More Snow, Tiamat and Dragons, Torture of Heretics, and the Scent of Eros

Back from the Tewksbury Meineke guys where we had the car’s exhaust pipe flange replaced ... whatever that means.  Nonetheless, it worked – she is back to purring like a kitten.

Meanwhile that distant roar you heard a few days ago was the entire northeast United States learning that we  were due for yet ANOTHER snow storm.  3-5 inches, they said.  Wrong!  We got between 10-12.  Most of us screamed, “Nooooooooooooo ...!” in unison and sobbed like babies.  We are so over the “average snowfall” amount for this year it isn’t funny.

Another thing I did:  called the travel agency and had them send me the details of the trip to Sicily in May with the Sicilian Project.  Now that it’s three months away, I’m finally getting excited about it.  The Greek temples!  The warmth!  The ocean!  The Sicilian food!  Some festival, which I couldn’t tell you a thing about!  But at least I have my passport renewed!

Went to Wal-Mart to buy a few more packing/moving bins; bought a “clearance” candleholder and incense burner because – obviously forgetting that I might actually need to use the ones I already had –   I’d packed them.  So, found a three-headed dragon one, looking forlorn and abandoned on a shelf.  Looked up three-headed dragons and discovered I’d bought a Tiamat incense burner and candle holder ... said, “Cooool!”

Tiamat/Theia colliding with Earth

But in my “Tiamat” search, I ran across all the people arguing and name-calling and screaming and yelling and jumping up and down over Zecharia Sitchin’s “Nibiru/Planet X” theory, since he’s also the one who theorized that “Tiamat” or Theia was the name of the rogue planet that crashed into the young earth, creating the moon in the process.   (Or, in other words, creating general chaos in the process.  Hence:  Tiamat=Chaos.)  He was actually proven ... probably right ... by others (as far as the collision theory went).  I’m scanning all of these pages of comments and posts (again), thinking, “Oh, brother ...” and sighing heavily.

Do I believe in any of it?  Disbelieve?  I’m not going to go through my opinion on that again – been there, done that.

But anyway, I have a Tiamat three-headed dragon sitting on my desk, wafting (coincidentally enough) tendrils of Dragon’s Blood incense all over the place.  Smells nice.

I also discovered a good use for the bottle of cat litter I had sitting near the door for the next time I took a run to the Royal Crest dumpster.  I could use it to stabilize a candle in a holder that was too large for it.  Only downside:  it smelled like cat litter.  No, not USED cat litter; just the litter itself.  When they say "unscented" it only means that they didn't add a fragrance to it.  They aren't saying that you can't smell anything.  I'm smelling chemicals, or whatever it is that they put in cat litter.  Awful stuff.  Mixed it with baking soda (which you could use for the same purpose all by itself, actually), and that took care of the problem.

Yesterday, I had something of a surprise in my daily meditation ... I decided to revisit the dreamscape I mentioned earlier (some would call it my astral temple; that sounds too formally religious for my taste) and start strengthening it.  By that I mean focusing on details; making it absolutely real in touch, taste, sound, sensation.  In the depths of this meditative trance, I discovered another opening into the space I hadn’t seen before and realized it was the entrance to the space from the other side.  The surprise was when I brought myself back to full consciousness and looked at the clock, an entire hour had passed!  That in itself was astonishing, as I usually start getting antsy after five minutes.  So practice really does work when it comes to meditating.  Also, I no longer need Christopher Penczak’s guided meditations to reach that level; I was able to do it myself.


Quick backtrack to Versace’s Eros if anyone is interested.  I had the chance to inhale it! 

You know me and my fondness (not) for fragrance descriptions, which are sometimes so bizarre and ridiculous you have to laugh.  This one was refreshingly straight-forward:  “ ... fresh, woody and slightly oriental. The fragrance includes mint oil combined with green apple and Italian lemon. Warmth is provided by tonka mixed with Venezuelan ambroxan and geranium flowers giving a fougere twist to the fragrance this way. “  (Fougere, by the way, is their one bit of pretentious nonsense in an otherwise comprehensible description:  it basically means “moss-like” and refers to the woodsy components of the cologne.)

