Trying to practice on seeing an actual aura, and not the “contrast image” that happens when you put something in front of a background of a different or contrasting color. I suspect that confusing the contrast image for an aura isn’t even necessarily a bad thing, as it accustoms you to seeing visible outlines around people and things, and the more you keep practicing, the more the image shifts from a contrast image to an actual aura. Or, at least that’s my theory ... speaking as an aura-spotting-challenged novice who has yet to see anything unusual beyond “I can’t sleep.” (see last entry)
[Update: I finally saw a non-contrast ‘aura’ while sitting at a Chili’s last Sunday. Once I saw it, I began to see it more consistently, knowing what I was looking for. I’m still only seeing a foggy outline, but I’m seeing it more consistently and with less struggle. The outline is only less than an inch away from the body I’m looking at, however. Next: begin to see a larger aura, and begin to see color. I’m being semi-consistent with the pre-sleep intent, though.]
I also learned that the aura is the energy field put out by the chakras ... AND that the lower spinal damage I suffered in the accident may be interfering with some of them, because the damage was to the lower vertebrae; possible messing with the 1st chakra. (Oh, lovely! Neurological damage to my lower legs and feet, and a messed-up chakra! Yay! However, it did occur to me that the second one may be overcompensating for the damage to the first, or that may be just me, making no sense.)
One of the advantages to slow and careful packing for a move is that every once in a while, you reach into the back of a cupboard, pull something out and say, “THERE it is! I was wondering what happened to this!” “This” being, in my case, a leather fountain pen case, with my other fountain pen in it – courtesy of the now-gone but not forgotten Joon Pens store in Manhattan. (*sob*) I have another one in my bedside table; I had been looking for the other one for a while. Found it at the back of my printer table drawer, and practically danced with joy when I pulled that out. Now I definitely have to clean it. And find a better place to store it in the future.
I also decided to avail myself of some guided meditations on chakras – as I said, in preparation for next month’s class on auras and chakras. This time I decided to listen to Deepak Chopra’s guided meditation on chakra balancing, which I found quite relaxing. I know, I’m turning into a New Age twinkie, go ahead, you can say it. Actually, I feel like it’s part and parcel of my aura-awareness intent.
They often say, as far as setting your will and intention goes, that your will and your ego (I may be using the wrong words) often conflict with each other. Meaning, in layman’s parlance, that your conscious habits and mind-set blocks the activities of your subconscious will or intent. Case in point: I fell asleep again last night without formally stating my intent. Woke up this morning muttering “&*^&%^” when I remembered. It almost feels like Me #2 is deliberately standing in the way of everything Me #1 wants to do. A bit frustrating. The near-split personality perception reminds me of the Byron poem:
“She was like me in lineaments-- her eyes
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty;
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears -- which I had not;
And tenderness -- but that I had for her;
Humility -- and that I never had.
Her faults were mine -- her virtues were her own--
I loved her, and destroy'd her!”
Manfred, June 1817. Could not tell you who the publisher was.
I realize his poem and my interpretation were not the same thing ... but it seemed appropriate. I loved reading Manfred – among the many references Byron makes is to the so-called “fallen” angels of the Book of Enoch. The very first time I read the poem (9 years ago) – I had no idea what he was referring to. Now I do, which makes re-reading it all the more meaningful.
Some words of encouragement from Mr. Signpost: “The universe wants to give you the desires of your heart. Do not be timid in what you ask for.” It makes me wonder how “the Universe” distinguishes the “desires of your heart” from your everyday momentary attractions. For example, I was looking for some of the graphics I had used in this blog before they disappeared. Haven’t found the graphic yet, but I did find a really bad poem I had written back at the U of M, and decided not to turn in. No comments from the peanut gallery, please. I KNOW it sucks.
"He swings past,
young, cocky Ojibwa
professor with black, unexpectedly
ruffled hair, shot from a cannon,
Chippewa blood boiling under his skin
striding unconsciously fierce
he thinks I'm just some twinkie
but suddenly I just think he's cute."
©Author, University of Michigan, June 14, 2005
So, how did the Universe recognize that momentary awareness of a man’s “cuteness” to the point where I wrote a rather pitiful poem about it, from “my heart’s desire”? I’d actually forgotten all about this “cute guy” until I re-read this ... and for the record, he really WAS hot: our class e-mail study group (all women) unanimously agreed with each other on that point, if nothing else.
Well, here was my latest (humorous) encounter with the lovely Z ... was laying in bed, giving him some thought ... among other things ... when I suddenly smelled brimstone. Yup. Sulfur. Snapped, “Oh, puleeze, you’re making that up. I know you don’t smell like that. You’re far older than all that christian crap. I do want you here, but not if you’re gonna reek up the place. Here – try this.” And I sprayed him with Versace’s Eros. Or, to be more specific, I sprayed the area in the room where I sensed he was lurking.
I was probably correct, because the last thing I heard off in the distance (to the point where I at first thought it was someone outside) was – laughing and coughing. No really, I sprayed him good. He hasn’t physically showed up because I haven’t evoked him, but he does do a fly-by every once in a while – ever since he turned and looked at me - because I think about him, inevitably when I’m incredibly horny. I get the feeling I amuse him because I make him laugh – and because I may be the only (amateur) magus on his “will call” list who ever sprayed him with Versace cologne for men. Am now envisioning him amidst his troops wafting Eros all over the place. Well, you can’t say it doesn’t match his talents, now can you?
Showing posts with label Eros. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eros. Show all posts
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
More Snow, Tiamat and Dragons, Torture of Heretics, and the Scent of Eros
Back from the Tewksbury Meineke guys where we had the car’s exhaust pipe flange replaced ... whatever that means. Nonetheless, it worked – she is back to purring like a kitten.
Meanwhile that distant roar you heard a few days ago was the entire northeast United States learning that we were due for yet ANOTHER snow storm. 3-5 inches, they said. Wrong! We got between 10-12. Most of us screamed, “Nooooooooooooo ...!” in unison and sobbed like babies. We are so over the “average snowfall” amount for this year it isn’t funny.
Another thing I did: called the travel agency and had them send me the details of the trip to Sicily in May with the Sicilian Project. Now that it’s three months away, I’m finally getting excited about it. The Greek temples! The warmth! The ocean! The Sicilian food! Some festival, which I couldn’t tell you a thing about! But at least I have my passport renewed!
Went to Wal-Mart to buy a few more packing/moving bins; bought a “clearance” candleholder and incense burner because – obviously forgetting that I might actually need to use the ones I already had – I’d packed them. So, found a three-headed dragon one, looking forlorn and abandoned on a shelf. Looked up three-headed dragons and discovered I’d bought a Tiamat incense burner and candle holder ... said, “Cooool!”
But in my “Tiamat” search, I ran across all the people arguing and name-calling and screaming and yelling and jumping up and down over Zecharia Sitchin’s “Nibiru/Planet X” theory, since he’s also the one who theorized that “Tiamat” or Theia was the name of the rogue planet that crashed into the young earth, creating the moon in the process. (Or, in other words, creating general chaos in the process. Hence: Tiamat=Chaos.) He was actually proven ... probably right ... by others (as far as the collision theory went). I’m scanning all of these pages of comments and posts (again), thinking, “Oh, brother ...” and sighing heavily.
Do I believe in any of it? Disbelieve? I’m not going to go through my opinion on that again – been there, done that.
But anyway, I have a Tiamat three-headed dragon sitting on my desk, wafting (coincidentally enough) tendrils of Dragon’s Blood incense all over the place. Smells nice.
I also discovered a good use for the bottle of cat litter I had sitting near the door for the next time I took a run to the Royal Crest dumpster. I could use it to stabilize a candle in a holder that was too large for it. Only downside: it smelled like cat litter. No, not USED cat litter; just the litter itself. When they say "unscented" it only means that they didn't add a fragrance to it. They aren't saying that you can't smell anything. I'm smelling chemicals, or whatever it is that they put in cat litter. Awful stuff. Mixed it with baking soda (which you could use for the same purpose all by itself, actually), and that took care of the problem.
