Aspartame Poisoning, Duality and Great Insults

There was an article that went its way through Facebook – who knows where it originated – on the symptoms of aspartame poisoning.  Two of the symptoms jumped right off the page at me:  muscle spasms and leg numbness/weakness.  I went and looked at the bottle of sugar-free Coffee Mate I’ve been drinking in my coffee every single morning since ... practically forever.  They apparently use sucrose, which was in the same category.

Neither the primary care or the endocrinologist had a lot of studies on aspartame poisoning they could pull up, but both suggested the same thing:  stop using it, then; let’s see what happens.

So ... my first morning using light cream and a teaspoon of stevia instead.  You know, if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s having my morning coffee messed with.  So I wasn’t happy with the taste, no – right now it tastes more like espresso to me than my morning coffee.  But I spent weeks in Italy drinking coffee that tasted exactly like this, so I thought:  I can adapt.  If this is what the issue was, all this time ... I can definitely adapt.  I’m not sure how much time I should be giving this.

In C’era una volta, I was reaching the point where I needed to figure out where the character of Satan originated.  I knew he wasn’t part of the Jewish tradition, so I needed to learn where the concept originated and why – mainly because I needed to know where John Milton came up with his rather colorful version of the guy.  Christians had to have drawn it from somewhere, and for some reason ... surely there had to be more to it than just controlling people out of fear, although I’m sure that was an added benefit of coming up with the Big Bad to point at and blame for everything they did that fell short of ethical purity.

I also knew other traditions believed in a “dark and light” duality, but even they hadn’t come up with a being to embody the dark side of things.  Zoroaster, for example, taught that darkness and light (or also translated as lies and truth) existed inside of each person and it was their responsibility to decide which side gained the upper hand.

Like most people, deities had always encompassed both light and dark aspects.  Pazuzu was a perfect example:  if you were a Sumerian, he was a household protector, someone you called upon to protect you and your family, someone you admired and thanked wholeheartedly for your blessings ... and someone who sent locusts when he was pissed off.  Like anyone else, he had his sunshiny and cloudy days.  And he was definitely not known as a being who possessed little girls and made them throw up green split-pea soup and masturbate with crucifixes until The Exorcist – if the ancient Sumerians were still around, they would be seriously pissed off at how badly the poor guy was libeled in that film.  (But since they’re not, I’ll act in their stead).  Blatty made that up, everybody!!! All of that disgusting stuff came out of Blatty’s head, not Pazuzu’s!!  Just saying!

So I was reading a biographical history of the character.  Unfortunately, it was written back in 1865, in an age where people would write coy little things like, “A popular Christian clergyman, the Rev. Mr. D ----, in a fit of inspirational turgescence and mental explosion ...” and should you wish to verify said “inspirational turgescence” – you’re basically out of luck, because who the heck knows who he’s supposedly quoting?

But what a great turn of phrase!  I would love to use that on somebody.  You know, like you’re on a first date, and the guy is boring you witless with his relentless self-indulgent opinions on everything.  You bat your eyelashes and purr:  “Oh myyyy, what inspirational turgescence!”

Okay, fine if you’re too lazy to look it up:   tur·ges·cence  (tûr-jĕs′əns).  n.  The condition of being swollen, the process of swelling, pomposity; self-importance.  Happy now?

Point is:  the author, Kersey Graves, was prone (in his own variation of turgescence, I would imagine) to write coy little sentences like that, making the heads of his readers ... or more specifically, me ... blow up in frustration.


But back to the Rev. Mr. D ---- of Xenia, Ohio, whoever he was ... this was part of his sermon to a congregation of men, women .. and impressionable young children.  Read this, and you’re thinking, “Wow.  No wonder people walk around filled with such horror and dread ... what a horrible image to lay out in front of them! Everyone you know and love – your spouse, your parents, your siblings – in unspeakable agony, while this awful being is stomping on them, sending geysers of their blood all over his own clothes, with a look of ... delight?? ... on his face.   Because ... why?  They’ve made a mistake?  They did something wrong?  This is their supposed loving deity?  He sounds worse than all of the world’s most evil tyrants rolled up into one ... a demonic creature so horrible you’d beg to escape any universe in which this thing has any place at all.

