Fencing Bear at Prayer

Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 20:16:00 +0000

Here be dragons. And doves.

Human beings long for transcendence. Such longing is, for the world, always out of fashion because, of course, it is not a longing for the world, and the world knows it.

We know what the world wants. The world—by which we mean Satan, the Lord of the World—wants above all our obedience, a jewel so precious that he will do anything to get it: lie, steal, murder, bear false witness, pretend to social standing, pretend to insider knowledge to get us to consent to his influence.

“God lied to you. You will not die.”

And suddenly we are anxious about having other people dislike us, about losing prestige in our social circles, about other people being more popular or influential or successful, about other people having secret knowledge, about our own influence and fame.

“You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

And with that temptation, our first parents fell. The irony is cosmic. There they were in the Garden, privy to conversation with God face-to-face, and in the flick of the serpent’s tongue, they lost all of it: the beauty of the Garden, the face-to-face conversation with God, their own innocence and harmony as two in one flesh.

That temptation is with us to this day.

You can see it everywhere in our social media, fed by the algorithms that promise us knowledge and fame: “You shall be as gods, with millions of followers hanging on your every word. They will see you as beautiful, take your words as truth, accept anything you do as moral because you know what is good.”

And yet nothing satisfies. Not the followers or the fame, not the illusion of knowledge or access to secret truths. And so we seek transcendence elsewhere, in control over our bodies through surgery or drugs; in the manipulation of our mood through sugar and yet more drugs; in the control of other people through, you guessed it, drugs.

“And why not?” you say. “Why shouldn’t I ease my pain from the incoherence and stupidity of the world by eating this apple (or cake)? Why shouldn’t I put goggles on and immerse myself in the ecstasy of a digital Xanadu? And who are you to say that the influencer whose merch I buy isn’t selling snake oil—isn’t that just what a snake oil salesman would say?”

Our Creator sees us succumbing to the Dragon—and weeps.

WWJD?

He knows he cannot break our addiction to the Dragon simply by demanding our obedience, even though, as our Creator, it is his to command. He does not want us as slaves, or even simply as willing servants; he wants us, all of humanity, as his bride, whom he made not for domination, but for love.

And yet, we turned from him and whored ourselves out to the Dragon because the Dragon promised us alchemical bliss.

It is quite the fairy tale, when you think about it. A lost bride, hated by an evil stepmother who prided herself on her beauty and status, is sent out into the world to be eaten by wild beasts and deprived of her groom. Unbeknownst to her, her prince watches over her, and sends her helpers to comfort her—prophets and patriarchs to take care of her until he returns—but even so she falls under the influence of the evil queen, who tempts her with potions and technology that the queen claims will ensure her beauty, knowledge, and fame. The bride dies, but her bridegroom has not forgotten her, and he returns at long last to raise her from the dead and welcome her to his throne—just as, in fact, Origen had predicted in his commentary on the Song of Songs. [1]

The Tale of the Bridegroom and his Bride,
as told by Honorius Augustodunensis in his commentary on the Song of Songs
Clm 4550

As to why the prince allows his bride to be tempted by Satan, the Evil Queen—it is, again, because he loves her and wants to win her back with his love, not force her to love him or take her by rape. (Are you starting to understand why I am so impatient with Bettelheim’s reading of fairy tales?) And so he takes the only way he can while being true to his love: he enters into the Story himself as a character and subjects himself to the trial of love.

The world needs good stories. More accurately: Middle-earth needs the Gospel, the Good Story of God’s love for Creation, first told in English by Caedmon, retold for centuries in the liturgy of the Church, enacted on stage and retold yet again in movies every time there is a princess to be rescued from temptation, every time a prince declares his love for the peasant girl whom he raises up to be his bride.

It is also, by the by, why it is so irritating to see these stories rewritten so that the princess or peasant girl saves herself—not because there are no strong women in the Greatest Story Ever Told, but because we, addicts of the Dragon that we are, sense the lie. The human soul enslaved to sin cannot save itself, not with the potions of the apothecary, not with the technology of Mage. Tolkien realized this, which is why he gave Frodo Gollum to bite his finger off and fall into the fire. We are saved not by our own willing, but by grace—the grace of the Bridegroom who came forth into the world as a giant striding out upon the course of the sun (Psalm 18:6), only to be humiliated and despised as he emptied himself to die of love on the Cross.

This is not an easy story to know how to tell, and yet we tell it constantly. Over and over and over again, in our movies and fairy tales, the Knight comes to rescue the Princess from the Dragon; over and over and over again, the Maker of the Story enters into his tale, the Singer into his song, almost as if the Lord of Hosts wants our attention, even as we turn away and take another pill. In Draco Alchemicus, our hero enters into the Casino as yet another man, almost as if he has emptied himself of his divinity to risk his luck against the House.

One among the punters, he encounters the Dragon’s Queen. Will he be able to overcome her potions and rescue his bride?

Read on.

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

dragoncommonroom.com

[1] I give the deep lore on this tradition in From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). I paraphrase above from Honorius’s version of the tale; see pp. 377-78.

Draco Layer Three: The Moral or Tropological Sense

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 19:39:00 +0000

Learn to discern.

We all know what sin is, right? Right?!

Once upon a time in the desert, the hermit Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) set out to make a list of the most deadly ones, albeit he called them “deadly thoughts,” not “sins.” You probably know the list, even if you don’t think you do: gluttony, impurity (a.k.a. lust), avarice (a.k.a. greed), sadness (a.k.a. feeling sorry for oneself), anger or wrath, acedia or sloth, vainglory, and pride (two different things).

Not quite the list you were expecting? That is because some centuries later—we’re talking ancient times here, when centuries passed like decades do now (or vice versa)—Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) revised the list, somewhat accidentally, in his commentary on Job.

Gregory had been expounding Job according to its multiple layers—yes, that’s right! Job, like Shrek, has layers!—and he happened somewhere in book XXXI to mention the “seven principle vices” to which Pride, the “Queen of Sins” gives rise: Vainglory, Envy, Anger, Melancholy, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust.

But wait! There’s more! According to Gregory, these several sins (Pride’s generals) each comes with its own army:

Vainglory gives rise to disobedience, boasting, hypocrisy, contentions, obstinacies, discords and the presumptions of novelties.
Envy gives rise to hatred, whispering, detraction, exultation at the misfortunes of a neighbor and affliction at his prosperity.
Anger produces strifes, swelling of mind, insults, glamour, indignation, and blasphemies.
Melancholy gives rise to malice, rancor, cowardice, despair, slothfulness in fulfilling the commands, and a wandering of the mind on unlawful objects.
Avarice gives rise to treachery, fraud, deceit, perjury, restlessness, violence, and hardnesses of heart against compassion.
Gluttony propagates foolish mirth, scurrility, uncleanness, babbling, and dulness of sense in understanding.
Lust generates blindness of mind, inconsiderateness, inconstancy, precipitation, self-love, hatred of God, affection for this present world and dread or despair of that which is to come.

If you feel overwhelmed as if by a swarm of buzzing insects, that’s the idea. Sin overwhelms the body, heart, and soul with howling desires, tempting us to further sins, always presented as desirable.

Vainglory exhorts the conquered heart: “Thou oughtest to aim at greater things, that, as thou hast been able to surpass many in power, thou mayest be able to benefit many also.” (You can tell these are sins speaking—they do so in archaic grammar.)

Envy whispers: “In what art thou inferior to this or that person? why then art thou not either equal or superior to them? What great things art thou able to do, which they are not able to do! They ought not then to be either superior, or even equal, to thyself.” (I’m sure you’ve never heard this one, right?)

Anger nudges the conquered heart, “as if with reason”: “The things that are done to thee cannot be borne patiently; nay rather, patiently to endure them is a sin; because if thou dost not withstand them with great indignation, they are afterwards heaped upon thee without measure.” (Are you feeling angry yet at how unjust it is to be accused of sin for feeling angry?)

Melancholy comes along to point out how ridiculous it is to feel anything but sorrow (read, blackpilled): “What ground hast thou to rejoice when thou endurest so many wrongs from thy neighbours? Consider with what sorrow all must be looked upon, who are turned in such gall of bitterness against thee.”

Avarice reassures that it is right to want more possessions because, after all, the hard times are coming: “It is a very blameless thing, that thou desirest some things to possess; because thou seekest not to be increased, but art afraid of being in want; and that which another retains for no good, thou thyself expendest to better purpose.”

Gluttony chimes in: “God has created all things clean, in order to be eaten, and he who refuses to fill himself with food, what else does he do but gainsay the gift that has been granted to him?”

