defining theocricide

I was very gratified earlier today when E.J. forwarded me a search result he'd done, where the word "theocricide" showed up on a website unrelated to me and my works. It is nice to find even one person using a word you had unabashedly coined twenty years ago (1987).

I have been asked, more than once, especially since the announcement of the book by the same name, what the word means. Mostly by people who are afraid it is sacrilegeous in nature. Not at all a true thought.

Theocricide is rooted in my own love of language (as are my other abominations, such as Nemicorn and the whole amote/amotation/amomancer family), but was originally coined for the title of a poem "Theocricide at Mach 10e6". I wanted a word that expressed an impulse for change, an impulse so powerful that one would throw down a belief or value system as tightly held as one's own belief in a Supreme Being. The word literally means "killing god".

In the context of the unwinding of my relationship with the woman whose mother's death prompted the poem, I needed to express how wrenching that had been to me, how far divorced from my own values and purpose I had thrown myself, how traumatic that was to me on so many levels and how sorrowful I was for it.

I have done many things in this life I am sorry I did, as Roy Batty said "I have done questionable things." But I try to look on the plus side of my failures. Once, when my daughter challenged me to admit that my marriage to her mother had been a mistake, I pointed out that had her mother and I not married, she and her brothers, probably the three most precious people in the world to me, would not have even been born. I can regret my actions and motives, but not the good fruits of sometimes bad actions.

I should not have broken off my engagement with Psyche. I should not have cheated on the Valkyrie, I should not have started the affair with the Panther unless I was unshackled. I should have been more honest than I have been on occasion (although, there are those who believe me far more vile and capable and guilty of things far beyond my ability to act out, purely because it suits their worldview to believe such things. So be it. Sometimes I was merely the dupe of others, using me to front their own actions and take the fall.)

Many of these acts were theocricidal, tearing me from core beliefs I still intellectually embrace, but have spiritually been separated from by willful acts. In some ways, a theocricide is just a three dollar word for a sin, a trespass, although of a magnitude to make it bloody rebellion.

Perhaps I should just name the book "Sin"?

No. And let me try to expand on that.

Some, perhaps many, of my theocricidal acts were necessary. Necessary to throw out "other gods" (and godesses) that had taken control of my life. Looking back I can see at least five acts of theocricide in my life, five upheavals on a metaphysical and spiritual level that ripped my self-identity to shreds and left me to reassemble my soul with the tools at hand. Most were the reflex backsquirm of a beast caught in a death grip by his own folly.

Sometimes the tools that patched me were my own skills. Sometimes they were a willing lover who lent me the motive force that only a lover can. And sometimes, the best of times, the tool was that still, small voice that never departs, but often we find it too easy to ignore.

The same voice that granted me my talents, my skills, and the life for which, even in times of sorrow or stress, I am most grateful for.

So, the book THEOCRICIDE is both a confession and a celebration, sort of a Mardi Gras without the raging hypocrisy. If I live to see it in print, I will die a happy man.

And my death with not be a theocricide.