The Stolen Word
The Coscuin Chronicles—The Flame Is Green, Half a Sky, Sardinian Summer, and First and Last Island—tell the story of Dana Coscuin across thirty years of the nineteenth century, from the Carlist hills of Spain in the 1840s to the Caribbean island of Basse-Terre in the 1870s. They are novels of revolution. But the word revolution is itself the contested ground.
“It is God whom we must fear offending,” Count Cyril Prasimos tells Dana, “but it is the Devil who so often puts us on the defensive. He has stolen so many of the enlivening words, from ‘Revolution’ to—well, possibly to nothing else. He has stolen perhaps only the one word, but he makes it seem like legion. He is not really a proponent of revolution but of a stultifying and evil regression. Yet he receives the plaudits for being a revolutionary.” SS ch. 1
Two revolutions contend across the saga: the Green and the Red. They are not factions or parties. They are, in Lafferty’s telling, opposed ontologies—two total claims on reality that share a single stolen name. The Green is ananeosisAnaneosis (ἀνανέωσις): Greek, “renewal.” From St. Paul (Eph 4:23, Col 3:10). Catherine Dembinska’s term for revolution as “constant conversion, renewal, the aborning again.”, the constant renewal and sacralizing of green-growth. The Red is the parasite upon that growth—the zizaniaZizania: tares or darnel (Vulgate Latin). From the parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24–30). The Black Pope’s term for the Red blight sown by the Enemy among the good seed., the tares sown among the wheat by the Enemy from the Beginning. Between them stands a third stream, the Black Revolution of the Carlist hills, monarchical and sacral, feeding “just the veriest touch of the Green” into Dana’s formation.
This companion assembles, cross-references, and analyzes everything in the four novels that bears on revolution: its colors, its theology, its historical cases, its actors, its key doctrinal speeches, and the paradoxes that Lafferty leaves unresolved. It is a single-subject research instrument. Its question: What does revolution mean in this saga?
The Novels
Fig—The Flame Is Green (finished August 1970). Chapters I–XII. Setting: ~1845–1848.
Has—Half a Sky (written 1971; rewritten 1977). Nine chapters. Setting: 1849–1854.
Ss—Sardinian Summer (finished March 1984). Twelve chapters. Setting: 1854–1861.
Fli—First and Last Island (finished May 1984). Twelve chapters. Setting: 1862–1872+.
The Colors of Revolution
Early in The Flame Is Green, Malandrino Brume tells Dana that the only question is “whether this phase of the Revolution will be red or black, or white or gold or green.” The saga develops three of these colors into full revolutionary philosophies. The others remain suggestive fragments—colors glimpsed and dropped, possibilities foreclosed.
The Green Revolution Prasinian
The Green Revolution is the center of the saga, and the hardest to define. Brume introduces it as an unformulated hope:
“I myself would join the Green Revolution—were it in existence to be joined. But the Green is no more than a hope only, a thin hope, and it breaks away into sea-green, eel-green, monster-green. The thing about it, Dana, is that it hasn’t been formulated yet, and it may never be.”
“Not formulated at all, Brume?” Dana asked.
“Only in scraps, by outlandish and contradictory people, Cobbett and Cobden in England, Ozanam and Buchez and Blaye and Cheve in France, August Olt in Alsace, the young Archbishop of Damiata who is named Vincent Pecci …” FIG ch. III
The Archbishop Pecci will become Pope Leo XIII, author of Rerum Novarum. The Green Revolution, in one of its aspects, is Catholic social teaching before its codification. Catherine Dembinska gives it its theological name:
“The Revolution is the World. It is the bound duty of every one of us. It is the constant conversion, the ananeosis, the renewal, the aborning again. Curse all heretics who use words to mean their opposites! The Holy Revolution is all the green-growth and its sacralizing. It isn’t their bloody and obstructing blight. They blaspheme!” FIG ch. XI
Catherine receives the Green through intellect and passion—“she had it in her heart and in her brain.” Her successor Angelene Domdaniel receives it differently: “The same thing is in my feet out of the earth. Catherine wore shoes; she never learned it from the earth through her feet. It works upward in me, as it worked downward in her.” HAS ch. 2
By Half a Sky, the sources of the Green in Dana are catalogued: Brume’s rough instruction, Christian Blaye’s speaking skull, Catherine’s intellect and passion, Angelene’s earthiness and oceanness, the Black Pope’s indoctrination, Count Cyril’s invisible direction. “People were trying to put the growing green revolution into words on paper.” HAS ch. 6
In Sardinian Summer, the Green acquires its Greek name: the PrasinianPrasinian: from Greek prasinos (πράσινος), “leek-green.” Also the name of the Green faction in the Byzantine chariot races. Lafferty applies it to the Green Revolution as a formal designation. Revolution, “dedicated to pulling the teeth and cutting the claws of insurrections and revolutions and wars.” SS ch. 6
And in First and Last Island, when Dana is elected the thirteenth Count Prasimos, he is given “full power over Greenfields EstateGreenfields Estate: the seat of the Count Prasimos on Basse-Terre (French Guadeloupe). Also called “the vagrant Rome of the whole green movement.” Originally purchased by Count Basil Prasimos, the sixth of the line, in the 17th century. and over the direction of the Green Revolution, and also over the world if you are able to exercise it.” Angelene warns him: “We must not allow the Green Revolution to become bland.” FLI ch. 12; FLI
The Red Revolution Red
The Red is not the opposite of the Green. It is its parasite. The Black Pope makes this explicit in a sermon that applies the parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13) directly to revolutionary politics:
“The world is a garden. It is a farm, a plantation, a sheep-ranch. In the garden are the cities also; they too are a great part of the planting. Believe me, all these plantations are sowed with good seed. But the Enemy from the Beginning also sows the red blight: these are the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate.… Or let us say that we have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever; and everything that is undone is undone by that. The parasite will present itself as a modern thing. It will call itself the Great Change. Less often, and warily, it will call itself the Great Renewal. But it can never be another thing than the Red Failure returned.” FIG ch. V
Count Cyril sharpens this in Sardinian Summer: the Devil “is not really a proponent of revolution but of a stultifying and evil regression. Yet he receives the plaudits for being a revolutionary.” SS ch. 1
In practice, the Red manifests as foreign-backed insurrections (Chile), as the Garibaldini (Italy), as the killing of priests, as centralization disguised as liberation. Its most telling characteristic, according to Catherine, is that it always allies with tyranny: “The Red Revolution, for all that it had thrown in with the ancient tyrannies here (as it will do every time) to forestall the Green locally, was yet coming onto lean days.” FIG ch. XII
Yet the polarity is not always clean. In Half a Sky, Dana finds that revolution on Basse-Terre “hadn’t the substance either of the Green Revolution or the Red”—it was “chattering and crackling in the air forever” without form. HAS ch. 2. Dana corrects the puny priest of Basse-Terre: Green and Red “did not resemble each other; they contradicted each other at every turn. Other eccentrics might be nothing, might be identically nothing; but one of these was the towering positive and the other was the abysmal negative.” HAS ch. 4
The Black Revolution Carlist
Dana’s first revolutionary education takes place in the Carlist hills of Spain, where the Black Pope teaches a doctrine that is monarchical, sacral, and ancient. The Black Revolution is “the King Thing, the Bold Thing, the Sky Thing. It is the tree with some of its branches in our hills and with its roots in Heaven.” FIG ch. IV