At which Lust delivers the coup-de-grace: “Why enlargest thou not thyself now in thy pleasure, when thou knowest not what may follow thee? Thou oughtest not to lose in longings the time thou hast received; because thou knowest not how speedily it may pass by. For if God had not wished man to be united in the pleasure of coition, He would not, at the first beginning of the human race, have made them male and female.” (Funny that, almost as if sex has something to do with being male and female, but never mind, time’s a-wasting, it’s time to get down to business!)

Whisper, whisper, whisper. The vices murmur at the conquered heart: “You deserve it. Why should she have his attention, and not you? They hate you, they want you dead—are you angry yet? You should be—they stole from you. You need to prepare, you might starve otherwise. Those longings you have for attention and sex define you. Here, take this pill, it will make you feel better.”

“The life of man upon earth is a warfare.” —Job 7:1

I know, I know. Nobody believes in sin anymore. Back in Gregory’s day, it was only monks who obsessed over not listening to the deadly thoughts, but by the early fourteenth century, when Dante was writing, the monks (and friars) had convinced everyone to worry about such nonsensical things as virtue and vice. There was a brief period (say, 1215-1517, a mere 300 years) when things got somewhat out of hand, with sinners thinking they needed to do penance to have access to communion (see canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council, plus all the handbooks in pastoral care for training the priests to train the laity to identify sins), but first somebody came up with the bright idea that sinners might give alms as a form of penance, and then somebody else came up with the bright idea that making charitable donations for hospitals and bridges had nothing to do with resisting sin, all the while arguing by the by that sin was simply a trick of the priesthood to make people feel guilty in the first place, and before you could say, “Jesuit casuistry,” “sin” had been redefined to mean something you could wiggle your way out of with equivocations and “ambiguous language” (see Suarez), not to mention charitable donations to the Church. Along the way, Protestants stopped believing in sin completely, except as something you could only be saved from by grace, which by definition, being Protestants, they were, so Q.E.D. no need to worry about sin! [1]

By the time Kant came along in the late eighteenth century, morality had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with perspective: your morality may not be my morality, although my morality should not interfere with yours. (I hope I have this right. I’m pretty sure I read something like this somewhere recently, but that’s the way with Kant—we think in his terms without realizing it.) Add a little J.S. Mill, and hey presto! Morality has become the pressure of the masses on the eccentrics who just want to do experiments in how to live (try polygamy, you’ll like it!). Cue Freud, and sin becomes something you can blame on your mother; cue Jung, and it is the stuff of psychedelic dreams that points you to the secrets of the archetypes. (Probably; it’s hard to tell with Jung.) Bring in the advertisers, and before you can say, “Knife,” everyone is encouraged to embrace his or her sin as healthy, because, after all, you wouldn’t want those desires repressed! Google “Seven Deadly Sins” nowadays, and you will come up with Disney Princesses and ad campaigns. Sin is good! Sin is desirable! Sin is sexy!

Conversely, of course, we are never meant to be unhappy, for which there are potions and pills.

To judge from the chatter on the Internet these latter days, absolutely nobody doubts that we are living through a moral crisis, although there is considerable debate on how to deal with it. Some want to double down on the drugs (read, hormones and anti-depressants). Some want to rage at the machine (Googling that phrase now...). Some blame the Globalists. Some blame the Nationalists. Some blame the cities. Some blame the whites. Pretty much everyone is busy blaming everyone else because, of course, without those people everything would be fine. (Feel free to add your own lists, I’m sure the federal officers reading this blog would like to know!) Everyone seems to recognize that we are under siege from ... something, but nobody seems to agree on its name. For some, it is Intolerance; for some, it is Degeneracy. For some, it is Hate; for some, it is Love. The premise would seem to be that if everybody else stopped being bad, things would be fine. Because, of course, their morality has nothing to do with mine. (Told you, we’re living in Kantland!)

Here’s a clue: Job did nothing wrong, and yet the Lord allowed Satan to test him. Why should that be?

Read on: Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

dragoncommonroom.com

[1] I’m kidding, obviously. You try paraphrasing over a thousand years of moral philosophy in a paragraph—it’s harder than it looks. Start here, if you want more bibliography: Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. from the 3rd edition by Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995).

Draco Layer Two: The Allegorical or Christological Sense

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 22:03:00 +0000

The world needs good stories.

Caedmon the cowherd sang songs about Creation (see previous layer). He also sang songs about other stories in the Scriptures.

According to Bede, he sang about “the creation of the world, the origin of the human race, and the whole history of Genesis, of the departure of Israel from Egypt and the entry into the promised land.”

Which should be a bit confusing, given the way most people talk about the Old Testament these days. Wasn’t Caedmon supposed to Christian? Why wasn’t he singing stories about Christ?

Well, you see, he was singing those, too. Songs “of the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of the Lord, of His ascension into heaven, of the coming of the Holy Spirit and the teaching of the apostles.”

But wait! There’s more: “He also made songs about the terrors of future judgement, the horrors of the pains of hell, and the joys of the heavenly kingdom.” [1]

By which time, we are certain he was telling fairy tales, not history.

I know, I know. The most fascinating thing about Jesus of Nazareth is not that he is the Second Person of the Godhead who became incarnate in time and place. It is not that he fulfilled the prophecies of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah), emptying himself to take on the form of a servant (Philippians 2:6-8) so that he might carry the sacrifices of atonement into the Holy of Holies for the redemption of the human race (Hebrews). It is not that he reigns now at the right hand of the Father, enthroned on the rainbow and surrounded by four living creatures full of eyes singing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty!” (Revelation)

It is that historians can now prove he existed (probably) as a human being (male, most likely) and spent a few years talking to people (maybe) before being executed as a insurrectionist by the imperial authorities some time in the reign of Tiberius (allegedly). Oh, and that he seems to have had ties to Jerusalem. Possibly.

My theological heroine Dorothy Sayers has a scathing take-down of this allergy to mystery in modern Christianity in her account of the reaction to a play she wrote about the rebuilding of the choir of Canterbury cathedral in 1179. Some young men came to her after seeing the play, The Zeal of Thy House, and accused her of making things up:

The action of the play involves a dramatic presentation of a few fundamental Christian dogmas—in particular, the application to human affairs of the doctrine of the Incarnation.

That the Church believed Christ to be in any real sense God, or that the eternal word was supposed to be associated in any way with the word of creation; that Christ was held to be at the same time man in any real sense of the word; that the doctrine of the Trinity could be considered to have any relation to fact or any bearing on psychological truth; that the Church considered pride to be sinful, or indeed took any notice of sin beyond the most disreputable sins of the flesh—all these things were looked upon as astonishing and revolutionary novelties, imported into the faith by the feverish imagination of the playwright.

I protested in vain against this flattering tribute to my powers of invention, referring my inquirers to the creeds, to the gospels, and to the offices of the Church; I insisted that if my play were dramatic it was so, not in spite of the dogma, but because of it—that, in short, the dogma was the drama.

The explanation was, however, not well received; it was felt that if there were anything attractive in Christian philosophy I must have put it there myself. [2]

Again, it is almost as if we were reading a fairy tale!

The story of why modern Christians know so little of the magic and mystery of the stories on which their faith is purportedly founded is a long one, having to do with the Reformation, the Enlightenment and historical critical methods of reading the Scriptures. It takes winding paths through the works of David Friedrich Strauss (translated into English by the not-yet-novelist George Eliot). It founders on the anxieties of Victorian English Protestantism and the quest for the historical Jesus declared mythical by Strauss. It catches up on the shores of German liberalism (think Schleiermacher) and philosophy (think Nietzsche) and crashes somewhere in the works of Rudolf Karl Bultmann (“New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation,” published in 1941).

By Sayers’s lifetime (b. 1893, d. 1957), it had already completely taken over Anglicanism, although Sayers and her fellow Inklings (she was an honorary one, if not a regular) did their best to try to pump some life back into King Henry’s Church. Sayers herself was invited to write the first play about Jesus performed in England since the seventeenth century. It aired on BBC Radio beginning on December 21, 1941 (note date relative to Bultmann), and running through the rest of the following year—to enormous controversy, on the one hand, because Sayers had the characters speak in contemporary, colloquial English (not KJV!); and on the other hand, because it was objected that it amounted to Christian propaganda because so many people enjoyed it.

Since then, Anglophone audiences have enjoyed the benefit of regular theatrical and cinematic portrayals of Jesus Christ “Superstar,” variously attempting to square the circle of his divinity with his humanity (or not). Think Godspell meets Jesus of Nazareth meets Jim Caviezel (sequel coming soon!). But as one of my Twitter readers (@brownmp) remarked on the first post in this series, nobody learns to read the Scriptures as Dante (translated in part by Sayers, in full by Professor Esolen) read them, as pointing through the Old Testament figures to their fulfillment in the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, with the result (in my experience) that nobody gets why the historical person should be so hard to portray, although Zeffirelli and Gibson come close. [3]

I know, the mind boggles. I asked my Twitter friend, “Why wouldn’t they teach [the four-fold meaning in seminary]? It is basic to reading the Scriptures!” His answer:

You might get a one day “in case you ever run across this” summary in homiletics 1 or an early exegetical class. But the primary message in even that summary is “this is not an acceptable way of preaching or interpreting today. It’s embarrassing.” Trotting out Joachim de Fiore.