And where did the Rev. Mr. D ----- get his awful imagery?  Can you just imagine him simply writing out this grotesque sermon?  Surely – you think – he had to have a biblical source of inspiration for this – surely it didn’t come out of his own horribly twisted mind!  And you’d be wrong, of course.

As neither the Torah or the Bible has any such description – the good (and I use that term rather doubtfully) Reverend just plain old made it up ... in the days before blood-soaked horror movies, apparently church on Sundays was the rough equivalent.  But what he did have was Isaiah 45:7.

From the various versions:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things (KJV).
I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things (NKJV).
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things (NIV).
The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these (NASB).
I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who does all these things (RSV).

Yes, what the reverend did have was proof that the original texts christians draw from (in this case the old testament, or the Torah) state rather baldly that it is their deity who is the source of all evil, not a separate entity.  Which would certainly explain how the poor, unsuspecting citizens of Xenia, Ohio got hit with such a nightmarish description, although it’s equally astounding that they didn’t all run screaming out the church doors and move to Columbus, where things might have been presented to them more rationally.  No offense to the residents of Xenia, but ... why didn’t you just fire the pulpit-pounding, blood-thirsty fool?  True, they might have – we’ll never know, will we?

Things to Wear If You're Marrying a Gorgeous Shepherd

Once again, Royal Crest Estates North Andover/AIMCO lied.  On their “Maintenance Request” website, they give you the option of requesting Saturday morning for maintenance.  At noon on Saturday, when the office staff finally shows up and you call them, demanding to know where the repair guy is, they chirp, “Oh, we don‘t do routine maintenance on Saturdays!  Yes, I realize we gave you the option of requesting it.  We bad!  Tee-hee!  Yes, we probably should have called you and told you that.  Oops.  Sorry!  Are you OK?  You sound like you’re having a stroke!  Oh well, tra-la-la, have a nice day!”

I could have had the car repaired – again.  I could have scheduled the second doctor’s appointment between 8 and 12.  But no.  Royal Crest Estates and AIMCO in their hideous (lack of) customer service, screwed me up – AGAIN.  I tried desperately not to run over to the leasing office just to choke everyone in the office with my bare hands.  And then you wonder why people go so berserk with rage they show up at places of business with sharp implements.

Meanwhile, the floor guy who I drove all the way to Seabrook at 3 in the afternoon to meet over a week ago still hasn’t sent an estimate, despite repeated promises to do so.  Now I need to find another who is more reliable.

Meanwhile, I discover that the Massachusetts Motor Vehicles Vehicle Registration WEBSITE is only operational Monday through Friday, 9-5 when 99% of drivers are at their place of employment and shouldn’t be accessing anything for personal business.  REALLY, Massachusetts???  Do Massachusetts businesses know you’re stealing their employees’ time?  Only open during business hours???  The WEBSITE?!?  Oh please get me out of this hell hole governed by some of the most stupid human beings on the planet.  The Website.  THE WEBSITE.

 Meanwhile, Stop & Shop is also getting more and more idiotic by the day ... I rarely go there any more due to their being the headquarters of the Soccer Mom’s Associative Ring of Massachusetts. (SMARM). Official SMARM Vehicle: SUV. Official Activity:  Being raving idiots and so narcissistically lazy they can’t amble their wobbly, dimpled rumps a mere 5 feet to a shopping cart bay.  Now they’ve talked S&S into foregoing the utterly delicious San Pellegrino (which I love, adore and am hopelessly addicted to) in favor of (are you sitting down?) Polar Double Fudge Cheesecake Seltzer Water!!!

I stood in the bottled water aisle and shrieked, “Double Fudge Cheesecake Seltzer Water!??  What evil woman came up with this idea???!!!?”  A man AND a woman standing behind me fell down on the floor laughing.  Because you know it was a woman.  Every one knows it was a woman.  No man on the planet woke up one morning and burbled, “You know what would taste good?  Double Fudge Cheesecake Tonic  Water!”