Yesterday, I had something of a surprise in my daily meditation ... I decided to revisit the dreamscape I mentioned earlier (some would call it my astral temple; that sounds too formally religious for my taste) and start strengthening it. By that I mean focusing on details; making it absolutely real in touch, taste, sound, sensation. In the depths of this meditative trance, I discovered another opening into the space I hadn’t seen before and realized it was the entrance to the space from the other side. The surprise was when I brought myself back to full consciousness and looked at the clock, an entire hour had passed! That in itself was astonishing, as I usually start getting antsy after five minutes. So practice really does work when it comes to meditating. Also, I no longer need Christopher Penczak’s guided meditations to reach that level; I was able to do it myself.
Quick backtrack to Versace’s Eros if anyone is interested. I had the chance to inhale it!
You know me and my fondness (not) for fragrance descriptions, which are sometimes so bizarre and ridiculous you have to laugh. This one was refreshingly straight-forward: “ ... fresh, woody and slightly oriental. The fragrance includes mint oil combined with green apple and Italian lemon. Warmth is provided by tonka mixed with Venezuelan ambroxan and geranium flowers giving a fougere twist to the fragrance this way. “ (Fougere, by the way, is their one bit of pretentious nonsense in an otherwise comprehensible description: it basically means “moss-like” and refers to the woodsy components of the cologne.)
Oddly enough, after the Italian lemon (they make Limoncello from Italian lemons, which have a distinctive fragrance to them; grown mostly in Sicily, they may be unique due to the volcanic components of the soil), I smelled the vetiver (but only because I knew what vetiver smelled like) ... I will tell you one thing: I LIKED it. Very sexy cologne, and not because (or not only because) I’m a personal fan and admirer of Eros himself – it really does smell good. Plus ... you know ... the lemons come from Sicily. :) And if you’re one of those people who clean out and re-use cool-looking bottles and jars for witchy potions, you can’t do better than this one! That’s actually Medusa on the bottle, by the way.
In preparation for our next class on cleansing auras, I started reading one of the e-books I’ve collected: Leland, Charles Godfrey, Your Will Power (Also Called “The Mystic Will”), or How to Develop and Strengthen Will Power, Memory, or Any Other Faculty or Attribute of the Mind, By An Easy Process, The Elizabeth Towne Co., Publishers, Holyoke, MA, 1918.
(Irreverent Thought: ‘tis a pity he couldn’t have also developed the mystic will power to shorten his book titles …)
A bit of a meandering read, through inserted anecdotes, backtracks and sidetracks … still quite readable. Other authors have adopted this primary method in the intervening years: calmly announce your intention before you go to sleep and let your subconscious implement it. I’m quite sure it isn’t original, either - I'll double check, but I think Paracelsus wrote about the process as well, and I'm not sure where HE got it from. Nonetheless, for those of us who truly love to sleep, this seemed easy enough – until I tried to do it!
Over the last three nights:
- the first night, I drifted off to sleep right in the middle of formulating an intent,
- the second night I mumbled, “Wait, let me think of something to intend,” and then passed out;
- last night I passed out sprawled sideways on the bed before I even undressed, that’s how exhausted I was. Deeply regretted doing that a few hours later: one of my legs was still hanging off the side of the bed, and when I woke up, my knee was screaming in pain, having been bent the wrong way for all those hours.
I will report back on the “Will Power” results ... er, when I can stay awake long enough to try it. So I’m guessing Leland didn’t have a full time job that tired him out to the point of no return, eh? What I eventually considered was, “I will see all auras easily”, or something along those lines, in preparation for the next class.
[Next Morning Report: I haven’t been able to see my own aura yet, but I was completely shocked when I was able (for the first time!) to see the hidden message in one of those pictures that are sent out over Facebook and Twitter (“Can you see this message?”) and you’re supposed to respond in some way if you can. Until this morning, I was one of those people who stared at the box every which way and never saw a thing. I always figured it was either a function of being nearsighted, or of having a (now surgically fixed) case of strabismus in my right eye. This morning I looked at a box someone posted, and saw the words, “I can’t sleep” in it. Said, “OMG, I can SEE it!” Thought that was interesting coming on the heels of the vocalized intent before falling asleep, which I finally managed to do.]
I was also reading The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition by Michael White (William Morrow, 2002) on the train. It was fascinating … until the Inquisition imprisoned him. I remember reading another review complaining that the author went into appallingly distasteful details of the christian sadism that went into the torture of heretics. I ended up closing the book after Bruno was put in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome, because as beautiful as it is from the outside, the entrance flanked by angelic statues ... what went on in the inside is enough to turn your stomach. I could only read up to a point before thinking, “Their deity must have been so proud of them ...” and tossing the book aside in utter nauseated disgust. Anyway, that reviewer was correct: White really goes into detail about the depraved forms of christian torture.
Now here’s the weird moment: Bruno’s last moment of freedom was in Venice, where he was turned over to the Inquisition by a nasty Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo. I had a bad reaction when I first read the name “Mocenigo”, as in, “Ooooh, I don’t like him,” even though I had no idea who he was. Or did I? He was one of those well-known Venetian family names that I could have read somewhere and consciously forgot ... but the name gave me one of those inner shivers of horror, which is not typical of a name you read once or twice in a history book. This was personal.
Recalling my previously described past life incident, and looking it up to refresh my memory, I suspect I would have disliked Alvise Mocenigo (26 October 1507 – 4 June 1577) who would have been elected Doge in 1570, during the fourth battle between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and this was the memory I experienced while in Venice – as you’ll recall I was blissfully married to one of the young men sent to sea to fight them, and he had already returned alive from one such battle, which took place in the 1560’s. Giovanni Mocenigo, the guy who turned Giordano Bruno in to the Inquisition was before my time there. Point being: if the dislike stemmed from a memory, maybe the entire family was not well liked. Or at least not liked by me.
Meanwhile that distant roar you heard a few days ago was the entire northeast United States learning that we were due for yet ANOTHER snow storm. 3-5 inches, they said. Wrong! We got between 10-12. Most of us screamed, “Nooooooooooooo ...!” in unison and sobbed like babies. We are so over the “average snowfall” amount for this year it isn’t funny.
Another thing I did: called the travel agency and had them send me the details of the trip to Sicily in May with the Sicilian Project. Now that it’s three months away, I’m finally getting excited about it. The Greek temples! The warmth! The ocean! The Sicilian food! Some festival, which I couldn’t tell you a thing about! But at least I have my passport renewed!
Went to Wal-Mart to buy a few more packing/moving bins; bought a “clearance” candleholder and incense burner because – obviously forgetting that I might actually need to use the ones I already had – I’d packed them. So, found a three-headed dragon one, looking forlorn and abandoned on a shelf. Looked up three-headed dragons and discovered I’d bought a Tiamat incense burner and candle holder ... said, “Cooool!”
 | |
| Tiamat/Theia colliding with Earth |
Do I believe in any of it? Disbelieve? I’m not going to go through my opinion on that again – been there, done that.
But anyway, I have a Tiamat three-headed dragon sitting on my desk, wafting (coincidentally enough) tendrils of Dragon’s Blood incense all over the place. Smells nice.
I also discovered a good use for the bottle of cat litter I had sitting near the door for the next time I took a run to the Royal Crest dumpster. I could use it to stabilize a candle in a holder that was too large for it. Only downside: it smelled like cat litter. No, not USED cat litter; just the litter itself. When they say "unscented" it only means that they didn't add a fragrance to it. They aren't saying that you can't smell anything. I'm smelling chemicals, or whatever it is that they put in cat litter. Awful stuff. Mixed it with baking soda (which you could use for the same purpose all by itself, actually), and that took care of the problem.
Yesterday, I had something of a surprise in my daily meditation ... I decided to revisit the dreamscape I mentioned earlier (some would call it my astral temple; that sounds too formally religious for my taste) and start strengthening it. By that I mean focusing on details; making it absolutely real in touch, taste, sound, sensation. In the depths of this meditative trance, I discovered another opening into the space I hadn’t seen before and realized it was the entrance to the space from the other side. The surprise was when I brought myself back to full consciousness and looked at the clock, an entire hour had passed! That in itself was astonishing, as I usually start getting antsy after five minutes. So practice really does work when it comes to meditating. Also, I no longer need Christopher Penczak’s guided meditations to reach that level; I was able to do it myself.
Quick backtrack to Versace’s Eros if anyone is interested. I had the chance to inhale it!
