogynist itself suggesting women are incapable of being thugs, in the same way that the blame is placed on alien intervention whenever there is an unexpected archaeological find demonstrating "advanced know-how" among stone age cultures, is ethnocentric at least and misanthropic at most.

Two things the female can do the male cannot is have and then feed children. Once patriarchs like Zeus and Apollo discovered milk-goats, they proposed the theory that the mother is merely a vessel, like a flower pot in which he plants his seed. Of course, the analogies here and throughout western mythology more specifically refer to the taking of boy children from their mother's influence to be initiated into the doctrines of patriarchy, and then sending the girl-brides away from home, essentially to live with the husbands father. It is the same tactic the catholics used when they sent Indian children to missionary boarding schools limiting communication with the folks back home, inclusive of beatings for native linguistic usage. In a sense, we still do this when we send our kids to school (or so-called "care center"), at an ever-earlier age, whereupon they must learn a new language or be cast out with the garbage. Educators today call it "slipping through the cracks in the floor of opportunity".

Even so, matriarchal centralisation would be difficult to acheive in the neolithic cultures we refer to as civilised (Minoan Crete, for example). There is no evidence of police or military. No fortifications. No sign that the priestess held any power like we would ascribe to a hollywood "Indian chief" or historical king. What hollywood labels Queen, going back to Shakespeare and Edmond Spencer, was very often the imposed metaphor on what in the oral traditions (myths and legends or ballads) were called "hostess". In the Ozarks, they would be called "grannies". In the Ewe language of Ghana, they are appropriately called "Dada" – 'mother, nurse, or elder woman' – while grandma would be "mama". The Greeks called them "Herophiles" when referring to the ancients or foreigners still living in the hinterlands – we call them priestess or queen because, after all, who could live without politics and religion and the institutions or sacraments on which they lie?

But this "myth-time" predated marriage and herophilia pertained not to entrapment (aka, the marriage bond or shackle) but free love expressed toward strapping young adventurers. When a hero comes to a permanent stand-still, he is a retiree. There is a reason the snake or vine slithering up a magic wand still gives rise to sexual inuendo more than any pharmaceutical intervention into ones health or lack thereof. The Ozark "Granny" is no reference to age but disposition, particularly in healing wisdom – some girls are just born to it. Likewise, "Crone" may derive from the matrix of Chronus, the dyonesian-like Titan who castrated the regal-grown patriarch with a scythe (a gift from his mother) in ambush (and not the greek god, "Father Time-Piece" who enjoyed a similar fate, and is about to again).

While grandmothers may become tyrranical old bitches, few pay it any mind, but it is always thought unbecoming in a nurse (in any sense). Just like being a dick-head generally grants no man a position of authority; on the contrary they are perceived as assholes and counterfucked as soon as conditions permit. It is power which grants authority, and that is why the powerful are almost always dicks. We've merely got the formula backwards, thinking the reinforcement is the cause of behaviour rather than its nurturing. As Dora Marsden said, civilisation rests on gunpowder (spears, in an earlier day):

Justice and civilisation – abstractions both at best – are not two things but one. Civilisation is rather related to Justice as a special case. It is Justice in limited and secondary application. Basic Justice is coincident with gunpowder.

The maenaides of Greek/Trojan fame could be literally taken as man aids (just as men have been portrayed as props or pillars in more than just the phallic sense – the omphalos or nexus is gender-neutral as everyone has a navel): they were described as "nurses" in early transliterations (which is what Homer did, put oral tradition(al) ballads into writtten verse). If we look to German, we see a historical tie between doctors and daughters, and the medieval term, leech, for healer derives not from the sucking aquatic creature later applied to infections but to the suck itself. A look to Spanish gives another different association or sequence, and that points to milk (leche). The wormy, sucking thing gets its name only after the fact, that being the nurturing process common to all mammals. The fe in female is itself a referent to succor and carry. It is the same fe in fecund and fertility and fare and ferry, meaning to carry like the mutual relation or symbiosis of a snake or vine and a staff (the symbol Mercury stole from the maenaides and Persian pairi and then lost to the american medical association of mainly manly doctors). And now we're back to nurturing, from which we get our common sense of nursing outside the limits of a performance duty as slave to master. But there is also a little fe in fury, which is said to be what happens when you fuck with the ladyfolk. The Greek Furries were three feminine "witches", possibly manifestations of the Wyrd Sisters, who took revenge or festerings upon overzealous patriarchs guilty of felicide, the killing of a cat.

