PrAIse Jeezes

For reasons, I wanted to create an image of jeezis that looked like an old Klasky-Csupo cartoon, like Rugrats, Ahh Real Monsters, or Wild Thornberrys.  Trying this in midj came back with very undignified results, quite amusing to me.  You should be scared, jeezis.  I hate you and I’m coming for your ass.

Anyway, I actually wanted a result with smaller eyes, like the Thornberrys, but I did like the vibes on those ones, so I used one as an image prompt, while using words to tease out smaller eyeballs.  I said “little tiny eyes” and –no large eyes, bulgy eyes, big eyes.  However, when using a bug-eyed image prompt and telling it to not make bug-eyes, I broke the AI’s mind.  Results:

Eldritch, son.  Once again, I was heartily amused, tho I gave up on making smol eyes, for now.

Next, unrelated, I was trying to get some ideas for motifs, rendering style, and composition, in a heraldic design.  Composition isn’t my strong suit as a visual artist.  This was a really strong result, and shows what I was looking for: not an image I could use as my final design, but something that can inform aspects of it.

The next one had a more rough-hewn texture and chiaroscuro that was appealing in other ways.  I have a wealth of inspirations to choose from, with a few pushes of a button.  I likes AI art tools.

I also like randomly recombining unrelated AI works, just to see what comes out, so putting previous jeezies together with heraldry, I got…

Again, love the indignity.  Nice texture too.  This next one brings back the chickenshitness of the klasky-csupo messiae.

But this is my favorite, reflecting my feelings on the big mans.  Catch one in the dome, motherfucker.  Catch you on the flipside.

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I Gets Religion

You gotta get yourself religion
And try to serve the lord
While the blood’s
Still warm
In your veins…

I dunno who wrote that but it played in the background of a deleted scene in Lord of Illusions.  Love that shit.  But yes, to the point…

I want the protection of religious faith, in a country that gives lip service to allowing non-christians religious liberties, but will never ever do the same for atheists.  But it has to be real, or I’ll fold under inquisition.  I need something I can believe in, and per some legal definitions, that needs to be a higher power.

Now more than ever I do believe in a higher power.  I believe that Chaos reigns supreme over both the meek and the mighty, that no human truly controls their own life or destiny.  The most powerful motherfucker in the world cannot keep shit from coming out his asshole on live TV.  The rich can never act with beneficence or generosity.  The bourgeoisie can do nothing but slide into fascism over and over and over again.

We’re all controlled by something which is why even the conspiracies that are actually true are a bad joke.  CIA you don’t own shit at the end of the day except your own bloody hands and wasted lives.

Entropy, of which Death is just one aspect, as best expressed by Ian Malcolm in Yurassis Next, “The kind of control you’re attempting simply is… it’s not possible.”  But not just dinosaurs, not nature more broadly, like in his little speech.  It’s everything.  The only consolations I’ve ever known are dark consolations, and it’s more of the same – the fuckos that rule the world are still subject to everything that they fear, everything that they want, everything that they’re afraid of losing.  They can ruin a lot, but they can’t control everybody all the time any more than the US could beat Vietnam.

This isn’t Discordianism, except insofar as those hippy fucks would claim everything is everything and nothing, and this would naturally be enfolded by that.  A lot of key differences, most notably that I don’t entertain headaches and I don’t love my higher power.  I just feel its explanatory power in all aspects of life, and it lets me throw up my hands sometimes when I need to.

I wouldn’t say I have holy, sacred, or unholy books or people to elevate, but there are some cultural icons that resonate with these feelings.

Ian Malcolm.  Not Mr. Goldblum, not even Mr. Crichton.  He is greater than the sum of his parts.  He showed me a truth I initially scoffed at, disregarded as inane.  Of course you can keep dinosaurs in a zoo, if you do it right.  And then it all came to pass, and now I know.

