Prompted by a question Chris Merrick asked on East of Laughter , I’ve been cataloguing the changes made when moving Lafferty's short stories from their original publications into his collected editions. Unsurprisingly, there are small cuts, a large number of accidentals, and surprising additions and clarifications. I’ll keep high-level summaries of these changes in this post as I track them, one collection at a time. Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970): Reprints. House style changes. Strange Doings (1972): Reprints. House style changes. Golden Gate and Other Stories (1982): Reprints. "Sky" unrevised. House style changes. Ringing Changes  (1984): A few of the stories are worth reading in both versions. "Old Halloweens on the Guna Slopes" is the one major overhaul. Other differences are comparatively light, although "And Read the Flesh Between the Lines" has different endings. The capitalization of “Earth” in the Ringing Changes version of "Sky" begins partway through the story and is a noteworthy change. However, I wonder if it wasn’t already capitalized in the original manuscript; it's such a superior choice. The earlier Golden Gate (1982) collection follows the original typography. There are a few amusing accidentals (among hundreds that aren’t really worth noting), the most notable being the difference between “nasty laughter” and “vasty laughter.” "Among the Hairy Earthmen" in Ringing Changes  has the correction; the original publication has the contextually nonsensical "nasty laughter." One significant, if minor, persistent change is Lafferty’s correction regarding Australopithecus , which was initially a species in the Austro stories. In later versions, this is changed to genus to match its taxonomic category. I’m curious whether Lafferty caught this himself or if someone pointed it out to him, and whether that is why it becomes something of a running joke in the The Men Who Knew Everything stories. On this point, if you are reading the fan compilation of the story in  The Man Who Told Tale s, don't assume that you have the final edit. From Ringing Changes , which gets the genus thing right: "Roy Mega was a young man of the genus Genius who worked for Barnaby Sheen at his lab. He was from a downtown family. Austro was a still younger man of the genus Australopithecus who also worked for Barnaby in his house and at his lab. He was from the Guna Slopes in Africa." From The Man Who Talled Tales : "Roy Mega was a young man of the species Genius  who worked for Barnaby Sheen at his lab. He was from a downtown family. Austro was a still younger man of the species Australopithecus  who also worked for Barnaby—in his house and at his lab. He was from the Guna Slopes in Africa."

A light post. Space Chantey  gets pigeonholed as a sci-fi Odyssey , but that one-liner misses what makes it remarkable. On East of Laughter  today, someone suggested that Lafferty set out to satirize heroism but ended up celebrating it instead, if I understood the comment correctly. This is an interesting take. I wonder how common it is. No one has yet pinned down what Space Chantey  is doing, but it is certainly more than a parody of heroism. It's a Menippean satire. Think of it as a literary Trojan horse. It wears the costume of epic, but only to sneak in and thumb its nose at everything from genre conventions to metaphysics. Epic isn't its subject. Epic is the disguise. In this way, it's like Don Quixote , which isn't really about Romance or chivalric culture: it's about the collapse of old values and the impossibility of Romance under new social conditions. Lafferty admires epic, but he also knows that writing one in late modernity is impossible, so he's going to give us picaresque. What Space Chantey  goes after is how we tell stories and what we think stories are for. The most obvious layer of the satire is aimed at the classical source material. The novel has fun with Homer’s Odyssey , as any reader will notice. The land of the Lotus-Eaters becomes “Lotophage,” an exclusive planet where only the beautiful are welcome and the crew is eventually processed into snack chips. The man-eating Laestrygonians are recast as players in a daily “sport fight,” where gruesome death is treated as casual entertainment on live television. This deflates the epic’s foundational status, turning heroic trials into slapstick. The mockery starts on the very first page, where Lafferty parodies the solemn epic invocation—“We give you here, Good Spheres and Cool Boy Conicals…”—blending the voice of the rhapsode with that of a carnival barker. I’ve glossed most of the doggerel to show how central this layer of the text was to Lafferty. But Lafferty's aim goes beyond the classics, taking swipes at the conventions of genre fiction. This is where things get interesting. Lafferty once said he read genre fiction mainly to learn how to write it; after that, he saw little reason to keep up with the field. In his nonfiction, he often spoke of it with open scorn. Few of his contemporaries were as openly critical of the genre in which they wrote. He brings his deep, pre-genre reading to bear on pulp, which makes Space Chantey , as I see it, an act of genre purgation. Lafferty skewers the pulp sci-fi obsession with technology through gadgets like "static repulsion" hover slabs, which don't rely on advanced physics but on the user shuffling their feet. The novel slips into Western tall tale territory during a chaotic asteroid episode, having fun with Doc Smith territory. He has fun with cosmic horror tropes from the weird tale tradition, especially in the Siren-Zo episode. One of its sharpest critiques comes in the "Improbable" Club Menitros, a send-up of the Edwardian gentlemen's club story. Lafferty's club is so stringent that even Jorkens would be in trouble. The gambling caper, so popular in the 1960s, gets mocked with the planet Roulettenwelt. Space Chantey ? It is a highly compressed genre bomb. I should also note that the satire operates on a philosophical level, questioning the worldviews that shape our narratives. The novel prompts the reader to reflect on hero worship and militarism, and whether “high deeds” are genuine or merely products to be packaged and sold. Lafferty takes a direct shot at subjective idealism, the Berkeleyan idea that reality exists only when perceived, through the character of Atlas, who believes the universe is a product of his own mind. This philosophical critique spills into a satire of social structures, from the consumerist (don't eat the chips) nightmare of Lotophage to the lethal snobbery of the Club Menitros. Still, none of that seems to me like the core of the book. Space Chantey  is a frolic but also an act of genre purgation that marks Lafferty's move toward the Coscuin books, The Fall of Rome , and Okla Hannali . Finally, Lafferty turns the satire on the act of storytelling itself. He employs self-parodying doggerel to remind the reader that they are within a mediated narrative. He mocks the clunky expository infodump common to science fiction. And he deploys blatantly allegorical names, the planet "Yellow Dog," the ship "Hornet," the "Improbable" Club, that telegraph tropes which set up his later defamiliarization and his genius for bizarre detail. To focus only on the satire of "heroism" is to see one tree and miss the forest. Space Chantey  isn't just making fun of the Odyssey and the epic. It isn't even mainly doing that. It's taking apart the ecosystem that gives pulp heroism its pigweed meaning. Lafferty is going after the machinery of the genre itself, the thing that made it possible for him to retire from keeping track of 30,000 electronic parts and live contentedly on what he called "easy alley," the money he earned writing genre fiction. If we want to know what Space Chantey  is really about, we ought to read his brilliant essay "The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician." There, he writes: "What did I miss by not having early encounters with SF? I had a reasonably happy childhood and do not believe that I was deprived in any way. And going back years later and reading the early pulps leaves me puzzled. Where was it, where was it? It had the air of being very near, but there wasn't much of it between the covers of those magazines. There was more of it on the covers themselves."

And she was into the weave now — pink and pungent — the numinous spook, the cinnamon cookie, the mad anima who had never left off being a kid. Plappergeistic and poltergeistic, the lavender lightning was about her especially — the witch who was no more than a sketch in red chalk. She had really never had a body, that Bedelia — only a chalk sketch of one. This gave her a certain lightness, and there was enough heaviness in some of the others.Summer lightning, lavender lightning inside the walls, and hazel-colored sparks out of her eyes. She had been, perhaps, the primordial mutation — light enough to come to life — and the heavier, normal things had not arrived till later. Fourth Mansions (1969)

Saying these novellas are about consensus reality doesn't say much, so can we do better? Here is my attempt. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny  and Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?   present opposing secular heresies regarding creation, providence, human freedom, and social meaning. On one hand, we see consensus reality as the result of absolutizing determinism in Armageddons . On the other hand, we see it as pure social constructivism in Sandaliotis . By placing two extremes side by side, Lafferty turns the reader's attention to what matters: human freedom and how consensus reality can erode agency and meaning. In Armageddons , the shared world originates from the brute facts described by the Devonian "Equations," a form of mathematical Logos. To appreciate the rigidity of this system, we can turn to Devonian's own words: "The mathematical and organic formulae comprising the 'General Equation' indicate that the Interaction Index of the Enclave... will be keyed onto a single individual... If the single key individual is withdrawn . . . that time will collapse with it." This illustrates a nightmarishly overdetermined reality, one that menaces Enniscorthy Sweeny 's personhood. It's a world that can be deciphered as neatly as a theorem. This might seem odd, but them's the rules the novella plays by. Because every thought follows fixed causes, people given similar inputs and incentives end up with the same mental picture of the world; institutions then ratify that overlap as public "fact." Determinism supplies the causal why  of belief-formation, while the resulting consensus is the emergent what : shared reality is the predictable product of rule-bound minds acting in concert. The crux individual is special, but not that special, despite appearances. Why? Because the system's laws are complete, but they are singular : they pivot on one coordinate, Enniscorthy Sweeny. Think of a spreadsheet whose every cell is a formula referencing A1: the sheet's contents are fully determined, but delete A1, and the sheet returns #REF! Conversely, Sandaliotis  provides the opposite form of consensus reality. Here, the world is nighmarishly underdetermined , shaped by ambient fog and collective belief, with no underlying Logos to ground it. Manufactured belief (with some diabolical intervention), rather than any inherent order, brings reality into being. One of the novella's best lines comes from the engineer, a minor character: "Everybody believes in the lavender fog when it is first in their eyes . . . and it creates reality for those who believe in it." All this is to say that  Sweeny  anchors consensus reality in a rigid, freedom-destroying Logos, whereas  Sandaliotis  treats reality as a fluid artifact spun into frictionless existence by attention, greed, whim, paranoia, revenge, deviltry, and desire. These novellas, then, are very different models of how consensus reality might work. Positioned as funhouse mirrors opposite each other, they are a closed circuit of secular metaphysics and social performativity, each exposing the limitations of the other. Recognizing this contrast clarifies how each narrative addresses providence and human freedom, the shared feature being a conspicuous absence of anything divine in either. In Sweeny , time is the main point. It seems superficially fluid but moves forward as a predetermined sequence we find disclosed by poring over the textual fragments Lafferty gives us as readers. The surprise is discovering that, amidst all that apparent disorder, lies a hellishly claustrophobic ordering logic. The "Crux-Individual" appears free but follows a script embedded in Devonian's equations. Ennis seems like a creative agent and a great artist, but he is merely executing the system's commands. Here, consensus reality is a straitjacket. In contrast, Sandaliotis  portrays a simultaneous rather than sequential reality, one that is dependent on consensus for its fragile existence. This system, too, fails, with freedom collapsing and truth becoming whatever the collective decides it to be. Both satires illustrate how consensus undermines human dignity. Lafferty intended these two novellas to be read together. They're complementary cautionary satires of worlds that sever objective truth from communal and subjective action. Both dissect a consensus reality to show how absurd it becomes when taken to the logical extremes: scientistic social determinism or soft "sociology of knowledge" constructivism. At the same time, they are also anxiety dreams about the real power that consensus has in our lives. They're a kind of dialectic that reaches a dead end, but there is an implication in both, namely, what would be needed for a way forward.