The whole other idea behind feminine guile as the art of seduction, certainly resting behind an anti-archist moral sensibility reacting against subliminal cooptation or even educational programming, making seduction itself a "bad" thing (so even Baudrillard said), an expression or desire for power and authority, may itself rest on the patriarchal institution of marriage, a gift from Egyptian PR men to the goat herders of Greece who, without it, were just too unruly to be proper subjects. Without the association with power, who could complain of seduction? I should think I'd be flattered to be seduced! Amoral seduction is just a personal invitation to party, announced or expressed with as much cosmetic flourish as is necessary to draw the attention, where a wink may run further than any mascara, with nary a thought toward massacre. (Body art is itself no necessary signal or demonstration of anything beyond the expression of a personal or social aesthetic: to imply a transmission, it must stand out lest one is reduced to invisibility.)

Without the bind of oath and ownership, where is there room to charge "infidelity"? Like feudal fealty or military obligation, marriage is the end of free association, and this is so well understood that even the state, devoid of wit as it is, has had to acknowledge it as "common law" to still get revenue from those who choose to stay together, where the aesthetic cosmetic – giving us the slogan "love is bling", er, "blind" – does not wear off quite so readily as one would expect. Without intrusion by the cash register and state, polyamory has been the standard fete.

Crete is known also as the place of the palaces. Pallas itself was said a goddess but means more literally "little maiden" related to pallake "concubine," a consortium outside institutional bounds. It was Persian patriarchs who changed the connection to "beautiful women seducing pious men", detourning their own namesake (peri < Paraika) after the discovery of marriage as institutional subduction and foundation for morality. If we are at all to retain the word "power" in an anarchist or even biological context, it can only refer to mobility and its metabolic maintenance. There is a reason there were no fortifications or armouries or mass graves (necropoli) found on Minoan Crete: they were mobile navigators who got out before the volcano blew. They were not any stage or age (bronze, gold or what-have-you) of civilisation precisely because there were no cities. The Island itself was not a city of palaces, it housed them and they were only stopping points for a seafairing culture. The palace was an entertainment center, where all sorts of intertwinement were possible, lasting only as long as it takes. Another descriptor for this sort of culture is "potlach", and sex is not the issue at all, even when children are.

– see Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion – by Jane Ellen Harrison, 1912

– see also Raw Materials for a Theory of the YoungBoy: Is or is it not a parody? Isn't everything?

Saturday, January 28, 2012

More on the Sinful Trinity

Had Augustine's trinitarian sins been more specified and clear, as say, megalo-manic rape & much massacre, we might have today a better ideaer of just whom the really bad bad-guys were. But like any reasonably adequate poem, probably the very reason it was sold as "ambiguous" and left entirely for judicial review, enforced by the soldiers, the good, proud & few, with the result that the merely clever have inherited the earth, an eye turned away from their militant machinations like a blind watch-maker incanting the always enchanting "Whatever!". We must now ask, "who was really the sociopath...the soldier, the cop or their marketing entrepreneuer?"