The liberal side sticks to historical-critical and turns every text into sitz im Leben. The conservative side sticks to crit in a different term: grammatical historical. That lets in typology (Christology or the 2nd level) but grudgingly.

The Old Testament is read typologically, or read in a silo about what it meant to Israel. Moral teaching is ignored because we are under grace, but it is done, is only on the literal (i.e. 10 commandments).

As far as contemplation, you have to read old books or the oddball.

Which, as I answered him, rather explains what makes me so dangerous—all those old books!

Modern Christians miss the drama because, thanks to Bultmann et al., we no longer know how to read mythologically, that is, allegorically, that is, seeing Christ in the fullness of Scriptures, not just as a figure in an historical play. I say, “we,” but my friend is right. It is very rare, even among Catholics, for Christians to have heard about the figures and resonances Caedmon the cowherd would have known in writing his hymns. I know this because whenever I talk about the symbolism in the Scriptures, people react much as Sayers’s young men—as if I must be making it up, and this includes members of the academy who have read my work, particularly about Mary.

Medievalists may know about the “four senses of Scripture,” if they read Dante, but the feeling of reality for most is not there. It is not that medieval Christians pretended to find Christ in the figures and prophecies of the Old Testament; it is that they knew he was there because the New Testament told them so. The Gospels were not written as historical documents to fill a bureaucrat’s archive. They were written as stories to draw people in, much like modern movies or plays, so that their audience would know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to battle with Satan and win. The Gospels are, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories,” but they are true only insofar as they are marvelous—and vice versa.

What would it take to tell a story for modern audiences that would show them Christ as the Incarnate Maker of the World? What genius (or inspiration) would it take to accomplish for modern readers what Dante did for the fourteenth century—to show them the reality of their mythological world? Magician and Hopemongerer Patrick Coffin suggested in our Monday Night Marathon on the Mosaic Ark that, in fact, the movies do it all the time, insofar as they recapitulate the Greatest Story Ever Told by using its structure to define the characters and plot. He suggested Little Orphan Annie, E.T., and Saving Private Ryan as examples. (We challenged him on E.T., so he added Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto to the mix.) Which is encouraging, but still skirts the question of Jesus’ divinity, unless you count E.T., but then we get aliens, not the Incarnate Son of God.

You know where I’m going with this. Medieval or GTFO! More precisely, Caedmon and his fellow poets, who somehow figured out how to sing Christ as the Maker and Redeemer of men in a way that was at once mystical and historical, mythological and divine. The story must begin as the Scriptures do, in Light, and proceed as modern thrillers do, through horror, but somehow resolve itself in eucatastrophe or joy without becoming saccharine (“Jesus in a white nightie,” as professor of history Meredith Veldman puts it). [4] It must partake of the allegorical insofar as it points to Christ, while at the same time be credible as a narrative in itself. It must have real characters in real crises, while participating in the cosmic whole. It must be grounded in tradition, but speak to present audiences. It must rhyme with the Scriptures and scan with the structures of the world. It must read like the fairy story we most want to know was true, without breaking the spell and becoming allegory.

It must, in other words, do what Caedmon did: sing verses that had never been heard before in praise of God.

“Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast, ofer middengeard monnum sended...”[5]

Read on: Draco Layer Three: The Moral or Tropological Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

dragoncommonroom.com

[1] Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, IV.24 (22), trans. Bertram Colgrave (Oxford: Oxford Medieval Texts, 1969; with new introduction by Judith McClure and Roger Collins, 1994), 216-17.

[2] Dorothy Sayers, “The Dogma is the Drama,” in Letters to the Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine (W Publishing Group, 2004), 16-17.

[3] Sayers was more circumspect. As she noted in the Introduction to the published version of The Man Born to be King, “To make an adequate dramatic presentation of the life of God Incarnate would require literally superhuman genius, in playwright and actors alike” (1943; reprint Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press, 2014), 27.

[4] Meredith Veldman, The British Jesus, 1850-1970 (London: Routledge, 2022), highly recommended for the history of Jesus narratives like Sayers’.

[5] “Hail, Earendel, brightest of angels, over middle-earth to men sent.” Advent Lyric V, The Christ of Cynewulf, inspiration for Tolkien’s savior-character Eärendil, but in fact a lyric about Christ.

Draco Layer One: The Literal or Historical Sense

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 22:14:00 +0000

Learn to scan.

Literature in English begins in poetry. Not because it was highfalutin’ and inaccessible, although literature in Latin was. But because it was not.

Literature in English begins in a poem composed, or so the story goes, by a cowherd at the monastery of Whitby in Northumbria around the year of Our Lord 700. Our cowherd—his name was Caedmon—had left the feast when the harp came round because he was too embarrassed not to be able to scan.

He went back to his cowshed to hide, but the Holy Spirit found him anyway (you know it was the Holy Spirit because it looked like a dove) and told him to write down what he heard. Okay, that’s not quite the story. Doves tended to talk to great composers like Pope Gregory the Great (see the manuscripts). Caedmon reportedly was visited by an angel in a dream, but the result was similar.

Just as Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604, but only after he sent missionaries to England) was credited with composing chants for the liturgy, Caedmon was inspired (technical term—the Spirit breathed through him) to compose hymns on the themes of Creation, the Fall, and Redemption. Significantly, Caedmon (like the authors of the Gregorian liturgy) composed his hymns in verse—thus giving birth to over a thousand years of great hymn-writing in English.

Thanks be to God—it is the only poetry most people now can remember.

It is surely ironic that a tradition that begins with a cowherd is now considered so highbrow that only professors of literature are allowed to talk about it, much less learn it. Tell someone you want to write poetry, and you will immediately be taken for either a Marxist or a fool. (You doubt me? Read The ABC of Communism—once the machines take over, we are all going to have time for writing poetry!)

The poets of the Dragon Common Room are not Marxists, but we are happy fools for Christ! Thus, like Caedmon, although we were never trained in the high art of literary poetry, we have taken up the figurative harp and learned to scan.

Our primary meter is iambic pentameter, which if you have not taken fancy literature classes on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, is simply the meter of your heartbeat in sets of five:

daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM

I have read a number of different explanations of how to spot this meter, some of them more helpful than others.

Clandestine poet and famous comedian Stephen Fry compares the beats of the iambs to musical counts, with each bar or measure counting as a single foot:

and ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and FIVE

Five beats, five feet: “Five feet marching in rhythm. If the foot is a heartbeat, the metre can best be described as the readout or cardiogram trace.” [1]

Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky insists that what matters is the sound, not the stress as such, so that in iambic pentameter it is simply pairs of syllables “in which the second syllable sticks out more in sound,” [2] while professor of creative writing and cinema William Baer describes iambs in terms of “constantly rising rhythm, moving from light syllable to stressed syllable,” as one might say, the HEART. [3]

Professor of literature and translator of Dante Anthony Esolen describes metrical English as a pattern of stresses which we hear as a series of rising and falling waves. In iambic pentameter, there will be five “crests” and five “troughs,” with each line beginning with a trough and ending on a crest. For example, from Milton:

To JUS·ti·FY the WAYS of GOD to MAN.

Which all sounds quite intimidating, until you read it out loud. Notice how the stresses fall where they would if you said the words without realizing you were reading verse. That is what makes great poetry in English sing: the stress on the syllables rises and falls “naturally,” although to achieve this perfect concordance of stress and vocabulary takes great art, a.k.a. attention to detail. [4]

The question I am sure you are asking: But why would you want to?

Because poetry is the form not just of hymns and Communists, but of all great folklore in every tradition, including English, although you wouldn’t know it from most modern verse. That most modern poets don’t seem to remember this fact about poetry—that it was folk—is, as Professor Esolen points out, because they have forgotten something even more important about poetry than that it was written by cowherds: it was originally for the most part religious.

Think Homer and Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dante, Petrarch, and Milton. Great poetry like Caedmon’s takes up religious themes like Creation because what folk like Caedmon sing about are things that matter—like God. In Professor Esolen’s words:

Perhaps that is why American schools [and, presumably also, British] have so thoroughly abandoned the study of literature written before 1900, and poetry in particular. It touches upon the eternal things. How can you read Paradise Lost [see line above], when in your mad institution God is deemed a filthier word than those scrawled by a teenage boy on the wall of a lavatory? [5]

It is almost as if, for modernity, poetry is dangerous because it touches on eternal things—but why should that be?