You know me and my fondness (not) for fragrance descriptions, which are sometimes so bizarre and ridiculous you have to laugh. This one was refreshingly straight-forward: “ ... fresh, woody and slightly oriental. The fragrance includes mint oil combined with green apple and Italian lemon. Warmth is provided by tonka mixed with Venezuelan ambroxan and geranium flowers giving a fougere twist to the fragrance this way. “ (Fougere, by the way, is their one bit of pretentious nonsense in an otherwise comprehensible description: it basically means “moss-like” and refers to the woodsy components of the cologne.)
Oddly enough, after the Italian lemon (they make Limoncello from Italian lemons, which have a distinctive fragrance to them; grown mostly in Sicily, they may be unique due to the volcanic components of the soil), I smelled the vetiver (but only because I knew what vetiver smelled like) ... I will tell you one thing: I LIKED it. Very sexy cologne, and not because (or not only because) I’m a personal fan and admirer of Eros himself – it really does smell good. Plus ... you know ... the lemons come from Sicily. :) And if you’re one of those people who clean out and re-use cool-looking bottles and jars for witchy potions, you can’t do better than this one! That’s actually Medusa on the bottle, by the way.
In preparation for our next class on cleansing auras, I started reading one of the e-books I’ve collected: Leland, Charles Godfrey, Your Will Power (Also Called “The Mystic Will”), or How to Develop and Strengthen Will Power, Memory, or Any Other Faculty or Attribute of the Mind, By An Easy Process, The Elizabeth Towne Co., Publishers, Holyoke, MA, 1918.
(Irreverent Thought: ‘tis a pity he couldn’t have also developed the mystic will power to shorten his book titles …)
A bit of a meandering read, through inserted anecdotes, backtracks and sidetracks … still quite readable. Other authors have adopted this primary method in the intervening years: calmly announce your intention before you go to sleep and let your subconscious implement it. I’m quite sure it isn’t original, either - I'll double check, but I think Paracelsus wrote about the process as well, and I'm not sure where HE got it from. Nonetheless, for those of us who truly love to sleep, this seemed easy enough – until I tried to do it!
Over the last three nights:
- the first night, I drifted off to sleep right in the middle of formulating an intent,
- the second night I mumbled, “Wait, let me think of something to intend,” and then passed out;
- last night I passed out sprawled sideways on the bed before I even undressed, that’s how exhausted I was. Deeply regretted doing that a few hours later: one of my legs was still hanging off the side of the bed, and when I woke up, my knee was screaming in pain, having been bent the wrong way for all those hours.
I will report back on the “Will Power” results ... er, when I can stay awake long enough to try it. So I’m guessing Leland didn’t have a full time job that tired him out to the point of no return, eh? What I eventually considered was, “I will see all auras easily”, or something along those lines, in preparation for the next class.
[Next Morning Report: I haven’t been able to see my own aura yet, but I was completely shocked when I was able (for the first time!) to see the hidden message in one of those pictures that are sent out over Facebook and Twitter (“Can you see this message?”) and you’re supposed to respond in some way if you can. Until this morning, I was one of those people who stared at the box every which way and never saw a thing. I always figured it was either a function of being nearsighted, or of having a (now surgically fixed) case of strabismus in my right eye. This morning I looked at a box someone posted, and saw the words, “I can’t sleep” in it. Said, “OMG, I can SEE it!” Thought that was interesting coming on the heels of the vocalized intent before falling asleep, which I finally managed to do.]
 |
| Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome |
I was also reading The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition by Michael White (William Morrow, 2002) on the train. It was fascinating … until the Inquisition imprisoned him. I remember reading another review complaining that the author went into appallingly distasteful details of the christian sadism that went into the torture of heretics. I ended up closing the book after Bruno was put in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome, because as beautiful as it is from the outside, the entrance flanked by angelic statues ... what went on in the inside is enough to turn your stomach. I could only read up to a point before thinking, “Their deity must have been so proud of them ...” and tossing the book aside in utter nauseated disgust. Anyway, that reviewer was correct: White really goes into detail about the depraved forms of christian torture.
Now here’s the weird moment: Bruno’s last moment of freedom was in Venice, where he was turned over to the Inquisition by a nasty Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo. I had a bad reaction when I first read the name “Mocenigo”, as in, “Ooooh, I don’t like him,” even though I had no idea who he was. Or did I? He was one of those well-known Venetian family names that I could have read somewhere and consciously forgot ... but the name gave me one of those inner shivers of horror, which is not typical of a name you read once or twice in a history book. This was personal.
Recalling my previously described past life incident, and looking it up to refresh my memory, I suspect I would have disliked Alvise Mocenigo (26 October 1507 – 4 June 1577) who would have been elected Doge in 1570, during the fourth battle between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and this was the memory I experienced while in Venice – as you’ll recall I was blissfully married to one of the young men sent to sea to fight them, and he had already returned alive from one such battle, which took place in the 1560’s. Giovanni Mocenigo, the guy who turned Giordano Bruno in to the Inquisition was before my time there. Point being: if the dislike stemmed from a memory, maybe the entire family was not well liked. Or at least not liked by me.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Fake Commenters Must Die!, Versace's Eros Finally Gets It!, the Sefer Yehzirah and Daybooks
OMG, I am so tired of the never-ending fake comments posted here by xanax and viagra pitchmen ... you don’t see them because I have to check the comments first before publishing them ... trust me, I have no problems with legitimate comments, even if the legitimate comments are, “You’re boring as shit!”, "[bleep bleep] and die!", or "I'm young, studly and rich; please marry me!" as long as there aren’t ads for viagra and penis enlargement attached to them. I go in and delete the hackers’ nonsense every single day ... and I am so tired of deleting them! This morning I deleted about 10 of them. Don’t these fools ever give up?
And yes, that last one was wishful thinking.
Meanwhile #1. Ahhh ... enjoying a Cosmopolitan martini, which makes me feel so ... cosmopolitan! Meanwhile #2: we are having about 8 inches of snowfall every three days ... will I ever manage to dig myself out before spring?
Speaking of my poor, snow-covered car; our second joint spell worked too – the muffler issue was a flange that had rotted away; a muffler shop should be able to fix it for very little $$$, thank goodness. Have an appointment in Tewksbury on Monday ... assuming I can dig myself out, that is.
Found a wizard’s forum, which is actually rather interesting ... have been reading the Goetia posts with interest. Also located a Facebook page that posts regular links to archeological discoveries in the Iran/Iraq area ... home of Sumer, of course ... so at least there are some people out there who aren’t swishing and flicking – and then shrieking “Real witches NEVER ... (fill in the blank)!!” with pursed lips, when the vast majority of them don’t know any. Such a relief.
So this was my next question. I’ve been reading the Kaballic translation Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation (Aryeh Kaplan, 1997, Revised Edition, Weiser Books). I hadn’t planned to start reading that just yet, but became engrossed in the Introduction. Sat and read the Introduction while waiting for my car to be examined. I was particularly interested in the authorship and history of the text, to wit:
“The earliest source to which Sefer Yetzirah is attributed is the Patriarch Abraham.” (page xii).
By which they don’t mean that Abraham sat down and scribbled the work onto the nearest scroll; they meant that these were his teachings that were recorded by others. The earliest assignment of the author dates back to the 10th century, when a scholar jotted down, “The ancients say that Abraham wrote it.” Who exactly those “ancients” were is not clarified.
However, my reaction was still, “Say what?”
This was my issue with that authorship: Abraham was a Sumerian; and not only Sumerian, the son of a very powerful (and pagan) temple priest/magus. And supposedly, Abraham was a very wealthy, influential Sumerian as well in his own right ... influential being an understatement, because it was his household god - yeah, that little clay statue nailed above his lintel to protect his home - that turned into the deity of the judeo-christian-islamic religions, and became known as “the god of Abraham”.
Rather than unpack a Sumerian history book (really! I do have them!), I’ll just quote from Wikipedia on the deities of Sumer:
“Sumerians believed in an anthropomorphic polytheism, or the belief in many gods in human form. There was no common set of gods; each city-state had its own patrons, temples, and priest-kings, however they were not exclusive. The gods of one city were often acknowledged elsewhere. Sumerian speakers were among the earliest people to record their beliefs in writing, and were a major inspiration later Mesopotamian mythology, religion, and astrology.
The Sumerians worshiped:
An as the full-time god equivalent to heaven; indeed, the word an in Sumerian means sky and his consort Ki, means earth.