  • Fornicate, from fornic for 'arch' or for 'vault', a euphamism for a brothel in Roman times because underneath the arch is where one could get hooked up. There is also Fornax, Latin for furnace, a constellation in the southern skies (and even in China, The White Tiger of the West and not its anteriorly regioned vagina), referencing heat, hearth and home useful to stellar navigators or the positioning of stelle – or standing stones – and harvesting grain for cooking some scones. In Roman mythology, Fornax was the goddess of hearth and baking. Her festival, the Fornacalia, was celebrated on or near 17 February. Like Autumnal Bach Ho in Vietnam or Bakyo in old Japan, Bacchus, formerly the Greeks' Dionysus, god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy, the protector of those who do not belong to any conventional society and thus symbolizing all that's chaotic, unexpected, risky or free, (and elsewhere Diana or Cynthia in Eurozone forests, if we are to believe Sir James George Fraiser) is Rome's male counterpart running amock behind Saturnalia along with Sinn Féinically Gaelic Bealtaine, Scottish An Cèitean (from which the English derived the name Satan on analogy with saturn, planetary patron of the Nordic fire-starter, Surtr and his mutterspell kin) – but it's really the midpoint in the Sun's progress between the spring equinox and summer solstice – May day – which frightens the squeamish captains of industry and official regalia even to this day with its threatening strikes and/or spreading flames inviting not even what ever or for, but "let's do it again and again and then more".

  • Idolitrate, from Greek, eidos – a 'form' or 'shape'. Consider the near isophony (same sound or proxima) of idol with ideal, 'a strict point of dogma', then the even greater sin and isophonism, idle - Old English for 'empty' or 'worthless' now meaning 'languid, relaxed or lazy'. Concerning the tripartite sin or sinning, the festive party is two thirds of the problem. Self-defense is the other for some. Bacchanalian maenaides regarded nothing as impious or criminal and their own popularity made them a threat to the Senate's authority. They "were allegedly characterized by maniacal dancing to the sound of loud music and cymbals crashing", rock & rollers one and all. Not much has changed but the back beat and call: superstitious, fractitious and up against the wall.

  • Bloodshed is pretty self-explanatory, but the point at which it is sinful is always context-sensitive, the context being whether or no one is violently acting with or against institutionalised dogmatic forms (the gods) or the worthless, lazy and dis-ordered who leave only chance, pleasure and season to guide them. But if it looks good and is pleasant or succoring, how is tailing the object of one's eye a yielding to seduction or defending it a wantan destruction, as long as there's an option: change course with new winds, or rewrite the chorus and not get the bends?. How soon we forget that it was Zeus who first with slick-talk and trickery seduced Semele nee Selenee, moon-godess, earth-mother of young Dionesy and not for a moment or two visa-versee.
    Lore related to many moon stations is one of the most interesting aspects of Asian Ethnoastronomy. Somewhat similar to Chinese but perhaps even more so, Japanese interpretations of these associations tended to revolve around agricultural needs and animistic views of nature. Unlike many Western myths and traditions, there were few if any perceptions in the myths of "active" god(s) creating or wreaking good or bad on the cosmos and/or humans. Rather, especially in Japan with its Shinto base, gods like the talismanic animals [four constellations] were seen as natural manifestations ... stars and celestial events were signs of change in season, life, politics, et al... perhaps most often portending "bad" but sometimes "good" as well.

Someone once said god is just an anagram for good, orderly direction, like the forward travels of a pentecostal penis. The multiple entendres derived from vaults and arches associated with female marine navigators (like Sheherazade) and mathematicians (remembering that Pythagorus' teacher was the school marm and sometime goddess, Arithmetica) sound astounding to patrilineal reckoning and their sidereal sidekicks with science degrees who think their pineal is dead, atrophied.

Some say the first Iron Aged anarchists were actually patriarchists with womb-envy fighting against the matristic and vaulted mothers who femed the arks by plotting the arches of stars, ending down South with a bloody clash called Titanomachy and in the Nordic north, the war between the Aesir and Vanir (for Venus, it seems). It was a particularly difficult task to wean the menfolk from wanting to stand as pillars to the great vaults and arches and consanguineal dreams. Like Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders, is said to have been feted for punishment for succombing to succcoring seductions in attempting to off the old man's theocrastatistical state. Might it have been that the four pillars (sometimes six or eight, or even twelve in Southwestern Great Kivas) holding up the heavenly vault were only metaphors for metaterranean cultures just like houseposts against the godly patriarchs, and why had the Africans painted their ceilings sky blue, even when it wasn't clouding or crowding, and homesick ones invented the blues and the great Mama Wata, Maenaidic Mermaid is still thought of fondly yet witches still burn for unofficial forcasts or talk out of turn, an abnormal rendition to those with no clue?

