Day of the Lobster, More Stupid Women and the Corn Moon

So this week, I went back to the beach for another two hours, in another weekly attempt to strengthen my core ... except this time I had a beach chair!  I experienced another roller where I got knocked down by a wave and rolled around in the foam before getting my bearings again, and all of my muscles felt the force of it the next day.  The only other difference was the time – rather than 8-10am, I ran a little late, stayed only a half hour longer and was there from 9-11:30am.

By the time I got home?  I looked like a lobster.  Lay most of the afternoon under a soothing high thread count sheet, teeth chattering, moaning, thinking:  oh, KMN.

I did learn that the same Vitamin E oil that I had on hand to minimize my head scar I incurred a week before my brother’s death worked well on sunburn, so I am now slipping and sliding around in my (now) oily chair, hoping the oil soothes this killer sunburn.  My scar responded better to patchouli oil, by the way, which I have no intention of spreading all over myself ... while I love the scent of patchouli in small doses ... the stuff is too precious to use as a body lotion, and I would probably choke the cat – and maybe even myself - with the fragrant overkill.

I also learned that women are just as empty-headed, narcissistic and mentally unhinged on the beach as they are on the commuter rail.  Within the span of those 2.5 hours, I witnessed idiot women ignoring the beauty of the ocean at their feet while they babbled loudly and maniacally on their cell phones, I suffered through not one but TWO idiot women positioning their idiot selves upwind of everyone else and then proceeding to spray themselves – therefore asphyxiating all the men, women, infants and children downwind of them - with toxic waves of aerosol sunscreen (LEARN TO DO THAT IN THE PARKING LOT, YOU STUPID NIMRODS!!!), and I watched a gaggle of seriously demented women thinking it was cute when their demonic and sadistic spawn chased down seagulls with plastic baseball bats – fortunately, I wasn’t the only person who yelled at them, so there is hope for humanity yet ... maybe.  (Also fortunately, no seagulls were injured due to these women’s complete and utter lack of parenting skills).  The rest of them babbled never-ending bullsh*t at each other in such high, squeaky, loud voices you wanted to muzzle each and every one of them.  Give me a roll of duct tape and next time I might just do it.

And that experience ought to teach me not to oversleep on the mornings I plan to visit the beach.  Last time, I had left before these jackasses showed up.  And before I looked like a lobster.

We’re in the middle of Metageitnion Aug 6 - Sep 4 (no, do not ask me to pronounce that), which I’m guessing runs from new moon to new moon, which Drew Campbell tells me are considered sacred – in Hellenic Reconstruction circles, so I’m assuming in ancient Greece as well.*  The Corn Moon on the 20th (more or less) was magnificent.

(*And once again, I’m wrong.  According to the www.hellenion.org website, Metageitnion began on the 8th, not the 6th, although I hope someone familiar with Grecian months can explain why, because the new moon WAS on the 6th).  True, I could raise my hand on Day #1 of “Witchcraft for Dummies” (not the real title of the course I signed up for in New Hampshire – I just can’t remember it) and ask, “Hey!  How come Metageitnion began on the 8th, not the 6th, considering that the new moon WAS on the 6th??”  But no, I figured I’d wait just a wee bit longer before getting myself expelled for being annoying.

I have spent the last week wandering around the apartment, scoping out “circle sites”.  Nowhere can I find room for a 9-foot diameter circle, but a smaller one, possibly.  I do have my altar in the bedroom, but realized that perhaps I needed more room for spiritual activities as opposed to a focal point for feeble attempts at meditation.  Options are down to the living room and study.

And yet another illiterate witch set off the The Grammar and Spelling Psycho Police Squad.   This time I had looked up Pennyroyal to see if I could remember why I ordered it.  A dumb witch had decided to make anti-flea stuff to spray on the floor outside of her door.  Included in her directions was this piece of nonsense:

The Grammar and Spelling Psycho Police Squad

"Since the infusion is quite dark and heavy looking I deluded it with water."

???

You what?  You deluded it?  You gave it a delusion?  Your anti-flea concoction is now delusional?  Sure you didn't mean you DILUTED it?  Argh!!!   [Ker-blam!]  [Ker-pow!] [Ka-blooey!]  DILUTE, DILUTE, DILUTE!  OMG PLEASE. Buy a dictionary. 

