Everything2
Near Matches
Ignore Exact
Full Text
Everything2

Seven for a magpie who tells me where to go

created by Glowing Fish

(idea) by Glowing Fish (2.3 d) (print)   ?   (I like it!) 2 C!s Sun Oct 02 2005 at 9:48:50

The line comes from the mangling of the corvid counting poem by Delirium, during the Wake of the original Sandman. Delirium's mangling maybe a simple pun and play by Neil Gaiman, but since this is Neil Gaiman we are talking about, we could imagine any number of meanings he could have injected, even without meaning that he meant them. Delirium knows about any number of paths outside the gardens, after all.

If you will all excuse the type of interjection that isn't allowed on wikipedia, it has a personal meaning to me ever since I was walking down Skalkaho Pass Road, and my eyes fell upon the cardboard box for a Hewlett Packard Printer, and I thought of this little freestyle (my abilities weren't very good then):

While you make copies like Hewlett Packard
I bring everything like the Blockstackers
, and for some reason, at the time, I was thinking of Chattering Magpie, even though she wasn't Chattering Magpie, and I wasn't really Glowing Fish, but this was just down the street from Fish Hatchery Road, so who knows. But it was Magpie who led me on to e2, and Taiwan, and more or less the job and lifestyle I know now, even thought I didn't know it then wandering around backroads in Montana.

But I am assuming this is not what Neil Gaiman had in mind. I have several theories about what, exactly, he did have in mind, and even what Delirium had in her mind. Since there is obviously a gnostic, qaballistic element present in Gaiman's work, and the crow counting game has been mentioned as an oblique, yet important role earlier in the series, I think that the seventh magpie, directing people where to go, may have a specific gnostic meaning.

In the cosmology of The Sandman, there are the seven Endless, and above them are the three fates. In the poem of the corvids, there are six crows that show duality, followed by one for "a secret never to be told". Above that, there are three that seem to be seperated from the realm of causality. In the system of the Sephiroth, there are seven sephiroth that are under the realm of causality, and three that are not. How exactly these things correspond to each other is not clear, but that some correspondence can be drawn is clear. The seventh magpie represents "the secret never to be told", that is, how to escape the world of duality into the world of the non-causal. It is made clear earlier in the series that Morpheus is doomed to death by The Fates, and that within the system of limitations that even the endless must operate under, his fate is tightened around him like a noose. However, when he dies, he may learn "the secret never to be told", something that perhaps even the Endless did not know of. Or perhaps the Magpie was just what led him to his rather cruel fate. There are several ways that it could be interpreted, especially if we are to take up the rather tedious task of trying to correspond the members of the Endless to the Sephiroth, or to the corvids of the song, in all its variations. That either Neil Gaiman, or Delirium, would toss off this line without any meaning at all, however, seems even more far fetched than the admittedly convoluted occult explanations that could be given for it.


printable version
chaos

why she makes her wishes at 7:07 Names that should never be given to important files A Conversation Between Danton, Robespierre, Napoléon, Chabert, and his wife Counting Crows
This is your brain on drugs Delirium So funny you will piss yourself laughing Conversation overheard between birds
Go fuck yourself Neil Gaiman Sephiroth Deltron 3030
Sephirotic interpretation of the Justice League of America 777 The Raven The Weight and The Density
Alan Moore qabal Link and Link Lost in the dangling conversation
freestyle Cosmology story internal story external
Y'know, if you log in, you can write something here, or contact authors directly on the site. Create a New User if you don't already have an account.
  Epicenter
Login
Password

password reminder
register

Everything2 Help

Cool Staff Picks
What you are reading:
Lie on your back and think of England
Pet Sounds
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Hamlet Chicken Plant Disaster
Mario Lemieux
This place needs more actual content. Let's begin.
Paranoia just ain't cool anymore.
A Thousand Points of Light
Lobotomy
Why the Borg have such terrible fashion sense
Blur
Making an F-16 from a cereal box, some Scotch tape, and a penny
Marvel Comics
New Writeups
Clarke
Multiculturalism(idea)
aneurin
Earl of Landaff(person)
Heitah
Pseudocide(idea)
XWiz
Google Knol(lede)
Mythi
July 24, 2008(personal)
locke baron
The fall of Earth(fiction)
BookReader
Fear the Cold(dream)
Pavlovna
Kathleen MacInnes(person)
stainedglass
1(fiction)
kalen
Three "T"s(idea)
octillion369
Undead(idea)
archiewood
Ico(fiction)
Heisenberg
Why I love Everything2(log)
octillion369
Death Knight(person)
XWiz
Are you hoping for a miracle?(review)
Everything 2 is brought to you by the letter C and The Everything Development Company