Update 33 - What is Revenancy and the Hanging Coffin?
Just a brief aside about what Revenancy is, and what the hanging coffin logo means.
I have reservations about plastering my face on things. I know this is partially rooted in my preference in staying off center stage where at all possible. I’m also motivated by encouraging people to stewardship over life and a revulsion for the need we seem to have for a messiah to come save us. These factors, along with a few others, combined to make me want to create something greater than Joe Pollhein Jr.
I’ve always been attracted to the myth of the revenant. I sometimes wonder at how much of that is because of how the word tastes, how it looks when written down. Revenant. In European mythology, a revenant was one who returned physically from the dead for the purpose of revenge or some other “unfinished business”. It is not a corpse animated by an evil spirit for the sake of malice. It is not a blood sucking vampire, or a necromancer who has conquered death. It is a dead person who came back to complete their will.
Will is a heavy concept. It’s a word used very casually and yet it holds great weight, like the word ‘God’ or ‘Awesome’. I am stressing that I mean the will of the human being, their will as a person that is part of a greater whole. I think the courage to follow one’s own will comes from great ignorance or greater perception. I want to help people perceive life in a greater way, see things as more than a sickly distillation of socialist or authoritarian core resin. Life is more than good and evil, it has more to do with order and chaos naturally, and those are neither inherently good or evil. Neither is a revenant.
I am a revenant, but I want to be more. I can’t do that as a man, but as an idea, I can maybe help open perceptions just a little more. As revenancy, I raise the dead to pursue their will. I want to bombard the spiritually deceased with so much life that they rise from their graves. I want to make people sick from how much life there is and how wildly it varies. I want to pry open senses in a way that fascinates the patient.
Revenancy is not me, it’s a greater concept. I dug it up, raised its coffin on a gibbet, and decided to play herald. I want to use it as a concept that ties back to my story, because I think a story is the only way I can get through to people and satisfy myself. I hope that when I do get to sharing True North, that it will help raise dead parts of every person who reads it.
Revenancy is the act of coming back from the dead for the sake of perpetuating life.
As for the hanging coffin, it comes from two symbols- St. Peter’s Cross and the Hanged Man Tarot card.
St’ Peter was set to be crucified after preaching the gospel for decades. When he learned of this, he asked that he not be killed in the same was as his messiah, as he was only a man. So the romans crucified him upside down. That being said, the inverted cross has been coopted in the past few decades to be a symbol of evil or a corruption of god. To me, it is neither. It is doing everything you can to the best of your ability, and still being unworthy of apotheosis. That does not mean I will not aspire for good.
The hanged man tarot is shown hanging by one heel. His face may look pained, but more often it looks beyond. The hanged man suffers for the sake of enlightenment, and accepts his fate. It is interesting to note that hanging upside down was also used as a punishment for thieves and traitors in the middle ages.
These two symbols I drew from. I will try my best, but I will not be God. I will never have all the answers, but I will continue to wonder at God’s thoughts and what the right thing to do truly is. I will not be martyred for others, for I pursue knowledge and open my mouth of my own free will. I will act of my own free will as a kind, honest, and patient man. That is the meaning of the Revenancy and the hanging cross.