Love Songs of the New Kingdom and Celebrating Puberty with Bob Cowsill Part II

Flee him, my heart - and hurry! -
for I know all too well this love of yours.
My antic heart won't let me walk like others
but dances off when I want it home.
It will not wait to let me catch my tunic
nor stop to let me get my party fan;
It leaves no time to shadow eyes with love lines,
no time at all to oil my unloved body.

"Don't stand there waiting! Get inside!"
so heart says as I stand there full of him.
O heart, don't make my aching thoughts turn foolish!
Why, are we mad? who gave you leave?
(It's wrong!)

Believe it or not, that glorious poem was created between 1600 – 1085 BCE ... in Ancient Egypt, the New Kingdom era.  Found in Love Songs of the New Kingdom, translated from the ancient Egyptian by John L.  Foster (1974, University of Texas Press, Austin).  Love the book, love that poem among many others ... but it made me wonder if I were reading an Egyptian poetess (in which case, she's astonishing!), or  John L. Foster - he does say he tried to remain true to the idioms, syntax, etc., of the originals, but also says he used a certain degree of freedom in translation. I would love to see the original hieroglyphics and literal translations for this particular one, to see how he did his translation - although he does do that for some of them. Summary: a marvelous collection of love poetry.

Nothing like starting a job search only to find out that COMCAST has disabled your fax line, moved your home telephone to the disabled fax line, and never bothered to look into it, despite repeated calls.  By the fourth or fifth call, they finally sent someone out and fixed it.  (Meanwhile, I’d never given out my cell phone number as a contact, and my answering machine announced that I had 41 missed calls!)  Another fun day with Comcast.  Yet another reason why they’re one of the most intensely disliked companies in the entire country.

But on the “glass half full” side – finally!  I got my SETI@home program to work.  I signed on to that in about 10 years ago, and at some point it stopped working.  SETI may be excellent at a lot of things, but Customer Service ain’t one of them – I’d continually ask for help and get no reply, so the program just sat there, idle, for the longest time.  Finally, they offered a new version of the program to download that was much more user-friendly, and I was able to re-start it.  I’m back to being mesmerized by the working graphics.  And I’m sure my computer will be the one to process the unit that proves we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe!  (Ahh, nothing like delusions of grandeur to cheer me right up.)

A topic they posted on their website basically asked, “What would the impact on society be if the discovery of life in space actually happened?”  Their analysis was a great deal more positive than my own “off-the-cuff” analysis was.  Not that I thought American society would degenerate into chaos or anything, but my own feeling was that the number of people who, like me, would react with a “Coool!” and a fascination to learn more would be relatively small compared to the number of people who would immediately toss the news onto their own political and religious accelerant bonfires ... making the news a lot more terrifying than it actually was.  All we would have discovered was that life VERY far away (and at some time in the past, when you take into account how long it would have taken for it to reach us) used radio signals, not that they were planning an immediate invasion and the annihilation of a swarm of parasitic homosapiens in a galaxy far far away from them.  But most Americans aren’t exactly logical, are they?

I’m sure I should be doing something industrious, but right now I’m just basking in the goofing off of it all.  Except for picking up the mail, there is nowhere I have to go or need to be .... and I definitely don’t want to battle pre and post-holiday shoppers anyway.  I did trek back over to North Andover and take a good look at my storage facility there ... Dana is going to clear it out. and I finally won’t have to pay them anymore, thank goodness.

But I did find my mother’s teapot!  Once I can find my iPhone cord, I’ll upload the photo.  I thought I had lost it; apparently, I had packed and stored it.  It’s one of those plain, much used variety of utilitarian teapots that bring back warm fuzzy  memories of my mother.  I’m in the middle of cleaning it out, using denture cleaner tablets – which have so many great uses, I’m almost sorry I don’t wear dentures.  This was not the teapot she used for Sunday dinners or company – this was her own personal daily teapot.  Dad did drink tea occasionally, but mostly drank coffee, so I always associate it with Mom.

And now for the amazing news.  Apparently, I will be “celebrating puberty with Bob Cowsill” after all.  They are having a 50th Anniversary concert on April 11th at The Cutting Room, celebrating their first record deal with Joda Records.  You never saw anyone hit the “Buy Tickets” button so fast in your life.  Then I had one of those, “I can’t believe it ... after all these years, I’m finally going to see ...” moments that almost felt like I’d reverted back to those days of hopeless idiocy I remembered.  I still can’t believe it.  Hotel booked, train tickets purchased, concert ticket bought ... methinks I’m off to see The Cowsills.

http://tickets.thecuttingroomnyc.com/event/754693-cowsills-new-york/

The Earth Collides with the Moon ... and I Think of Sex

Flipping through the March 2013 issue of Astronomy, we find an interview with Professor Sarah T. Stewart of Harvard who would, I am quite certain, be none too pleased to find herself in a magickal blog between fallen angels and incubi. But – oh well, tra-la-la, she’ll have to get over it. The details originally appeared in Science.

