Sunday 15 December 2013

Ishtar And Destruction

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Brief Lives (New York, 1994), Chapter 5, p. 20, Ishtar says that gods:

start as dreams;
walk into the land;
are worshiped and loved;
take power;
when they are no longer worshiped, return to dreams;
do not know what comes after.

Elsewhere in The Sandman, it is said that gods no longer worshiped go from Dream to Death to non-existence.

In Chapter 8, on p. 16, Ishtar's former lover, Destruction of the Endless, says that the Endless, whom we know to be anthropomorphic personifications of aspects of consciousness, are:

patterns;
ideas;
wave functions;
repeating motifs;
echoes of darkness;
nothing more.

Death told Destruction that everyone knows everything but pretends not to. Delirium comments:

"She is. Um. Right. Kind of. Not knowing everything is all that makes it okay, sometimes." (Chapter 8, p. 15)

One of my school teachers was, in some ways, rather obtuse but did make one wise statement, that if, at the beginning of life, we were given a preview of all that was ahead of us, we would not be able to face it.

Delirium insists that she knows things that even Destiny does not, including why she stopped being Delight (Chapter 7, p. 11).

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