Bad Falls, Bad Drivers and Really Bad Books

Another header.  I can see why they think I’m a fall risk – took one header into the kitchen counter a little while ago; just took another one the other morning – a bad one.  This time landed on my left knee ... and could barely move  I was so sore and stiff.  Didn’t break it – thank goodness – and am actually quite surprised that I didn’t, as hard I hit the floor.  But I was  absolutely miserable for the next few days.  In both cases, I stumbled over the left foot, the drop one, which I wasn’t able to get lifted up in time.

Finally got the brace the same day I fell ... and it does seem to be holding the left foot up, although as miserably sore and stiff as my left leg was at the time, I had no way of knowing if the pain was from the brace or the fall.  It is not the most flattering thing I’ve ever worn, that’s for certain.

I knew the first moment I saw it that there was no way that thing would fit under my new jeans.  I had the same reaction to this thing that I had when I first saw my awful haircut.  So now I not only have un-sexy hair, I have this awful contraption around my leg.  Could I LOOK any more pitiful?  No, I honestly don’t think I could.  Got tears in my eyes when I saw it.  And the gypsy curse continues, doesn’t it?

Went from a reasonably attractive human being with long, pretty hair to a sore, stiff, limping, gimping cripple who can barely move, dressed in loose, baggy jeans bulging unattractively on one side of one leg, while the other leg is atrophying to the point where her own physical therapist called her “chicken legs”, and who looks like someone took a weed wacker to her head – all in 1 month’s time.  How is that even possible?  Feels like I was just mowed down by a Mack truck or something.

Onward.  Nothing I can do about any of that now.  Well, other than bitching and moaning about it.

Started reading the novel I described earlier, The Demonologist (Andrew Pyper, 2013) ... the premise is that a professor of religious literature uses clues from Paradise Lost to find his daughter who went missing under mysterious occult circumstances in Venice.  Ahhh, Venice.  Unless it crops up later, the author has already missed one key connection:  he has a hallucination where he sees a herd of crazed pigs racing towards him.  Makes the connection between that and the story of the christian Jesus supposedly casting demons out of a man into a herd of pigs who then race into the sea and drown – which, when you think about it, was a pretty cruel and inhumane thing to do, really.  But that’s beside the point.

He seems to have missed the underlying foundation for THAT story, which historians believe came directly from the Eleusinian Mysteries ... where pigs were sacrificed - at seaside -  during the trip to Eleusis by the initiates.  Also a pretty cruel and inhumane thing to do, and again, beside the point.  However, the parable in question when it was written down draws a pretty juvenile line between emerging christianity and popular faiths in existence at the time.  Basically, a childish “Neener, neener, neener, our religion’s better than yours!” sort of thing, where they heisted the well-known Eleusinian tradition and stuck their Jesus into it.  The POINT is that the author seems to have missed that key historical link, and since the character in the novel is a Professor of religious literature – that seems like a key detail the character should have known.  And yet – unless he inexplicably remembers it later – he doesn’t.  Generally speaking, readers get a little perturbed when they know more than the author does.  And I still haven’t learned anything useful about Paradise Lost.  Or at least not yet.  I’m about halfway through the novel.

Still, nothing so far has convinced me of anything more than I already know.  If you believe in Quantum Theory, you already know it, too.  You do create your own reality, so if that’s what you believe in, they do exist for you.  If you don’t, they don’t.  It is that simple.

Meanwhile, the car has been detailed, and is absolutely gorgeous, inside and out.  All of the drips from the North Andover pine trees are gone; it’s been vacuumed, cleaned – even the tires were polished.  Smells wonderful inside – nice and fresh and clean.  No sooner had I pulled out of the parking lot with my gorgeous new car, a car stopped short in front of me because a stupid woman ahead of him hadn’t bothered to flip her turn signal, and just stopped and turned without warning – I had plenty of room to stop behind him - and did. 

And of course, some idiot in an SUV (naturally) behind me wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention either, and all I heard behind me was the screech of tires.  Fortunately, he swung to the left and just missed rear-ending me by half an inch – he stopped just as our front seat windows were side by side; I’m in the regular lane; he’s in the turning lane.  The look of shock on his face pretty much said it all – he hadn’t been paying any attention whatsoever and got caught (extremely) short.  I just looked at him with an expression of disgust.  Really?  I now have the world’s most beautiful car and you came HOW close to squashing both me and my car like bugs?  He just shrugged, “Sorry.”

There are far too many dangerously inept people who need to have their licenses revoked.  The stupid woman and the SUV driver are both at the top of the list.  It’s almost summertime now ... I’ll be willing to bet that both of them are idiot touristy beach people from Massachusetts, where learning how to drive properly is optional.

The two books I thought would be useful for my research for C’era una volta/Paradise Lost came in – was a bit disappointed in one of them and utterly disgusted with the other, to the point where I’m thinking of returning it as fraud.

The far more tolerable of the two was I, Lucifer (Corvis Nocturnum, 2011).  I’m all in favor of photos and diagrams where they aid understanding of the text, but I, Lucifer is slick, shiny and chock full of pictures, to the point where you take it the author assumed his readers couldn’t follow the text without pictures to keep them entertained.  In its favor:  it cited Michelle Belanger and her “vast personal library” as a resource (when I mentioned it to her, she said she had 3,500 books in her library).  Knowing her, I could assume her material was educational and knowledgeable ... she is the one who went and researched demon bowls at the University of Michigan for her encyclopedia, and is one of my personal resources for Sumerian deities.  And I will give him this:  he had an excellent bibliography at the conclusion of the book.  I wished for more text, less photos, if I could have had a choice.

The other, Lucifer, Father of Cain, is utterly ridiculous.  You turn the book over and get to read a “review” on the back cover from a mentally unstable woman named Joye Jeffries Pugh.  I’m not even going to touch her idiotic theories they are so ... distasteful and appalling.  All you have to do is Google the fool to get some idea of just how awful she is.

Point is:  that is not a good selling point for the book, and you haven’t even opened it yet.  “The true message,” she babbles helplessly, “Concerns getting to know God, the Creator, and His only begotten son, Jesus.”  So, this was NOT a study of the archetype, this was a book written for fundamentalist christians who’ll buy anything.  Pugh figured out just how to tap into this idiot market:  she bottle bleached her hair, gave herself a fake doctorate (she insists its in education from Nova University in Florida, but her idiocy is so pronounced, I have no idea how she got one unless she wrote up the degree  herself), and dove into apocalyptic books with wild and irresponsible abandon, insisting that a bad dream when she was a kid made her do it.  Why her parents didn’t haul her off to a child psychologist I have no idea, but they instead set her free to torture the rest of us.

Meanwhile, the author, a guy ironically self-named “Zen Garcia” seems to have written most of the book based on voices he’s hearing in his head.  He makes stuff up, and twists them into knots to feed his own demons.  It felt like I was reading – and that was only a few pages – something written and then endorsed by two of the most mentally and emotionally unstable people on the planet.  It was a  shudder-provoking experience.  Ugh.  And what knocks me flat is:  there are a myriad of demented fundamentalists in the USA who buy this retch-inducing awfulness without even blinking.

Hell, even John Milton would have blinked in horror at this book and then decided maybe writing HIS poem was not such a good idea after all ... as it appears his prime protagonist had already captured these two nitwits and their drooling readership singlehandedly.

Following Up on Last Year's Issues

"The practice of magic was omnipresent in classical antiquity."

One of my favorite opening sentences in a textbook – possibly ever. Bibliographed. Footnoted. Cited. Loved it.
Graf, Fritz. Magic in the Ancient World. Philip, Franklin, trans. Harvard University Press, 1997. 

Ah, the utter joy of discovering legitimate magickal traditions and not the nonsensical burbling of Tinkerbelles and Twinkies claiming to be witches when the truth is they have half of their sizeable rumps ensconced in local churches, singing "kum bah yah" around campfires just like they did in childhood bible camp. I’m serious, most of those women have deprived so many students of legitimate power in favor of "feel good" silliness, they should be run out of town on a rail.

I know, I shouldn’t be singling out christians devolving into christian-wiccan idiots for their disastrous leaps of logic that send them flying into the nearest abyss. Great example: (tune up the violins); "Every time I hear a newborn baby cry ... I believe." They even put that one to music. One of the most inane voids of logical course ever devised. Really??!!?? You believe ... what, exactly? That infants of any species are born with an inherent ability to express their basic needs? That proves evolution in the art of survival if anything, not a deity.