The Two Maxes.  We are living in the cyberpunk dystopia as symbolized by Max Headroom, and living in anticipation of the post-apocalypse as symbolized by Mad Max.

Hellstar Remina.  The only ethos worth having when everything is bad, it’s the ethos that allows you to keep doing good.  I don’t find that in abasement and martyrdom.  I find it in two characters from Hellstar Remina.  Remina herself, not strong enough to do much more than suffer what the world does to her, and the grace with which she does so.  And the astronaut dropout Whatsisface, who is strong enough to help her, when all it can afford them is a short reprieve from the evils of the world, leading up to certain death.  He is Antifa.

The Adversary.  My girl Satan is weak right now, tho people who do not recognize her true form may suppose the opposite.  Satan is the one who opposes sanctimonious authority, and she has been thrust like Sisyphus to the bottom of the mountain.  It will be a while before she has the sauce to start pushing that boulder up again, but when she does, she’s on my list too.

… that’s all my thoughts for the moment.

–

Sometimes I’m an Antichrist

This is a post that sat not-quite-finished in my drafts since before October, dusted off because I am done with my “hope” series.  That’s not to say I’m going doom, just that my big push is over.  I will try to include a silver or at least grey lining in all future posts on dire topics.  If you missed any of my hope articles and want to check them out, I had at least one a day between 11/6 and 11/16.  Oh 2024, what a time…

Anyway, the same old shit, back to one post most days:

***

The massive fuckboyism of organized atheism has put me off the brand completely.  You won’t catch me saying “atheist and proud,” because how can I be?  Don’t come up in my comments begging for a list of the dozens of famous atheists that have turned out to be shitbirds.  The movement itself was a contributing factor to the rise of reactionary fascism, and while FtB types should feel good about how we conducted ourselves since Deep Rifts 2.0, most of us were part of the problem for a decade leading up to it.*

But I do hate jeezis an awful lot.  If hate could power telekinesis, I’d have accidentally caused a few million in property destruction over the years.  I see a bus go by with the name of some vile religious fake charity, youth group, church, or whatever?  One devil claw in the side, scraping through the words as it passes by.  Billboards in flames.  Church facades in rubble.

I’ve long thought the origin of American fiction’s love for underdogs has to do with our national narrative of rebellious colonies, but realized today it’s apiece with the way jeezis fans here will imagine themselves oppressed, and that can be traced all the way back to the origin of xtianity** itself.  Why in fuck did the Romans adopt the religion of some Hebrews – people they’d colonized and oppressed?

It’s because of that dramatic story in Exodus, and the reiteration of the same theme in jeezy’s story – wanting to play the brave victim.  It captured imaginations.  More importantly, it somehow gave license to people with all the power in the world to feel like they were oppressed courageous fighters for that one special truth.

Religion in general promotes and protects itself with truth claims no matter where it’s found, but these narratives of oppression have a unique appeal which has given the abrahamic faiths potent recruiting power – especially xtianity.  Jewish and Muslim people aren’t mine to talk about, but xtians are.  They spread jeezix germs nowadays with tears for the magic suffering boy (and voter suppression and using collection plate money to fund the legalized murder of gay people abroad).

Look at what you did, sinners.  You made the magic boy cry.  And when you accept him into your hearts, you can feel the empowerment of that suffering.  His performative victimhood is yours!  For just $9.99 a month (which we will use to prop up conservatives that help us launder more money and eviscerate the social programs on which so many of you depend).

Jesus is my enemy.  Progressive and liberal xtians aren’t necessarily my enemies, but if they see me talking like this and take it that way?  Fine.  Your boy is shit.  He’s an excuse to feel oppressed in a culture where your fellows in faith have control of nearly everything, to feel justified in persecuting anybody who can’t or won’t fall in line with your fables.