Three women cashiers agreed with me as well – only an idiot woman would have thought up THAT idea, because only fat, idiot, dimply-assed women are buying it.  Back to Market Basket, which has more common sense at the moment.

(Deep breath).  BREATHE, woman.  Keep Calm and … whatever.

I still don’t know how to create parallel universes and step into them (see last entry), but I do know what I need to prepare for being able to do it:  visualization, imagination, invocation, focus, intent … WILL.  The underside of that:  no distraction, disorder, disarray, disquiet.

One of the more interesting invocations I’ve read came out of Sex & Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (Leick).  Background:  Inanna is preparing to marry her beloved young gorgeous shepherd Piero … er, I mean, Dumuzi.

“She bathed in water, anointed herself with sweet oil,
Put on for an outer garment the grand Queenly robe,
Also took her “man-beast” amulets,
Was strengthening the lapis-lazuli stones on her neck,
And held her cylinder seal in her hand.
The young lady stood waiting, Dumuzi pushed open the door,
And like a moonbeam she came forth to him out of the house.
He looked at her, rejoiced in her, took her in his arms and kissed her.”

Leick, Gwendolyn.  Sex & Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature.  Routledge, London and New York.  1994, 2003.  Page 78.

“Man-Beast amulets”.

See, now, I’m once again questioning interpretative bias.  The negative connotation of the word “beast” sounds condescending and christian to me, right out of the “We are the boss of you!” mentality that American christians spout on a regular basis, as they stagger drunkenly around in the woods with their shotguns waving vicious bear traps and spraying each other in the face with buckshot.

In this context, let’s go back to the Sumerians, who are trying to write a love story here.  In much of their erotic love poetry, and even in charms and spells, Sumerians drew allegorical lines between the lust of human male animal and the lust they witnessed in the animals around them:  the bull, the ram, the lion, the goat, and so forth.  Robert D. Biggs, in ŠÀ. ZI. GA ancient Mesopotamian potency incantations (1967) wrote that, based upon potency incantations, “to describe the copulation of animals was considered sexually stimulating”, which is why you see women crying out to their bridegrooms to “mount me like a wild bull!”

So, the “man-beast amulet” takes on a certain significance here … especially if you’re doing magick.  Do we know what those looked like?  Can we design a new one?  For example, a “centaur” would be considered a “man-beast” (i.e., man and horse), as would a sphinx (man, lion, bull, I think, but don’t quote me on that).  An amulet depicting the god Pan would fulfill that requirement, or I’m even thinking a Cesare Borgia amulet:  he’s a man, known for his virility and lust; their family crest was a bull!  Would that count?

The importance, however, is that this is Inanna wearing the amulet.  She’s preparing to marry her beloved Dumuzi (later known as Tammuz), and this is one of the ways she prepares for the wedding night:  she puts on her “man-beast amulets”.  If a Goddess does this to enchant her handsome bridegroom, I’m thinking there must be some good reason for it.  I WISH I were the creative sort who could design her own “man-beast amulets” out of Sculpey© and bake them!

The Earth Collides with the Moon ... and I Think of Sex

Flipping through the March 2013 issue of Astronomy, we find an interview with Professor Sarah T. Stewart of Harvard who would, I am quite certain, be none too pleased to find herself in a magickal blog between fallen angels and incubi. But – oh well, tra-la-la, she’ll have to get over it. The details originally appeared in Science.

Along with SETI scientist Matija Ćuk, Professor Stewart has proposed a solution to the disputed notion that in Earth’s earliest formative period, she was part of a monumental collision, sending ejected material out into space – which eventually coalesced into the body we know as the moon.

If we temporarily set aside the mythology and only look at the science, some of the data raised by scientists in support of the collision theory include

(1) the volume of water on the planet – they believe the volume better matched a planetary body further away from the sun, which would be explained if a huge collision moved Earth closer to the sun that it had been originally. Another clincher:

(2) the earth and the moon contain identical isotopes.

