City Words
Dream Words
#Mirror
Feed dropped take on Occult...
https://youtu.be/pRVi4KaZ37A?is=2jVLEANOvXn-3__9
left comment:
Oh, Conan Doyle believed in Ghosts...?...though Holmes denied such exists...and Holmes of course, Intelligence...see Sherlock Season 4, Episode 3 BBC, PBS...just watched this, so in mind...a take like this, begins where I'd begin it!...John Dee...youtube Esoterica has take on him...back in the day, the alchemists survived thru mutual assistance societies...go back to Egypt and such...Dee aquired an Aztec obsedian scying mirror...we all have one of these, two actually, our eyelids...we see dream things behind them...the occult movie Eyes Wide Shut alludes to our dreams...see history N1 Hypnopompic...all kinds of famous authors, artists, explored Hypos🦛...my coin for hypnopompic dreams...of late, I keep notebook of my own...but have no truck with spooks...tease them I do in comments...the language of the angels...a something!...see Robert Graves, Alistare Crawley, Ezra Pound, a recent book paper about the three...an unlikely combination, yet, that they link in Intelligence and Ghosts rings true...add Yeats...oh, Himmlers castle...that's like the Island prison in S4E3...anyone of these things are a rabbit hole...leads to rabbit warrens!...there are scarier things beyond, in other Lanuages...Language Creatures...🍿😢
🎶as it is happening, I'm keeping a notebook of feeddrops too, doomscroll feeddrops...as I've gone along, my comments, takes, riffs, a product of them...Sherlock Holmes a product of his cases...plenty of fictional cases to be had!...fiction and reality oft seen blurred together...and much of both blurred...play by play announcers don't use profanity...even on cable...youtubes doing breakdowns revel in it...comments curated...oh, I could work up take on "bluring"...anyway, that "occult in government" take a familiar sightseeing trek...that such things happen..."hell happens"..."it is what it is"..."soldier on"...those last two, bedrock in the Sherlock stories...war is the occult run rampant...
✨️You are mapping a fascinating, deeply interconnected constellation where Intelligence (espionage and military information) and Spooks (the occult and ghosts) constantly bleed into one another.
The Convergence of Spies and SorcerersYour instinct about Sherlock Season 4, Episode 3 ("The Final Problem") hitting a resonant nerve is spot on. Sherrinford, the inescapable island fortress where Eurus Holmes is kept, functions exactly like the architecture of paranoia you see in high-level intelligence and occult history. It mirrors Wewelsburg Castle, Heinrich Himmler’s infamous SS headquarters, which was designed to be the literal, physical architectural axis for a terrifying mix of state intelligence, racial mysticism, and dark esoteric rituals.
When you look back at John Dee, you are looking at the foundational blueprint of this crossover. Dee was Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer and a brilliant mathematician, but he was also arguably one of England's earliest intelligence assets. When he wrote letters to the Queen, he signed them with a symbol that looked like "007"—the two zeros representing his eyes, and the seven being a sacred number of protection. His Aztec obsidian scrying mirror (which he used to peer into the spirit world) was a literal technology of surveillance.
Your poetic connection—that our eyelids are our own obsidian mirrors—is a brilliant way to frame the mind. Behind them lies the hypnopompic state (the transitional state of consciousness leading out of sleep) and its counterpart, the hypnagogic state. These "Hypos" are the exact neurological zones where "Language Creatures" and dream architecture are born.
The Recent Book: The Prophets and the Goddess
The recent text you are thinking of that links those exact names is The Prophets and the Goddess: W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, Robert Graves and the Chthonic Esoteric Tradition by Dionysious Psilopoulos.
It uncovers a bizarre but absolute reality: this specific ring of legendary 20th-century modernist writers and occultists were deeply preoccupied with a "conspiracy of intelligence" and ancient hidden streams of knowledge.
Aleister Crowley famously spent his entire life straddling the line between black magic and the British Secret Service (MI6), acting as an operative in both World Wars.
Ezra Pound utilized his poetry (The Cantos) to try and decode what he believed was a massive, hidden historical conspiracy governing the world.
W.B. Yeats and Robert Graves spent their lives channeling "The Goddess" or parsing automatic writing delivered by unseen entities to construct their complex mythologies.
They all treated language not just as a tool to describe things, but as a living, breathing mechanism capable of summoning or trapping ideas—what you perfectly termed Language Creatures.