But that logical failure crosses all belief systems. I was also reading H.P. Blavatsky’s preface to the first volume of Isis Unveiled: "Prove the soul of man by its wondrous powers – you have proved God!" – in her "ex nihilo nihil fit" discussion, raising again the problems with idiots not realizing they are giving a sole deity a capital "G" ... raising all sorts of new issues. This is the same designation used by "an unspiritual, dogmatic, too often debauched clergy; a host of sects, and three warring great religions; discord instead of union, dogmas without proofs, sensation-loving preachers, and wealth and pleasure-seeking parishioners' hypocrisy and bigotry, begotten by the tyrannical exigencies of respectability, the rule of the day, sincerity and real piety exceptional." (same source) So why use the term?

But setting that aside for the moment in favor of the (il)logical leap, above: noooooo, (assuming you can conclusively prove the existence of a soul of man by any method, in the first place) you have only proved that men have souls. Can’t even prove that women do, according to Blavatsky, which seems an odd premise in a book written by a woman, but no matter.

(And by the way, for those who never bothered to pick up some elementary Latin: "ex nihilo nihil fit" means "nothing comes from nothing". And here you thought Rodgers and Hammerstein invented that, when they wrote the lyrics for "The Sound of Music". Ha! Not likely.)

Or this, in a discussion of Plato:

And the greatest philosopher of the pre-Christian era (i.e., Plato) mirrored faithfully in his works the spiritualism of the Vedic philosophers who lived thousands of years before himself, and its metaphysical expression. Vyasa, Djeminy, Kapila, Vrihaspati, Sumati, and so many others, will be found to have transmitted their indelible imprint through the intervening centuries upon Plato and his school. Thus is warranted the inference that to Plato and the ancient Hindu sages was alike revealed the same wisdom. So surviving the shock of time, what can this wisdom be but divine and eternal?

Oh, I dunno..! Knowledge which had survived the "shock" of time might not be automatically "divine and eternal", but (logically speaking) "very, very old"? I really hate stuff that is supposed to be passing for logical deduction failing in an "epic" fashion, to use a contemporary adjective. Point being that if Ms. Blavatsky had something worthwhile to say, we might never know about her message if we can’t bring ourselves to progress in her book beyond the preface after reading nonsense like this.

I would dismiss this with, "So much for the theosophists" were it not for her basic, underlying premise that there is one "universal" truth and that all of earth’s belief systems contain one facet of it. I can’t swear that’s true, I just suspect it is; still, she hasn’t proved that in Isis Unveiled, or ... at least not so far. All she’s done is irritate me with logic failure.

I also basically agree with her overall opinion of Plato and the influence of the Eleusinian Mysteries on him, although – again – have problems with her logical deductions.

"The philosophy of Plato, we are assured by Porphyry, of the Neoplatonic School was taught and illustrated "in the mysteries". Many have questioned and even denied this; and Lobeck, in his Aglaophomus, has gone to the extreme of representing the sacred orgies as little more than an empty show to captivate the imagination. As though Athens and Greece would for twenty centuries and more have repaired every fifth year to Eleusis to witness a solemn religious farce!"

In this, I actually do agree with her, but I wouldn’t use the "twenty centuries" length as a source for logic, unless it was used by some christian to prove the veracity of their faith. I’ve actually seen them try this: "It HAS to be true. It has lasted for 2000+ years!" Then, of course, you ran roll your eyeballs at them and bring up the Eleusinian Mysteries, or even this quotation, just to watch their heads explode, trying to discredit it without discrediting their own mythologies. To come up with strong proof that the Mysteries were legitimate, it would be required to recreate them, as it appears no one broke the law and wrote down their experiences. Or at least we haven’t found a document thus far.

Although, you possibly could remind them that actual manifestations were recreated at every initiation, which might stump them for a while – until they start singing (tune up the violins); "Every time I hear a newborn baby cry ... I believe." And at that point, I give you full permission to slap them. Initiates in the Mysteries had lots more foot blisters but lots more fun – read about the recreations of Baubo and her dirty jokes sometime.

I know I haven't finished the list of fallen angels in the incubus/succubus discussion, but I did run across an interesting discussion on the word "demon", which does possibly explain the change in the word in the christian era into something exclusively malevolent, when it was not intended that way in ancient Greek:

"DAIMONION is a diminutive of DAIMWN, which originally meant something like "dispensing power" and which was often used of a god whose name was either unknown or not deemed important to identify in this instance. DAIMONES are nameless supernatural powers, generally thought subordinate to the Olympian pantheon. Bauer cites in particular a celebrated passage from the Symposium of Plato where Diotima is trying to define EROS as a supernatural power that mediates between humanity and the gods. If you want to understand what is meant by that phrase there, you really ought to look up that passage in the Symposium and read more of it. DAIMWN and DAIMONION can mean so many things across such a range that I don't think it would be fair to venture any simple account."

Source: a 1998 discussion, now archived, on http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

Moving forward: January. The month of Janus, the God of beginnings and transitions. From the online etymology dictionary:

"January (n.) late 13c., Ieneuer, from Old North French Genever, Old French Jenvier (Modern French Janvier), attested from early 12c. in Anglo-French, from Latin Ianuarius (mensis) "(the month) of Janus," to whom the month was sacred as the beginning of the year (see Janus; cf. Italian Gennajo, Provençal Genovier, Portuguese Janeiro). The form was gradually Latinized by c.1400. Replaced Old English geola se æfterra "Later Yule." In Chaucer, a type-name for an old man.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=January

Eleusinian Mysteries and Drugs, 2012

I thought I was being wise and proactive when I got a flu shot last week, so of course another dangerous woman came to work with a cold, coughed open-mouthed all over me and now I’m recovering from a bad case of bronchitis. What is it with women and their desperate need to race into American offices while virulently sick, infecting people?

On a more positive note: (1) thank you again to all the men who have the brains to stay at home and whine, and (2) at least I don’t have the flu?

Erratum: "CBS Sunday Morning", not "CBS This Morning."

Eleusinian Mysteries 2012
Given the time of the year, I went back to studying the Eleusinian Mysteries. I’ve discovered a few things: first thing is that a few of the present day crop of secretive societies, the Masons, the Rosicrucians to name two, and I’m sure there are more, have made it a point to study the Mysteries, so many of the papers and books written on them are often aligned with those types of societies, presumably because all of these societies want to align their initiation ceremonies with other ceremonies: "Pythagorean, Hermetic, Samothracian, Eleusinian, Drusian, Druidical" – list is from Dudley Wright in his Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites, a Freemasonry paper-turned-book.

As Freemasonry admits only men - while the Mysteries were open to men, women, slaves and freeborn alike as long as they spoke Greek - if Freemasonry draws from the Eleusinian Mysteries (or, as they claim, inspired them, although there is no proof anywhere of that), there was one heck of a patriarchal perversion somewhere along the line, to the point where they lost all contact and respectability.

As for some of the others, I don’t know enough about them, to support their supposed connections or not. There is a Pythagorean Society (created 1945, Plymouth England), and every math club in every high school on the planet called itself "The Pythagorean Society", after the original. The Samothracian Mysteries venerated mysterious deities called the Kabiri. The Drusian seemed to be connected with both Lebanon and China. The Druids are ... well, the Druids.

Magick
The second thing is a bit harder to pin down, but it seems to be that no one believes in magick anymore. Or is it terror, experienced by our present day crop of christian-Americans (to distinguish our home-grown nutballs from some of the saner varieties in other countries) or science inspired students, when something happens that they cannot explain biblically or rationally? In those cases, one has to reduce the 2,000+ year old Sacred Mysteries to drug-induced mindlessness, rather than admit that both their christian heroes and gods of science destroyed something so irrevocably precious and real? Even the new age twinkies got in on the act:

"The human intellect is not capable of comprehending the god-force directly."
Ventimiglia, Mark, The Wiccan Rede, p. 6.

Says who? Has anyone ever tried? Who made the attempt? When? Under what circumstances? I really dislike these blanket, sweeping statements, that authors hit you with, out of nowhere. And we, the readers, are all supposed to sit here, nod like bubble-heads on dashboards and intone, "*Duh*, okeydokey," without even questioning it. I mean, did the author try, and fail to "comprehend the god-force"? A mere 520 years ago, most people thought that "human beings would fall off the side of the earth if they sailed west", and look where I got deposited!