If xtianity was truly a good thing, it wouldn’t still hold a concept of hell, wouldn’t separate the saved from the damned.  It would just give to everyone, and take nothing in return.***  It can’t pretend to.  If jesus the superghost exists, and christianity is his will, then he can be held to account for so many crimes, enormous and small.  Not a day goes by that somebody isn’t victimized in his name.  This entire nation is about to get reamed by his holeyness.

He’s in my head because I’m culturally xtian.  Even if I’ve never believed, I absorbed the lessons of misogyny and homophobia and islamophobia from the culture he controls, and they made me do bad things, made me harm myself, made me harm others – or at least annoy them.

Progressives can quote all the parts of the bible where magic boy is not being hot trash, but conservatives have the veto of cultural dominance.  Your version of jeezis has never held sway over the masses.  The one in control demands human sacrifice and is already drinking that tithe of blood and souls from those who died waiting for an abortion.

I’d crucify him again just for that.

–

*It’s funny that slymer bitch “nunyabiznis” is Xitting that we should feel bad for making him a fascist.  Fucko, the only thing we should feel bad about is that we were rubbing elbows with you up until the soup went down.  The movement was always ableism and islamophobia with a progressive gloss.  In our own separate ways, we’ve both figured that out, and are now living our truths.  It’s not our fault if your truth makes it hard for you to look in a mirror.

**I get that x can stand for jesus, hence xmas and xianity.  I just think xtianity sounds better, but honestly I’m up on the air for what I should call this dogshit what I’ve been stewing in.  I don’t want to call it by the name it wants for itself.

***It’s a low bar to clear but I’m holier than that, giving help to people regardless of political persuasion, nine to five – for less money than I’d need to pay my mortgage by myself!  I’m one accident away from disaster, as most of us are, but I’m still putting myself out – even to utter fucking bastards – for this pittance.  Back of the line, jesus.  I’m numba one!  Seriously, fuck you!

–

Does this post need a silver lining?  Maybe.  Most of us are not women whose lives depend on an abortion in the Midwest or south, not gay people in Uganda, so most of us will be fine – just sad, is all.  Whoever you are or however much risk you personally endure, take care of each other and take care of yourselves, comrades.  I love you!

Monster’s Wedding

Me and my dude have a relationship.  Been together close to 19 years, if I got that right.  But we never got married, because a bunch of reasons that were not wholly clear to me until now, when the plan is in place.  We’re gonna make it official October 13th.  This is important for reasons of legal protections and whatnot, and also to get what we deserve, which is recognition for this thing we got.  But, this is kind of a bad time.

We have little money and incredibly few family and friends, we aren’t going to reproduce, and we’re not young.  Marriage as popularly conceived heavily leans on those things.  It’s to have a day of expensive shangri-la decadence?  No.  It’s a way to celebrate the merging of two families and sets of friends in a great big… there’s a guest list of officiant, wedded, and three other people.  It’s a way to make holy or legitimate the birth of your… nope.  It’s two wacky kids starting life together as…  nope.

If you put this question to the masses, the usual answer is “don’t bother” or “just elope.”  But our self-respect won’t let that stand.  We deserve a genuine ceremony, not scratching paper with ballpoint pens under fluorescent lights in an office space.  The thing is this – as you take away all the things of marriage as currently conceived, either because you can’t afford them or don’t want to do them, what do you replace them with?  Eventually, you have nothing left, and have to reinvent marriage from scratch.

One could wonder how we ended up with so few friends and family.  I have the stereotypical broken home, my dude just had a single mom from generation of socially maladjusted people who couldn’t stay married or get married in the first place, half of whom are now dead.  My dude has health problems that have him socially isolated, I just don’t feel the need for friends outside of my most important few, and I let the others all drift away.  I don’t think about this most of the time, but it does have us looking like a pair of quasimodos living on a blasted margin of human society.  A wedding of monsters.

It’s kind of darkly funny.  I had an internet homie read one of my unpublished novels and she said it struck her as incredibly wrong the main character didn’t have a lot of friends and family, a community around her.  It never occurred to me to write that for her, because I don’t think of life as having a lot of people in it.  A little failure of my imagination.

