Sedon's Head: Inspiration or Destination

Growing up I was accounted as having a fertile imagination, -- although I have to admit there were some who said it was febrile. My Greek grandfather told me I had a fabulous 'phantacea', a word that simply meant imagination in his native tongue. As a teenager in the late Sixties I was often accused of having my head in the clouds. (I assume they meant the ones in the sky, not the bedroom.) There were even times I was accused of being lost in my own headworld. Whereupon I had this inspiration.

Wouldn't it be interesting, I thought, if there was an actual Headworld, a place where not just me but anyone who knew how could go? That in mind I drew one up. It looked something like the image on the right of this paragraph. This Headworld had to have a name and, not wanting to be exclusive, I could not very well call it Jim's Headworld, could I? So for reasons that are still somewhat of a mystery to me I called it Sedon's Head instead.

A number of years later, in the late Seventies, I decided to put out my own comic book series. Which I did; called it PHANTACEA and wrote and published six issues before I ran out of money. Pass forward some more years, into the mid-Eighties. Around that time I sold an enormous amount of back issues. Which of course meant I could publish more comic books. Which I did, including a graphic novel entitled "Forever and Forty Days - The Genesis of PHANTACEA". Whereupon I promptly ran out of money again. The ultimate villain in this novel was, of course, this Sedon fellow. Who, as you might have realized by now, is the Devil.

Not being a complete idiot I decided I would not be self-publishing any more comic books or, especially, any more graphic novels. I still had all these characters, though, and had been afflicted with the writing bug since long before I came up with Sedon's Head. I bought a Smith Corona PWP (Personal Word Processor) with some of the proceeds from selling all those aforementioned back issues of the original comic book series and purchased my first personal computer, an IBM, in the early Nineties. Along comes the Worldwide Web and, after learning HTML, mostly from a book, I launched PHANTACEA on the Web in 1996. Idea was to put up my weekend writings and sell disks with complete novels on them for $10 U.S. Sold a few too. Which partially explains why I started having money again.

I took to travelling farther afield during my vacations. (Yes, I had a regular job in those days. As any would-be writer learns at an early age you don't give up your day job for the sake of your art. Or artlessness, as the case may be.) On Crete, which claims a civilization as old as Ancient Egypt, I made what I considered an intriguing and, to my mind, serendipitous discovery. Was a cave I had never heard of before, where all sorts of ancient Etocretan (circa 2000 BC) artefacts were found. Its name? The Sedoni Cave.

In the Bible you can read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities that were apparently destroyed around the same time, circa 2000 BC. I'm reliably informed that in the Jewish Talmud there's a story about King Solomon, who reigned around 1000 BC, and another King, that of the Elementals. His name is Ashmedai but his particular brand of Elementals are called the Shedds.

I looked up this story in a book called "Ancient Israel: Myths and Legends", which was first published sometime in the early part of the last century I'm guessing. (The copy I have was published by Bonanza Books of New York in 1988. However, its author, Angelo Rappoport, died in 1950.) There the Shedds are called the 'Shedim' and they are referred to as demons. Throughout PHANTACEA the Moloch Sedon is just as commonly referred to as the Demon King.

In Lebanon you can find one of the Whole Earth's earliest still extant cities. It's called Sidon. In Egypt, in a place the Greeks called 'Heliopolis', or Sun City, and I understand the Bible called 'On', there was some sort of Pharaonic fertility-affirmation ritual practised called the Sed Ceremony. Which made me wonder if the city was actually called 'Sed-On'. There's more of course. Much more as it happens. For example, New Agers will tell you there's a place in Arizona where ever so many ever so mysterious mystic fields converge. It's name? Sedona! Starting to get where I'm going?

(In a book by Ahmed Osman entitled "Moses and Akhenaten -- The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus", which was first published in 1990 by Grafton Books and was recently reissued by Bear & Company, the author claims the Sed Ceremony was held in the Pharaoh's thirtieth year of ruling and repeated every two or three years thereafter to demonstrate his continuing suitability for sitting on the throne, or whatever Pharaohs sat upon back then. Osman does not go into any real details as to what rituals constituted the Sed Ceremony but if you flip through picture books of Pharoanic Egypt you will often come across references to something called the Djed or Zed Pillar. It supposedly represents the backbone of the god Osiris and symbolizes stability. Might this Djed or Zed pillar have something to do with the Sed Ceremony. Words certainly sound similar and, for what it's worth, in English they do rhyme with 'head'.)

Lebanon was once known as Phoenicia. In its Cedar Mountains, where parts of the pre-Biblical Gilgamesh Saga took place, is one of the oldest man or god-made structures in the world. It's called the Trilithon and it's situated in a place known as Baalbek to the locals. The Romans, and the Greeks before them, called it Heliopolis, however. Curiously, besides the Sed Ceremony, Egyptian Heliopolis is reputed to be the birth place of the famous sunbird or Phoenix, who dies in its own flames only to rise anew out of its own ashes. And where do you think the name Phoenicia came from? Could it be from the Phoenix Sunbird? Isn't a matter of could, is it?

Ever heard the Greek myth of Zeus, who was born on Crete, taking the form of a white bull and carting Europa, from whence came the name for the continent of Europe, from her birthplace to his birthplace, where they founded its, the Cretan-Grecian, civilization together? And where was this Europa from? Phoenicia, as it happens. And who was her brother, he who came looking for her? Name was Cadmus and, according to mythology, he brought our alphabet to Europe, -- hence phonetics.

So, just to review, in the late Sixties I call my Headworld after Sedon, a name I came up with out of the proverbial blue. I make him into the Devil and he becomes the main antagonist in what I now think of as 'The PHANTACEA Mythos'. I thereafter start coming across all these bizarre synchronicities; ones which, thus far on our serendipitous little journey, have led us from Phoenix to Phoenicia to phonetics and back again.

Believe me, it only gets weirder. How weird? Try this on, trilithon!

I envisioned Sedon's Head as a place, a hidden continent, in effect the Inner Earth to our Outer Earth. Anyone who knew how could go there. One of the ways to go to the Headworld is supposed to be through the, to me, obvious doorway situated between the legs of the Egyptian Sphinx. (I recognize a doorway when I see one and so might you when you take a look at the picture immediately to the right of this paragraph.) It sits on the Giza, or Gizeh, Plateau, not far from the modern day Cairo suburb of, you guessed it, Heliopolis.

I already know this because by now I'm writing and publishing PHANTACEA on the Web. I'm also doing research. During that research I read "The Message of the Sphinx" by Hancock and Bauval, as published by Crown Publishers, Inc., in 1996. And what did I see on Plate 23 of that book? (No need to look for the photo, I scanned in both the one from the book and my own photo of it!)

So, according to the book, what we have here is an "aerial overview of [the] Giza Pyramid Plateau". Book does not state when, or who by, it was taken. I found out, though, when I went to Cairo in late September, early October 2000 and found the source photograph. It's in one of the Old Kingdom rooms of the Cairo Museum. Turns out it was taken by the Egyptian airforce sometime in the late Twenties or early Thirties.

Long-winded point being, -- what's that in what is now, and was in the 20s or 30s, a parking lot? Looks very much like a head, doesn't it? Remind you of any head in particular? Does me.

For more peculiar perspectives, synchronous, serendipitous and just plain strange, check out the ongoing PHANTACEA Feature entitled: "Serendipity and PHANTACEA".

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