I still haven’t figured out why I bought pennyroyal.  If anyone has a good use for it, let me know.

Discovering Salisbury and Poseidon

Ah.  The things we forget as we grow older.  Our car keys.  The grocery list.  Why we ordered pennyroyal.  The reason for cryptic class notes.  The fact that when we go to the beach for the first time in (mumble mumble) years and remove our bathing suits once we’re back home, we’re going to dump the entire contents of the sandy beach onto our bathroom floor, sink, bath tub and everything else!!! 

Yes, I should have been standing somewhere safe – inside the shower.  On a newspaper.  I was standing there, remembering all of the various efforts to “protect the floor!” my late mother undertook with three sandy kids crawling indoors after a day at the beach in Brewster, and thinking, “Mom, you could have tapped me on the shoulder or something!”  But no, she’s off riding fire engines in another galaxy somewhere (she always wanted to ride in a fire truck) ... and of no use to me whatsoever.  I remembered all of her valiant efforts only AFTER I’d made a sandy mess of the bathroom floor.  Again, I say:  “D’oh!!”

But ahhhh, the beach.  Salisbury.  I got there just as it opened, for several solid reasons:  less chance of huge numbers of people and less chance of a killer sunburn if I left before noon.  And you say, “So wear sunscreen!”.  To which I say, “Have you ever read the contents of a bottle of sunscreen, you gullible idiot ... er, I mean ... you easily misled and altogether rather pitiful nice person??” (I’m trying to be more polite.  How’s it going?)

Given the choice between absorbing all of those toxic chemicals into my skin and spending 2 hours in the morning sun and building up a tan tolerance?  The sunscreen is more likely to kill me than Ra or Sekhmet (“Blazing Eye of the Sun”) ever could.  I can’t believe the vast numbers of people in this country who bought into the “The sun is BAD for you!” nonsense without giving it any thought.  If Mr. Signpost taught us anything, it’s the exact opposite:  it’s the NO SUNLIGHT option that is truly bad for you.  And according to a recent study cited in Scientific American, ¾ of teens and adults in the U.S. are now lacking Vitamin D, “whose deficits are increasingly blamed for everything from cancer and heart disease to diabetes, according to new research.”  I’m not even remotely surprised.
Source:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-deficiency-united-states

Overdoing ANYTHING isn’t good for you, no matter what it is.  If I stayed out there all day and ended up getting a sunstroke, that’s overdoing it.  Try eating a bushel of apples all at once and tell me that eating a bushel of apples “keeps the doctor away”.  Not.  The doctor would be looking at you pitifully over the stomach pump.  That woman who looked like she spent her life in a tanning bed and could now donate her skin to the shoe leather industry definitely overdid it and even she’s not dying of skin cancer.  People have lived their entire lives out in the sun for millions of years without dying of skin cancer in droves. We are without a doubt the most idiotic, gullible country on the planet, seriously.  Dousing ourselves in toxic chemicals is safer than spending a few hours with the glorious, life-giving Sun???  OMG!

But back to the beach.  It was so beautiful.  So peaceful.  So calm and soothing.  I even thought I could learn to meditate to the rhythm of the waves.  I’m still relaxed from a mere few hours there.  I definitely have to go there more often.  I learned a few things about my own health and strength.  As the water rushed in and out, I found it difficult to keep my feet.  A few times I lost my balance, and let the waves push me in to and pull me out from the shore.  Which may or may not be unusual, but I recognized a difference in fearlessness in myself:  at one time I was unafraid of being pulled out – I knew how to swim sideways against an undertow and escape it.  But that was before the accident.  Now I wasn’t as sure of my strength and stamina as I was earlier.  First thought:  “I need to rebuild my core.”

I even found it difficult to walk on the sand itself, and when I returned home, discovered that my ankles and feet were sore and achy.  On one hand:  I should not be that weak in my legs and feet.  On the other hand:  YAY!  I can feel them!  The feeling did go away after a while, but for a time, I could feel the tingling of the water and sand on my feet.  I almost feel like going to the beach more often will contribute to a healing process.  Ahhh, Poseidon!  I’ve come home!

