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.

Elliot Cowan, Uses for Spider Webs and Renewing Your Virginity

Under the title of Miscellany:
More books that will piss you off if you have an iota of common sense:

Olympus and its Inhabitants, Agnes Smith, 1851.

“The universal belief in the existence of a Supreme Being shines through the accumulated mass of error which it [i.e., Greek and Roman mythology] presents…” (emphasis mine, Page 9)

UNIVERSAL belief???  “Accumulated mass of error”??  Really?!!???  Poor Aggie.   If she hadn’t already kicked the bucket, that chirpy and dimwitted bit of toxic ridiculousness opening this silly book would have inspired me to help her get there in a more timely fashion.  Apparently, she had so little knowledge of every other faith beyond her own judeo-christian cult, it was downright pitiful.  Let’s run it past a few Atheists, Pagans, Hindus, Buddhists and non-capitulatory Native Americans and see what THEY think of it.

Maybe that should be my first book:  “Books to Avoid If You Don’t Wish to Watch Your Own Head Explode”.  In fact, SHE’s the only “accumulated mass of error” I could see on that page.

Fortunately, this was a Google books download, so when I say I basically tossed the entire book after reading her first “narrative sketch” - a horrific description of Jupiter:

“Jupiter, the father of gods and men, the most powerful and most generally worshipped of all the heathen divinities ...” (emphasis mine, page 12) - heathen!!??!!

- I meant:  thank goodness for delete buttons.  Stupid woman.

DaVinci’s Demons
Don’t ask me why, but I ended up watching the world’s silliest movie, “Lost in Austen”.  Premise:  goofy, vulgar, London girl exchanges places with Elizabeth Bennett, the fictional heroine of Pride and Prejudice, and proceeds to screw up the entire plot, not to mention lying unashamedly to everyone connected with that twisted plot, so why she  - chronically rude liar that she was - gets rewarded with the hot hunk at the end, I have no idea.  Austen herself would have been horrified.  I was about to change the channel, when … I suddenly caught sight of said aforementioned “hot hunk”.

(*BLINK*!!) (*BOING!*)  “Hey, that’s Lorenzo de Medici!”

It was indeed.  Elliot Cowan – a younger Elliot Cowan than the man I had been watching on “DaVinci” – was playing the role of Mr. Darcy.  And that guy, may I state for the official record, was seriously hot.  Ladies, if you manage to catch the movie and find yourself getting nauseous in general, you must at least stay through the “wet shirt in the small pond” scene.  Ohhhh myyyyyyy.  That boy was utterly delicious.

After that scene you can tune out, because it was a pitiful movie except for the scenes he was in.  I, despite my better judgment, actually sat through the whole thing, just to watch Elliot Cowan.  He’s probably the hottest guy in “DaVinci” too, now that I think about it – bare butt and all – and the series shows more male frontal nudity than I’d seen on TV ... I was going to say “in quite some time”, but perhaps I should say “ever”.

Explanation:  if you’re going to show women fully naked, men should get the same exposure in the name of gender equality.  And yet, for some reason, male producers/directors have always had an aversion to filming the male appendage (in all its softened, relaxed, unexcited glory) bobbing about on the screen.  Even those silly late night Cinemax soft porn programs never show an un-erect, dangling penis.  Why?  Because they’re supposedly not arousing to look at?  Perhaps we all need to define what “arousing” could possibly mean.

The producers of “Game of Thrones” could learn this lesson from “DaVinci” – and I love “Game of Thrones”!  One of my few complaints about the series is just this – we get plenty of full frontal nudity when there are women on the screen, but not of men.  Why is that?

Starz should get an award for simply taking the beautiful human body – both male and female, young and old - in its natural state and putting it on film without blinking.  Of course, even Starz has room for improvement:  we haven’t yet seen an older woman naked, while they’ve shown plenty of grandfathers with everything hanging out.  But I’ll welcome the small steps wherever I can find cause to celebrate them.

And by the way, they’ve been pronouncing the family name incorrectly since Day One.  It’s “MEH-dee-chee”, not “Med-EE-chee”.  How do I know this?  I know one of their descendants, born and raised in Florence, and now living in the USA, personally.  That’s how she pronounces it, and is extremely emphatic about it.  I’ll take her pronunciation over theirs any day.

Finally, on behalf of Italians everywhere ... we WISH Lorenzo de Medici looked like that!  Because here’s the real one ... sculpturally captured in the days of old, while he was probably thinking, “Damn!  Why can’t I look like Elliot Cowan?”

**********************************************

Back to business.

