Quiet Weekend Reading

This last weekend was mostly a rest and recovery weekend.  I got a second COVID booster Friday evening, had my typical Very Strong Reaction, and spent most of Saturday morning in bed and most of Saturday afternoon in a lawn chair.  With a fever.  Not eating.  Much.  

Sunday I just felt tired, although I rallied enough in the afternoon to mow the back yard.  The rest of the time I read Dion Fortune's "The Winged Bull."  It was just the thing to pick up and put down as wanted, although I had to wince over the period's -isms.  I'll quote someone else and say that it's not great literature, but it does give an idea of proto-Neo-Paganism in 1930's Britain.

I did wonder how one might rewrite it only with gay characters.  I think the trick would be to loosen up a lot of the binary thinking underpinning the novel's philosophy, and make a distinction between duality of Cosmic Forces and magical gender polarity—all the while steering clear of Iron John's Mythopoeticism.  

Hmmm.  I'd probably have to use the title, "Sex Secrets of Atlantis."  Oh well.

Dream: The Professor's Telegraph

I'm not sure if it was the Easter candy or something else, but I had a series of odd dream images the following Monday morning.  

The setting was a mix between a college campus and an outdoor shopping mall.  I was skating around (although I wasn't wearing skates), on a long, rectangular, frozen pool.  As the dream progressed, the pool became less icy and more a long, narrow paved walkway with a lightly ornamental edge (which had been the curb of the pool).  

A professor and about three assistants were at one end of the pool, levering molten metal in a crucible on a very long pole to a kind of dark metal platform on the far end.  The platform was surrounded by a network or scaffolding of poles.  This turned out to be a kind of giant, oscillating, telegraph machine (?the glowing crucible was on a swinging arm, striking the cold, dark platform/anvil ?), but it was never fully constructed during the duration of the dream.

Through a dream-transition, the pool was covered by a white tent, and a crowd of people stood inside, along the edge of the pool.  There was much more, but my recall isn't so good about it and this part seemed the most intersting—usually when I dream pools, they are more like hot tubs and there's a low level of sexual tension in the dream; this is the first time that I can recall the pool being frozen over (to the extent that it became a wide sidewalk).  

The telegraph machine is new; I'm not sure if it's a version of the Vision the Cosmic Machine or if it is a signaling device the Professor Figure is attempting to use to tell my normal waking conscious something.  

Interweave

The other week I saw an interweave design entwined around the letter H in a medieaval manuscript.  I liked the combination of interlocked squares and and vesica piscis (it turns out the vesica piscis is not a true one).  So I set out to make something similar.  

The arcs on the false vesica pisci are quarter-circles cut on the diagonal; I had to fiddle with the placement and settled on having the arcs start one square in on the straight interweave—if I had used a proper arc starting at the arcs' intersection points, the interweave would have badly distorted the squares in the outer diagonals of the interweave.  

Without the H in it, this version puts me into mind of open-mouthed snake heads, and I can almost see this being used in a Viking design of some sort.

𓆣 Easter Eggs

This year for Easter, I decided that I would attempt to use the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, hpr, ( or 𓆣  ) on dyed eggs.  Hpr is an ideogram of a dung-beetle, and is used in words like "manifest" and "becoming."    In ancient Egyptian iconography, the dung-beetle is shown with a sun disk, and is symbolically related to the beginning of a new day and regeneration.  I used photos I'd taken of various ancient Egyptian artifacts as the basis for the design and fired up Inkscape.  Several hours later, I had a DFX file that I could import into Silhouette.  

In the past, I've used painter's tape on eggs to resist the dyes.  I purchased a one inch wide roll, the widest I could find.  I thought I might be pushing the limits of the cutter-plotter's ability to incise the tape without shredding it, but it turned out that that wasn't a problem.  Also, if the tape was too wide, there would have had difficulty applying it evenly to the curved surface of the eggs.

I shrunk down the design, placed a strip of the tape on an older Silhouette mat that had lost some of its stickiness, and set the software for washi paper.  Moments later I had a flawless cut (beginner's luck) of the hpr hieroglyph, and I laughed with a crafter's glee.

While I was at it, I had the cutter-plotter cut out some painter's tape stars.  If I had been thinking, I would have made them duat, or netherworld, stars, (𓇽 ) but they were plain, regular ones.     I also cut out two larger beetles out of 3x5 index cards with a vague notion that they might be able to roll the eggs like their live counterparts will roll dung balls.  

After that, it was a matter of setting up the dye from a kit and dunking eggs.  Neither Mark nor The Child were really into the process, although Mark was interested in natural dyes and tried out onion skins and some Earl Grey tea as dyes.  

