From: Tagi@cup.portal.com (Tagi Mordred Nagashiva)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Detailed notes on Merlin Tarot: Merlin's Life
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 92 12:50:43 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)

9208.19 e.v.


Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The word of Sin is Restriction.


There was some talk about Merlin living his life backwards.  It was
mentioned that this would prove difficult for interactions.  My
understanding of how this could be possible is expressed in the letter
which follows.  There was, for a time, a thread on sci.philosophy.meta
on just this subject.  It may even still be there.

---------------------------

A Letter....

--------------------------------------------------------

Dearest Vivian,

I write this letter in communication on an issue of utmost
importance.  You think that you know me well.  Perhaps this is
true, for certainly you know more about things than I do concerning
my future.

This may be hard for you to believe, but tomorrow you will ask me to
write this letter.  Tomorrow you will have understood how we are
different and convinced me of my need to grow.  Please excuse the words
I use.  Often I fail to translate them before I express them.  The
tenses may be wrong for you, but the meaning will come once I explain
how we are different.

I am not from a different culture that I need to translate my language,
I am from a different time, rather, a different experience.  You
see, I live backward through time.  I plan for what you call my past.
As I grow younger, I remember the death of my awakening.  My before
means your after.  My after means your before.  We find it interesting
to remember each other's future.  My past is your future.  My future
your past.  The only way I write this letter is by removing the
scribbles from paper.  This quill works quite well in this regard
and I store the ink in a bottle of crude design.

Our experience of time is opposite to one another's and you think I
am strange because I do not know the past yet I remember the future.
'Mystic' they call me.  'Insane' they label me.  Curious, I search
your books on the future and close them, reading right to left, 
bottom to top, until I begin and am pleased by its content.  Why do
I read the book if I have read it before?  I can tell you exactly
what a book is about until I 'read' it in your way of thinking.  Then
I have no knowledge of its content.  Why can I never remember the
questions to your answers?  Offended, you wait as if I should say
something.  From indignancy to expectancy you ask the question and
then you seem friendly.  If I tried to answer you would think me
strange.

People called me 'senile' when I was young.  Your young is my old,
my young your old.  I wonder what it will be like to be pulled into
my mother and shrink into the cosmic origin of life.  Will I lose
my consciousness?  Will I become my parents?

I wake as you look so tired and I remove a bandage from my thumb.
It bleeds, so I pour water over it into the pitcher and hit it with
my knife.  The bleeding stops!  No cut.

Elimination intrigues me.  I sit down.  My bowels fill and my
bladder absorbs urine.  Later I get some dirty dishes from the servants.
Putting them on the table I sit down and enjoy the taste of my meal as
I regurgitate it, chewing it into wholeness, remove it from my mouth and
place it on the plate.  I spit up a mug of water also and, finishing
my meal I send it to the kitchen where they restore the animals and
plants to life.  Once a week they send the goods to market and
we receive silver.

Each evening I walk in the woods.  The sun rises in the sky and I
replace herbs and roots to their rightful place.  I do things and
people ask me to do them again.  I understand that they do not want
me to do them again, they want me to do them when I did them before.
I receive salves and elixirs and someone sends a message, asking me
to send them.  I understand what they mean.  I have lunch (like
giving birth) while reading a book.  I return to my tower as the sun
sets and the birds sing.

I am taking these letters off the paper because I want you to know
about my experience.  I will not 'remember' this letter just as you do
not 'remember' the meals you will have tomorrow.  As we pass this time
together try to take this idea into consideration when you deal with
me in your future (my past).  I will not remember your name one day
and you shall have to introduce yourself, just as I will have to
introduce myself to you again.  That night I shall die in your world.
As I remember it, I was born on that evening.

I don't want to tell you too much, my love.  Just as you told me
tomorrow (my yesterday): "The future is a joyous mystery, why spoil
it by telling secrets before their proper time?"  Now I wonder, who
created this letter and that question?  I remember it from yesterday's
conversation.  You had tears in your eyes and a smile on your
face as you said those words.  How could I know that I would
send you a letter which included them?  You remembered and recited
them from this letter.  I remember and recite them from our
conversation.  Where did they come from?  Quite a paradox.

I have been alive many years; many more than the decades that I
have left to live, some of which you can remember.  It is appropriate
that I will 'grow up' an orphan.  In many ways I do not wish to see my
mother until the end.  It must be as difficult for you to understand
and believe me now as it was for me when you took the time to explain
it to me yesterday.  Why did you wait until yesterday to do so?  Ah,
yet I see you tried to explain it earlier and I did not catch on.  
I suspect I would have an impossible time making you believe it
tomorrow when you wake up.  At least we shall have this time 
together and a fine letter to remember, to think back upon, relating
our separate pasts, our separate, yet connected experience of our
confusing lives.


With much love,

Myrddin


Invoke me under my stars.   Love is the law, love under will.

I am I!

Frater I Nigris (666)