ALL THAT’S TO SAY,

I am trying to reinvent the wheel of Marriage between now and October 13th.  Any suggestions that don’t involve additional invites or thousands of dollars may be welcomed.  The officiant is my brother, the witnesses my father and my dude’s mom, and my home boy Jeremy.

Ideally my bro will leave his daughters at home because they are about 6 and 4 and would almost certainly misbehave – less of a problem with a wedding crowd to disappear into than it would be in our tiny condo living room.  But he might not have a choice but to bring them and not his wife, so having her tend them is not a workable solution at the moment.  Maybe Jeremy can play croquet with them on the dead grass behind nuestra casa.

Meanwhile, what do we do or say at this thing?  How to make it feel like a ceremony instead of an awkward tea party of people who don’t know or necessarily like each other?

I’ve been pondering ritual magic.  My dude once had a hallucination as a small child, possibly a seizure, where he saw a small donkey go into his house.  He pursued it but could not find it.  In studying demonology, I found there’s a demon called gamigin or samigin (plus many variant spellings) that is sometimes depicted as a small donkey.  This tells us, if there’s anything in occultism, Sammy Gene is my dude’s patron spirit.  Who is mine?  I find Acar from the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum interesting.  Also our house is full of random arthropods, and Acar helps you control those.  Lambes, on the other hand, has male pronouns, appears as a woman, and causes people of all sexes to fall in love with the conjurer.  So much higher queer points.

Anyway, Acar and Lambes did not have Ars Goetia-styled sigils so I had to make up my own.  Sammy’s is as depicted in ye olde grimoire’s tho, save an update on the name.  How do you like me now?  Or as some transphobic catholic tweeter once famously said, This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation.  Revel in the annihilation of Man as the image of God.  DESTROY.  Plot designs of death.  Disfigure the face of Man and Woman.

But still, one of the invitees -somebody we have to live with- is christian, so overt hostility to god jeezups is not gonna do.  I’ll just slip these bad boys under the rug.  Feel like I’ve lost track of the purpose of the post.  Back to business…

Invitees show up at small condo with tiny living rooms and dining rooms in which to hang out.  There is a back yard, which is not fenced off from our closest neighbors, but possibly also a place to be.  We have some minor refreshments and chit chat, then

THE INVOCATION

Some kinda preamble to the marriage.  Normally middle class people would feed everybody foie gras on platinum spoons or something, I don’t know.  I feel like we should try to fill ten to thirty minutes with this, whatever it is.

THE UNION OF QUEER PEEPS

Some kinda marriage.  Normally an able-bodied dad walks a daughter down an aisle, I guess a man gets escorted by a home boy?  Then a preacher says jesus is cool, asks if we wanna do some slam poetry vows, then asks the do you do you, then it’s I do, rings, mandatory public display of affection, and you are forcibly escorted out of the building.  I’m not sure how we’ll do this at all.  PDA would be super-awk outside of a chaste smooch.  Even standing for the ceremony is kinda dubious in our small space and general comfort.  I feel like the run time for this should be ten minutes-ish?

POSTAMBLE

If we were outside, we stay outside for a minute to do some kind of a thing.  If we were inside, we go outside, because one of the things my dude is into is getting confetti chucked at us, but he doesn’t wanna clean it out of couch cushions.  Normally the woman one of us would chuck flowers at some nerds, then we get rice bukkake’d.  I don’t know, this could be pretty short.  Oh yeah, and my dude is cool with cutting a cake together, so this could end in a dining room, perhaps.

EVENING ENTERTAINMENTS

I just don’t dig board games, for the most part.  I like scrabble but that’s because I’m better than average at it, and people don’t love losing to me, and I don’t wanna give anybody a bad time.  Uno feels low stakes and foolish.  Penny ante poker?  I don’t know.