On the other hand, here’s a contradictory version of that:

"Once, when my mind had become intent on the things-which-are, and my innermost mind/understanding [nous] was raised to a great height, while my bodily senses were withdrawn as in sleep, when men are weighed down by too much food or by the fatigue of the body, it seemed that someone immensely great of infinite dimensions happened to call my name and said to me:

What do you wish to hear and behold, and having beheld, what do you wish to learn and know?"
The Corpus Hermeticum, "Poimandres to Hermes Trismegistus", Book 1, Salaman, Van Oyen, Wharton and Mahé, translators, p. 17

"Someone immensely great of infinite dimensions" seems a perfect a description of the "god force" to me. So we have a first hand account of an encounter with the god-force from a time before Moses and not only having absolutely no problem doing it, but having the same god-force offering to answer any questions he might have!, and a guy from 2003 stating unequivocally that no one can even comprehend this god-force – and without any explanation as to how he came by that rather startling irrefutable announcement.

So which version are we going to go with? Sorry, Mark – I’m going with Hermes on this one.

Still, what is disturbing about these sorts of exposés on what was supposedly the REAL mystery behind Eleusis is a complete failure of any of these people to understand basic magick – the force of the will. It never occurs to them that when participants reported witnessing Demeter ... that those people might have, in fact, witnessed Demeter ... simply because of the force of their will. Many of those same poo-poo’ers would be the first to believe in, say, the shroud of Turin, or the appearance of a woman who looked nothing like Jesus’s Jewish mother could possibly have looked and yet claimed to be her, at Lourdes, or any number of christian miracles, but turn up their noses at Eleusinian ones. No, they say, it had to be drugs.

For example, this is the second time I’ve read The Road to Eleusis, but it appears they’ve done more research on the Kykeon, moving away from an ergot concoction to possibly a fasting and ergot or shroom combination. Also, I don’t recall reading about Socrates’ "impiety" – which is why he was handed hemlock to drink - being in reference to holding drug-addled "Mysteries" parties in his home for high-born Athenians using a stolen recipe for the sacred drink. Where did that come from?

(Mayan mushroom figurines, 1000 BC through 500 AD, Guatemala)

Of interest is the comparison between the use of mushrooms by (possibly) both the Greeks and the Mexicans. Damien used one of their paths: the fast. Used by both the Greeks and the Meso Americans. The Greeks, according to the authors, mixed barley water with mint as a base; the Mexicans used a chocolate drink.

In both Greece and Mexico both eggs and alcohol are taboo, the alcohol for 4 days. In both cases, the ceremonies were "guided" by shamans or skilled practitioners. Twinkies who stomped all over the Mexican forests and offended every native they encountered were considered to have corrupted the sacred purpose of the mushroom. R. Gordon Wasson, one of the authors of Road to Eleusis, was said to have promised the shaman he learned from, that he would never reveal her secrets. As soon as he crossed the Mexican border, he did just that. He sold her "children" – as she called her sacred mushrooms - to a pharmaceutical chemist to be torn apart, examined and eyeballed. He is getting richer by the day from books like Road to Eleusis; she died in poverty.

But I happened upon someone who had the same reaction to the "Eleusinian Mysteries initiates were drugged" explanation as I did. I absolutely loved this:

The initiates were purified. They fasted. They walked in a very long procession to the site from Athens, along the way singing and engaging in ritualized acts like the bawdy jokes. They danced where Demeter once sat. They spoke sacred formulae. They were led together in a series of rituals older than they could even comprehend, on sacred ground, in a place where the veil between this world and the underworld was thin. They had a good deal of psychological investment and religious faith in the process. They built up anticipation and expectation.

And of course, the gods were there. They set up the Mysteries in the first place, and it was a revelation of the gods’ power that formed the climax of the ritual. Now, most scholars don’t believe in the gods, and so this isn’t a factor they can take into consideration, but it’s certainly something we need to remember.

This was from the "Forest Door". Loved the blog so much I subscribed to it. The author, Dver, "is a spirit-worker on the margins of Hellenic polytheism, with ties to English, Germanic and Slavic folk traditions as well. A priestess of Dionysos, and also devoted to Hermes, Apollon, Persephone, Hekate, and a host of personal and local spirits, her main practices include oracular trance, pathwalking, bone-working, and devotional worship. Dver resides in the lush, green, nymph-haunted Pacific Northwest."

URL to the Eleusinian Mysteries opinion: http://forestdoor.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/ergot-and-eleusis/?shared=email&msg=fail

URL to the blog: http://forestdoor.wordpress.com

Check it out.

The Eleusinian Mysteries

I, at Eleusis, saw the finest sight,
When early morning's banners were unfurled.
From high Olympus, gazing on the world,
The ancient gods once saw it with delight.
Sad Demeter had in a single night
Removed her sombre garments! and mine eyes
Beheld a 'broidered mantle in pale dyes
Thrown o'er her throbbing bosom. Sweet and clear
There fell the sound of music on mine ear.
And from the South came Hermes, he whose lyre
One time appeased the great Apollo's ire.
The rescued maid, Persephone, by the hand
He led to waiting Demeter, and cheer
And light and beauty once more blessed the land.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919)

Day Before Yesterday, The Asormos.

Yesterday, the Holade Mystai, the Day of Purification. Ritual bathing to purify yourself for the ceremony to come. Day is dedicated to Demeter and Persephone, with, Stein says, "strong influence of Isis".

Today, the third day, offerings of barley and grain, "the life force".

Last year, I started reading about the Eleusinian Mysteries – which you may recall, got me started on waking dreams – which you may also recall, came to a screeching halt when I was prescribed medication to halt the leg cramps, and temporarily lost my ability to remember dreams, due to the drugged state the medication inflicted on me. I have hope that the ability will return. A year has passed, and I again picked up my reading on the Mysteries. The more I read about them, the more enthralling they become. I still want to go back in dream time into Greece for the Mysteries. I can almost taste the excitement the initiates must have felt.

Meanwhile, I found the mythology that may have eventually developed into the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries:

Telipinu was the Hittite god of farming. He was the son of the weather and fertility god according to their mythology.

In one story, he grew angry at the world and left his house, causing the crops to fail. Hannahannas, the mother goddess, sent a bee to find him; when the bee did, stinging Telipinu and smearing wax on him, the god grew angry and began to wreak destruction on the world. Finally, Kamrusepa, goddess of magic, calmed Telepinu by giving his anger to the Doorkeeper of the Underworld.

The Telepinu Myth is an ancient Hittite myth about Telepinu whose disappearances causes all fertility to fail, both plant and animal. This results in devastation and despair among gods and humans alike. In order to stop the havoc and devastation, the gods seek Telepinu but fail to find him. Only a bee sent by the goddess Hannahanna finds Telepinu, and stings him in order to wake him up. However this infuriates Telepinu further and he "diverts the flow of rivers and shatters the houses". In the end, the goddess Kamrusepa uses healing and magic to calm Telepinu after which he returns home and restores the vegetation and fertility. In other references it is a mortal priest who prays for all of Telepinu's anger to be sent to bronze containers in the underworld, of which nothing escapes.

But the Eleusinian Mysteries were much more extensive. Everything in the Greek world stopped for them. Initiates came from all over the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Ionian Seas, possibly further than that. Wars stopped. Travel to Greece that might have been banned at the time, was now allowed. The buzz in the air was audible, throughout the entire region. Preparations had been underway, and now there was no time left. The Mysteries had begun. THIS is the event I have always wanted to dream travel back to, and experience. Except for the medication screwing with my dream recall, I see no reason why I can’t do that. I just need to learn how.

I’m reminded of a past dream I had that was so immediate and so real I had trouble readjusting when I woke up.

I lived in Yonkers. Took a nap. Fell so deeply into this dream it became reality for me, for a time. This was the dream:

I was a boy of about 9 years old. There was a small group of us, sitting on the ground. A man of about 30-40 years was sitting on a rock. I knew the man’s name in that lifetime. I don’t want to say we were all wearing togas – more that we had cloth wrapped around ourselves by way of clothes.

The older man definitely had sandals of some sort on his feet; I’m pretty sure I was barefoot. He had salt and pepper hair and beard. He was instructing us in something, and I do remember him drawing the infinity symbol in the dirt with a stick.

I had just said something out loud, which was dry or sarcastic. I made the other boys laugh. The man looked at me, and as he reached out to cuff me on the side of the head for interrupting the lesson he was imparting to all of us, I distinctly heard him think (so in this dream, I could read minds as well!) that I reminded him of his younger self. But he cuffed me anyway, for being a smart-ass. As his hand impacted the side of my head, I gasped and said, "Wait! I know who you are! You’re ---", and I blurted out the name of someone I knew in my present life. He put his finger to his lips, and as he did so, I felt myself fall over sideways onto the ground, and side-slipped through time and woke up in Yonkers.