The Carlist indoctrination connects kingship to divine image: “Every King is really a King Charles, since Charles means King. But no King will rule us on Earth unless he is in the image of the King Himself.” The name Carlist is traced (with the old lecturer’s “cheerful lying”) to deep etymologies: KarlikKarlik (Slavic): a dwarf. “However, a massive and ponderous dwarf, larger than a giant. It is the Mountain Dwarf.” The Black Pope claims Karlik blood for the Carlist line., the Mountain Dwarf; Val Carlos, the Valley of the Word; Mount Sinai as “Gebel Kharluf or the Carlist Mountain.” FIG ch. IV
The illumination at the center of this doctrine is simple: “that there is one father, God, and that we are all brothers and sisters, both in blood and in love. Man, who is each man, is made in the Image and is given Dominion. It is required of each man that he rule over himself in justice, and that he rule over the world in justice.” FIG ch. IV
Brume describes the relationship between Black and Green precisely: “In the Carlist Hills you will be indoctrinated with the Black Revolution, and just the veriest touch of the Green.” FIG ch. III
Other Colors
Brume mentions white, gold, and blue as possible colors. Of these, only fragments survive. Blue is Dana’s half-joke—“Were it not so, it would have to be blue. Is there a Blue Revolution?”—and Brume locates it in the Tricolore: “the red for the blood of Christ, the blue for the eyes of my wife, the white for the innocence that must come back to us. The Tricolore has generally failed, in the same sense that everything has generally failed.” FIG ch. III
In Montevideo, the shirt-colors proliferate: “black shirts of the anarchists, blue shirts of the Greater Columbia countries, gold shirts of Bolivia and Ecuador, tricolor shirts after some of the new national flags.” Even Dana’s green shirts are imitated “within days, seemingly within hours.” HAS ch. 8
The Relationship Between Colors
The opening of Half a Sky, the second novel, states the structure explicitly: “The people of the appointment had gone their several ways to play their hands in the double revolution that is the program of the world, that is the most persistent of the life-death double masks of the world.” HAS ch. 1
This is why characters can be divided within themselves. Santa Ana is “so divided in himself between the Green Revolution and the Red Revolution as to be almost driven to insanity.” Victor Emmanuel II “will catch fire easily. The question is whether he will catch fire with the red flame or the green.” Tancredi himself has ardor for both: “Every Sardinian is born with the dream and vision of a flaming red-haired hero and savior riding out of red clouds on a red horse.” Even Rosas, the bloody dictator, is discovered—through the dead Catherine’s voice—to be “overgrown with green; he’s green field and forest and pampas.” HAS ch. 9; SS; SS; HAS ch. 8
And the Green grows, always, with “its own impetus wherever it is not blighted.” FIG ch. IX
The two revolutions even have a shared geography. On Basse-Terre, Count Cyril’s Greenfields Estate and Count Ouzel’s red estate adjoin—“on an island that is Earthly Paradise—with snakes.” “It was indeed true that all persons of the two Revolutions knew or would know each other.” HAS ch. 5; FIG ch. VIII
Theological Foundations
Revolution in the Coscuin Chronicles is not a political program with theological decoration. It is a theology expressed through political action. The Green Revolution’s deepest claims are about the nature of creation, the nature of evil, and the destiny of the world.
1. Ananeosis: Revolution as Renewal
“The Revolution is the World. It is the bound duty of every one of us. It is the constant conversion, the ananeosis, the renewal, the aborning again. Curse all heretics who use words to mean their opposites! The Holy Revolution is all the green-growth and its sacralizing. It isn’t their bloody and obstructing blight. They blaspheme!” FIG ch. XI
Catherine inverts the Jacobin meaning entirely: true revolution is not the overturning of an order but its perpetual renewal from within.
2. Wheat and Tares: The Enemy’s Sowing
“Believe me, all these plantations are sowed with good seed. But the Enemy from the Beginning also sows the red blight: these are the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate.… Or let us say that we have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever; and everything that is undone is undone by that. The parasite will present itself as a modern thing. It will call itself the Great Change. Less often, and warily, it will call itself the Great Renewal. But it can never be another thing than the Red Failure returned.” FIG ch. V
If Red is tares among wheat, it cannot be rooted out without destroying the wheat—they must “grow together until the harvest” (Mt 13:30). The Green can never achieve a final temporal victory over the Red. Revolution is not a battle to be won but a condition to be worked within—pulling teeth and claws, not killing the beast.
3. The Politician as Angel
“We are politicians, Dana, I myself, and you also by my appointment.… What is a politician? A politician is always an angel of God, or of the Devil. And a competent politician is always an archangel of God, or of the Devil. An Angel means a messenger or a delegate. Every act of a politician is an annunciation to one of God’s creatures, or to a group of creatures, or to a corporate creature called a polis.” SS ch. 1
Count Cyril means it literally: “We have strong power, Dana. We can order the elementals and they will obey us. We can command a throne or a realm to fall, and it will fall.” But the angelic frame cuts both ways: “a competent politician is always an archangel of God, or of the Devil.” Ifreann Chortovitch is the diabolical counterpart.
4. The Two Worlds
Christian Blaye, in the bone and skull of his, had once given Dana Coscuin instructions in the Red and Green Revolutions, and the stakes that were to be fought for. “They are fought for the two worlds, for this world and the next,” the talking skull had said. SS ch. 11
Count Cyril confirms this from beyond death, speaking to Dana in dream during his own funeral mass: “We will continue to do what we may do to bring on the blessed, and not the cursed revolution.” His proof—three knocks from inside his coffin at the Lavabo, “I will wash my hands among the innocent”—demonstrates that the dead remain invested in the revolution. SS ch. 8
5. Center and Eccentric
The puny priest had stated that all the eccentrics resembled each other in their weightless noise and in their error. But this did not take into account the intense polarization between the Green Revolution and the Red Revolution, and it was in this polarity that Dana lived. The two did not resemble each other; they contradicted each other at every turn. Other eccentrics might be nothing, might be identically nothing; but one of these was the towering positive and the other was the abysmal negative. HAS ch. 4
Dana insists on the reality of the eccentric—“It is not a nothing. It is ourselves.” The priest’s Christocentric theology is correct but incomplete. It cannot account for the kinetic dimension of the world—what the priest calls “the Angular MomentumAngular Momentum: the puny priest’s term for the kinetic energy of the eccentrics—the off-center force that drives history. He admits its proper name is “the Life Affair.” In physics, angular momentum is the rotational energy of a body in orbit. The metaphor is precise: the Green Revolution orbits the Center (Christ) and draws its energy from the tension between center and periphery.“ and what he admits is properly named “the Life AffairThe Life Affair: the proper name of the Angular Momentum. The entire engagement of living creatures with history, driven by the polarity between Green and Red. Dana’s correction of the priest insists that this engagement is real, not nothing—it is “ourselves.”.”
6. Eschatological Confidence
“We cannot ever lose,” Ercule said, “not till the last trumpet sounds. And when it does sound, it will be the signal that we have won. But, yes, the exponential increase in the size of wars will be a horrifying set-back to us and to everyone.” SS ch. 8
The Green lives in the tension between ultimate confidence and historical failure—between the trumpet that will sound and the teeth and claws that grow larger in the meanwhile.