After that I think we’re good.  Any ideas?

–

500 Words on the Topic of Hellraisin’

My donors are so shy and unimposing.  I have a guess who one of them is, and if I’m right, he might like a word about cenobites…  Jeezis Shit, I just went searching for the origin of the quote “Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me” and the entire internet thinks Rihanna came up with it.  I heard that shit in junior high and I’m forty-seven years old, so … time travel?  I was thinking, maybe Andrew Dice Clay, but that didn’t come back with anything.  Why can I imagine it in Woody Allen’s voice?  Somebody help me.

Anyway, sexy menace.  Tearing your soul apart as a euphemism for the ecstasy of orgasm.  Chains and blades and hooks with a life of their own.  The black-eyed priests and nuns and less specifically gendered clergy of Hell, in sexy leather clothes, ready to give you the business.  You know you want it.

Something about the cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (original story Hellbound Heart) is just sooo iconic.  They are gods among monsters.  I’d love to come up with something that hits the same way, but is it possible?  Is that kind of idea just lightning in a bottle?  Were they a Platonic Ideal just waiting in the realm of Forms, and Barker just happened to be the first guy to pluck them from that airy plane?

There’s the seeker.  Frank “Come to Daddy” Cotton and his ilk.  Somebody chasing a high that can only be found in transgression, and there’s never enough.  Then there’s the box.  Beautiful, elegant, small, activated by touch, by curiosity.  The cracks in the world, admitting the power of Leviathan.

Then there’s the Apostles of Pain.  The cenobites.  Love those guys.  I’m not into S&M, not really, but the look of it all?  Very cool.  I like cool things.  I like the aesthetics.  Total poser, I know.  I remember being in The Metro on Seattle’s Broadway buying leather accoutrement, and the clerk asked, “Stocking up for a good time?”  I felt so uncool.  Whaddyagonnado?

I guess I could seek the box, do that fiddly hand jive, unlock the lament configuration, and get my cool on.  Or my flesh off, whichever happens first.  I’ll be like the doctor in Hellraiser II, “To think, I hesitated!”

I came up with the core of a formula for trying to arrive at the power of Icon in monster design.  Come up with Sinister Themes of the monster, Visual Motifs, Colors, Shapes, Textures, Powers, and Places associated with them.  You can see some mention of it here.  I still haven’t successfully used it to come up with anything interesting.  Just never got around to it.  Maybe on another one of these posts.

For now, this post will just be a note of admiration for the creation of a master.  Maybe when I’ve sold my screenplay for Gun Lemurs and made a bank full of money, I can buy the time to pursue my own immolation.  To earn that charisma.  Wish me luck?

–

1000 Words on the Role of Satan in US Religion

A donation with a topic, fantastic!  What is the role of Satan in current American religions?

What I want is a metaphor.  A role as a personified archetype.  To contemporary US christianity, is Satan a brother?  A gadfly?  A nemesis?  A lover?  Maybe we can arrive at this through observation.

To start with, few actually believe in Satan.  The first poll I could find says the number is closer to 60% than to 50% but I don’t fuckin’ believe it.  That’s belief from the mouth, from the top of the head in survey mode.  What’s in your heart?  Is there really a supernatural nemesis to your god’s designs, tempting people with forbidden pleasures?  Aside from me, I mean.

There’s an analog for that in something my bf told me about.  Somewhere on internet, republicans were grousing about the stolen election and a troll appeared to say, “Hahaha, I was a voting booth volunteer and I threw out millions of republican votes, teehee.”  They tutted at him like, “Oh you darn rascal,” but didn’t seem nearly as mad as they should be.  This is their boogeyman; this is what they believe happened.  Or do they?