In The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny , consensus reality appears as a centralized construct, and Lafferty’s main concern is the diachronic process, the way that consensus forms and transforms over time. In Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? , the focus shifts to the synchronic: the structure of consensus as it stands at a given moment. A central philosophical conflict in both works arises between Platonic realism and philosophical nominalism. I think Enniscorthy Sweeny is the stronger novella in literary terms, but Sandaliotis ventures into more profound philosophical territory, which gives it a different kind of interest. Leaving that question aside, we can look more closely at how consensus reality operates within Sandaliotis. As he often does, I think Lafferty draws on 1 Enoch for some of his weirder ideas. Readers who want to go deeper might want to check out what 1 Enoch says about Azazel and then consider Azazel’s ritual role in the Book of Leviticus. The "shining" technology ("improbably technology") and the novella’s ending, with the spontaneously appearing "precipice"/holes in reality ("full of holes since the minute we made it"), reflect these sources. And the strange figure of “Haziel,” whose name recurs, is not incidental. But how does consensus reality work in the book? Here, reality is not a truth waiting to be uncovered; it is a construction. The process begins with a small group of creators, “forgers” like Angelo DiCyan, who invent an entire physical setting, in this case a peninsula, complete with a fabricated history and official documents to support it. The implication is clear: in Sandaliotis, existence is wholly performative. Once an enforced story is present and the necessary paperwork is in place, the physical world forms around it. Narrative is the engine that calls reality into being. This invented reality becomes solid through a sequential process: belief must be cultivated, and not individually, but across a crowd. The system works through a kind of social funnel. It begins with fringe clubs and targeted interest groups, progresses through curated tours and exhibitions, and ultimately gathers people into a “Drift Crowd” of curious tourists. What matters is not the content of their belief but the fact of their participation. As their attention gathers and their credulity builds, they perform the reality-creation act. They do not just imagine the place; they finish making it. The landscape becomes real, not because it is true. It's just that enough people agree to act as if it is. On the other hand, the illusion does not sustain itself; it requires constant work. Behind it lies an industrial-scale system that we can call “Illusion Technology,” comprising artificial mists, controlled lighting, and constructed landscapes. These tools do not change the world directly. They reshape what people perceive. The goal is not to alter matter, but to guide attention, to edit belief. This makes clear that perception, not substance itself, is what holds a world together. To strengthen the illusion, the Sandaliotis system adds layers of story and structure. An active mining economy draws settlers with the lure of riches. At the same time, a ritual calendar, centered on a symbolic clock tower, organizes the year and makes the invented history feel continuous and real. Through repetition and ritual, the fiction begins to behave like fact. Yet this constructed reality is extremely fragile. It is not governed by a single authority; there is no crux individual or a Devonian equation or Effector Fumulae to shield him. Instead, control is cultural, scattered among rival groups (forgers, sadists, media moguls, devils), each with access to tools for shaping perception. As a result, the consensus can be tampered with from multiple directions simultaneously, creating an unstable and insecure environment. Entropy is not a distant threat—it is built into the system from the start. If upkeep falters, the illusion begins to unravel. The world does not fall apart through violence, but through neglect. Conflict here is not mainly physical; it is narrative. Groups fight by rewriting stories, shifting memories, and redirecting attention. In this sense, consensus reality becomes a vast and ongoing civic project, part spectacle, part system, running on belief and design. It can be engineered, sold, hijacked, but it never stops needing repair. If the maintenance fails, the illusion falls to pieces under its own complexity. When thinking through the book, I find it useful to break it down into a set of distinct “packages.” P1 · Artifice & Authentication:  This first package involves master forgers creating the foundational artifice of the peninsula by fabricating its history, maps, and official documents to make it seem authentic. P2 · Audience Generation:  This package systematically generates an audience by moving people from curious outsiders to on-site spectators through clubs, fleets, and guides, creating the demand for the illusion. P3 · Perception Scaffolding:  This package functions as pure stagecraft, using illusion technology like artificial fogs, landscapes, and simulated locals to edit perception and provide the audience with convincing sensory proof. P4 · Economic & Ritual Anchors:  This package locks the illusion into the real world by creating tangible economic and ritual anchors, such as a profitable mine and a unique calendar, that embed the fabricated place in external systems of money and time. P5 · Consensus Belief Solidification:  This package solidifies the illusion into a consensus reality where shared myths become accepted fact, creating a reinforcing feedback loop that validates and funds further artifice. PE · Instability / Entropy:  This package represents the constant force of entropy, introducing instability through physical decay, rival narratives, and random chaos that threatens to unravel the fabricated reality if maintenance falters. The packages set up the world-jack, which is the most visible and straightforward part of the plot. As I suggested at the beginning of this post, the philosophical drama of the book centers on a basic problem: Platonic forms are too "airy" for reality; Ockhamite nominalism cannot hold it together, which fuels Constantine's comedic search for reality in the form of words: written history, deeds, and other records. The packages show how consensus reality can be made to cohere, at least for a while.

