Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

Recommended Books

May 2003

10 Wands, Pluto and the Right Hand Path;
Part II"

Stone Kiss A Peter Decker / Rina Lazarus Novel, by Faye Kellerman, Warner Books hc July 2002

I think the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus novels are needed to bring the issues of prejudice and power discussed last month into perspective.

The Decker/Lazarus novels are detective novels with plenty of gory murders and often a heroic shoot-out or life-and-death confrontation at the end. They are "formula" novels – but they offer something different because of the characters and their lives.

In this, they are like C. J. Cherryh’s novels, and like the Star Trek: Enterprise TV series, written entirely within the strictures of a given genre, and very unlike the novels discussed last month, The Cowboy and the Vampire by Hays and McFall, and unlike Beneath a Mountain Moon by Silver Ravenwolf, which are both mixed genre novels.

Faye Kellerman’s Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus novels portray a detective who has a full and rich home life, and is a better detective for it. Thus almost every novel shows Peter Decker progressing through the Initiations of life – undergoing religious conversion, marrying into his new religion, having been divorced, raising a child by himself, sending that child off to college, meeting his new in-laws, living through pride and horror when his eldest daughter becomes a cop too, adopting two young boys by his new marriage who desperately need fathering because their father died, and their mother almost got killed. Having a new baby by his new wife.

For years he defends his need to keep the house he loves, then because his new family needs to be closer to their own community, he sells it and takes on a fixer-upper and joins their community. In The Forgotten, Decker defends his new synagogue from horrific vandalism and uncovers deeper crimes by teenagers, and bonds with his adopted sons.

In Ritual Bath and the first few novels in this series, we meet Peter Decker who was himself adopted and raised as a Christian, and who discovers only later in life that his actual birth makes him technically Jewish.

He explores those roots only because he finds himself in love with a woman who practices Orthodox Judaism. And in that process he runs into prejudice from both sides – some of her family don’t accept him, some of his colleagues make fun of him, and sometimes those he has to deal with professionally change their minds about him when they discover he’s Jewish. And he discovers he has a few prejudices too.

A good detective can’t afford to have prejudices – it gets in the way of solving murders, and preventing them. It gets in the way of finding out the truth. It gets in the way of targeting Power.

See my Jan. 2002 column for more on The Forgotten, a story about Nazi influence, slander, and vandalism. To find all the novels in this popular (I found The Forgotten pb. in Sam’s Club) series, go to amazon.com and put "Peter Decker Rina Lazarus" into the search engine.

These novels are about how understanding prejudice is actually a life-or-death-matter for users of Power – and for victims. And I don’t mean "overcoming" prejudice here.

Prejudice (pre-judging situations by categorizing elements in them) is not a bad thing. The analog based human brain needs this shortcut to make accurate judgment calls in instantaneous life-or-death situations. Our errors occur when our prejudices are not based on proven facts.

Stone Kiss by Faye Kellerman does something the other novels in this series don’t often do. The ending poses a problem in right-and-wrong that clashes badly with the Law and creates a quandary for Peter Decker. He must act instantaneously, and has no time to ponder the conflict between secular law and religious law and his own hard-won notions of right and wrong.

He comes to this hard Initiation because he agreed to do a favor and look into a murder mystery in which his in-laws are involved if not implicated.

His in-laws, Rina Lazarus’s relatives which include Rina’s relatives’ in-laws, belong to the Group Mind Peter has allied himself to. They are the good guys by prejudiced definition. But what if one of them has done something really wrong? What if the wrong thing was really the right thing? With only an instant to judge and act, with lives at stake, what would you use to decide?

To get the full impact of the final scenes of Stone Kiss, you really should read several of the previous novels.

Stone Kiss stands alone as a detective novel. However, by reading all the previous novels in this series in order, you can see how Peter Decker discovered his prejudices, reprogrammed them using facts instead of hear-say, tested them, and staked his life and the lives of his family members on them.

He has examined his personal value system, discarded, retained, and added elements to it, gained insight and wisdom the hard way – with much blood on the pavement. The series as a whole is an exploration of how our minds process information into prejudices – and why we need solid, good, well-formulated, high precision prejudices to survive.

Devlin’s Luck by Patricia Bray is a totally different sort of book – a heroic fantasy. It too is not "mixed genre" but adheres to the strictures of the action-fantasy genre. We have the hero, Devlin Stonehand who has taken a mighty magical vow. He has fled his homeland in utter disgrace, and must hide that fact in order to fulfill his vow to see that his dead brother’s widow and children have enough money to survive. He cares nothing for his own survival because his own family has been murdered and prejudice figured in those events.

So he arrives in a foreign country where he can earn this monetary reward, and discovers those who seek this reward are the targets of vast and somewhat justified prejudice. But it’s not justified when aimed at him.

Now, what have all these books got to do with the 10 of Wands and Pluto?

Wands (in my system) represent Fire, which is the substance of thought, of ideas, of what we term philosophy. The Ace is An Idea emerging from deep in the subconscious. It meets itself in 2, is conceptualized in 3, meditated on in 4, defended in 5 (usually at college age), prevails in 6, is defined in 7 by imagination, aspiration and hope, is analyzed in 8, internalized in 9, and becomes a philosophy, an assumption, a prejudice in 10.

The 10 of Wands is depicted as a man carrying a burden of wands so vast he can’t see where he’s going. This image bespeaks prejudice – ideas you have invested so much of yourself into that you can’t let them go without losing your identity, your certainty that you know how the world works. Your philosophy, once developed all the way to 10, is a capital investment and a liability. It can’t be replaced – you can only live through your 20’s once. Thus an attack on your prejudices triggers a fear-fight-flight response.

Pluto in astrology represents the "baggage" you’ve brought from past lives, and it is rooted deep in the subconscious. Pluto in your natal chart, and other planets associated with your nodal axis, show the structure within you that was there at birth. These are the structures that filter and interpret the messages sent to you by your nurturing parent.

Don’t blame your parents for your problems – another person born with different prejudices, different karmic issues, would have gotten a different message.

Pluto brings Power up from your subconscious and rams it into manifestation in your life according to the timing of the transits to your natal chart. You respond to these challenges according to the burden of ideas ( your philosophy) you are carrying.

The objective of life is not to avoid having a 10 of Wands. 10 Wands is not a "bad" card to have turn up in a reading. Your matured philosophy, your prejudices, can be your tool, your magical weapon, and the greatest targeting mechanism for your Power. Or it can be the bars that prevent you from reaching the goals you can see.

A carefully constructed fiction-reading program can reveal your own unconsciously held philosophical assumptions (prejudices) more easily than any non-fiction reading program.

If you read by becoming the character, feeling the emotions, imagining other outcomes, crying, laughing out loud, you can mark the spots where you exploded with emotion, and later study the wider context and find out what you really believe.

The Wands of your philosophy can be transformed from a burden and prison-bars into the quarterstaff in the hands of a Martial Artist.