Oddly enough, after the Italian lemon (they make Limoncello from Italian lemons, which have a distinctive fragrance to them; grown mostly in Sicily, they may be unique due to the volcanic components of the soil), I smelled the vetiver (but only because I knew what vetiver smelled like) ... I will tell you one thing:  I LIKED it.  Very sexy cologne, and not because (or not only because) I’m a personal fan and admirer of Eros himself – it really does smell good.  Plus ... you know ... the lemons come from Sicily.  :)  And if you’re one of those people who clean out and re-use cool-looking bottles and jars for witchy potions, you can’t do better than this one!  That’s actually Medusa on the bottle, by the way.

In preparation for our next class on cleansing auras, I started reading one of the e-books I’ve collected:  Leland, Charles Godfrey, Your Will Power (Also Called “The Mystic Will”), or How to Develop and Strengthen Will Power, Memory, or Any Other Faculty or Attribute of the Mind, By An Easy Process, The Elizabeth Towne Co., Publishers, Holyoke, MA, 1918.

(Irreverent Thought:  ‘tis a pity he couldn’t have also developed the mystic will power to shorten his book titles …)

A bit of a meandering read, through inserted anecdotes, backtracks and sidetracks … still quite readable.  Other authors have adopted this primary method in the intervening years:  calmly announce your intention before you go to sleep and let your subconscious implement it.  I’m quite sure it isn’t original, either - I'll double check, but I think Paracelsus wrote about the process as well, and I'm not sure where HE got it from.  Nonetheless, for those of us who truly love to sleep, this seemed easy enough – until I tried to do it!

Over the last three nights:
-    the first night, I drifted off to sleep right in the middle of formulating an intent,
-    the second night I mumbled, “Wait, let me think of something to intend,” and then passed out;
-    last night I passed out sprawled sideways on the bed before I even undressed, that’s how exhausted I was.  Deeply regretted doing that a few hours later:  one of my legs was still hanging off the side of the bed, and when I woke up, my knee was screaming in pain, having been bent the wrong way for all those hours.

I will report back on the “Will Power” results ... er, when I can stay awake long enough to try it.  So I’m guessing Leland didn’t have a full time job that tired him out to the point of no return, eh?  What I eventually considered was, “I will see all auras easily”, or something along those lines, in preparation for the next class.

[Next Morning Report:  I haven’t been able to see my own aura yet, but I was completely shocked when I was able (for the first time!) to see the hidden message in one of those pictures that are sent out over Facebook and Twitter (“Can you see this message?”) and you’re supposed to respond in some way if you can.  Until this morning, I was one of those people who stared at the box every which way and never saw a thing.  I always figured it was either a function of being nearsighted, or of having a (now surgically fixed) case of strabismus in my right eye.  This morning I looked at a box someone posted, and saw the words, “I can’t sleep” in it.  Said, “OMG, I can SEE it!”  Thought that was interesting coming on the heels of the vocalized intent before falling asleep, which I finally managed to do.]

Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome

I was also reading The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition by Michael White (William Morrow, 2002) on the train.  It was fascinating … until the Inquisition imprisoned him.  I remember reading another review complaining that the author went into appallingly distasteful details of the christian sadism that went into the torture of heretics.  I ended up closing the book after Bruno was put in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome, because as beautiful as it is from the outside, the entrance flanked by angelic statues ... what went on in the inside is enough to turn your stomach.  I could only read up to a point before thinking, “Their deity must have been so proud of them ...” and tossing the book aside in utter nauseated disgust.  Anyway, that reviewer was correct:  White really goes into detail about the depraved forms of christian torture.

Now here’s the weird moment:  Bruno’s last moment of freedom was in Venice, where he was turned over to the Inquisition by a nasty Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo.  I had a bad reaction when I first read the name “Mocenigo”, as in, “Ooooh, I don’t like him,” even though I had no idea who he was.  Or did I?  He was one of those well-known Venetian family names that I could have read somewhere and consciously forgot ... but the name gave me one of those inner shivers of horror, which is not typical of a name you read once or twice in a history book.  This was personal.