In between happy bouts of rolling around in and enjoying the water, I was reading Sorita d’Este and David Rankine’s Hekate:  Liminal Rites.  Word of the Day:  Apotropaic.  Protection against evil.  Literally from the Greek apotropaios "averting evil," from apotrepein "to turn away, avert," from apo- "off, away"+ trepein "to turn".

But back to the cryptic class notes.  Apple pie spices (i.e., cinnamon, nutmeg, mace) and citrus are examples of incense fragrances that draw higher frequencies ...!  (see last entry on incomprehensible notes.)  That was in the segment about preparing the magickal circle.  Now, if I could only figure out what “higher frequencies” meant.  I have this visual image of being aurally assaulted by a herd of crazed sopranos, and my head exploding from the high-pitched noise.  Maybe I should look that up.

Magickal Circles and Pitiful Class Notes

Recently enjoyed my second Saturday afternoon workshop in New Hampshire, this one on casting a magickal circle.  The workshop was so interesting and so packed full of information, I kept forgetting to take good notes, and ended up with bizarre and incomprehensible scribbles such as:  “apple pie, citrus, wafts in space.”   Which is why no one should allow me to cast a magickal circle any time soon.  (see diagram of my anticipated first attempt at it, right)  And then I spent the next morning trying to make sense of everything that was said.  No luck so far.  *sigh*.   Or should I say, “d’oh!”

Fortunately, the instructor decided to tape the workshop, so I’ll listen to it this weekend and try to catch some clues as to why it was I scribbled incomprehensible nonsense about apple pies and citrus.

Found another wonderful witch in support of anti-Twinkism.  Twinkiism?  WHATEVER!  This one from Zsuzsanna Budapest in The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.  Now, obviously she’s not in favor of running up and down the west coast zapping everyone who ticked her off with some swishes and flicks of her wand ... or the entire coast would be one gigantic mass of boils, warts and broken bones, and all of Hollywood’s special effects make-up artists would be out of business.  But she is, thankfully, completely in favor of empowering witches with the ability to zap people when they need to.  Such zaps should be well thought out, definitive, done with courage and a willingness to face whatever consequences there may be.

“A witch who cannot hex,” sayeth she, “cannot heal.”

My first reaction?  Just what you might expect:  THANK YOU!!!!!

I hadn’t realized that there was a name for what I had been slowly doing over the last several years – more or less:  Pagan Reconstructionism is the general term for insisting on going back to the original historical source material.  Drew Campbell in Old Stones, New Temples described Reconstructionism as preferring:

•    The primacy of historical precedent regarding deities, worship and symbolism.  (And yes, I can see from here those readers who have witnessed me blowing up time and time again when this hasn’t happened, nodding energetically at that one.)
•    An insistence on cultural specificity and rejection of eclecticism.  (Say wha ...?  Took me a while to figure out what that meant.  Basically:  pagan reconstructionists are not in favor of picking and choosing deities or rituals from various cultures and combining them.  I’m not sure I do agree with that one.  Sounds too much like “rules and regulations” to me.  Why couldn’t I combine a ceremony honoring Sekhmet with a ceremony honoring Aphrodite?  They both have sexuality, lust, love and sensuality as characteristics, although there are differences in nuance, I think.  Other examples:  An and Ki, Nut and Geb playing much the same roles).
•    The rejection of Mesopaganism (e.g., revival-era druidic groups, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, ceremonial/ritual magick) and Christic influences on modern pagan religions.  Another definition:  “A term coined by Robin Goodfellow and used to refer to a religion which attempts to revive any of a various form of a paleo-pagan religion but are unable to completely give up judeo-christianity. Some examples are Masonic Druidism, Thelemic and some eclectic wiccans who still attend a xian church.”
•    An emphasis on “hard” polytheism, and skepticism regarding modern unifying theologies, particularly (1) Wiccan duotheism (“All gods are one God; all goddesses, one Goddess”) (2) the triple goddess paradigm of Robert Graves (Maiden-Mother-Crone); and (3) Jungian archetypism.  The unifying theology sounds to me much like the mesopagan definition.
•    A respect for personal gnosis (individual spiritual inspiration) coupled with a clean distinction between practices derived from intuition and those based on historical precedent.

Now, not every single one of those points pertained to me.  I hadn’t rejected ceremonial or ritual magick, mainly because it seemed somewhat useful in the “Let’s Learn About Incubi!” side of things, and I found Crowley’s work with ritual magick – or was it ceremonial magick? – fascinating.  I did realize it didn’t quite fit in with everything else I was learning, though.