Along with SETI scientist Matija Ćuk, Professor Stewart has proposed a solution to the disputed notion that in Earth’s earliest formative period, she was part of a monumental collision, sending ejected material out into space – which eventually coalesced into the body we know as the moon.

If we temporarily set aside the mythology and only look at the science, some of the data raised by scientists in support of the collision theory include

(1) the volume of water on the planet – they believe the volume better matched a planetary body further away from the sun, which would be explained if a huge collision moved Earth closer to the sun that it had been originally. Another clincher:

(2) the earth and the moon contain identical isotopes.

As for the original story of the collision – I do remember the mythology: Earth and a planet called Tiamat (others say Theia) collided in a gigantic explosion, returning the earth to its molten state and sending a big chunk of itself rolling and spinning out into space, where it became the moon.

But how did the Sumerians know this? Not sure … I want to say that Zecharia Sitchin credited the inhabitants of the supposed Planet X itself – called the Annunaki - with passing the info along, but don’t quote me on that, either.

I may have had lot of respect for the Sumerians, but did I believe Zecharia Sitchin’s Planet X/ Nibiru/ Annunaki story?? No, I did not – or at least, not the “we’re all gonna die!” version of it you see all over the internet. Mainly because of the fact that if Sitchin were correct, we would have seen the planet approaching, coming in out of its 3,600 year-long orbit a long, long time ago. I mean, really, some of these conspiracy theorists are too silly – they seem to believe that a gigantic planet would appear in the skies out of nowhere, and only start causing havoc all over the place when it got within a few miles of Earth. Ain’t gonna happen that way. Hasn’t anyone read the reviews of the movie Melancholia? Every scientist on the planet – not to mention a lot of laypeople as well - made fun of the (complete absence of) astrophysics behind it.

There are telescopes on satellites from every civilized country out there in immediate orbit around Earth – even if the U.S. government decided to keep it a big secret, you don’t think other countries would go along with us, do you? Ha! Trust me, we’re not THAT well liked.

Besides, trying to keep it a secret would be futile anyway: NASA is correct – it would be visible to the naked eye while still a huge distance away, and would be the brightest object in the night sky – again, while still a long, long way away. It could not “hide behind the sun” – given our own orbit, we would have seen it a long time ago. Things that big don’t just “show up” out of nowhere. Nobody could have kept it a secret.

But if you’re interested in the original article on the theory of the moon being spun off from earth following a collision:
Ćuk, M., S. T. Stewart. Making the Moon from a fast-spinning Earth: A giant impact followed by
resonant despinning. Science, 338 (6110), 1047-1052, doi:10.1126/science.1225542, 2012.

And now … ahhh, the joy of returning to the topic of sex.

“GOOD LORD! IS THAT ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT??” you shriek.

“Why, yes. Yes it is,” I reply calmly. “That’s all I EVER think about. Morning, noon, night. Always. Sex, sex and more sex.  It’s constant. It’s relentless. It never ends. It’s the exclusive focus of my entire existence. A perpetual Dionysian drool-fest, born of desperation and wanton craving. I’m completely overwhelmed with white hot passion, twenty-four hours a day. I hunger with desire, from sunrise to sunset; I am submersed in raw, untrammeled, raging lust!!”

[PAUSE]

Okay, not really. But why do you even CARE?

Ahem. As I was saying … ahhh, the joy of returning to the topic of sex.

So I was reading the The Plant Spirit Familiar, by Christopher Penczak. Not the first book you would open, were you to be researching incubi, and in fact, I wanted to read about people who could hear plants, trees, flowers, etc. Last time I brought up this topic, I was the only one who could hear trees scream, because, thanks to christians, I had to endure that misery almost every year.

“Oh, PISH-POSH!” snaps the know-it all from Yale. “How could they scream? They don’t have vocal cords!”

(*SLAP!!!!*) (Heh, heh. I always wanted to do that, just slap a pretentious Yalie upside the head, for the fun of it. Don’t worry, Harvard, you’re next).