Earlier today, I shared some thoughts on how Jung’s Aion  influenced Lafferty’s Past Master . I must confess I’m no admirer of Jung, and reading him closely, out of interest in Lafferty, hasn’t changed that. What it has done is make me more attentive to how often Lafferty plays with the finer details of Jung’s ideas—not to affirm them, but to preserve what is mystical and strange while keeping them consonant with his Catholic faith. Lafferty shares with Jung a sense of the spiritual world as oceanic and patterned. Which brings us back to Aion . Behind Aion  lies Jung’s insistence that evil must be acknowledged as having real, positive existence. In Liber Novus , the private work that resulted from his spiritual crisis in the mid-1910s and from which he developed much of analytical psychology, he wrote: “Evil is one-half of the world, one of the two pans of the scale.” Jung never abandoned this conviction; we find it in its fully mature form in Aion , where he writes: “If, as seems probable, the aeon of the fishes is ruled by the archetypal motif of the ‘hostile brothers,’ then the approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as a mere   privatio boni ; its real existence will have to be recognized.” This idea became central to Jung’s later theories on the positive role evil plays in the individuation process. He returned to it repeatedly in his esoteric writings on alchemy and the transcendental function, where he sought to articulate how the self integrates the shadow. Ultimately, Jung’s move is to reify evil and integrate it into the self—a move Lafferty resists, offering instead a counterview of spiritual transmutation in Fourth Mansion ’s Freddy Foley and Past Master ’s Thomas More. Although Jung insisted he was no metaphysician and concerned only with the empirical, he nonetheless treated evil as a metaphysical—and arguably Manichean—reality. He claimed to be merely describing what he found in empirical experience, but his language often suggested otherwise. Nowhere is this tension more vivid than in his correspondence with the Dominican Father Victor White. Their exchange reached a critical point in White’s essay “Kinds of Opposites,” published in Jung’s 1955 Festschrift , Studien zur analytischen Psychologie . White attempted to clarify the Catholic position for Jung: while good and evil may be opposites in abstract thought, this does not mean that people experience evil abstractly as absence. Therefore, he argued, Jung did not need to reify evil to acknowledge its empirical impact. The Dominican position was compatible with analytical psychology, a position one finds in his God and the Unconscious  (1952).   But Jung would not yield. His rejection of evil as mere privation was absolute, and White’s carefully reasoned objections were set aside. For anyone trying to understand what Lafferty resisted in Jung, this exchange remains essential reading—especially White’s rarely cited and never reprinted “Kinds of Opposites.” It’s unfortunate that White’s association with Jung seems to have harmed his reputation, both among Catholics and within his Dominican community at Oxford. SW3, Chelsea Embankment, Erected 1969, almost one year after the publication of Past Master. " An hour or two of crisp walking on the road and Paul was to Chelsea." Picking up on the theme of sources Lafferty did not name in Past Master , I want to offer a few thoughts on two Catholic influences that shaped the novel, particularly in its treatment of Thomas More. His portrait of More shows signs of having been influenced by the 1912 entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia . The Catholic Encyclopedia , which stood on the shelves of Lafferty’s family home, draws its entry on More directly from Erasmus’s description. Lafferty lifts the physical details almost intact: More, “not tall, though not remarkably short,” with dark brown hair and grayish-blue eyes “with some spots,” carries a slight asymmetry in his shoulders, the right rising when he walks. In the novel, Thomas becomes a “dumpy little almost-old man,” “short and chunky,” and even a “ferret-faced little man.” Paul notes that he resembles “the Thomas More of Holbein’s portrait... but only a little.” Lafferty draws on Erasmus’s portrait and turns physical detail into symbol and satire. The slight, unassuming body marks Thomas as an outsider in a world engineered for perfection. His physical presence is a foil to Astrobe’s golden order. So is his humor. G. Huddleston, author of the Catholic Encyclopedia  entry, quotes Joseph Addison’s eighteenth-century tribute in The Spectator , where More’s mirth, so constant in life, is said not to have forsaken him in death: “His death was of a piece with his life. There was nothing in it new, forced, or affected.” Lafferty’s version of More ends on much the same note, with More going to his execution with a witticism: “Can a man have more heads than two?” Other borrowings and influences from the Catholic Encyclopedia  appear throughout Past Master , but no work shaped it more directly than a now-forgotten occasional volume: The Fame of Blessed Thomas More . Published in October 1929, the book collects commemorative addresses delivered that July at the More Memorial Exhibition in Chelsea. At the time, More had been beatified but not yet canonized, and the collection, issued with a new introduction, formed part of the wider campaign among English Catholics to secure his sainthood. Lafferty, then in his early twenties, admired several of the contributors. We tend to associate Lafferty with the cultural currents of the 1960s and after, but in 1935, when More was finally canonized, he was already an adult in his mid-twenties.   Unsurprisingly, the most direct echo in the entire book comes from G. K. Chesterton's contribution, titled "A Turning Point in History. " Chesterton writes, "Utopia was partly a joke, but since his time, Utopians have seldom seen the joke" (67). Anyone who knows the novel will hear that line resound in Chapter 5 of Past Master , where More says, "Shove it, my little mechanical mentor, shove it. I made it up. I invented it. It was a joke, I tell you, a bitter joke. It was how not to build a world." Lafferty takes Chesterton's critical insight and places it directly in the mouth of Thomas More himself, who is now forced to confront a world constructed on the foundation of his bitter joke.   Also unsurprising is the influence of Hilaire Belloc’s piece, “The Witness to Abstract Truth.” Belloc argues that Thomas More accepted martyrdom not for a sweeping religious cause, but for “one particular small point of doctrine—to wit, the supremacy of the See of Peter.” He locates More’s heroism precisely in his willingness to die for what seemed a “dry, narrow intellectual point.” Lafferty echoes this view in Past Master , portraying More’s final stand against a deceptively minor piece of legislation: the “Ban the Beyond Act.” At first, Thomas objects simply to its covert inclusion, stating, “I thought it innocuous also; I only resented the attempt to slip it by me in the dark.” As he nears death, he grasps the clause’s deeper significance: “But I see now that it cannot be innocuous.”   Finally, Ronald Knox’s essay “The Charge of Religious Intolerance” is important for two reasons. First is Knox’s portrayal of More as a man witnessing the disintegration of a living civilization, replaced by a sterile rationalism that reduces Christian faith to “a mere inference from a string of Bible texts.” For Knox, More was not resisting a new belief system but a lifeless abstraction masquerading as progress. Second is Knox’s reason for reading Utopia as a satire. Knox reads it satirically, as does Lafferty. “It was a joke, I tell you, a bitter joke. It was how not to build a world.” That line, voiced by Thomas in Past Master , echoes a reading now largely out of academic fashion. Knox puts it this way: “It is clear, then, that the Utopia  was a youthful jeu d’esprit , which was intended, indeed, to draw attention to some abuses of the author’s day, but not to be accepted as a serious program for their reformation.” Other essays in the collection also find their echoes in Past Master , particularly Bede Jarrett’s “A National Bulwark against Tyranny,” which emphasizes More’s earthiness, and Thomas Chambers’s “Sir Thomas More’s Fame Amongst His Countrymen,” which reflects on the consistency of More’s character. Read together, the occasional pieces in The Fame of Blessed Thomas More form a kind of crib on many of the social, political, and religious themes that shape Lafferty’s novel. An annotated edition with passages from Chesterton and the other contributors in appendices would help new readers see not just what Lafferty was doing in the 1960s, but how he was thinking: backward through a tradition, forward into crisis.

The Leviathan, by Charles Dufresne (1876-1938) “Devil, Devil, come in hate! Take the fine Evita bait!” the wild-girl chanted, but her eyes no longer focused, and she was frozen in hysteria. Past Master “The ambivalent attitude towards the fish is an indication of its double nature. It is unclean and an emblem of hatred on the one hand,but on the other it is an object of veneration.” Aion I’ve written before about the importance of connecting the allegory of the devil-hydra episode in Past Master  (1968) with the dream sequence involving John Sourwine. Together, these scenes reveal something essential about how the programmed persons relate to Ouden. But this post focuses on a different thread: the symbolic logic of bait, fishing, and the monstrous, particularly how Thomas More is cast as Christ-bait, and how that image ultimately connects to Maxwell's transformation. This logic extends in every direction. Paul fishes Thomas More from the past. More’s first conversation with Paul is about fishing. The first climax in The Feral Lands centers on a fishing event. More’s interactions with the people of Astrobe are repeatedly cast in terms of fishing. Even the mouth of Ouden is described as a gaping maw, wide and exposed, vulnerable to being hooked. The Metropolitan of Astrobe wears the fisherman’s ring. One could go on cataloging such moments. The Christian symbolism in Past Master  is hard to miss, but some of its deep cuts are easy for modern readers to overlook. This post calls attention to one of them. The Christological theme of “fishers of men” runs parallel to the other pattern in the novel: the fishing for the devil. The idea that the devil might be caught on a hook is ancient. It appears in the writings of Jerome and St. Basil. Its source is Job 41:1–2: “Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?” That passage gave rise to a long tradition of imagery in both Talmudic Judaism and Catholic patristics, and it continued through medieval and Renaissance art and theology. Thomas Aquinas addresses this in his Expositio super Iob ad litteram . The image is not limited to Catholic sources. It appears in Luther’s