As my interpretation goes – the narrator, Oinos, addresses the audience in the past tense, recounting a tale of a night in Ptolemais, from which he indicates that sometime thereafter he has “gone [his] way” into the region of shadows. He continues to describe the revelations of his journey- that there are secret things to be known, indicating that there are things of which many others will want to disbelieve- but that a few will find “much to ponder upon”. I feel great identification with the weight of the introduction of this passage, and as such decided to use Oinos as a pen name for the blog.
In the story itself, Oinos is an aware figure, at first to the goigns on of the time. He speaks of the plague (542 a.d.), and an astroligical event which seems to indicate impending change- altering the very "souls, imaginations and mediations of mankind". In reasearch, I found a book with some historical analysis which offers a few interesting historical notes -
"The action takes place in the twilight of Greco-Romand civilization in Egypt, where even older cultures had flourished and were no more. The scene is appropriately laid in the city of Ptolemais, where the Sun casts no shadow at noon during the summer solstice; what better city could have been chosen for the ever-present Shadow, Death, than that in which the Sun himself casts none?"There Oinos sat... aware of the figure of Zoilus, dead, within the same room staring intently upon them. Zoilus was a greek philosopher and critic who was famous, in part, as an early critic of Homer. An interesting note with this is an apparent proverb that existed at the time- "Every poet has his Zoilus". I imagine Poe may have seleted this figure to be the scrutinizer - symbolic of a figure who, essentially, made a life and a career out of criticizing one man harshly. Although Zoilus criticized other philosophers at the time (Isocrates, Plato), Homer was supposedly his primary focus of scrutny. This is perhaps conveyed by the narrator describing Zoilus' interest their merriment, but the un-nerving feeling that he "felt that the eyes of the departed where upon [him]".
It is in this work from Poe that I found the personification of the motivation for this blog. I had already started down the path of learning about the disclosed histories of other great empires- Russia, China and the like. I had begun to venture outside my own beliefs to explore the histories of not only other religions- Hinduism, Buddhism, Muslim, Scientology- but the re-visitation and the re-evaluation of my own Christian-rooted understandings.
It was in these two key areas- government and religion- that I began to piece together some common repeated themes of deception, control, and corruption of original values and ideals for the express purpose of not just self gain, or ambitious domination, but furthermore to completely fabricate and cultivate entire generations of thoughts and beliefs that were founded upon terrible lies, terrible atrocities, and an underlying desire for control.
Now, granted, I am not (nor was I) completely naive as to fall completely surprised by much of what I read. I’ve known for many years the capabilities of man in negative pursuit – but it was when I started to realize that some areas that should have been grossly astonishing to the people at the time or the world at large – areas that should have been obvious to the complete laymen with any shred of common sense or decency, but wasn’t- that I began to feel that same twisting anxiety that people feel when they hear the story of Kitty Genovese and the perplexing “bystander effect” that it coined.
I remember reading about things like The Great Leap Forward in China, and the famines during the Collectivization periods of Russia, where body counts in the tens of millions (dwarfing those of Hitler), ended with a historic footnote that people like Mao and Stalin were generally regarded by the people as heroes despite it all! “How could this be!”, I thought, in periods of time when media existed, where information could travel fast enough to not be able to altered or suppressed 100% of the time!
It was somewhere in understanding the concept of Cult of Personality that I realized one key thing – we are in part engineers, sometimes willingly, of our own deceptions- even on a grand scale. Certainly, there are individuals out there, working hard day any night, to create those deceptions and attempt to sell them to us, but we certainly are liable if not in some cases culpable to these actions. And once these cons have taken enough of a foothold on the people to become enforceable, or at the very least defendable, then we have doomed ourselves to partial responsibility for the results that follow.
And this, then, is the catchphrase for the blog: “Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.” – The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived. The blog url exists as a play on words along similar lines – “decipi revera”, loosely translated to “Ensnare in reality”.
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