Spiders.  Living on the ground floor (by which I mean, partially underground – great for insulation against either heat or cold!) – can also mean you’re visited by spiders.  Fortunately, I’m not terrified by the sight of spiders, the way some people are, and we have a basic agreement, those spiders and I.  I give them a few hours notice to get themselves free of the bathtub nooks (like the soap dish – for some reason, they like to hang out in the soap dish, don’t ask me why) and I won’t wash them down the drain.  A simple, “You need to find a safer place to hang out – fair warning!” is sufficient ... by the time I turn on the shower, they’re hiding somewhere else.  Also, I’ve politely requested that they stay away from the bed area, as I would prefer to not wake up with one of them crawling on me, and they’ve stayed away ever since.

So we co-exist quite peacefully, the occasional spider and I.

Was reading The Real Witches’ Year for 29 March – did you know placing a clean cobweb (without the spider in it, obviously) over a cut or bleeding wound will help stop the bleeding?  Here’s another:  “if you can collect a cobweb with dew on it, without breaking it, place it on a dish of water to attract love into your life.”  The things I learn these days!  I won’t have access to any dew-covered cobwebs until I move, but I’m slowly building a mental list of the things I want to try when I move into my home.

The Witch’s Book of Days for the same day cracks me up.  “As Diana, prepare for coming renewal of virginity and the need to hunt.”

OK, well, I don’t feel any need to hunt, so let’s toss that one out the window, but ... “renewal of virginity”??  How exactly does THAT work?  Isn’t that sort of a “you either are or you aren’t” kind of thing?  Hey, here’s my take on that.  If any of you remember your first moment when you stepped over the “virginity” line in the sand – and I’m referring to women here, not men – a lot of us don’t always remember that moment fondly.  Not the most pain-free moment of your life, usually.  I know most guys like to imagine their bedding of a virgin to be her most ecstatic discovery of the glory of the male phallus, but ... yeah, that rarely is her first thought at that moment.

Unless you consider “^&%^&, that ^&*%^’ing HURTS!” to be a euphemism for “I’m really ecstatic but am masking it extremely well by grimacing in pain.”

So, do I want my virginity renewed??  Two words:  HELL NO.  Jes’ sayin’.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity.

No sooner had I started off this blog entry with the word than it arrived in an e-mail from a blog I follow, on that very topic.  He described it as a call to the universe for connections, for knowledge; a result of “magical thinking”.  I like that.  So – synchronicity in progress.

About two weeks ago, as I greeted my beloved tree in the morning, I asked her, “Would you mind very much letting me have a few of your seed pods?  I would like to plant them outside of my home in New Hampshire, and have a piece of you there with me.”  The response was a gentle, “I will consider your request”, more or less – so I let it go.

Yesterday morning – a small branch – more like a long twig - was there, right at my feet – complete with a number of fuzzy seed pods!  I thanked her with all of my heart.  I think I need to plant two, for cross-pollination reasons?  But I will spend time researching how to best care for them.

Meanwhile, I turned on the television, stumbled across a marathon in progress, this one for “DaVinci’s Demons”, which I’d never seen before, as I’d originally thought it was a bad TV imitation of the Tom Hanks movie.  I was wrong – it was actually about Leonardo DaVinci.  Within 30 seconds of the first program’s ending, I was searching for the remote, wanting to view the program from Day One.  Luckily, it was still available.

Alexander Siddig, from my favorite Star Trek series (Deep Space 9, of course!), saying, “And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish.  Give me quickly the cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”

Before he had even finished the first of those two sentences, I sat up straight and gawped at the TV screen.  “OMG, that’s Osiris!”  I had been reading about the connection of the worship of Osiris with the annual inundation of the Nile.

The poem wasn’t from Osiris really, but I had just finished reading that very same spell, or invocation – and that’s really what that was – mere minutes earlier, so you can imagine my shock at hearing the words quoted right back at me from my television set.  I was still in the middle of packing and had opened M. Isadora Forrest’s Isis Magic briefly before packing it.  Opened right to that very passage (page 109), which began, “A later Hellenistic magical formula from Crete combines the Osirian theme of the cool water of renewal with the Orphic desire of the deceased to drink from the Lake of Memory – thus remembering the past life, or as the Egyptians would have said, repeating life.”

OK, so it wasn’t Osiris speaking those words per se; it was a magical formula supposedly found in Crete.  However, the dialog in the program instead mentioned Mithras, while the quotation in Isis Magic cited Robert A. Wild’s Water in the Cultic Worship of Isis and Sarapis.  Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981.  Out of print, without even a used copy available, anywhere (of course!), but I did find a partial .pdf online.  HIS source cited was Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Jane Ellen Harrison, 1903; pp. 659-660); hers was The Pætilía Tablet (Petelia; Gr. Πετηλία), found in excavations near Petelia, South Italy, and now in the British Museum.  (*whew*!  At least everyone in this chain had cited their sources.)

So, here it is: 

"Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this Well-spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,
Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.
Say:  'I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Ouranos. [1]  This ye know yourselves.
And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish.  Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.'
And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy Well-spring,
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship..."

