But another part of me won’t let me back out.
Is this courage? Limping into Manhattan with a twisted face and a perpetually running nose, swollen from steroids, to face someone whose beautiful Sicilian tenor voice unknowingly helped to begin to pull you out through the other side of your own personal hell, knowing that it is quite possible that he may glance at your face and then turn away in ... what? Disgust? Disinterest? Dismay? Or worse: pity? Do I need to spend an entire concert sitting right in his line of sight and praying, "Please don’t look at me, please don’t see me"? How small and pitiful my world has become.
I begin to suspect that surmounting the fear of traveling to Salem would be courage; fear of traveling to Manhattan is merely vanity. But I’m afraid, nonetheless. My heart has been sliced to shreds from so many other things lately; I’m being asked to lay it down on a sacrificial altar again. I don’t want to. Oh, I so don’t want to. I don’t trust the universe anymore.
The truth of it still: I still can’t face Salem without self-loathing and tears, while I feel safest and most at home in Manhattan ... even after September 11th, I went back to work two days later because Manhattan is such a source of familiarity and comfort for me ... so if I’m going to go anywhere, it is the best place I can be to face this new and unexpected fear, vanity driven or not.
As if to cuff me rather abruptly upside my head ... Sekhmet appears with Damien again. In Manhattan, of course. It’s very difficult to describe the impact of the two of them together without sounding ... I don’t know ... weird.(Photo by Damien Echols)
Individually, they’re awesome anyway: Sekhmet the All Powerful, the Healer, the Eye of the Sun, sparkling with thunderous solar magick, Purifying Goddess of the Desert; Damien the Magus and the Teacher, acolyte of the Holly and Harvest Kings, lover of the North Wind and the snow, and (I loved Henry Rollins’ analogy) a gleaming, fire-tempered, razor-sharp blade of a samurai sword.
Put them together, and – at least in my world anyway - now they’re a powerfully silent sonic boom, a portent, an omen, a sign of something. A new something, like a star nursery, lighting up what was once a remote corner of the universe, laying in darkness. Together, they make the air shimmer and undulate in waves.
Damien has no idea, I know this, but She’s got one huge paw laying on his shoulder. A benediction of sorts, I keep thinking. She really does use him to speak. He’s her low, rumbling growl. The two of them together make my head turn, expecting something. They immediately have my complete attention, although I’m not quite sure what the message is, yet. The two of them are this massive wall I can’t get through, can’t go around, have to confront whether I want to or not. Seeing them together makes me want to cry.
That Damien showed up (completely unexpectedly) in the first of the two psychic readings (the only accurate one) where the psychic was also seeing Karnak – Sekhmet’s temple in Egypt- is now getting even spookier. Given THAT scenario, maybe I should have expected this development – the two of them standing side by side - but I really didn’t.
This isn’t as breathtaking as the earlier photo of the two of them looking like an impenetrable force of nature; this time he photographs her and comments, "She's as lovely as ever." and took a closer photo of the ankh in her hand.
Although drawn, I find myself unwilling to look too closely at them, mainly because the two of them are such powerful symbols of change, of communication. My change. Being pushed or pulled towards something. When I’d much rather cower behind closed doors and hide, and to beg people not to look at me, I suspect I’m about to be pulled back out – and I don’t want to be. It hurts to be.
He made me smile a day or so ago, in an interview – he said he didn’t want to be remembered as one of the West Memphis 3. I read that and, OK, while I didn’t exactly think, "Oh, was he one of the ...?", I did realize that I’m past there, already. I rarely think of him that way, unless he’s brought the topic up for some reason. One minor exception: I still love reading his prison journal, so I suspect at some very minor level that will always be there somewhere, but it is far from being the first thing I think about him, or when I read his tweets. I tend to see him as the Magus and Mr. Signpost now. I might also start thinking of him as Sekhmet’s low, rumbling growl, if this keeps up.
I’m trying to make sense of all of this.
"The Tarot is a living being. It has its own intelligence, a personality you can feel every time you use the Tarot. When you take the Tarot cards in your hands, you do not hold an impotent document or an inanimate book. The Arcana of the Tarot are a real tool that allows you to invoke or evoke an immaterial and invisible mind. These Tarot cards are the visible appearance of an invisible form of consciousness that can communicate with you through the medium of the Tarot deck."
DeBiasi, Jean-Louis, The Divine Arcana of the Aurum Solis, 2011, Llewellyn Publications, p 7
The Divine Arcana, so far anyway, is an interesting book. Definitely lacking in historical footnotes at critical moments, but interesting. I’ve been reading the history of Georgius Gemistus — later called Plethon or Pletho — a Greek Neoplatonic philosopher, "one of the chief pioneers of the revival of Greek learning in Western Europe", he advocated a return to the Olympian gods of the ancient world. Fascinated by his reasoning in advocating a return to the Olympian gods, and right at the height of christian fatal retaliation for heresy, I’m reading John Wilson Taylor’s 1921 dissertation for the University of Chicago, Georgius Gemistus Pletho’s Criticism of Plato and Aristotle, hoping to learn something – and desperately wishing I’d gone further than one year in Latin. Damien - Mr. Signpost - does it again: this time he had re-tweeted something about Hermes Trismegistus, which sent me off to the Emerald Tablet, which immediately sent me off in this direction.
Interesting factoid I’ll bet most christians don’t know: Thomas Aquinas "[so] far succeeded in reconciling the doctrines of the church with the philosophic thought of Aristotle that, for two centuries after he wrote, an attack on Aristotle was construed as evidence of hostility to the church."
Taylor, John Wilson, Georgius Gemistus Pletho’s Criticism of Plato and Aristotle, University of Chicago, 1921, p. 6
Say that again? An attack on Aristotle was construed as evidence of hostility to the church? Did I mention that Aristotle pre-dated christianity by a mile and lived in a thoroughly pagan society? No? Consider it mentioned ... although many scholars suggest he was an atheist. Point still remains.
So far, all I’ve gotten out of the dissertation is an amusing discussion amongst the ancients of the divine "Fifth Element" ... I say ‘amusing’, because if they’d known the truth (i.e., that the "Fifth Element" was in fact a hot, naked, comic-book sketch of a chick who falls from the sky into an air cab piloted by Bruce Willis) ... it would have saved me a few hours I’ll never recapture of squinting at the text and mumbling, "Huh?"
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