7. The Constrained Revolution
“Our task is to extirpate by prevention. Our own great movement will grow with its own impetus wherever it is not blighted. We will break up persons of blight and centers of blight. But often, and this will be the hard part for all of you to understand, we will warn and advise before we kill. And quite often we will not kill at all.” FIG ch. IX
“We are compelled to truth, and they are not. We are constrained from unreasonable murder, and they are not. Oh, it would be wonderful to combat them”—Catherine had a rather devilish brightness in her eyes—“for a while, with all the rules abjured.” FIG ch. XII
The Green kills—Dana is “the pleasant assassin who had killed a dozen key men”—but under constraint. Catherine’s “devilish brightness” at the thought of fighting without rules reveals how close the temptation comes. Mariella reinforces the constraint from within the Company: duelling “is clearly forbidden by the moral law and by the inner conscience of all members of the Company and of the Green Revolution.” SS ch. 9
8. The Green-Growing World
“Listen, all you people, the green-growing world is not restricted to its vegetation. There is a green-growing God above, there are green-growing people on the earth, and plants and rocks and ores and machineries, and graces and dedications and ideas and arts. There are green-growing prayers arising. But the devils in Hell are not green-growing, and those on Earth are not.” FIG ch. IX
Catherine is explicit that this is not pantheism: “I am not a pantheist, not even a green one. To be that is to confuse the bridge with the ultimate shore. It is to confuse the pot with the potter. But I am a living pot; I am a green vessel of earth; I am the perfume of a full vase.”
“All the final answers were given in the beginning. They stand shining, above and beyond us, but they are always there to be seen.… We ourselves become the bridges out over the interval that is the world and time. It is a daring thing to fling ourselves out over that void that is black and scarlet below and green and gold above and beyond. And we must be rooted deeply. A bridge does not abandon its first shore when it grows out in spans towards the further one.” FIG ch. IX
The bridge is not steel but living vine—“It is not a girder-steel bridge we make; it is a living liana-vine bridge that we grow and fling out in exaltations of arches.” Railways, foundries, organizations of men and money—“there is nothing new about” any of these; “they also are green-growing things.”
And then Catherine gives the devil’s counter-strategy: “They must, at all cost to themselves, destroy the growing tendrils before such can touch the other side. For, whenever one least growing creeper touches across the interval, that means the extinction of one devil.” The Red’s violence is targeted at the Green’s moments of near-completion.
9. Revolution as Homing
Can one come home to a place where one has never been before? Yes, of a certainty. It was for this that God put Homing in man. The only purpose of man is to reach the Home where he has never been before, and this homing is often prefigured on earth. HAS ch. 2
The revolutionary does not invent a new world. He homes toward the one that was always intended—“all the final answers were given in the beginning.”
10. The Naturally Peaceful Revolution
“’He represents the Revolution’, the people say. But he does not represent the revolution at all. The revolution could be a peaceful one if it were not for such intrusions from hell.” SS ch. 4
Left to itself, the ananeosis is peaceful growth. Violence is the revolution’s corruption by its enemy, not its nature.
11. The Testament of Kemper: The Devil Unchained
“Something momentous came into the world in the middle of the eighteenth century.… A new evil came into the world; or an old evil, better organized, came into power. This evil has now ruled the world for one hundred years. It is the power behind all governments and the power behind all anti-governments. It is behind all movements of mankind, for no movement (not even our own green movement) has been able to stand totally clear of it. It has even infiltrated the Church.” HAS ch. 7
Kemper identifies this evil theologically as the Devil UnchainedThe Devil Unchained: Kemper’s term for the new evil. “I believe that, just one hundred years ago, the millennium ended… and the force that had been bound and limited for a while was unbound.” From Revelation 20:2–3, 7: Satan bound for a thousand years, then released.: “I believe that, just one hundred years ago, the millennium ended (the Thousand Years was the name of a mystic, and not an exact, period), and that the force that had been bound and limited for a while was unbound.”
Kemper rejects every attempt to localize the evil in a single organization:
“It is no good to name it the Freemasons.… It is no good to name it the Jews.… It is no good to name it the International Bankers.… It is no good to name it the Illuminati or the Carbonari or the Rosy-Cross men. It is no good to name it the old Gnostics or the new Communists. These are things that the Beast has passed through, or they are footprints left by the Beast, but they aren’t the Beast himself.” HAS ch. 7
The evil is a “Hidden Hand” that “slips inside one puppet and then another; and when it moves on they are puppets as lifeless as before.” And then Kemper asks:
“I ask you this: was there ever an Ifreann? Is Ifreann our own projection? Does he in fact exist?… Have we merely externalized him as repository of our own Falsities and Violences? And why have we had such Falsities and Violences in ourselves?” HAS ch. 7
Dana angrily rejects this: “It was no projection that murdered my wife in Krakow.” But Kemper’s question stands.
12. The Parousia: Everything Pertains
“We must at every moment be in expectation of the moment of the parousia.… the parousia meant originally no more than the presence. Then it meant the special presence that must be in us. It is the in-dwelling, it is the resolution, it is the coming, or it is the second coming; it is the day of judgement, it is the end of the world; it is tomorrow, it is today yet if we hurry. And we must hurry if we are to be ready for it, and we must be ready for it.” HAS ch. 7
Kemper insists that “everything pertains to the parousiaParousia (Greek: παρουσία): presence, arrival. In Christian theology, the Second Coming of Christ. Kemper extends the term: “it meant originally no more than the presence. Then it meant the special presence that must be in us.” The parousia is not only a future event but a present demand.“—economic, social, political, artistic, scientific, all the “musikotic” and “agapetic” principles must be arranged “in accordance with the parousia.” The Green Revolution is the daily work of making the world ready for a presence that might arrive “tomorrow at the very latest.”
Kemper dying: “I’m a lopped off limb of this green growing thing, and I’ll still believe in it as the true image of the Thing itself till I reach (after a thousand years in these white flames) Green Heaven of the BlessedGreen Heaven of the Blessed: Kemper’s term for paradise. “I’ll still believe in it as the true image of the Thing itself till I reach Green Heaven of the Blessed, of which I have already seen a fragment.” Heaven itself is green. The Green Revolution is not merely a temporal project but an image of the eternal destination., of which I have already seen a fragment.” Heaven itself is green.
13. The Adjacent Estates
“Your own Count Cyril is Count of all green lands whatever, and his special estate is named Greenfields. So the private estates of the two Counts adjoin, on an island that is Earthly Paradise—with snakes.” HAS ch. 5
Count OuzelCount Ouzel: elder half-brother and mentor of Ifreann Chortovitch. “Count of extensive red meadows in hell and of a corresponding estate on earth.” His terrestrial estate adjoins Greenfields on Basse-Terre. A “high member of the Serpent Lodge.”, Ifreann’s elder half-brother, is “Count of extensive red meadows in hell and of a corresponding estate on earth.” The double revolution has a geography: on the same island where Dana will establish the “vagrant Rome of the whole green movement,” the Red has its own adjacent estate.
14. Mixed Good and Straw Governments
“We cannot even say with clear conscience that we are working for clear good. The most we can say, and that with mixed conscience, is that we are working for mixed good. This is a shadowy land, between good and evil, and we must be two shadowy men to work in it at all.” FIG ch. VI
And the Red’s counter-strategy is subtler than direct seizure of power:
“Should it become the actual government in any locale, and this will be rare, it will have no choice but to mock itself.… But it will prefer to maintain straw governments which it will pretend to oppose. But it will oppose only the rare good that is to be found in them.” FIG ch. VII
The Red does not need to rule directly. It needs only to occupy the position of opposition, ensuring that the Green is crowded out.