As for the original story of the collision – I do remember the mythology: Earth and a planet called Tiamat (others say Theia) collided in a gigantic explosion, returning the earth to its molten state and sending a big chunk of itself rolling and spinning out into space, where it became the moon.

But how did the Sumerians know this? Not sure … I want to say that Zecharia Sitchin credited the inhabitants of the supposed Planet X itself – called the Annunaki - with passing the info along, but don’t quote me on that, either.

I may have had lot of respect for the Sumerians, but did I believe Zecharia Sitchin’s Planet X/ Nibiru/ Annunaki story?? No, I did not – or at least, not the “we’re all gonna die!” version of it you see all over the internet. Mainly because of the fact that if Sitchin were correct, we would have seen the planet approaching, coming in out of its 3,600 year-long orbit a long, long time ago. I mean, really, some of these conspiracy theorists are too silly – they seem to believe that a gigantic planet would appear in the skies out of nowhere, and only start causing havoc all over the place when it got within a few miles of Earth. Ain’t gonna happen that way. Hasn’t anyone read the reviews of the movie Melancholia? Every scientist on the planet – not to mention a lot of laypeople as well - made fun of the (complete absence of) astrophysics behind it.

There are telescopes on satellites from every civilized country out there in immediate orbit around Earth – even if the U.S. government decided to keep it a big secret, you don’t think other countries would go along with us, do you? Ha! Trust me, we’re not THAT well liked.

Besides, trying to keep it a secret would be futile anyway: NASA is correct – it would be visible to the naked eye while still a huge distance away, and would be the brightest object in the night sky – again, while still a long, long way away. It could not “hide behind the sun” – given our own orbit, we would have seen it a long time ago. Things that big don’t just “show up” out of nowhere. Nobody could have kept it a secret.

But if you’re interested in the original article on the theory of the moon being spun off from earth following a collision:
Ćuk, M., S. T. Stewart. Making the Moon from a fast-spinning Earth: A giant impact followed by
resonant despinning. Science, 338 (6110), 1047-1052, doi:10.1126/science.1225542, 2012.

And now … ahhh, the joy of returning to the topic of sex.

“GOOD LORD! IS THAT ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT??” you shriek.

“Why, yes. Yes it is,” I reply calmly. “That’s all I EVER think about. Morning, noon, night. Always. Sex, sex and more sex.  It’s constant. It’s relentless. It never ends. It’s the exclusive focus of my entire existence. A perpetual Dionysian drool-fest, born of desperation and wanton craving. I’m completely overwhelmed with white hot passion, twenty-four hours a day. I hunger with desire, from sunrise to sunset; I am submersed in raw, untrammeled, raging lust!!”

[PAUSE]

Okay, not really. But why do you even CARE?

Ahem. As I was saying … ahhh, the joy of returning to the topic of sex.

So I was reading the The Plant Spirit Familiar, by Christopher Penczak. Not the first book you would open, were you to be researching incubi, and in fact, I wanted to read about people who could hear plants, trees, flowers, etc. Last time I brought up this topic, I was the only one who could hear trees scream, because, thanks to christians, I had to endure that misery almost every year.

“Oh, PISH-POSH!” snaps the know-it all from Yale. “How could they scream? They don’t have vocal cords!”

(*SLAP!!!!*) (Heh, heh. I always wanted to do that, just slap a pretentious Yalie upside the head, for the fun of it. Don’t worry, Harvard, you’re next).

“The ‘scream’ is my interpretation of what I feel when I’m near a christian christmas tree lot, Yalie boy,” sayeth I in annoyance. “Pressure. Frantic pressure. The urge to run, to escape. Panic. To cover my ears or to cry. Physical pain. It’s horrible; a horrible sensation. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s the christians who aren’t emotionally or mentally – or spiritually - evolved enough to be aware of the damage, destruction and death they cause to other living beings. And then they dress the corpse up like a Las Vegas showgirl and prop the dead body up in their living rooms. It’s horrifying. How can those evil christians not HEAR what they’ve done? When I was a child, I’d actually throw up.”