Two things: I did know who the older man was in this lifetime, and he actually confirmed it later on, without even being asked about it, by remarking that he was a man with the name I’d already been aware that he had, because of that dream. I remember every hair on my body standing up in shock when he said that.

The other thing: I was scared out of my wits to wake up and find myself a woman. I cannot describe the terror, because it’s one of those things I’ll bet not a lot of people experience. I’d identified so completely with the body and mind of a nine-year old boy that waking up as a woman was foreign and unfamiliar. I actually started crying out in horror and backing up toward the headboard of the bed in a panic to get away from myself, before I returned mentally and remembered I was a woman. Terrifying, let me tell you. And extremely odd.

I hadn’t thought of that dream in a long time, but a photo of Piero was posted. I looked at it, and suddenly said, "I KNOW him." Well, of course I knew it was a photo of Piero Barone, but it was the first time I’d felt a glimmer of "other recognition", for want of a better phrase ... and couldn’t figure out why. I’d just thought I loved his voice and hadn’t thought there may have been more to it than that. As though I’d known him from somewhere else. The reaction was nearly identical to the one I’d had in the Yonkers dream. Couldn’t place him anywhere else – I knew of only a few other lives I’d had: Venezia was one, and probably the one that left the greatest emotional impact on me. The boy of nine in a Grecian type settlement was another. There was a third one in Mesoamerica.

The Grecian one makes me think, "Might have been ..." where I may have encountered Piero, because I’d always thought that life took place in Greece or Magna Graecia, and Sicily has Grecian roots. No other reason for me to think that, though. I couldn’t remember why he seemed familiar to me outside of his role as "Piero Barone of Il Volo".

But because I’d said almost the same thing ("Wait! I know him!") – or close to it – when I saw that photo of Piero, I found myself wondering if he was a fellow student, or a brother or something in that life. Something about the way his body was shaped, or his collarbones looked, or the way his head was turned. I can’t find it again. I just know that at the time the sense of recognition happened, it sent a bolt of electricity through me, the ‘recognition’ was so startling. Would at least partially explain the period of obsession – with him I must have felt safe, even subliminally.

The point being: is it possible I might have been familiar with the Mysteries while they were actually taking place? After that "glimmer" happened, I was even more eager to see if I could dream-walk into the Mysteries.

"And thou shalt know the Source ethereal,
And all the starry signs along the sky,
and the resplendent works of that clear lamp
of glowing sun and whence they all arose.
Likewise of wandering works of round-eyed moon
Shalt thou yet learn and of her source; and then
Shalt thou know too the heavens that close us round –
Both whence they sprang and how Fate leading them
Bound fast to keep the limits of the stars ...
How earth and sun and moon and common sky,
The Milky Way, Olympus outermost,
And burning might of stars made haste to be."

Parmenides

Back from Manhattan

Thursday, September 6, 2012
I can’t seem to stop the urge to start crying. I’ve been walking aimlessly around my apartment, tears poking me behind my eyelids for absolutely no reason, but not certain how to get the sensation to go away. Not certain what’s causing it. Suspicion but there’s no proof, as the man in the crowded house says. Failure to ground New York City’s powerful energy? As soon as that thought enters my mind, it slides back out again. I forget that I ever had the thought and return to walking in aimless circles.

I know part of it – everything was perfect ... except me. And the weather. As soon as I left the apartment on the 4th of September, I was flying on a magic carpet, albeit a limp and soggy one. I think we – and by "we" I mean the residents of the East Coast - were in the remnants of Hurricane Isaac. Hot, stifling, humid, miserable.

If anyone were to ask me, I would say that the concert started for me at about 3:00 in the afternoon, when Amtrak hissed to a stop at Penn Station. I commuted most out of Times Square (the 1 to Van Cortlandt Park) and later the Port Authority Bus Terminal than Penn Station, but Penn Station was still so familiar it even smelled the same as it always did. The other part of it may be that I’ve fallen headfirst into my own love poetry. An absolutely terrifying place to be, lost in your own unrequited love poetry. As soon as that thought occurs to me, I start holding back tears again again. Not that I wanted HIS love, particularly, but that I found myself to be so pitiful.

I had said that the first thing I planned to do was inhale energy in big gulps and that’s exactly what I did ... we drove up 10th Avenue, through Hell’s Kitchen, past the back side of the Lincoln Center Library complex, onto Amsterdam and jogged left, pulling up in front of the Beacon Theater. All the way north I was inhaling deeply, whispering, "Please heal me." Everything felt welcoming and safe, despite the high heat and humidity, which was enough to flatten you in seconds. When I was here, days like this – especially when the AC in the subway went on the fritz – liked to have killed you, but today it felt familiar and perfect.

I tried to remember why I left in the first place. Oh yeah. That annoying necessity of life: work. After glancing at the Times’ Help Wanted section recently ... I conclude I’m still better off, opportunity wise, in the Boston area, but damn! I am still so miserably homesick for New York.   Even on days like this.

The hotel, by the way, sucked: room the size of a closet, no amenities, no ice machines anywhere, no ability to cool the room down unless you were in it – i.e., as soon as you left the room, the AC went down, and you had to re-cool the room every time you returned. The process was so slow, I had to step into a cold shower to cool down every time I came back to the room. And for this, they charged a huge amount of money.

You walked into a dripping sauna every time you walked outside. I made a few acquaintances, and after picking up our tickets agreed to go out for dinner, only to find lines out onto the sidewalk. Change of plans. We wandered into a local beanery, just to get out of the heat and humidity.

Naturally, this wouldn’t happen in a million years if I were hoping and planning for it – but the very first man we ran into, just walking in the door, was Piero’s father. Next, a lovely older woman who wanted to know if we were there to see her nephew. After I raised both hands in the air and swore I never touched her nephew, I got around to asking who her nephew was.

Oh, her nephew was PIERO! Well, that put a new slant on things. Bless the women, she had no idea how much I was there to see her nephew. Surrounding the two of them were a handful of other Barone relatives – I have no idea who they were, cousins maybe? Huge and loving family who obviously adored Piero, these Barone’s.

After that, there was no time for dinner, so I wandered back to the hotel to try and reapply all of the make-up, which had run off of my face in the high heat. My hair was hanging on the sides of my face in wet ringlets. I look at myself in the mirror and ordered my dream to come true. Just looking at the ticket number didn’t really tell me how close to the stage I was, but ... I dunno, Row B seemed pretty close. I cast about 20 spells that my dream – i.e., that I never had to worry about him seeing me and could just enjoy the concert without feeling self-consciousness and miserable – would come true.

And my dreams came true! Thankfully, Row B in the Beacon Theater alphabet is not the second row; it is the fifth. Apparently, and I’m certain solely under the force of my powerful witch’s spell, the Beacon invented a new alphabet, where "B" was the 5th letter. Might have upset some people, not me. The moment I saw the seat, I practically danced with joy. There’s NO WAY he was going to see me back there. And as far as I know – until he grabs me on a street some day and yells, "I know you! You were in the fifth row in the Beacon Theater!" – (in Italian, that is, in which case, I might just stare at him stupidly) - he never did.

Note to self: casting spells that people not see you when you really don’t want them to, actually works!

Friday, September 07, 2012
I cannot believe it is Friday already. I have been recovering from the lack of sleep I enjoyed on the 4th ... yesterday I would wake up, putter around for 2 hours and sleep for the next two. Did that all day. Tomorrow I run off again for an overnight stay in Boston. Today I have to pay homage to the endocrinologist by getting my blood sucked out of me, or she’ll withhold all of my medication. Love being held hostage by doctors.

I was also thinking of getting my hair cut today.

To finish up New York: There was, for me, only one man on that stage. This is no reflection on the other two – they are wonderful. But Piero ... cameras don’t do him justice. He has the most exquisite face, the most heart-fluttering, rakish smile, the most delicious high-powered sensual energy that he exudes. I never saw the other two, there was only Piero. I spent most of the concert with my eyes fixated solely on him.

I could see why girls propose to him, declare their undying love for him, want to follow him to the ends of the earth – he’s that intoxicating in person.

After belatedly grounding the powerful NYC energy sparkling and thundering around inside of me – geez, no wonder I was such a mess! – I feel much better. Rule #1 of magick: always ground the energy you raise! I had forgotten that, too.

