Back From Ireland

So, I'm back from Ireland and already missing it. So many things left unseen, so much to still experience.

Here's some pictures:

Two days were spent roaming around Dublin. Really, no time at all to get even the feel of it. We did manage to find the allmighty Epicurean Food Hall (really...only the Irish...) and of course, Temple Bar, the tourist Trap.

The other days were spent around the Wicklow Mountains and visiting some Megalithic sites. The first picture is the lovely view of Dublin from the montains, and the second is the view of the Boyne valley from the top of Cnobha.

This is Cnobha entrance and the back stone (which we were introduced to as a calendar) of Newgrange. I wont post the "70's bathroom wall" they built over the site because...it makes my eyes bleed. On a positive note, on the musealization of Cnobhá they left the stones of the outer shell untouched, which is good news for researchers (apparently, Kelly didnt even photograph the "outer shell" (have no idea what the term is in english) for later record (Go go!)


'Twas lovely, the Irish are great, Ireland is beautiful, but I was homesick at the end of it and needing proper food. The cherry on top of the cake was the lovely surprised i got when i finnaly arrived home. Birthday presents from Finland! A friend sent me a lovely card of witchy zodiac and it reads:

Virgo:

Belongs to the family of Healers
Special: Flies rarely because she is busy doing scientific witchcraft research.
When other witches play around bonfires, this one goes through encyclopedies about Witchcraft in other countries vigorously. Her nickelpots shine cleanly and her broom its always straight in its racle.
All kinds of wisecracking and picking on details are her preferred hobbies and nobody will be saved from her malicious mocking.
Pet: Hedgehog
Favourite food: Cactus pancakes and foreign exotic delicacies.
Wand: Rowan with jaspe.
Most important thing in the shelves: Herbal guides
Favourite hobbies: Wisecracking, mocking and nagging. 

Overall, quite accurate.  Next I had the "Sex Tips for Husbands and Wives", from the lovely Mrs. Smythers but don't think for a second this was some kinky vintage sex advice, oh no, this was advice on how to avoid the horrible practice of coitus between man and woman. Mrs. Smythers lovingly tells us that:
 " While sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful. it has to be endured...One cardinal rule of marriagge sould never  be forgotten: give little, give seldom, and above all, give grudgingly"

And for this she sagely points out that
" One heartening factor for which the wife can be gratefuul is the fact the husband's home, school, church, and social environment have been working together all through his life to instill in him a deep sense of guilt in regards to his sexual feelings so that he comes to the marriage couch apologetically and filled with shame, already half cowed and subdued. 

The final outcome being:

The wise wife seizes upon this advantage and relentlessly pursues her goal first to limit, later to annihilate completly her husband's desire for sexual expression.

Lovely isnt it?

What is this witch doing now?

Packing and preparing for my trip to Ireland!


Har Har! See you in a few days.

Do not buy a book by it’s cover

I follow a lot of blogs and lately I've come across a few blog posts on Piracy. Plutonica nicely sums up the bloggers discussion on the matter with further links to different posters and their opinions. I'm still waiting on Jack's history of piracy and its relation to a capitalist society but has already put out some sources for further reading.



I really don't have much to contribute to the knowledgeable discussion. I have only a pirate honest story.

  
Yesterday it was my 26th birthday. This means that there's more than 10 years on my back as a pirate, even more if I consider the times when I was too young to have a say on what to purchase and instead followed mean cousins around to listen to the music everyone complained about (and that was copied already).

 

It all started with underground music and the bands that had maybe 25 to 100 copies of their demo tapes. In these days for you to listen to their music you had to know so and so who in turn knew so and so that had a pen pal from Norway or Sweden or England who also happened to be the original copier of the material. Then you had the catalogues. You ordered tapes from these catalogues and the people who compiled them were often the pen pal dudes. No more than a week would pass before the original tape would miraculously multiply and a previously unknown band would grow a fan base out of pirated material, zines and pamphlets would appear and so on. This fan base eventually grew up and with technology and information moved on to CD's and DVD's, credit cards and low budget travelling. Many of us became anonymous but loyal fans - the ones who buy the merchandise directly from the bands website, who travel many kilometers through a fair deal of countries to see those bands play live, who buy their CD's and other media. I say buy instead of respect, love or inspiration because, when piracy is concerned, it's money that worries people and not the awe that an unsuspecting passerby felt when he decided to check out what was that sound all about and pressed a REC button or, nowadays, a Download one. In music, I went from pirate to law abiding consumer, for the most part… and only if the band proves worthy. It's the same thing with books, but inversed. I never pirated before,

  
I started reading on the occult and witchcraft when I was pretty young and started buying all the books I could. This meant about 2 books a month, with prices ranging from 10 to 25 euros and from the most random subjects available. At this rate of book purchasing what do think that I, at 26, have to show as a personal library? Perhaps 40 titles where there should be, at the very least, 100. You see, sometime ago I went to clear space for new stuff and holy Jesus. I threw into the recycling bin so much stuff I hurt inside. There was really no other option because I'm not a bibliophile and I underline and write on the margins of every book I own so I couldn't sell them and the vast majority of my collection was…crap. So there I was, with bags and bags of useless printed garbage and a load of money wasted. Do you think I, or any other consumer, want to repeat the mistake of buying blindly? We do not.


 
Let's fast forward to now. I'm no longer 12 or 15, I have a stable job. Although I'm not rich I'm almost where I want to be financially. Still, I have a digital library of hundreds of books. Is it because I think I'm entitled? Is it because I have no respect for the authors work? Perhaps. It's a combination of several factors. Buying crap I didn't knew was crap because I didn't knew any better and later buying crap because I had no other choice than to take that risk taught me that reviews are priceless (and for a long long time I didn't had access to occult related reviews) and also that much too often reviews are also crap. So what do you do? You check things out before.


