The OC Series
THE OC UNIVERSE
AUTHOR Q & A
to be repurposed with author q & A text
A Childhood Under State Surveillance
Arnold Hermann was born in Bucharest, Romania at the height of Communist/Stalinist rule, and spent his first eleven years under threat of the secret police who had declared his father, Otto Hermann, a Seventh-day Adventist minister, an enemy of the State. Otto Hermann had been a prisoner of war in WWII. He was captured by the Soviets in Poland and served several years in Siberian Russian prison camps. Otto managed to escape, twice, but was recaptured.
When Stalin installed a Communist regime in Romania, the first to be arrested were priests and ministers. Otto hid away in attics and basements of friends and family members for a few months, but when he dared to marry Arnold's mother, Camelia, the authorities found out and arrested him straightaway on their wedding night.
It was three years before Camelia found out from a released political prisoner that her husband was alive. Otto had been sent to Canal, an infamous Stalinist forced-labor camp at the mouth of the Danube Delta, close to White Island (Ukrainians call it "Snake Island" today—a location featured in the OC). Otto almost died in captivity and later credited a group of Freemasons for saving his life. After another year and a half, he was finally released and able to rejoin his wife. Arnold was born a year later, just a couple of months after Stalin's passing.
From Bucharest to Santa Monica — A Mind Without Borders
When U.S. President Kennedy struck a deal with Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, Arnold's family was allowed to repatriate to the U.S. Arnold went straight from a Marxist-Leninist primary school in Bucharest to an American middle school in Santa Monica, California.
Born something of a savant, with remarkable recall and a close to photographic memory, Arnold spent his childhood devouring his father's extensive library. When he ran out of books he turned to dictionaries and encyclopedias, which he'd read cover to cover. Perhaps trying to reconcile the harrowing contrasts between communist Eastern Europe and 1950's coastal California, he absorbed the contents of hundreds of volumes growing up.
Guided by luminaries like Jospeh Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Manley P. Hall (with whom he had a fateful chance encounter shortly before the latter's death), Arnold acquired a panoramic understanding of humanity's histories, religions, mythologies, and philosophies—the known/official versions as well as those held by organizations outside of the mainstream, including secret societies, religious sects, private collections, think tanks, and other hidden, lost, or forgotten sources.
The Eleatic Vision: Thinking as Method
Working as an autodidact outside the confines of traditional academia, Arnold's scholarship in ancient Greek—particularly Pre-Socratic—philosophy earned him invitations to lecture and present papers at universities the world over. He was part of the burgeoning field at the intersection of Pre-Socratic Philosophy and Quantum Physics, contributing papers at conferences and workshops on Quantum Theory, Quantum Cognition, and Quantum Computing—often serving as the only "token" philosopher present.
In addition to his scholarly monograph, To Think Like God: Pythagoras and Parmenides. The Origins of Philosophy (which has an award-winning illustrated version), he published a new translation, in collaboration with Dr. Sylvana Chrysakopolou, and interpretation of Plato's Parmenides, one of the most influential and notoriously difficult of Plato's works. In the spring of 2007, he hosted a multi-day slow-reading seminar on the work with Dr. Douglas Hedley of Cambridge University and his doctoral students in Athens, Greece.
Arnold's sustained interest in Parmenides—whom Plato's called "the father of philosophy"—is based in part on the extraordinary success of the city where Parmenides founded his Eleatic school: Elea, originally Hyele, and later known by its Roman name, Velia, in Southern Italy. Elea was one of the wealthiest cities of Magna Graecia, whose policy of neutrality—a bit like Switzerland—kept them out of the many surrounding conflicts at the time. Parmenides founded a medical school there and was also the city's principal lawgiver and policymaker. Elea's citizens enjoyed half a millennium of continuous peace and prosperity, providing an example and model of how a philosophy of "right thinking or "thinking as method" (as enshrined in law) can bring about—and help maintain—a prosperous, thriving, and peaceful communal state.
Temene: Refuges from Time
Alongside his scholarly work, Arnold has conducted numerous expeditions to sites of ancient and shamanistic cultures across the globe. An intrepid explorer and documentarian, he has an abiding interest in sacred spaces, also known as "temene" (singular "temenos," Greek "tem-" means "to cut off," so literally: "cut off from the world"), which in earliest times were associated with caves. He has explored subterranean archeological sites throughout Europe, including in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, Turkey, and Georgia, as well as in Scotland, the U.S., Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Argentina, just to name a few.
