"Frog on the Mountain" (1970)

“To discover the way in which this first human thinking arose in the gentile world, we encountered exasperating difficulties which have cost us the research of a good twenty years. [We had] to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort.” — Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1744), §338

“First, you have a dignity of aspect, and you seemed almost like a Rogha to me as you were embattled there. I respect and love you almost as much as I do any of the Rogha. And then, it has been discovered that World-men will do as well as the Rogha for us . . .”

In one way or another, most of Lafferty’s stories are about the back-brain; but his great anatomical treatment of it outside the novels is his short story “Frog on the Mountain,” one of his masterpieces.

What the back-brain means is fundamental in Lafferty. The organ itself appears in his poem “Sylvester.” It recurs in various short stories. (Think of "Boomer Flats": "Dr. Velikof Vonk with his huge head, with his heavy orbital ridges, with the protruding near-muzzle on him that makes the chin unnecessary and impossible, with the great back-brain and the great good humor.") It is most fully developed in the Argo Legend.

There, readers learn about the contrast between the ancient back-brain and the modern forebrain, and its importance in Neanderthal and “other people” physiology. Lafferty tells us that although Neanderthals had slightly larger brain capacities than modern humans (1,400–1,600 c.c.), their brains differed structurally. They had a pronounced basal bulge, caused by the great back-brain at the base of the skull, six times the size of ours. While the forebrain is well understood, the backbrain is mysterious. It is a ticket into the Oceanic, associated with the unconscious, the subliminal, and all kinds of psychical or spiritual phenomena, not least the ghostliness of the ghost story itself.

Caromody Overlark’s study in The Devil is Dead (1971) puts it this way,

The back-brain at the base of the skull, which must have been six times the size of ours, a difference that is frightening, it is partly the site of the unconscious, we know; of the subliminal, of certain psychical phenomena, of parapsychological manifestations, of what we can only call ghostliness.

Lafferty’s greatest villains and heroes are large in back brain, but whether hero or villain, they access a wider, truer world than we forebrain people.

In the ghost story, the so-called ugly or large-back-brain people have contributed disproportionately to humanity’s imagination and spiritual depth. This contrasts with moderns, whose forebrain consciousness can easily become trapped in Flatland. If anyone truly understood the backbrain, we could lead fuller lives, because we would better understand deeper, recessed parts of our human nature.

Some modern people exhibit Neanderthal traits—“pumpkin heads” with a basal bulge. They tend to be extreme in disposition. Finnegan has a large backbrain; so does Papa Diabolius. A big backbrain is the secret weapon of the criminal, the mystic, the seer, the inventor, and the poet. Take away the big back-brain, and you lose Plato, Homer, Attila the Hun, Aquinas, Rabelais, Luther, Rasputin, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Steinmetz, and other mystics and poltergeist hosts.

These back-brain ears may be facially ugly, but they are spiritually or intellectually intense—and sublime for it. They belong to a bigger Prime, opened to them by their backbrain inheritance and tied to ancient types such as the Grimaldi and Aurignacian peoples.

Which takes us to “Frog on the Mountain, ” It is a statement about the back-brain as a symbol of what people have lost, and what they need, in the conditions of Flatland.

It’s also all about Lafferty’s great theme of the all-animal, with its many variations—from demiurgic Snuffles to primordial Adam. I’ve called this the Zoon Anthropikon because of its overwhelming importance to Lafferty as an idea, one of his fixed ideas. The clearest exposition of it comes from Lafferty’s essay, “Riddle Writers of the Isthmus”:

“But the theme of the Fall in the deep past is implicit in most of the central works of science fiction and in virtually all of the fringe works. It is the breath of life of High Fantasy. It is the ‘memory of Magic’ behind all sword-and-sorcery. The idea of a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind, is echoed in the Tarzan stories, in the Planet-of-the-Apes pieces, in the Island-of-Doctor-Moreau pastiches. The idea of humanity still containing a spirit world, a supernatural world as well as a preternatural world, a ghostly as well as a poltergeistly world, is the theme of all the Tales-of-the-Uncanny-and-Supernatural, or all Tales-of-the-Mysterious-and-Macabre, of all Great-Tales-of-Terror-and-the-Unearthly, of all Weird Tales, of all Great-Ghost-Stories-of-the-Gas-Light-Era.”

