A Blizzard Named Nemo and I Think Outside the ... Embroidery Frame

To the spammer who prefaced her spam with, "Do you have problems with spam? So do I! Check my blog out if you don’t believe me!" – may I offer a few observations. First, if I’m going to see any spam by logging into your blog, all that tells me is that YOU’RE too stupid to control it. So why should I visit a blog run by someone that dumb? Second, while there may certainly be bloggers stupid enough to fall for that obvious opening line, I’m not one of them. If I see a link ANYWHERE in a comment, you’re tossed out as spam. Do NOT use this blog as cheap advertising for your own. Won’t work.

Friday the 8th: Preparing for two feet of snow ... well, ok, I’m not sure how one "prepares" for that beyond staying indoors and peering out the window nervously every once in a while, but I am eating artichoke hearts. And you might ask, "How does eating artichoke hearts help you prepare for two feet of snow?" Easy-peasy! I happen to love artichoke hearts. Eating them makes me happy. Digging myself out of two feet of snow and sitting in the dark when the power goes out does NOT make me happy. I’m hoping one balances the other out.

Saturday the 9th: It worked! No lights went out! Alright, I haven’t ventured out of doors yet, but as for the absence of a power outage: ah yes, the top secret, never before published, magical Artichoke Hearts Munchies spell came through! Oh, what a truly gifted witch I am! This spell works every time - which is to say, er ... once. :=\

Sunday the 10th: So this morning I had to stumble outside and dig my car out of two feet of snow. Afterwards, stumbling back indoors with the backache of the week, I realized I needed a spell for situations like this, to wit:

"Got hit with a blizzard and it was a zinger,
Free my car now without my lifting a finger!"

Of course, it would have been more useful had I come up with the spell BEFORE I went outside and dug the car out. (*Doh*!) (<---- Witch With Dangerously Low Preparatory Skills)

There must be some sort of witchcraft instruction somewhere that reads, "Create magic out of the things you know best.", or "Create magick from your strengths." Something along those lines. That basic "ism" hit me like a lightening bolt between the eyes when I happened to pick up Dorothy Morrison’s Utterly Wicked: Curses, Hexes & Other Unsavory Notions. Her comment in the Introduction is wonderful:

"This is not a book for those who believe that life can be lived without ever harming anyone. This is not a book for those who are overly concerned with Karma, the Threefold Law, and the Golden Rule. Nor is it a book for the squeamish, the straight-laced, or the easily offended."
Morrison, Dorothy. Utterly Wicked: Curses, Hexes & Other Unsavory Notions. Willow Tree Press, 2007. Page 1.

Ahhhh, lovely. I like her already.

The chapter that really knocked me for a loop, though, was the brief chapterino (a "very small, teensy-weensy, miniscule chapter") on the magic of stitchery. Trust me when I tell you that if there’s one craft-y skill I do have, it’s needlework. Quilting and embroidery, mostly. Okay, quilling too, which isn’t needlework, but it IS craft-y, and which I learned at Kensington Palace. But mostly the first two … although on some days when I’m feeling particularly brilliant, I can work myself up to sewing on a button.

I came across the tiny chapter on imbuing needlework and stitchery with magical intent and, because it never once occurred to me to try and combine the two, the proverbial light bulb over my head lit up.

Coincidentally – yes I know there ARE no such things as coincidences – I was reading Jonathan Cott’s The Search for Omm Sety at the same time. For those who have never heard of Omm Sety: born Dorothy Louise Eady in London, she is best known for her belief that in a previous life she had been a priestess in Ancient Egypt, and a lover of Pharaoh Seti I. According to Wikipedia, a New York Times article described her life story as "one of the Western World's most intriguing and convincing modern case histories of reincarnation."

While she was also a greatly respected Egyptologist, it is her role as the reincarnated beloved lover of Pharaoh Seti I that interested me, as (according to Omm Sety herself) he waited eons in the afterlife to find her again, and after doing so, paid her regular nightly visits, to her great joy – and mine, too, when I read about it and realized that such things were perhaps possible – spirit men in all of their anatomically correct magnificence … and living women. He was able to draw from her life force to create a solid physique that enabled their lovemaking. Yet he remained seemingly unaware that she was now a middle-aged Englishwoman – he still saw her as a young, virginal Egyptian girl that he fell in love with in his temple in Abydos. It seems that their initial sexual union (resulting in a pregnancy) was such a crime that, rather than betray him, the young priestess committed suicide, devastating him, as he was unaware as to why she died.

For those who remember the traumatic lifetime in Venice that I remembered when I was there, suicide played in a role there, too. So many aspects to the story caught my attention. Not to mention that Omm Sety was also an embroiderer, and supported herself selling embroideries of Osiris, among other things.

So many coincidences … so many ideas … so little time. I knew I needed to begin studying correspondences, symbols, sigils – physical symbols I could fill with magic intent. I also got ideas for pendulum boards, tarot layouts and all sorts of things I could embroider onto linen. I could also teach myself Shisha embroidery (mirror-work, where small pieces of mirrors, coins or other shiny objects are embroidered onto fabric), but use it for also attaching small crystal fragments if crystals were used in a spell.

Meanwhile I happened to stumble across a love spell. I won’t cite the source; suffice it to say it was written by another dumbbell of a woman. The spoken part of the spell goes like this:

"I call to thee, beloved one,
To love me more than anyone,
Seven times I pierce thy heart,
Today the magick of Venus starts.
I bind thy heart and sole to me;
As I do will so mote it be."

[Blink] [Blink, blink]

"I bind thy heart and sole to me"????? What, the idiot is ordering her readers to bind themselves to some guy’s fish dinner, or to the bottom of his foot or his shoe???

The Grammar and Spelling Psycho Police Squad

ARRGH! No, no, no, no!!! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! Spellcheck! Grammar check! Spellcheck! Proofread! Proofread! Soul! Soul! Not sole! Sole is a fish! Sole is the bottom of the foot, or the bottom of a shoe! SOUL is the … actually, I’m not sure WHAT the technical definition of a soul is. One moment, please.  (tap, tap, tap) (sound effects of a computer keyboard) Ah. Thank you. SOUL is "the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal"! (And thank you, Dictionary.com) KERBLAM! KA-POW! KA-PLOOEY!!

[*heavy sigh*] Thank you.

So, I suspect I’ve identified my own path, after all of the preliminary research and jumping up and down with frustration. Wicca? Definitely not. Enochian? I believe so. I’ve started reading Aleister Crowley’s Magick. (Hey, at least Aleister proofread his stuff, setting him light years ahead of most of these twinkies.) We’ll see how that goes.