But I digress.

All of a sudden I flip open the book, see a chapter on “Sexual Congress with the Green”, and I’m reading about incubi. I’m sure your first thought (as was mine, I’m ashamed to say, so I can’t really pick on you) is, “He’s having sex with PLANTS?!?” No, he is not, so you can stop trying to imagine the logistics and visualizing yourself covered in grass stains with thorn scratches in peculiar places on your body – unless you enjoy that sort of thing. (And not that there’s anything wrong with that!) What he IS talking about are spirits associated with various trees and plants.

Before that, however, he devoted a paragraph to the history of the incubi/succubae. Made me smile.

“Modern psychologists speculate that the mythos of the succubae/incubi stemmed from religious guilt over erotic dreams and men’s nocturnal emissions, and provided an explanation for both sleep paralysis and pregnancy out of wedlock. The concept of something evil seducing one into the pleasure not normally allowed to them by those who felt it was wrong to experience and enjoy such things, provided them with the opportunity to have the experience but ultimately take no responsibility for it, though such confessions usually led to other problems, such as clergy believing such people were bewitched. Some even speculate that the mythos acted as a coping mechanism to help people deal with issues of rape and sexual abuse, particularly when the clergy themselves were the perpetrators. Devout parishioners couldn’t face that fact, so the myth of sexual demons was created.”
Penczak, Christopher. The Plant Spirit Familiar: Green Totems, Teachers and Healers on the Path of the Witch. Copper Cauldron Publishing. 2011. Page 262.

THANK YOU!!!!

Although actually, I tend to think that last speculation on clergy being the perpetrators came from the historical record I published here earlier of a nun’s complaint against a priest and his response that an incubi who looked like him had done the deed, not him. (And the convent believed his version of the story over the nun’s “That letch humped me like a dog!” version. Oh, what else is new?)

What Penczak does point out – and I now want more information on this:

“If you go into surviving tribal shamanic traditions, you will find the concept of the shaman’s spirit lover, or spirit wife, as a primary inner world tutelary spirit and initiator. You will find a similar concept in the Celtic faery traditions of a Faery Lover, Faery Bride and every Faery Queen/King mating,”

and …

“Sexual union of this nature, i.e. the transmission of such energy between incarnate and discarnate entities, was both initiatory and sacramental, benefitting both entities in their spiritual evolution and development. Only in a dark age, where such knowledge is lost, would potentially holy contact with the spirit world be interpreted as demonic.”

THANK YOU!!

I hadn’t thought of these days as “The Dark Ages”, but from our perspective they really are, aren’t they? Those westerners whose beliefs pre-dated or stood outside of monotheism really were made to suffer for a long, long time. Only now are we regaining any space for our own beliefs, and grudgingly at that. In the news as I write this are the stories of Fox News jumping up and down and squealing hysterically over a decision made by the University of Missouri:

Students at University of Missouri don't need to cram for exams that fall on Wiccan and Pagan holidays, now that the school has put them on par with Christmas, Thanksgiving and Hanukah.

The university’s latest “Guide to Religions: Major Holidays and Suggested Accommodations” — designed to help faculty know when and when not to schedule exams and other student activities — lists eight Wiccan and Pagan holidays and events right alongside more mainstream occasions. It's all part of the school's effort to include everyone's beliefs, although some critics say listing every holiday associated with fringe belief systems is a bit much.*

(*And by “some critics”, Fox News meant, of course, Fox News, “the official mouthpiece of the lower intellectual echelons of christian fundamentalism”).

Penczak also wrote The Green Lovers, which I want to read next.

Finally, another idea I hadn’t thought of is learning the skill of creating an “artificial familiar”. Also known as a “tulpa” in Tibet, or a “thought form”, this is basically a being that you create with your own mind and will for a specific purpose. We already know what the specific purpose is; now, we need to learn how to do it.

More later!