Here’s another theory: because it is beautiful, and beauty depends on something that frightens modernity even more than the word God. Because poetry is beautiful, it is also memorable, which means it sticks in the mind and becomes real—and thus a powerful antidote to the manipulation of those who would have us think otherwise about God.

What was it that Caedmon sang? The Venerable Bede (d. 735) offered a translation into Latin, which, he said, could hardly do the lines justice: “For it is not possible to translate verse, however well composed, literally from one language to another without some loss of beauty and dignity.” [6] And yet, we remember Caedmon thanks to Bede as the author of this first English hymn (here, as translated by Craig Williamson):

Now let us praise the Creator and Guardian
of the heavenly kingdom, his power and purpose,
his mind and might, his wondrous works.
He shaped each miraculous beginning,
each living creature, each earthly kind.
He first made for the children of men
heaven as a roof. Then our holy Shaper
crafted middle-earth, a home for mankind:
our God and Guardian watching over us—
eternal, almighty—our Lord and King. [7]

The holy Shaper crafting our middle-earth? It almost sounds...magical. Like something you would read in a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Like something that might bring you sorrow—and joy. Like something breath-taking and solemn, written by hobbits. Like the song of Creation as crafted by Everyman.

Why are we writing Draco Alchemicus in iambic pentameter? Because that is the meter in which Everyman sings in English to God. To be fair, Caedmon’s verse was written in Old English and, therefore, in alliterative verse, but those of us who write in modern English are but poor craftsman in comparison. And yet, as that great professor of Old and Middle English J.R.R. Tolkien put it in his argument in favor of myth,

We make still by the law in which we’re made. [8]

Which, if you read it out loud, you will realize is written in iambic pentameter.

Read on: Draco Layer Two: The Allegorical or Christological Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

dragoncommonroom.com

[1] Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (London: Arrow Books, 2005), 7.

[2] Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 31.

[3] William Baer, Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Traditional Forms (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2006), 20.

[4] Anthony Esolen, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019), 14.

[5] Ibid., 10.

[6] Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, IV.24 (22), trans. Bertram Colgrave (Oxford: Oxford Medieval Texts, 1969; with new introduction by Judith McClure and Roger Collins, 1994), 216.

[7] Craig Williamson, The Complete Old English Poems (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 1050.

[8] J.R.R. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia,” in Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 1964), 87.

The Four Senses of Draco Alchemicus

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 22:09:00 +0000

Good stories, like Ogres and onions, have layers. [1]

We are not sure how many layers Ogres and onions (or cakes) have, but thanks to Dante Alighieri (and, before him, John Cassian) we know good stories, like Scripture, have four: historical, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

Are your eyes watering yet?

Dante Alighieri was, of course, the author of one of the greatest stories ever written (the Divine Comedy) so we may take him at his word that his own story had layers, but even Dante found that his readers needed help recognizing the layers through the tears. (Real Ogres cry.)

Accordingly, Dante (near rhyme with Donkey) found it necessary to explain to his friend Cangrande della Scala (near alliteration with Shrek) what those layers were:

For the sake, then, of clarifying what we have to say, it has to be understood that the meaning of this work [the Commedia] is not of one kind only [non est simplex sensus]; rather, it may be described as “polysemous”, as having, that is to say, several meanings [polysemos, hoc est plurium sensuum]; for the first meaning is that conveyed by the letter, while the next is that conveyed by what the letter signifies, the first of which we call the literal meaning, and the second the allegorical or mystical meaning.

And for the better illustration of this way of conducting the argument we may take the following verses: “When Israel came out of Egypt and the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.” [2] For if we consider the letter alone, what is signified is the coming out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if, by contrast, the allegory, what is meant is our redemption through Christ; if, again, the moral sense, what is meant is the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace; and if the anagogic, what is meant is the passing of the sanctified soul from the slavery of our present corruption to the liberty of our everlasting glory.

And although these mystical meanings have various names, they may all of them in a general sense be termed allegorical, inasmuch as they are all of them different from the literal or historical meaning; for the word “allegory” is so called from the Greek “alleon”, which in Latin is “alienum” or “diversum.” [3]

Don’t you wish you had some parfait so as to map the layers? Or maybe some cake?

Fairy tales, including fairy tales about Ogres, are good stories, so they have layers, too, although in most modern readings they have only two: the literal or historical (including efforts to discover the “real” or original version of the story) and the psychological (a.k.a. how they are always already about sex).

To be fair, modern scholarship has done the same thing to the Scriptures: the Gospels are either mined as sources for the life of the historical Jesus or read for evidence that Jesus was gay. [4] But fairy tales have been known to carry a psychological layer ever since Freud. Think Oedipus, with a Sphinx instead of a donkey. (Donkeys love riddles.)

Back in college between courses on the letters of Paul, the synoptic Gospels, and the historical Jesus, I took a course in Gender Studies for which I did a paper on fairy tales, which meant reading Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1975). You will be familiar with Bettelheim’s argument even if you have never read him. Tl;dr: Fairy tales are about coping with trauma. And, of course, sex.

(Shrek just wanted to recover his swamp from the fairy-tale refugees, remember?! But then he fell in love with Fiona.)

Layers, you see, are metaphysical realities, which is why onions are so hard to peel. How many you can count depends on your sensitivity to peas, not to mention quests and riddles. It also depends on your willingness to be baptized and transformed by Christ.

Which is perhaps why some people, unlike Ogres, can see only two (the literal and the psychological, a.k.a. sex).

The great Alexandrian exegete Origen (d. 254) read the Song of Songs—on the surface, a series of poems about, you guessed it, sex—as a drama with four main parts in as many layers: “This little book is an epithalamium, that is a nuptial song, which it seems to me that Solomon wrote in dramatic form, and sang after the fashion of a bride to her bridegroom, who is the word of God [sermo Dei], burning with celestial love. Indeed, he loves her deeply, whether she is the soul, made in his own image, or the Church.” [5]

Throughout the Middle Ages, this is the way Christian exegetes read the Scriptures: as a love song between God and his bride, whether his Church, his mother Mary, or the human soul. (Trust me on this, I have bibliography.) Christian readers expected Scripture to open out into layers and layers, like an art fair blooming onion. They also expected some of those layers to bring them to tears. Think eucatastrophe, with a side order of meditation on the Passion.

I know, you thought medieval Christianty was a swamp, when in fact it was a blooming onion.

If only someone would write stories like Ogres again. With layers. And tears.

Read on: Draco Layer One: The Literal or Historical Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

dragoncommonroom.com

[1] Allusion to Shrek (2001).

[2] Citation of Psalm 113:1-2 (Vulgate numbering).

[3] Epistole 13.7, cited by John Took, Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 529n9.

[4] Yes, really. See the controversy over Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel of Mark (1973). Smith read the nakedness of the young man in the linen garment as a reference to a secret initiatory rite involving baptism, magic, and hypnotism (according to Wikipedia), but musicologist Peter Jeffrey insisted that Smith’s imagination had run away with him, just like the young man ran away in Mark 14:51-52. It’s complicated. Sort of.

[5] As translated into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia, and into English by me, according to the footnotes in my PhD thesis.

Kickstarter FAQ

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 20:56:00 +0000

We made it! Our first-ever Kickstarter for the Dragon Common Room concluded on Tuesday, June 20, at 8:02am CDT. We have successfully funded the first three Acts of our five-Act faërie tale, while at the same time learning valuable lessons in advertising, promotion, and design.

Most important lesson: Be clear, rather than clever when telling people about your work. Not an easy lesson for dragons who love riddles!

FAQ

What is Draco Alchemicus? A faërie tale, fully illustrated, with dragons.

Why is it called Draco Alchemicus? “Draco” is Latin for “serpent” or “snake.” In English, the title might be rendered as “The Alchemical Dragon” or, more properly, “Snake Oil,” which should make you wonder about how (and why) scientists and physicians similarly use Latin to obscure the ingredients of the potions they sell. You know how doctors use fancy words to disguise the fact they are prescribing you poisons? So do drakes.

You claim to be writing as Christians. Aren’t dragons a symbol of Satan? This is another reason our title is Draco Alchemicus. Again, “draco” in Latin simply means “serpent” or “snake.” The ambiguity in the tradition comes from Psalm 148:7, where the “dracones” sing praises to God along with the other creatures. In the Dragon Common Room, our purpose is to recover fantasy for Christ, much as the dragons singing their praises in the psalm recover creation for the praise of the Lord. Thus, in our poem, the “Draco” is twinned: both Satan (the Dragon of the Apocalypse of St. John) and Christ (the Brazen Serpent lifted up in the desert, as noted in John 3:14-15).