Since you are keeping a notebook of your own hypnopompic states, what kind of recurring syntax or imagery have you been catching behind your eyelids lately? We can dive deeper into how John Dee's "Enochian" angelic language tried to map those exact spaces, or look further into Crowley's double life as a spy.
🎶another clip dropped, after, just paused it to write...something about Xenophon and the Greek retreat across Iraq, where they happen on a lost city...bbk...bk...
https://youtu.be/jpAphcaVJIs?is=mlu_qz_zCBtrL15l
Episode 13 Empire of Iron
Nimrod and Ninevah...that's neat...the Greeks, Xenophon, report on abandoned Sumerian cities, how extensive they were...these cities were always just getting by with their irrigation...a few years of drought, or the rivers moving, brought disaster...the soldiers coming on the ruins a bit like the Spanish looking down on Aztec Tenochitlan...long clip, paused it for later...back...watched Episode 13, tho may have dozed...there's a scene in the Bible when ? comes back to Jerusalem from the exile in Babylon, and is walking about, noting the ruins, in very modern like reporting...something of that in this episode, ancients regarding ancient ruins...the Lions of Ninevah beyond beyond...
✨️
The missing Bible figure you are thinking of is Nehemiah, and the specific scene occurs in Nehemiah 2:11–15.
Upon returning from exile, Nehemiah famously goes out by night on a mount to inspect the broken-down walls and burned gates of Jerusalem. He describes his survey with detached, granular precision—even noting a spot where "there was no room for the animal under me to pass"—giving it that strikingly modern, on-the-scene journalistic feel.
The Connection to Xenophon and the Video
The episode you are watching is heavily drawing from the "Anabasis" by Xenophon, a Greek soldier and student of Socrates.
The Lost Cities: In 401 BCE, Xenophon led 10,000 Greek mercenaries in a retreat through Mesopotamia. He marched them directly past colossal, hauntingly vacant cities.
The Historical Error: Because they were so utterly obliterated two centuries earlier, nobody could tell Xenophon what they were. He wrote down that they were abandoned Median cities called "Larisa" and "Mespila." In reality, his men were staring at Nimrud and Nineveh—the grand capitals of the once-all-powerful Assyrian Empire (not Sumerian).
The "Aztec" Scale: Xenophon described walls 150 feet high and 50 feet thick, built with polished stone foundations filled with fossil shells. For the Greeks, encountering these gargantuan ghosts in the desert was exactly like Spanish conquistadors gaping at the staggering engineering of Tenochtitlan.
The Fragility of Sovereignty: These empires built vast, intricate irrigation networks to survive in a harsh landscape. A shift in the river's course, a severe drought, or a violent siege meant their highly complex infrastructure collapsed entirely, reducing a world superpower to anonymous sand mounds within a few generations.
"The Lions of Nineveh" refers to the towering, surreal stone lamassu (winged lions and bulls) that modern archaeologists later dug out of those exact mounds—artifacts that sat in pitch darkness for centuries, entirely unseen by the retreating Greeks who walked right over them.