Table Talk , though Luther was not one of Lafferty’s favorites. Rabelais was. He made it central to Panurge's battle with the great sea creature, the physeter. “Poor Panurge began to cry and howl worse than ever. Babille-babou,” said he, shrugging up his shoulders, quivering all over with fear,“there will be the devil upon dun.This is a worse business than that t’other day. Let us fly, let us fly; old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan, described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.It will swallow us all—ships and men, shag, rag, and bobtail—like a dose of pills.” Gargantua and Pantagruel , 4:XXIII Most readers pass over the devil-hydra scene without recognizing the tradition behind it. That kind of cultural amnesia deeply troubled Lafferty. As he wrote, “The world really has been chopped off behind us. Just how the old world ended isn't clear. There is a group amnesia that blocks us out from the details. It didn't end in Armageddon. The two world wars were only side lights to a powerful main catastrophe. The so-called revolutionary movements did not bring anything to an end. The world had already ended. Those things were only the grubbiest of brainless grubbings in the ruins.” For many readers, this makes one of the most memorable scenes in Past Master  an amnesiac fragment. It brings back the image of Christ as the hook that catches the Leviathan, now figured as the Christian devil, though it often goes unnoticed. Scratch away the devil-hydra, and the older image is still there, just as it appeared before the great forgetting, in works like the Hortus Deliciarum . At the bottom of the image, a wing-scaled sea dragon thrashes as a cruciform hook pierces its jaw. The fishing line rises as a Jesse tree, passing straight into the monster’s open throat. The same logic is at work in Past Master , where the bait fish is sacrificed to draw out the devil-hydra. Its Christ-like blood spills in every direction, in what I have called bloodsmell: “It bled in spectacular fountains of dark rushing red that exploded with the lustful smell of rampant iron and stripped green wood and battlefield stink.” More’s martyrdom completes the pattern. His blood joins the bait’s blood. He, too, becomes Christ-bait, cast before the powers and principalities that govern Astrobe. Why was this particular image on Lafferty’s mind in the late sixties? It likely has to do with how critically and creatively he read Jung’s Aion , a book he drew on heavily for the aquatic and fish symbolism in 1969’s Fourth Mansions , one of whose chapter epigraphs is taken directly from it. Some of the novel’s deeper layers open up when read alongside Aion , with its emphasis on quaternities and the ambivalence of the fish as Christ, devil, and anti-Christ, as well as St. Teresa’s Interior Castle . The ambivalence of the fish symbol gives its title to Chapter IX of Jung’s Aion , where he examines the role it plays across human cultures and in the human mind. In that dense chapter, Jung writes, “The ambivalent attitude towards the fish is an indication of its double nature. It is unclean and an emblem of hatred on the one hand, but on the other, it is an object of veneration.” This doubleness is one of the things that unites the two sides of the devil-hydra in Past Master . It also runs through Fourth Mansions , where we see it in figures like Carmody Overlark and Wing Manion, each linked to fish in different moral registers. “Carmody Overlark had had his head under water for more than five minutes, and the water itself was in constant change or parade. There were schools of small fish that passed through it laterally. They did not follow around the curve of the bowl, they disappeared. And other sorts of fish appeared, all traveling a parade in the same direction, coming out of the glass itself (for all that could be discerned of them), traveling across the bowl in a straight line and disappearing into the glass wall again. There was optical illusion or there was strong current flowing through that bowl.” “Wing Manion came in, wrinkled her fish-nose in many-layered disgust, and stood over her sick-dragon husband Arouet. She also had sworn to break the weave. The Harvester mark was still livid on her forehead, but she would no longer be a Harvester.” It is fascinating how much Lafferty draws from Aion  in his earliest novels. This influence also helps explain one of the strangest elements of the devil-hydra scene in Past Master . One might wonder where Lafferty got the idea. It’s unclear whether he knew of the apocalyptic tradition of consuming Leviathan and Behemoth before reading Jung’s Aion , but he would certainly have encountered it there. The image stayed with him. Father Oddopter says that eating the brains grants “a certain mastery of this enemy.” Consider Maxwell. He consumes the creature’s brain, and the act transforms him. He is perfected, initiated into the ordo gratiae . Transformation and transubstantiatio  define his arc, marking a passage from infirmitas  to auctoritas . “In Maxwell it was a sign of weakness and slowness, almost of witlessness. It was a good-sized, swarthy, almost sinister body that he wore, and it was a sepulchral voice he spoke with. But one had the impression that he had to stand on tiptoes to see out of his own eyes.” It is one of the book’s most compelling developments when Thomas More tells Nortprophet that Maxwell is between bodies. Soon after, Maxwell enters the body of a minor character—the crone—who has just died. His eyes go from weak to strong. At the beheading scene, it is Maxwell, now inhabiting the crone, who sees more reality than the others. “ What is it in me that survives?” Maxwell asked.He had the shabby old lady's form and her voice, but they all knew him as Maxwell now." “There were those who said that something disappeared from Thomas at the same moment—that he left in his essence, and that it was a shadow man who put his head on the block. A weird old woman cried out that she could see through him; but it was an illusion” This eating of the devil's brains draws on Lafferty's appropriation of the midrashic tradition in which the messianic banquet includes Leviathan flesh. Jung returns to this image several times in Aion . In one note, he writes, “In Jewish tradition the Leviathan is a sort of food stored up for the faithful in Paradise. After death, they clothe themselves in fishrobes.” In another, he adds, “According to the Apocalypse of Baruch, Behemoth as well as Leviathan is eucharistic food. This is assiduously overlooked.” Lafferty did not overlook it. What brought all this back to mind was thinking again about Petersen’s work on Lafferty’s environmental strangeness. He defines the ecomonstrous  as “any object, force, figure, vision, or experience that induces some sense of vertiginous, category-defying excess, without inherent moral valence.” It’s a helpful way to describe how Lafferty breaks categories open. That critical insight has helped me notice patterns I had missed. But once one moves past the surface weirdness and through the cultural amnesia, something becomes clear: the ecomonstrous very often carries a moral valence.

"Aeon is the measure of the duration of non-material creatures or substances, as time is that of material creatures or substances. Thomas writes, ‘Although the aeon is instantaneously whole, it differs from eternity in being able to exist with before and after.’ There is one aeon for every immaterial individual and for every immaterial relationship. Some aeons apply only to the non-material aspects of individuals and relationships. A person who is partly material and partly immaterial will be sometimes in time and sometimes in aeon. There are more aeons than one." More than Melchisedech I've been considering Gregorio Montejo's outstanding essay on time in the Argo  Cycle ( Feast of Laughter , vol. 1) and thinking about how I would tackle the issue of Duffey and time. Unsurprisingly, for anyone who reads this blog, knows the essay, and has any interest in these issues, my pushback comes down to the always interesting and difficult figure of Origen. Montejo views Origen as a primary precedent for Lafferty's plural, temporal, and non-temporal manifolds. Going to Origen for this makes sense. Origen believes there are many "aeons," and he uses the term in many ways. His primary sense of "aeon" is a finite historical age-world with a beginning and a consummation, not the intermediate between time and eternity Aquinas calls an aevum . Montejo takes on none of Origen's associated doctrines in making his case, but I'm not sure that they can be disentangled. In any case, Montejo limits his appeal to Origen to the bare fact of aeonic plurality, setting aside any wider cosmology of cyclic ages and universal restoration. How important is Origen for Montego's argument? He writes that Lafferty should be seen as "privileging Origen's interpretation of the Aeon, according to which there are multiple aeviternal manifolds—a position that Thomas himself considers, seems to find disturbing, and ultimately rejects, since he envisions a unitary aeviternity hierarchically ordered to the eternity of an immutable God." I think this makes Origen too important for the Argo  cycle, but there is much room for disagreement here. Lafferty does say, "There are more aeons than one," and Montejo is quite right to call attention to that line.  