Why the “alchemical” dragon? What is alchemy? Alchemy is the ancient and medieval tradition concerned with the transformation of matter, particularly the transformation of base metals into gold. It was also concerned with finding a universal elixir or medicine said to prolong life. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, it was invoked as a metaphor for spiritual transformation. The Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic convert Johann Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) used this metaphor frequently in his epigrams, describing the soul transformed by God as finest gold, clear as crystal. Our story works on multiple levels, taking the metaphor of transformation both as a spell cast over modernity in its quest for money and extended life, and as a promise of redemption through Christ.

Alchemical Dragon and Brazen Serpent

Is Draco Alchemicus a game or a story? I see playing cards in the Kickstarter rewards, but I don’t understand why. Draco Alchemicus is a poem, written in iambic pentameter, using the stanza form invented by Edmund Spenser for his great Elizabethan epic The Faërie Queene. We made the playing cards as a backer reward for the Kickstarter to introduce readers to the main characters in the story: Damian Stone (Kings), Eliza Drake (Queens), Guardian (Jacks), Dove (Aces), and Dog (Jokers). We also designed special pips for the suits to symbolize the different time periods in which the story is set and to play off the symbolism of the original medieval Tarot suits. Our pips are Daggers (Spades; Elizabethan); Flowers (Hearts; Commedia dell’arte); Gears (Diamonds; Steam Punk); and Vines (Clubs; Casino Magic).

Magician Patrick Coffin demonstrates the power of the cards

I don’t read fantasy/poetry/comics. Why should I be interested in Draco Alchemicus? Draco Alchemicus is intended as a challenge both to the dumbing down and deconstruction of modern storytelling (think, Hollywood blockbusters as studied in college classes) and to the mystification of the great works of English literature as “inaccessible” or “high brow” (think, Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer as studied in college classes). Rather than complain about the lack of great art, the Dragon Common Room has taken up the gauntlet and chosen to make some, while at the same time embracing the teachings of Augustine of Hippo on the importance of the sermo humilis—the mixture of rhetorical styles necessary for the communication of Christian mysteries. Perhaps the easiest way to describe Draco Alchemicus is as a crossover between Star Wars (itself modeled on Spenser’s Faërie Queene) and Shakespeare (a mastercraftsman of both comedy and tragedy, kings and fools). Much as in the Incarnation, God humbled himself to speak to us with human words, we, as Christian artists, use the low styles of preaching and comic art to lift the mind and heart to the contemplation of God.

Why should I read this book? It will make you smarter. Just like listening to Mozart.

Crossover—somebody tell Mel!

Post further questions in the comments, and we will endeavor to be clear—as well as clever!

—The Dragon Common Room

dragoncommonroom.com

Fountain of Fate

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 19:44:00 +0000

1) Evangelical Animals, The Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin, MS 58, fol. 27v
2) Baptistery, St. John Lateran, Rome
3) The Copernicus Planisphere, by Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica, plate 4

Act I, scene i

12
He stood beneath a dome of tow’ring height.
The ceiling of the room was far away;
a false sky met his gaze with twinkling lights,
a belt of time in Zodiac array.
Gold curtains fell like waterfalls, risqué
and riverine they flowed around the vault.
The veils were drawn across the grand archways
and framed the ceiling made of dark cobalt.
The neon lights flashed on and off like flaming salt.

13
A sea of bronze upheld by oxen pairs
stood brimful with the waters of the skies.
The waters poured out over stony stairs
into a fountain filled with golden bribes.
A sterling current rolled its liquid ice
spewed by a dragon from the fountain’s hearth,
while on its base were words deeply incised:
“All fate’s a wager—boldly now cast forth!
Dame Fortune favors those who go in quest of worth.”

14
Four faces ringed the watery wheel of chance:
a man, a bull, a lion, and a drake.
Laid out in gemstones on the floor, they danced,
and bowed down towards the brazen oxen lake.
Their wings were dazzling in the water’s wake;
four bodies were of men, three faces beasts.
The creatures proffered; who would treasure take?
The man surveyed them, north, south, west, and east.
Their mouths gaped open, hungering for souls to feast.

Enter the Myth. Drink the Spice.
Learn to scan.

dragoncommonroom.com

Cosmic Egg

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 22:43:00 +0000

The Trinity in the Unity, and The Cosmic Egg
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, II.ii and I.iii
Rüdesheim/Eibingen, Benediktinerinnenabtei St. Hildegard, MS 1, fols. 47r and 14r

Act I, scene i

1
A band of crystal lit with heaven’s fire
burst o’er the earth and flashed across the plain,
reverberating through the raining pyre
of stories sung in cities built by Cain.
A pinioned cloud danced rings around the flame,
its cooing harmonized with chords of grace.
A deep base note encoded love reclaimed
from kingdom’s fall of mankind’s ancient race.

The resonating wings revealed a clouded face.

2
The pigeon ether undulated free,
an orchestra of feathers white as frost.
The wingéd loom descended on the sea;
from light it spun a subatomic cross.
Bright feathers knit atomic Helios,
while oscillating sparks set fire to quills.
Reverberating wings turned light to dust.
The looming man from loom that seemed to trill

emerged in flesh from cloud of sapphire-blue beryl.

3
The chorus swelled; the man stepped onto land,
from clouds delivered to the darkened shore.
He stood there naked, looking at the sand;
his face shone bright like heated iron ore.
White strands of hair presaged the coming war,
while from his lips came songs in ancient tongue
not heard since towers fell to angels’ lore.
He took a breath like snakes soak up the sun;

his voice like thunder rolling o’r the waves, he sung:

4
“I loved you from the first glance of your eye;
your garden was a paradise of doves.
I came into my kingdom from the sky
because you left me languishing with love.
I called you to my wrist, my falcon’s glove,
and promised I would warm you at my breast
with aromatic spices from above.
The winter now has gone, the rain has passed;

arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my one most blessed.”

Pigeon Cloud
Draco Alchemicus
Act I: The Casino

Enter the Myth. Drink the Spice. Learn to scan.

dragoncommonroom.com

“I will eviscerate you in fiction.”

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:26:00 +0000

Imagine being Chaucer before The Canterbury Tales.

Nobody you know writes poetry in English. Certainly nobody you know writes poetry in English in iambic pentameter.

For centuries, the literati have written in Latin (or French), but you, Chaucer, have the idea of writing in English. (Middle English, for you literary types.)

Great literature.

High symbolism.

Various characters in all their embarrassing and heroic complexity.

Except you do it in English. Even worse, you do it in rhyming, metered verse.

Your first effort involves an animal allegory—a parliament of birds.

Nobody reads it. (Well, not as many as you’d hoped!)

So you seek adventure in other ways.

And lose all your clothes gambling.

Which means you end up on a road somewhere in France, naked, trudging.

When a not-knight comes along with his fellow servants and rescues you, if you will forge for him patents of nobility.

You spend the next year writing heraldic introductions for him and proofs that he is of the nobility.

But you still have this need for gold.

So you play at cards.

And lose all your clothes.

Your not-knight confronts you about your gold-digging.

And you beg, “Please, Will... Please, will you help me, Sir Ulrich? I promise you won’t regret it.”

Your creditors mock you when you give them their gambling gains.

“It’s sixes-and-sevens tonight, Chaucer. Do you feel lucky?” “Do you wear enough clothes?”

“Go on, be gone. I’m done with you,” you respond. “Except to exact my revenge.”

The Pardoner and Summoner grin. “What on earth could you possibly do to us?”

You riposte: “I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every last pimple, every last character flaw. I was naked for a day. You will be naked for eternity.”

They scoff.

Because who cares what some naked poet-to-be says he can do with words? They’re the ones with the gold!

The poets of the Dragon Common Room have gambled our gold in the hope of winning at the telling of tales.

But we’re naked.

Please, will you help us?

Back us—or be in it. Pick a card!

Alchemical Storytelling for the Electric Mosaic: Making the Old New

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 17:04:00 +0000

Most people are idiots.

Tell them you are writing an entirely new story, and the first thing they want to know is how it is like the stories they already know.

In the profession, we call this “genre,” but what it really means is that most people are afraid of dragons.

“People think that people tell stories,” the narrator of the Discworld opines. “In fact, it’s the other way around. Stories tell us. This is why in a hundred worlds, the princess always marries the frog and the witch is always burned at the stake.” (I paraphrase.*)

Tell the story a different way, and people get upset.

People hate being shown themselves in the mirror, which is what stories do.

Everyone wants to be Snow White, nobody wants to see herself as the Witch Queen.

Except we are all the Witch Queen, looking in the mirror, begging to be seen as beautiful.

Just try it out here on the Internet sometime.

And see the Dragon looking back.

George Lucas wanted to be famous, so he used a story everybody already knew. Except they didn’t know they knew it.