Saturday, September 08, 2012
Il Volo now in Boston, by way of Westbury, Long Island. The endocrinologist neglected to mention that she had prescribed a fasting blood test, not a regular one. I hadn’t fasted ahead of time. We had to reschedule: this morning at 7:30 a.m. in Haverhill. I contemplated reporting her to ... whatever organization it is that you complain about idiot doctors to ... for messing up yet another peaceful Il Volo concert day, much like VIP Nation had stressed me out for the first one. Hit the road at 7:00 am and made it to the lab at 7:30. Hit so many potholes speeding back to North Andover, the "service engine soon" light came on. Oh, of course it did! I’m ignoring it for now.

Supercuts had already destroyed whatever thoughts I might have had of enjoying a Meet & Greet with Piero. They’d chopped my hair so short I looked like ... well, let’s put it this way: Gertrude Stein’s heart would have leapt for joy upon seeing me. I, on the other hand, went back to my car, banged my head on the steering wheel for a while and cried my eyes out when I saw the result. I’m hoping to somewhat ameliorate the result with either lots of make-up, lots of dangly jewelry, lace, a push-up bra, eye-popping cleavage and a diving board nailed to the side of a bottle of perfume. Or maybe all of them combined. No, then I’ll look and smell like a brothel hooker who just got diagnosed with head lice.

It doesn’t matter anyway. As my facial nerves began to reawaken – I assume that’s what they’re doing – the entire right side of my face began to twitch. I was staring at myself in the mirror before I left and watched in horror as the eyelid, nose and chin area all began to twitch simultaneously. The effect was astonishing, and I looked like I had a serious nervous disorder and required large doses of tranquilizers one might use on a charging rhinoceros. At least that side of my face was moving again. New York City had done something amazing to me when I asked her to heal me. Unfortunately, because of the power behind the transformation, it was uncontrollable and startling when it did.

Monday, September 10, 2012, post Il Volo Boston concert
Again recovering. This is a more difficult recovery, because it was the last concert until ... who knows. For this Boston concert we all needed to construct an ark. Not just rain, but a typhoon: thundering downpour, and wind later clocked at 50 mph in Boston, blowing rain sideways through the concert arena, the stage, the performers and the audience. A few songs later, the three members of Il Volo were actually inspired to break into a spontaneous chorus of "Singing in the Rain". Make-up ran off my face in rivers. I looked like a drowned raccoon. Of COURSE I did. I wasn’t even surprised anymore at my increasing state of hideous.

People to the right of me started shrieking as water poured off of the roof on top of them. I don’t know if Piero could see or hear them from the stage, but he had just started "The Theme from Love Story" when it happened, seated on the stage riser. I could see his eyes flash left, more in curiosity than anything else, because I suspect he saw some audience reaction but wasn’t certain why he was seeing it – but he kept singing, as wind and rain blew across him sideways from Stage Left. Such poise that boy has ... more than I do, that’s for sure – I promptly ducked, expecting a rare New England F5 water spout to hit land at any moment.   He, on the other hand, didn’t even flinch. He really is fearless.

Afterwards, I swore that the first thing I would do after kicking the bucket would be to kick the Sky Sadist in the nuts for this stunt alone. Wait until Il Volo appeared and then level me with Bell’s f**king Palsy and all of its horrendous side effects. Then have Supercuts ignore a simple set of instructions and turn me into ... I can’t even describe it. Then douse me with water – AGAIN! I did go to the Meet & Greet – not to meet him, but to see him off stage – and he was as beautiful off stage as he was on. Calm, peaceful, beautiful. I left before the boys got to me, and went back to the hotel. I couldn’t bear to meet any of them with this grotesque buzz cut and the broken, dripping face the Sky Sadist painted on me.

I really need something to break this curse.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012
I dread anniversaries of September 11. Guy in my (North Andover) apartment complex stopped me as I was going grocery shopping to urge me never to forget 9/11. I glowered at him in disbelief. Like I’m ever going to forget the day that still gives me nightmares. I hate this day. I hate peoples’ obsession with this day. I hate all the TV specials. That is the day I can point to as a direct line of causality to my being trapped in exile in Massachusetts – not many people remember that the New York economy tanked after that, and I had to find a new line of work. It’s the reason I acted like a neurotic asshole when the Boston Red Sox sent an air force jet over my head to celebrate the opening of the baseball season, and I cursed the entire franchise and prayed for their immediate destruction – from my fetal position on the ground in Cambridge.

On the other hand, I can generally ignore all of the nightmarish memories because of the beautiful weather – it’s now cool, crisp and perfect. I opened all the windows and am basking in the freshness.

Thursday, September 13, 2012
Meanwhile, back to Mr. Signpost. His book is being released in 5 days and Penguin Books is holding a drawing: send in a question that Johnny Depp will ask Damien, and you’ll get a copy autographed by both of them. A mischievous thought flickers through my head briefly, followed by the inevitable self-correcting ridicule which tosses it back out again, "No, you can’t ask him the incubus question now, you idiot!!!" Darn.

I seem to be surrounded by quotes from other contexts that I wish I could send to him. Two of my favorites that made me think of Damien as soon as I heard and/or read them:

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Jonathan Swift

Sometimes you can only find Heaven by slowly backing away from Hell." ― Carrie Fisher, "Wishful Drinking".

... although maybe that second one applies to me as well.

Since I’ve gone back to work, I’ve also gone back to reading on the train. All sorts of things. I pulled out my old Latin primer, and am stumbling around muttering fascinating pronouncements like, "Ego poeta et non nauta!/I am a poet, and NOT a sailor!" – in elementary Latin. Not that I expect to be proficient any time soon, I just thought it might eventually be useful to know ecclesiastical Latin if I wanted to read the old vatican nonsense on witches of days gone by.

The doorbell rings and some delicious perfume I could have used to compensate for the Gertrude Stein buzz cut arrives. Those who’ve followed this blog know that I am usually enchanted by the silliness of perfume descriptions – which I find about as entertaining as the even sillier descriptions of fine wines – the latter of which is completely driven by the "ew" factor, as well as being unintelligible, most of the time. I still remember one of my favorite Spanish tempranillo wines described as "redolent of tar and pungent dirt" or something disgusting like that. And it was heavenly, the best wine on the planet that year. Go figure. (And tasted NOTHING like tar or dirt).

Descriptions like that make you want to toss professional "wine reviewers" off the nearest cliff and then toss an "Acme" safe right after them. Meep, meep. And then dump a piano off that same cliff onto the perfume advertisers.

 Anyway, here’s a partial description of this particular fragrance:

"The fragrance inspired by love and romance ... an audacious chypre with a citrusy freshness and a jasmine heart. Sprinkled with fruity notes and underscored by the elegance of patchouli, this chic and daring fragrance is a new classic." Italian Mandarin Essence, Egyptian Jasmine Absolute, Indonesian Patchouli Essence. Pure. Precious. Elegant.

Riiight. So, basically: orange, jasmine and patchouli. Audacious? Daring? These are among the three oldest fragrances on the planet – how did they become "audacious" and "daring"? Like no one’s ever heard of them – or put them together – before. And how are they "precious"? They smell heavenly but they’re as common as dandelion fluff.

I look up jasmine on Google: Jasmine is used to treat depression, insomnia, nervous tension and infertility. Its aroma is soothing and calming and can bring about a restful state to those who are suffering from emotional trauma. It is said to act as an aphrodisiac.

Well, alriiiiiighty, then!! Wait, how can it be both an aphrodisiac AND bring about a restful state? Aren’t those contradictory? You’re restful but horny? Overwhelmed with lust, but have an urge to sleep it off? I don’t get it.

Patchouli, apparently, also works on depression and on the libido ... er, while it’s repelling bugs, and making you pee every five minutes.

Patchouli oil stimulates the replenishment of skin cells, so that it is very valuable in speeding healing and preventing scars from wounds. The therapeutic uses for patchouli oil are in fighting depression, to kill bacteria and cleanse wounds, to enhance sexual desire and performance, to cleanse oily skin and hair, repel bugs, deodorize, and rid the body of excess water.

But first I run to the bathroom with a small bottle of patchouli oil, not to pee, but to smear it all over my head scar. WHO KNEW??? And why didn’t anybody tell me this before I went running off to New York City and into bayside Boston?? (*sigh*) I don’t know if it will work, but my head scar is quite fragrant now. Finally, Orange:

Orange oil is a good diuretic and is most useful in balancing water retention and obesity. Its lymphatic stimulant action further helps to balance water processes, detoxification, aiding the immune system and general well-being. For the digestive system, orange oil can help with constipation, dyspepsia and as a general tonic. It is also useful in cases of nervous tension and stress.

