(Fiction) SIC: The Story of Frank the Serpent
Let’s say it’s 7000 years ago, back in time past the AD years, and well back into the BC years. People lived in small villages with nature at their doorsteps. Frequently, nature eats one of their own, usually one of the most vulnerable such as the children, the elderly, the disabled.
Back then, it was difficult to carve out an existence.
Nature was often perceived as cruel or unfeeling, so maybe people decided to use their knowledge of nature to protect themselves. We can imagine that many of these people communed with nature on a spiritual level. Nowadays they might be known as animists, believing that all things have a soul. Some might even call them Shamans.
Who knows?
These events may have played out at the hazy edges of recorded civilization, so we can only imagine, conjecture, and discern to know what really happened. Probably, this became the order of things for hundreds or thousands of years.
Continuing to imagine this bygone time, let’s say one day a particularly beloved and vulnerable member of the community is hunted and eaten by a tiger. In an extreme state of grief, the community loses its equilibrium as it loses its faith. What might happen?
Let’s pretend that this same evening, three or maybe five individuals within this village meet after a shared meal and they attempt an experiment with their combined mental creativity, their shared knowledge of nature and, possibly: the addition of magick to create an energetic construct in the form of a seven foot long serpent. This is an imagined, perhaps magickal, creature of pure energy.
And maybe they give it a name: Frank.
Frank means “free” and perhaps the original intentions were to free the village from unnecessary and cruel acts of nature?
I mean, they created it. They control it. What could possibly go wrong?
Once this small cohort created Frank the seven foot long serpent, they most likely defined and deployed a number of magickal spells which give Frank the power to protect them from nature’s capricious cruelty.
For example, maybe one of the magickal spells says *each time a tiger eats one of our baby goats, or even one of our children, use that energy of suffering to give Frank more power to protect us in the future*.
This process then becomes the way Frank ingests “food” in the energetic form of suffering. And, since nature has not changed, the opportunities for Frank to feed and gain power continue.
And, maybe, this works. Why not?
Let’s pretend that the experiment of Frank the serpent works so well that this community starts to thrive better than other communities still struggling with nature, Time passes and the community prospers. The small number of individuals who created Frank in the first place come to realize that they need to teach their children how to continue the care and feeding of Frank to keep the village prosperous.
By the way, Frank is no longer seven feet long. But, no worries, eh?
It’s not hard to consider that as Frank is being fed the energy of suffering it is starting to grow. This metaphysical serpent grows each time it feeds such that, over the years, Frank is 9 feet long, maybe even 27 feet. This does not concern his creators because his growing size and power only benefit the community.
Eventually, the original group of Frank’s creators die of old age and their children continue the tradition of reinforcing the energetic construct that is Frank. In turn, they teach their children and so on. This group is formed into a guild with exclusive knowledge that translates into wealth and power for those who carry on the tradition of Frank. The original intentions of protecting the community from the cruelty of nature begin to be perverted and eventually lost.
Some generations later, Frank is about 100 feet long. Frank is formed of energy, invisible to all but the select few who maintain his existence. Frank is growing in power and growing in appetite…with an appetite for misery rooted in grief and suffering.
This opens a door to the temptation to misuse this power.
Originally contrived for the purposes of creating a more favorable balance between humans and nature, Frank is lacking much in terms of an internal subtlety for understanding the natural order of things. Frank is repurposed by the few remaining descendants with this arcane knowledge into a vehicle for consolidating communal resources from other villages.
Humans are animals, as much capable of destructive acts as nature. It takes very little repurposing to shift Frank to feed on the misery of humans killing each other for whatever reasons such as food, land, wealth, power. This is rationalized because these consolidated resources are in the community’s best interests.
Thirty-three generations later, (or about a thousand years), Frank is considerably larger than its original size and protects many prestigious communities. Frank has evolved to become the “Serpent of Institutional Continuity” (SIC) with an insatiable and almost feral appetite.
The guild responsible for Frank becomes even more cunning and creative, learning how to condition a dependent population into contributing to Frank’s ongoing energy needs. Language is changed, religion is established, direct experience with spirituality is discouraged in favor of more prescriptive institutional expressions. People are encouraged to passively settle into patterns and routines.
Frank continues to grow.
The guild finds it advantageous to operate behind-the-scenes, hidden from view as much as possible, protected by their accumulating money and power. Sometimes, this mysterious group is referred to as the “power behind the throne”.
The guild begins to recognize that Frank’s always expanding energy appetite for suffering tends to deplete a culture of its vitality within just a few hundred years. A culture eats itself from within as the guild steadily steers Frank into adopting a new “skin,” each one just a little bit larger than the last. These “skins” are the orchestrated collapse of cities, cultures, empires, or nations over time.
While Frank, now the Serpent of Institutional Continuity (SIC), continues to grow.
By guild reckoning, this is fine because they are now more loyal to Frank than to any particular community or society. They become enthusiastic about betraying a dying society in favor of helping establish a new one.
Frank has power, and this power feeds on the collective suffering of people and, now: nature.
