Do Not Read The Next Sign!

I wonder if this has ever happened to anyone else.  You’re told – and it actually makes a lot of sense – that your thoughts are the creative force behind the world you live in.  Everyone pretty much believes that anyway, or you wouldn’t be bombarded with, “You have to think positively!” every time you turn around, to the point where you fight the urge to slap people.  So, okay, for the sake of this argument,  let’s say you believe it.  And you start becoming your own thought police.

The problem is:  there are some of us – and by “some of us”, I mean me – who have a contrary personality.  The minute you tell us we CAN’T do something, we immediately want to prove you wrong and begin plotting ways to do exactly what you’ve ordered us not to do.  The minute I read, “Do not read the next sign!” – you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to read it.  And of course immediately regret it, because it’s usually a stupid advertising ploy describing in gory detail the cruelty of your current brand of toilet paper on your sensitive ... whatever.  Point is, while I’ll deeply regret reading the second sign, I can’t seem to stop myself from reading it.  I’m annoyingly contrary (or gullible)  like that.

There are other reactions to a sign like that;  the people who already know it’s an advertising ploy and don’t give a crap about the second message, and those so beaten down that obedience is second nature.  The women who read the first sign and say, “Yes sir, I won’t read it!” – and don’t – are usually the republican women who hold obedience up as a beacon forestalling the encroaching gloom of their inevitable decline, and are also the women who fervently adore domestic discipline (and what’s even funnier:  they also  truly believe the husband is the embodiment of Jesus in their household, so in effect these nutballs are actually begging “Jesus” to spank them hard for being naughty, naughty little girls.  I’m not a biblical scholar or anything, but ... WTF?)

I digress.

So I have become my own thought police.  I discovered that I could go for years without being buried under horrifying thoughts, but as soon as I accept that my thoughts can materialize, I immediately have a hell of a time controlling them.  Would love to know how anyone else has surmounted the problem.

Synchronicity:  one of these days, I will try to describe my initiation ... it was one of those things very difficult to put into words that are sufficient enough to communicate the internal experience.

However, I will relate one very small portion of it – this was the instructions given to me by the two deities who initiated me.  Lots of things I need to do this year (working on disciplining my thought processes being one of them) – another was beginning to learn the art of invocation; it was suggested that there were many other beings who could help me with trouble spots, but I needed to learn how to contact them.  The idea of learning about sigils came into my head, or, more accurately, the picture that Mr. Signpost had posted of a sigil he had created.  I thought, “I should learn how to do that”.

Synchronicity strikes again!!!  Within a few days, he announced he was giving classes in just that very subject. In Salem.  As he appears to have moved back to New York City, his announcement of a Salem class was a bit of a shocker.

Well, for two reasons.  One:  the very deity (Sekhmet) who – whether he knows it or not – has her paw on his shoulder every time I see them together, is the one who gave me the instruction.  And two:  Sekhmet, being my courage-inspiring Goddess, is now making me face returning to Salem, Massachusetts, after I’d sworn I would never set foot in the place ever again, after my brother’s death.  In other words: no sooner had she issued the directive, she’d handed me two tasks in one:  learn about sigils and magickal invocation from Mr. Signpost himself, and secondly, overcome an emotionally debilitating aversion to Salem, Massachusetts.

She doesn’t miss a trick, that magnificent lioness.  If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that she has little patience for whiners and whimperers – “I’ll help you get there, but you have to stand up and walk with me; I’ll not carry you.”  That’s basically the way she is with me.  She was willing to give me a breath of courage to overcome a lifelong needle phobia and inject myself with insulin, but I was the one who had to learn the process for doing it, take the deep breath and actually do it.  No one was more stunned than I was when I did do it. 

Sekhmet Stolen, Fluid Condensers and Sneaking into Men's Bedrooms

Woke up this morning to the news that thieves had stolen the statue of Sekhmet from her shrine in Nevada.  Have a memory of reading about what happened to some desecrators/thieves in Egypt, who tried the same thing ... it was not a pleasant outcome (for the thieves), who in that case, were starting to desecrate the statue, “in the name of Allah”.  Apparently, “Allah” did not have their backs when Sekhmet awoke within the statue, impregnated as it was with magickal power from centuries of Egyptian magick and worship.  I’ve always said, Sekhmet is not a Goddess you want to be messing with.  Never.  (That’s not the statue they stole by the way.)  For more information: 
https://www.facebook.com/letecia6

Woke up one recent morning (April 16th, if I recall) to find snow on the ground!  And may I say, on behalf of everyone in the path of whatever storm it was that dumped snow on us after all of the flowering trees and bushes had begun to blossom so beautifully:  W ...T ... F?

Llewellyn’s Moon Sign calendar for the same day told me to “plant biennials, perennials, bulbs and roots.  Prune.  Irrigate.  Fertilize (organic).”  Right.  Let me just get out my snow shovel first ... well, more like a broom, there isn’t that much of it ... and my handy-dandy frozen ground pile driver, and I’ll get right on it!  Actually, I’m mostly crabby because I had packed my winter coat and am going to have to dig it back out again.

Was reading Franz Bardon (Initiation into Hermetics) which, in addition to getting me completely confused and bewildered about electric v. magnetic body parts (have NO idea what the guy was going on about), led me to the topic of scrying mirrors and fluid condensers.  Had never heard of the latter before; that led me to reading up on tincture of gold … which struck me as appallingly expensive for a tincture, since I had such a bad surface allergy to gold that I didn’t have any, even in my jewelry box.  If I wanted such a tincture, I would have to buy some for this purpose alone – I certainly could never wear it.  Somewhere else in a discussion of fluid condensers, someone added,

“Sybil Leek says you can use blood or semen in place of gold tincture.”

Well!  Alrighty then!  Sybil has spoken! Blood it shall be!  One of the many advantages of needing to prick your finger 4 times a day is you end up with magical materials you never knew you could use in place of gold, so let’s hope Sybil knows what she’s talking about.  (Actually, I should probably go look her up to see if she DOES know what she’s talking about.  “Witch”, “England”.  That’s about all I know, I’m sorry to say.)

As for semen:  Right.  Entertained a brief image of hiring some guy to perform the hand in glove dance followed by him then gracing the surface of my brand new scrying mirror with his … er … whatever.  Yeah, not a pleasant image.  May I say for the official record, “Ew.”