Temene are significant in that they provide a Refuge from Time. They are spaces where the veil between the transient human world and the so-called Eternal is found to be thinnest. Caves, sanctuaries, temples, and churches are considered passageways between one realm and another, where people deposit religious artifacts, mementos, and tokens in hopes of being remembered by the Divine.
Descent into the Underworld
A central temenos in the OC is the "Orphean Cave"—the supposed portal to the Underworld. The book's version is based on a blend of two real-world caves that were sacred to the local Thracian and Dacian tribes. One is Devil's Maw in Bulgaria, which harbors a mysterious underground river that snakes for 17 miles under the rock, resurfacing within the same cave before falling into an impenetrable abyss. It is called Devil's Maw because everything that is thrown into it disappears ("swallowed whole") without ever resurfacing again. According to Thracian myths, Orpheus descended into the Netherworld from here.
The other contender is the recently discovered rock-hewn grave in Tatul, Bulgaria, believed to belong to Orpheus. Arnold visited this (now) open grave, which rests on the very top of a pyramid facing the sky. Underneath Orpheus' grave lies the sarcophagus of King Rhesus of Trojan War fame. Inscriptions in the area led archeologists to suppose that the king had wanted to be buried directly below Orpheus' tomb. Rhesus' resting place has the shape of an eye cut straight into the side of the pyramid, reminiscent of the Masonic symbol on U.S. dollar bills.
Sky God and Sky City
Outside Ouranopolis, near Thessaloniki in Greece, Arnold came across the ruins of a temple dedicated to Ouranos, the Sky God. "Ouranopolis" means "Sky City" in Greek. Ouranos is the oldest known Greek deity, and the temple the only one known in existence devoted to his worship. It was here that Arnold first conceived of the "Numen," the OC's Sky Lord, and the voice of conscience in Kayin's head.
The site of greatest personal as well as OC-related significance to Arnold is the ancient Hopi village of Old Oraibi, near Flagstaff, Arizona. It is the oldest continuously occupied settlement on the American continent, and the Hopi believe it to be, in a real sense, the very "center of the universe." The name "Hopi" is an abbreviation of Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, meaning "the peaceful ones.” The Hopi have managed to live in peace and harmony with their land and each other for more than a thousand years—with only one remarkable exception (which is explored in the OC).
The Center of the Universe: Among the Hopi
It was Manley P. Hall, founder of the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) in Los Angeles—which houses 20,000+ mostly out-of-print books on esoteric knowledge to this day—who advised Arnold to study the Hopi traditions and ceremonies. Hall had been adopted by the Hopi tribe in the 1930s, and Arnold was to find himself in the same position some 60 years later.
In 1994 Arnold and his wife, Sara, founded the Hyele Institute, a Center for Comparative Ceremonial Studies, with the purpose of fostering research into the origins of civilization, religion—particularly rites and ceremonies—language, art, symbolism, and culture. One of the Institute's inaugural acts was to co-sponsor the first ever encyclopedia and dictionary of the Hopi language, published by The University of Arizona Press in 1998.
Through regular visits and engagements with the Hopi people, Arnold and Sara were adopted by one of the ancient families of the Greasewood Clan of Old Oraibi. Becoming adopted meant they were allowed to attend some of the sacred ceremonies off-limits to non-Hopi. Arnold learned much about Hopi ceremonial traditions, myths, songs, and other shamanic practices from his Hopi mother, Virginia, Hopi brother, Hubert, and other Hopi siblings, as well as from the local snake priest, and other members of the tribe.
Living Knowledge
Western science and philosophy offer theories on the Self and the cosmos while religions provide us with representations and symbolic enactments of profound existential ideas, but only the Hopi actually live, daily, in accordance with their sacred understanding. For the Hopi people there is no abstraction, and therefore no separation between the knower and the known. The Hopi language is famously devoid of markers for time, so there is no distinction between past, present, and future. Everything is now. Knowledge is lived, and the known is expressed in the actions of the knower.
Toward a Philosophy of the Eternal
With the OC Arnold hopes to give readers a taste of this sacred kind of knowing, by imparting profound truths not only through description and explicit explanation, but primarily through the initiatory experience provided by the design and structure of the story itself. The OC distills a lifetime of research, thought, and experiences into one epic saga in which Arnold philosophically integrates Aristotle's argument from Final Cause, Wittgenstein's "throw-away ladder," physicist John Archibald Wheeler's "It from Bit" model, and the Quantum "Observer Effect" on temporal phenomena.