The most difficult part was waiting for the eggs, and more importantly, the painter's tape, to dry so that there wouldn't be smudges.  There were some places where the tape had buckled a bit:  worst-case they made some smudged boundaries; best-case there was a kind of marbling effect in some of the stars.  

Next time I will re-work the wing-case design to simplify it and make it less of a T-shape and more of a Y-shape.  It might be possible to stencil a short word or phrase and have it wrapped around the widest part of the egg.  

The eggs were received well (at least on social media) and added to the decor of my folks' Easter table.  

Magic Dreams

Strange mash-up dream:  I was Vaneyl Askeveron--sort of, since I was still mostly me with some powers of levitation and not a brooding Herald-Mage.  I appeared at a game that was vaguely Quidditch, only now that I'm recalling, it was more on the ground, like soccer.  My recall is muddled.  One team declared me their captain (they all seemed to know me and were very enthusiastic; they did not remind me of anyone), and I attempted to sort out their game skills and positions; they all seemed to be teenagers, and the goalie may have been younger.  

The playing field dream-transformed from a large soccer field with white netted goal areas into a large enclosed area, surrounded by castle curtain walls and with tower-like barbicans capping either end.  Someone had a large locomotive they were attempting to navigate up stone steps, which was holding up the start of the game (somehow the locomotive was part of our team?).  

There was a dream shift, and I was in a collegiate setting, possibly the lobby of a library, surrounded by a knot of people—folks had brought their children to watch, so possibly it turned into a kind of Country Faire performance.  I was in a mutable state of undress, ritually pouring water over myself, soaping up, and rinsing, all while singing "Station of the Sun."  As the washing progressed, it became less of a personal ritual and more of a public performance, like a between-acts show of some sort.

I am not sure what this dream signifies other than possible performance anxiety of some sort.

Revisiting "The Sea Priestess"

I reread Dion Fortune's novel, "The Sea Priestess."  I don't recall when I purchased my copy—probably something like thirty years ago—so it's been a while since I read it.  In the first reading, I read it as a reader with NeoPagan interests; in the second reading, I was reading both as a writer looking at another writer's style and as a NeoPagan looking at ritual technique.  

I remember that the characters were unsympathetic, which Fortune herself remarks upon in her forward.  In the first read, the plot was slow; in the second read I realized it's because there's a lot of "talking heads."  I'd forgotten the story was set in 1930's England, in a small coastal town near Bristol (probably based on the area of Brean Down Fort), with its attendant British Middle Class Problems with hiring good help, small town conformity, and family finances.  

In the first read, I hadn't read much of her magical theory work; in the second read, I realized much of the dialog was statements on Fortune's theories on the magical polarity of male and female forces.   The Child and I were talking about 1930's England, and he pointed out that there would have been some gaps in the male population as a result of casualties during World War I.  This made me wonder at Fortune's focus on male and female vitality.

In the first read, the rituals' descriptions were dense; in the second, I was more interested in them technically.  There was recognizable material in "The Sea Priestess" that appears in some Wiccan ritual; a kind of "Isis-Istarte" chant shows up in the invocations.

I had forgotten that reincarnation and past lives from Atlantis were major plot points.  It occurs to me that "The Sea Priestess" may be one of the first "I was Morgana Le Fey in a past life" pieces of fiction.    There was some of the typical Fortune racial stereotypes, with some "the Atlantian religious clan did not allow out-clan breeding in order to keep the bloodline pure and attuned to the higher powers," lore thrown in—which doesn't age well.

What works best is some of the evocative language of the coastal setting,  the rituals, and when the characters commune with the moon, the sea, and the land.  

April Moon Near Taurus

The skies are clouding up again after a few days of relative clear.  Earlier this afternoon, I saw a half moon, but now the evening overcast has hidden it from view.  Possibly when the night becomes darker I'll be able to guess where the moon is by the glow of the clouds.  

The other night I managed to photograph the crescent moon as it sailed between the Pleiades and Aldebaran.   I looked at some similar photos from last year; I think those photos are a little better because I used a higher ISO, I was therefore able to take shorter exposures which resulted in less star streaking.  

I am hoping that in a month's time the skies will be clear enough to catch a slender crescent near Taurus.  The timing will be tricky because the whole spectacle will be closer to the setting sun, so while the Moon should be visible, it might not be so easy to see the Pleiades.  