 
Nowadays i buy mostly online so i cant really take the book to the bookstore's cofee parlour and give it a good diagonal reading, so, if can get my hands on a free digital copy I will, in fact that's the very first thing I look for when considering a new purchase. I take my money very seriously and I will not give it to bad authors. Do I feel I am stealing from them? No. My intention is never to have the book and use it without showing proper respect to the author. My intention is to know and to try the product before making the decision, only I have been deceived too many times by raving reviews, enticing indexes, and well made advertisements. When I did that major reorganization of my book collection, the vast majority of "in the crap bin" materials were from occult/pagan authors. It was funny, even, to see the small pile of keepers consisting almost entirely of academic/recently purchased books and the sum of my years ready to be off to recycle. Lesson learned? Yes.


 
There's also the "getting to know new stuff" factor. Just like what happened with tape trading, unless pirated I wouldn't even know it existed, I would never read those books much less buy them. When I was younger, the important factor was quantity. We wanted a lot of music and we wanted to know. We did. Most of those bands we pirated fell apart or were simply too crappy to endure but there's quite a few others that thrived and have a solid musical career or that achieved a "cult" status. These bands were/are innovative, they were talented, and they consistently and systematically put up excellent sound. Nowadays the same standard of quality applies, even more so because now we can see what authors do beforehand. Is the author good? Is the research solid? Is the work properly cited? Is the writing style clear and to the point? Is the bibliography comprehensive? What does the author include there? Can the book withstand multiple readings? In essence, is the book a keeper? If the answer is yes I'll buy, if not, I won't, but I won't keep it in my hard drive either. It will be deleted and forgot. As with bands, if as an author/publishing house you have my respect as a consumer I'll buy from you without a moment's thought. It's new, it's shiny and I want it. I want it because I trust you and what you can put out, even if that particular work isn't precisely to my tastes I won't consider it a waste or an act of deceit. If not, if I can I will screen you beforehand.

The witches’ night-flight – Musings on the soul flight

 “…It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women, turned away after Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that, in the hours of the night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, goddess of the pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of night traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her commands as of their mistress, and are summoned to her service on certain nights.”
Cannon Episcopi, X century

In the last quarter of the XIV century the stereotype of the witch was already well established drawing from a number of sources and one of the most relevant powers of the witch was her ability to fly at night to attend the diabolical meeting that came to be principally known as the Sabbath, but, unlike what is described in the passage of the Cannon Episcopi transcribed above, from the XIV century onwards the flight was no longer considered an illusion caused by demons or a remnant of superstitious thought but a real phenomena caused by ointments the witches concocted at their nightly reunions. Despite academic brawls and polemics, there is a strand of commonness regarding the supernatural flight of the soul. It is present in mankind’s oldest structured religious forms, it finds its way along the classical age, continues onwards through the medieval and modern period and nestles itself in contemporary mystical experiences. It is not, then, surprising that in many of traditional witchcraft pathways the flight and consequently the Sabbat became one of the cornerstones of the officium.

Looking at historical sources we know for certain that this night travel forms a core part of European Witchcraft as described in the middle ages and modern period. Supported by the work of Tomas Aquinas and his contemporaries on the nature of Evil and the activities of the Fallen with their followers, it became one of the most sought after descriptions by later medieval and renaissance inquisitors, however, before the systematization of an otherwise reactive and eclectic Christian cosmology, several elements regarding the flight were already in place and being commonly attributed to witches. The Strigae, winged demons who vampiricaly preyed on humans and the Bonnae Mulieres, a Latin term used to refer to the company of women that escorted the goddess Diana and that needed to be placated with offerings of food and drink are two of the most prominent examples of this with both terms being commonly used to describe witches. In Apuleius novel Metamorphosis, Lucian sees Pamphile speaking incantations to a lamp and rubbing her body with an ointment that causes her to develop characteristics that make her resemble a strix: she grows wings, feathers, a beak and talons and, although not related and in a much later period of time, the motifs of flight, animal shape and the use of incantations come to us narrated by Emma Wilby on her work “The visions of Isobel Gowdie”.  Especially relevant due to its insular nature is also the case of the Benandanti, a group of men and women from the northern part of Italy who claimed to fly in spirit to wage a war against witches and secure crops or participate in a procession of dead souls and who also told of travelling on or in the shape of animals at times.

Nowadays, the iconic Witch is young, naked, and when preparing to depart to the Sabbath she is often accompanied by a broom. Although consistent with the crystallization of the witch stereotype timeframe, the broom is a later addition, dating from XV century and owing its existence to a marginal illustration of witches in the poem Le champion des Dames by Martin Le Frank. In this poem, the witches fly on several household items and also on farming instruments, something that maybe or may not be relevant symbolically and whose significance will rest on the eyes of the interpreter but before instruments were used, the witch required only herself, an incantation which is  used due to the metric/rhythmic properties to induce trance and occasionally her ointment,  to be on her way to cause mischief.

The examples related above are just a small drop in the ocean of sources that the movement of Modern Traditional Witchcraft drinks from. Understandably, there is high value on the experience of the flight. If you are interested in reading more about the nature of flight and how to achieve it I recommend reading The Witch of Forest Grove article on it. There she discusses the parallels between the flight and out of body experiences being an excellent initiatory reading. In addition she also provides several goods in her botanica that, although I haven’t tried myself, seem to be done with utmost care and devotion.