The first part of the puzzle is what Lafferty means by this plurality. Montejo and I agree he isn’t just echoing Origen. In Origen’s cosmology, an aeon is a shared cosmic stretch, a single spatio-temporal world-system framed by successive consummations. Every rational soul lives, dies, and waits within that one span, still embodied after death in subtler, pneumatic flesh; no one gets a private timeline. As I understand Origen, Montejo’s leaking aeons are a creative departure from him, crafted to interpret Lafferty, and it works. The second part of the puzzle is this: given what Lafferty says in the passage above about Saint Thomas, does he privilege Origen? That is what this post will try to work out. As far as Origen goes, what strikes me as more suggestive is how he and Lafferty handle the end of an aeon. For Origen, each closing comes with a κρίσις and περικεφαλαίωσις: judgment and cosmic summing-up. These mark an ending that clears the stage for whatever comes next. That rhythm of closure followed by birth mirrors Lafferty’s cycles of recurring world-loss in novels like Past Master. But the end of worlds is a separate issue. So, on the face of it, Lafferty's position (again, there are more aeons than one, one for every immaterial individual ) sounds contrary to Summa theologiae  I, q. 10, a. 6, where Aquinas says that, just as there is one time and one eternity, "there is only one  aevum " that measures every created spirit. On the other hand, it also contradicts Origin, who does not think that one can be immaterial within an aeon. Taken unequivocally, Lafferty's multiplication of aeons goes beyond both Origen's position and Thomas's position. But if we read Lafferty's "many aeons" not as distinct kinds of measure but as many participations in the single Thomistic aevum,  each angelic person or real relation "taking its slice" of a common non-metric duration, then the difference is mostly verbal; the underlying metaphysics (one generic aevum , numerically multiplied only by the subjects it measures) can still be squared with Aquinas. It contradicts Aquinas only if we construe the plurality as separate measures rather than many instances of one measure. I think this is necessary if we want to prevent the ontological economy from exploding. There are different ways to do this. One way forward is to dissolve the apparent contradiction in the age-old manner: make a distinction. We can posit one participated instance for every immaterial relation, not a second aevum , only another share of the single measure. Aquinas never says this, yet it doesn't contradict his philosophy of time: aevum  is already the proper (non‑metric) duration of created spirits, and real relations are distinct, immaterial realities. Because a real relation's being is "toward another" ( ad alterum ) and thus numerically distinct from the substance it qualifies, Thomistic ontology can plausibly be extended to grant a relation its participated share of the one aevum , a modest extension of ST I q. 10. This extension is speculative: Aquinas never says that relations, as distinct beings in ad alterum , possess their share of the aevum; I am drawing that inference from ST I, q. 28 on real relation plus q. 10 on aeviternity. Because Aquinas distinguishes substance from real relation (ST I, q. 28), even as he holds that every created spirit is measured by one generic aevum (ST I, q. 10, a. 6), a personal-aₚ / relational-aᵣ split is no ad-hoc  gimmick relation taking its participated slice of one measure. If I understand Montejo, he is saying that Lafferty follows Origen in that every immaterial person occupies its aeviternal manifold, with overlapping aeons Aquinas would have rejected. Duffey's "Seven Lost Years" happen when he steps out of clock time and crosses the overlaps between his aeon and other manifolds recorded in the Argo  log. It's an ingenious solution: The Origin-Based Metaxy Note that, in addition to many aeons, we get a considerable amount of metaxy in this model. On my reading, Lafferty’s “many aeons” are really many participations in one Thomistic aevum . Each spirit or relation holds a non-metric slice of a single measure. Duffey’s detours are shifts along his personal or relational slice within that shared aevum —he leaves clock-time without ever entering a separate aeon. In short, I think Lafferty chose to speak of “many aeons” because it’s a simpler way to say that each spirit has its non-temporal career, without introdu cing Aquinas’s more abstract idea of numerical participation in a single aevum . Alternative View To see how this works, here is the model I have in mind: Term Classical / Theological Source Definition Aeon Origen A finite “age-world” bounded by a cosmic beginning and consummation; several aeons can compose a larger historical cycle. Aevum / Aeviternity Thomas Aquinas The Thomistic mode of duration proper to created immaterial beings—simultaneously whole, originating at creation, lacking an intrinsic end, and allowing only accidental change. Eternity (Aeternitas) — (divine attribute) God’s own “simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life”; absolutely changeless, without before-and-after succession. Time (Tempus) — (creaturely realm) The fully metric succession of “before” and “after” that measures every motion of material beings. Participated aevum — A single generic aevum numerically shared  by all immaterial subjects—many individual “slices,” one common measure. aₚ (Personal aevum) — The non-metric career of a particular spirit that can branch from—and later re-enter—clock-time. aᵣ (Relational aevum) — The non-metric duration of a real immaterial relation (covenant, pact, friendship) uniting two or more subjects. Metaxy — The “between-space” where slices of aevum touch clock-time—a participation point rather than a separate stratum. What Exists There Kind of Succession Narrative Function Clock‑Time (T) Physical bodies, material events, calendars, causal chains Fully metric, strictly forward Provides the stable yard‑stick against which Duffey’s detours register as anomalies. Personal Participated Aevum ( aₚ ) The non‑material duration proper to each immaterial supposit (Duffey, Bagby, Black Giants…) Ordered (earlier/later) but non‑metric Accounts for Duffey’s private detours such as the “Sea of the Seven Lost Years.” Relational Participated Aevum ( aᵣ ) The non‑metric duration of a real immaterial relation (e.g., Duffey–Eva covenant, Argo–crew pact) Ordered, non‑metric Explains why the Argo log can record events whose personal aeva have not yet intersected Clock‑Time. Eternity (E) God’s timeless act of knowing all that is No succession at all Provides the metaphysical ceiling hinted at by Lafferty’s omniscient asides. The Time Game 1. Single metric baseline Clock-Time (T) is one continuous orange line; its x -axis is the only place durations can be measured. Solid orange baseline 2. Level exclusivity Every event or slice occupies exactly one layer—T, personal aₚ, or relational aᵣ. Separate vertical bands; no markers straddle layers 3. Forward-only motion inside T Movement within Clock-Time can proceed only to the right (later instants). Baseline arrowheads on magenta rays 4. Forward branching Any T-instant may fork into mutually exclusive futures; branches diverge and never reconverge. Magenta shallow V anchored on the baseline 5. No direct back-walk To reach an earlier T-date an agent must exit Time, traverse an aevum, and re-enter. Crimson dashed path (Sea of Seven Lost Years) rising into aₚ then bending back to an earlier point on the baseline 6. Trial-balloon retro-message A not-yet-fixed future branch may send one information packet backward along an immaterial layer, landing strictly before its own fork. Black dashed left-pointing arrow above the baseline 7. Block-axis alignment A vertical dotted line marks instants that are logically co-present across layers; it shows how a single “now” spans T and aₚ (or aᵣ). Cyan dotted vertical 8. Block invariance Facts inside any fixed T-block remain identical whether viewed from past record, present sense, or prophetic knowledge. Implicit in the unbroken orange baseline (no edits after the fact) 9. Non-metric aevums Both aₚ diamonds and aᵣ hollow circles are evenly drawn  for legibility but signify an order without measure—no durations, no clocks. Discrete markers at y ≈ 1 and y ≈ 1.3 10. Cross-level personal identity A person’s continuum is the causal chain of slices (memory + form + intent) that may hop layers yet still counts as one and the same subject. Diamonds linked by crimson/teal paths crossing layers Let's use the model to read the memorable scene in More Than Melchisedech  where Duffey tells Gertrude that “if one brings any artifact … and touches it to the piece of talking oak that is built into the ship’s wheel, that talking oak will call out the year of origin of the piece in whatever aeon or era it belongs.”   This complete action (see diagrams) happens not across the Clock-Time (no one time-travels) but in the relational participated aevum (aᵣ): the immaterial covenant that links Argo , her crew, and every object ever bonded to the ship. Because aᵣ is ordered yet non-metric, the wheel can “see” dates that sit far to the right of the baseline, events whose personal aeva  (aeons) have not yet intersected T, then pipe that information leftward along the black dashed retro-arrow (Rule 6). Nothing violates Rule 3’s forward-only motion inside T; the data surfaces across layers. The vertical dotted “now” slots Duffey, Gertrude, and the wheel at one instant, while the hollow circle marking the ship-artifact slice shows that, inside aᵣ, that future year is already present. Reading the scene this way, the wheel’s prophecy isn’t supernatural clairvoyance; it’s the normal, cross-level traffic of a relational aevum mirrored in the diagrams. With a touch of irony, we can say that the wheel’s so-called clairvoyance ceases to be miraculous. It is simply the routine, cross-level logic of relational aᵣ, laid out in the diagram. This brings us to how Montejo conceptualizes metaxy in Lafferty, the “between-space” where aeviternal reality and ordinary clock-time meet. Drawing on Origen, he suggests that Lafferty multiplies that middle tier into many aeviternal manifolds, each of which can open onto temporality. I would keep the same point of contact but interpret it differently: metaxy is the instantaneous act of participation whereby any personal ( aₚ ) or relational ( aᵣ ) slice of the single Thomistic aevum  brushes the temporal baseline, so no corridor between separate aeons and no additional stratum is required. Other puzzles in the book can also be worked through. Take Duffey’s three childhoods: Argo Puzzles # Puzzle in the fiction (verbatim / neutral paraphrase) Why the Origen-based model can stall T – aₚ – aᵣ interpretation 1 The Argo’s wheel “dating-clock.”  Any object touched to the talking-oak inset “will call out the year of origin … in whatever æon or era it belongs,” and the log “covers anything within the last nine thousand years, or the next sixty-seven.” Origen-based model’s leaking-æons idea gives no metric binding the ship–artifact pair or limit explaining the ±9 000/ +67-year horizon, so the read-out remains mysterious. The wheel queries the Argo–crew relation inside non-metric aᵣ . Makers of artifacts (past 9 k years back or 67 years ahead) already co-exist there, fixing the log’s span; the wheel simply reports a date present in aᵣ , not foretelling. 2 Mixed simultaneity.  For a Master the deck may be future while dockside folk experience the same instant as present . Overlapping æons “leak” qualitatively but never assign observers to slices, leaving simultaneity ad hoc. Rule 7  erects a vertical block-axis through T, aₚ, aᵣ  defining one shared Now . A Master translates along his personal aₚ fork, acts, then rejoins T ; observers anchored in T  experience one continuous moment. 3 Effigies & the Sea of Seven Lost Years.  Duffey lives seven subjective years offstage while an effigy works the deck, then returns with no seven-year gap in public time. Origen-based model concedes æons hold “before/after,” yet offers no way to detach a seven-year block or empower a copy without causal rupture. Rule 4  lets a private aₚ  fork sideways from T ; the Lost Years lie on that forked segment. Re-joining under Rule 5  projects length 0 onto T . An effigy borrows Duffey’s aₚ  vector and essential aᵣ  bindings, so the ship runs normally. 4 Conflicting testimony (St Louis vs Omaha).  