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

The Ego and its Sin

In those societies where, for historical/cultural reasons, it is acceptable, even encouraged, to talk about internal states of mind, individual motivations and autobiography, there are many diachronics and these will often take centre stage. It should be noted however that, as they do this, they are not exposing their selves, their individuality, their personhood, their agency, to the harsh light of day. They are doing something quite different; they are telling stories about themselves to others, which should not be mistaken for the complex business of being oneself among others.

We've come to see the world, after centuries, even millennia of repetitious instruction, as composed of in-outies and out-innies (or innies and outies, like the navel but with the connotation that this specific inny is an avant garde or par excellent constituent of generalized "other" innies, outies being those in need of surgical democratisation or disposal) in a multitude of narrative forms: individualist/socialist political discourse; Jungian introspective/extrospective (or "version" there-of) personalities; but rarely do we hear from those (I can think of Arthur Conan-Doyle and Milton Erickson in medicine and hypno-psychology, Samuel Butler, R. Buckminster-Fuller and esoteric zen in metaphysics and certain – who might be considered "post-modern" – biologists) who see the so-called "ego" itself as a nested or recursive, at times tautological community of events and participants:

...Moreover, to the internal continuity of the blob must be added another continuity: that between blobs...the exposed parts of the different blobs are not fully distinct one from another. They are organically united with each other. We are a social species and, as is the case for other social species, the fully isolated Cartesian individual cannot be anything other than what it was for Descartes – a thought experiment. – op cit

If the self is only a referent of the bawdy organism-community, then the "I" is never more than a limited spokesperson or interface to other bodies and not a holder (or hoarder) of power or executive function outside of neurotic circumstances or environmental psychopathy. So much for Mr. Grey Matter and its delusions of grandeur. This would explain the secrecy of most bodily functions and habits like a heartbeat or flow of air or humour to the always serious, often arrogant intellect who is blind to its own whereabouts and what-fores without addressing the coordinates on a map or otherwise instruction manual. Curiosity may be its only virtue.

Stanley Kubrick brought up the idea of in-out-in-out as a bawdy designation for sex between bodies but it also resonates with Buckminster-Fuller's "in-outness" as a quality or attribution of all so-called identities. Clearly it's a behavioural notion rather than a narrative perspective. Rather than a dialectical position of either-orness like a two-step or march or class structure, it is a non-dialectical ambling shifter with no reference to speed. Another word for this is free movement (although it used to be called sloth). It is part of Humberto Maturana's autopoiesis and Butler's inconsequence of the chicken-egg argument. Sequential (or linear) determinism is thrown out the window and the dilemma or paradox or dialectical tension not only relaxes, but disappears entirely. Hegel may have used too much formaldehyde in mummifying Plato & Aristotle and all three became deified.

The project and the process of all institutional logic is religion and its generation of truth, representing the retying of past ligatures just like loose shoe-laces. Of course, belief in the dictums of competing institutions or alternative representations is idolatry (or heresy), extra-institutional sex (unsanctified or unregistered by church & state) is fornication just as the sin of bloodshed is only recognised when outside the avant garde institution of warfare or police action (this is why killer cops always go free or with a merry slap on the wrist to appease the spectating public who expect to see virtue in the authorities who distribute the punishments for everyone else's sins).

The triclycler, Augustine listed "carnal" or organic pleasure, pride (from the self-acknowledgment or inward rumination of outward or others' encouragements – and I should think necessary to give any sort of thanks), and "unnatural" curiosity as triangulating upon every possible transgression. These were the big three motivating forces of the big three sins (idolatry, fornication and bloodshed) which seemed to suffice for peaceful congregations who encountered too much trouble with the initial ten, till the theocracy got back on its feet, when these were later expanded to seven[1], which is also a pretty easy number to remember.

This shift is the beginning of thought crime, where motive (or intent) is the proof of the pudding and the act is only a cosmetic detail. In other words, if no conspiracy with the imp of the perverse can be established, payment is unjustified (or at least reduced).