Class again this week.  A guided chakra activation exercise ... and I am going into such a deep level, I had difficulty coming back to full awareness.  Here’s the fun news:  next month is astral travel!  I am so psyched.  I was telling them of my long-held desire to participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

And no, I’m not going to go visit a man in his bedroom.

MORALITY PLAY IN 8 LINES

DEVIL:    Yeah, but if the guy runs around in his bedroom naked with the curtains open, he obviously has no expectation of privacy.

ANGEL:    True, but would you want people to fly unexpectedly into YOUR bedroom if you’re naked, even and especially if you can’t see them and don’t even know they’re there? 

ME, after a lonnnng, thoughtful pause:    Hmmm.  That would definitely depend on who was flying in the window.  Could be a memorable experience.

DEVIL:    Great answer!!  Do it!  Do it!

ANGEL:    DON’T DO IT!  Have some consideration for the guy!

ME:    Why?  HE started it!  HE’s the one who put that incredibly erotic and exhibitionistic image in MY head.  Really, when you think about it, that was almost an open invitation to join him.

DEVIL:  Hear, hear!  She speaks truth!

ANGEL:    “Almost”, eh?  THAT’s your justification for going against your own principles?

ME, after an even lonnnnger, agonizing pause:    ARGH!  Having a conscience sucks!

End of Morality Play ...

... proving that (1) witches, magicians, sorcerers, etc. don’t need Twinkies to set rules and regs, since we are all perfectly capable of struggling to live by our own ethical standards, as frustrating as those standards are at times.  And by “at times”, I meant, “RIGHT NOW”.

Meanwhile, somewhere, a man wipes his brow in relief.

Man:  (*whew!*)  That was close.

(Or, possibly, DOESN’T wipe his brow in relief and instead remarks, “Darn!  That could have been a hot, steamy  night!”, in which case, I will kick that dumb angel around the block for a year, and don’t think I won’t do it; *bleep* the consequences!)

And (2)  I suck at writing morality plays.  But this is not news.

Piero Goes to Venice, I Contemplate Cesare

This has been such a week of synchronicity ... not sure why Piero is in Venice, but there he is ... in my second home, more or less.  (New York is first, Venice is second, Boston isn’t even on my radar, I’m just in exile here; the jury’s out on New Hampshire until I move there.)

(Addendum:  Ah.  Performing at The Venice Film Festival.  Makes sense!)

And, of course, since I’d just finished discussing Venice in my past life discussion, suddenly I’m seeing this, and could hear the music of the water in the canal in his ears right now; could smell what he was inhaling at that moment; got tears in my eyes.  I love this city so much.

Mr. Signpost, meanwhile, was in Paris and made mention of the home of medieval French hermeticists, just as I was reading about them.

And it occurred to me watching re-runs of “DaVinci’s Demons” in anticipation of this week’s new episode, that since 2011, the painting over my head here in the study watching over me – another serious hunk from Italy of course – was of the one and only (another l’uno e solo) Cesare Borgia, who, like Lorenzo (see reference to Elliot Cowan, the seriously hot hunk playing the role of Lorenzo), was a patron of Leonardo DaVinci’s for a time.

Watching Over Me From Above (On the wall, that is): 

Cesare Borgia

I think I just won this year’s award for a run-on sentence.  Sorry about that.

Thought:  “Ooooh!  I wonder if they’re going to introduce Cesare in this series!”  If they do, I hope they do a far better job of casting him than that other series, “The Borgia” did – that actor was definitely not up to Cesare Borgia-esque standards of attractiveness.  The real guy had women falling all over him ... which is probably why he ended up with a bad case of syphilis, or whatever STD he had ... although I suppose he was fortunate in being killed in battle before it really started eating away at him.

The family crest was a depiction of a bull in red – believed to represent the Apis Bull – which is appearing in “DaVinci” in their discussions of the Book of Leaves ... which I don’t believe is based on a mythological artifact gone missing.

“The Apis Bull was originally the Herald (wHm) of Ptah, the chief god in the area around Memphis.”, sayeth Wikipedia ... and Ptah was the spouse of ... Sekhmet!!  Who Mr. Signpost posed with, in New York.

In any event:  back to the color red.  Lorenzo’s clothing (always red), the Apis Bull in red and Z always wearing red as well.  I seem to be in a red phase, surrounded by symbols and colors and images that all tie together in one way or another, overlapping, resurfacing.

Z, by the way appeared ever so briefly in a black scrying mirror a few days ago.  I couldn’t bring myself to pack it yet, so was sitting on the bed, peering into it during a meditation.  I didn’t see the clouds everyone supposedly sees, and which I was looking for; I did see a faint red glow, far off into the depths of the mirror – I knew the glow came from the mirror, as there wasn’t anything around to reflect a red glow.  A few twinkling red lights ... I knew who I was seeing – or who I supposed I was seeing, I should say – and smiled.  Still haven’t evoked, but I did buy him a red onyx goblet, by way of a future offering of wine.

In a way, I keep wanting to wait until I’ve moved and am settled into my new home ... the chaos here (boxes upon boxes upon boxes and an inability to find anything I’m looking for) ... has been utterly  distracting.  Not to worry ... I’ll be moving with a few weeks.  I also be working my ass off, going on a business trip, and generally in a state of high pressure.  Not the best time to be focusing on more important things, like actually developing a meditation schedule or Rite of General Offering or invocation schedule.

My horoscope of a few days ago:

You take your commitment to love quite seriously today and want to share your perspective with anyone who will listen. [That means you, readers!]  But the reflective Moon in your busy 3rd House of Communication can create logistical cross-currents as everyone distracts you from your agenda. Don't change directions now; just temporarily operate on blind faith. Your unwavering devotion should bring you closer to your goals sooner than you expect.

Cross-currents.  That’s a good word for it.  Every time I go hunting for a specific book, I’ve already packed it.

So I contented myself reading American Gods (Gaiman, Neil, 2001)  on the train  … and I have a vague memory of reading it on the bus out of Port Authority.  Have no idea why I never finished it, and suspect it is packed in a box somewhere in New York.  Premise:  all of the European gods brought over with immigrants are forgotten and left to their own devices.