Its original author called it The Faerie Queene.

George Lucas called it Star Wars.

But it’s the same story.

Short version: There is a young Knight. There is a Princess. There is a dwarf. There is an evil Wizard. And there is a Dragon. The Knight comes to the rescue of the Princess, whose parents have been enslaved by the Dragon. The Knight learns faith from an old hermit and fighting from an older knight whom he encounters on his way to fight the Dragon. The Knight kills the Dragon by stabbing it in the throat, and the Princess’s parents are set free.

Spenser’s version: The Redcross Knight is Holiness; the Princess is the One True Religion (thus her name, Una). Her dwarf is Prudence or Common Sense. The evil Wizard (Archimago) is Hypocrisy, and the Dragon is the Spanish Empire and/or the Roman Catholic Church. The hermit is Contemplation, and the experienced knight is Prince Arthur (Protestantism or the Church Militant). And, of course, the Princess has a Lion (Reason, Natural Honor) representing Henry VIII and/or the Natural World, while she is opposed by the False Duessa, representing Mary, Queen of Scots.

Lucas’s version: The Knight is Luke Skywalker; the Princess is Leia (dressed, like Una, in white). The dwarf is twinned as C3PO and R2D2. The hermit is also twinned, as ObiWan Kenobi and Yoda, while the assisting knight, Han Solo, is somewhat less than perfect, but still necessary for the young Knight’s training. The evil Wizard is Darth Vader, and the Dragon is the Death Star, which Luke Skywalker kills by driving his X-wing, a.k.a. sword, into its throat. The Princess is befriended by a lion (Chewbacca) and threatened by the monstrous Jabba the Hutt.

Even the Ewoks make sense if you realize what Lucas was doing. In Spenser’s version, Una is rescued by forest-dwelling satyrs, and the satyrs worship Una as their god. The Ewoks rescue Leia, Luke, and Han, but they worship C3PO (who is gold). In Richard Simon’s words: “Star Wars really is The Faerie Queene in modern dress.”**

Do you feel better now, realizing you already knew this story? Of course you do. We all do. Because there is only one Story, and we are always already in it.

Except some people lie to us and pretend there are other stories, with secrets to reveal, that only certain special people will have access to.

The Dragon loves this kind of story. The story that promises mysteries hidden behind a veil. The story into which only initiates are allowed.

Such stories come enveloped in much pomp and circumstance. Fancy robes. Secret handshakes. Pyramids of trials to overcome.

And then you find yourself at the threshold of the Secret Chamber... and you realize it’s the same story still.

The story of the Serpent who said, “God lied to you.”

The story of the ancient Enemy who promised, “You will be like gods.”

Most people are idiots.

And yet God loves us anyway. And keeps trying to tell us the Story that is True.

Draco Alchemicus is one version of that One Story. The same one told by Spenser and Lucas. The same one told in the Gospels. The same one the Serpent most wants you to believe isn’t true.

You don’t believe me?

Enter the Myth. Drink the Spice. Arm yourself for the battle to come.

*Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991), 8-9.

**Richard Keller Simon, “Star Wars and the Faerie Queene,” in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 29-37, at 34.

The Sign of Six

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 16:31:00 +0000

DCR Poet KJ Crilly with more Spenserian backstory on our setting and characters to add to the Dragon’s hoard!

Apogee

A thousand points of light glowed in the room,

illuminating throngs of devotees

who watched the golden dragon fountain spume

its water arches towards a canopy

atop four pillars, tall as cedar trees.

Below it, a foundation myth in tile

belied the purpose of this apogee;

the consummation of mimetic style

was transformation of the world through Dragon’s guile.

Smoke Signals

The smoke from cigarettes and pipes was rising

above the heads of guests at their banquettes

around the chandelier and rafters, spiraling,

incensing the casino and smart set

who’d come to watch the race and place their bets.

Like signals from a secretive callsign,

the particle, infused by sulphuret,

formed sultry Theosophical designs

that led her to the chosen mark in vaporous lines.

Mathematic Rivalry

She was in thrall to esoteric signs;

symbology and little charms and fate,

the currency in all her grand designs,

accelerated her excited state.

It was a frivolous but harmless trait,

or so he hoped while calculating times.

“The thoroughbreds will soon be at the gate.”

He thought about statistic paradigms

and placed her wager to subdue her frantic mind.

Orb and Scepter

What will it be, the scepter or the orb?

Two images drawn on mimetic decks

display two creatures mined from mythic lore.

The first, an undulating epithet;

the second one, a shade of Amalek,

whose venom made its victims fade and die

inside an addict’s spiraling vortex.

This game of cards has only one ace high.

Lay down and muck, or bet on the ignoble lie?

The Bouncer

Casino patrons daily pass him by,

the bouncer standing sentry at the gate.

While not invisible to all those eyes,

his stealth comportment guarantees his fate

as one who watches o’er the maddened state

of men and women’s dramatizéd lives.

He’s seen it all from love to burning hate

inside those walls where concupiscence thrives,

where no man in this merely mortal coil survives.

Good Boy

The man was quickly walking from the surf

with military purpose, city-bound.

Some dogs were barking, guarding their own turf,

but one among them kept circling around.

He sniffed the man without making a sound,

then followed him—a self-appointed guide,

a wild card in the man’s plan to gain ground

within the City’s seedy, darker side.

They walked together to the Gothic gates, clear-eyed.

Arm yourself for the Art War! Back our Kickstarter today!

Look for the Dog among the decks of cards—and place your bets on story-telling for the stars.

Follow KJ Crilly on Twitter @KJCrilly.

On Christian Dragons

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Tue, 30 May 2023 21:13:00 +0000

Once upon a time...

There was a City on the shore of a great Sea. Its name was Carthage, and it was filled with pagans. But not just any pagans.

These were pagans in the old style. Pagans who studied the liberal arts to become orators. Pagans who studied philosophy to live virtuous lives. Pagans who enjoyed the theater and the circus as entertainment. Pagans who gave money to their city to erect monuments and public works.

And they wanted to become Christians.

Deogratias was the deacon of the cathedral where they came for instruction, but he had a problem. As he wrote his friend and teacher Augustine of Hippo, he was bored with giving the pagans lessons. He didn’t know what to tell them when they asked for instruction, so much so that his discourse left a nasty taste in his mouth, not to mention leaving his audience confused and unconvinced.

“What should I say?” he begged Augustine. “Why can’t I explain to them what it means to be Christian when it is so clear to me? Why do my words fail to inspire them?”

“Start with love,” Augustine counseled him. “But also start with the realization that, if you find your words wearisome and profitless, think how much more frustrating it is for God, trying to talk with us.”

I paraphrase.

This is what Augustine, the great professor of rhetoric, actually told Deogratias, as translated by S.D.F. Salmond:

Now if the cause of our sadness lies in the circumstance that our hearer does not apprehend what we mean, so that we have to come down in a certain fashion from the elevation of our own conceptions, and are under the necessity of dwelling long in the tedious processes of syllables which come far beneath the standard of our ideas, and have anxiously to consider how that which we ourselves take in with a most rapid draught of mental apprehension is to be given forth by the mouth of flesh in the long and perplexed intricacies of its method of enunciation; and if the great dissimilarity thus felt (between our utterance and our thought) makes it distasteful to us to speak, and a pleasure to us to keep silence, then let us ponder what has been set before us by Him who has “showed us an example that we should follow in His steps” (1 Peter 2:21). For however much our articulate speech may differ from the vivacity of our intelligence, much greater is the difference of the flesh of mortality from the equality of God. And, nevertheless, “although He was in the same form, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant [being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the] death of the cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). What is the explanation of this but that He made Himself “weak to the weak, in order that He might gain the weak?” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

Got all that? Right. Neither did Deogratias’s pagans. Nor do most modern Christians, to judge from the debates raging on the Internet. (I’m sure you’ve encountered the modern-day Donatists! You haven’t? Try mentioning the pope.)

“But it’s so clear to me!” wailed Deogratias. “That flash of understanding, and I just know Jesus Christ is Lord as prophesied in the Scriptures, born of the Virgin Mary, sent to save humanity from its sins! How is it that others can’t hear me?!”

Imagine that you are Deogratias, surrounded by pagans, and you want them to understand and experience the mystery of Christ.

What would you say?

“You need to tell them a story,” answers Augustine. “And you need to show them that they are already in it.”

Once upon a time...

There was a City on the shore of a great Sea. It was Every City and No City, a great City of Light. And it was filled with pagans. But not just any pagans.

These were pagans in the old style. Pagans who believed in science and the power of physics and chemistry. Pagans accustomed to travel the world on great ships of iron fueled by coal fires and oil. Pagans with degrees from great institutions of learning where they had studied the secrets of the universe in order to control the waves. Pagans who gave money to their City to erect monuments and public works.