Historical Spine
The saga moves through thirty years of nineteenth-century revolution. Each historical event is both real and exemplary—a case study in the dynamics of Green and Red.
Dana Coscuin, fisherman of Bantry Bay, enters the Carlist hills of Spain through “the Back Doors of the World.” He is indoctrinated by the Black Pope into the Carlist doctrine—the King Thing, the Sky Thing—with “just the veriest touch of the Green.” He meets Tancredi Cima, who will become one of his closest companions. The Carlist hills are the womb of Dana’s revolutionary education.
Dana encounters Ifreann Chortovitch, the Son of the Devil. He meets and marries Catherine Dembinska. He is formed by the Select Company—the Green’s inner circle. Catherine articulates the doctrine of “extirpate by prevention” and distinguishes the Green’s constrained violence from the Red’s unconstrained destruction. Dana becomes “the pleasant assassin.”
“The Eve of the Revolution.” Three farcical days of pale, token bloodshed that somehow shake the world. “The unrecognized but effectual heads of the two revolutions here under one roof,” Ifreann says. The Paris revolt is both farce and catalyst—“three gnats’ bites” that send “whole multitudes of elephants trumpeting and charging in terror.” The telegraph carries the shock wave at electrical speed.
Vienna riots (March 13), Berlin barricades (March 18), Milan street fighting (March 18–19). “So there were to be national revolutions as well as social revolutions. The blight would settle on the national revolutions as well, but essentially the national revolts were always a part of the Green Revolution.” The Red allies with ancient tyranny to forestall the Green locally. In late November, Dana marries Catherine Dembinska in Krakow. Eleven days later she is murdered—“horribly, unnaturally dead, completely broken and splattered.” The year ends with her prophecy, spoken before her death: “Everywhere, over all, it is better and greener at the end of this year than it was at the beginning.”
The bridge between the Green-Flame adventure and the Half-Sky adventure. The company disperses. “The double revolution that is the program of the world, that is the most persistent of the life-death double masks of the world.” Kemper Gruenland is murdered in a canal.
Dana arrives at Basse-Terre in the Antilles. He meets Angelene Domdaniel, who receives the Green Revolution “directly out of the Earth and Sea.” Revolution on Basse-Terre is “chattering and crackling in the air forever, but it hadn’t the substance either of the Green Revolution or the Red.” Angelene gives Dana an earth-rooted form of the Green that Catherine’s intellectual passion could not provide.
Chile’s good years under Manuel Bulnes are threatened by foreign-backed revolution. “Tares were sown in the wheat.” The revolution demands centralization disguised as liberation. The Chilean people vote for Montt; the revolutionaries revolt anyway. Dana’s ship, disguised as a ghost, breaks the revolutionary naval blockade at Valparaiso. “The beginning of optimism in Dana for the Green Revolution in the land under half a sky.”
Dana confronts the problem of Rosas—the bloody dictator whom Catherine’s ghost pronounces “overgrown with green.” The Red’s shirt-colors proliferate in Montevideo. Ifreann appears, subdued. Rosas falls. The Unitarios and international revolutionaries had wanted centralization—“central governments can be grabbed off by sudden assault; governments diffused into scattered local parts and sub-parts cannot be.” But Rosas had stood in their way for twenty-two years, and the victory over him proves hollow.
The Catherine Dembinska and the Gates of Hell clash between Basse-Terre and Marie Galante. Dana and Galopade survive three days in the sea. Dana suffers an “ocean change”—fractured reality, delirium. Count Cyril speaks to him aboard ship, teaching the doctrine of politics as angelic art.
The Prasinian Revolution defined: “dedicated to pulling the teeth and cutting the claws of insurrections and revolutions and wars.” Generals discuss the future: “all the wars and battles of the last half century could be put into just one little corner of one of the large battles or campaigns to come.” The Green faces wars without limit.
Count Cyril dies, having received the sacraments and signed his testaments. At his funeral mass, at the Lavabo, three knocks come from inside his coffin—one for each friend to whom he promised proof of his safe crossing. A fourth knock, set off by a pause, is for Dana. “My knock was the loudest,” Dana gloats. The Count speaks from Purgatory: “We will continue to do what we may do to bring on the blessed, and not the cursed revolution.”
Italy unifies, but by which flame? Victor Emmanuel is “a straw man” who “will catch fire easily.” Garibaldi’s “bloodless warfare”—“a new sort”—is really hypnotism, pageantry. But Cavour’s forces massacre the small papal aggregation completely. “Murder and arson, there is nothing like murder and arson to get the supporters flocking to you.” Tancredi has ardor for both revolutions: “Every Sardinian is born with the dream and vision of a flaming red-haired hero.”
Dana and Angelene settle on Basse-Terre. Greenfields Estate and Porte d’Infar Estate become the operational centers of the Green—what Dana calls “the vagrant Rome of the whole green movement.” The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung publishes inducements to Dana’s murder, calling him “one of the instigators of the murderous and notorious and everywhere-illegal ‘Green Revolution.’” Angelene plays the Purple Thunder Suite. “We must not allow the Green Revolution to become bland.”
Seven dead electors—Sabatelli, Napoleon III, Lord Kingsberry, O’Boyle, Scheherazade, Ercule Tirana, Brume—vote from beyond death to name Dana the thirteenth Count Prasimos, head of “the Green Revolution everywhere in the World.” The election by the dead completes the theological circle: the revolution is fought for the two worlds, and the dead remain its most reliable electors.
Dramatis Personae of Revolution
Not a general character guide. Only characters who act as revolutionary actors, organized by allegiance.
The saga’s protagonist. Formed in the Carlist hills, tempered in Paris, tested in South America and the Crimea, installed as head of the Green Revolution worldwide. “The pleasant assassin who had killed a dozen key men of a dark conspiracy.” Receives the Green from every source—Catherine’s intellect, Angelene’s earth, Brume’s roughness, Count Cyril’s strategy—and becomes its embodiment.
FIG · HAS · SS · FLI
The Green’s greatest intellect. Gives it its theological name (ananeosis), its ethical doctrine (“extirpate by prevention”), and its prophetic voice (“the land will be forgotten for a hundred years and more”). Her ship, the Catherine Dembinska, becomes Dana’s vessel. Her ghost speaks through the rigging. Married to Dana for eleven days.
FIG · HAS (as ghost/influence) · SS (as ghost)
The Green’s strategist and patron. Never fully visible—Dana cannot see his face clearly. Teaches the doctrine of politics as angelic art. A “Failed Lion” who has “failed so abysmally that he could no longer show his face in the world.” Dies January 1855. Knocks from inside his coffin. Speaks from Purgatory. Continues to direct the revolution from the Second Kingdom.
FIG · HAS · SS · FLI (as dead elector)
Receives the Green Revolution “directly out of the Earth and Sea”—through her bare feet. Where Catherine’s Green was intellectual and descended from mind to world, Angelene’s ascends from earth to spirit. “It works upward in me, as it worked downward in her.” She is fate-weaver, dream-walker, and prophet: “We must not allow the Green Revolution to become bland.”
