that they are all glass, and therefore will suffer no man to come near them; that they are all cork, as light as feathers; others as heavy as lead; some are afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders,
glass delusion 1613
People feared that they were made of glass “
and therefore likely to shatter into pieces".
anxiety of new materials:
alien implants- bio-telemetry
"subdued by "small earphones" placed behind his ears"
alien implants appear to be ordinary materials such as a shard of glass,
a jagged piece of metal, and a carbon fiber. The objects are often
found lodged in extremities such as noses, toes, hands and shins.
normal objects picked up during a fall or by walking barefoot often become surrounded by scar tissue.
A US town has rejected plans for solar panels amid fears they would 'suck up all the energy from the sun'
a posthuman collectivity,
an "I" transformed into the "we" of autonomous agents operating together to make a self.
smith-and-the-devil
With the possible exceptions of the wolf, the raven and the crone, no
one has a closer mythological connection with malevolence than the
smith. One of the archetypes of northern European folklore is Wayland,
the divine but evil blacksmith tutored by the trolls. He was maimed
(becoming lame, like Hephaestus, the smith-god of the Greeks) and
imprisoned by the legendary King Niduth, who forced him to use his
magical skills to make trinkets for the court. The vengeful Wayland
lured the king’s children into his forge, raped his daughter, killed his
sons and turned their skulls into goblets from which the unwitting king
drank. Then he fashioned himself a pair of wings and flew away cackling
with delight. Throughout northern Europe his unquiet wight is said to
haunt the Neolithic burial mounds reputed to be his smithies.
It is almost certainly Wayland who, in another incarnation, surfaces
in the Fens of eastern England. There Will the smith, having been
granted an extra life by the Devil, accumulated so much evil in his
double span that he turned into the ghastly Will o’ the Wisp, the
flickering blue flame of burning marsh gas.
There are stories of smiths using their powers to benign ends: St
Dunstan, for example, seized the nose of the Devil (who came in the form
of a beautiful temptress) in his blacksmith’s tongs. In other English
folk tales a young man arrives at a forge and miraculously hammers an
old horse into a young one, or an old woman into a lovely girl.
But these tales are far outnumbered by those which equate the smith
with evil. Several tell of smiths entering into a pact with the Devil to
get fire and the means of smelting metal; indeed it is arguable that
the medieval vision of Hell represents the smith in his forge. His
anti-Christian associations persisted into the 19th Century (there is
still a sanitised version at Gretna Green today), when British couples
who could not get the Church to bless their marriage would leap over a
blacksmith’s forge together. In some parts of Britain, the introduction
of iron tools was resisted for centuries, as farmers believed that the
evil they contained would poison the soil.
Strikingly, archaeological evidence suggests that blacksmiths in
Europe may, like the Nkunono, have been isolated, physically and
culturally, from the remainder of their tribes. Iron Age forges appear
to have been built outside the ramparts of settlements; the smiths’
ceramics, by contrast to those of the rest of society, are full of
inclusions, suggesting that they did not have access to the same
resources.