Enki in the south at the temple in Eridu. Enki was the god of beneficence, ruler of the freshwater depths beneath the earth, a healer and friend to humanity who in Sumerian myth was thought to have given humans the arts and sciences, the industries and manners of civilization; the first law-book was considered his creation,
Enlil, lord of the ghost-land, in Nippur. He gave mankind the spells and incantations that the spirits of good or evil must obey,
Inanna, the deification of Venus, the morning (eastern) and evening (western) star, at the temple (shared with An) at Uruk.
The sun-god Utu at Larsa in the south and Sippar in the north,
The moon god Sin at Ur.”
So which one was Abraham’s household god? An? Enlil, since Abraham is credited with practicing the highly mystical Sefer Yetzirah? My favorite, Enki? Which one of these became the JCI (judeo-christian-islamic) deity, Yahweh/Allah? Definitely not Inanna, the Abrahamic tribe turned her into a harlot, even though she most assuredly wasn’t. Probably not Utu or Sin, even though Abraham came from Ur (and no, the word “sin” did not come from the moon god; the word “sin” itself is Proto-Germanic.) Might have been a lesser one, not listed here.
Anyway – even at that early stage – the kabbalah of the Sefer Yetzirah was still a mystical, magical oral teaching, which Abraham did not invent. We know this because practicing the magick of the Kabbalah was considered too sacrilegious to practice alone; you had to perform the rites with another person or the gods would not look kindly on you for trying to usurp their skills and “play god” all by yourself. According to those same “ancients”, Abraham practiced the magick with Noah’s son, Shem. (I would really like to know who these “ancients” were, if they actually existed! Kaplan does not identify them.)
In other words, this was something they both had to study FIRST, become proficient at, and then perform. It had to have pre-dated both of them. And Abraham was a Sumerian.
So where did it originate?
Kaplan hints at rituals from the near and far east carried by traders and travelers ... possibly from ancient Egypt; materials found at their sites indicated trading routes to Africa. Archeologists just recently (as in last month) began a major excavation at Tell Khaiber in Iraq; they have a Facebook page, too (not the same one as mentioned above) so I’m following their work with interest.
Now – I do understand the Kaballah being connected with judaism because it passed through Abraham, and because so many jewish scholars studied the Kaballah and attached the Hebrew alphabet to it. The vast majority of commentaries are jewish. BUT, the Hebrew alphabet came from the Phoenician. And if the Kaballah predates the patriarch of judaism, where DID it originate? Which alphabet was connected with it?
For answers to these and all other questions ... we should all fervently hope that this book answers all of them. I’ll keep reading.
Meanwhile, back to my Daybook. The Pagan Book of Days is completely empty for today. The Witch’s Book of Days announces, “Victoria’s Day promotes promotions, leadership opportunities and success!” without once telling you what “Victoria’s Day” actually was. Only one I can find is celebrated in May, in Canada. Grrrr. Between the Lights waxes poetic about serving others. The Real Witches Year has a post-Valentine’s Day “Drawing partners closer together” ritual. Which would be lovely if I actually had one. Interestingly enough, though, the entry for the 14th, “Eros” is actually interesting, if not a validation of what I posted well over a year ago about the infantilization of Eros in the Common Era. (Addendum: my observation in that entry that Aphrodite was his mother was not true of these earlier incarnations of Eros):
“According to Herodotus in his Theogony, Eros was one of the primeval gods who, along with Chaos and Gaia (Earth), were responsible for the Creation.” (Mark Cartwright, 06 May 2013, http://www.ancient.eu.com/Eros/)
“They said that in the beginning the whole world was all one mass of stone, and there was no earth or sky or sea. Then Eros, or Love, was the only living thing; and just as the mother-hen warms her eggs till the little chicks peep out, so the Greeks said Love brooded over the world until living things appeared, and the world began to take shape.”
http://www.heritage-history.com/?c=read&author=harding&book=greek&story=eros
“According to Hesiod (c. 700 BC), one of the most ancient of all Greek sources, Eros was a primordial god, that is, he had no parents. He was the fourth god to come into existence, coming after Chaos, Gaia (the Earth), and Tartarus (the Abyss or the Underworld).” (Wikipedia)
This almost sounds like the Sumerian creation myth as well – their Ea/Enki Tiamat/Chaos, for example.
As I was hunting around for a graphic of the REAL Eros, and not those silly sanitized infants courtesy of the Common Era and their terror of sex ... I ran across a wonderful advertisement for the Versace male cologne, Eros. Now, far be it from me to support the usual advertising hoo-ha on this blog, but this made me stop and take notice. You can look at the images of the older Eros on Greek vases all day, but even they (and they're pretty accurate as far as his age and masculinity goes) don't do justice to the guy. Nothing like bringing Eros up to the present and our latter day image of male beauty. Maybe not my personal one; I'm the one drooling over Piero Barone. But this wonderful commercial, with all of its steaming imagery, was the closest thing to Eros that I've seen in a while. Featuring the rather strikingly tanned, oiled and buffed Brian Shimansky as the Greek god in question (minus the wings, but you get a glimpse of them as he removes his cape after climbing the pedestal) ... now THIS is Eros! Enjoy:
http://www.essential-homme.com/2013/07/10/brian-shimansky-in-versace-eros-new-fragrance-campaign/
I wonder what it smells like? Has anyone whiffed this cologne?
And yes, that last one was wishful thinking.
Meanwhile #1. Ahhh ... enjoying a Cosmopolitan martini, which makes me feel so ... cosmopolitan! Meanwhile #2: we are having about 8 inches of snowfall every three days ... will I ever manage to dig myself out before spring?
Speaking of my poor, snow-covered car; our second joint spell worked too – the muffler issue was a flange that had rotted away; a muffler shop should be able to fix it for very little $$$, thank goodness. Have an appointment in Tewksbury on Monday ... assuming I can dig myself out, that is.
Found a wizard’s forum, which is actually rather interesting ... have been reading the Goetia posts with interest. Also located a Facebook page that posts regular links to archeological discoveries in the Iran/Iraq area ... home of Sumer, of course ... so at least there are some people out there who aren’t swishing and flicking – and then shrieking “Real witches NEVER ... (fill in the blank)!!” with pursed lips, when the vast majority of them don’t know any. Such a relief.
So this was my next question. I’ve been reading the Kaballic translation Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation (Aryeh Kaplan, 1997, Revised Edition, Weiser Books). I hadn’t planned to start reading that just yet, but became engrossed in the Introduction. Sat and read the Introduction while waiting for my car to be examined. I was particularly interested in the authorship and history of the text, to wit:
“The earliest source to which Sefer Yetzirah is attributed is the Patriarch Abraham.” (page xii).
By which they don’t mean that Abraham sat down and scribbled the work onto the nearest scroll; they meant that these were his teachings that were recorded by others. The earliest assignment of the author dates back to the 10th century, when a scholar jotted down, “The ancients say that Abraham wrote it.” Who exactly those “ancients” were is not clarified.
However, my reaction was still, “Say what?”
This was my issue with that authorship: Abraham was a Sumerian; and not only Sumerian, the son of a very powerful (and pagan) temple priest/magus. And supposedly, Abraham was a very wealthy, influential Sumerian as well in his own right ... influential being an understatement, because it was his household god - yeah, that little clay statue nailed above his lintel to protect his home - that turned into the deity of the judeo-christian-islamic religions, and became known as “the god of Abraham”.
Rather than unpack a Sumerian history book (really! I do have them!), I’ll just quote from Wikipedia on the deities of Sumer:
“Sumerians believed in an anthropomorphic polytheism, or the belief in many gods in human form. There was no common set of gods; each city-state had its own patrons, temples, and priest-kings, however they were not exclusive. The gods of one city were often acknowledged elsewhere. Sumerian speakers were among the earliest people to record their beliefs in writing, and were a major inspiration later Mesopotamian mythology, religion, and astrology.
The Sumerians worshiped:
An as the full-time god equivalent to heaven; indeed, the word an in Sumerian means sky and his consort Ki, means earth.
Enki in the south at the temple in Eridu. Enki was the god of beneficence, ruler of the freshwater depths beneath the earth, a healer and friend to humanity who in Sumerian myth was thought to have given humans the arts and sciences, the industries and manners of civilization; the first law-book was considered his creation,
Enlil, lord of the ghost-land, in Nippur. He gave mankind the spells and incantations that the spirits of good or evil must obey,
Inanna, the deification of Venus, the morning (eastern) and evening (western) star, at the temple (shared with An) at Uruk.
The sun-god Utu at Larsa in the south and Sippar in the north,
The moon god Sin at Ur.”
So which one was Abraham’s household god? An? Enlil, since Abraham is credited with practicing the highly mystical Sefer Yetzirah? My favorite, Enki? Which one of these became the JCI (judeo-christian-islamic) deity, Yahweh/Allah? Definitely not Inanna, the Abrahamic tribe turned her into a harlot, even though she most assuredly wasn’t. Probably not Utu or Sin, even though Abraham came from Ur (and no, the word “sin” did not come from the moon god; the word “sin” itself is Proto-Germanic.) Might have been a lesser one, not listed here.
Anyway – even at that early stage – the kabbalah of the Sefer Yetzirah was still a mystical, magical oral teaching, which Abraham did not invent. We know this because practicing the magick of the Kabbalah was considered too sacrilegious to practice alone; you had to perform the rites with another person or the gods would not look kindly on you for trying to usurp their skills and “play god” all by yourself. According to those same “ancients”, Abraham practiced the magick with Noah’s son, Shem. (I would really like to know who these “ancients” were, if they actually existed! Kaplan does not identify them.)
In other words, this was something they both had to study FIRST, become proficient at, and then perform. It had to have pre-dated both of them. And Abraham was a Sumerian.
So where did it originate?
Kaplan hints at rituals from the near and far east carried by traders and travelers ... possibly from ancient Egypt; materials found at their sites indicated trading routes to Africa. Archeologists just recently (as in last month) began a major excavation at Tell Khaiber in Iraq; they have a Facebook page, too (not the same one as mentioned above) so I’m following their work with interest.
Now – I do understand the Kaballah being connected with judaism because it passed through Abraham, and because so many jewish scholars studied the Kaballah and attached the Hebrew alphabet to it. The vast majority of commentaries are jewish. BUT, the Hebrew alphabet came from the Phoenician. And if the Kaballah predates the patriarch of judaism, where DID it originate? Which alphabet was connected with it?
For answers to these and all other questions ... we should all fervently hope that this book answers all of them. I’ll keep reading.
Meanwhile, back to my Daybook. The Pagan Book of Days is completely empty for today. The Witch’s Book of Days announces, “Victoria’s Day promotes promotions, leadership opportunities and success!” without once telling you what “Victoria’s Day” actually was. Only one I can find is celebrated in May, in Canada. Grrrr. Between the Lights waxes poetic about serving others. The Real Witches Year has a post-Valentine’s Day “Drawing partners closer together” ritual. Which would be lovely if I actually had one. Interestingly enough, though, the entry for the 14th, “Eros” is actually interesting, if not a validation of what I posted well over a year ago about the infantilization of Eros in the Common Era. (Addendum: my observation in that entry that Aphrodite was his mother was not true of these earlier incarnations of Eros):
“According to Herodotus in his Theogony, Eros was one of the primeval gods who, along with Chaos and Gaia (Earth), were responsible for the Creation.” (Mark Cartwright, 06 May 2013, http://www.ancient.eu.com/Eros/)
“They said that in the beginning the whole world was all one mass of stone, and there was no earth or sky or sea. Then Eros, or Love, was the only living thing; and just as the mother-hen warms her eggs till the little chicks peep out, so the Greeks said Love brooded over the world until living things appeared, and the world began to take shape.”
http://www.heritage-history.com/?c=read&author=harding&book=greek&story=eros
“According to Hesiod (c. 700 BC), one of the most ancient of all Greek sources, Eros was a primordial god, that is, he had no parents. He was the fourth god to come into existence, coming after Chaos, Gaia (the Earth), and Tartarus (the Abyss or the Underworld).” (Wikipedia)
This almost sounds like the Sumerian creation myth as well – their Ea/Enki Tiamat/Chaos, for example.
As I was hunting around for a graphic of the REAL Eros, and not those silly sanitized infants courtesy of the Common Era and their terror of sex ... I ran across a wonderful advertisement for the Versace male cologne, Eros. Now, far be it from me to support the usual advertising hoo-ha on this blog, but this made me stop and take notice. You can look at the images of the older Eros on Greek vases all day, but even they (and they're pretty accurate as far as his age and masculinity goes) don't do justice to the guy. Nothing like bringing Eros up to the present and our latter day image of male beauty. Maybe not my personal one; I'm the one drooling over Piero Barone. But this wonderful commercial, with all of its steaming imagery, was the closest thing to Eros that I've seen in a while. Featuring the rather strikingly tanned, oiled and buffed Brian Shimansky as the Greek god in question (minus the wings, but you get a glimpse of them as he removes his cape after climbing the pedestal) ... now THIS is Eros! Enjoy:
http://www.essential-homme.com/2013/07/10/brian-shimansky-in-versace-eros-new-fragrance-campaign/
I wonder what it smells like? Has anyone whiffed this cologne?
Saturday, November 17, 2012
A (Real!) Lust Provoking Spell from Ancient Greece
One of my favorite examples of a (legitimate!) Grecian love spell that incorporates all of the power of Eros, and definitely not the reason and sanity of Anteros: the passion, the insanity, the desperation, the urgency. Key players are: Apalos, who had the spell cast for him, and Karosa, the object of his uncontrollable lust. Try not to read this like the pursed lip wiccan church ladies, with one eye searching for a contemporary restraining order, and the other trying to remember the twitter account of the Wiccan Inquisition. (Dollars to doughnuts they’ve already given the Wiccan Inquisition my name anyway, so you have nothing to worry about.)
Instead, read it with one eye on the Eros-inspired erotically urgent desire that provoked this spell:
"Aye lord demon, attract, inflame, burn, cause her to swoon from love as she is being burnt, inflamed. Goad the tortured soul (psyche), the heart of Karosa, whom Thelo bore, until she leaps forth and comes to Apalos, whom Theonilla bore, out of passion and love, in this very hour, immediately, immediately, quickly, quickly ... do not allow Karosa herself, whom Thelo bore, to think of her own husband, her child, drink, food, but let her come melting for passion and love and intercourse, especially yearning for the intercourse of Apalos, whom Theonilla bore, in this very hour, immediately, immediately, quickly, quickly."
Source: Faraone, Christopher. Ancient Greek Love Magic. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), London. 1999. Spells for Inducing Uncontrollable Passions (Erōs), page 59.
Now ... did Karosa, the object of this spell, actually spin on a dime, run away from her husband and child and run to Apalos’ home for a wild and crazy night of never-ending sex?
"Of course she didn’t!" snaps a pretentious know-it-all from Yale. "They didn’t even HAVE dimes in ancient Greece!" (*sigh*) See, and this is exactly why you Yalies get beaten up all the time.
It is this sort of spell that has today’s wiccan women all a-twitter. They insist that Apalos, by not asking Karosa’s permission to cast this spell, has interfered with Karosa's free will - proving that none of them have any idea what true "free will" actually is - and messed up his own karma, completely forgetting that:
(1) his karma is none of their business and none of them are in any position to judge or evaluate such things in the first place, and,
(2) Karosa had plenty of options available to her as well, and her "free will" is fully intact. Karosa (assuming Apalos was more or less an overheated weirdo following her around and drooling unattractively) could just as easily have had someone whip her up a counter curse designed to rebound HIS spell.
Here’s an example: "May Apalos’ lust be reflected off of me and be turned in another direction, and cause him to fall madly in love with a crazed bull."
Source: Me! I made it up! Just now!!
We’ve just come up with our very own restraining order, and Apalos is now entertaining the townsfolk being chased by a crazed (and seriously pissed off) bull through the local pasture.
If, on the other hand, Apalos was a serious stud, Karosa might have chosen to let herself be caught up in his wild, insatiable lust. Could be fun! And what would have happened if either one of them had stopped to ask the other for permission?
If any bad karma is going to rebound on anybody, I’m guessing it’s going to land squarely on the heads of the dainty, inept little twinkie witches of the 21st century for failing to impart any real power or strength to the budding witches they should be training properly, and for turning nights of wild, crazy, lustful and passionate sex into a frowning old biddy lecture on mathematically calculated possibilities, requiring a frown, a slide rule and a protractor. No wonder Eros is depressed these days.
More later.
Instead, read it with one eye on the Eros-inspired erotically urgent desire that provoked this spell:
"Aye lord demon, attract, inflame, burn, cause her to swoon from love as she is being burnt, inflamed. Goad the tortured soul (psyche), the heart of Karosa, whom Thelo bore, until she leaps forth and comes to Apalos, whom Theonilla bore, out of passion and love, in this very hour, immediately, immediately, quickly, quickly ... do not allow Karosa herself, whom Thelo bore, to think of her own husband, her child, drink, food, but let her come melting for passion and love and intercourse, especially yearning for the intercourse of Apalos, whom Theonilla bore, in this very hour, immediately, immediately, quickly, quickly."
Source: Faraone, Christopher. Ancient Greek Love Magic. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), London. 1999. Spells for Inducing Uncontrollable Passions (Erōs), page 59.
Now ... did Karosa, the object of this spell, actually spin on a dime, run away from her husband and child and run to Apalos’ home for a wild and crazy night of never-ending sex?
"Of course she didn’t!" snaps a pretentious know-it-all from Yale. "They didn’t even HAVE dimes in ancient Greece!" (*sigh*) See, and this is exactly why you Yalies get beaten up all the time.
It is this sort of spell that has today’s wiccan women all a-twitter. They insist that Apalos, by not asking Karosa’s permission to cast this spell, has interfered with Karosa's free will - proving that none of them have any idea what true "free will" actually is - and messed up his own karma, completely forgetting that:
(1) his karma is none of their business and none of them are in any position to judge or evaluate such things in the first place, and,
(2) Karosa had plenty of options available to her as well, and her "free will" is fully intact. Karosa (assuming Apalos was more or less an overheated weirdo following her around and drooling unattractively) could just as easily have had someone whip her up a counter curse designed to rebound HIS spell.
Here’s an example: "May Apalos’ lust be reflected off of me and be turned in another direction, and cause him to fall madly in love with a crazed bull."Source: Me! I made it up! Just now!!
We’ve just come up with our very own restraining order, and Apalos is now entertaining the townsfolk being chased by a crazed (and seriously pissed off) bull through the local pasture.
If, on the other hand, Apalos was a serious stud, Karosa might have chosen to let herself be caught up in his wild, insatiable lust. Could be fun! And what would have happened if either one of them had stopped to ask the other for permission?
If any bad karma is going to rebound on anybody, I’m guessing it’s going to land squarely on the heads of the dainty, inept little twinkie witches of the 21st century for failing to impart any real power or strength to the budding witches they should be training properly, and for turning nights of wild, crazy, lustful and passionate sex into a frowning old biddy lecture on mathematically calculated possibilities, requiring a frown, a slide rule and a protractor. No wonder Eros is depressed these days.
More later.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Tossing out More Witchcraft Books
Ahhh, ze blessed San Pellegrino!
Not the church in Vatican City, the sparkling water. I blame Piero for this, since he (and his unofficial brothers Ignazio and Gianluca) handed out bottles of Ferrarelle at New York City’s Beacon Theater and I promptly fell in love with the stuff.
I’ll never forget the sacred moment. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, choirs were transcendentally choiring and with reverence in my heart I lifted "Piero’s Holy Water" to my parched lips, took a hesitant sip of the sacrament – which I was sure he had collected, bottled and shipped singlehandedly – and said (my utter obsession with him at the time notwithstanding), "Wow, this is pretty good."
OK, FINE. It was 9:00 at night, hot, steaming, any birds there were had been drowned out by traffic, and the choir was in my head. The water was still first rate, though.
The only sparkling water I’d had until that moment was something cheap with carbon dioxide injected into it, and I had immediately choked on it. This was infinitely better. Not even just infinitely better but in another category of water altogether. It was heavenly. But they neglected to mention that Ferrarelle was only available in restaurants; you couldn’t go to the nearest store and buy some. Thanks for the heads up, guys.
But you know me: the minute you tell me I can’t have something, I absolutely have to have it, so next I tried San Pellegrino. It was also superior to the Eau du Carbon Dioxide I’d had when I was a child, so I went out and bought ten 1-quart bottles of San Pellegrino with the expectation of carrying them off to the office to drink. Italy turns out the best stuff, and now I’m absolutely addicted to it ... to the point where I suspect they spiked the stuff with something deliciously and actually medically addictive. Am guzzling a bottle as I write.
Meanwhile ... as we recover from Superstorm Sandy rolling up the east coast, blowing us off the map, drowning everything in sight and squashing us like bugs ... I’ve decided to slide ever so discreetly back into "semi-normal" mode. For me, "normal" means being so overwhelmed with office work and overtime and work-consumed weekends, I can’t can’t get anything else done. "Semi-normal" means it’s easing up a bit, and I’m finally able to read books again.
Ahhh, ze blessed historians!
True, most citizens of the United States – given our notoriously poor educational system that left us at #17 in the math and science skills, and even lower in the literacy skills – would have no idea how to maneuver their way through the "arcane jargon of professional scholars" without falling asleep, or drooling in dumfounded bewilderment. In fact, three-fourths of the country couldn’t even maneuver their way through that last sentence without going cross-eyed.
Fortunately for me, I was educated both in an excellent New York suburban school system (Pelham, NY) and majored in history at the University of Michigan, so I’m quite familiar with the "arcane jargon of professional scholars", having needed to employ it myself for various papers and theses.
*Note: I did not coin the phrase "arcane jargon of professional scholars", I just reached over and swiped it because I liked the sound. Credit where due: Christopher Faraone.
The more I read, the more I’m convinced that one’s sacred texts must be self-composed and created; and definitely not a scrap-pile of hoohah written by other people - with their own beliefs and their own inspirations and their taboos, all of which are considerable. So much of what I read conflicts with other texts, or is presented so self-righteously and so dogmatically it might as well have been written by a charter member of the Spanish Inquisition. So many wiccan writers aren’t even aware of how bound up they are by their own former beliefs that it overshadows anything they present. I know that’s true of me as well ... rarely can writers see their own binding ropes.
So ... back to the serious objection I have against getting permission from people before you cast spells on them. I’m sure I sound obsessed by this point, but ... this is important, dammit!
I have read so much ridiculous finger-wagging at readers from so many girly-girly so-called witches who are – in all honesty – imposing their own puritanical christian nonsense on everything they write that it’s beginning to make me nauseous. They do this because it feels safe and comfortable to them, and that’s fine – as long as they recognize what they’re doing and claim it. As soon as they start telling you it’s traditional witchcraft, you should feel so infuriated that you zap them with a counter-spell, like – say – intense and long-standing writer’s block, topped off with a few boils and warts on their genitalia, and why should you do that? Because they’re lying. They’re also depriving an entire generation of witches of their power and their strength, and turning them into Tinkerbelles. You wanna be Tinkerbelle? Fine. Go be Tinkerbelle. But Tinkerbelle isn’t a witch.
Ultimately, I find it sad that I need to read serious history textbooks to learn what REAL witches should be teaching me and aren’t.
"In this regard, according to Christopher Faraone (1999), on the one hand, Athenian male citizens employed love magic in attempts to transfer their erotic suffering from the affliction of Eros onto the love-objects to whom they felt so vulnerably attracted. On the other hand, with the exception of courtesans, Athenian women and male slaves employed erotic magic not in order to project and thereby displace erotic suffering but in the hope of calming and controlling their angry and passionate male superiors."
Stephenson, Craig. Anteros: A Forgotten Myth. Routledge, London and New York. 2012. p. 15.
Nowhere in this paragraph is there mention of anyone dialing up the person they were shooting love spells at, and asking for their "permission" to do it. And the magic of Ancient Greece IS "traditional". The crap that the girly-witches (be they male or female) are feeding people now is NOT traditional, and never was. They’re lying to you. Now - if these ladies and gents want to re-write wicca to conform to contemporary standards of PC-stained morality, I have no problem with that. Really!! There is a lot of fully traditional witchcraft I couldn't bring myself to perform - good example: animal sacrifices. But I would never try to tell you that my variant (i.e., "no animal has been harmed in the performance of this spell!") is traditional witchcraft. It most certainly is not. My problem is that too many writers claim that their way is traditional, when it absolutely isn't. It is the reader who should be deciding which "ways" they want to adopt, not the writers. And writers are not owning up to their own variants of witchcraft inserted into their books, claiming it to be the real one.
Along those same lines, they're not owning up to their own variants of so-called "morality", either. Taboos differ across locales, boys and girls. One person's sense of "morality" is not the same as another's. While there may be some taboos that cross cultures, don't make the assumption that your ideas of morality should be adopted by everyone. Makes you sound, as I said, just like a charter member of the Spanish Inquisition, wearing a pointy hat.
By the way, Christopher Faraone’s brilliantly readable and and well-researched history book mentioned above – complete with an awesome bibliography - is Ancient Greek Love Magic. Back to that next entry.
To digress briefly, and because of the perception of Eros in the above quote, I’m finding Anteros fascinating. For those who don’t know, Anteros is Eros’ younger brother, conceived because Eros – after he was born – stopped growing. His mother, Aphrodite, asked for advice and was told to conceive another son with Ares, the god of war – and as soon as Anteros was born, Eros began to mature.
There is a primary difference between the two, I think: Eros is the god of love and sexual desire; the "madness" of love; you’re shot full of arrows, and are staggering about, clutching your chest, pining for your beloved ... who may or may not feel the same way. Usually not, which makes you crazy. Eros is the insanity, the longing, the desperation, the madness; Eros is Dante idolizing Beatrice from afar, Petrarch aching for Laura ... this is the pain of often unrequited love that sends you into near death spasms when it has passed the point of reason.
Anteros was the stabilizing force that tempered and perhaps (or perhaps not, hard to say) matured the insanity, the lust of Eros: he is the god invoked when requited love is desired, also the deity who punished those who scorn love and the advances of others, or ‘the avenger of unrequited love". He was sometimes mistaken for Eros, but can be identified by his long dark hair and butterfly wings. "He has been described also as armed with either a golden club or arrows of lead."
One of the most laughable cases of mistaken identity: christians insisting that the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus (above right) is actually the The Angel of Christian Charity.
Riiiight. Half naked guy with his (quite attractive) muscular bare butt hanging out, wielding a bow and arrow and sporting butterfly wings. Christian charity. Okay, after we all finish laughing ...
I guarantee that any minute now one of those same christians is going to pop up and squeal, "We call it that because he symbolizes the selfless philanthropic love of the Earl of Shaftesbury for the poor!" Riiiight. He couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to express that, could he? He had romantic and sexual feelings for the poor? Little bit weird, idn’t it?
The rest of the time people who aren’t idiots poo-pooh the Angel of Charity nonsense and assume it’s Eros. It isn’t. It’s Anteros. Look at the butterfly wings. I find it interesting though, as did Stephenson, that Eros and Anteros regressed to childlike and infant-like proportions only after christianity gained a foothold in people’s bedrooms and proceeded to make people feel like crap for being utterly normal, enjoying the sensation of lust, and falling in love with other people.
Eros and Anteros were originally muscular young men. When you look at the art of the Renaissance, and the art of the romantic era, the young men have disappeared, replaced with one or two chubby infant(s), floating in the air and preparing to shoot things with bows and arrows. In fact, those two somewhat violent chubby infants show up today on 9 out of 10 valentines.
Think about it. Why????? You want to capture the eye of a hot hunk and the best way you can devise to turn the guy into a panting love slave drooling for your naked and lascivious body is a ... card with a fat baby on it??? Did you actually give that some thought before you sent that card out? Why?????
If there were anything more representational of the christian horror, fear, loathing of (or ultimately desperate hunger for) sexuality and fulfilled desire, that would be it: turning Eros and Anteros into harmless and chubby little babies. (Explains a lot, doesn’t it?)
For another example, under the "Why, oh why did I buy this appalling book?" category, I started reading a translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, "a powerful fusion of Greek and Egyptian thought", according to the back cover. Title: The Way of Hermes. And yet, on page 1 we read the following:
‘I wish to learn,’ said I, ‘the things that are and understand their nature and to know God".
I stopped dead in my tracks at that. God. Capital G. Singular.
Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics which contained no "capital letters", and worshiped multiple deities, even in the "Ra" era. Ancient Greeks worshiped multiple deities, and usually identified them by name. God???
This was a gang of translators sticking their big, hairy christian rumps right in the middle of a critical pagan text translation, undermining any trust I might have had in it. And dollars to doughnuts these fools thought they did a great job on this book. Whatever happened to editors? Serious peer review?
I had no choice. I screamed in outrage, pulled out my handy pistol and shot the book... er, which I propped up out of sight against the computer screen (see graphic, right). Oh, yeah. One of the authors is on the board of directors of a group of private schools in England being investigated for child abuse. (Brutality in their caning of small children). Tossed THAT book right over my shoulder in disgust.
More stuff being passed along as "Wiccan tradition" when it isn’t. From an article on Wiccan meditation techniques:
Gerald B. Gardner found Wicca in the mid-20th century after claiming to have been initiated into a coven of Witches. Gardner admits that his information on Witchcraft was fragmentary and that he had to reconstruct it by incorporating other materials. Before founding Wicca, he was an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, involved with Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Order. These involvements, as well as more than 30 years spent living in Asia, heavily influenced and inspired Gardner as he formulated Wiccan rituals.
Wicca Meditation Techniques | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_4572037_wicca-meditation-techniques.html#ixzz28aRXsKNW
Not at all sure where Mackenzie Wright, who wrote the above came by his or her her information, but given the amount of nonsense a lot of wiccans repeat without any traditional sources behind it, I’m not even remotely surprised.
Not the church in Vatican City, the sparkling water. I blame Piero for this, since he (and his unofficial brothers Ignazio and Gianluca) handed out bottles of Ferrarelle at New York City’s Beacon Theater and I promptly fell in love with the stuff. I’ll never forget the sacred moment. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, choirs were transcendentally choiring and with reverence in my heart I lifted "Piero’s Holy Water" to my parched lips, took a hesitant sip of the sacrament – which I was sure he had collected, bottled and shipped singlehandedly – and said (my utter obsession with him at the time notwithstanding), "Wow, this is pretty good."
OK, FINE. It was 9:00 at night, hot, steaming, any birds there were had been drowned out by traffic, and the choir was in my head. The water was still first rate, though.
The only sparkling water I’d had until that moment was something cheap with carbon dioxide injected into it, and I had immediately choked on it. This was infinitely better. Not even just infinitely better but in another category of water altogether. It was heavenly. But they neglected to mention that Ferrarelle was only available in restaurants; you couldn’t go to the nearest store and buy some. Thanks for the heads up, guys.
But you know me: the minute you tell me I can’t have something, I absolutely have to have it, so next I tried San Pellegrino. It was also superior to the Eau du Carbon Dioxide I’d had when I was a child, so I went out and bought ten 1-quart bottles of San Pellegrino with the expectation of carrying them off to the office to drink. Italy turns out the best stuff, and now I’m absolutely addicted to it ... to the point where I suspect they spiked the stuff with something deliciously and actually medically addictive. Am guzzling a bottle as I write.
Meanwhile ... as we recover from Superstorm Sandy rolling up the east coast, blowing us off the map, drowning everything in sight and squashing us like bugs ... I’ve decided to slide ever so discreetly back into "semi-normal" mode. For me, "normal" means being so overwhelmed with office work and overtime and work-consumed weekends, I can’t can’t get anything else done. "Semi-normal" means it’s easing up a bit, and I’m finally able to read books again.
* * * * * * * * * *
Ahhh, ze blessed historians!
True, most citizens of the United States – given our notoriously poor educational system that left us at #17 in the math and science skills, and even lower in the literacy skills – would have no idea how to maneuver their way through the "arcane jargon of professional scholars" without falling asleep, or drooling in dumfounded bewilderment. In fact, three-fourths of the country couldn’t even maneuver their way through that last sentence without going cross-eyed.
Fortunately for me, I was educated both in an excellent New York suburban school system (Pelham, NY) and majored in history at the University of Michigan, so I’m quite familiar with the "arcane jargon of professional scholars", having needed to employ it myself for various papers and theses.
*Note: I did not coin the phrase "arcane jargon of professional scholars", I just reached over and swiped it because I liked the sound. Credit where due: Christopher Faraone.