HAS · SS (indirect) · FLI
Introduces the color taxonomy. Identifies the Green as unformulated, existing “only in scraps, by outlandish and contradictory people.” Names its advocates: Cobbett, Cobden, Ozanam, Buchez, the young Archbishop Pecci. A practical man: “Ride any analogy or any horse one hundred miles in a day, and it will go lame on you.” Dead elector for Dana as Count Prasimos XIII.
FIG · HAS (mentioned) · FLI (dead elector)
Meets Dana in the Carlist hills. His voice is “intensely directional”—a mumble that flies to the intended ear like a bird. Cork-oak farmer with ardor for the Green Revolution, “but, being a true Sardinian, he had a fair amount of ardor left over for the Red Revolution also.” Represents the practical tension of men who must work within both streams.
FIG · HAS · SS · FLI
“We cannot ever lose, not till the last trumpet sounds. And when it does sound, it will be the signal that we have won.” The voice of the Green’s ultimate hope. Acknowledges that the exponential increase in wars will be “a horrifying set-back.” Dead elector for Dana.
SS · FLI (dead elector)
“Christian Blaye of Hendaye, murdered in Toulouse.” His wife Jane keeps his skull, which speaks. Defines the stakes: revolution is “fought for the two worlds, for this world and the next.” Laments from beyond death: “If only I had hands, if only I had mobility, I could do sweeping things.… I got smart only after I was dead.”
FIG (mentioned) · HAS (mentioned) · SS
His surname means “Greenland.” “A giant man in body, who might also be a giant in mind and spirit.” Murdered by assassins who overturned his coach into an Amsterdam canal. His testament, delivered posthumously, contributes to the written theory of the Green Revolution. “Bloody-handed Kemper had never been able to communicate well.”
FIG · HAS
Something of the Green Revolution came to Dana “from Scheherazade’s round belly in Amsterdam; she had given it words and story-form.” A story-teller who shapes destiny. Renews fates on the street. Dead elector for Dana as Count Prasimos XIII.
FIG · HAS · SS · FLI
A man of puzzling depths who knows Basse-Terre before Dana does. He spooked the brown lion Asad. Present at the Amsterdam dispersal, at the Basse-Terre establishment, at Dana’s marriage. He is the Green’s steady, unsensational operative—less theoretical than Catherine, less earthy than Angelene, less rough than Brume, but always present.
FIG · HAS · SS · FLI
A separate character from Dana Coscuin, though they share the name “Dana” and a mystical connection that Lafferty leaves deliberately ambiguous: the Purple Thunder Suite was “put together by rough Joe O’Boyle before he became smooth Dana Coscuin of Ireland.” They appear together throughout the saga, fight side by side, and are clearly distinct persons—yet something in the saga’s identity-logic links them. Composer of the “strange and powerful Wasteland Cantos.” Dead elector for Dana as Count Prasimos XIII.
FIG · HAS · SS · FLI (dead elector)
The Green’s practical operator. Where Catherine teaches “extirpate by prevention” and “quite often we will not kill at all,” Mariella replies: “Of course I will kill her.” The tension between Catherine’s doctrine and Mariella’s practice runs through the saga. She is enormous, fearless, a crack shot with a rifle, and entirely without Catherine’s moral hesitations. The Green’s hands are not always clean.
FIG · HAS · SS
Sends Dana packets of pamphlets and booklets—“people were trying to put the growing green revolution into words on paper”—and begs him to acquire an intellectual background to the movement. Shoots a man dead on a steamship between Amsterdam and England to defend herself, and is harassed in courts for it. Delivers her dead father Lord Kingsberry’s after-death vote for Dana as Count Prasimos XIII.
FIG · HAS · FLI
Runs the “House of Appointments” in Hendaye—“the foremost nest of spies in all Europe.” Around her place are such sibyls as the Blind Woman and the False Blind Woman. She is the Green’s intelligence broker, small and rich and formidable: “It is all right that I am small, Dana.”
FIG · HAS · SS
Military commander of the Green’s forces. Issues commissions. Present at the Crimean War discussions where the future of warfare is debated. Dead elector for Dana as Count Prasimos XIII.
SS · FLI (dead elector)
Watcher of the meddling in Naples. Has a sense of color for the soul’s aura—she detects whether a person can perceive color and flame at all. Of Garibaldi: “That one cannot see colors. That one cannot know about flame, even when he is inside one.” Goes from Lyon to Naples by coach while the others go to Paris by train, because somebody has to watch the southern front.
SS
Delivers four of the seven after-death votes for Dana’s election as Count Prasimos XIII—those of Ercule Tirana, Malandrino Brume, General Sabatelli, and Joseph O’Boyle. The Green’s continuity depends on its widows and survivors carrying the dead’s intentions forward.
FLI
Dana’s adversary across the saga. His name is Irish for “Hell” (ifreann). “Whether or not Ifreann was the Son of the Devil, he was a very huge and shape-changing” creature. His uncle is the Lord of the Flies—in the diabolical anierocracyAnierocracy: Ifreann’s coinage—an inverted hierarchy. Greek an- (not) + hieros (sacred) + -cracy (rule). “With us it should properly be called the anierocracy.”, his superior until Ifreann attains his majority. He captains the ship Gates of Hell, crewed by gape-mouthed mutes whose tongues he has cut out. The Red’s active agent—not its theorist but its instrument, “always nervous,” dragging “broken nerve ends like lopped lengths of fire-hose.”
FIG · HAS · SS · FLI
Curses Dana in a roadway at Hendaye and swears to “put a pig-knife between his ribs” and “burn down the Carlist Hills.” A man of the Red in its purest destructive form—not a revolutionary with a program but a burner.
FIG · HAS
His German-language paper in New York publishes a story about Dana that is “a plain inducement to murder.” The Staats-Zeitung’s personals section is “a regular bulletin-board for revolutionary activity almost everywhere.” Ottendorfer calls the Green Revolution “murderous and notorious and everywhere-illegal”—the Red’s propagandist, weaponizing journalism.
FLI
The Red’s territorial counterpart to Count Cyril. His estate on Basse-Terre adjoins Greenfields—“on an island that is Earthly Paradise—with snakes.” A “high member of the Serpent Lodge.” Where Count Cyril is “Count of all green lands whatever,” Count Ouzel holds the corresponding red domain. The geography of the double revolution: Green and Red share an island.
HAS
Delivers the wheat-and-tares sermon. Teaches the Carlist doctrine: the King Thing, the Sky Thing, Estella as Star-on-Mountain, Karlik blood. “A cheerful liar” in Tancredi’s estimation, but the indoctrination takes root. He is the voice of the Black Revolution—sacral, monarchical, ancient—that provides the Green’s theological substructure.
FIG
Adopted the red shirt cheaply from a Montevideo warehouse. His “bloodless warfare” in Sicily is “a new sort”—not battle but pageantry, “a form of hypnotism.” His conquest is real but his means are theatrical. He “had abjured massacres”—unlike the refined Cavour, whose forces had not. A stumble-tongued man who “had somehow become a most remarkable orator.” Green or Red? The saga leaves it genuinely ambiguous.
HAS · SS
Catherine’s ghost pronounces him green: “Of course he is green, Dana. He is overgrown with green; he’s green field and forest and pampas.” The red was his early trademark—“for the Gaucho energy and its surging blood; and it was a pun on his own name.” The “early and earnest enemy of the red revolution in all its phases” who nonetheless invented its symbols.