The Man-That-Contained-All-Animals is especially relevant to "Frog on the Mountain" because it is one of Lafferty’s most intense explorations of man versus animal, the whole thing gone wrong—man against primordial animal, as primordial animal brings out what is primordial in man himself.

There is a wonderful moment in the story when we see how the Zoon Anthropikon works in its purest form outside of Eden:

“It was with amazement that Garamask saw intelligence, almost total intelligence, in the eyes of Sinek the panther. This was a person and a personage, whatever the species. The intelligent look was almost friendly to Garamask, and the two understood each other. They would fight to the death, but they recognized each other for what they were, excellent ones, superior ones, Panther, Man, Rogha, firstlings, not to be compared to Oganta or Swine or Sloths.”

Garamask, our protagonist, is a wealthy and experienced space traveler. He arranges to be awakened on the planet Paravath, having grown to hate space because it "spoils the bigness" of worlds by reducing them to "microbes under the microscope." He wants a direct, unmediated experience on a planet known for its challenging environment and immense, man-scale grandeur. This “hunting trip in depth" has three objectives: to hunt the four legendary creatures of the planet's three-stage mountain; to crack the mystery of why the planet's elite civilization, the Rogha, has been supplanted by the oafish Oganta; and to avenge the murder of his friend, Allyn, who, like an Elizabethan or Jacobean revenant, has appeared in a dream and told Garamask that his Oganta guide, Ocras, killed him.

Once on Paravath, Garamask meets his booming Oganta guide, Chavo, and he begins his ascent of the first mountain, Domba. After arming himself with claw-gauntlets and daggers for the ritualistic, "direct confrontation and intimate encounter" required by the hunt, he fights the first prey, Sinek the cat-lion. This is some of Lafferty's most memorably violent writing. It’s a brutal fight, and during it, Chavo attempts to kill Garamask by rolling boulders at him. Garamask kills the Sinek but is wounded and feels a strange transmission of essence, realizing "part of the spook of Sinek, falling to death, had passed into Garamask." It is as if the Zoon Anthropikon is returning to him, filling his backbrain, making him more like what Adam had lost in the fall.

During an interlude between climbs, Garamask questions Chavo about the planet's central mystery. Chavo says that the Oganta and Rogha are the same species. The Oganta aspire to transform through a process called the "frog-leap," a metamorphosis that has ceased to occur naturally and now requires a "special stimulus." Chavo has a paradoxical reverence for the Rogha that shows up as a ritualistic imperative to kill the few that remain. He talks about the Oganta's ability to project a "dark companion" or poltergeist, admitting he tried to kill Garamask because "you seemed almost like a Rogha to me as you were embattled there."

The hunt continues. Now sick and fevered, Garamask ascends the second mountain, Giri, to face Riksino, the cave-bear. A grueling fight ensues on a crumbling ledge. Garamask is mesmerized by the creature's strange influence and falls "head-first into the mouth of the riksino bear." He is nearly crushed to death, but Chavo intervenes. Chavo explains that the manner of death is crucial: the way Riksino kills, devouring his prey too rapidly, would render Garamask "of no use to us dead." A "freshly dead, or still dying" Garamask, however, would "represent our ultimate hope."

The hunt proceeds to the final mountain, Bior, where Garamask must face the Shasos, the eagle-condor, which he kills while dangling from a rope.

At the summit, Garamask confronts Chavo. There is a revelation. Chavo explains that Ocras did kill Allyn and, by eating his "back-brains," was "translated" into the Rogha Treorai, a character met earlier in the story. The "special stimulus" the Oganta require is the essence of a "fully-charged World-man" who has proven himself by surviving the hunt. Chavo says that the fourth prey, the Bater-Jeno or "frog-man," is not a creature but a mythic role he now embodies. "We fight, Papa Garamask, and I eat your back-brains!"

Catholic elements in the story are important, but I’d like to propose a fun way to read it through the ideas of the Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist Giambattista Vico (1968-1744). Vico is an endlessly fascinating thinker. He was best known for his work The New Science (Scienza Nuova), which laid the groundwork for modern theories of history and culture. Vico challenged the dominant rationalist thought of his time, picking a major fight with rationalists such as Descartes. He argued that human knowledge is rooted in the social and historical contexts of human experience, with the exception being the sacred history of the Jews. That exception was a complication in his system because the Jews had a direct way of being guided by God. The problem was: how did all those non-Jewish nations—the gentiles—ever figure out culture? This led him to theorize about biblical giants and to propose a cyclical theory of history in which societies pass through recurring stages of development, from divine to heroic to human ages, before returning to a primitive state and beginning anew.

