"Savagery, Super-Science & Sorcery" – March 24th, 1991

"Three Septembers and a January"

The story featuring the “Emperor of America,” also known as Three Septembers and a January, is found in The Sandman #31, part of the “Fables and Reflections” collection. It was first published in 1991. This story, written by Neil Gaiman, is based on the true historical figure Joshua Abraham Norton, who declared himself “Emperor of the United States” in the 19th century. In Gaiman’s story, Dream (Morpheus) intervenes in Norton’s life to give him a sense of purpose, which shields him from madness and despair. This tale explores themes of delusion, identity, and the nature of self—a resonant chapter in The Sandman mythos, weaving history with the metaphysical and mythological.

“The majority of my family were either healers or lawyers, and I had the idea of studying pre-med, to make sense of the body and the mind and understand more clearly what was happening within me. Here, one of the major turning points in my regard for those systems of consciousness would happen in the streets of Boston …” …

After spending time at a community college I make my way to Boston University where I encounter characters who will infulence my movement deeper into the realms of magic and the subjective sciences

1990 – Boston University

The many methods of mind

By the time i’d made it to my twenties I had gained a small measure of discernment into the shifting tones which made up my world. I had graduated from Nassau community college and had been accepted into Boston University, where I would experience two major events that would shape the course of my story.

Difficulties with modern society

One of the great challenges i’ve had with modern society comes from the idea of myself as a tabula rasa, as not being made of the karmic impressions which make up the patterns of society and culture and regarding them from that place of innocence.

In essence, I found them incomprehensible, made of various kinesthete pressures and watercolor sensations that were incoherent and ungraspable. It was a kind of savant experience where the patterns that defined their existence and it’s comprehension were invisible to me, slipping like sand and liquid glass through my fingers. In comparison, the beings in the realms of fiction were somehow more real to me, more grounding, more relatable than the patterns I experienced in the people.

“When I still lived in the realms of psychology and western science, I considered myself a kind of savant, one that had tremendous access to certain dimensions of life and nearly total incomprehension of others. Yet over time, as I traveled further and further from that territory of the world, I came to see myself in a more mystical context as a being born with a certain awareness to fulfill a certain function which by definition lay outside the parameters of the so-called “civilized” world.”

“Super-Science”

Yet while Barrand’s class had inspired me, it was truly my relationship with Clark Sherlie that shifted the course of my inquiry.

“It was there, in the streets of Boston, that I first met Clark Scherlie, a being of no small measure of intellect and agency engaged in an M.D./PhD program at Harvard Medical School. He was a child prodigy who had gone to UCLA for microbiology and molecular genetics when he was 12, and I had met him in his early twenties while skating through the streets of Memorial Drive near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

“Wow. That’s impressive” said Calliope, raising her eyebrows. “It’s a rare story in this Age. But then again (she said with a smile), so is yours.”

“True” Peter admitted. “I realized I fit into the category of a kind of genius. Tell me Calliope, do you know what the word genius comes from?”

She nodded. “It comes from the original latin. It means ‘guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth’. Everyone has their own genius to one degree or another. It is part of the weave of their story and it’s purposing in the world.”

He nods in return. “Yes. And in the current Age it is usually interpreted to mean a significant degree of ability that exceeds the common framework of things, speaking to a quality of consciousness that is different than the norm.”

“And you felt Clark had this genius?” she asked.

“And myself.” he replied. “In the storm of incandescent energies I sensed around Clark I felt a certain grounding, a camaraderie of intensity which I had rarely experienced anywhere but myself. It was a beautiful thing, the way his consciousness moved through the ethers, and it’s distinctiveness, it’s groundedness into itself provided me with a reflection I deeply needed.”

This would be a major movement for me from the realms of science and psychology into what I considered my own feral intuitive senses as i’d considered Clark to be an example of the highest tier of that style of thinking and felt that while it was brilliant and fine, there was another road for my own storms and sensations.

—

It was during this time that I made a decision – that what I consider the intellectual shape of mathematics and the rote memorization of science to be inferior to the visceral language of precision that existed within the body.

To me Clark was the embodiment of a certain type of genius. A certain way of perceiving and processing information that was itself a shape within the shifting shapes of the world, a signature of energy that I could perceive in the subtle planes of what was.

This was important to me, and was instrumental in my leaving the world of biology and psychology behind, feeling the language of it’s substance in the subtle as being dry and disconnected from the visceral experience of life. In Clark I had seen the redemption of this style of consciousness, his mighty intellect transcending and exalting it’s form beyond anything I had encountered before. Yet for all of this, the style of consciousness that existed around the radiance of his genius was troublesome for me, incompatible with my own blend and brand of visceral excellence. In this Clark was both an ambassador of awareness and it’s transcendence, showing me that the way of mathematics and biological precision was not my true path.

Clark’s mind fascinated me. I had never met someone who had a comparable level of manic energy and intellectual process, whose consciousness could process information at a speed which I found appealing. Through the field I could feel his consciousness sparking along lines of information, connecting the constants throughout the disciplines in a structure that both elemental and disciplined, capable of seeing the underlying mathematics of life and process in a way that guaranteed his success in his chosen field.