HAS
“The man who was so divided in himself between the Green Revolution and the Red Revolution as to be almost driven to insanity.” In Mexico, Dana encounters “a deeper Religion coupled with a deeper Atheism than he had met anywhere.” Santa Ana is the embodiment of the double revolution in a single person—the two flames burning in one man.
HAS
“He will catch fire easily. The question is whether he will catch fire with the red flame or the green.” A straw man who believes himself a master negotiator. The vehicle for Italian unification—but which revolution does the unification serve? The saga leaves the question burning.
SS
The “highly refined Count” whose forces massacred the papal guard at the September 1860 crossing of the papal frontier. “The highly refined Count Cavour wasn’t the one who had abjured massacres. That had been rough Garibaldi.” The sophisticate is more bloody than the rough man.
SS
Believes in “always holding a small and quickly expandible corner of Italy.” After death, his ghost delivers his own after-death vote for Dana as Count Prasimos XIII—“the same ghost that now sits sleeping at your table.” Even in death, the contested figure participates in the Green’s succession.
SS · FLI (dead elector / ghost)
Key Speeches and Doctrinal Passages
The revolution’s doctrine is delivered in speeches—sermons, lectures, credos, deathbed testaments. These are the passages a reader must know to understand the model. They are organized here in four thematic groups.
I. What Is Revolution?
1. Brume Introduces the Color Taxonomy
“Soldier Coscuin, it is not the question whether there will be Revolution in Europe. What is this Revolution, a hundred-year-old foetus that we should doubt whether it has ever been born yet? No, the Revolution is the oldest and most creaking thing in the world, a gray man-image that renews himself always with difficulty. The only question is whether this phase of the Revolution will be red or black, or white or gold or green.” FIG ch. III
2. Catherine’s Ananeosis Credo
“What do you really believe in, Catherine?” Dana asked.…
“Oh, I believe in God in his Heaven and in the Revolution on Earth.”
“That is all?”
“What else is there?”
“And the Revolution is that important to you?”
“Oh, the Revolution is the World. It is the bound duty of every one of us. It is the constant conversion, the ananeosis, the renewal, the aborning again. Curse all heretics who use words to mean their opposites! The Holy Revolution is all the green-growth and its sacralizing. It isn’t their bloody and obstructing blight. They blaspheme!” FIG ch. XI
3. Count Cyril on the Stolen Word
“It is God whom we must fear offending, but it is the Devil who so often puts us on the defensive. He has stolen so many of the enlivening words, from ‘Revolution’ to—well, possibly to nothing else. He has stolen perhaps only the one word, but he makes it seem like legion. He is not really a proponent of revolution but of a stultifying and evil regression. Yet he receives the plaudits for being a revolutionary.” SS ch. 1
4. Count Cyril on Politics as Angelic Art
“We are politicians, Dana, I myself, and you also by my appointment.… What is a politician? A politician is always an angel of God, or of the Devil. And a competent politician is always an archangel of God, or of the Devil. An Angel means a messenger or a delegate. Every act of a politician is an annunciation to one of God’s creatures, or to a group of creatures, or to a corporate creature called a polis.” SS ch. 1
II. The Enemy
5. The Black Pope’s Wheat-and-Tares Sermon
“The world is a garden. It is a farm, a plantation, a sheep-ranch. In the garden are the cities also.… But the Enemy from the Beginning also sows the red blight: these are the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate.… We have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever; and everything that is undone is undone by that. The parasite will present itself as a modern thing. It will call itself the Great Change. Less often, and warily, it will call itself the Great Renewal. But it can never be another thing than the Red Failure returned.” FIG ch. V
6. The Center and the Eccentric
“It is not a nothing. It is ourselves,” Dana maintained.… But this did not take into account the intense polarization between the Green Revolution and the Red Revolution, and it was in this polarity that Dana lived. The two did not resemble each other; they contradicted each other at every turn. Other eccentrics might be nothing, might be identically nothing; but one of these was the towering positive and the other was the abysmal negative. HAS ch. 4
7. Catherine on Red Allying with Tyranny
Catherine was a little bit doctrinaire that evening.… She believed that the Red Revolution, for all that it had thrown in with the ancient tyrannies here (as it will do every time) to forestall the Green locally, was yet coming onto lean days. The withering thing had itself begun to wither. FIG ch. XII
III. The Method
8. The Carlist Indoctrination—the King Thing
“The Carlist Thing is the King Thing, the Bold Thing, the Sky Thing. It is the tree with some of its branches in our hills and with its roots in Heaven. Every King is really a King Charles, since Charles means King. But no King will rule us on Earth unless he is in the image of the King Himself.” FIG ch. IV
9. Catherine’s Doctrine of Prevention
“Our task is to extirpate by prevention. Our own great movement will grow with its own impetus wherever it is not blighted. We will break up persons of blight and centers of blight. But often, and this will be the hard part for all of you to understand, we will warn and advise before we kill. And quite often we will not kill at all.” FIG ch. IX
10. Ercule on Eschatological Confidence
“We cannot ever lose, not till the last trumpet sounds. And when it does sound, it will be the signal that we have won. But, yes, the exponential increase in the size of wars will be a horrifying set-back to us and to everyone.” SS ch. 6
IV. The Hope
11. Angelene’s Earth-Revelation
There really was something of the Green Revolution that came to Dana from Angelene’s lap, and that came to her from out of the ground. Something of it had also come to Dana from Scheherazade’s round belly in Amsterdam; she had given it words and story-form.… And Angelene was not the least of the influences. HAS ch. 2
12. Catherine on the Forgotten Land
“The land is too much forgotten,” a morbid man said. “Both sorts of revolutionaries think only of the cities and the industries.”
“Oh, the land will be forgotten more and more,” Catherine said. “What is the novelty about land? It will be forgotten for a hundred years and more. And then one day the people will wake up in panic and ask ‘What ever happened to the land?’” FIG ch. XII
13. Count Cyril’s Posthumous Testament
“It is fortunate that we are together, Dana. Even though I am in my coffin and you are in your pew.… We will continue to do what we may do to bring on the blessed, and not the cursed revolution.” SS ch. 8
14. Dana’s Election and Angelene’s Warning
“All seven of the dead electors name Count Dana Cosquin of Basse-Terre as the new and thirteenth Count Prasimos of Greenfields Estate and of the Green Revolution everywhere in the World.” FLI ch. 12
“We must not allow the Green Revolution to become bland.”