Why is everyone insistent on getting water out of me? But you can sorta see why the copy writer chose to avoid some of these homeopathic properties: if it helps to alleviate both constipation and water retention ... the best copy you could get out of that would be something like, "lose ten pounds in 10 minutes on the porcelain throne!" which might make the FDA raise a few official eyebrows.

In any event, despite the questionable advertising copy – which is not the fault of those who actually made the perfume itself – this actually is a delightful fragrance. Really. I’m turning MYSELF on, that’s how aphrodisiacal it is.

Riff between Piero and Ignazio on Piero's difficulty with English, specifically pronouncing the word "world".  They were about to introduce a solo by Gianluca when they did this.  Westbury, Long Island.


 
Saturday, September 15, 2012
The Asormos.

The First Day of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Gathering of the Initiates. I can easily imagine how excited those initiates must have been, when this day arrived. Everything in the world stopped for these Mysteries. Wars stopped. Travel to Greece that might have been banned at the time, was now allowed. The buzz in the air was audible. Preparations had been underway, and now there was no time left. The Mysteries had begun.

 

Sex, Sin and Sumerian Magic

Recovering from a fund raiser held at Sal’s, my favorite Italian restaurant, in Lawrence. Stayed out way past my bedtime, drank too much and paid the price in severe leg and foot cramps. So for the last couple of days I’ve been limping and hobbling around the apartment, groaning. I dusted, reorganized my altar, washed clothes and dishes, sewed another blouse, taught myself how to set in a shirt yoke, set up a small "study corner" and bookcase under one window in the bedroom. Damn. I’m acting like such a June Cleaver girly-girl I’m making myself sick. So I went back to reading Old World Witchcraft in an attempt to witchy-witch myself back to normal. Better witchy-witch than girly-girl. (Note to self: hey, you should needlepoint that and hang it on a wall somewhere). Arrgh! I’m corrupted beyond all hope! Someone needs to slap me silly!! OK, forget the needlepoint. Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing lace granny panties and knitting tea cozies.

Anyway. Old World Witchcraft . Same author – Grimassi - who wrote about streghe, or stregone, or whichever term you want to use. But even he tiptoes around the reality that the concept of "Do as ye will an’ harm none" certainly never came from the old world, I don’t give two figs what the Gardnerians say.

One of my favorite courses in my final year at the University of Michigan was "Mesopotamian Witchcraft and Magic" – about which you would think: "Wow. THAT had to be an easy course!" And once again, you’d be dead wrong. YOU try reading ancient Sumerian runes sometime and interpreting who a given spell was being cast on and why. We used to get into the biggest classroom debates with each other. And some of those spells were absolutely disgusting.

The point was that, in those days, people went to the Sumerian magi to not only get protective spells, but to get love potion spells, zap people with curses, etc. First thing you read in the "girly-girly" books on "How to be A Witch" is "Never use spells on other people without their permission!" And you think, "Well, what’s the frackin’ point, then, you pinhead?" If everyone fell in love with you on their own without even blinking, you wouldn’t need a love spell, now would you?

You can get some idea of why Aleister Crowley finally got so fed up with the "girly-girly" version of witchcraft he stomped off in disgust and became known as "The Great Beast". True, a lot of women who knew him personally also thought of him as the "Great Perv", but there’s not much I have to say about that. Same thing with the injunctions against using dream walking to spy on people. WHY NOT? Because it’s rude? If we’re all connected, how much privacy could we each have, to begin with? I should add, before people start getting nervous, I still haven’t been able to engage in any dream traveling and spy on anyone anyway. I suspect it’s the anti leg-cramp meds. Would I, if I could? I can’t actually think of anyone worth spying on, so probably no, I wouldn’t; I want to watch the Eleusinian Mysteries. I just don’t like being told I absolutely can’t do something, or I’ll be punished in the hereafter. Sounds like the wiccan version of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady raising her blue haired head again.

I also have a real problem with the girly-girlies trying to make it sound as though it’s a traditional "no-no" while they’re slapping your wrist with their dainty little white gloves. It’s a western culture no-no, certainly. Traditional? I don‘t think so. Sumerian is about as traditional as you’re gonna get, historically speaking, and I sure didn’t see the Sumerians running around flapping their hands and squealing, "Oooo! Naughty spell! Bad! Bad!"

Anyway, a few days ago, Damien re-tweeted a quote issued by Sacred Leather: 

"The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills."

Aleister Crowley

Never heard of "Sacred Leather", so went and looked at them. Found quite a collection of floggers, whips, cat o’nines, etc. Beautifully made, actually. Started to smile. Wasn’t sure a titillating flogging or two qualified as "the normal sex instinct", but I had absolutely no room to judge anyone as far as that went. What exactly IS a "normal sex instinct"?

Picture it: Manhattan. Some time ago. Met Bob, a head hunter, while looking for a new job. Ended up as a friend of both Bob and his wife. Bob & wife – when they weren’t working with suits filling legitimate 9-5 job openings - were actually in the sex ... excuse me, the "adult entertainment" ... trade, but next to nobody knew that. They owned a collection of call-in lines. Two of us who did know that were Suzanne and myself. She and I met because we were both looking for jobs and Bob introduced us. Suzanne and I used to go out drinking and picking up guys together.

Only time in my life I’ve ever been in a three-way with two voyeurs: business man from out of town wanted two-on-one action and some voyeurs. I have no idea how he and Bob met, but bottom line was that Bob pimped us out with the cover story that he and his wife were pimping out their coed daughters and had to supervise. Sick story, but the guy seemed to fall for it, sadly enough. Suze and I played the coed daughters, and pulled it off only because we got ourselves good and soused ahead of time. 

It was one bad casting job since the only thing she and I had in common was our bra cup size – we looked nothing alike. Didn’t even require sex; B&D mostly. I made enough money to pay 3 months rent, and at that age, that’s a lot of money. Anyway, Bob handed us a few bucks; Suzanne and I went out earlier that evening after work and bought floggers in preparation for being pimped out that evening to an unsophisticated dom. Guess where we went?

No, not Sacred Leather, the Pink Pussycat, but they had a whole bunch of floggers! I looked at the Sacred Leather website and started lopsidedly grinning. The website brought back unexpected memories of my one and only experience as ½ of a silly hastily thrown-together sub tag-team. Would I do it again? Hell .... no. Once was enough. I was young, horny - and incredibly stupid, or I never would have gone along with it.

And it seemed that Crowley was correct. How had the businessman been twisted enough where he thought "disciplining" two (supposedly) college girls was exciting – with their (supposed) parents looking on? How had Bob and his wife been twisted enough to the point where they enjoyed diving into the sex trade in their spare time? How had Suzanne and I been twisted enough that we got giddy and drunk at the idea of going along with Bob and his wife for this pimping-out plan?

And in answer to your question: yes, they hurt. They stung and burned like hell, those things. Some people find them very erotic, and that’s fine. Me, I’m fine with being threatened with pain – and I’m not sure why that is, but I guarantee you it’s a holdover from a previous life, because my parents certainly never went to town on the physical punishment end of discipline - but I’m not so good with the pain itself. I’m a serious wuss, actually.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not subscribe to the judeo-christian concept of sex equaling sin by any stretch of the imagination. But I also don’t believe that the appalling "sex" crimes we all keep hearing so much about - Penn State and the Vatican come to mind - have anything to do with sex anyway. Mostly, they have to do with power, with rage, arrogance, with control, with acting out childhood abuse, with dominance, with violence, with everything except sex.

I was brought around again to the question I was going to ask Damien someday. First time I asked this, he was in New Zealand for the first time; here we are – he’s in New Zealand for the second time almost a year later: why is it that incubi are always considered to be demons? That they are always identified as such, along with their feminine counterparts, the succubae, strikes me as yet another judeo-christian finger-wagging response to "sex" – i.e., in the judeo-christian world view, they would have to be demons, because they equate sex so completely with sin. But why should they be?

The reason that the question came up in the first place was a matter of personal safety. These days, you never know, when you spin the "pick-me-up" roulette wheel, whether you’ll get a glorious man who truly believes in the sacredness of sex, or another Craig’s list serial killer. So why not a spirit who truly believes in the sacredness of sex?

The reason the question came up the second time had to do with a twisted face, a non-stop running nose, and violently cramping legs and feet any time I tried exercising them, or even straightening them out and trying to point my toes. Needless to say, anything that might resemble having fun - in that sense – has been shot out the window, possibly for good. I remembered the erotic dream I’d had a while back that was interrupted by vicious leg cramps. Even if I managed to up the meds high enough that the leg cramps didn’t happen as often, would the meds also put an end to the big "O"? Besides, I still had the twisted face. At least temporarily. Perhaps permanently.