Some witnesses swear Duffey was present; others insist he vanished for those same years. Æonic “ripples” give no criterion for selective impact. A detached aₚ fork rejoins T only at certain loci. Where it has not rejoined, Duffey’s aᵣ  bindings are absent (memory gap); where it has, bindings exist (memory intact); hence mutually consistent yet contradictory accounts. 5 Swimming ashore in 1923 still “quite a young man.”  The Lost Years “are not deducted from the years of the life,” though Duffey experienced them. Origen-based model must posit “æonic shrinkage” to square real metabolic ageing with zero external lapse; no energy ledger is offered. Proper time and entropy accrue along the fork; its projection on T  remains 0. Energy generated on the fork is carried with it and re-enters T  at the join, preserving conservation without chronological deficit. 6 Seven traversals of the Lost Years.  Duffey is told he “has lived … and died” those years seven times. Single-pass æons forbid repetition; extra traversals are ad hoc. Multiple private aₚ¹, aₚ² … forks can branch, age, die, and all rejoin the same T-event  with projection 0, naturally stacking memories and deaths. 7 Biloxi Brannagan’s thirty-year shore-leave  occurs during a “quite short” Argo absence. “Elastic duration” is asserted but no invariant couples the clocks. The ship’s aᵣ  ordering lacks a metric; Brannagan’s thirty-year aₚ fork still rejoins T  with projection 0, so the log merely notes “leave complete.” 8 Casey Gorshok mars three effigies; Masters survive.   The theory wavers on whether injury crosses æons. Each effigy holds a borrowed aₚ vector and selected aᵣ  bindings. Damage perturbs those bindings, causing remote shock, but never reaches the distant aₚ  source, so each Master lives. 9 Duffey’s bones rest aboard while living Duffey steers.   Origen-based model replies with “symbolic recurrence,” skirting dual mass–energy. The coffin contains a spent effigy: once its borrowed aₚ  is released, inert matter tagged in aᵣ remains. Living Duffey continues on another aₚ fork, so both manifestations coexist without identity clash. 10 Three overlapping childhoods and clashing memories.  Duffey jokes he wishes for “more than three” to choose from. “Resonant dream æons” give no rule for reconciling contradictions. Concurrent aₚ forks let several childhood segments occupy identical spans of T ; when the forks merge, bringing memories while leaving somatic histories disjoint, mutually exclusive yet co-present recollections arise. • T  = baseline public time (what outside observers call “history”). • aₚ  = personal/“proper” aevum, a metric time-line an individual can fork sideways  from T . • aᵣ  = relational aevum, a timeless, non-metric web of relationships. • fork  = a detour in aₚ  that departs from T  and later rejoins it. • projection 0  = the fork’s elapsed duration in T  is exactly zero; clocks in baseline history advance not at all while the traveller’s proper time advances along the fork. When it comes to the ship’s prophetic log, the split witnesses, and the Seven Years, this non-Origen model does help explain how these high concepts (and others) work in-world. Whether one needs that extra machinery depends on how much value one places on ontological parsimony. Do you really want billions of aeons leaking into each other? It also depends on how allergic one is to either Origen or to ragged ends. Does it matter? Probably not. One can always make allowances as problems arise. But the interpretative choices do have consequences. For example, how would each model handle other in-world aspects of faith that mattered to Lafferty—like the Communion of the Saints? Catholic teaching Many-Æons model One-Aevum model “One Church in heaven and on earth”  (LG 49) Must insist that multiple aeons still form one  Mystical Body; danger of implicit pluralism. Fits naturally: one immaterial measure ⇒ one ecclesial milieu. Simultaneity of the beatific vision after death Straightforward: each aeon instantly offers its saint the Vision. Also straightforward. Universality of Marian mediation Needs meta-aeonic privilege for Mary to access every manifold.* Simple: Mary’s slice permeates the whole aevum and so every time. Eucharist as “synaxis with all angels and saints” Would require real-time convergence of aeons at every Mass—possible but complex. Mass already “touches” the single aevum; the communion is ontologically built-in. What I think does  matter is how Lafferty’s Argo  cycle demands that the reader think about time and think with the past and with the thinkers of the past. Aquinas is out of step with the development of sacred dogma in a few places, the best known of which is Mary’s sanctification. Origen has always been a complex figure in Catholicism: both toweringly inspirational and more than a little dangerous, a man who perhaps avoided heresy only by the timing of his birth and the slow development of sacred doctrine. He hovers over the contemporary Catholic Church, especially in its embrace of nuptial theology since John Paul II, and in certain quarters that quietly (and not so quietly) flirt with universal reconciliation. Wherever one lands on the aeon question in Lafferty, on which so much of the surface madness of the Argo  cycle depends, it is worth pausing over one of its great passages, found in “From the Commentary of Count Finnegan”: "Simple insanity is like heresy in one way. It loses, or it throws out, only one thing of many, and it keeps the rest. It allows the original structure (whether of mind or of institution) to stand, with only one big gaping hole in it. Sometimes the structure will collapse quickly then (if the gaping hole is at the heart of it); but sometimes it will stand for a very long time with the wind whistling through that hole. If the wind does not happen to blow from the wrong direction, one might not even notice the insanity, or the heresy." * Here is my reasoning. If souls are spread across multiple aeons that only touch one another sporadically, Mary’s universal reach cannot be taken for granted. Either every aeon must overlap with hers (which collapses the plurality), or Mary must enjoy a higher-order status that lets her step into, or be simultaneously present in, all  those aeons. You would need a proposed “meta-aeon" to preserve both the cosmology (many semi-autonomous aeons) and  Catholic teaching. By making the allowance that Mary’s glorified presence is not limited to one ordinary aeon, she would hold a trans-aeonic  or pan-aeonic  position, functionally the “hub” through which graces flow to every spoke. But now that you have allowed a pan-aeonic factor into the scheme around a strictly human person, why did you want all those aeons in the first place?

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration): Mimesis 1 is the pre-narrative, lived understanding of human action, encompassing its structural, symbolic, and aporetic temporal dimensions, which generate a demand for narrative configuration. Mimesis 2 (Configuration) : Mimesis 2 is the pivotal, poetic act of emplotment that, by "grasping together" diverse elements, creatively forges a followable, discordant concordance from succession, offering a poetic resolution to the aporias of lived temporality (Mimesis1). Mimesis 3 (Refiguration): Mimesis 3 is the refiguration of the reader's world through the act of reading, where the text's configured world, via poetic reference and iconic augmentation, intersects with and reshapes lived experience and temporality, with the reader actively completing the narrative and potentially having future action remade. --- Today I want to share some thoughts on Andrew Ferguson’s 2014 article in Science Fiction Studies , which, as far as I know, is the first peer-reviewed piece devoted entirely to R. A. Lafferty. It’s a significant and thoughtful contribution. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis, Ferguson offers a focused and philosophically grounded reading of Lafferty’s work. Ricoeur’s ideas are not easy to work with, and Ferguson brings them into the conversation well. That said, I’m reluctant to adopt his argument in full. My hesitation concerns preserving what I would call ontological sacramentality—something that, in my view, Ferguson’s reading does not accommodate. While his account is brilliant and fascinating, it leaves limited room for this dimension of Lafferty’s project. Before getting started, I want to point out that for Ricoeur, mimesis is about how humans make sense of time, action, and identity through narrative, the real stuff of our lives. Fiction is one way of doing this, but mimesis underlies all forms of meaningful storytelling, including history, autobiography, the routines of daily life, religion, myth, law, medicine, and so on. It’s an ontological and epistemological process, not just an artistic one. The stakes for getting it right are high. So, what does Ferguson argue? He writes that Lafferty’s fiction stages a radical “day-after” moment in which the old symbolic order has collapsed and only the “bones and stones” of culture remain. Because these remnants are, in his words, “informationally dense yet symbolically undecipherable,” narrative cannot open with Ricoeur’s mimesis 1 (pre-figuration). It must begin in mimesis 2, where an act of fictive declaration renames the debris, posits new anchors, and configures a provisional plot. Only after that reboot can mimesis 1 emerge, giving readers a usable horizon that they complete in mimesis 3 through a fusion of horizons with the text. In short, world-building proceeds in a kind of Ricouerian retrograde, m₂ → (re-create) m₁ → m₃, and its footing is initially immanent, constructed from the speech-act of storytelling itself. For that very reason, adopting Ferguson’s model wholesale has big knock-on effects for how we understand Lafferty’s theological imagination. If our current reality and every story Lafferty tells has to begin in mimesis 2 (on a ground conjured by sheer fictional declaration), then the sacramental chain that normally links creation, history, and eschaton is, at least functionally, cut. On this point, one should remember that in the 1979 talk “The Day After the World Ended,” Lafferty keeps the theological largely offstage: “I’m not even pushing transcendence over gosh-awful secularism,” he says. At the same time, the “gosh-awful” tips his hand. Ferguson’s retrograde sequence (again, m₂ → re-created m₁ → m₃) risks turning Lafferty's courteous half-restraint into another version of the secularist hermeneutic Lafferty disparages. Why is this the case? By starting Lafferty's Ghost Story in mimesis 2, Ferguson's reading confines the first phase of world-building to a purely semiotic fiat and postpones any return to pre-figurative until the narrative has rebuilt a horizon from the ground up. As a logical possibility, mimesis 1 could later flag transcendence, but this (for reasons that I will explain in a moment) would be like painting a window