“The movement will not become bland, nor will I,” Dana said. “But the thunder gathers itself for a while before it launches a new series of strikes.” FLI ch. 12
15. Catherine’s Green-Growing Lecture
“The green-growing world is not restricted to its vegetation. There is a green-growing God above, there are green-growing people on the earth, and plants and rocks and ores and machineries, and graces and dedications and ideas and arts. There are green-growing prayers arising. But the devils in Hell are not green-growing, and those on Earth are not.” FIG ch. IX
“All the final answers were given in the beginning. They stand shining, above and beyond us, but they are always there to be seen.… We ourselves become the bridges out over the interval that is the world and time.” FIG ch. IX
16. Revolution as Homing
Can one come home to a place where one has never been before? Yes, of a certainty. It was for this that God put Homing in man. The only purpose of man is to reach the Home where he has never been before, and this homing is often prefigured on earth. HAS ch. 2
V. The Testament of Kemper
17. The Devil Unchained
“A new evil came into the world; or an old evil, better organized, came into power. This evil has now ruled the world for one hundred years.… I believe that, just one hundred years ago, the millennium ended, and that the force that had been bound and limited for a while was unbound. I believe that the name of this new evil, or the old evil resurgent, is The Devil Unchained.” HAS ch. 7
18. Footprints of the Beast
“It is no good to name it the Freemasons.… It is no good to name it the Jews.… It is no good to name it the International Bankers.… These are things that the Beast has passed through, or they are footprints left by the Beast, but they aren’t the Beast himself. The Devil Unchained has been in all of these groups. But also he has been in ourselves.” HAS ch. 7
19. Was There Ever an Ifreann?
“Was there ever an Ifreann? Is Ifreann our own projection? Does he in fact exist?… Have we merely externalized him as repository of our own Falsities and Violences?” HAS ch. 7
“Thou amadan, thou Narr, thou kraut-head, thou Kemper—it was no projection that murdered my wife in Krakow.” HAS ch. 7
20. The Parousia
“We must at every moment be in expectation of the moment of the parousia.… it is tomorrow, it is today yet if we hurry. And we must hurry if we are to be ready for it, and we must be ready for it.… everything pertains to the parousia.” HAS ch. 7
“I’m a lopped off limb of this green growing thing, and I’ll still believe in it as the true image of the Thing itself till I reach (after a thousand years in these white flames) Green Heaven of the Blessed, of which I have already seen a fragment.” HAS ch. 7
Glossary of Terms
Key terms, names, and concepts as they are used in the saga’s revolutionary framework. Terms marked with a color tag carry revolutionary allegiance.
Greek ἀνανέωσις, “renewal.” From St. Paul: “be renewed [ἀνανεοῦσθαι] in the spirit of your minds” (Eph 4:23; cf. Col 3:10). Catherine Dembinska’s theological name for revolution: “the constant conversion, the ananeosis, the renewal, the aborning again.” The Green Revolution understood as perpetual spiritual and social renewal, not violent overthrow. FIG ch. XI
Ifreann Chortovitch’s coinage for the diabolical hierarchy. Inverts hierocracy (sacred rule): Greek an- (not) + hieros (sacred) + -cracy (rule). “With us it should properly be called the anierocracy.” The Devil’s organizational structure, in which the Lord of the Flies outranks his nephew Ifreann until Ifreann attains his majority. HAS ch. 8
The puny priest of Basse-Terre’s term for the kinetic energy of the eccentrics—the off-center force that drives history. He admits its proper name is “the Life Affair.” In physics, angular momentum is the rotational energy of a body in orbit. The metaphor is precise: the Green Revolution orbits the Center (Christ) and draws its energy from the tension between center and periphery. Dana insists this momentum is not nothing—“It is ourselves.” HAS ch. 4
French: “hooded ones.” Masked secret societies. Catherine distinguishes the Green from such groups: “I have no sympathy for the old Cagoulards of France or for any other masked society. We will not go masked, we will not disguise. We will be ourselves under our own names.” The Green operates openly; secrecy is the Red’s method. FIG ch. IX
Italian: “charcoal burners.” Secret revolutionary society of early 19th-century Italy. In the saga, associated with the Red: “the most destructively revolutionary of all societies.” Judas Revanche is a Carbonarist. The charcoal burners who have “given their name to the most destructively revolutionary of all societies” are also, ironically, an ancient and humble guild. FIG · SS
Historically, supporters of the Carlist pretenders to the Spanish throne. In the saga, a much older and deeper thing. The Black Pope traces the name to Karlik (Mountain Dwarf), to Val Charla (Valley of the Word), to the star-group Charles Wain. “The Carlist Thing is the King Thing, the Bold Thing, the Sky Thing.” One young man mumbles the alternative etymology: “The real meaning and first form of Carlist is Charlatan.” FIG ch. IV
Irish: champion, hero. Dana’s designation in the Half a Sky Continuum: “Dana Coscuin, the green-shirted curadh or Irish hero.” The term carries connotations of single combat, legendary prowess, and a duty to the community—the Cú Chulainn tradition. HAS Continuum
Elder half-brother and mentor of Ifreann Chortovitch. “Count of extensive red meadows in hell and of a corresponding estate on earth.” His terrestrial estate adjoins Greenfields on Basse-Terre. A “high member of the Serpent Lodge.” The Red’s territorial counterpart to Count Cyril—Green and Red share an island, “Earthly Paradise—with snakes.” HAS ch. 5
Kemper Gruenland’s term for the evil resurgent in the mid-18th century. “I believe that, just one hundred years ago, the millennium ended, and that the force that had been bound and limited for a while was unbound.” From Revelation 20:2–3, 7: Satan bound for a thousand years, then released. Kemper dates the unbinding to approximately 1748. The Red Revolution is this unchained force operating through history. HAS ch. 7
“The double revolution that is the program of the world, that is the most persistent of the life-death double masks of the world.” The fundamental condition: Green and Red are not optional allegiances but aspects of reality, growth and blight, wheat and tares. Every person and every event participates in both. The double revolution is “the program of the world”—not a human invention but a cosmic structure. HAS ch. 1
“A constellation of persons or events will have precedent. It will not appear out of nothing; it’s a converging of previous trails and persons. Before one set of adventures, there was always another set; and before those, still another set, back to the beginning of the world.” The revolutionary company is not an organization but a constellation—persons drawn together by convergence, not recruitment. HAS Continuum
Catherine’s extension of the Green beyond vegetation to all of reality: “There is a green-growing God above, there are green-growing people on the earth, and plants and rocks and ores and machineries, and graces and dedications and ideas and arts. There are green-growing prayers arising.” Railways and foundries are green-growing things. “But the devils in Hell are not green-growing, and those on Earth are not.” The one ontological division. FIG ch. IX
“There had been several centuries of Failed Lions.” The Prasinian line’s pattern of temporal failure. Count Cyril Prasimos is “one such Failed Lion. He had failed so abysmally that he could no longer show his face in the world, good man though he really was.” Failure is structural to the Green—because its horizon is eschatological, worldly success is not its measure. But the failures are real and painful. SS ch. 2
The seat of the Count Prasimos on Basse-Terre (French Guadeloupe). Originally purchased by Count Basil Prasimos, the sixth of the line, in the 17th century. Dana calls it “the vagrant Rome of the whole green movement.” Has a Stewart and eight Residential Governors during the interregnum between Count Cyril’s death (1855) and Dana’s election (1872). FLI
“Green Fire in the Ocean, Red Fire in the Sky”—a Guadeloupe prophecy quoted in Half a Sky. The compact prophetic image of the two revolutions: Green rooted in the ocean (earth, depth, the material world), Red burning in the sky (abstract, aerial, destructive). HAS ch. 9
“The only purpose of man is to reach the Home where he has never been before, and this homing is often prefigured on earth.” Revolution understood as a form of homing—movement toward a destination recognized but never yet reached. Connects the *ananeosis* to eschatological longing: the renewal is always in the direction of Home. HAS ch. 2
Slavic: a dwarf. “However, a massive and ponderous dwarf, larger than a giant. It is the Mountain Dwarf.” The Black Pope claims Karlik blood for the Carlist line: “I myself am of this Karlik blood.” The paradox of the Karlik—a dwarf larger than a giant—mirrors the paradox of the Carlist revolution: a small, hidden, ancient movement that claims to be the largest thing in the world. FIG ch. IV
Kemper’s term for paradise. “I’ll still believe in it as the true image of the Thing itself till I reach (after a thousand years in these white flames) Green Heaven of the Blessed, of which I have already seen a fragment.” Heaven is not neutral—it is green. The Green Revolution is the temporal image of an eternal reality. HAS ch. 7
Greek παρουσία: presence, arrival. Kemper redefines it expansively: “it meant originally no more than the presence. Then it meant the special presence that must be in us. It is the in-dwelling, it is the resolution, it is the coming, or it is the second coming; it is the day of judgement, it is the end of the world; it is tomorrow, it is today yet if we hurry.” The Green Revolution must arrange all things “in accordance with the parousia.” Everything pertains to it. HAS ch. 7
From Greek πράσινος (prasinos), “leek-green.” Also the name of the Green faction in the Byzantine chariot races. Applied to the Green Revolution as a formal designation: “the Green or Prasinian Revolution.” The name connects the 19th-century movement to an ancient tradition of factional identity—the Greens and Blues of Constantinople. SS ch. 6
Brume’s interpretation of the French Tricolore: “the red for the blood of Christ, the blue for the eyes of my wife, the white for the innocence that must come back to us. The Tricolore has generally failed, in the same sense that everything has generally failed.” A symbol of the attempt to unite the revolution’s colors—and of the failure of that attempt. FIG ch. III
Vulgate Latin for tares or darnel—the weeds sown among wheat in the parable of Matthew 13:24–30. The Black Pope’s term for the Red blight: “the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate.” The parable’s instruction—let both grow together until the harvest—is the theological ground for the Green’s inability to achieve final temporal victory over the Red. The separation comes only at the eschaton. FIG ch. V
The Paradoxes of Revolution
The Unformulated Revolution
The Green “hasn’t been formulated yet, and it may never be.” It exists “only in scraps, by outlandish and contradictory people.” The Red can be systematized; the Green resists it. Pecci will write Rerum Novarum, and even that will be only one man’s encyclical, not a program. The Green’s resistance to system is its defense against capture by ideology, which is the Red’s territory.