The first u.s. patriot act, in a reasonable evolution of rational discourse from the seven deadly sins through the already omnibus criminal code, was twelve-hundred pages long, a mere appendix taking up about as much computer space as a complete dictionary of the english language. Obviously today, there is no escape from sin and no counter-virtue[2]. Government has gone post-modern in the recognition of the irreality of both rights and morality, the very two invented notions (neologisms) which gave them a leg up in the first place: their own property rights and the appeal or petition (prayer) for charitable mercy or regress of chastisement upon a proper demonstration of one's own chastity.

Virtue turned out to be a big joke on the calculators of morality who produced jurisprudence, the juxtaposition of the virtues of justice (the balance of sacrifice and theft as well as crime and punishment) and prudence (the stingy management of resources which covers charity or taxes and chastening or austerity). The modern word is "political economy" which effectively combines all seven christian virtues, the other four accompanying justice and prudence being temperance, the restraint from ones desires; love, the pacifist or self-sacrificing stance toward whatever harm might come your way; the related courage, endurance without complaint through pain or deprivation; faith which accepts orders without question and finally hope, the amnesia of the past and disregard of the present in the preferential preparation for the future (progress, debt &/or death).

The beauty (from the point of view for statecraft) of the seven deadly sins (and all modern legislation) is that they can be seen to apply to anything anyone does: they are virtues of the powerful and sins of the wicked (the weak). The meek, on the other hand, have the proper airs required of citizenship in any kingdom: cowed, showing a bovine submissiveness and lack of initiative or will. This is also called self-control, an effective invisibility cloak disregarded by police. And if they do become collaterally damaged, no one will care. No one (of any importance) has ever believed in natural virtue when it comes to humans – it must be indoctrinated, in every sense of the word. Naughty children are the proof of the pudding smeared all over their faces, walls, tables etc., another vicious cycle of political discourse just inviting a slap in the face (or ass, as pertains the current rate of exchange) lest one spend life in humility and debt – "not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run", to quote Mark Twain.

Politics, ‘the science and art of government,’ has little or nothing to do with the anti-politics of liberating life from the control complex.

[1]: One is perfectly appropos to confuse clerks and clerics, as both measure distance from the norm or standard (set value) and hand out a comparable bill of trade, the incurred (to beat a dying dog with a willow branch for the crime of meandering or bending like a snake or river away from the master's intentions) debt in any transaction or wager with receipt on payment, in either or all, pence, penance or penitentitude. Latin 'salic' meant willow (the tree which also gave us aspirin or salicilic acid) and became saligia or "sin". The one punishes the other after the axiom, "It takes one to know one": it takes a contrary to cure or kill a contrary, thus justifying all uses of state power.

The seven sins are superbia (pride), Accidia (sloth), Luxuria (lust), Invidia (envy), Gula (gluttony), Ira (wrath) and Avaritia (greed), spelling Saligia for mneumonic effect. The latinized words are revealing. Notice the sins are feminine in gender or personification, illustrating the association by Salic Law (forbidding matrilineal inheritance) of guild (old Norse for a community of shared interests), guile (a presumed female trait, once related to "agility" as in "nimble" or "in the act", agon, which only an impotent patriarch would find agonizing, confusing ingenuity with in-geniality), gild, (a reference to the matrilineal/matrilocal neolithic or so-called Bronze age ended by the iron-wielding gods in their clash with the Titans, specifically with the institution of marriage as a property arrangement) and gluttony, referencing a special distaste for the Epicureans who promoted taste itself and thereafter, on approval, enjoyment. Quality, chance or risk, passion and abundance are equally transgressive lines of thought. It appears Mark Twain was right when he cited soap, education and hypocrisy the three virtues of civilisation and chiefly responsible for most massacres.

[2]: Synonym for manliness or rod-like, "virtue" was always just a drilled or purchased (provisionally "inalienable", not indigenously rooted) right, otherwise a rite (ritual) exercised to avoid or deliver punishment, well after "righteous" had been divorced from the more matronly, even child-like gift-giving by "wrong-doing", an archaic rip-off creating all modern senses of moral economy restricted to "trade", a word once meaning trample, crush, flatten, press, stomp & squash, still alive and well in the phrase "I've been wronged!".