It was super-science to me. Or at least, the super-scientist. A style of genius which worked within the structures of the paradigm of a certain type of thinking.

It was beautiful. Crystalline. Elegant in a form of polymathic transcendence. I could feel the timbres of Clark’s mind in the field, a thing of pressure creating diamonds out of the tides of the world. The shapes around it were fascinating to me, geometries of synapses and the rhythm of inner lightning forging connections at tremendous pace.

“Stalking the Wild Mind”

During what was an otherwise uneventful time at Boston University I took a class called “ Stalking the Wild Mind: The Psychology and Folklore of Extra-Sensory Perception and Psychic Phenomena“ which looked into the nature, an application of the arts of divination. Such was the first time I saw the impressions of psychic phenomena presented in a mainstream curriculum, something I now consider to be a precognitive precursor to the emergent trends of modern academia. While Barrand and I were not close and had no deep relationship, I have no doubt his class inspired me for what would be my own leaving of the common forms of academia for a more direct approach to the mystic arts.

True to form, I tried to use the definition to determine if a girl that I found attractive in the class would go on a date with me. (she did not), yet here was an interesting phenomenon – a class which addressed the very substance of consciousness. That was my interest in understanding And diagnosing the way in which I saw the world.

More than anything, Barrand’s class was an affirmation to what I was already feeling inside – that there was a language of the senses, one that spoke to the mathematics of motion and emotion more than to the vertices and valences of scientific formula.

September 27, 1991 – The Fisher King

It was in the wake of Clark’s brilliance and the inspiration of Barrand’s class that I made a decision, one informed by the inspirations of the movie “Labyrinth” from my childhood.

I loved the sphere. Whether it was the association with my love of the film or not, it represented a kind of excellence in the body, in the arts of motion, that sang to me. I spoke to my devotion to Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, and would be an integral part of my journey into the arts of motion.

Ethers and the Pavement

The sense that Clark and I were contemporaries in the raw strength and amplitude of our cognition was clear, and I experienced it as different "mutants", beings of a different shape and configuration that I could feel in the ethers. While his abilities manifested through the formulaic sciences and his perception of their relationships, mine moved more towards the dancing, towards the sphere and the worlds of story – yet both were sculptural things. He had told me of his desire to be a plastic surgeon, that he considered it an expression of art and to which i'd agreed, recognizing him.

It was then I had a vision, a recognition that in order to exist in this plane one had to develop repetitive patterns, yet to liberate oneself from this plane they had to dissolve those patterns. It was a strange sensation, one that I recognized as coming from a deeply transcarnate and celestial place, where I felt myself looking at the nature of the Creation, of the emanations of sound moving from Source consciousness into the world of forms and how they formed the basis for our identities and realities, simultaneously an identity and an imprisonment in the waves of colored sound that were form itself.

Much later in life i'd realize that I was seeing a pattern that would play out across my life, though it wouldn't be until 2024 that this would even arise in my consciousness.

While I did not recognize the word of it at the time, I later realized I was having a direct perception of the ethers of consciousness as they exist in the akasha.

Over time, the nature of this thing would truly challenge my ability to have acceptance for the mortal condition.

A Gathering of Magic

L.A. Story

August 1st, 1991 – The Dark Tower III – The Waste Lands

The Commonwealth

Kenmore Revelations

“There was a moment in Kenmore Square, Boston a few years later, where all of a sudden a fugue of information poured into me regarding the various systems of the world and how they interfaced with each other — “

There was a comic book store on the corner, and every week I would give my tithe to Story …

“What was that like?”

“It happened in the space around me, made of the gravities of those things, of commerce and banking and the flow of information and money through the systems of the world. It was both expansive and grounding, where I could feel the pulse of the world markets, the feeling of what was moving through the space around me, no different than the pulse of the electric lights and the flow of the cars and personalities that were constant in the space.”

“Enter the Fictiverse”

The early iterations of what I would eventually call the ‘Promethea Inception’ came together as I struggled to anchor in a way to articulate my unique relationship with Story.

Because I couldn’t grasp or hold onto the ideas of story-writing and editing as they existed in the modern world, story evolved for me as an act of ritual invocation, where I would incarnate an aspect of my own self into the story in a process which formed the world from the blankness of the page as an act of embodied invocation. It was a process where I would literally start with nothing, with the narrative of an white blankness to which there was a gradual etching of tones that formed into being with every act of writing.

“So this was the first time you felt you entered the world of story?” she asked.

“Not exactly. I had written a few short pieces when I was in high school, yet in the fugue the manner of it was lost.”

The Gunslinger

I had come late to the Stephen King series ‘The Gunslinger’ yet it’s significance in my story was vast. For me it was the tale of the last knight, the last of the House of Eld, finding his way across the blasted remnants of the once-worlds in defense of the Rose. Of the Dark Tower that sat at the center of the worlds.

1992

Cool World