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’.