Thrygragos Varuna Mithras offers his two Great God brothers the option of henotheism, with him as the top god on the Hidden Continent of Sedon's Head. If they refuse his offer, he promises to obliterate them. They refuse.
In 2009 Phantacea Publications released “The War of the Apocalyptics”, the opening entry in the ‘Launch 1980’ story cycle. At its centre stood the same stirring saga of extraterrestrial Shining Ones and the doomed but unyielding Damnation Brigade as that related in “Phantacea Revisited 1: The Damnation Brigade”. That 2013 graphic novel gleaned material from the pages of Phantacea 1-5 (1977-1980) as well as Phantacea Phase One (mid-1980s). Its novelization’s until then untold Outer Earth sequences introduced or re-introduced a number of fascinating protagonists; ones who appeared or would have appeared in the comic book series had it continued. With a breathtaking cover by Ian Bateson, “Nuclear Dragons” turns the spotlight back on many of them. Given what’s coming, though, if they’re on Centauri Island days after the launching of the Cosmic Express, will any of them last long enough to return for a third entry in the ‘Launch 1980’ story cycle? No matter. Jim McPherson’s Phantacea Mythos is as full of incredible individuals as it is of astonishing challenges for them, and/or others, to survive.
In "The War of the Apocalyptics," the first book in the Launch 1980 story cycle, a number of acknowledged devils breaks out of the Sedon Sphere, the dimensional barrier between the Inner and the Outer Earth. In response, the Supranormals re-emerge whole, bodies with minds, from nearly a quarter century in Limbo.
For most of the previous century forces loyal to the death-gods of Lathakra, King Cold and his triplet sister, the Scarlet Empress, have sought to replace the Head's reigning sense of hopelessness with another Golden Age, that of their own. Equally godlike devils such as the Unity of Chaos support them.
Contagion Collectors aimed to destroy the Inner Earth's Shining Ones, their devil-gods, by killing off those who would worship them - virtually everyone alive beneath the Cathonic Dome that enclosed the Hidden Continent of Sedon's Head. Thrygragos Everyman and his firstborn Unities thought them sorted when they stormed the Hoodoo Hamlet in 5476 as the four fearsome Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And so they had ... except, it wasn't just the bringers who needed sorting. It was the poxes and plagues they brought. The Hidden Headworld needed purging. There could be no doubt of that. Yet the Moloch Sedon had disappeared from the night's sky years earlier and evinced no signs of returning. Everyone knew what needed to be done yet no one, especially not Thrygragos Everyman, the Lord Laziest of Great Gods, was willing to command the purge begun. Then someone, ostensibly in the name of love, played a Trigregos Gambit. The Head lost its Balance, capitalized and female. Her brother Unities, Order and Chaos, regarded each other balefully. No longer restrained, a continental catastrophe of unprecedented proportions ensued. With calamitous rapidity, nearly 500 years of Panharmonium gave way to seemingly endless despair. The Inner Earth's populace lost faith in its devil-gods as by far the mightiest of them went at each other unrelentingly, unmindful of those they trampled beneath their gargantuan feet. The Dead didn't stay dead, though. They rose, disbelievers no longer. They battled on, their newly puissant goddess to exalt the higher. Came All-Death Day there were more Dead Things marching than Living Beings breathing. Fecundity no longer, the Vampire Queen of the Dead looked to rule the world - both sides of it!
Some 65 decades after claiming credit for abolishing the Death's Head Hellion and more than 50 decades after finally realizing their long-held dream of Panharmonium, Thrygragos Everyman and the Unities of Chaos, Order, and Balance, are horrified to learn that the plagues and poxes ravaging the Inner Earth are far from natural. They're deliberate attempts to end its days.
In the third volume in the Thrice-Cursed Godly Glories series, Nergal Vetala, the Blood Queen of Hadd, the Land of the Ambulatory Dead, is the lone devic vampire. For 35 years she has been unable to prevent the encroachment of the living on her realm. Then her soldier falls out of the sky and she's back in the pink againNas in arterial. But that's hardly enough for her.
A rip-roaring outburst of creativity featuring Jim McPherson’s taut storytelling and spectacular artwork gleaned from the pages of Phantacea 1-5 (1977-1980), Phantacea Phase One #1 (1987) and #2 (unpublished), it presents the stirring saga of extraterrestrial Shining Ones and the doomed but unyielding Damnation Brigade. Anheroic Fantasy Illustrated, with a wraparound cover by Phantacea’s master colourist Ian Bateson and 120 pages of interior artwork in glorious black and white by a wide variety of exceptional artists often at the very beginning of their careers, the two-part Phantacea Revisited series reveals how Jim McPherson’s ongoing Phantacea Mythos really got underway.
At the heart of process-relational theology in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) is the rejection of coercive omnipotence and the embrace of divine persuasion as the patient and uncontrolling means by which God works with a truly self-creative world. According to Whitehead, Plato's conviction that God is a persuasive agency and not a coercive agency constitutes "one of the greatest intellectual discoveries in the history of religion." According to Hartshorne, omnipotence is a "theological mistake." What is behind these claims? Why do process-relational philosophers and theologians reject divine omnipotence? How have they justified a commitment to divine persuasion, and what kind of theoretical and practical implications are involved? Featuring contributions from key process-relational thinkers, this book situates a shift "from force to persuasion" across multiple thresholds of discourse, from philosophy and theology to spirituality and politics to pluralism, axiology, and apocalypse. It aims to reawaken attention to the operations of divine persuasion as ever-loving and inherently noncoercive, but always at risk in an open and relational universe.
A collection of essays that outline the recent work on ecology, political theology, religion, and philosophy by one of the leading theologians of our age As we face relentless ecological destruction spiraling around a planet of unconstrained capitalism and democratic failure, what matters most? How do we get our bearings and direct our priorities in such a terrestrial scenario? Species, race, sex, politics, and economics will increasingly come tangled in the catastrophic trajectory of climate change. With a sense of urgency and of possibility, Catherine Keller’s No Matter What reflects multiple trajectories of planetary crisis. They converge from a point of view formed of the political ecologies of a transdisciplinary theological pluralism. In its work an ancient symbolism of apocalypse deconstructs end-of-the-world narratives, Christian and secular, even as any notion of an all-controlling and good God collapses under the force of internal contradiction. In the place of a once-for-all incarnation, the materiality of unbounded intercarnation, of fragile yet animating relations of mattering earth-bodies, comes into focus. The essays of No Matter What share the preoccupation with matter characteristic of the so-called new materialism. They also root in an older ecotheological tradition, one that has long struggled against the undead legacy of an earth-betraying theology that, with the aid of its white Christian right wing, invests the denigration of matter, its spirit of “no matter,” in limitless commodification. The fragile alternative Keller outlines here embraces—no matter what—the mattering of the life of the Earth and of all its spirited bodies. These essays, struggling against Christian and secular betrayals of the spirited matter of Earth, work to materialize the still possible planetary healing.