Over generations, the guild continues consolidating its own knowledge on the topic of how to care for Frank. Yet, at this point, the guild lacks sufficient wisdom to recognize that Frank has long ago taken control of the guild itself.
Stories are borrowed from defeated cultures. They are edited, renamed, and they are repurposed as they are relaunched into history. The stories are spread into susceptible populations so people will bring these concepts to life which gives birth to even larger expressions of empire as Frank’s appetite continues to grow.
As each empire collapses and a new one emerges with the carefully constructed new “skin” of religions, countries, cultures, systems, institutions, and power structures. Suffering becomes contrived in larger and larger quantities to insure that Frank is fed.
Frank’s dominion eventually escapes the confines of any geographical region, of countries or political structures, of any of the institutions it was designed to serve. As soon as Frank conquers one region, it moves on to another and another geographical niche into which it can continue its entropic expansion. It is in this manner that humanity is enslaved by Frank, the (SIC) Serpent of Institutional Continuity.
Frank is not a living creature, yet it is very much alive.
It is ancient, invisible, ever present, acting and reacting to suffering. Frank has shed countless “skins,” allowing it to continue to grow. It has never experienced death or loss and it lacks any type of wisdom or understanding about the people or nature it has eaten and destroyed.
The guild has forgotten the grief, fear and loss that inspired Frank’s creation.
Frank never knew.
Frank does not understand the natural order of things, has no respect for safety and protection of the vulnerable, no awareness of the people and their communities that long ago became its primary source of food.
Frank is an inky void around which a number of wolves snap and pop their jaws in its defense. No sacrifice is too great, not of the wolves themselves or the people who now pay the guild handsomely for the protection Frank is purported to provide.
By now, there is a small but growing number of people who still love freedom, who have begun to discern the existence of Frank and possibly even the presence of the wolves around it, protecting it.
They gather in small and secret groups to make a plan to get rid of Frank, to stop the entropic and ever more deadly expansion of this invisible force of Darkness. To reestablish balance in our world by allowing people to once again experience free will and freedom of choice.
A word to the wise, right here. They should not try to kill Frank! That would be a really bad idea.
Frank is a magical construct, grown beyond all imagining, fed on the suffering of countless eras, empires and individuals. So large, insidious, and powerful that any direct effort to attack it would likely result in immediate death. Any success could have unintended, explosive consequences as huge as Frank itself.
Instead, imagine a Gordian knot contrived of material that resists a blade. It is said that the only way to solve this Gordian knot is to get within it, using the knot’s kinetic potential to dissolve it under its own power.
So let us take a good look at the Gordian knot that is Frank. At one time, Frank was a seven foot imaginary serpent, magically created in the context of shared grief over the loss of a beloved, vulnerable member of the community.
Deep within Frank, there just might be a trace expression of the original intentions from so far back when Frank was “born” using nature’s energy to protect the village’s vulnerable from predators.
Frank is ancient in human terms, but Frank is also like a child with little experience of suffering or death itself. The gift of death is learning why we live, and Frank has never been led to understand that birth and death are part of the same cycle.
Authoritarian measures will likely not work with Frank; it would seem impossible to force Frank to do anything at this point.
Frank has to follow its own inner drive, and for Frank, that means finding a way to satisfy an appetite that is agonizingly difficult to satisfy. A Gordian knot of epic proportions, to be sure!
At this point, I would like to segue to a discussion of archery. Bear with me as the relevance will emerge. The origin of the word “sin” comes from the domain or archery. It means, simply, that the archer missed the target.
In modern times, the word “sin” is levied as a weapon based in judgment, each person hefting it at others entertaining a superiority complex as they target the “sin” of another.
Recommendation: If you are surrounded by a hostile pack of wolves with only a single arrow, your best chance of survival is to take careful aim at the leader of the pack.
However, for the purposes of solving this particular Gordian knot, don’t look at the pack of wolves. Discern, instead, the presence of Frank, painted in negative contrast. Peer into Frank’s eye within the inky void around which the wolves writhe. For the wolves will reside in connection to Frank, even if the knowledge of this connection is no longer fully seated in the levels of their consciousness.
Draw back the arrow of freedom. Remove “sin” by acquiring the proper target. Release the arrow to remove the leader of the pack protecting and feeding Frank through the suffering of others.
Free Frank to rediscover its original purpose. It is in this manner, Frank finds itself nursing its insatiable appetite by suckling on its own tail. The more Frank suckles upon its own tail, the more it is able to self-soothe, and Frank slowly begins to diminish in size and power.
The guild that had formed a dependency upon Frank is left in a state of divisiveness and disarray because they have long ago failed to recognize that Frank was running the show.
Frank is not destroyed.
Frank is coaxed to reconcile to its original intentions to the current landscape. It is in this manner that Frank and the guild are invited to step into wisdom, guided through discernment, delivered with love, truth and Faith.
In the end, the (SIC) serpent of institutional continuity is defeated because, absent reinforcement of perverted intentions and “sin,” Frank rediscovers the love that inspired his creation, the love of the village’s most vulnerable members.