I enjoyed it, up to a point, because it seems that Gaiman never quite grasped the reality of his own premise – those gods have NOT been forgotten, by a long shot.  In every town in America, you will find someone, somewhere (if not many someones in many places) who still worship them, quite fervently.  Every time there was a whiny discussion between, say, Odin and Ibis (Thoth) about no one loving them anymore, I could only snort, “What a pinhead!”  (“Pinhead” being directed at the author, not Odin or Thoth.)  In this author’s twisted fictional world, all of the old gods spent all of their time killing people.  He probably should have done a little more research on what each of his gods actually did before he started writing THAT novel, IMHO;  it would have been more appealing and a lot less stupid, I think. 

So this was my next question:  I was staring at the Invocation of the Bornless One, which came from the same book as The Rite of General Offering  (see last entry).   I must have read about four versions of this same invocation, all of them varying slightly, one from the next.  But all invocations were full of words without translations.  I know I mentioned here once before, discussing Maxine Sanders and her chant of “Eko, Eko, Azarak” that,

“She provided no explanation as to what was actually being chanted, which – to my mind anyway – is at best never a good idea, and at worst a possibly dangerous idea.  Who or what are we invoking with this?  Aradia I knew (I’m Italian, after all, and she’s ours thanks to Charles Leland), but who was Azarak, Zamilak and Karnayna?  And what did “Eko, Eko” mean?  “Hail, Hail” or “Come right in, have a spot of tea and take over my body!”?”

The same applies here.  I make it a rule never to chant anything – not a single word! – until I know what it is I’m chanting.  Dangerous, dangerous idea.

And yet here are all these so-called “nerd wizards” passing THIS around without translating a word of it, as though it was another daytime outing, skipping in circles and singing “Mary had a little lamb” in the park.  Ask almost any one of them what those words actually meant, and I almost guarantee you they’d stare at you with their best “deer in headlights” expression.  “*Duh* I read it in a grimoire and decided to use it ...”

Yeah.  Great idea, dumbass.

Time to Make a Talisman ... and Zepar Turns His Head

I seem to be circling around again, revisiting past topics.  Reason:  the assignment this month for my class was reading and meditating about protective shields and talismans, and making charms.  I’m required to make a charm and infuse it with intent, which brought me back to the issue of beneficial, protective and wonderful spirits being laden with the false label of “demon” because,

(1) Renaissance-era christians didn’t translate the Greek designation “daemon” (i.e., spirit) properly – the rise of humanism during the Renaissance was inspired by the translation of ancient Grecian, Roman, Egyptian, near eastern etc., documents and papyri, and

(2) the sadistic viciousness of the Vatican and their inquisitors prevented anything other than circumspection and secrecy; magi from this time period – one eye fixed nervously on the fate of men such as Giordano Bruno - needed to easily defend their works if needed, and what better way than to point at their continued use of the wrong translation of the Greek word for spirit as proof of their genuine piety.  (“See?  I’m on YOUR side!”)

My perfect example has always been Enoch’s so-called “fallen angels” and the incubus/succubus who, I’ll be the first to admit, may include spiritual beings whose readings on the “Morality-O-Meter” may be a negative number, but you can’t assume that this is true of all of them, or even the vast majority of them.  If you read the lists of things these beings are known for, rarely do you find mention of murder and mayhem.  Primarily it’s answering questions and teaching … or helping you with love issues.  Hardly the sort to send you running for the nearest fire alarm.

It turns out that most of those are cheerful, friendly, loving, lusty spirits whose only interest is to make you happy.  REALLY happy.  Dancing-in-the-rain singing “On The Street Where You Live” happy.  Bad guys?  Hardly.  In fact, they’re better to have around than many human beings, when you think about it.  But because some christian heard the word sex and lost his or her marbles in prurient, squealing horror, they’re all painted with the same brush.

I truly believe that is the job of THIS generation to un-paint them, so to speak.  Most of them deserve to be revisited, with an open mind.

The sad part is that, following in the heels of these sexually repressed and thus sadly perverted christians are the (see my previous posts on this) wiccan twinkies with pursed lips (or as I like to call them, the church ladies with pointy hats) squealing “Witches shalt NOT do this and that!” and the guys (they always seem to be nerdy guys) who thought they’d rebel against mommy and daddy by reading Anton LaVey in the basement, not realizing that the only thing they’re accomplishing is reinforcing the christian rule-book in their creation of opposites.  In other words, they buy into the christian list of “demons” by invoking and worshiping them as demons.  None of them stop and question the judeo-christian point of view at all.  But then – as I said – they’re all in dark basements, sulking and whining and pretending to be bad boys.  Sad, really.

The same may be true of the retelling of the King Solomon mythology:  he obviously was quite familiar with magick and the use of invocation, and the story of him invoking all sorts of beings to help him build his temple is well known.  So, many of us are familiar with faux Solomon’s grimoire, chock full of beings with the word “demon” and “hell” written after them, whether or not they deserve such designations.  I personally think the vast of a lot of them don’t, because there is no indication that any of them ever did anything to deserve the label.

I mean, think about it:  we pre-christians (pagans, witches, streghone, whathaveyou) have no use for “satan”, “demons” and “hell”, although christians seem to enjoy wildly tossing the concepts about.  They should – they invented them and their emotional discards (the Anton LaVey crowd) continue to perpetuate them.  After all, it’s what they use to keep their followers in line, shaking pitifully in their boots and swooning at the theater unspooling of “The Exorcist”.  Extremely useful, true or not, when you’re in the business of scaring the crap out of people and then telling you their deity is “full of love”.  May be, but you’d never know it, listening to their apocalyptic banshee wailing, would you?

So.  Back to charms and talismans.  Protection.  I already have the cimaruta – so shiny and beautiful I love it! – so I’m not sure why I need to make another one.  Perhaps to prove that I know how.  Okay.

I sat around this weekend thinking about Sekhmet and Enki and Zepar and how to represent them on charms and talismans.  I have never figured out why Zepar in particular wound up with that label.  After all, HE never firebombed entire cities just because some creep behind its walls pissed him off, and the christian deity sure did.  HE never initiated and perpetuated the Spanish Inquisition, probably one of the more horrific and sadistic acts in christian history.  HE never ordered the Trail of Tears.  HE never did anything remotely as awful as christians have done, and he got the big “D” label?  Hypocrisy, anyone?  As far as I’m concerned, he isn’t one.

There is another reason I think that.  And that is because not that long ago I saw him turn his head and look at me.  Astonishing and unexpected mini-vision in the midst of a daydream about something else entirely.