I haven’t stopped searching for methods ways to invoke incubi, which I consider the same as the angels from the Book of Enoch.  I think Ida Craddock’s spirit husband was more of a very talented ghost than anything else.  But to invoke one of those angels, there are a lot of skills I need to pick up first.

About the Christic influences?  Definitely!  That always stuck out like a sore thumb, it was so obvious when you saw it.  Every time I went nuts over yet another “church lady in a pointy hat”, spouting rules, regulations and puritanical anti-sex crap at everybody, that’s what I was rejecting.  Far too many of those running around, pretending they were witches, or, even worse, actually thinking that they were witches.

I’m not ready yet to run headlong into pagan reconstructionism, though, mainly because there are so many directions in which to run.  Towards Sekhmet?  The Sumerians, Assyrians?  The Italians?  The teachers I’ll be learning from focus on the Celtic, which I suspect is not where I want to go – I’m not Celtic, for one thing – and some of the Gardnerian foundation bothers me.  Still, if the recent class was any indication, there is so much to be learned from them.  Once you respect the teacher’s basic skills and intelligence, it doesn’t much matter what tradition they seek for themselves, as long as they have the ability to teach you the skills you need to learn to seek your own.  Basic classes begin in September.

Woke up a week ago SCREAMING.  Charleyhorses in both calves, tendon cramps on the outside of both feet, and the inside of both feet, ankle level; cramps in both thigh muscles; tendon cramps on the backside tendons of both thighs.  All simultaneous.  At that point I was beyond crippled, beyond immobile and howling with pain.  I couldn’t even move to massage the cramps in both legs; all I could do was lay flat and scream into the pillow until I was hoarse, and try to WILL my muscles to unclench.  It took five to ten minutes of horrific agony until I could try to roll over and push myself up, and by that time I was nearly blacking out from the pain.  Even that slight movement set my legs off again – and me into another bout of pillow screaming.  Took me a full thirty minutes before it was even remotely bearable.  By four in the afternoon, Saturday, I could still barely walk, that’s how awful the damage was.  Both of my eyes were bloodshot from the screaming.

There has to be some way to get rid of these things!  The medication they gave me works most of the time, but is also beginning to give me tremors – slight ones, although every once in a while my hand will suddenly fling itself off to the right or something, and my pen flies across the room.  My legs do the same thing every once in a while, too, and thank goodness I’m usually sitting down when it happens.

While I recovered from the horrible leg & foot cramp experience, I read more detail about the cimaruta in The Evil Eye : an account of this ancient and widespread superstition by Frederick Thomas Elworthy, 1895, London: John Murray.  If you can stomach the sneering christian condescension and nastiness ("superstitition"?), it’s available on Google Books for downloading.  Really.  It’s nauseating.  The next time a christian whines about all the anti-christian sentiment directed at people like her who are obviously saints, wave the book under her nose as a good reason why she and her ilk had it coming.

Still.  If you can ignore the appalling rudeness, the book is vaguely useful when it comes to historical practices – even without the information on cimarute, the work is full of the ancient symbols and talismans employed in classical civilizations – although, you have to admit, it didn’t much save them from the onset of the Dark Ages from which  we’re still suffering, although fortunately, the dark Age of Pisces is fading away, brought on by ever more ugly scandals perpetuated by christians and their deeply repressed lust.

The cimaruta is always made from silver, which is sacred to Diana and is always created with three branches, sacred in all sorts of ways:  maiden/mother/crone (see, there’s that Robert Graves thing again.  I should probably read his book); three-road intersection; the three sisters, the three wyrd sisters, the Triple Crown ... okay, forget that last one, but you get the idea.

Early morning nooner with a FWB and went flying over the moon – twice.  Second flight so intense it felt as though it lasted 5 minutes.  Afterwards, he was so sure he was responsible for the experience, strutting around so puffed up and impressed with himself I didn’t have the heart to remark that, in actuality, a Piero fantasy – both times – was responsible.  The second fantasy was just a little more inventive than the first.  I consider myself lucky I didn’t scream Piero’s name out loud and destroy the FWB’s ego for life.

Oh, the shameful deliciousness of it.