Some considered themselves atheists. Some considered themselves “spiritual, but not religious.” All were inclusive and tolerant and wanted to have a Good Time. Especially on the Internet. Especially at the Rave.

And they all loved dragons, although it was difficult to say why.

Dragons, after all, were not creatures of science. The people of the City had never seen a dragon, not in real life. Dragons lived somewhere on the edges of imagination, behind the green screens and in the shadows of the theme parks. They whispered to the people of powers over land and sea, of treasures hidden in the earth and in the skies. They promised immunity against poverty and disease.

Nobody was afraid of them because, of course, they weren’t real. And yet, everyone knew that one day the dragons would arrive.

And eat them.

Once upon a time...

There was a City on the shore of a great Sea, and a dragon had captured it. The people lived in fear of angering the dragon. They called it by abstract names like “The Government” and “Scientific Consensus” and “Emergency Use Authorization” in order to avoid attracting its attention. No one had ever seen it, but they knew where it lived.

Or thought they did.

Daily, they communed with the dragon, feeding it with their attention and praise. And the dragon rewarded them with calculated bliss. Nobody could remember a time when there had not been a dragon, but they loved it and served it because it promised them comfort and safety from harm.

And then one day a stranger came, and he showed them a mirror in which to see themselves.

He looked just like them, a man in form and manner. But when they looked on him, they were dazzled and blind. He spoke of currents through which the energy of the cosmos flowed and of a City built not on fear, but on love.

And he warned them about the dragon and its insatiable appetites and told them he could rescue them from it if only they would follow him into the Light.

But the people loved their comfort and safety more than they feared the dragon.

And so they hated the man and wanted him dead.

Once upon a time...

There was a City on the shore of a great Sea about which many stories were told. This is one of them:

I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know... If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. — G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925)

Here is another:

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving; “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath. —J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” (1947)

And a third:

So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero. If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild,“ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand. True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as “that fox”; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a “gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had a “daily beauty in his life that made us ugly,” and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness. —Dorothy Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged Is the Official Creed of Christendom” (1938)

Once upon a time...

There was a City on the shore of a great Sea. You know the stories that are told about it. You have lived them your whole life.

Some you want to believe are true. Some you hope very much are not true. And some you wish you had told yourself.

Part of you wants to enter into the stories and meet the dragon.

Part of you wants to be sure that the Savior has come to slay it.

Part of you is suspicious that the stories told about the dragon are lies.

Part of you is torn between fear of the dragon and fear of the mob.

Part of you is stunned that so many refuse to believe the dragon exists, when its traces are everywhere to be felt—and seen.

Draco Alchemicus is the story of these fractured desires. It is the story of the Dragon who guards—and controls—the City of Light, and of the stranger who has come to destroy it.

Enter the myth.

Drink the spice.

Arm yourself for the battle to come.

Draco Alchemicus Kickstarter

Draco Alchemicus: Press Kit

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Thu, 25 May 2023 22:37:00 +0000

Enter the Myth.
Drink the Spice.
Arm yourself for the battle to come.

Where the attention flows, power goes.

An electric faërie tale

Act I: The Casino
Act II: The Court
Act III: The Market
Act IV: The Carnival
Act V: The Wedding

Authors: Rachel Fulton Brown, Kilts Khalfan, Kimberly Crilly, Mel Wiggin, Ken Ramsey

Illustrator: Zé Nuno Fraga

#ArtWar
#DracoAlchemicus
#DCR

Trailer: https://youtu.be/RV8xS2xZoB0

Website: dragoncommonroom.com

Email: books@dragoncommonroom.com

Why Stories

Kilts Khalfan, “Storytime is the Art War,” gab news, May 24, 2023

“The alchemical desire of mankind for healing was amplified as the entire internet became a maelstrom of medical debate. And yet we found our healing in our story time, where Art became our focus. Art was our immunity to the fear. It was also the way for us to craft our own narrative within the chaos of lockdowns. And as we created this narrative, we began to understand the power of telling stories that orientated our focus away from fear and towards the only Serpent who cures all: the Brazen Serpent of Numbers 21:4-9....

“Storytime is the real cult of any people as the attention of children is the life or death of any culture and civilization. Identity is forged in fable: stories tell us who we are and who we desire to become. Storytime for the ancient Greeks was an ArtWar against barbaric oblivion. As Christ said, “life and death are in the tongue”. Our civilization is so uncultivated that Aeneas fleeing the flaming ruins of Troy would look at it in greater horror. We need a poetic resurrection in the West.”

Why poetry

The Dark Herald, “The Need for Poetry Like Draco Alchemicus,” Arkhaven Comics, May 24, 2023

“Poetry is pure creation, which is why The Enemy hates it.

“‘The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.’—Tolkien

“They redefine words to make them liars. ‘Deconstruction,’ ‘Decolonization,’ ‘Through the Lens of Critical Theory.’ The real definition of Critical now means to Destroy. What happened to poetry first is also what happened to dance, then music, then art, and yes even the humble comic book. The Enemy cannot create it can only commandeer mock and ruin.

“Yet for all of those wasted efforts, Truth and Beauty still find their way into the world.”

Why comics

Rachel Fulton Brown, “Bear’s Theory of Comics,” Fencing Bear at Prayer, June 11, 2009

“Comics are neither novels with pictures nor pictures with captions, but something wholly other, a hybrid of text and image with which it is possible to tell stories that can be seen as well as ‘heard.’ Theorists have found them so difficult to describe because they (the theorists) are habituated to think in terms only of text (literary critics) or image (art historians). In this respect, comics are analogues of God, more particularly, of the Second Person of the Trinity, who, while by nature divine (the Word), became incarnate, taking on not only flesh, but also (as per the Nicene Creed) our nature as human beings.”

Behind the Scenes: The Mosaic Ark

40 Courting the Dragon

The Ark gets ready to launch the Dragon Common Room Kickstarter by taking inspiration from Edmund Spenser’s own fund-raising efforts in the Elizabethan court. The professor explains how training in English Iambic Pentameter is so important and why learning to scan is a top priority for speakers of the magical tongue of England. Can you scan? — Streamed May 3, 2023

41 Behind the Scenes

The Ark prepares to launch the Dragon Common Room Kickstarter for the upcoming work DRACO ALCHEMICUS. Walking you through the new DCR website, the Professor and her pigeon describe their vision of the Electric Mosaic: DCR's multimedia resurrection of an integrated Medieval sub-creation culture, where the archaic becomes new in our own space and time through Art. You wanna learn to scan? Join the stream! —Streamed May 10, 2023

42 Art War

What if we told you that “Star Wars” is the basis of Western Civilization? The Professor explains the origin story of DRACO ALCHEMICUS, as the Pigeon weaves in and out of various themes getting lost in fairyland. How did George Lucas come up with the idea for an intergalactic war of empires? Could it be that Edmund Spenser was the muse for our civilization all along? —Streamed May 24, 2023

Kickstarter

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rachelfultonbrown/draco-alchemicus
Launched May 21, 2023. Closing June 20, 2023 at 8:02 CDT.
Goals reached as of May 25, 2023:

dragoncommonroom.com

Vaccus Poeticus

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Thu, 25 May 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Sacred Cows

The pillars might recall the Lateran.

The Dragon might be wholly Manichaean.

The verse romance might be an also ran.

Without romance, our world would be plebeian.

And so I offer a truncated paean

requested, for an image I can’t want.

Twelve oxen holding up a vessel. Be an

impression of a fine baptismal font.

Maybe the oxen are the twelve apostles.

Perchance they are old Israel’s twelve tribes.

Perchance they mock us, just as Gosse’s fossils

against Creation became hostile jibes.

What are the mystic and mysterious vibes

which round the watcher in her tower rain down?

What wine, who’s blond, what nectar now imbibes

the Passion’s fencer, Rachel Fulton Brown?

—Verses offered in tribute, if not accolade, by David Ganz, fellow lover of fonts medieval and modern

Can you read the riddle of the cows?

dragoncommonroom.com

Dragon’s Hoard

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:51:00 +0000

DCR Poet KJ Crilly gets her Spenserian stanzas on!

Chasing the Alchemical Dragon

In Pharmakeia’s pixilated world,

which holds the fractal myths of time gone by,

the Dragon’s whispered lies slowly unfurl,

to captivate men in his mirrored eye,

suspended seventh heaven ever nigh.

But one comes now, intending to restore

the world with a creative battle cry.
And who is this, this reconquistador,
this champion, come to take our part in this Art War?

Sigil Star Wars

The planets, in concentric circles pass

by way of golden tracks through space and time.

Each one a shining star through mirrored glass;

each one predestined for the pantomime

of underhanded hatefulness sublime.