The reference to Ouranos:  [1] The original translation says "Heaven (alone)." The Greek words are: gænos Ouranion (ΓΕΝΟΣ ΟΥΡΑΝΙΟΝ), "my origin is from Ouranos."  Ouranós is the Father. The "alone" is the translator's comment and is not justified. Ouranós is one of the Six Kings (Phánis [Phanes], Nyx , Ouranós, Krónos, Zefs [Zeus], and Diónysos), the evolution of Aithír (Ether; Gr. Αἰθήρ) described in Orphic Kosmogony. He is the Father; Earth is the Mother; two material substances. In the Greek language (both ancient and contemporary) Ouranós means sky, sky = Ouranós. So it must be understood that this is not like the Christian "heaven" which contrasts with the Christian "hell."  Ouranós = sky = Aithír.  He is the Father because the poem is claiming him as the origin.  Ouranos is the origin, the Father, in any case.

And here is a photograph of The Pætilía Tablet.

Now, quite honestly, having read a little on both of them, I am not fond of either Ouranos, or of Mithras – both strike me as appallingly violent and ugly.  Ouranos loathed and was castrated by his children at the bequest of his wife (making them the first John and Lorena Bobbitt in known history); Mithras followers slaughtering bulls and opening their doors only to men, calling themselves “Fathers” and “Sons of Fathers”, and women, apparently, being utterly irrelevant*.  Such an endearing bunch of phallus-obsessed yahoos, generally speaking.  Some ancient deities we’re probably better off relegating to the dust bins of history.

*The Mithraic details came from A Mithraic Ritual, (G.R.S. Mead, Theosophical Publishing Society, London, Benares, 1907.)

The photo, by the way, came from:
http://www.heavenlyascents.com/2009/06/18/instructions-for-the-netherworld-the-orphic-gold-tablets/

And I’m not sure what any of it means.  What magical thinking of mine was behind this particular synchronicity?  I focused on the “Lake of Memory”, which was, the remembering of a past life.  I’ve already told you about one, where I was the wife of a seaman/soldier who was killed when Venice went to war with Constantinople.

The second one:  I suspect this preceded the Venetian lifetime.  I was a boy, of about 8-10 years of age.  I was in a group of boys, all sitting in a semi-circle on the ground facing an older man (salt & pepper hair and beard, obviously an instructor or teacher of some sort), who was seated on a rock.  I came into this lifetime from a dream almost as though I had leapt through the air and landed unexpectedly in my previous body.  However, I was so at home in it, and so familiar with it, the strange leap didn’t seem odd to me at all, and considering that I was an adult woman experiencing this – the fact that it wasn’t strange seems awfully strange in retrospect.

But there I was: a young boy.  When I arrived, the man had just drawn the symbol for “infinity” in the dust with a stick he had in his hand.  I had just said something out loud, that made all the other boys laugh.  The man looked at me, and I knew he was thinking that I had reminded him of something he had said or done when he was the same age.  Nonetheless, he reached out and cuffed me on the side of my head.  When he did that, I suddenly saw through the teacher’s face to another face I was familiar with.  I said, “I know who you are!  You’re ----“ , and I named a man I knew in my current life as an adult woman.  However, as soon as I said that, I stopped, looked very confused and said, “What?  Who?  I don’t know anyone with that name.”

The teacher’s reaction was equally odd:  he put his finger to his lips and said, “Sssshhhhh.”  As soon as he did that, I fell over backwards from my cross-legged seated position, as though I had been pushed – and woke up in my adult-woman body.

The problem was, in my mind, I was still a boy, who just awakened in a strange bed, in a strange place, in a very strange time, surrounded by all sorts of strange, unfamiliar noises (traffic, for one!) and worse, with a woman’s body.  I did what any boy would do, I screamed in terror, and tried to back up from myself in the bed.  I was yelling, “Help me, help me, help me!” like a lunatic.  A second or so later, my present day consciousness caught up with me, and I slowly began to remember who I was.  Oh yeah.  I WAS supposed to have two bazangas, after all.  But I had been so badly frightened, I was nearly sick to my stomach.  The horror and fear had been that intense.

About 6 months later, the man whose name I had spoken calmly told me that a psychic had told him that I had once been his student in … naturally I can’t remember it now.  Macedonia?  Thebes?  Thrace?  Something like that.  Well, technically, what she SAID was, “Do you know someone who has these physical characteristics?  She was your student in …”  And he knew it was me she was talking about.  So there you go.

Was I supposed to remember that life?  The life in Venice?  Another life I didn’t remember?  Was that the “Lake of Memory” I was supposed to be drawing from?  The last episode I saw suggested that “The Lake of Memory” was a method of being able to travel anywhere in time ... which brings me back to my longing to travel via lucid dreaming to participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

I guess I just have to trust that it will make sense … sometime.