on a wall and trying to look through it. The central issue is that, for Ferguson, the pre-figurative horizon in Lafferty becomes operative only after a human act of re-signification. Its depth, then, is derivative of human declaration, falling far short of the ontological continuity that Lafferty assumes, even when he leaves it mostly unspoken. The alternative, as he puts it, is “gosh-awful.” There is another theoretical snag: in Ricoeur’s own scheme mimesis 2 presupposes the competencies, temporal intuitions, actions, and symbolic networks of mimesis 1, so "beginning" the three mimetic moments without an already functioning pre-figuration (mimesis 1) hobbles the coherence of the model itself. Making that case would require more patience than I can expect of anyone here, so I just suggest it as something to consider. If you want to look into it, a good place to begin is Ricouer claim in Time and Narrative, Vol 1, that "Whatever the innovative force of poetic composition within the field of our temporal experience may be, the composition of the plot is grounded in a preunderstanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character. These features are described rather than deduced" (67). In other words: "the composition of the plot" : This clearly refers to Mimesis 2, the configurational act of emplotment. "is grounded in": This phrase directly indicates presupposition and dependency. Mimesis 2 cannot exist or function meaningfully without Mimesis1. " a preunderstanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character": This is a comprehensive list of the core components of Mimesis 1 Setting that theoretical problem aside for now, here is the theological problem with Ferguson's proposed model, as I see it: ID Proposition drawn from Ferguson F1 The “day-after” debris is ontically present  (“bones and stones” retain informational density). F2 That debris is symbolically undecipherable  until a fictive act in mimesis 2 renames it. F3 Because nothing is decipherable, mimesis 1 is functionally collapsed ; narrative must open in mimesis 2. F4 Mimesis 2 performs a declarative bricolage : it calls anchors “into being,” re-plots the ruins, and thereby re-creates  a usable mimesis 1. F5 Only after this re-created mimesis 1 is in place can mimesis 3 occur and any deeper horizon (including sacramental meaning) potentially  re-enter. F6 During the opening phase, symbols can evoke transcendence only aesthetically ; they cannot mediate grace efficaciously because sacramental mediation presupposes an already-operative mimesis 1. This means there is a point where people are cut off from it. From F2 and F3, the chain of sacramental poesis is non-functional at the start. From F4 and F5, any later recovery of that chain depends entirely on a human act of re-signification . Therefore, in Ferguson’s retrograde sequence, the narrative’s initial stance is post-Christian in practice; transcendence lacks ontological continuity with creation until the text "fabricates" a new horizon. How can this be modified? The first step would be to identify each propositional sense of “world” in "The Day After the World Ended." Once those senses are clarified, we can set Lafferty’s full argument alongside Ricoeur’s three-moment sequence and ask, case by case, whether mimesis 1 is truly absent or merely dormant and still readable. Lafferty’s own cues, such as “Somebody had better be remembering fragments” and “Fine building stones all around us,” suggest that some of the debris becomes intelligible the moment it is recalled and sparked. Ferguson, by contrast, describes the same fragments as “symbolically undecipherable” until a declarative act in mimesis 2 renames them. Let's create a clarified table of “world senses” to serve as a diagnostic. The question we need to ask is whether Lafferty ever writes from a point where the pre-figurative horizon is completely erased, or whether a readable remnant persists in every world he creates. When Lafferty says the “world” is lost, I take him to mean that the cultural world has collapsed, not that every pre-figurative condition has vanished. He still speaks of the physical cosmos ( world₁ ) and addresses his listeners as choice-making, situated subjects. This is evidence that world₇ —the immediate Lebenswelt —endures, even if attenuated, after the intermediate worlds have ended. Recall that Ferguson, by contrast, argues that this pre-figurative horizon has been “flattened” and “cannot even enact the first stage of mimesis, or mimesis 1.” Lafferty must therefore “begin instead with mimesis 2 … and then build backwards,” calling every anchor “into being by fictive declaration” before any mimetic capacity can be re-instilled. A good way to get at this is through the historical novels. In Ferguson’s scheme, The Fall of Rome  and Okla Hannali  become laboratories. Lafferty scavenges “bones and stones” that remain “inscrutable” until re-named in configuration (mimesis 2). Only after this bricolage can readers, in refiguration (mimesis 3), fuse their own horizon with the text and install a substitute mimesis 1—a humanly fabricated ground rather than a recovered sacramental continuum. The historical worlds the author fashions are initially immanent, since every symbolic anchor must be declared in mimesis 2. I would want to avoid these consequences. The physical cosmos and its metaphysical structure ( world₁ ), along with the Lebenswelt  ( world₇ ), would remain sufficiently ontologically intact for mimesis 1 to be badly damaged but not erased. Flatland  ( world₄ ) names the unstructured condition in which people negotiate this loss, not a complete estrangement from mimesis 1. A total rupture that blocked subjects from mimesis 1 would, paradoxically, eliminate even the awareness that people have that anything had been unstructured in the first place. It is hard to see how they would still be people at all because consciousness of lack presupposes a horizon of fullness that can be conceptually re-presented, which is already a rudiment of mimesis 1. On my reading of Ricouer, Lafferty salvages fragments of the collapsed West ( world₂ ) and other civilizations ( world₃ ), sets them beside the abiding cosmic and experiential substrates ( world₁ and world₇ ), and gestures toward a prospective world₆ that remains in continuity with its sacramental past because mimesis isn't completely inaccessible. It's what he's doing when he writes The Fall of Rome  and Okla Hannali. He opens new futures through acts of imaginative remembrance. Through this “construction after destruction,” the real historical destruction of those actual historical worlds, the narratives reignite a damaged mimesis 1 and show via recovery that grace can still traverse history’s breaks. Transcendence is not manufactured this way in mimesis 2 or mimesis 3. Lafferty rindkeld it from the pre-figurative depth that Flatland never fully levels. To twist a famous Faulkner quote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Or to quote Lafferty, there are no endings. It can’t end. I think that Ferguson’s retrograde Ricouerian sequence has the consequence of making Lafferty a virtuoso of post-Christian world-creation and domesticating him for a highly educated secular audience. This is fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your own commitments. If the fragments are “informationally dense yet symbolically undecipherable,” the sacramental horizon is functionally silent, and the story must begin in mimesis 2 on an immanent footing. Sacramental symbols transmit revelation only when they are decipherable; at the mimesis 2 stage, they can only imagine transcendence aesthetically. And, as I have said, it's not necessary. In Ricoeur’s own model, mimesis 2 presupposes the competencies and symbolic networks of mimesis 1. Starting the hermeneutic reduplicating spiral without a functioning pre-figuration strains both Catholic sacramental logic and Ricoeur’s theory itself. Ricourer argues that hermeneutics is concerned with reconstructing the entire arc of operations by which practical experience provides itself with works, authors, and readers. It does not confine itself to setting mimesis 2 between mimesis 1 and mimesis 3. It wants to characterize mimesis 2 by its mediating function. What is at stake, therefore, is the concrete process by which the textual configuration mediates between the prefiguration of the practical field and its refiguration through the reception of the work, which is just to say that mimesis 2 is defined by its mediating function . That Ferguson traps Lafferty in an initial mimesis 2 is ironic since Ricouer created his theory out of intellectual frustration. He thought the French structuralists had lost the phenomenological by focusing too much on mimesis 2: everything became the relation of signs. For Ricoeur’s type of hermeneutical mediation to occur, a prefiguration (mimesis 1) must still be minimally present, even if damaged, because there must be something for configuration to mediate from and something for refiguration to mediate to. Ferguson sees mimesis 1 flattened and unable to be enacted until after a fictive declaration in mimesis 2. This fiat removes the very pole that mimesis 2 is meant to mediate from, contradicting Ricoeur’s claim that hermeneutics must “reconstruct the entire arc of operations.” It seems that a functioning, though exhausted or abruptly transformed, mimesis 1 is non-negotiable, whereas Ferguson initially seals off mimesis 1 and thereby breaks the dialectic Ricoeur insists must already be in place. A latent-mimesis reading like the one I have outlined here keeps Ricoeur’s three moments of mimesis in its original logical order. It also keeps Lafferty a metaphysically realist Christian fabulist whose world-making shows that shattered cultures can still mediate grace. I would add that this rests on creatio continua  ( conservatio in esse ), whereby God continually sustains both the cosmos ( world₁ ) and each person’s Lebenswelt ( world₇ ) . "Lightning, a billion times as bright as that on Electric Mountain, a billion times as short in duration — does it lace the things together with its instantaneous fire, or sunder them forever? " Two Ways to Read Lafferty Through Ricoeur question Ferguson’s retrograde reading Latent-mimesis reading Where does the story begin? In mimesis 2  on a ground created by a fictive declaration that must rename the “bones and stones.” In a wounded mimesis 1 ; debris is already meaningful though dormant. Configuration ignites what survives. Status of mimesis 1 at the start Collapsed and non-functional. It must be rebuilt after m₂. Latent but present (world₁ and world₇ still carry sacramental depth). Order of the spiral m₂ → re-created m₁ → m₃. m₁ (latent) → m₂ (world-building) → m₃. How are fragments described? “Informationally dense yet symbolically undecipherable” until renamed. “Fine building stones” that are already readable once remembered and sparked. Footing of early