But in the center of this force majeure,

the only true star, constant in its shine,

attracting and repelling at its core,

will challenge their dark master in the new Art War.

The Golden Helix

The helix wraps around a world adrift;

it coils and then recoils down every path

while pantomiming Fibonacci’s gift,

perverting nature’s order in its wrath,

to bask in the chaotic aftermath.

Enrobed in gold to lure the longing heart,

a jeweled eye and charms to hold them fast—

elixirs brought by sea from old spice marts.

The Dragon holds that war is just a term of art.

Dragon Spiral

Artistically inclined, creative born,

the Dragon’s minion wields fantastic sway.

Her own humanity now long forsworn,

she gleefully identifies her prey.

Ambitious men are easy ones to play.

Human respect is what they’re longing for.

And pride? Legions could fall in just a day.

The woman will trade up her love for more.

“Oh, yes, this is delish,” she thought, “this little war!”

Magic

The symbol of the Mage, the well-trained dove,

a feathered semaphore of grace refined,

emerges to alight upon the glove

of a thin man who’s charm personified.

Upon the stage, commanding every eye,

he deftly moves between the light and dark.

His voice and countenance are magnified

by the electric medium’s hallmark;

performance and perception can’t be split apart.

City of Light

Above, as lighted buildings pierced the air

in bold attempts to colonize the sky,

the streets were pulsing, flowing with the wares

of every rank indulgence one could buy.

It was a well-played grift, a polished lie—

civilization’s gift the gods bestowed.

It crushed the souls of those who came to scry

their futures in the city’s darkened glow.

The present’s past and future in the great below.

Arm yourself for the Art War!
dragoncommonroom.com

Follow KJ Crilly on Twitter @KJCrilly

BREAKING! 🐉 🔥🕊✨🌈👑🕸️🍄🪐⚡️❄️🌺🍾🏵️🎭🌃⛪️🪅❤️‍🔥⚜️

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Mon, 22 May 2023 19:09:00 +0000

Enter the Myth. Drink the Spice.

The Dragon Common Room is pleased to announce that we are now raising money for the publication of Act I: The Casino of Draco Alchemicus.

Backer bundles include options to receive all five acts of the poem in digital or hardcover format, as well as color prints suitable for framing.

Top tier backers will have the opportunity to enter the story and become part of the myth. Premium rewards include exclusive edition playing cards, guest appearances on our livestream, and donor portraits.

To back our project, please go to Kickstarter, and look for the Dragon Jewel.

dragoncommonroom.com

Kickstarter Exclusive!

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Sun, 21 May 2023 14:01:00 +0000

The Dragon Common Room is excited to announce our first Kickstarter! We wanted you to be one of the first to know about our formal launch on May 22, as we have exclusive rewards that only the top backers will be able to share. We are grateful, of course, for whatever level of support you are able to give, but as one of the early readers of our work, we are hoping you are as excited as we are about our new fairytale!

DRACO ALCHEMICUS is an invitation to enter the myth and join the battle against the Alchemical Dragon—the great enemy of art, joy, and love who hypnotizes humanity with spices and lies.

We have written the first Act of the five-Act story and are raising money to help pay our artist, the magnificent Portuguese comic illustrator Zé Nuno Fraga.

Kilts Khalfan and Rachel Fulton Brown give a sneak peek behind the scenes of the work we have been doing with Zé here: https://youtu.be/52vd32NZylw. We give more behind-the-scenes details including the reading and research we have been doing into the history and symbolism of our story here: https://www.dragoncommonroom.com/forthcoming.

Intrigued? Lay your bets and back today! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rachelfultonbrown/draco-alchemicus

Dragon Cards available exclusively to loyal Dog Tier backers and above!

dragoncommonroom.com

Serpens Aeneus

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Fri, 19 May 2023 13:24:00 +0000

21:9 Fecit ergo Moyses serpentem æneum, et posuit eum pro signo : quem cum percussi aspicerent, sanabantur.

COMING SOON

Art War is Coming

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:46:00 +0000

Enter the myth. Drink the spice.

Arm yourself for the battle to come.

May 22, 2023

Designing the Dragon Sigil

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Wed, 17 May 2023 10:57:00 +0000

The Professor gives a brief lesson on designing the Sigil for a key scene in Draco Alchemicus Act I, as a married couple decide which language they will use to navigate their way through a test. Are men and women complete strangers in their own focus, or do the sexes consider the same truth with two different symbolic realities? Can total opposites synchronize without destroying their distinctions?

Join our Kickstarter! Sign up now to be the first to know when we launch!

Want to know more? Watch the full episode: Mosaic Ark 41 Behind the Scenes

Visit Dragon Common Room for backstory!

Watch This Space

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Tue, 16 May 2023 16:21:00 +0000

Sign up now to be the first to know when we launch!

Wanna bet?

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:44:00 +0000

Coming Soon

Enter the Myth. Drink the Spice.

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Sat, 13 May 2023 19:47:00 +0000

Coming soon

Dracosmos

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Fri, 12 May 2023 22:21:00 +0000

Coming Soon

McLuhan Moment: Sauron’s Mic

noreply@blogger.com (Fencing Bear) — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:57:00 +0000

Memes h/t No-EZ

Fencing Bear at Prayer

Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense

Here be dragons. And doves.

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

Draco Layer Three: The Moral or Tropological Sense

Learn to discern.

“The life of man upon earth is a warfare.” —Job 7:1

Read on: Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

Draco Layer Two: The Allegorical or Christological Sense

The world needs good stories.

Read on: Draco Layer Three: The Moral or Tropological Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

Draco Layer One: The Literal or Historical Sense

Learn to scan.

daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM

and ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and FIVE

To JUS·ti·FY the WAYS of GOD to MAN.

We make still by the law in which we’re made. [8]

Read on: Draco Layer Two: The Allegorical or Christological Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

The Four Senses of Draco Alchemicus

Good stories, like Ogres and onions, have layers. [1]

Read on: Draco Layer One: The Literal or Historical Sense

Can you solve the riddle and read the signs?

Kickstarter FAQ

FAQ

Post further questions in the comments, and we will endeavor to be clear—as well as clever!

—The Dragon Common Room

Fountain of Fate

Act I, scene i

Cosmic Egg

Act I, scene i

“I will eviscerate you in fiction.”

Back us—or be in it. Pick a card!

Alchemical Storytelling for the Electric Mosaic: Making the Old New

Enter the Myth. Drink the Spice. Arm yourself for the battle to come.

The Sign of Six

Apogee

Smoke Signals

Mathematic Rivalry

Orb and Scepter

The Bouncer

Good Boy

Arm yourself for the Art War! Back our Kickstarter today!

Look for the Dog among the decks of cards—and place your bets on story-telling for the stars.

On Christian Dragons

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time...

Enter the myth.

Drink the spice.

Arm yourself for the battle to come.

Draco Alchemicus: Press Kit

Enter the Myth. Drink the Spice. Arm yourself for the battle to come.

Where the attention flows, power goes.

An electric faërie tale

Act I: The CasinoAct II: The CourtAct III: The MarketAct IV: The CarnivalAct V: The Wedding

Authors: Rachel Fulton Brown, Kilts Khalfan, Kimberly Crilly, Mel Wiggin, Ken Ramsey

Illustrator: Zé Nuno Fraga

#ArtWar#DracoAlchemicus#DCR

Trailer: https://youtu.be/RV8xS2xZoB0

Website: dragoncommonroom.com

Email: books@dragoncommonroom.com

Why Stories

Kilts Khalfan, “Storytime is the Art War,” gab news, May 24, 2023

Why poetry

The Dark Herald, “The Need for Poetry Like Draco Alchemicus,” Arkhaven Comics, May 24, 2023

Why comics

Rachel Fulton Brown, “Bear’s Theory of Comics,” Fencing Bear at Prayer, June 11, 2009

Behind the Scenes: The Mosaic Ark

Kickstarter

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rachelfultonbrown/draco-alchemicusLaunched May 21, 2023. Closing June 20, 2023 at 8:02 CDT.Goals reached as of May 25, 2023:

Vaccus Poeticus

Sacred Cows

Can you read the riddle of the cows?

Dragon’s Hoard

Chasing the Alchemical Dragon

Enter the Myth.
Drink the Spice.
Arm yourself for the battle to come.

Act I: The Casino
Act II: The Court
Act III: The Market
Act IV: The Carnival
Act V: The Wedding

#ArtWar
#DracoAlchemicus
#DCR

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rachelfultonbrown/draco-alchemicus
Launched May 21, 2023. Closing June 20, 2023 at 8:02 CDT.
Goals reached as of May 25, 2023:

Arm yourself for the Art War!
dragoncommonroom.com