“The ‘scream’ is my interpretation of what I feel when I’m near a christian christmas tree lot, Yalie boy,” sayeth I in annoyance. “Pressure. Frantic pressure. The urge to run, to escape. Panic. To cover my ears or to cry. Physical pain. It’s horrible; a horrible sensation. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s the christians who aren’t emotionally or mentally – or spiritually - evolved enough to be aware of the damage, destruction and death they cause to other living beings. And then they dress the corpse up like a Las Vegas showgirl and prop the dead body up in their living rooms. It’s horrifying. How can those evil christians not HEAR what they’ve done? When I was a child, I’d actually throw up.”

But I digress.

All of a sudden I flip open the book, see a chapter on “Sexual Congress with the Green”, and I’m reading about incubi. I’m sure your first thought (as was mine, I’m ashamed to say, so I can’t really pick on you) is, “He’s having sex with PLANTS?!?” No, he is not, so you can stop trying to imagine the logistics and visualizing yourself covered in grass stains with thorn scratches in peculiar places on your body – unless you enjoy that sort of thing. (And not that there’s anything wrong with that!) What he IS talking about are spirits associated with various trees and plants.

Before that, however, he devoted a paragraph to the history of the incubi/succubae. Made me smile.

“Modern psychologists speculate that the mythos of the succubae/incubi stemmed from religious guilt over erotic dreams and men’s nocturnal emissions, and provided an explanation for both sleep paralysis and pregnancy out of wedlock. The concept of something evil seducing one into the pleasure not normally allowed to them by those who felt it was wrong to experience and enjoy such things, provided them with the opportunity to have the experience but ultimately take no responsibility for it, though such confessions usually led to other problems, such as clergy believing such people were bewitched. Some even speculate that the mythos acted as a coping mechanism to help people deal with issues of rape and sexual abuse, particularly when the clergy themselves were the perpetrators. Devout parishioners couldn’t face that fact, so the myth of sexual demons was created.”
Penczak, Christopher. The Plant Spirit Familiar: Green Totems, Teachers and Healers on the Path of the Witch. Copper Cauldron Publishing. 2011. Page 262.

THANK YOU!!!!

Although actually, I tend to think that last speculation on clergy being the perpetrators came from the historical record I published here earlier of a nun’s complaint against a priest and his response that an incubi who looked like him had done the deed, not him. (And the convent believed his version of the story over the nun’s “That letch humped me like a dog!” version. Oh, what else is new?)

What Penczak does point out – and I now want more information on this:

“If you go into surviving tribal shamanic traditions, you will find the concept of the shaman’s spirit lover, or spirit wife, as a primary inner world tutelary spirit and initiator. You will find a similar concept in the Celtic faery traditions of a Faery Lover, Faery Bride and every Faery Queen/King mating,”

and …

“Sexual union of this nature, i.e. the transmission of such energy between incarnate and discarnate entities, was both initiatory and sacramental, benefitting both entities in their spiritual evolution and development. Only in a dark age, where such knowledge is lost, would potentially holy contact with the spirit world be interpreted as demonic.”

THANK YOU!!

I hadn’t thought of these days as “The Dark Ages”, but from our perspective they really are, aren’t they? Those westerners whose beliefs pre-dated or stood outside of monotheism really were made to suffer for a long, long time. Only now are we regaining any space for our own beliefs, and grudgingly at that. In the news as I write this are the stories of Fox News jumping up and down and squealing hysterically over a decision made by the University of Missouri:

Students at University of Missouri don't need to cram for exams that fall on Wiccan and Pagan holidays, now that the school has put them on par with Christmas, Thanksgiving and Hanukah.

The university’s latest “Guide to Religions: Major Holidays and Suggested Accommodations” — designed to help faculty know when and when not to schedule exams and other student activities — lists eight Wiccan and Pagan holidays and events right alongside more mainstream occasions. It's all part of the school's effort to include everyone's beliefs, although some critics say listing every holiday associated with fringe belief systems is a bit much.*

(*And by “some critics”, Fox News meant, of course, Fox News, “the official mouthpiece of the lower intellectual echelons of christian fundamentalism”).

Penczak also wrote The Green Lovers, which I want to read next.

Finally, another idea I hadn’t thought of is learning the skill of creating an “artificial familiar”. Also known as a “tulpa” in Tibet, or a “thought form”, this is basically a being that you create with your own mind and will for a specific purpose. We already know what the specific purpose is; now, we need to learn how to do it.

More later!