Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Mr. T and the Shaver Mystery

According to this 1983 People article,

Mr. T was born Lawrence Tureaud on the poor, black South Side of Chicago. He first shortened his name to Tero, then, in 1970, legally shortened it to T.

Tero will be a familiar word to anyone who knows anything about the Shaver Mystery -- the pulp-fiction oeuvre of Richard Sharpe Shaver, promoted by himself and by his editor Ray Palmer as being secretly true. I've never actually read Shaver myself -- even though about five years ago I was on an "inner earth" kick and read The Smoky God; Beasts, Men, and Gods; Journey to the Center of the Earth; and all the other classics. He's certainly on my radar, though -- enough that the name Tero jumped out at me.

"The Dero! The Tero! The battle between good & evil mutants underground."

The Deros are the evil mutants -- the name is short for "detrimental robots," even though they're not actually robots -- and the Teros are the good ones. I don't think the latter name stands for anything in English, but I'm sure it means something, because Shaver had an A.E.-like system where each individual phoneme has a secret meaning. He called it Mantong -- somewhat reminiscent of the name Mr. T uses for his haircut. People again:

Q. What's the story of that hairdo?

A. This is not a Mohawk and it's not a punk cut. It's a Mandinka. That's a tribe in Africa.

Last night, when I was exploring the Mr. T / T. rex connection, I randomly ran an image search for t rex jibba jabba, and this came up.

This caught my attention because I had just posted this:

That's a namarudu -- an Australian meteor-spirit. In the namarudu story I quoted in the linked post, there was a good namarudu and a bad one (like Teros and Deros). The good namarudu saved a human boy from the bad namarudu after "they opened the door of the cave for him."

Look back at that Hidden World cover: A Dero behind an open door, and "I Enter the Caves."

Ever wonder what Mr. T's up to these days? Well, I guess saying "I pity the fool" would be just a little too obvious, wouldn't it?

2 comments:

ben said...

There's a green comet that was/is closest to Earth on February 1st 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2022_E3_(ZTF)

Found it via the news.

WanderingGondola said...

Dero/derro is one Aussie slang term I still hear now and then.

Watching this the other day, part of the introduction -- from about 2:08 to 2:35 -- describes these times as "the end of an age, which opens the door for another".

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