He was sitting somewhere, leaning forward with his forearms arms resting on the tops of his thighs, listening intently to someone who was speaking to him.  I thought, “What the … who is that?” and then inhaled in shock and thought, “Why, that’s Zepar!”  At that, his head whipped to the right and I was absolutely rooted to the ground, immobilized by the intensity of his eyes.  He looked at me for about five seconds (during which time I felt as though I’d been scanned to the core and whatever secrets I thought I had inside of me were laid bare and trembling.  I didn’t know what to do).  Then – his eyes softened ever so slightly … and the corner of his mouth twitched as though he wanted to express amusement – but he didn’t – and then he turned his head back and the vision was gone.  I was as big a wreck after that unexpected moment as I was when that invisible someone closed his hand over my ankle.  Same someone? 

No, he didn’t strike me as the type to stay invisible and grab women’s ankles for his own entertainment.  He struck me as … POWER.  Coiled, exquisitely controlled, lion-esque power.  Not easily distracted but easily bored.  I also think he’s confident and perhaps even arrogant enough to send someone else – one of the men under his command for example – in his place, when he has no use for the conjuror.  He only allows himself to be summoned when HE wants to be summoned, for reasons all his own.

Embarrassingly enough, I panted for a good ten minutes after that happened, tingling from head to toe and back again.  Oh my goodness, what a good looking man!!

By the way, it wasn’t as though I had some image of him in my head before I saw him – I didn’t.  Only afterwards I went into Google and looked up “images of Zepar”, hoping someone else with artistic talent had seen him and managed to capture him:  not a single image in that mess of nonsense looked anything like him.  Not even REMOTELY.  Animae?  Hardly.  Everything in there came out of the minds of wide-eyed animae sketch artists and (as I said) pimply little boys with christian demons still lodged in their tighty whities.  Made me want to seriously apologize to him for the abject stupidity of the human race.  I recognized the red breastplate (which he did have), but the rest of that utter nonsense in Google images?  Not him.  Not the being who transfixed me with his gaze.  He’s awesome and wonderful and powerful.  Even if I never see him again, I will always remember the sensation.  Unbelievable.

Oh – and it just occurred to me that if some conjuror had one of those appalling images in their head when they summoned him – just, as I said, for his own amusement – I could see him saying, “OK, if that’s what you really want.” and showing up like that, just to scare the scrap out of them.  And then having a hearty brewski and riotous laugh-fest with the spirits under his command later, roaring his ass off at their panicked expressions.

Nope.  Those images aren’t the Zepar I saw.  None of them.  I almost want to say that his eyes are … or maybe they were reflecting something else I couldn’t see?  Dark purple-ish black?  Almost the color that an eggplant has – aubergine?  Except they had lights in them.  I do remember seeing infinitely deep purple-ish starry lights in them – yet another reason I was awed.  But they go right through you like a laser.  He can just root you to the ground with them.

I can’t tell you anything about his voice, because he never spoke – I’ve read somewhere that he has an unearthly voice, or an unusual voice.  But he didn’t speak, so I can’t confirm.

Needless to say, that – his sigil - was one of the ideas I immediately thought of, when we were asked to come up with protective talismans.  Will definitely try to sketch one – when I can get my hands to stop trembling.

[Addendum:  no, I haven’t seen him since I wrote that, and no, I haven’t heard his voice either.  But he did give me something of a revelation, by way of a question posed to me when I was thinking about him this morning.  The question wasn’t posed to me in words, so I’ll have to give my own voice to it; it basically appeared within me as though I’d had my crown opened, and the question poured in, full-blown, like watery light.  Basically it was this:  “WE ARE ALL ONE.  You KNOW we are all one.  How could I be something outside of that one unity?”  [*blink!*]  Eureka.  Answer was:  he couldn’t.  Wasn’t possible.  THAT’s why all of those Google images were so wrong, and so sad.  They were drawn by artists who still didn’t realize that WE ARE ALL ONE.  The Zepar they drew couldn’t look like the hideous, ugly or pitiable monsters they were drawing, because we would all look like that, if he did.

He may have a [far] more evolved skill set than I do – true – but ultimately he is cut from the same cloth of stardust and divine intent.  I experienced such a surge of joy when I realized that.

The occasional ones you find in grimoires with unpleasant skill sets are no different than the dumb criminals you see every day on reality TV – those boringly moronic nitwits who always get caught because they’re so mindlessly stupid.

Judeo-christian-islam adherents, of course, don’t believe that – they believe in a narrow patriarchal hierarchy and a divisiveness – their deity is outside of them, because they believe themselves to be full of “sin” or something outside of the “one unity”; they can’t see themselves as godlike.  (I would almost feel bad for them, if they weren’t so bent and determined to exterminate me).  Ah well.

Looping back into Lupercalia and Imbolc.  I don’t celebrate either one, Imbolc because I’m not Celtic, and although I’d be be more likely to celebrate Lupercalia, the Romans (pause while I ka-pooey on their collective memory, at least on this topic) sacrificed a dog and a goat for Lupercalia.  And I feel the same way about that awful stunt as I do about the judeo-christian insistence that they are superior to all animal life and therefore perfectly justified in killing them with machine guns.  Personally, I’d rather sacrifice a weekend hunter, his John Deere cap AND his cooler of Budweiser than an animal, I don’t care what anybody says.  Really.  No loss.  Just sacrifice the bleep and leave his severed head in the middle of the woods - like the Blair Witch project! – to scare the wits out of any other hunter that wanders by.  Heck, it would be worth it just to watch the lot of them run screaming out of the woods, weeping hysterically after spying that severed head in its John Deere cap, tripping drunkenly over their rifles and shooting themselves in the nuts.

Ooooh ... having a crabby day, are we???

Well .... yeah.  Sorta.  But it would still be funny.  In any event, this is historically the day when everyone celebrated the return of the Sun – the light – because now is about the time one is eminently aware that the days are getting longer.  Heck, I notice it just taking the commuter rail home at night.  The sun has returned!!  So one celebrates joyously.  The christians – as always – unable to pull together an original thought in their heads at all, swiped this one from us pagans and strega as well and called it Candlemas.  This is yet another stolen holiday, but most christians today are either too stupid to know it, or too vicious to care.