COVID-19 restrictions are easing up.  It's taking some getting used to.  I'm so used to wearing a mask when I go into work that not wearing one, and being in an inside open space with people who also aren't wearing makes feels weird.  I will have to keep a more consistent eye on the local COVID case count to see if a spike starts up.  

Cats, Books, and Dreams

Yesterday was a vet day:  I loaded both cats into carriers and drove them to the vet's for their vaccinations.  The theory was if they were both going at the same time, they'd keep each other calm.  Based on the syncopated caterwauling, I'd say it was a bogus theory.  

The cats eventually forgave me for stuffing them into cages and taking them to That Awful Place -- Smokey was over it about ninety minutes after we got home; but Cicero held out all afternoon and refused to come into the house, even when it was hailing.  To be fair, he had hidden under our bed when he heard Smokey wailing from his cage, but I had coaxed him out and then immediately thrust him into a small loaner carrier.  

That evening, I read the synopsis of Dion Fortune's contribution to Neo-Paganism in Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon," as a kind of counter-balance to some other readings.

So, naturally, I dreamed...

I was on an island research center.  The island was rocky and temperate -- there were fir trees instead of a jungle, and it wasn't icy.  A group of us entered the center, which was blocky and reminiscent of classical architecture.  The more I think about it, the more I am realizing that it was based on the architecture of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

There was something about riding an elevator, which, paradoxically, seemed to be lowering (there was some sort of shuttling motion in the rafters of the elevator car as if a cable was being unwound), but we travelled up to one of the upper floors.  There was also something about entering a defunct part of a library -- in my dream's eye, I saw a floor schematic of the complex, and we entered a greyed out portion.  This had been under the prevue of an unnamed country, but they had withdrawn from the research center for reasons that were never revealed in the dream. 

Somewhere around here in the dream, Cicero was with me.  We were in a kind of card catalog hall, with lots of shelves of unread books.  The room was large and airy, but dim, as if only every third light worked.  Leaning up against a shelf was a pile of books which included Dion Fortune's "Moon Magic," "The Sea Priestess," some other books of her fiction, and some sort of book on antiquities that belonged to my parents (their names were written on the inside cover of the book.  The sense was that since this section of the research center was closed, if we wanted to, we could take some of the books.  I wanted some of the books I saw, especially the one that had been my parents' -- in the dream I supposed that the book had been left behind when they left the Mangla Dam Project, but I couldn't figure out how it had ended up in a foreign government's library.  I had a sense that this was my, or at least my family's, book, and that I had every right to it.

The ownership of the books didn't resolve, and the group left the library.  There was something here about going down a level or two to a kind of utility or engineering floor filled with lots of unused machinery.  At this point, Cicero got away from me (he'd been good up until then) and I had to coax him out from between collections of shelved tools and conduit that he'd crawled into.

There was probably more to the dream, but that's all I recall.  What strikes me about this dream is that it could have turned into an elevator anxiety dream, but didn't; it could have turned into a lost in a twisty, constricted place, but it didn't; and that it was set in a conflation of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Library of Alexandria.  

 

New Moon and Dreams

It's new moon.  This last one has been somewhat typical in that instead of feeling the Currents of Nature Flowing through the Secret Station of Regeneration, I've just felt fatigued.  

Lately I've been trying to use social media less and journal by hand more.  I'm doing this to recondition my brain to go through the mechanics of writing and composing, to help with focus, and also to improve my dream recall.  One advantage of journaling is that I don't have to censor it or make it as publicly performative as much as I would for an on-line post.  

It's hard to tell if it's working, but I at least I have had some interesting dream images appear over the last two weeks.  Significantly, I had a "Return to Arcosanti" dream the other day that was different on three counts.  Instead of being there by myself, Mark was with me;  instead of feeling stuck there and anxious about travel back, Mark said, "We're not in a hurry. Why don't we spend the night?", and; instead of the canyon being filled with a giant lake, there was a glowing, crystal structure at the base of the southern mesa facing the site.   

On the reading front, I set aside Jung while I read a fluffy book about Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune.  I guess I've been spoiled by Ronald Hutton, because I was disappointed by the second- and third-hand anecdotes and speculation in the book.  At 160 pages, it was a quick read  filled with trivia.  The central theses are that Crowley and Fortune might have worked together, that they were geniuses, that they lay the astral groundwork for the queer (Crowley) and women's (Fortune) movements through sex magick, and taken together they represent balanced polarities working in the magical European landscape of the mid 1900's.  While the book did read like the author's notes on other books,  I did think that working with a reverse-chronology and beginning the book with the two's deaths was a clever choice.  I'm not sure if I would hang onto the book it, but the book could be an interesting source for writing magician characters.