"Normal sex" in my world now simply meant, "getting the biological urge met". An incubus seemed the safest and least painful way to do that. So WHY was an incubus considered a demon? Why not an angel? Why couldn’t I invoke one? "Get the urge met" without screaming in pain as though I’d been mortally wounded because all of my leg muscles seized up at the same time? And as self-conscious as I was about my face now ... trying to meet someone new was so out of the question it had passed "ridiculous" last Thursday.

If he knew me, I suspect that Damien - Mr. Signpost - would not only treat the question as a serious one, but be one of the few people whose answer I would trust, who wouldn’t make "Church Lady" judgments as he answered the question. But he doesn’t know me. It’s not as though I could tweet him the question right out of the blue. So, I’m back to trying to do research on the topic, and you’d be surprised how many stupid women – christian, witch AND pagan – still have the "sex is sin" thing stuck firmly in their heads and couldn’t be trusted to offer an honest, thoughtful answer. (*sigh*)

Damien Echols and My Daybook

Day #19 in my Search for my Soul mate

Well, I have to say, Damien Echols gave me a boost in the … er, well, he gave me some inspiration, as far as this project went.

You probably have to understand who this guy is. He started out – in the world of ‘Public Figures’, that is – as a teenage high school dropout in the backwater of West Memphis, Arkansas with a penchant for the gothic, the wiccan, Stephen King and Metallica. In a small town packed to the gills with empty-headed, black-souled and vicious Southern Baptist Church Ladies, his behavior immediately pegged him not as a young man forging his own unique creative path through life and art (as it should have), but as a demonic Satanist, capable of murdering small children in cold blood.

Naturally, when three cub scouts turned up dead in that small pitiful town, all official eyes swiveled towards Damien and his best friend Jason Baldwin, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime. That was irrelevant, according to the Puritanical Salem Witch hunters of West Memphis. Thanks to a coerced confession out of a third teen with an IQ of 72 – a teen who obviously knew nothing about the case and was merely repeating what the police wanted him to say – by an incredibly corrupt and hopelessly incompetent West Memphis Police Force, (and thanks also to an evil and hopelessly corrupt judge), Jason ended up sentenced to life without parole, and Damien ended up on Death Row without a shred of physical evidence against either one of them. Were it not for an HBO film crew who caught this backwater explosion of appalling nitwitted evil stupidity on film, Echols would have been dead by now.

They are, thankfully, both quite alive and now free (see previous entry), thanks to an outpouring of intense revulsion directed at the State of Arkansas by practically the entire planet, after that film aired. And you know when even the drug lords of Columbia, South America are nauseated by the actions of Arkansas officials, things have gone pretty far afield. Particularly when the residents reward such appalling corruption by sending the key perpetrator – see evil and hopelessly corrupt judge, above -- off to the U.S. Senate. (See Senator David Burnett, Senator from Arkansas. And then people wonder what’s wrong with Washington, D.C. Look no further. He is still protecting his own corrupt hindquarters by sending minions – mostly women - off to post anti-West Memphis Three sentiments on message boards to this day. The guy needs help.)  Then there’s another batch of obsessive women who so desperately want to see Damien back behind bars you’d think he turned them down for the high school prom or left them at the altar. Hell hath no fury and all that …

Damien Echols and wife, Lorri Davis Echols

All of that aside, let us return to Damien Echols, the innocent man sitting on Arkansas’s Death Row after Senator David Burnett’s corrupt trial, which Burnett held in support of the evil felons making up the West Memphis Police department.

After a very brief stint of understandable self-pity, Echols pulled himself together. Got married. And what emerged into the sunlight not all that long ago was an enormously creative and spiritual man who had spent nearly twenty years educating himself, studying, writing journals, writing and publishing an autobiography, writing lyrics and short stories and gathering to himself a huge body of supporters, readers and admirers. (Not to mention the supporters who helped to finance the DNA analysis which proved that none of the three teenagers were anywhere near the crime scene.)




For me, he was basically “Mr. Signpost”! I was ambling in one direction; came to a crook in the road, was cheerfully sideswiped by Damien Echols one morning in August and ended up pointed in a relatively different direction altogether. My very own Carl Frost moment, minus the snow.

I had read Damien’s writings and was so moved by them I read more and more, and got all sorts of ideas about how to proceed with my Soul Mate search project. The man writes so well he reads like he’s sitting next to you in a rocking chair on the front porch and chatting amiably about one thing or another. And really, considering where he started out in life … a high school dropout from the statistically retarded State of Arkansas being beaten up by their evil injustice system, he’s downright amazing – his literacy, his style and his attitude. (One and only promotional line: Almost Home, by Damien Echols. At any online bookstore near your computer. His journal is on wm3.org).

As you’ll recall (or probably you won’t, so I’ll remind you), everything had stopped at the “write your negative thoughts down on small scraps of paper and burn them” instructions. I still have a metal mixing bowl sitting on my dining room table with small scraps of paper in them. I had so little faith in my own luck and so MUCH faith in my own clumsiness, I just didn’t want to start a fire in a bowl in my apartment; and have been seriously dragging my feet since then. In fact, it’s been so long, I can’t even remember what I wrote on those scraps of paper, and ought to open them and read them one of these days.

One way Damien sent me flying off in another direction was by mentioning Michelle Belanger in one of his journal entries. I didn’t realize I already was (vaguely) familiar with her until I’d already taken his lead and ordered one of her books. From there, I logged onto her website and uttered the somewhat insulting, “Hey, that’s the chick from Paranormal State!” Which is true, but she probably could have gone without being identified as a “chick”. Oh well, too late now.

Michelle had written several books, one of which is entitled Psychic Dreamwalking. If I’m not mistaken, I have had a few (and far between) experiences of becoming conscious while dreaming, if only for a micro-second. As I read her book, I began to suspect the experiences I had weren’t episodes of "dreamwalking", I suspect they were episodes of "lucid dreaming" – moments of being aware that you are dreaming while you are still in the middle of the dream.

At the same time, I had begun re-reading anthropological articles and books about the ten days of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which occur right around the time of the Autumn Equinox. Why I was doing that, I will explain momentarily. Nothing I read divulged the true Mystery of the Mysteries, because in those days people could die for releasing any of those secrets or mysteries, and it must have been a believable threat because no one did.

The Greeks must have had one hell of a “Homeland Security” system in place to scare that many people into silence for that long. Or … here’s my suspicion: the awe inspiring Goddess Demeter is … wait for it … REAL!!! … and people protected her secrets out of love for 2000 years until the Southern Baptists of Arkansas showed up and murdered everybody! Hmmmmm. Things to think about.

Anyway, I knew all about the theory of the ergot on the barley causing hallucinations after initiates drank the kykeon, but I also knew all of the arguments AGAINST the ergot on the barley: (a) if that was all it was behind the Mysteries, people would be recreating the Mysteries at home, and didn't, and (b) all of the women initiates would be spontaneously losing infants all over the place, because it causes all sorts of horrible side effects. And how did the awesome huge jet of flame go flaring up into the sky over Eleusis? This was Ancient Greece. Flame throwers weren't around, and no one has found pockets of gas under the town. People would have noticed initiates erecting a huge pine tree and setting the top of it on fire, so I’m pretty sure THAT didn’t happen … someone would have mentioned it and didn’t. I found myself thinking, "Wow, I wish I could have been an initiate in those Mysteries to see what really happened ..."

And then, all of a sudden it occurred to me: [insert "Eureka!" music they always throw into cartoons when a light bulb goes on above some character’s head] Hey! Is it possible to dream walk into the past, into history?

And speaking of which, why is it that winnowing baskets – the same baskets the initiates carried into the Eleusinian cave as part of the initiation - all looked the same no matter where on the globe they were created? Like, how is it that the Ojibwa winnowing baskets in North America look the same as African winnowing baskets, before 1492? Or did they start looking the same after 1492? More importantly, do I get an award for the most irrelevant question set in the middle of a paragraph of 2011? Yes? WOO-HOOO!!!

But I digress. Belanger didn't discuss dreamwalking into the past - only how to pass along important messages, how to have sex in the dream space (well, that would cut down on wear and tear on the sheets, I guess), and most importantly, how to always ask permission first, or you could scare the *&^%$ out of someone, dreamwalking in on them when they weren't expecting it - but nothing about dreamwalking into history.