The other talisman I considered was Enki’s.  Zecharia Sitchin aside, I really like Ea/Enki as a protector God.  So, given the christian habit of announcing that every deity or spirit but theirs is demonic, I went and pulled a .pdf copy of The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, by Reginald Campbell Thompson of the British Museum (1904).  Semi-interesting, if you can ignore his ironic references to indigenous cultures as “savages”.  I say “ironic” because while he finds the “words of power” used by Assyrian or Babylonian “priests” perfectly acceptable, the same words of power used by others, is termed, “the customs of many savage tribes”.  At some point, you struggle against the urge to also call him a “moronic pinhead” and stop reading.  Ahhh, the joyful and incessantly clueless stupidity of 1904.  I wonder if I can find a spell to resurrect him just to slap him senseless.  Hmmm.

More on "Man-Beast Amulets"

Continuing from my previous entry on “Man-Beast amulets”:  I doubt very much that the Sumerians would have depicted Inanna using amulets with a Sphinx on it – I am not sure of the Sumerian-Egyptian comparative timelines to know far apart the Sphinx and the recorded love story in Sumerian hieroglyphics are – or even if they ARE “far apart”.

However, since I have no idea what Inanna’s amulets looked like, if I need to make a good faith effort to design a contemporary amulet that still dives deeply into history, you can’t do better than the Sphinx.  Particularly as there are so many magickal correspondences attached to the Sphinx.

“Eliphas Levi here offers the Four Powers as the words of the Magus and casually links them with the Sphinx. He goes on in the same chapter to link the Four Powers of the Sphinx with the four Elements and the four Kerubic Signs of the zodiac:

“You are called to be king of air, water, earth and fire; but to reign over these four living creatures of symbolism, it is necessary to conquer and enchain them. He who aspires to be a sage and to know the Great Enigma of Nature must be the heir and despoiler of the sphinx: his the human head, in order to possess speech; his the eagle’s wings, in order to scale the heights; his the bull’s flanks, in order to furrow the depths; his the lion’s talons, to make a way on the right and the left, before and behind.”
Source:  http://hermetic.com/osiris/onthepowersofthesphinx1.htm

Okay, so I missed the eagle in my last entry.  Human, eagle, lion, bull.  There’s a “Man-Beast” if I ever saw one!  I will say that Levi seems a tad “patriarchal” in this paragraph, enthusing about “conquering” and “enchaining” things.  I’d rather seduce things, or maybe that’s just me.

I also should have added an explanation of that “cylinder seal” she held in her hand:

“A cylinder seal is a small round cylinder, typically about one inch in length, engraved with written characters or figurative scenes or both, used in ancient times to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface, generally wet clay. Cylinder seals were invented around 3500 BC in the Near East, at the contemporary sites of Susa in south-western Iran and Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. They are linked to the invention of the latter’s cuneiform writing on clay tablets.  They were used as an administrative tool, a form of signature, as well as jewelry and as magical amulets; later versions would employ notations with Mesopotamian cuneiform. In later periods, they were used to notarize or attest to multiple impressions of clay documents. Graves and other sites housing precious items such as gold, silver, beads, and gemstones often included one or two cylinder seals, as honorific grave goods.”

Now here is an interesting coincidence.  The ancient city of Susa, which “appears in the very earliest Sumerian records”, is  “one of the places obedient to Inanna, patron deity of Uruk, in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta .” (Wikipedia)  Susa is located in present day Iran.  An ancient cylinder seal was unearthed in Susa.  In an article comparing mankind’s search for the elixir of life to the history of dragon mythology and folklore (“the most venerable symbol employed in ornamental art and the favorite and most highly decorative motif in artistic design"), author G. Elliott Smith captured early depictions of dragons on cylinders found in Susa (founded in 4200 BCE), with many similarities to the Great Sphinx which is commonly believed to have been constructed later, 2558–2532 BCE.  Looking at the general timeline:

4200 BCE: Susa is founded in western Persia
4700-2900 BCE dragon motifs found along the Yellow River in China from this period
3000 BCE - Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt unite. Successive dynasties witness flourishing trade, prosperity and the development of great cultural traditions. Writing, including hieroglyphics, is used as an instrument of state.
2558–2532 BCE - Construction of The Great Sphinx
2500 BCE - Construction of the pyramids
2018 BCE - the Sumerian empire disintegrates

... it appears that, of the two/three empires,  the dragon motif originated first in Sumer or China and migrated to Egypt.  I suspect Sumer because the components of the Sphinx seem more closely connected to Sumerian origins than Chinese, and because Iran is closer to Egypt than is China.  (However, the Chinese have traditionally been known as seafarers so I wouldn’t completely disregard them, either).

However, Elliott draws a fascinating line between the earliest Sumerian dragon and the Egyptian Sphinx by pointing out that the Sumerian consisted of Sekhmet (the lioness), Horus (the eagle or falcon) and Osiris (human attributes and water controlling powers) – which also brings us back to the Sphinx which was believed to be near water at the time it was constructed.

Smith, G. Elliot, M.A., M.D., FRS.  Dragons and Rain Gods,  “Bulletin of the John Rylands Library”, Volume 5, The University Press, Manchester; Longmans, Greene and Company, London; August 1918 – July 1920, p. 317-380.

And yes, on the right is the same dragon of chaos you saw battling Marduk in this blog. 

THE ultimate point being that I suspect an amulet of the Sphinx is a perfect “Man-Beast” amulet to celebrate Inanna’s sacred marriage to Dumuzi.

Michelle Belanger, Sekhmet, Phobias and Sex Magick Again

Ran out the door of a terrific workshop conducted by Michelle Belanger on Psychic Vampires, dashed home, frantically packed a suitcase and was back out the door at 4 the next morning after 2 hours of sleep.

I seriously dislike flying.  Sekhmet was burning away a phobia of flying, but I was still suffering from air pressure changes, and usually staggered off the plane with blinding headaches and a runny nose.  This time I had to be delightfully pleasant and charming as one of our VPs was on the same flight and graciously chauffeured me over to the Raleigh office.  Last thing you want to do on a business trip is puke all over the shoes of senior management, so I managed not to.

Fortunately we didn’t sit together, so I was able to distract myself somewhat by reading,  without having to explain that I was reading the biography of the woman who was married to the King of the Witches of  the Alexandrian line, in England.

At the suggestion of the WC1 class instructor, I was now reading Maxine Sander’s biography, Firechild.  I didn’t think I’d enjoy it all that much, but it turns out I did, because she describes initiation and instruction that is exactly what I think it should be … and not the twinkie nonsense women are spewing out ad nauseum in their frustratingly inaccurate and nonsensical Tinkerbelle wiccan books (“Clap your hands if you BELIEVE, boys & girls!”) every time I turn around.  She both received and then delivered serious initiation training that was, in turn, amazingly intense, enormously valuable and sometimes almost cruel.