But this defense is also a weakness. Without a system, the Green cannot organize on the Red’s scale. It depends on personal encounters, the laying-on of hands—Catherine’s intellect, Angelene’s lap, Brume’s big vital hand on Dana’s shoulder, Scheherazade’s round belly. “All persons of the two Revolutions knew or would know each other.” The Green transmits itself person to person.
The Stolen Word
The Devil steals “Revolution” and wears it as a mask for regression. But the Green also claims the word—Catherine calls it “the Holy Revolution,” Dana believes in “the Revolution on Earth.” The word is contested ground, and neither side can abandon it. The Red cannot, because the word’s positive energy is what powers its deceptions. The Green cannot, because the word names something real—the ananeosis, the constant renewal—that has no other adequate name.
This is why Christian Blaye says revolution is “fought for the two worlds.”
The Constrained Combatant
The Green kills under rules—“warn and advise before we kill. And quite often we will not kill at all.” The Red kills without rules. Catherine acknowledges the temptation: “Oh, it would be wonderful to combat them, for a while, with all the rules abjured.”
But Mariella sees it differently: “Of course I will kill her.” Dana is “the pleasant assassin who had killed a dozen key men.” Brume admits they work “for mixed good” with “mixed conscience.” The Green’s operatives must fight under rules they cannot always keep.
Revolution Allying with Tyranny
Catherine observes that the Red “throws in with the ancient tyrannies to forestall the Green locally, as it will do every time.” In Chile, the “revolutionaries” demand centralized dictatorship against a working decentralized government. In Italy, Cavour’s forces massacre the papal guard. The nominal program of liberation conceals an actual program of control.
Both the Red and tyranny oppose the same thing: organic, uncontrolled, local growth. The Green’s decentralization is the common enemy.
The Forgotten Land
Catherine prophesies that land will be forgotten “for a hundred years and more.” The Green is rooted in earth—literally, through Angelene’s bare feet. The Red is urban, industrial, abstract. As the world urbanizes, the Green’s natural constituency disappears. “Both sorts of revolutionaries think only of the cities and the industries and the industry workers.”
But Catherine also predicts the return: “And then one day the people will wake up in panic and ask ‘What ever happened to the land?’” Written in 1970, this prophecy reads differently in every decade.
Failed Lions
“There had been several centuries of Failed Lions.” And yet Ercule says “We cannot ever lose.” The Green cannot lose eschatologically, but it fails historically—regularly, structurally, almost necessarily.
The Failed Lions fail because they are constrained by the very things that make them Lions. A Green that succeeded by the Red’s methods—by system, by centralization, by unconstrained force—would no longer be Green.
Wars Without Limit
The Prasinian Revolution is “dedicated to pulling the teeth and cutting the claws of insurrections and revolutions and wars.” But General Campbell predicts that “all the wars and battles of the last half century could be put into just one little corner of one of the large battles or campaigns to come.” The teeth and claws grow faster than they can be pulled.
Lafferty, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, has his 1850s characters prophesy what he has already seen. The Prasinian Revolution’s task becomes not the abolition of war but the survival of hope within it.
The Infiltrated Green
Kemper’s testament contains a devastating admission: “No movement (not even our own green movement) has been able to stand totally clear of” the new evil that has ruled the world for a century. “It is the power behind all governments and the power behind all anti-governments.… It has even infiltrated the Church.” HAS ch. 7
The wheat-and-tares parable applies reflexively: there are tares among the Green’s own wheat. This is why Failed Lions fail—not only because of external opposition but because the enemy is already inside. And yet the movement continues, because the alternative to an infiltrated Green is no Green at all.
The Tendrils and the Devils
Catherine’s green-growing lecture reveals a precise mechanism: “whenever one least growing creeper touches across the interval, that means the extinction of one devil.” And the diagnostic: “whenever there is this special shrilling, when there is the wild flinging out of catchwords to catch you in, when there are the weird exceptions and inclusions, when there are the specious arguments and the murderous defamations… then one green growth has almost reached across to the other side, one devil is in danger of extinction.” FIG ch. IX
The Green can never advance quietly. Every real achievement announces itself through the shrillness of its enemies.
The Projected Enemy
Kemper’s testament asks the most unsettling question in the saga: “Was there ever an Ifreann? Is Ifreann our own projection? Does he in fact exist?… Have we merely externalized him as repository of our own Falsities and Violences? And why have we had such Falsities and Violences in ourselves?” Dana angrily rejects this—“It was no projection that murdered my wife in Krakow”—but the question is never withdrawn. HAS ch. 7
If Ifreann is a projection, then the double revolution collapses into a single internal struggle—the enemy is not out there but inside the Green itself. If he is real, the double revolution holds, but the Green must still account for “such Falsities and Violences in ourselves.” Either way, the Green cannot claim innocence. The Infiltrated Green (Paradox VIII) says the enemy has penetrated the movement. The Projected Enemy goes further: perhaps the movement generated the enemy.
The Model
What emerges from the saga is not a political theory. It is a theological anthropology of revolution—a model of how growth and blight, renewal and regression, the blessed and the cursed, coexist within every human effort to change the world. The Green is not a faction to join. It is a way of being in the world that resists every formulation, including this one.
The Structure of Revolution
A visual synthesis of the model that emerges across the four novels.