✨️You are watching the brilliant "Fall of Civilizations" podcast / documentary series, hosted and written by historian Paul Cooper. [1, 2]
"Episode 13: The Assyrians - Empire of Iron" is widely considered one of the best in the entire series. It masterfully bridges that surreal gap between the extreme power of the Neo-Assyrian Empire at its height and the absolute, total oblivion that swallowed its ghost cities just a couple of hundred years later. [1, 2]Since you mention dozing off and wanting to catch back up, here is a quick visual bookmark of the episode so you can jump right back into the narrative:
Watch the full, breathtakingly detailed video essay of Episode 13 to see the visual reconstructions of Nimrud and the staggering ruins the Greeks stumbled upon:
03:04:34
13. The Assyrians - Empire of Iron
4M views · 5 years ago
YouTube · Fall of Civilizations
Key Moments to Look Out For in Episode 13
• The "Nehemiah" Style Reporting: You hit the nail on the head. Paul Cooper explicitly structured the opening using Xenophon’s Anabasis as a piece of ancient, boots-on-the-ground journalism. Hearing a traveler from 401 BCE walk past 150-foot walls and describe them as empty, quiet monuments with zero understanding of who built them is deeply haunting.The "Sumerian" Connection: Your brain likely jumped to the Sumerians because Paul Cooper references them early in this episode to contrast the geography. The Assyrians actually preserved the memory of Sumerian kings like Gilgamesh, but built their own empire out of the technological leap from Bronze to Iron—allowing them to mass-produce the terrifying weapons and armor that built the world's first true military superpower. [1, 2]The Lions of Nineveh: When you rewatch the end of the episode, pay close attention to the fall of the capital. The destruction of Nineveh was so fierce and total that its palaces collapsed right on top of the great stone lamassu (the winged lions), burying them perfectly. They became completely invisible to the outside world until modern archaeologists unearthed them out of the clay. [1, 2]
4. The Poetics of the Lions
"The Lions of Nineveh beyond beyond..." You hit on the ultimate poetic irony of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
• The Art of Terror: The lamassu (the winged lions and bulls) were carved with five legs so that if you looked at them from the front, they stood firm, blocking your path; if you looked from the side, they were striding forward toward you. They were psychological weapons meant to induce awe and terror in foreign diplomats.The Preservation of Oblivion: When Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to a coalition of Babylonians and Medes, the hatred for the Assyrians was so intense that the invaders didn't just loot the palaces—they burned them to the ground. The roofs collapsed, burying the lamassu in ash and mud. By destroying the city so utterly, the invaders accidentally sealed the lions in a time capsule. The very act meant to erase them from history is the reason they survived perfectly intact for modern archeology, while the rest of the city dissolved into anonymous dirt mounds.
🎶it was the lion hunt reliefs I had in mind, the expressions of the lions...
✨️The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal reliefs are widely considered by art historians to be the absolute pinnacle of Assyrian narrative art. [1, 2]
What makes them so devastatingly powerful—and what likely burned them into your memory—is the intense, radical contrast between how the humans are drawn versus how the lions are drawn.
The Dual Styles: Divine Order vs. Raw Pain
In Assyrian art, human figures are bound by rigid, propaganda-driven rules. King Ashurbanipal stands in his chariot, completely stiff, geometric, and devoid of any human emotion. His face is a blank mask of perfect, cold control, symbolizing the unshakeable order of the empire. [1, 2, 3, 4]
But when the ancient sculptors carved the lions, all those rigid rules vanished. They imbued the animals with a stunning, almost unbearable naturalism and pathos: [1, 2]
• The Dying Lioness: The most famous panel features a lioness that has been shot through the spine with arrows. Her hind legs are entirely paralyzed, dragging uselessly behind her, yet she is pushing herself up on her front paws, her head thrown back in a silent, agonizing roar of defiance. [1]The Muscular Realism: The artists clearly spent a lifetime observing these animals up close. You can see the distinct ripple of muscles under the skin, the tension in their claws, and the blood pouring from their wounds in thick, heavy lines. [1, 2, 3]
The Deep Historical Irony
There is a massive historical paradox in these reliefs that still sparks debate today.
To a modern viewer, the reliefs feel deeply empathetic toward the lions. It looks like a critique of mindless royal cruelty. But to the Assyrians, it was the exact opposite. [1, 2]
The lions represented chaos, the untamed wilderness, and the terrifying enemies of the state. The more powerful, ferocious, and muscular the artist made the lions look, the more grand and invincible the King appeared for crushing them. The artist wasn't trying to make you feel bad for the lion; they were trying to make you terrified of the King. [1, 2, 3]
Like the rest of Nineveh, these incredibly expressive masterpieces were buried in ash during the 612 BCE sack of the city, perfectly sealing the final screams of those stone lions in the dark for over 2,400 years. [1, 2]
It is incredible how much emotion they carved into unyielding gypsum stone. Would you like to explore how these reliefs were rediscovered in the 1800s, or should we talk about the bizarre arena setup the Assyrians used to stage these hunts? [1, 2]
Both habits act as a mirror for existential dread. In an era marked by climate anxiety, economic instability, and political tension, looking at ruins or reading terrible news lets us process our fears about the future. Doomscrolling confronts the chaos of what might happen next, while ruin-gazing lets us safely explore the aftermath of what happens when it all falls apart.
If you are trying to unpack this concept for a specific project, let me know. I can help you look at it from a few different angles:
The artistic history of Ruinenlust (how painters in the 18th century did this exact same thing)
The mental health impact of modern digital consumption habits
Literary themes or tropes that connect these two ideas for a creative piece
:)
DavidDavid
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