Still, those are the events that were  real learning events, the ones that stuck with you.  They taught her things she could use.  They let her pick the wrong herbs out in the wild and watched dispassionately as she retched them all back up again.  They left her in a trance in the woods all night – alone.  The hard housekeeping work – brass polishing, robe laundering, cleaning floors, walls, altars ... each act done with focused intent and enormous concentration.  I was finding myself more and more inspired and despairing of ever finding initiation instruction here in the USA like that.  (Actually, the first WCI instructor did initially strike me as a bit of a slave driver, but then she also told me a lie about Charles Leland which irked me a bit.  Okay, it irked me a lot.  She’s going to really work hard to get past that lie.)

But back to Maxine.  On the negative side, a lot of her talents seemed to be inherited … for example, astral projection came really easily to her from a very early age, while others of us need to struggle with simple things like basic meditation and feeling energy between the palms of our hands.  Her mother wavered between the occult and the rigidity of the catholic church ... which had to make for an odd upbringing.  And lastly, the book devolves into being insufferably British now and again, obsessed with “knowing your place” and dubbing people “royalty” within the occult world.  I find that difficult to get past ... especially when women here in the U.S. demand you call them “Lady Such and Such”, which generates in me a raised eyebrow of disdain, mainly because it makes women sound like they never grew up past their fairy tale-believing days when they really wanted to be a “princess”. 

Be that as it may, so far it’s fascinating.

I had raised the spectre of sex magick again last entry, and came across the three spirits Sitri, Beleth and Zepar, three of the so-called “demons” that the Judeo-Christian Solomon controlled.  And you know how defiant I am about taking a definition (i.e., “demon”) from the judeo-christian-islamic world without first doing my due diligence on their personality and what they do.  The majority of them, (so far anyway) seem to be completely – or mostly – free of malice or anger or hatred or any other personality trait that would earn them the title we now know as “demon”.

I am of the belief that those of us in this generation need to be the ones who research these beings and systematically strip the title of “demon” from them.  Until proven otherwise, they will be “spirits”.  So, here are three conjurable “spirits” I found:

“The 12th spirit is Sitri, he is a great prince & appeareth at first with a Leopards face, and wings as a griffin. But afterwards at ye command of ye exorcist, he putteth on a humane shape very Beautifull, Inflaming Men with womens Love, and women with mens love, and causeth them to shew themselves Naked, if he [it] be desired, &c. he governeth 60 Legions of spirits, and his seal to be worne is this.”
http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/goetia.htm

Original Purpose:  Sitri is a lust spirit and causes men and women to be passionate and get naked around one another.

Author’s Notes: Invoke Sitri for seduction rituals (become Incubi or Succubae). Invoke Sitri during sex magick to boost the energy raised. Sitri can also be called up when you seek to infuse any creative project with passion.  (Connolly, S. (2010-09-02). Daemonolatry Goetia (p. 60). DB Publishing. Kindle Edition.)

Then there is Beleth:

He can breathe fire.  He can shape shift, and can manage about three shifts in a day before he wears out. Human (winged or not) is his favorite and most-seen form; his true form is slightly beyond human comprehension and for the sake of interaction is not used often.

He can transport himself and other people between summoning circles, even if it means crossing between dimensions. Beleth is capable of moving between a highly technological location to a magical location and back again, though this requires a great deal of energy and leaves him exhausted afterwards.

If someone successfully makes a contract with Beleth (which not only requires the agreement of Beleth and the character involved in the contract but the agreement of the players of any third parties), he can do more. His specialty is that he “causeth all the love that may be, both of Men and of Women, until the conjuror hath had his desire fulfilled” (LKS).

Finally, Zepar:

Zepar is a Great Duke, who tries to seduce women, and if requested by them, he can change his shape into that of their beloved man, but makes them sterile. He has twenty-six legions of spirits under his command. Other sources say that he makes women love men and brings them together in love.  He is depicted as a soldier with red clothes and armour.

Now comes the fun part - learning how to invoke .... and not forgetting the controlling and banishing part ... one of the three of them.  More later.

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.

Damien Echols Booksigning in Peabody

Back to magick.

I’d forgotten that Damien was book signing in Peabody until he tweeted it, an hour ahead of time. I vaguely remember, when I first heard about it, looking up the store online and thinking, “Can I stand on line that long?” Then I ended up figuring that might be problematic and had decided that I couldn’t.

Spent the morning doing other exhausting things I needed to do: a car inspection, grocery shopping, and then the fun of having to lug heavy bags of groceries, one by one, into the apartment. Then collapsing in pain and exhaustion.

But then, when he tweeted about needing to prepare for the Peabody appearance, I took off without even thinking about it – it was merely an irresistible urge to go. If I wanted to paint myself as a logical thinker, I might have said that I wasn’t sure I’d have the chance again. No way in hell you’d catch me in Salem (don’t ask me to explain why again!), so Peabody had to be it. But no, I didn’t even give it that much thought. It was just a sudden sense of urgency ... “GO”. And off I went. Didn’t even get dressed up for the occasion, just gimped out the door. I must have looked like hell, but didn’t care.

He’s, what, 10 miles away from me, at this appearance? A straight ten miles up Route 114! – and again, I got lost, by being caught on a “right turn only” lane in heavy traffic, and couldn’t move left – I have no idea where Lowell Road went to (I know it goes to Lowell! Besides Lowell, although I have no idea where that was, in relation to 114, or which direction it was headed) , but I was on it, couldn’t get turned back around and became hopelessly, hopelessly lost. As usual. I ended up banging on the steering wheel with both fists and screaming my utter hatred for the State of Massachusetts and everyone in it at the top of my lungs, crying uncontrollably, screaming curses at the State’s refusal to take good tax money and buy street and directional signs with it, instead of forcing us all to hear tale after tale of Massachusetts politicians snorting it up their utterly corrupt noses. See? Even heading in the direction of Salem was hell!