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Poetic License = Free Association:

nefarious, adj
evil: utterly immoral or wicked
[Early 17th century. < Latin nefarius < nefas "sin" < ne "not" + fas "divine law"]
from the dictionary
Literally, "illegal" in Latin, but elsewhere and before sinful pissing, nephele was just a cloud or kidney. Figuratively "nephish": like life of the kidneys, full of piss and vinegar ready to burst so consequently afterward dead-like (a cooked fish out of water, and thus, dis-elimen(a)ted or cleaned & deotherized, just like the ever ubiquitous æther).

The dictionary thus fails to illustrate the etymologically hypocritic rendering of energetic life (signified by a healthy kidney-function and the know-how of clouds which piss rain) to crime, sin and punishment, but warns us not to confuse hear and ear or rain and reign (both produced from shadows), just like to, two and too (all referencing a relation between/of one and/to another (in common) position, number and chance resonance or synchronicity):

"Do not confuse the spelling of air, ere, err, and heir, which sound similar. Air is the most common of the four words, as in the air that we breathe, an air of superiority, to air an opinion. Ere is a literary word meaning "before" (as in ere long), err is a verb meaning "make a mistake" (as in to err is human, err on the side of caution), and heir is a noun meaning "legal inheritor" (as in the heir to the throne). "

Yet how often do heirs scarcely manning chest-hairs which procure them the title: "Herr" meisters grow arrogant airs ere err interferes and they come to arrears, mis-hearing the jeers, inferring them cheers from inferiors?

Then, like to be too prodigiously wined thereby prodding officious other's whines, there is:

more.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Machinic & Maginic:

Why are they mining people and continents to the hyper-extent, to the depths seen below? Are they desperate attempts funding building events (with pipelines & parking & prison cements) which I owe, is only to cover a doubtful continuance. A ruse to hide existential incontinence? The fact they've discovered we can no longer indenture (... because there is none) a lucrative future? It's not for a lack of imagination, but its downright banishment and incarceration. Despite the abundance of think tanks and plots, official thinking's subsumed below thoughts. Fortunately, only they are deluded by their prestidigitations; some have even concluded political economy (archaic jurisprudence) is the state of religion – not science after all – a mere mysticism – a means to control. Unfortunately, everyone else still hurts from machinery's magical melancholic curse.

magic. n,

  • power that makes impossible things happen or gives somebody control over the forces of nature.
  • a special, mysterious, or inexplicable quality, talent, or skill, usually performed as entertainment
  • so beautiful or pleasing as to seem supernaturally created [< magus 'big']

    machine. n,

  • a simple device used to overcome resistance at one point by applying force at another point
  • an organized group of people that controls or directs something, especially a political group
  • somebody who is efficient but uncreative
  • a mechanical device used in the theater, especially in classical drama, to create special effects such as the entrance of a supernatural being
  • a character or factor introduced into a work of literature to produce an effect or to resolve the plot [< L. machina, G. mekhos 'means']

    magistrate. n,

  • a minor law officer or member of a local judiciary with extremely limited powers,
  • a justice of the peace who deals with traffic violations
  • the power and authority to administer justice
  • behaving in an overbearing or dictatorial way
  • an expert or scholar (formal or archaic)[< master]
    Machinating Magistrates devise secret, cunning, or complicated plans and schemes to achieve a goal or to cause harm to others.

    imagine. v,

  • to form an image or idea of somebody or something in the mind
  • to see or hear something that is not there, or think something that is not true
  • to suppose or assume something

    imagination. n,

  • ability to visualize: the ability to form images and ideas in the mind,
  • especially of things never seen or experienced directly
  • creative part of mind: the part of the mind where ideas, thoughts, and images are formed
  • resourcefulness: the ability to think of ways of dealing with difficulties or problems
  • creative act: [< imagin-]
    from the dictionary

    – see Darius and the Lions’ Den