Not the church in Vatican City, the sparkling water. I blame Piero for this, since he (and his unofficial brothers Ignazio and Gianluca) handed out bottles of Ferrarelle at New York City’s Beacon Theater and I promptly fell in love with the stuff. I’ll never forget the sacred moment. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, choirs were transcendentally choiring and with reverence in my heart I lifted "Piero’s Holy Water" to my parched lips, took a hesitant sip of the sacrament – which I was sure he had collected, bottled and shipped singlehandedly – and said (my utter obsession with him at the time notwithstanding), "Wow, this is pretty good."
OK, FINE. It was 9:00 at night, hot, steaming, any birds there were had been drowned out by traffic, and the choir was in my head. The water was still first rate, though.
The only sparkling water I’d had until that moment was something cheap with carbon dioxide injected into it, and I had immediately choked on it. This was infinitely better. Not even just infinitely better but in another category of water altogether. It was heavenly. But they neglected to mention that Ferrarelle was only available in restaurants; you couldn’t go to the nearest store and buy some. Thanks for the heads up, guys.
But you know me: the minute you tell me I can’t have something, I absolutely have to have it, so next I tried San Pellegrino. It was also superior to the Eau du Carbon Dioxide I’d had when I was a child, so I went out and bought ten 1-quart bottles of San Pellegrino with the expectation of carrying them off to the office to drink. Italy turns out the best stuff, and now I’m absolutely addicted to it ... to the point where I suspect they spiked the stuff with something deliciously and actually medically addictive. Am guzzling a bottle as I write.
Meanwhile ... as we recover from Superstorm Sandy rolling up the east coast, blowing us off the map, drowning everything in sight and squashing us like bugs ... I’ve decided to slide ever so discreetly back into "semi-normal" mode. For me, "normal" means being so overwhelmed with office work and overtime and work-consumed weekends, I can’t can’t get anything else done. "Semi-normal" means it’s easing up a bit, and I’m finally able to read books again.
* * * * * * * * * *
Ahhh, ze blessed historians!
True, most citizens of the United States – given our notoriously poor educational system that left us at #17 in the math and science skills, and even lower in the literacy skills – would have no idea how to maneuver their way through the "arcane jargon of professional scholars" without falling asleep, or drooling in dumfounded bewilderment. In fact, three-fourths of the country couldn’t even maneuver their way through that last sentence without going cross-eyed.
Fortunately for me, I was educated both in an excellent New York suburban school system (Pelham, NY) and majored in history at the University of Michigan, so I’m quite familiar with the "arcane jargon of professional scholars", having needed to employ it myself for various papers and theses.
*Note: I did not coin the phrase "arcane jargon of professional scholars", I just reached over and swiped it because I liked the sound. Credit where due: Christopher Faraone.
The more I read, the more I’m convinced that one’s sacred texts must be self-composed and created; and definitely not a scrap-pile of hoohah written by other people - with their own beliefs and their own inspirations and their taboos, all of which are considerable. So much of what I read conflicts with other texts, or is presented so self-righteously and so dogmatically it might as well have been written by a charter member of the Spanish Inquisition. So many wiccan writers aren’t even aware of how bound up they are by their own former beliefs that it overshadows anything they present. I know that’s true of me as well ... rarely can writers see their own binding ropes.
So ... back to the serious objection I have against getting permission from people before you cast spells on them. I’m sure I sound obsessed by this point, but ... this is important, dammit!
I have read so much ridiculous finger-wagging at readers from so many girly-girly so-called witches who are – in all honesty – imposing their own puritanical christian nonsense on everything they write that it’s beginning to make me nauseous. They do this because it feels safe and comfortable to them, and that’s fine – as long as they recognize what they’re doing and claim it. As soon as they start telling you it’s traditional witchcraft, you should feel so infuriated that you zap them with a counter-spell, like – say – intense and long-standing writer’s block, topped off with a few boils and warts on their genitalia, and why should you do that? Because they’re lying. They’re also depriving an entire generation of witches of their power and their strength, and turning them into Tinkerbelles. You wanna be Tinkerbelle? Fine. Go be Tinkerbelle. But Tinkerbelle isn’t a witch.
Ultimately, I find it sad that I need to read serious history textbooks to learn what REAL witches should be teaching me and aren’t.
"In this regard, according to Christopher Faraone (1999), on the one hand, Athenian male citizens employed love magic in attempts to transfer their erotic suffering from the affliction of Eros onto the love-objects to whom they felt so vulnerably attracted. On the other hand, with the exception of courtesans, Athenian women and male slaves employed erotic magic not in order to project and thereby displace erotic suffering but in the hope of calming and controlling their angry and passionate male superiors."
Stephenson, Craig. Anteros: A Forgotten Myth. Routledge, London and New York. 2012. p. 15.
Nowhere in this paragraph is there mention of anyone dialing up the person they were shooting love spells at, and asking for their "permission" to do it. And the magic of Ancient Greece IS "traditional". The crap that the girly-witches (be they male or female) are feeding people now is NOT traditional, and never was. They’re lying to you. Now - if these ladies and gents want to re-write wicca to conform to contemporary standards of PC-stained morality, I have no problem with that. Really!! There is a lot of fully traditional witchcraft I couldn't bring myself to perform - good example: animal sacrifices. But I would never try to tell you that my variant (i.e., "no animal has been harmed in the performance of this spell!") is traditional witchcraft. It most certainly is not. My problem is that too many writers claim that their way is traditional, when it absolutely isn't. It is the reader who should be deciding which "ways" they want to adopt, not the writers. And writers are not owning up to their own variants of witchcraft inserted into their books, claiming it to be the real one.