Finally had to ask for directions back to 114, after half an hour of trying to get turned around, but getting more and more lost. When I finally made it back to 114, I was stuck in pre-Christmas traffic. Then I thought the Barnes and Noble was IN the North Shore Mall but it wasn’t. Of course, I wouldn’t learn that until I’d managed to hunt down a space to park and limp my way into the huge complex. One week before Christmas – took another 30 minutes just to find a parking space. Then another 20 minutes trying to find one of their mall maps screaming (“You Are Here!”) – which the mall had stuck in out-of-the-way places. What they DID have easily accessible were pamphlets with print so small no one could read them. The pamphlet locations are easy to find: just search for clusters of squinting people asking each other, “Can you read what this says?”

And of course, the Barnes & Noble was not only not IN the mall, but it was on the other side of this huge complex, and there was NO WAY I’d find another parking space. I limped from one end of that awful place to the other in a heavy winter coat, dragging my bum knee behind me. Took me at least 45 minutes to gimp through that awful place being run down and bumped and pushed by teenage shoppers. Took me another 20 minutes to gimp through three parking lots, dodging killer women in cars, cell-phone chatting and texting as they sped through parking lots and pedestrian crossings, to the Barnes & Noble, wiping tears of pain and frustration from my eyes. I was so late and in so much pain I was sure he was gone by then, but somehow, by some miracle ... thank you Sekhmet ... he wasn’t.

I found myself at the very end of a dwindling line. The advantage to it was that I was able to manage standing (sort of, as long as there was a wall to brace my back against, or a shelf I could lean on), because I was so late that the worst of the line had already come and gone. It didn’t take that long. Coincidentally enough, they had put him under a sign that said “Learning”. I saw that sign and started to smile. How absolutely perfect was that!

I don’t want to repeat everything I told him, although I did say he didn’t have to sign the book if he was getting hand cramps, because I only wanted to say something brief. He responded with something sweet about if I could stand on line for him that long, how could he not sign the book?, and I remember thinking, “He’s so nice ...” – in fact, he was so nice, I didn’t want to confess the truth about the hell I’d gone through to get there – really! It took hours to go 10 miles! – and that I hadn’t stood on line all that long; just gimped through a killer mall. Which might have amounted to the same thing, but was nothing compared to what he went through, so I wasn’t even ABOUT to complain about it.

Anyway ... it was nice. I was able to tell him SOME of what I needed to tell him and that was all I wanted. And I have an autographed book. Oh yes, and I did make him chuckle mentioning that I could retire on what I could sell his first book for. He’s very easy to talk to. And what a soothing aura. Here’s what his aura reminds me of: the ability that Jackson Rathbone’s character has in the Twilight series: the ability to calm people into a peaceful state of acceptance just by looking at them. I wonder if Damien knows he has that ability. I relaxed so quickly just talking to him that a lot of the back stiffness I’d gimped in there with went away. And THAT was nice too.

So here was my badge of courage: the Sky Sadist had twisted my face with Bell’s Palsy and I had still worked up the courage to travel to New York to see Il Volo. Now the Sky Sadist had hairline-fractured my left kneecap (yeah, I haven’t mentioned that yet – sorry) so badly I could barely move, but I ignored it, listened to Sekhmet instead and went to Peabody to meet Damien – Mr. Signpost – even though I was afraid of looking like a deformed old crone. Fuck the Sky Sadist! And as I said, thank you Sekhmet. It did, it felt like I had earned the silver Badge of Courage, afterwards. It would have definitely been easier to stay home and hide.

Continuing with the Fallen Angels list:

4. Kokabiel, also spelled Kפkabמךl, Kפkhabמךl, Kakabel, Kochbiel, Kokbiel, Kabaiel, or Kochab, considered the 'angel of the stars,' is a fallen angel, the fourth mentioned of the 20 Watcher leaders of the 200 fallen angels in the Book of Enoch. His name is generally translated as "star of God," which is fitting since it has been said that Kokabiel taught astrology to his associates. According to The Book of The Angel Raziel, Kokabiel is a holy angel; in other apocryphal lore, however, he is generally considered to be fallen. Kokabiel is said to command an army of 365,000 spirits.

[An army of 365,000 spirits? For what?]

5. Tamiel, also spelled Tâmîêl, is a fallen angel, the fifth mentioned of the 20 Watcher leaders of the 200 fallen angels in the Book of Enoch. His name is generally translated as "perfection of God" (the combination of tamiym and El-God) but Tamiel is also called Kasdeja or Kasyade (meaning "observer of the hands") in the Book of Enoch, Chapter 69. Michael Knibb lists the translation of Tamiel as "God is Perfect" or "Perfection of God." Tamiel taught "the children of men all of the wicked strikes of spirits, [the strikes of] demons, and the strikes of the embryo in the womb so that it may pass away (abortion), and [the strikes of the soul], the bites of the serpent, and the strikes which befall through the noontide heat, [which is called] the son of the serpent named Taba'et (meaning male)" during the days of Noah, not the days of Jared.

6. Râmîêl is a fallen Watcher in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, one of 20 leaders, mentioned sixth. Ramiel means "thunder of God" from the Hebrew elements ra'am and El, "God". Remiel is one of the archangels of the Christian and Islamic traditions, the Hebrew name meaning "Mercy of God" or "Compassion of God" [wow, talk about your irony, eh?] (see Jerahmeel). He is often confused with Azazel who is also called Râmêêl ("arrogant towards God" or "evening of God") although they are not the same angel. Remiel is the angel of hope, and he is credited with two tasks: he is responsible for divine visions, and he guides the souls of the faithful into Heaven. He is called Jeremiel or Uriel in various translations of IV Esdras, and is described as "one of the holy angels whom God has set over those who rise" from the dead, in effect the angel that watches over those that are to resurrect. He is said to have been the archangel responsible for the destruction of the armies of Sennacherib, as well as being the bearer of the instructions of the seven archangels. He is mentioned also in 2 Baruch where he presides over true visions (55:3).

So obviously, none of the judeo-christian scholars can decide if he’s good or fallen ... which doesn’t say all that much for the judeo-christian scholars, does it?

Preparing To Venture Forth



This is the first time I’ve seen the Sonnet Cycle printed out ... all 70 pages of it. I guess I knew I’d churned out that many sonnets, but holding the pages in my hand somehow makes the volume of them more real ... more solid. Attach a check ... mail it off. Poetry contest.

