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".

Jason Statham, and the Nine and Queen of Pentacles

Over in the comments at Leo's blog , Bill brings in the recent Jason Statham movie A Working Man  with reference to my supposed laziness...