Recalling my previously described past life incident, and looking it up to refresh my memory, I suspect I would have disliked Alvise Mocenigo (26 October 1507 – 4 June 1577) who would have been elected Doge in 1570, during the fourth battle between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and this was the memory I experienced while in Venice – as you’ll recall I was blissfully married to one of the young men sent to sea to fight them, and he had already returned alive from one such battle, which took place in the 1560’s.  Giovanni Mocenigo, the guy who turned Giordano Bruno in to the Inquisition was before my time there.  Point being:  if the dislike stemmed from a memory, maybe the entire family was not well liked.  Or at least not liked by me.

Talking to the Dead

First week back at work after my vacation. Nibbling on salsiccia e verde (or salsiccie verde, if you’re mumbling), home-made whole wheat buttermilk biscuits, and sulking. Last Thursday was an infuriating waste of my time, and an embarrassment (for her, not for me – I was merely pissed off) – the dumb broad didn’t "psychically divine" anything until it was fed to her, and by the end of the session I was feeding her ridiculous amounts of crap just to see what brilliant "psychic message" she could come up with. A fraud, basically. And I’m still dragging my feet on going to Salem to meet with one of the other witches in October, and so probably won’t.

Talking to the Dead

She can talk to the dead, she says. "I sweah, I sweah."
I suspect a surfeit of bullshit in this claim
as she follows my leaders through lightening and rain,
claims her hair stands on end from souls’ fire in ether.
At last I feed her crumbs of invention, and there
she nibbles and extends her neck while I exclaim
"You knew that he was a stock broker!" An insane
vision of him rises, smug, at the haberdasher.

She was right about one thing, he stood behind me.
I could hear him, rattling his tool belt, toeing
gravel with his side-slipped boots and wheezing
with laughter. But he did not speak to me. I need
his forgiveness, but he is not forthcoming now, freezing
the lips of a fraud while facing eternity.

©Snake’s Trail, 2012. All rights reserved

Damien’s excitement about Lammas is actually sort of infectious. I wasn’t planning to start thinking about it until probably ... oh, I don’t know, the day before ... so for once I’m actually preparing for it. I also found two curiosities: a book on Italian witchcraft, with references to a source that pre-dates Gardner, and a symbol.

Naturally, the authenticity of the pre-Gardnerian, turn of the century Gospel of the Witches is disputed, but what caught my attention was the name for the harvest celebration, "cornucopia". What popped out of my memory was one of the very few disagreements I ever remember witnessing, when I was very young, between my mother and grandmother, and the disagreement was over that particular word. My mother saying, "It’s a gourd, filled with fruits and vegetables", and my grandmother saying, "No it isn’t, it’s a feast." (or festa, I can’t remember which word she used). My mother – from whom I probably inherited my godawful stubbornness - got up and pulled out a dictionary. I assume she looked up "cornucopia" and found a graphic of the usual image everyone envisions when they hear the word. My grandmother waved her hand in dismissal and snapped. "I don’t care what your book says, it’s a festa." And I remember my mother looking hurt when she did it. Ahhh, ancient family drama.

Now, I’m not trying to say my grandmother and mother were practioners of the Old Religion. Hardly. But I was reminded of that disagreement when I opened Raven Grimassi’s Italian Witchcraft, and found that Cornucopia, in Italy, is something like a sabbat at the end of August, a feast between the May celebration and the first Harvest. A festa, just as my grandmother insisted. The thing was, my grandmother never grew up in Italy – it was her mother or grandmother who emigrated to Michigan from the Veneto with her family, when SHE was a girl, before the unification of Italy - I sat there with the book, trying to figure out if Cornucopia was actually celebrated in the Veneto ... by Catholics. Because I’m pretty sure they went waaaaay back as Catholics. Or perhaps they were both, and just kept the witchiness part pretty much under wraps.