You’d think this was a sign of courage, or of confidence. Nope. This is a sign of ... defeat, in a way. The Sonnet Cycle touched upon a lot of subjects, one of them being the obsession with Piero Barone aiding me in a passage through horrific grief with his beautiful voice. The Sonnet Cycle will have taken about 5 months to unspool. Even though the obsession itself has lessened, I still fully expect my heart to be shattered by him in nine days’ time – which is when I bought tickets to see him and Il Volo at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan. When I bought the tickets, I still had the reasonably attractive face and smile I was born with. I’m not saying I was stop in your tracks, drop-dead gorgeous ... I’m saying that the face I saw when I looked in the mirror was MY face! I was used to it, familiar with it, comfortable with it. Now I have no idea who that face in the mirror belongs to. Certainly I was quite a bit more positive and enthusiastic than I am now. I had planned to make a comforting weekend of this trip home to New York, have lunch with friends, maybe visit Enchantments again, the works. Now I’ll be lucky if I work up the confidence to go at all.

So I thought I’d send the Sonnet Cycle out now – before my heart is shattered into a million frozen shards of ice, and before I’m inspired to permanently shred the thing. Actually, in his defense, I have no reason to believe he’d react cruelly to an twisted, unbalanced, swollen face ... really! Nothing he has ever done makes me think that. To the contrary, everything he has done suggests he is extraordinarily kind and good-natured.

But think back now, and consider the "unlucky hand" I’ve been dealt over the last year or so, and then ask yourself why I would expect kindness – from anyone or anything: the universe, the world, a tenor from Sicily ... even Mr. Signpost. The answer? I wouldn’t expect kindness, of course – I would expect the polar opposite. And that’s why I’m sending that sonnet cycle out now, getting it out of range of my shredder. I’m expecting the absolute worst in nine days’ time. Par for the course and all that ... and that expectation has nothing to do with him, really.

It has more to do with me, despite Sekhmet’s use of Damien to block me from continuing along that emotional path. I can’t quite seem to get my expectations turned around. But then, I can’t think of anything that has happened which would convince me to do that. I get punched in the gut so regularly; I can’t even recover from one sucker-punch before I’m doubled over by another. That’s just the way it has been going over the last year or so.

28 August 2012
Two sides of a wolf’s head ... on one side, I had a beautiful dream. It was beautiful because nothing happened in it. I went to the concert and was so mesmerized by the performance, I forgot all about myself, my dead feet, my cramping legs, my swollen, deformed face ... and had a wonderful time. Nobody noticed me, nobody looked at me with pity, it was a wonderful evening. The dream was merely a fragment of a moment, but I absorbed a great deal in that one moment. I think it was triggered by one of Damien’s re-tweets about happiness, which I will go back and hunt down when I have a moment. But the end result: I’m far less intimidated and frightened than I was, even yesterday. Something changed, anyway.

The other side of the wolf’s head: I keep forgetting all of the pieces I need to send the Sonnet Cycle out. Yesterday I forgot the envelopes and the checkbook. Today I remembered the envelopes but forgot the postage stamps, the instructions and left my debit card at home so I couldn’t go to the Post Office anyway – or even buy lunch, come to think of it. The next day I forgot my flash drive all together. I’m thinking, "Are you TRYING to shoot yourself in the foot every five minutes?!?" Because – damn! – that’s what it feels like I’m doing.

29 August 2012
Must have been another long-lost memory jostled to the surface by some tweet or another, no doubt one about the forthcoming full moon, or blue moon... all of a sudden I recalled a lullaby Mom used to sing to us when we were young. She did NOT sing a version about "God blessing" anybody, she sang this one, that started out with the oak tree – probably yet another reason why I love trees – and larks – and maybe even roses:

I see the moon; the moon sees me
Down through the leaves of the old oak tree.
Please let the light that shines on me
Shine on the one I love.

I hear the lark; the lark hears me,
Singing a song with a melody.
Please let the lark that sings for me
Sing for the one I love.

I kiss a rose; the rose kisses me,
Fragrant as only a rose can be.
Please let the rose that comforts me
Comfort the one I love.

Here was Damien’s tweet about the moon: "The blue moon is the night after next. She'll be my last full moon in NYC. Have you decided what you'll wish for?"

Great. No wonder I forgot it. He reminds me he’s moving to Salem, of all places. [Mumble, mumble, frickafracka, stupid place, grumble ...]

I learned a while ago not to wish for anything because I’ll get the exact opposite. I mean: how many times have I wished that the Sky Sadist would stop punching me in the face every other week? That something good would happen ... as opposed to a never-ending string of death, disasters, near fatal illnesses and accidents? And what was the result?

30 AUG 2012
And it also somehow escaped my notice – once I came to the realization that Piero wasn’t going to give me a moment’s thought or attention so it didn’t matter WHAT my face looked like ... or if my nose was running like Usain Bolt... or if I was drooling so profusely I could serve as a stand-in for Niagara – that in five day’s time I was going to be in HIS PRESENCE. I unexpectedly started shaking and my hands turned ice cold. 

(Photo - Piero and his father, 2012)

Actually, I’ve never had an obsession like this before, so I felt like I should humbly track down and then apologize to all my high school girlfriends whom I ridiculed for their obsessions, all of which I thought were silly at the time because I considered myself so much more intelligent and self-possessed than they were – as I recall, one of them was so obsessed with one of the Backstreet Boys she was last seen crying and wailing when one of them was photographed with a girl. And now, here I was. Payback was indeed a bitch, now that I was going through it myself.

It’s not as though I regarded him as someone greater than any other man on the planet ... wait a minute. Who am I kidding? Of course I think of him that way, he’s Piero Barone of Il Volo, but that’s not the issue. The issue was more that this was the man whose voice had soothed me as I crawled through the depths of hell after my brother’s death, through accidents, nerve damage, illnesses and crippling surgeries, which is really an intimacy you don’t get with very many people. This was the man whose voice I heard in my dreams. This was the man who had inspired untold metres of passionate poetry. And in five days time I’d be staring up at him, from a spot somewhere south of his thighs. OH GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE, I SHOULDN’T HAVE BOUGHT THOSE TICKETS, I’VE LOST MY MIND!!!

I still find it incredible that a nineteen year old boy has a voice like this ...

Damien and Sekhmet Part II ... and My Fear of Il Volo

"The Tickets" have arrived. I’m trying not to throw up in fright. Spent an hour looking into a mirror, trying to smile ... wincing at the sight ... and then getting frightened. I don’t even want to leave the house ... and in a few week’s time, I’ll be traveling to Manhattan. Part of me is whispering, "I’m afraid ... don’t make me do this, please don’t make me do this..." to myself. I have a different face than I did a mere month or so ago.

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?"