Farmer’s Future

Every book – or movie for that matter – is a product of its time, and never more glaringly so than when it is “ahead of its time.” This is especially manifest in science fiction where every laudatory response of the type “Wow, I can’t believe this was written back in 1957” will be paired with a headshaking “Wow, this was written in 1957, alright.” The imaginative, freethinking, and socially unconventional HG Wells, for example, is nonetheless deeply grounded in +-1900 in ways that were invisible to himself. His unconventionality is very much of a Victorian/Edwardian brand. As a screen example, the otherwise groundbreaking Forbidden Planet is infused with 1950s sexual dynamics. The best works rise above their time even while remaining rooted in it, however, by revealing constant truths – truths which may be publically discussed in some eras, but only whispered in others. It is currently fashionable not to make allowances for past mores that are unacceptable today – a judgmental fashion that no doubt itself will cause eye rolls among our descendants – but one gets the most out of older fiction by doing so. That applies to one novel on my nightstand this past weekend; it is enjoyable if read in the context of its publication date.

Scifi master Philip Jose Farmer published Flesh in 1968, the high water mark of the counterculture that was so integral to the decade 1965 to 1974. The book arrived from Amazon on Friday. As you might imagine there is not much social distancing in it. (An earlier shorter version came out in 1960, but he rewrote it extensively in 1968.) It is very much of its era. And yet, it is much older, too.

A starship crew has sought out and found new habitable worlds. Thanks to sleep stasis and time dilation, they are not much older than when they left although 800 years have passed on earth. They return to a widely depopulated post-apocalyptic world on which technology is no more than 17^th century (sail and animal power) in every way but biology: a religious order is quite skilled at bioengineering. The North American Eastern Seaboard is divided into several entities including Caseyland (New England), Deecee (New York to Virginia), Pants-Elf (Pennsylvania), and Karelia (a Finnish colony bracketing the others to north and south). The societies differ significantly but they play each other in a deadly variety of baseball. The balls are steel with spikes, the bats have metal plates, and it is perfectly legal for the pitcher to kill the batter (or a runner) by hitting him with the ball if he can. Casualties are expected.

The ship lands in the former city of Washington in Deecee. The crew discovers a pagan society dedicated to a fertility cult of the triple White Goddess (manifested by the waxing, full, and waning moon) whom they call Columbia. (They assume the White House is dedicated to her.) While men occupy many prominent secular offices (with titles such as John Barleycorn and Tom Tobacco), they are just executing the policies of the priestesses in this fundamentally matriarchal society. Arriving shortly before the winter solstice, the starship captain, whose name happens to be Stagg, is modified with antlers that hormonally influence him to behave according to his intended role as the year’s designated sun-king (having actually arrived out of the sky) in Deecee’s central mythology. The crew at first think they have landed amidst a free love free-for-all, but they have not. The orgiastic goings-on are ritualistic, which is not the same thing – they are a seasonal rite. The book interweaves the stories of three crewmembers (one of them Stagg) who try to make sense of and survive in the new world.

Philip Jose Farmer clearly was strongly influenced by Robert Graves’ 1948 book The White Goddess – and also by Frazer and Campbell though Graves seems to have had the biggest impact. The White Goddess is a rewarding read, though a difficult one for anyone not well-grounded in (at the very least) classical mythology and preferably Celtic as well. Robert Graves (classicist, poet, novelist – author of I, Claudius) argues (as does Frazer) that Neolithic (i.e. farming, but pre-urban and pre-copper) or earlier peoples throughout northern Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean basin shared similar fundamentally matriarchal religions based on the seasons and the cycle of birth, life, and death. Their rituals involved a chosen sun-king who was either figuratively or literally sacrificed at the solstice under the auspices of the Triple Goddess (maiden, matron, crone) represented by the moon. Elements of this primal myth underlie later more masculinized mythologies of early civilizations; they are there to be uncovered if you look for them as are the ways in which they were transformed by the rise of warrior states. He looks for them, finds them, discusses the evolution of mythology from earlier to later forms, and additionally comments on such matters as tree alphabets and pre-literate numbering systems that had occult significance. He further argues these elements are still embedded in our culture (however obscurely) and that all true poetry (not everything that scans is poetry) figuratively or literally expresses some aspect of this most ancient myth:

“My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry.”

Anthropologists differ on the value of Grave’s analysis. Some dismiss it outright as wholly imaginary, some find the evidence (admittedly interpretative) for it compelling, while others are agnostic since at this distance in time there is no way to prove or disprove the thesis. Something about it seems right to many readers though, for the book has been influential on historians, psychologists, major literary figures as well as pop culture authors such as Farmer, and practitioners of the pagan revival including Wicca. As to whether priestesses of Columbia will be grafting antlers onto sun-kings’ heads in our future, I guess we’ll have to wait 800 years to find out.

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