God of Fire and Forge - Pekudei - Mythic Torah

Purphoros, God of the Forge by Eric Deschamps, from Magic: The Gathering

 "Purphoros is the god of the forge, the restless earth, and fire. He rules the raw creative force of heat and energy that fills the souls of sentient beings. His energy emerges as chaos, something to be harnessed and shaped by labor and passion. For this reason, Purphoros is also the god of artisans, of obsession, and of the cycle of creation and destruction."
 -Planeswalker's Guide to Theros

As much time as I spend thinking about Sea Monsters, I probably spend more thinking about Magic: The Gathering, the awesome collectible card game published by Wizards of the Coast. While I love games of all kinds, Magic has the amazing combination of endlessly varied gameplay, the opportunity to experiment and be creative, and unbelievable fantasy art, that it has become my absolute favourite.

The idea behind Magic, and other collectible card games, is that every few months a new set of cards comes out, giving you hundreds of new possibilities for building your decks, and each year the game is set on a different fantasy world.

Now given everything you know about me, you can probably imagine my excitement when I discovered that this year would be set on a world inspired by Greek mythology, a world called Theros. This rich fantasy world has an equally rich pantheon, and one of the major gods is called Purphoros, god of the forge.

As the quote above shows, Purphoros is both the god of fire and destruction, and the god of artisans and artistic creation, the god who creates powerful enchantments and artefacts, and the god of violent rage and consuming fire.

This combination of art and fire marks the end of this week's parasha of Pekudei. We've spend much of the last month reading about the plans and construction of the mishkan, the mobile tabernacle in the wilderness, and after we've read about all these artistic and creative works, God finally manifests in the holy sanctuary:

Rewriting Radiance - The ancient mountains

Another addition to Radiance, this time in the second part, Yesod/Foundation, in between chapters 8 and 9, after Asher has met the Seven and before his encounter with the dybbuk.

My original intent had been to cut out as much of Asher's training as possible to get to the 'super-powered' part as quickly as I could but I found that it was both too fast and ended up giving the supporting cast too little air-time. Without some opportunity to get to know them, it seems that the readers have little reason to worry about the fate of each member of the Seven. This is my attempt at filling both those gaps.

But have I done enough?

I could easily imagining stretching some of these encounters into longer ones, or having Asher meet angels and take part in an exorcism. Would these be good additions or is this enough as is?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

    As Asher watched the sun dip in the sky, he found himself astonished that he was not as terrible at Hebrew grammar as he had always supposed. Two months in, he was really getting the hang of it, conjugating verbs like a master (or so he thought), beginning to read full sentences and complex ideas. The pattern of it seemed to make sense to him - there was a kind of music about it that made it stick somewhere deep inside in a nonsense poem of verb formation. I killed, you killed, you (f.) killed, he killed, she killed… Everybody killed.
    But in the growing frenzy of preparations for the oncoming shabbat, he couldn’t help but hope for some more peaceful verbs to work with.
    In the kitchen, Ostar surged around the counters, mixing ingredients together furiously to prepare the meal before the sun set and all preparations had to be complete. Even without his gleaming armour, the manifestation of Netzach, Divine Victory, was an impressive sight a bulking figure that seemed to fill the entire small urban kitchen, smiling and laughing out loud at his own near-unending jokes, even as the sweat started to gather on his brow. Mercury, the embodiment of Hod, Divine Splendour, and, as Asher had learned only a month prior, Ostar’s wife, was slicing carrots while drilling him on his verb forms, her long dark hair tied neatly behind her head..
    “What was that?” she said, never looking up from the silver blade that effortlessly divided the vegetables.

Rewriting Radiance - Tiferet Edition

Complete links to the first draft of Radiance (my kabbalistic fantasy novel) can be found here.

Progress on rewriting Radiance continues, albeit rather slower than I would like as real life complications, such as expecting our first child in the next 8 weeks, get in the way. But I wanted to share some revisions from the fifth section of the novel, entitled Tiferet/Adornment.

In the first chapter, entitled Good to Give Thanks to the Lord, Emma Grunfeld, Asher's mother, journey's through the heavens to encounter the divine. In the early part of the chapter I described roads of fire and ice, concluding:

"Emma’s mind was full of ice and flames. But she had to keep moving.
    A wall rose up before her eyes, a wall of sapphire stones, refracting the light into a million shards of green and blue. "

But I realised that this was a very abrupt transition from the heat and cold to the sapphire stones. I also decided that I wanted more phrases that were redolent of biblical and rabbinic texts. Combining both of these issues, I came up with the following solution:

"Emma’s mind was full of ice and flames. But she had to keep moving.
    And then the heat and cold was no more, like streams that overflow with thawing ice whose water vanishes in the dry season.
    A wall rose up before her eyes, a wall of something like the appearance of sapphire stones, refracting the light into a million shards of green and blue."

Continued after the jump...

The Book of Josiah - Chapter 18

    It wasn’t his fault. Not really. He was afraid of his dreams and so he fought the darkness. What had happened to his beautiful dreams? Once he had dreamt of other worlds and other times, when a man could be a hero, where he was free to live out his fantasies. But he had squandered his infinite dreams and now was left with only two.
    In one, he watched a cup of tea fall to the floor, so elegant, so graceful, and shatter into a thousand pieces like a drop of rain as it hits the ground; and an inhuman screech filled his ears as brakes burned, tires slid and a car, all too close, collided with a brick wall. It was inevitable and he was bound to watch, over and over again.
    But relatively speaking that was the good dream. In the other, he woke up in his bed to find Ammi lying beside him, worn by the passing of years but as beautiful as ever. And he would wake her up and tell her about the strange dream he had had, and how he had imagined the crash, and her funeral, and his sorrow, and she laughed and said “what a funny dream” and they both laughed together until Dinah came to find out what was going on; and she was so beautiful it ached his heart, and he told her about his strange dream, and how she had died and he had gone to her funeral and been unable to say a word, and he laughed because she was so full of life - they all laughed.
    Joe felt himself falling asleep again and drove his nails harder into his leg - he had to stay awake. it wasn’t his fault that he kept falling asleep in this meeting. How could he go to sleep at night knowing what waited for him in the shadows?
    His head jerked backwards and he knew that he couldn’t help himself. In a few minutes he would be asleep, and there was nothing he could do about it. No, he wouldn’t accept that.
    Eli was still talking but it was just a senseless drone, like an itch at the base of Joe’s mind. He did not understand a word that was being said but couldn’t ignore it. He had to seem interested but to do that he had to stay awake. Rising from his seat in what he hoped was a surreptitious manner, Joe went over to the water machine and poured himself a large cup of water.
    ‘I need something stronger than water,’ Joe thought but then was immediately angry at himself for thinking it. He did not drink any more.

The Tales - A Poem

1.
In a dark and brooding night,
Of endless sighs and scorching gales,
The shaman sat in the fire light
And told the ancient tales.

Across his veined and furrowed face
The fire-light danced in glee,
As in a hushed but forceful voice
The shaman spoke to me: