Aspartame Poisoning, Duality and Great Insults

There was an article that went its way through Facebook – who knows where it originated – on the symptoms of aspartame poisoning.  Two of the symptoms jumped right off the page at me:  muscle spasms and leg numbness/weakness.  I went and looked at the bottle of sugar-free Coffee Mate I’ve been drinking in my coffee every single morning since ... practically forever.  They apparently use sucrose, which was in the same category.

Neither the primary care or the endocrinologist had a lot of studies on aspartame poisoning they could pull up, but both suggested the same thing:  stop using it, then; let’s see what happens.

So ... my first morning using light cream and a teaspoon of stevia instead.  You know, if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s having my morning coffee messed with.  So I wasn’t happy with the taste, no – right now it tastes more like espresso to me than my morning coffee.  But I spent weeks in Italy drinking coffee that tasted exactly like this, so I thought:  I can adapt.  If this is what the issue was, all this time ... I can definitely adapt.  I’m not sure how much time I should be giving this.

In C’era una volta, I was reaching the point where I needed to figure out where the character of Satan originated.  I knew he wasn’t part of the Jewish tradition, so I needed to learn where the concept originated and why – mainly because I needed to know where John Milton came up with his rather colorful version of the guy.  Christians had to have drawn it from somewhere, and for some reason ... surely there had to be more to it than just controlling people out of fear, although I’m sure that was an added benefit of coming up with the Big Bad to point at and blame for everything they did that fell short of ethical purity.

I also knew other traditions believed in a “dark and light” duality, but even they hadn’t come up with a being to embody the dark side of things.  Zoroaster, for example, taught that darkness and light (or also translated as lies and truth) existed inside of each person and it was their responsibility to decide which side gained the upper hand.

Like most people, deities had always encompassed both light and dark aspects.  Pazuzu was a perfect example:  if you were a Sumerian, he was a household protector, someone you called upon to protect you and your family, someone you admired and thanked wholeheartedly for your blessings ... and someone who sent locusts when he was pissed off.  Like anyone else, he had his sunshiny and cloudy days.  And he was definitely not known as a being who possessed little girls and made them throw up green split-pea soup and masturbate with crucifixes until The Exorcist – if the ancient Sumerians were still around, they would be seriously pissed off at how badly the poor guy was libeled in that film.  (But since they’re not, I’ll act in their stead).  Blatty made that up, everybody!!! All of that disgusting stuff came out of Blatty’s head, not Pazuzu’s!!  Just saying!

So I was reading a biographical history of the character.  Unfortunately, it was written back in 1865, in an age where people would write coy little things like, “A popular Christian clergyman, the Rev. Mr. D ----, in a fit of inspirational turgescence and mental explosion ...” and should you wish to verify said “inspirational turgescence” – you’re basically out of luck, because who the heck knows who he’s supposedly quoting?

But what a great turn of phrase!  I would love to use that on somebody.  You know, like you’re on a first date, and the guy is boring you witless with his relentless self-indulgent opinions on everything.  You bat your eyelashes and purr:  “Oh myyyy, what inspirational turgescence!”

Okay, fine if you’re too lazy to look it up:   tur·ges·cence  (tûr-jĕs′əns).  n.  The condition of being swollen, the process of swelling, pomposity; self-importance.  Happy now?

Point is:  the author, Kersey Graves, was prone (in his own variation of turgescence, I would imagine) to write coy little sentences like that, making the heads of his readers ... or more specifically, me ... blow up in frustration.


But back to the Rev. Mr. D ---- of Xenia, Ohio, whoever he was ... this was part of his sermon to a congregation of men, women .. and impressionable young children.  Read this, and you’re thinking, “Wow.  No wonder people walk around filled with such horror and dread ... what a horrible image to lay out in front of them! Everyone you know and love – your spouse, your parents, your siblings – in unspeakable agony, while this awful being is stomping on them, sending geysers of their blood all over his own clothes, with a look of ... delight?? ... on his face.   Because ... why?  They’ve made a mistake?  They did something wrong?  This is their supposed loving deity?  He sounds worse than all of the world’s most evil tyrants rolled up into one ... a demonic creature so horrible you’d beg to escape any universe in which this thing has any place at all.

And where did the Rev. Mr. D ----- get his awful imagery?  Can you just imagine him simply writing out this grotesque sermon?  Surely – you think – he had to have a biblical source of inspiration for this – surely it didn’t come out of his own horribly twisted mind!  And you’d be wrong, of course.

As neither the Torah or the Bible has any such description – the good (and I use that term rather doubtfully) Reverend just plain old made it up ... in the days before blood-soaked horror movies, apparently church on Sundays was the rough equivalent.  But what he did have was Isaiah 45:7.

From the various versions:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things (KJV).
I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things (NKJV).
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things (NIV).
The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these (NASB).
I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who does all these things (RSV).

Yes, what the reverend did have was proof that the original texts christians draw from (in this case the old testament, or the Torah) state rather baldly that it is their deity who is the source of all evil, not a separate entity.  Which would certainly explain how the poor, unsuspecting citizens of Xenia, Ohio got hit with such a nightmarish description, although it’s equally astounding that they didn’t all run screaming out the church doors and move to Columbus, where things might have been presented to them more rationally.  No offense to the residents of Xenia, but ... why didn’t you just fire the pulpit-pounding, blood-thirsty fool?  True, they might have – we’ll never know, will we?

Bad Falls, Bad Drivers and Really Bad Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disorder, Chaos, Orthotics and Pride

Trying to get my life organized.  I’m off to the orthotics people to test a leg brace tomorrow; suspect it won’t be the right one and I’ll need to have my leg molded for the permanent one, which will take another long period of time to get back - and then need to drive up to Portsmouth again to get it.

I’m getting my car looked at tomorrow.  Too many things all at once. Getting the car detailed on either Tuesday or Wednesday, can’t remember which one.  Have physical therapy one day next week; can’t remember which day.  I have an appointment calendar somewhere; can’t find it at the moment.  Have been wasting fabric and time screwing up the applique portion of Beautiful Beige; can’t seem to get it right for the life of me.  Have no idea why things are so chaotic at the moment; it feels like New York City and The Cutting Room all over again.

I thought I would have a leg brace by now; I don’t.  So I’m back to needing to struggle my way around Westerly, Rhode Island without one next weekend.  Just like New York City.  And how well I remember the physical problems I had after New York.

Meanwhile ... ahh, the fun of researching ... I realized that at some point I would need to get some background on Milton’s belief in the character of Satan to begin with.  Since I pay next to no attention to that particular character, one way or the other, I went and read up on what various groups of people have to say about him ... and if that wasn’t a messy and confusing collection of opinions, I can’t tell you what is.  You have christians squealing “Eeek!” and running around in circles like chickens with their heads chopped off, and you have satanists squealing “Yay!” and making him sound like the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel.  Was actually hoping for a more rational, reasonable, unemotional approach.  Origins?  History?

I eventually looked up various books written on the subject, and ordered two of them – my interest was in the historical background of the concept, not the generally hysterical fear or glee that some people get themselves bound into knots over ... those people you end up feeling (somewhat) sorry for, as it must be awful to live your lives in such fear all the time.

My own thoughts on the subject?  He exists for those who believe he exists; for those of us who don’t, he’s irrelevant.  And the character is more of an archetype.  You create him in your own mind because you’re told to when you’re too young to question it, or because he meets a need that is already inside of you to begin with.  Or, as Milton himself wrote:  “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

You want to run around being a serial killer, you invent someone who propels you into it, because you need to. 

The Luciferians are another breed altogether – they don’t buy into the Satanic thing; they do believe in the Morning Star being; one of light and radiance.  So, as I said, there are a lot of different thoughts on the subject; and trying to wade through all of it can start your eyeballs rolling around in your head.  You start looking for individual threads to start untangling the mess.  Not an easy task, believe me.

I did know that the concept is believed to have originated with both the Zoroastrian concepts of dark and light that infiltrated Jewish tradition during their Babylonian exile, and in a confused mistranslation of references to the “Morning Star” (hence the name of Lucifer – Bright Star, Morning Star, etc.) which seems a rather inappropriate name for the being eventually saddled with the “root-of-all-evil” moniker.  And that christians took this and literally ran with it ... they absolutely adored the concept of an entirely evil creature to hang their dark, shameful sins on.  That wasn’t me, the Devil made me do it!

So how did this being – whose brilliance was so intense that he was named after a bright morning star, and who even resided in the heavenly realms long after ancient scrolls were incorporated into the Torah – come to personify the changes in people’s beliefs that transformed a being who was a brilliant denizen of the heavenly realms to a being who scares the (bleep) out of people and yet makes them do horrible things?

And which version of him was Milton looking at or envisioning, as he wrote Paradise Lost?  The beliefs of Milton’s time had their own flavoring ... the beliefs of the American fundamentalists today may not match Milton’s.

I may have missed something in all of those pages, but it seems like his big crime was “pride”.  Really.  Pride?  That’s what did it – that’s what precipitated the gigantic “fall”?  Do you have any idea how many people on the planet are guilty of the same thing, if not worse levels of it?  Hell, the asshole who cuts you off on the highway and the woman too fat and lazy to wheel her shopping cart into the shopping cart bay are both guilty of the same thing:  the underlying belief that their needs surpass everyone else’s needs – at its most basic level:  pride.

Everyone knows someone who believes that they exist at the center of everyone else’s universe ... which is another form of pride.  People who post their opinions as standards that everyone else should aspire to – yet another form.  Your local gym is packed to the walls with people admiring their own physiques; everyone knows a manager who practically oozes arrogance out of his or her pores.  Let’s face it – the whole planet is practically waterlogged with people who have the same issue that Satan  supposedly did:  a seriously overinflated sense of themselves – and that includes the a lot of the same people I mentioned above who are running around flapping their hands and squealing “Eeek!” at the very mention of his name.  And this was his big crime?  It almost makes you laugh, when you think about it.

My favorite current example of overweening pride came from (naturally) an American fundamentalist who witnessed the devastation caused by the earthquake in Nepal and tweeted:  “Praying 4 the lost souls in Nepal. Praying not a single destroyed pagan temple will b rebuilt & the people will repent/receive Christ.”

The revulsion that tweet generated was global, because it was such an evil thing to think – much less say out loud – and, practically dripping with arrogance, horrified and disgusted just about everyone other than other American fundamentalists.  I don’t think even “Satan” has ever been credited with a quote that awful.  So congratulations to the Santa Clarita, California author of that – for surpassing the big bad guy who supposedly experienced a great “fall” for even less arrogance and pride than that one tweet evinced.  Everyone has been hearing how California is running out of water.  And yet, you don’t see the millions of Hindus and Buddhists tweeting that obviously his beliefs generated a terrifying drought in the State of California, so he should come around to their way of thinking, do you?  Ought to tell you something, right there.  Insufferable pride.  In his case, a nauseating degree of it, and an utter lack of compassion his own deity would have found horrifying.

Needless to say, I look forward to doing a bit more research into the subject ...

Am now the proud owner of the most beautiful ring – a rose quartz in the shape of a teardrop, which means, according to some site which I have forgotten to credit:  “Innocence. Will help you to link with the confidence of your inner being and be grounded with the earth.”  The rose quartz is supposed to attract love, so the combination of the two should ... attract love, but enable me to retain my innocence, which almost sounds like a false impression of unbroken virginity?  Okay, maybe not such a good interpretation.  And okay, I feel neither innocent, confident in my inner being or grounded at the moment – but wow, does it ever look nice on my finger!  Let’s hope I don’t break the nail again, shall we?  Breaking nails right and left does not do a lot for my confidence – in either my inner or outer being.

But maybe it will attract the perfect lover, who doesn’t care that (a) my innocent and confident demeanor exists only in my ring, (b) I have dirt on my shoes (well, I am ‘grounded with the earth’, right?), and (c) my nails may or may not be broken?  I like that possibility, let’s hold out hope for that one.

Bad Hair, Bad Products, Bad Blood and Paradise Lost

WHEN WILL I EVER LEARN?  I just don’t learn, do I?  Again – the hair styling was a complete and utter disaster.  Complete.  Total. Absolute.  I’d jump out the window were it not for the fact that (again) I live in a one-story and it wouldn’t accomplish much beyond giving me a scraped knee.  Went to a clothing store, bought stuff that was too big for me and had to return to the seamstress and have it fixed.  Went to Tallman’s for new glasses only to discover that they were closed.  That closed the window on my getting new glasses in time.  On my way back, stopped at Sylvan Grille and drank myself into a stupor.  Came home.  Cried a lot.

The disaster now required me to find something that will shape the straight-hanging mess into something less awful.  Tried a hair oil that is supposed to help hair keep a curl, thinking I could get the hair to turn under a little.  Instead, I was allergic to the oil itself and spent the next few hours with tears running down my face, sneezing repeatedly and with my nose running like a faucet.  Bought a curling iron.  Haven’t figured out how to do it right, and only ended up looking even more goofy than I already did.

Whatever self-confidence I once had (and it wasn’t much) disappeared in the blink of an eye.  And I will be seeing my childhood crush in exactly 9 days.  Of course I will.  Why strut out of an expensive hair salon looking like a quadrillion bucks when it’s so much more typical to slink out of it looking you were just run over by a leaf mulcher?  I just never learn, do I?

Well, while I battle the utter horror that is my hair, I’m also battling a never-ending round of doctors, appointments, physical therapy, more doctors, more appointments, more physical therapy - and my life shrinks to the dimensions of my appointment calendar – I started reading an annotated version of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I’m finding inspirational, and I’m only in the Introduction.

I cannot get my head around Milton’s point of view ... by the time he started writing his Paradise Lost, ships were already sailing their way across the Atlantic, depositing colonists on the North and South American east coasts, so he is already aware that there is an entire continent over here, chock full of people who had no knowledge of the supposed “truth” he was espousing, which had originated within a very small tribe of nomads based in a very tiny region of the Middle East – of which, needless to say – none of these North and South and Central American continental natives had any knowledge.  So why – at some point – didn’t that “a priori” truth he was basing his entire epic poem upon stop making logical sense?  The Far East was already well known.  The beliefs of China, India ... they were well known.  Where is his logic?  His “lost paradise” was intelligence?  That isn’t saying much for him and his ilk is it?

From his first book, he is only making reference to Greek and Roman mythology, as though they were the only civilizations with which he had to parry and thrust.  It may be that he looks at Egyptian later in the work, but at least in his first book his entire glance towards Egypt consisted of Moses.  That’s it.  Just Moses.

True, the fact that most historians are seriously questioning the Biblical story of Moses altogether may be a more recent development, and ancient Egypt wasn’t really discovered by western culture until the time of Napoleon, so perhaps I can’t fault him for that as much.  But the other regions?  Makes no sense to me, none of it does.  So much of his initial argument makes no sense I can’t even find a place to start, as far as making a counterpoint is concerned.  Maybe with the original Lilith or something, to squash his Eve?  But he doesn’t focus on Eve so much anyway – Adam is his guy, which, for a man steeped in the toxicity of an extremely conservative, religiously fundamentalist patriarchy – much like the Republican Party of the U.S.! - isn’t surprising.

I have just discovered today that I really love tea made from roasted dandelion roots.  Why stupid suburbanites (the evil “Manifest Destiny” lunatics)  have this passionate need to destroy, slaughter, poison or trample everything worthwhile, I have no idea, but it seems they do.

One thing you should try not to do is allow your blood sugar to drop so far you nearly black out from it – which happened to me when I started feeling gawdawful and discovered my blood sugar was 37.  That isn’t a typo.  Thirty-bleeping-seven.  Drank two glasses of fruit juice pronto and had some toast ... and that was before I could make my way back to the bedroom where I had the glucose tablets.  I was hanging on to the countertop, trying not to let my knees buckle.  37.  Who gets readings like that?  And it wasn’t as though I was doing anything unusual when it happened; my sugars just plummeted for no good reason that I could determine.

Incubi come from Watchers?

Am relaxing this day before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Thursday with a White Fluffy: 1 oz. marshmallow vodka, 1 oz. dark chocolate liqueur, 2 oz. cream, all poured over ice and garnished with marshmallows and cocoa powder. Yum. Tomorrow I’m going to taste absinthe for the first time – have my own glasses, sugar cubes and spoon! – expensive as hell, but supposedly heavenly. But first ...

Il Volo released their latest cd. (I would have said "second", but they released so many variations of #1 – Continental, Global, Spanish, French, Takes Flight/Live in Detroit – and I suppose the christmas mini-cd counted as something – I’m not sure what number this actually is). Anyway, they just released their latest cd.

You get so used to groups or solo artists releasing their first cd, a spellbinder, and then falling flat on the second ... even someone as talented as Vittorio Grigolo, whose classical crossover career fizzled as fast as an open bottle of coke in a desert ... but not so this one.

My jaw dropped again – this is actually better than the first one, and I didn’t think that was possible, because I adored the first one! Holy crap, these guys are awesome! I can’t even find a "least" favorite, and I could on the first one – ("Smile". They sang it beautifully, it was just a snoozer of a song).

Mr. Signpost tossed out one of the Native American Plagiarist’s insipid tweets again: "Unusual sights can fill the heart with great joy. Keep your eyes open for the odd and different." Well, okey-dokey dear! And you have a real Tinkerbelle Day too, ‘kaaaaay?

Of course, the very next thing I saw was this photo:

<---------------

of the members of Il Volo goofing off while getting ready for a concert in Los Angeles.

Keep in mind that this was one of their last concerts at the tail end of a long, three-month straight, country-wide tour of the states. They were three exhausted and punch-drunk teenagers, eager to go home ... so silliness was perfectly understandable to those of us who had working brains.

Ah, but America is so lacking in working brains and so overstuffed with pretentious church ladies, the reaction of the American Hissy Fit Society was utterly predictable. "Eeek!" "Put your pants back on!" "Ohhh NOOO!" "Can’t we just... sing?" ...

Perfect example of the puritanical nonsense most American women spew all over the place to the point where your fingers are literally itching to slap them silly. European women wouldn’t have even blinked; American women – some of them, anyway – were all in this flutter of despair that "da boys" had turned into lusty old men on them. I’m sorry, I started laughing so hard I almost fell out of my chair at some of their prissy, condescending church-lady nonsense.

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

Lost my train of thought. Incubus. I arrived back at the incubus question via the direct and roundabout way: a while ago, I discovered that I really missed my daily sonnet burning its way out of me – and while the agony that provoked them has lessened somewhat, the comfort derived from creating them has not. I decided to start writing again.

I thought I would venture off in a different direction with the second poetry series. My inspiration was found in Milton’s Paradise Lost – although when I say "inspiration", I actually mean that the more I read of it initially, the more I wanted to slap him too for allowing himself to be sucked into a mass delusion. On the other hand, the more I read about him, the less I was sure as to what he did believe. Some day, I may get around to reading a biography. Meanwhile ...

This is the bit that bothered me:

Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme

I do realize that the line directly after "Aonian mount" was a nod to either or both Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato or Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso but my irritation was his reference to the Greek gods and their creation being far inferior to his "Adam and Eve" story.

For the more under-educated readers, "Aonian mount" is a another way of saying "Ionian mount" which is another way of saying, "Greek mountains, such as Mount Olympus, which was the home of the Grecian deities." He’s basically saying, "They sucked; I win!" So, yes, he more or less comes across as the literary Sheldon Cooper of medieval poetry.

Second point being: a complete refutation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost is also possibly among those "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme" (I suspect not but wouldn’t lay down a wager on it), but that’s the direction I wanted to go. I began this attempt a few weeks ago. And as I have decided that I also want to look down my upturned nose at poetry that doesn’t have a rhyming structure ... I ridicule him for his complete rhyming failure as well! BWAH-HA-HA!

So, speaking of Paradise Lost, and the urgent need christians have to demonize human sexuality ("Bad incubus! Bad! Bad!"), it made me wonder how many other spiritual beings were respected and even loved by the pagan world, and then turned into sexualized demons by christians.

For example, The Horned God was so demonized he appears regularly on your TV as Hellboy with his horns shaved off ... (and actually, I love Ron Perlman’s interpretation of him, so I’m not picking on Hellboy, believe me). But the Horned God was absolutely beloved in the pagan world, not made into something evil, as christians have done. Rather than draw from a variety of sources, I’ll quote from Wikipedia that the horned god was "associated with nature, wilderness, sexuality, hunting and the life cycle." I’m not sure this was one of the sources of sexuality and demons, but it certainly contributed. I’m not sure how far back that goes.

In the Book of Enoch. ("the wha ...?") we read an interesting story about The Watchers. The Book of Enoch is dated back to somewhere in the 3rd century B.C. Some of the mythology in Enoch is found in judeo-christian texts, but the larger version is only in Enoch. What makes Enoch interesting as far as research into incubi and sucubi is concerned? Angels falling in love with women and mating with them. But even that isn’t the whole story.

This may be one of the first mentions of situations which christians now call an "attack by an incubi". Basically, so Enoch reports, angels fell in love with human women, mated with them, and the resulting offspring were ... not particularly human, to put it politely.

But I’m not sure that was essentially correct. Enoch lists the band of angels who fell in love with mortal women; their leader’s name was Samyaza or Semjâzâ.

And here’s what I think may be the real source of the demonic attribute: "And the Lord said unto Michael [ this is Michael the Archangel]: 'Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness."

Read that one again. They’re fallen angels not because they're evil or demonic, or have done anything awful or unlawful, but because they consorted with women ... who are UNCLEAN! Fallen angels? Demons. According to your local judeo-christian hate-spreader, THAT may be the real reason why incubi are demons: they are attracted to and have sexual relations with women!! My jaw dropped when I found this – if anyone else has any other ideas behind incubi being demons, I’m all ears.

In the meanwhile, I'm thinking we need to free the incubus and succubus from christian clutches and treat them with respect again.