“Through the mist of the white dawn men moved like ghosts…”

-Robert E. Howard, Spears of Clontarf

Eugenics, as understood by people 100 to 150 years ago, was a different animal than the two-striped ideological beast in Left wing/Right wing debates today. In our current climate, eugenics is about race war and is based on the Nazi experience, which involved a severe skewing of the concept.

Eugenics is Greek for ‘good-generation,’ ‘good-birthing’ or ‘good-parenting’ depending on what ancient Greek thinker you might have asked and what his dialect was. The concept was deeply imbedded in the Gospels which were preceded in literature by hero legends [some involving ascension] in which various virgin births of ancient heroes were attributed to a divine interest in the human bloodline. The 19th Century concept was aimed at the cultivating of the best possible people. Various peoples have practiced different versions of this. There is an Amazonian tribe where the women attempt to regulate conception by being inseminated by three different men who possess three varying desirable characteristics, trying to engineer their own multi-tasking super baby.

Our current concept of eugenics is either Right-wing and based on racial purity as a politically separatist goal, or Left-wing and based on racial homogeneity as a politically absolute goal—a global monocrop of people. The implications of either of these genetic end games are both vastly interesting to the sci-fi writer, as are the next probable entry into the game: the engineering of designer people for specific goals or tasks.

I am currently looking at an old variation on the genetic theme, a theme that died with the authors who were exploring it about 100 years ago. Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard all explored racial memory as fiction themes. I have also detected some inclination to this possibility in the writings of Aristotle, Menander, Pausanius, Darwin, Stoker, Ohiyesa, Black Elk, Lovecraft, and Wolfe, and am interested in exploring the possibilities.

I have used the Hemavore, Fruit of The Deceiver and Winter settings as vehicles for the exploration of this theme, in which I explore the question of racial memory.

The racial memory theme supposes that blood has memory traces that are revealed in dream sequences to the carrier of a certain genetic line. I believe Stoker was going after this early on in Dracula and got off topic. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel War Chief is explicitly along these lines, as was much of Robert E. Howard’s fiction.

Vision quests in Native American cultures which were periods of outward isolation and sleep and food deprivation, sometimes with elements of pain, were intended to induce a waking dream. Other societies have used drugs to attain this. It seems probable that the ancient Cretans used opium in their religious rituals. Hellenic athletics and their preparatory agonistics were thought to have a similar effect, and those men who died during these competitions were thought to have died in a complete spiritual state. There was one athlete who was killed in an ancient MMA competition, Arrikhion, whose ghost is shown departing from his body in a painting depicting the moment he dies in the contest.

Staying with the ancient Greeks, the three deified athletes referred to above were regarded as totems of their tribe [and in ancient Greece tribal identity revolved around an urban polis]. The Greek notion of eugenics was tied into their notion of ancestral divinity, typified by Theogenes [here translated as divinely parented, but usually translated as God-Born], who was thought to have been conceived when the ghost of Herakles possessed his father, who was the priest of Herakles on the island of Thasos. The isolated nature of Greek communities in steep valleys and on islands like Thasos accounts for the other element in their tribal thinking, which is that of boundaries. For example, the second Greek boxer to be deified was Euthymus [Grace-Speaker], who was thought to have been fathered by the river that separated his home territory of Lokri from another region infested with an unlucky type of grasshopper. Euthymus was thought to have departed from life in, “extreme old age,” and “by some means other than death.”

The third boxer to be deified was named Glaukos [Grey-Fish], whose home was on an island, and he was thought to be fathered by the sea spray, which would mean that he was thought to be fathered by Zeus, because sea spray and sea foam were thought to be the semen of Zeus. One would think this should be from Poseidon, however, Poseidon was another sky god who proceeded Zeus to the Mediterranean with the invaders and was demoted to the god of the sea, as the Indo-European worshippers of Zeus supplanted the Indo-European worshippers of Poseidon. The third sky god to enter the Hellenic mythos was Apollo, where Poseidon was regarded as the brother of Zeus, and Apollo was the son, indicating that the Indo-European invaders who brought the worship of Apollo, amalgamated with rather than supplanted the existing tribes. Aside from the fact that Zeus seemed to have maintained the right of Prima Nocta over his brother Poseidon in regards to inseminating earthly females, the larger picture emerges as the layering of ancestral traditions through the pantheon of deities. Glaukos, who was thought to be divinely conceived, was named after the sea that protected his island home from invaders, which is the geographical aspect of the idea of ancestral blood memory—that it is tied in with the homeland or a certain type of homeland. For example, a Robert E. Howard character whose ancestors were born in a misty hill country might be inspired to dream when he finds himself in a misty hill country, half a world away, which this reader suspects was the inspiration for Howard’s poem, Cimmeria, or at least that Howard might have believed so.