" ... the charm of the forbidden is very great, and witchcraft, like the truffle, grows best and has its raciest flavor, when most deeply hidden."
Leland, Charles Godfrey, Aradia, Gospel of the Witches of Italy, London, 1899, David Nutt, publisher, 270-71 Strand, p. vi

I looked up the nearest farmer’s market and learned we actually have one here, on Saturdays, and looked up corn bread recipes – which could run the gamut from bread with corn in it, bread made out of corn meal, or corn fritters – all a form of corn bread. Trying to decide on the Lammas Feast which is actually fun! Since August 1st is a Wednesday, I’m going to celebrate Lammas on the 4th.

In ancient Egypt, we’d be ... what? ... about a month away from the Inundation: the rising of the Nile, the inundation of farmlands, preparing them for planting. Priests would be preparing for community prayers for a perfect inundation – enough to fertilize the land, not so much it flooded everyone out of house and home and brought plague and disease. In Europe, we’d be awaiting the first grain harvest. Lammas. Same with the Americas, but here in the Americas we’d be watching the corn.

The corn. Place hand over heart, lift eyes to the heavens and all together now: "ahhhh...!" Greatest grain ever. Listening to Clinton J. Miller’s "Return to Mother Corn" off his Rez Boy album. I should find more odes to corn songs. Anyone know any Corn Maiden songs? I did learn a song back in the Enchantments days, although I have no idea who composed it. That song was "Hail to Koré", although one of the lines was, "Hail Corn Maiden, lady of the fields", so that probably counts as a Corn maiden song. Take note that no agrarian society has ever identified corn deities as male. Only one organization is that retarded: The Whole Grains Council – out of Boston, of course! I’m in favor of almost anyone who promotes corn ... unless they’re so obsessed with their own phalli they identify the grain as "King Corn"!

Wednesday of last week was the birthday of Nephthys (the sister of Isis) – recognizable for the two items she usually has on her head: a temple (or a column of a temple; sometimes a structure that looks like a house), and a basket. I’m not quite sure what the basket represented, unless it was to collect body parts: in addition to being Goddess of the Temple, she also accompanied Isis in her search for Osiris.

Another thing I liked about her was a certain similarity to Sekhmet: "Nephthys is sometimes featured as a rather ferocious and dangerous divinity, capable of incinerating the enemies of the Pharaoh with her fiery breath." She is also a deity you could celebrate with beer ... that is, if you happened to like beer, which I don’t, unless it’s in a batter you can use to fry things, like fish. But I wonder if she’d appreciate other forms of grain alcohol that didn’t actually contain hops.

Photo, left:  Nephthys- Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

　
According to the Pyramid Texts, Nephthys, along with Isis, was "a force before whom demons trembled in fear, and whose magical spells were necessary for navigating the various levels of Duat, as the region of the afterlife was termed."

So here we have a tri-fold power in place for the week’s activities: the dark moon, Nepthys, Sekhmet. Damien’s tweet about red wine for the dark moon taken to heart, at least. Last Thursday was the new moon.

Damien, for some reason, tweeted from Brooklyn last week (I have no idea why), before leaving for New Zealand. He was contentedly listening to Frank Sinatra and eating fried chicken. I would be more than OK if he moved there instead of Salem. Not saying that would be best for HIM, but I would sure be fine with it. I will always feel he’s safer in New York. Hell, I always feel safer in New York! But no, he’s tweeting about his days in New York being numbered and his upcoming move to Massachusetts. Damien!!! You can’t buy bolines here! You’re better off in New York if you want a boline or an athame!! (So whineth the native and homesick New Yorker). (*sigh*)

Back to Nephthys. For my purposes, she was also considered the unique protectress of the Sacred Phoenix, or the Bennu Bird. From The Book of the Dead, "I am the Bennu bird, the Heart-Soul of Ra, the Guide of the Gods to the Duat." Sekhmet being the eye of Ra, the Bennu Bird being the heart-soul of Ra; Ra is astoundingly well represented today, which strikes me as fortunate. Not to mention the incredible solar flares going on recently.

As far as I can tell, they really haven’t impacted me – all of my electronic equipment has been working just fine, and the only interruption to my cable viewing was a tornado warning recently, which utterly freaked me out. A tornado WARNING? In Massachusetts? Obviously, nothing beyond a thunderstorm to the south of me happened after that, noticeable only by the sound of distant thunder and a light drizzle.