The more I read, the more I’m convinced that one’s sacred texts must be self-composed and created; and definitely not a scrap-pile of hoohah written by other people - with their own beliefs and their own inspirations and their taboos, all of which are considerable. So much of what I read conflicts with other texts, or is presented so self-righteously and so dogmatically it might as well have been written by a charter member of the Spanish Inquisition. So many wiccan writers aren’t even aware of how bound up they are by their own former beliefs that it overshadows anything they present. I know that’s true of me as well ... rarely can writers see their own binding ropes.
So ... back to the serious objection I have against getting permission from people before you cast spells on them. I’m sure I sound obsessed by this point, but ... this is important, dammit!
I have read so much ridiculous finger-wagging at readers from so many girly-girly so-called witches who are – in all honesty – imposing their own puritanical christian nonsense on everything they write that it’s beginning to make me nauseous. They do this because it feels safe and comfortable to them, and that’s fine – as long as they recognize what they’re doing and claim it. As soon as they start telling you it’s traditional witchcraft, you should feel so infuriated that you zap them with a counter-spell, like – say – intense and long-standing writer’s block, topped off with a few boils and warts on their genitalia, and why should you do that? Because they’re lying. They’re also depriving an entire generation of witches of their power and their strength, and turning them into Tinkerbelles. You wanna be Tinkerbelle? Fine. Go be Tinkerbelle. But Tinkerbelle isn’t a witch.
Ultimately, I find it sad that I need to read serious history textbooks to learn what REAL witches should be teaching me and aren’t.
"In this regard, according to Christopher Faraone (1999), on the one hand, Athenian male citizens employed love magic in attempts to transfer their erotic suffering from the affliction of Eros onto the love-objects to whom they felt so vulnerably attracted. On the other hand, with the exception of courtesans, Athenian women and male slaves employed erotic magic not in order to project and thereby displace erotic suffering but in the hope of calming and controlling their angry and passionate male superiors."
Stephenson, Craig. Anteros: A Forgotten Myth. Routledge, London and New York. 2012. p. 15.
Nowhere in this paragraph is there mention of anyone dialing up the person they were shooting love spells at, and asking for their "permission" to do it. And the magic of Ancient Greece IS "traditional". The crap that the girly-witches (be they male or female) are feeding people now is NOT traditional, and never was. They’re lying to you. Now - if these ladies and gents want to re-write wicca to conform to contemporary standards of PC-stained morality, I have no problem with that. Really!! There is a lot of fully traditional witchcraft I couldn't bring myself to perform - good example: animal sacrifices. But I would never try to tell you that my variant (i.e., "no animal has been harmed in the performance of this spell!") is traditional witchcraft. It most certainly is not. My problem is that too many writers claim that their way is traditional, when it absolutely isn't. It is the reader who should be deciding which "ways" they want to adopt, not the writers. And writers are not owning up to their own variants of witchcraft inserted into their books, claiming it to be the real one.
Along those same lines, they're not owning up to their own variants of so-called "morality", either. Taboos differ across locales, boys and girls. One person's sense of "morality" is not the same as another's. While there may be some taboos that cross cultures, don't make the assumption that your ideas of morality should be adopted by everyone. Makes you sound, as I said, just like a charter member of the Spanish Inquisition, wearing a pointy hat.
By the way, Christopher Faraone’s brilliantly readable and and well-researched history book mentioned above – complete with an awesome bibliography - is Ancient Greek Love Magic. Back to that next entry.
To digress briefly, and because of the perception of Eros in the above quote, I’m finding Anteros fascinating. For those who don’t know, Anteros is Eros’ younger brother, conceived because Eros – after he was born – stopped growing. His mother, Aphrodite, asked for advice and was told to conceive another son with Ares, the god of war – and as soon as Anteros was born, Eros began to mature.
There is a primary difference between the two, I think: Eros is the god of love and sexual desire; the "madness" of love; you’re shot full of arrows, and are staggering about, clutching your chest, pining for your beloved ... who may or may not feel the same way. Usually not, which makes you crazy. Eros is the insanity, the longing, the desperation, the madness; Eros is Dante idolizing Beatrice from afar, Petrarch aching for Laura ... this is the pain of often unrequited love that sends you into near death spasms when it has passed the point of reason.Anteros was the stabilizing force that tempered and perhaps (or perhaps not, hard to say) matured the insanity, the lust of Eros: he is the god invoked when requited love is desired, also the deity who punished those who scorn love and the advances of others, or ‘the avenger of unrequited love". He was sometimes mistaken for Eros, but can be identified by his long dark hair and butterfly wings. "He has been described also as armed with either a golden club or arrows of lead."
One of the most laughable cases of mistaken identity: christians insisting that the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus (above right) is actually the The Angel of Christian Charity.
Riiiight. Half naked guy with his (quite attractive) muscular bare butt hanging out, wielding a bow and arrow and sporting butterfly wings. Christian charity. Okay, after we all finish laughing ...
I guarantee that any minute now one of those same christians is going to pop up and squeal, "We call it that because he symbolizes the selfless philanthropic love of the Earl of Shaftesbury for the poor!" Riiiight. He couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to express that, could he? He had romantic and sexual feelings for the poor? Little bit weird, idn’t it?
The rest of the time people who aren’t idiots poo-pooh the Angel of Charity nonsense and assume it’s Eros. It isn’t. It’s Anteros. Look at the butterfly wings. I find it interesting though, as did Stephenson, that Eros and Anteros regressed to childlike and infant-like proportions only after christianity gained a foothold in people’s bedrooms and proceeded to make people feel like crap for being utterly normal, enjoying the sensation of lust, and falling in love with other people.
Eros and Anteros were originally muscular young men. When you look at the art of the Renaissance, and the art of the romantic era, the young men have disappeared, replaced with one or two chubby infant(s), floating in the air and preparing to shoot things with bows and arrows. In fact, those two somewhat violent chubby infants show up today on 9 out of 10 valentines.
Think about it. Why????? You want to capture the eye of a hot hunk and the best way you can devise to turn the guy into a panting love slave drooling for your naked and lascivious body is a ... card with a fat baby on it??? Did you actually give that some thought before you sent that card out? Why?????
If there were anything more representational of the christian horror, fear, loathing of (or ultimately desperate hunger for) sexuality and fulfilled desire, that would be it: turning Eros and Anteros into harmless and chubby little babies. (Explains a lot, doesn’t it?)
For another example, under the "Why, oh why did I buy this appalling book?" category, I started reading a translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, "a powerful fusion of Greek and Egyptian thought", according to the back cover. Title: The Way of Hermes. And yet, on page 1 we read the following:
‘I wish to learn,’ said I, ‘the things that are and understand their nature and to know God".
I stopped dead in my tracks at that. God. Capital G. Singular.
Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics which contained no "capital letters", and worshiped multiple deities, even in the "Ra" era. Ancient Greeks worshiped multiple deities, and usually identified them by name. God???
This was a gang of translators sticking their big, hairy christian rumps right in the middle of a critical pagan text translation, undermining any trust I might have had in it. And dollars to doughnuts these fools thought they did a great job on this book. Whatever happened to editors? Serious peer review?
I had no choice. I screamed in outrage, pulled out my handy pistol and shot the book... er, which I propped up out of sight against the computer screen (see graphic, right). Oh, yeah. One of the authors is on the board of directors of a group of private schools in England being investigated for child abuse. (Brutality in their caning of small children). Tossed THAT book right over my shoulder in disgust.More stuff being passed along as "Wiccan tradition" when it isn’t. From an article on Wiccan meditation techniques:
Gerald B. Gardner found Wicca in the mid-20th century after claiming to have been initiated into a coven of Witches. Gardner admits that his information on Witchcraft was fragmentary and that he had to reconstruct it by incorporating other materials. Before founding Wicca, he was an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, involved with Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Order. These involvements, as well as more than 30 years spent living in Asia, heavily influenced and inspired Gardner as he formulated Wiccan rituals.
Wicca Meditation Techniques | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_4572037_wicca-meditation-techniques.html#ixzz28aRXsKNW
Not at all sure where Mackenzie Wright, who wrote the above came by his or her her information, but given the amount of nonsense a lot of wiccans repeat without any traditional sources behind it, I’m not even remotely surprised.
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