Trying to figure out what the difference between dreamwalking and lucid dreaming was, I also went and bought Mark McElroy’s Lucid Dreaming for Beginners. In answer to the question of the benefits of lucid dreaming, he says, “Live your fantasies … visit third century Rome. Go sky diving – without a parachute. Give yourself magic powers. Buy everything your heart desires. Meet your favorite celebrity. Heck, seduce your favorite celebrity! …)”

Ohhh-kay. On one hand, visiting third century Rome was closer to what I was seeking - the Eleusinian Mysteries went on for 2,000 years and so started waaaaay back in Greek history - but no, on the other hand, this really isn’t what I was hoping for. Exception: seducing your favorite celebrity? Helllllo, Viggo Mortensen!! No, wait. Hellllllo, Gil Birmingham! No, wait. Helllllo, Stephen Bowman! No, wait … (just kidding!) This sounded like an interaction with your own imagination, not dreamwalking.

Using Viggo Mortensen as an example, would the real Viggo Mortensen wake up the next morning and wonder who that ravishing succubus (humble, aren’t I?) was that he was boinking all night in his dreams? Not likely, as I would have been interacting with my imaginary version of Viggo Mortensen, not the real thing. I think we’re still discussing dream walking, not lucid dreaming.

Speaking of succubi, this raised another question I couldn’t find an answer to. Why is it always assumed that succubi and their male counterparts (incubus-es? incubi?) are demons? You come across people raising the question in all sincerity on Ask.com and getting answers from even more annoying church ladies (or maybe they're the same ones from Arkansas) with withered-up and desiccated nether regions protected by sterile granny panties, and sniggering prepubescent boys trying to play “Skeptic”.

No one ever answers the simple question. Why the assumption of evil? Are they just passing along old wives’ tales? Has anyone ever seen one? Why assume they’re evil? Because they think sex is evil? Why do Westerners (translation: Christians) automatically think sex is evil? Too many people in this world just don’t question their own assumptions. Bottom line: why aren’t succubi/incubi merely spirits who enjoy the activity for what it is? More importantly, does this count as yet another completely irrelevant question in the middle of a paragraph? Yes? WOO-HOOO! Twice in one entry! And where is Damien Echols when you need an answer to something??? The guy is supposed to be really smart after all that self-disciplined studying he did for the last 20 years. Oh, right, I think he’s in New Zealand. (*sigh*) Someone tell Peter Jackson to quit showing him “Lord of the Ring Outtakes” and shove this question under his nose!

THE DAYBOOK
Back many, many years ago I had started a Day Book. There is (or was) a witchy little shop I loved, on East 9th Street in the Village, Enchantments, where I went through Wicca 101. Another reason why, when I read about Damien, I thought, “Thank goodness I lived in New York”, where they tend not to arrest you and throw you on Death Row for going to Wicca 101 classes.

If you ever find the store, not only is it the best-smelling store on the planet, they have the coolest stone carving of the “Green Man” hanging from the wall in the back of their tiny garden; something you never expect to find in lower Manhattan.

Anyway, I’d started the Day Book back in the Enchantments days, in lieu of a Book of Shadows (the book where witches are supposed to keep their spells and recipes) since I was pretty green around the gills (much like Elphaba) and had no spells or witchy recipes to record, beyond the usual, “Oops, I just accidentally set fire to the kitchen …”, or “Darn, I just blew up another cauldron.”

I was not a talented Wicca student in those days. Or these days either. Ever seen those funny Halloween decorations of a witch who has just crashed into a tree on her broomstick? That would have been me for real.

As it was, I went through the course, enjoyed it for the most part, made some new friends and then forgot about it until now. I’d also forgotten I still had that Day Book and spent an entire evening searching for it, hoping to start making entries again – I didn’t even expect to find it, but I did.

Anyway, the reason I’d pulled the Day Book back out again was to record one of the most beautiful examples of lyrical prose I’d ever read. Damien had written:

“On August 31st I’ll sit up all night long to see September in. At midnight she’ll begin to stir and stretch. When September opens her eyes I’ll be the first thing she sees.”

I absolutely loved that when I first read it. Now HERE was a guy who definitely should have been born and raised in the northeast instead of Arkansas; we are definitely a part of the country that makes a big colorful to-do about Autumn and fall leaves. But back to my dream-walking into history idea, I may be closer to being able to do that than you might think! Check this out!

The good news of the week is:

"Particles shot from European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) labs near Geneva, Switzerland to Gran Sasso, Italy, reportedly surpassed the speed of light by 60 billionths of a second. The experiment was part of OPERA, a project designed to test the oscillation of small particles called neutrinos." (URL: http://marquettetribune.org/2011/09/27/news/speed-of-light-comes-to-halt/)

“The report has sent scientists into a tizzy because "a particle traveling faster than the speed of light would violate causality. In other words, an event can have an effect on an earlier event," Michael Witherell, vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, physics department, told TechNewsWorld. Though the difference of speed compared to light is small, it could challenge the entire law of physics, open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. A lot of science-fiction stories are based on the concept that if the light-speed barrier can be overcome, time travel might theoretically become possible." (URL: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/219577/20110925/particles-faster-than-light-neutrinos-opera-cern-einstein-s-theory.htm)

So, either (a) we've just discovered warp drive and can act out "Star Trek" for real, or (b) we can go backwards in time (yay! I want a ticket for THAT ride!) OR – (c) the Swiss miscalculated and their findings are incorrect. But think about it ... the Swiss miscalculating??? Come on - Just not possible. I'm leaning towards time travel. Or … well, okay … being a Ferengi might be fun for a day, too. :) And the really sad news was that most American media sources thought the idiotic Republican candidate squabble for president was more important than this news story!!??? I don't get it. Most exciting scientific news story in the last 100 years and it ended up mostly on the back pages. Unbelievable.

More URL’s:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/science-light-idUSL5E7KM4CW20110922

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2011-09-22/particle-travels-faster-than-speed-of-light/50518790/1

http://marquettetribune.org/2011/09/27/news/speed-of-light-comes-to-halt/

So … the Daybook was something like this: if you were Hindu, this is what you might have posted on October 1st: that being the first day of the Festival celebrating Durga, the personification of the active side of the divine “shakti” energy of Lord Shiva, the ferocious protector of the righteous, and destroyer of evil. Durga is usually portrayed as riding a lion, and carrying weapons in her many arms.” So … for my Daybook entry on October 1st, I would record everything I could find about Durga, perhaps her picture, and some ideas as to how to celebrate her festival next year, (And yes, I agree with you, that graphic above DOES look like “I Dream of Jeannie” when she’s inside the bottle.)

Whle I was recording that, I made another brilliant discovery (I am learning the strangest things lately, thanks to that kid from Arkansas): why does frankincense smell like … cloves and anise and grapefruit? And what IS frankincense? (Pitter, patter of feet to “Google”): Hmmm. Resin of the Boswellia tree. Obtained by slashing the tree. Over harvesting is endangering trees. (blink) (gasp) They slash a tree for it???? The poor trees! Oh, lovely. Frankincense going the way of the American buffalo because human beings are so greedy and stupid.

Why Women Who Don’t Know Their Roots Should Never Make Daybooks: So I was over at Whole Foods. Reason: one of the root recipes for harvest time I recorded many, many years ago required burdock root, which I’ve never tasted, as I had no idea what it was, what it looked like or where you’d buy any. Only that it was supposedly very good for you. Someone said they’d seen some at Whole Foods, so off I went.

Produce packed in the stands very tightly together, so I picked up something that looked like it might be a root only to discover it was actually a radish, although it sure didn’t look like the small red, round radishes I was familiar with. Long, white, huge – looked like an albino carrot on a diet of excessive growth hormones. But since I’d picked it up already … I had to buy it, and was now stuck with daikon – a Japanese radish. A rather costly mistake. Had no idea what those tasted like, either. Never even heard of it. Brought it home, scrubbed it off, cut off a slice … {chomp!} … {chew, chew, chew} … {pause} …. {face turns bright red} …. {insert sound effect of five-alarm fire bell at local firehouse} … OH, JUST KILL ME RIGHT NOW! Like I don’t have enough body parts catching fire at the moment. (See knee socks of fire, previous entry somewhere)

Bottom line: if you love torturing yourself with really spicy stuff, try one of those, you’ll love it.

* *Apparently, cooking them reduces/eliminates the bite. Grated a root, added half a Bermuda onion and garlic, egg, bread crumbs added some spices and made some decent patties out of it – like those grated potato pancakes. Fried it up in olive oil. Not bad at all. Another recipe for the Day Book, October 1st, still celebrating the Autumnal Equinox!

Next entry:  what all of this has to do with my Search for My Soul Mate!