Along those same lines, they're not owning up to their own variants of so-called "morality", either. Taboos differ across locales, boys and girls. One person's sense of "morality" is not the same as another's. While there may be some taboos that cross cultures, don't make the assumption that your ideas of morality should be adopted by everyone. Makes you sound, as I said, just like a charter member of the Spanish Inquisition, wearing a pointy hat.
By the way, Christopher Faraone’s brilliantly readable and and well-researched history book mentioned above – complete with an awesome bibliography - is Ancient Greek Love Magic. Back to that next entry.
To digress briefly, and because of the perception of Eros in the above quote, I’m finding Anteros fascinating. For those who don’t know, Anteros is Eros’ younger brother, conceived because Eros – after he was born – stopped growing. His mother, Aphrodite, asked for advice and was told to conceive another son with Ares, the god of war – and as soon as Anteros was born, Eros began to mature.
There is a primary difference between the two, I think: Eros is the god of love and sexual desire; the "madness" of love; you’re shot full of arrows, and are staggering about, clutching your chest, pining for your beloved ... who may or may not feel the same way. Usually not, which makes you crazy. Eros is the insanity, the longing, the desperation, the madness; Eros is Dante idolizing Beatrice from afar, Petrarch aching for Laura ... this is the pain of often unrequited love that sends you into near death spasms when it has passed the point of reason.Anteros was the stabilizing force that tempered and perhaps (or perhaps not, hard to say) matured the insanity, the lust of Eros: he is the god invoked when requited love is desired, also the deity who punished those who scorn love and the advances of others, or ‘the avenger of unrequited love". He was sometimes mistaken for Eros, but can be identified by his long dark hair and butterfly wings. "He has been described also as armed with either a golden club or arrows of lead."
One of the most laughable cases of mistaken identity: christians insisting that the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus (above right) is actually the The Angel of Christian Charity.
Riiiight. Half naked guy with his (quite attractive) muscular bare butt hanging out, wielding a bow and arrow and sporting butterfly wings. Christian charity. Okay, after we all finish laughing ...
I guarantee that any minute now one of those same christians is going to pop up and squeal, "We call it that because he symbolizes the selfless philanthropic love of the Earl of Shaftesbury for the poor!" Riiiight. He couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to express that, could he? He had romantic and sexual feelings for the poor? Little bit weird, idn’t it?
The rest of the time people who aren’t idiots poo-pooh the Angel of Charity nonsense and assume it’s Eros. It isn’t. It’s Anteros. Look at the butterfly wings. I find it interesting though, as did Stephenson, that Eros and Anteros regressed to childlike and infant-like proportions only after christianity gained a foothold in people’s bedrooms and proceeded to make people feel like crap for being utterly normal, enjoying the sensation of lust, and falling in love with other people.
Eros and Anteros were originally muscular young men. When you look at the art of the Renaissance, and the art of the romantic era, the young men have disappeared, replaced with one or two chubby infant(s), floating in the air and preparing to shoot things with bows and arrows. In fact, those two somewhat violent chubby infants show up today on 9 out of 10 valentines.
Think about it. Why????? You want to capture the eye of a hot hunk and the best way you can devise to turn the guy into a panting love slave drooling for your naked and lascivious body is a ... card with a fat baby on it??? Did you actually give that some thought before you sent that card out? Why?????
If there were anything more representational of the christian horror, fear, loathing of (or ultimately desperate hunger for) sexuality and fulfilled desire, that would be it: turning Eros and Anteros into harmless and chubby little babies. (Explains a lot, doesn’t it?)
For another example, under the "Why, oh why did I buy this appalling book?" category, I started reading a translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, "a powerful fusion of Greek and Egyptian thought", according to the back cover. Title: The Way of Hermes. And yet, on page 1 we read the following:
‘I wish to learn,’ said I, ‘the things that are and understand their nature and to know God".
I stopped dead in my tracks at that. God. Capital G. Singular.
Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics which contained no "capital letters", and worshiped multiple deities, even in the "Ra" era. Ancient Greeks worshiped multiple deities, and usually identified them by name. God???
This was a gang of translators sticking their big, hairy christian rumps right in the middle of a critical pagan text translation, undermining any trust I might have had in it. And dollars to doughnuts these fools thought they did a great job on this book. Whatever happened to editors? Serious peer review?
I had no choice. I screamed in outrage, pulled out my handy pistol and shot the book... er, which I propped up out of sight against the computer screen (see graphic, right). Oh, yeah. One of the authors is on the board of directors of a group of private schools in England being investigated for child abuse. (Brutality in their caning of small children). Tossed THAT book right over my shoulder in disgust.More stuff being passed along as "Wiccan tradition" when it isn’t. From an article on Wiccan meditation techniques:
Gerald B. Gardner found Wicca in the mid-20th century after claiming to have been initiated into a coven of Witches. Gardner admits that his information on Witchcraft was fragmentary and that he had to reconstruct it by incorporating other materials. Before founding Wicca, he was an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, involved with Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Order. These involvements, as well as more than 30 years spent living in Asia, heavily influenced and inspired Gardner as he formulated Wiccan rituals.
Wicca Meditation Techniques | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_4572037_wicca-meditation-techniques.html#ixzz28aRXsKNW
Not at all sure where Mackenzie Wright, who wrote the above came by his or her her information, but given the amount of nonsense a lot of wiccans repeat without any traditional sources behind it, I’m not even remotely surprised.
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