Dwarven Kingdom

Dwarven Kingdom
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

So, as a gamer, I’m always interested in building new locations or settings for games. Moria, the dwarven kingdom in LORD OF THE RINGS, kind of sets the standard for dwarven ways. Yet given their interactions with the surface, compared with other earth-resident races, it always seemed to me that the dwarven kingdom belonged in a cleft in the rock.

Here, I’ve used Picknik’s tools to label the map with some of the regions or territories within the Dwarven kingdom of Westcleft, a surface-dwelling dwarven princedom on the western slopes of the Fogtooth Mountains.

The original picture is of a cleft in a sand-covered snowbank in the school parking lot. I wish there’d been some greenery, but no such luck.

The photo on Flickr has roll-over notes with additional ideas for what happens in each place or region. I don’t have a good sense of scale yet, but I’m figuring it’s a day’s march between Three Road City and Black Rock Tower. So it’s really more of a city-state than a principality or kingdom.

The Essay

I wonder what kids will write in their journals and media sources today? How long will it take before they are believed?

Islamic tile pattern

Islamic tile pattern
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

This one photo in my Flickr feed was viewed over a thousand times today. I think it must have been some sort of a bot, because I can’t imagine that many people being interested in such a photo. Still, it was pretty incredible to go from under 100 views of my photos yesterday to almost 2000 today. Enjoy the image!

The horse may learn to talk…

 There’s a famous story involving the Persian philosopher and fool-figure, Mullah Nasrudin.  One day, he was watching the Sultan of Baghdad tame a new horse.  Suddenly, the Sultan was flung from the back of a new wild stallion brought to his stables from Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan).  The horse was wild and uncontrollable. Nasrudin began laughing because the Sultan was covered in dirt and manure.  

Angrily, the Sultan rose to his feet and ordered his bodyguards to arrest Nasrudin.  "Why are you laughing at me?" the Sultan asked.  "Because I was flung from my horse?"

"No," said Nasrudin the fool. "Because you are trying so hard to tame the horse in a single day, and failing.  You should stick to what you are good at, not breaking horses."

The Sultan grew red-faced. "I suppose," he said, "that you could do better?"

"Oh yes," said Nasrudin, and he grew boastful.  "I could tame that horse," and here he snapped his fingers, "like that! But better than that… because of my great wisdom, if I had a year…. well, I could teach that stallion to talk!"

The Sultan smiled an evil smile. "In that case," said the Sultan, "you may have a year. In a year, I expect this beast to be a trained, talking war-horse.  And if not, I shall take his head, and yours, and mount them both on spikes above my gate for insolence!" And the Sultan stomped away.

Nasrudin’s followers wept, and tore at their beards.  They urged Nasrudin to come with them, and escape!  But Nasrudin only went into the paddock with the wild horse, and picked a handful of sweet grass, and tried to get the horse to eat it.  Again and again, the horse only ran away, or kicked at him.  This went on for months.   Finally, one of Nasrudin’s disciples asked him, "Master, why do you not run away? The horse is dangerous, and the Sultan is even more dangerous.  Why not give up this mad pursuit?"

Nasrudin shrugged. "Ah, my disciple, how little you know!   I lot can change in a year.  The Sultan could die of old age, or an assassin’s knife. He could be strangled in his harem by a jealous concubine.  I could die, of disease or age.  I might feel an urge to make the <i>hajj</i> and go to Mecca, and even the Sultan could not refuse me that.  I could be laid low by a wasting sickness, or there could be a palace coup, or the Mongols may invade."

"But, master" said the student in a doubtful voice, "that does not explain why you persist, day after day, in trying to tame this dangerous and wild stallion."

Nasrudin smiled, "Oh, that.  Well, a lot can happen in a year.  It may even be that I shall succeed in teaching the horse to talk."

Learning to draw the Tree of Life

Tree of life.

Originally uploaded by anselm23.

UPDATE: For reasons I don’t quite get, this entry gets a LOT of traffic, somewhere between two and ten visits a week since it first went live over almost two years ago.  Yet no one ever responds to it or comments.  You’re clearly looking for the stuff on the Tree of Life, because that’s the search term that comes up.  But I would like to meet you, if only online, if you’re visiting this entry.  Please consider leaving a comment, ok?

I’m more than moderately interested in magic, both from a fantasy “hey watch me throw this Fireball” point of view, and from the perspective of the historical curiosity of the Hermetic movement from the late 1500s up into the early part of the 20th century and even today.

One of the more common features of this movement is, of course, the Qabalistic Tree of Life, composed of ten Sephiroth (sing. Sephirah) and the pathways that join them. It is simultaneously a map of the cosmos, a map of the human being, and a map of the relationships between them.

So. All very high-falutin’ stuff, and there’s a copy of the Tree of Life diagram in almost every historical book on magic ever published; there’s frequently a similar diagram in almost every gaming supplement on magic ever published, too. The diagram is always the same, so frequently the same size and with the same geometrical relationships present that one has to assume that the book editors plagiarized the diagram from each other, eventually even ripping off the ur-creator of the Tree of Life, who was probably just dicking around with the 14th century equivalent of Adobe PageMaker. “Ooooh! Look at me! I drew a ‘magical’ symbol! Hey… I wonder how many other charlatans I can get to copy my drawing as legitimate magic? Hmmmm?”

So as I was reading a book on geometry and sacred forms (among other things), it came as a great surprise to me to discover that this form is in fact based on a set of precise mathematical and geometric relationships. The reason this diagram always looks like this is that it’s based on an underlying set of geometric principles, which are themselves derived from Islamic and Jewish tiling patterns (such as I’ve already drawn and posted here).

So, if you want to draw your own Tree of Life, here’s how:

1) Draw a straight line.

2) Start at one end, and draw a circle with the centerpoint at one end of the line.

3) Draw a new circle, using the intersection point of the previous circle’s circumference with the straight line as the center of the new circle.

4) Repeat step (3), three more times.

You should now have a straight line bisecting four circles, each of whose circumference touches the circumference of the next circle. the places where the circle circumferences intersect each other are the center points of the sephiroth. Only one point doesn’t have a sephirah, but if you’ve seen this image enough, you’ll be able to figure out where it should be absent.

There are other related pictures showing the drawing in progress over on Flickr.

Update: I made a short (6-second) video on Vine, showing the basic run-down of steps to lay out the Tree of Life, which is available through a link, here.

Clio and the possum

CLio and the possum
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

Clio suprised a possum in the bushes outside school yesterday, before the SuperBowl. Here she is with her quarry, which she did not get — though my arm is pretty sore today as a result.

She’s doing ok, for those who asked, but her pee problem is not any better. It’s always tricky, and I don’t really feel welcome at many people’s houses any more. There’s always an issue of “is she welcome? Is she really welcome?” and I’m rather indecisive about what to do about that.