Here, we should set aside questions of direct influence, even if Lafferty had read Vico. What matters is the pattern, what Vico reveals in Lafferty, and the following discussion aims to deepen our enjoyment by examining how the story works through its mythic elements. The argument, in brief, is that Lafferty rewinds Vico’s project in The New Science.

Garamask is a nostalgic spacefarer, a rational man who loves the Romantic. "Frog on the Mountain" can be read as an allegory of Vico’s entire system. Think of it as a collision between Vico’s final human age (the age of reason, abstraction, and reflection) embodied in Garamask, and the primal heroic age of myth and passion, embodied in the legendary beasts. Garamask is a man of reason, a modern who has grown weary of the very abstractions that define his era. He hates space because it reduces worlds to “microbes under the microscope.” He throws himself into the world of Paravath, not realizing that as a Fallen man he is essentially the equivalent of an Oganta, and that the Rogha are the equivalent of the Primordial Adam. Suppose the Fall and man’s diminishment are like having a smaller backbrain. In that case, the story reverses the process to supercharge Garamask’s back-brain as spiritual kibble, so that another creature can make the leap to a superior form.

Lafferty’s story does something strange and wonderful. It treats the spiritual by reversing its sequence. Man was large. Man fell. Man became smaller. The Oganta are small. They could be large, but something has gone wrong. Vico's fantasia is a useful concept for thinking about this.

Fantasia is the formidable, primordial faculty of the human mind. It precedes reason. It is not "fantasy" as make-believe. It’s the “making imagination" rooted in the body, senses, and passions. It is the mechanism and bulge of the backbrain. Working through overwhelming sensations like terror and wonder, fantasia structures the world by creating concrete, powerful images that Vico called "poetic characters" or "imaginative universals." Instead of abstracting qualities, it seizes upon a single, vivid particular. Vico’s famous examples of these are the thunderclap and great warrior, the universal category itself, giving birth to gods like Zeus and heroes like Hercules. These creations are the first nouns and are category nouns. The type precedes the particular. The first myths, and the very foundation of human culture, represent a mode of thought where the image is the reality, not a reflection of it. It’s the big Sinek, Riksino, and Shasos versus their particularizations, the little versions that sometimes pester Garamask. Vico puts it like this. When someone at the dawn of culture said Hercules, it was like participating in Hercules. All very sacramental, but Vico was a devout Catholic. This type-precedes-individual logic is why Vico famously says that "every ancient gentile nation had a Hercules as its founder."

As for Paravath itself, it is like a theater of the heroic age, and Lafferty clearly enjoys himself here. He gives us terrific combat and even his version of literary arming scenes:

Garamask clipped the claw-gauntlets over the backs of his hands, binding them by wrist and palm straps. He had been proud of his crushing grip, of his massive hands and forearms; but could he with these deliver lion blows on the lion himself? He bound on the elbow and knee and toe and heel daggers, needle-pointed, double-bladed, curiously curved. He bound on the crotch and throat armor. He slipped the casing fangs over his own dog teeth. He bound on the cap with the skull saber. Chavo similarly equipped himself. Well, the animals of Paravath had such claws and fangs (not all of them having the same ones), so the hunters could have such also.

The Oganta are like what Vico called theological poets in that they do not think in abstract principles but in concrete “poetic characters.” There is not a species of cat-lion, but “Sinek himself”:

“There is only one at a time, Papa Garamask. Whether it is always the same one that is translated back to live on the mountain, or whether one inherits from another, we do not know. But always there are many sineks, and there is Sinek himself.”

Their social structure is myth-thought, shaped by ideas like the frog-leap. In the three-stage hunt, Garamask’s forced journey becomes not only a recovery of the Zoon Anthropikon as he charges his backbrain, but also a backward movement through Vico’s ages. It is a process that strips away his rational exterior until he becomes a “fully-charged World-man,” full of the primal Oceanic backbrain the Oganta can consume to make their own leap.

It’s pure fun and extreme Lafferty. I can’t imagine anyone who loves his work finding a single bad thing to say about it.

Frog on the Mountain Notes.pdf

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