world-building Initially immanent, purely semiotic. Immediately open to sacramentality through surviving cosmic and experiential layers. When can transcendence re-enter? Only after the rebuilt m₁ is installed; optional, not guaranteed. Always latent; grace can flash through the rubble from the first moment. Theological consequence Functional break in the chain creation–history–eschaton; risk of a secularist hermeneutic. Chain is stretched but unbroken; Lafferty remains a Christian fabulist who shows grace mediating through ruins. Ricoeur coherence test Starts the spiral without the competencies of m₁, creating a tension in Ricoeur’s own model. Keeps Ricoeur’s precedence of m₁ over m₂ and m₃ intact. The Seven Worlds of “The Day After the World Ended” label compressed definition key passage world₁ – physical-cosmic Material cosmos that can suffer “cosmic destructions.” “Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds.” world₂ – structured Western world “Western/Modern Civilization,” ‘The World’ for a few centuries, ending somewhere between 1912 and 1962. “…the end of the world  in which we lived … still sometimes referred to as ‘Western Civilization’ or ‘Modern Civilization’.” world₃ – any civilization-unit A Toynbee-style culture that can burn and phoenix-rebirth. “the historian Toynbee … grubbing into the depths of twenty-four separate civilizations or worlds.” world₄ – post-world / Flatland Unstructured, half-conscious limbo after world₂’s collapse—scarcely a world, yet the setting of the crisis. “We are now in an unstructured era … in a post-conscious world … We’re living in Flatland.” world₅ – literary / imagined world Any internally coherent reality invented by prose, especially SF “world-building.” “‘Sometimes [science fiction] designs new worlds.’ ” world₆ – future world-to-come A not-yet-realised civilization that sparks might kindle from present rubble. “There will be … a new world, a new civilization-culture to follow …” world₇ – personal experiential world The individual Lebenswelt. “I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made.” Table A | From Residual Latency to World-Creation mimetic moment creation-oriented reading Residual pre-figuration (m₁) world₁  endures; world₇  survives though “half-conscious.” Ruins of world₂  and myths of world₃ lie dormant—material potential  awaiting ignition. Re-configuration (m₂) Crisis: collapse of world₂ into world₄ . Creative act: audience is exhorted to strike sparks that can invent   world₆  from the dormant debris. SF conventions ( world₅ ) supply cannibalised design tools. Re-figuration (m₃) Commissioning line—“ If you are not right now making a world, why aren’t you? ”—hands the creative work to readers. Appropriation succeeds because m₁, though latent, can be activated to support brand-new world-creation, not mere restoration. Table B | Agreement & Divergence with Ferguson (2014) # analytic point Ferguson latent-creation view relation 1 Status of m₁ Flatlanders lack any functional m₁ m₁ survives ontically but is dormant until sparked disagree  (degree) 2 Symbolic debris Ruins are “bones and stones,” undecipherable until renamed Same debris is already readable once remembered and sparked disagree  (function) 3 Mode of world-making Anchors are called into being by fictive declaration cobbled from ruins New world emerges by activating latent structures—creation through debris, not from nothing partial disagree 4 SF conventions Must be dissected and reincorporated Same cannibal logic agree 5 Reader collaboration Fusion needs rebuilt horizons Fusion works once dormant m₁ is stirred; collaboration builds world₆ agree + nuance 6 Spiral direction Begins in m₂, reverses to m₁, then proceeds m₁ → m₂ → m₃ Canonical forward flow once latent m₁ sparks; local back-mapping only for decoding mixed 7 Temporal grounding Calendar stuck in an “infinitely indivisible present”; time objects persist but mean nothing Damaged yet countable time becomes raw material for new chronology partial 8 Ethical task Violent interpretation clears space Violent world-creation from leftover matter agree Table C | Speech Touchstones and “Latent-Creation” Reading # speech line what it shows in the text Ferguson’s spin latent-creation spin 1 “Somebody had better be remembering fragments…” Fragments undeniably exist. Undeciphered until declared. They’re potential creative stock . 2 “We are, partly at least, in a post-conscious world.” Cognitive impairment, not total erasure (“partly at least”). Treats this as a functional blackout of mimesis 1. Calls it dormant awareness that can flare. 3 running jokes, quotations, exhortations Shared symbols still work in live performance. A paradox until a new ground is rebuilt. Performance itself is the ignition act. 4 “Fine building stones all around us” Ruins are already perceived as usable. Bones & stones remain undeciphered. They are proto-materials for new construction. 5 Stuck calendar reference Time is distorted but still countable. Evidence of a temporal void. Raw chrono-material for a new era. 6 “Ideas to germinate and sparks to kindle” The situation needs ignition. Implies an almost ex nihilo fiat. Spark = catalyst on latent debris. 7 Meta-title “Notes for a Speech Delivered the Day After…” A dual vantage: Lafferty addresses fans from within  Flatland’s day-after and from an outer rhetorical frame. Highlights the in-story zero ground; outer frame only underscores how deep the loss is. Two horizons: the rhetorical layer sparks diegetic creation; the speaker is simultaneously “in” Flatland and able to point beyond it. value-added = deeper readings of Lafferty’s corpus Textual fidelity Thinking of Flatland’s wreckage not as an absence but as latent energy helps explain how Lafferty’s blend of folklore, patristics, and tall-tale humor still resonates in his bleakest settings. This view extends to his stories where ruin and absurdity do not halt the symbolic interplay but instead drive it into deeper, stranger forms. Theoretical coherence with Ricoeur By letting mimesis₂ presuppose a wounded yet present  mimesis₁, we gain a systematic way to track how Lafferty’s plots repeatedly jump from broken worlds to exuberant invention. It supplies a stable hermeneutic spine for reading the whole oeuvre, not just one speech. Middle-way synthesis Casting the “bones and stones” as sparks-in-waiting  reconciles Lafferty’s apocalyptic rhetoric with his stubborn hopefulness. Transferable heuristic (“latent scaffolding → ignition → new world-building”) This three-step pattern leads readers to ask direct questions about the latent elements it brings to light. It serves as a tool for tracing thematic arcs throughout the full span of Lafferty’s work.

Lafferty’s knack for weird and wonderful words is a big part of the joy of reading him. His stories don’t just tell—they sing, hum, crackle, and bang with the pleasure of language. Some of that magic lies in the odd, rare, and sometimes completely made-up words he slips in, all part of his linguistic mischief. One of my favorites? Gynotikolobomassophile —his coinage for someone who loves women with fat ankles. For anyone tracking down these linguistic curiosities, a good place to start is with what linguists call hapax legomena , words that appear only once in an author’s body of work. I’ve compiled a full list of Lafferty’s hapaxes from his short fiction, which you’ll find attached. But in the meantime, here are some of his strangest and most delightful oddities. Some are his own inventions, some are simply obscure, but all of them are fun: Adynatogenesis  – The creation of impossibilities ( a-  "not" + dynatos  "possible" + genesis  "origin"). Akymatic  – Without waves ( a-  "not" + kyma  "wave"). Alogos  – Without reason ( a-  "not" + logos  "word, reason"). Anemonead  – Related to windflowers ( anemōnē  "windflower" + -ad  "group"). Cacemphatic  – Badly expressive ( kakos  "bad" + emphatikos  "emphatic"). Chryselephantine  – Golden and ivory ( chrysos  "gold" + elephas  "ivory"). Enteropneustron  – A creature that breathes through its guts ( enteron  "intestine" + pneustos  "breathed"). Logogriphs  – Word puzzles ( logos  "word" + griphos  "riddle"). Porphyrogenite  – Born into nobility ( porphyra  "purple" + genitos  "born"). Schedonanthropologist  – A near-expert on humanity ( schedon  "almost" + anthropos  "human" + -logist  "one who studies"). Stauroscopus  – A watcher of crosses ( stauros  "cross" + skopos  "observer"). It would be great to have something like Dan Temianka’s Jack Vance Lexicon  for Lafferty (link) . Like Vance, Lafferty didn’t just use words—he played with them, reshaped them, pulled them from the depths of history, and conjured them out of nowhere. Vance's polysyllables fit seamlessly into his mandarin eloquence, while Lafferty, somehow, made them an essential aspect of his own version of wild secondary orality. It’s one of the many reasons his work is so unlike anything else.

I thought it would be fun to build a program that generates visual maps for R. A. Lafferty’s fiction and nonfiction. After a fair bit of trial and error, I now have a version of the code that does part of what I originally had in mind. As I create these story maps, I’ll be sharing them, most likely in unedited form for now, in the hope that others will find them helpful. You can interact with the story map by moving the nodes. The connection lines between nodes are adjustable and display relationship details. Clicking on the nodes themselves gives you details about the characters and their relationships to other characters. The Elliptical Grave . (Thanks, Dan!)

I’ve been working on Okla Hannali and thinking about Lafferty's first draft in ‘63. It’s usually said, based on what Lafferty himself disclosed in interviews, that the novel draws heavily from his own experiences and from the stories of Indians he knew personally. That is undoubtedly a major part of it. But I also wonder when he became aware of the connection between the Choctaw and the Irish. Did he know this in his youth? If you have read Okla Hannali , you probably know that the Choctaw and the Irish people share a bond rooted in a really astonishing act of generosity. In 1847, during the height of the Irish Potato Famine, the Choctaw, reeling from their own suffering after the Trail of Tears, donated $170 to assist Irish famine relief. This compassionate gesture created a lasting connection between the two peoples, one that the Irish have honored and reciprocated in later years. Given Lafferty’s Irish heritage and his deep interest in Choctaw and Irish history, it seems plausible that this moment informed Okla Hannali in subtle but significant ways. After all, Oklahoma Irish Catholics and the Choctaw were both amid the alien corn. While the novel is largely built from oral histories, important sources such as John Swanson, and personal encounters, the spirit of solidarity between the Choctaw and the Irish probably shaped its emotional and thematic foundation.