Likewise rizzless stooge Candace Owens tut-tuts about the devilish queer menace of the Sam Smith-Kim Petras joke jam “Unholy,” but something in her performance is so lackluster.  Oh you kids, playin’ at satanisms.  You won’t think it’s so fun when the devil comes to collect his due, which is totally gonna happen…

I just don’t believe them.  I’m sure some smaller percentage of USians are for real about fearing The Adversary, but they’re too busy abusing children and stockpiling weapons to participate in polls.  Gods-peed, christian soldiers.  Anyway,

The Church of Satan have formalized this relationship.  You perform your belief in Satan and we’ll perform the part you have written for us.  It’s a shame the high-ups are just nazi fucks who tricked rebellious progressive types into paying for their vacations and incompetent pet lawyers, because they give lip service to promoting all the good things that US xtians despise.  But who cares even if they were actually cool?  They’re lesser court jesters with no impact on the larger society.  I just mention them here as a cultural phenomenon that shows how shallow the belief in Satan really is.

So what role does Satan play in modern US religion?  A less important boogeyman to keep children in bed.  A scarecrow that is absolutely covered in crow shit.  Nobody of consequence.  That cousin who you talk shit about but still invite to the party, maybe hoping they’ll do something scandalous for gossip fuel, but it just never happens.

I kid, I kid.  Hail me.

No, seriously, I’d like to personally freak every human being in the Unholy video except for the dirty dirty boy the song is about.  Hit me up Sammy.  But the end result is inarguably less cool than Lil’ Nas X’s performative unholiness.

On the other hand, Sam Smith and Kim Petras aren’t American Satans and Lil’ Nas X is, so…  I am reminded now, thinking about African Americans, of the expression, “Not today, Satan.”  It’s a way to dismiss the temptation to act the fool, I think usually through violence.  Satan can be in the person tempting you to “go upside their head,” or maybe just be the part of one’s self that feels temptation.

This is one key difference between Satan in US christianity and Satan in, say, US judaism.  In judaism it seems like HaSatan is a figure from the past, or a metaphor, or just generally unimportant.  In christianity (as practiced more than in the book itself), he’s an omnipresent mirror image of god.  Similar powers, only differing in that Satan is destined to lose at the end of time.  At least for some people, Jesus is there when you wanna be a good boy; Satan is there when you are drunk or jackin’ it or whatever.

I guess the belief in both is pretty situational.  A christian is more likely to feel like Satan is real if they were exposed to bad situations.  I’m culturally christian, much as I reject that entire deal, and it colors my perception of evil when I encounter it.  I’d like to reverse that in my head.  Why should an anti-christ see devils as evil?  Brainwashing, man.  Like when I sip my pop during the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” shit before movies.  (For more on my feelings about deviltry, see this article.)

There are some who believe we’re in a new era of “Satanic Panic.”  Looking over the article on the ’80s version, I don’t buy that.  QAnon definitely takes a lot of cues from that era, but it doesn’t get serious play on mainstream TV.  Fox might like to fondle the Q balls, but they couldn’t bring themselves to work the shaft.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but there are no cases recently where conspiracy theorists have managed to prosecute people for trafficking christian babies out of pizza parlors, without getting laughed out of the courtroom.  Nothing on the order of the McMartin preschool trial.

But maybe we can get there.  The republican parts of the USA are drowning in wild garbage ideas, with no light to be seen.  So getting back to my original aim, taking all these things into account, what role does Satan play?  The wall non-fundies will have their back against when fevered right wingers start shooting again?  Windmill giants to their Don Quixotes?

My personification of Satan must be a cipher, a passive figure onto which ideas are projected.  A scapegoat?  A ghost.  A person who exists more as an idea than an entity.  Let’s say religious America is an abandoned child, who wonders about her parents, builds theories about them.  Daddy God must be good, Mommy Satan must be the wicked harridan who left you in that garbage can behind the church.  One day Daddy will find you and set things right.  One day you will find Mommy and make her suffer.

Satan is whoever you want her to be, America.

–

Occult Expert Needed

Trying to find a source for some half-remembered knowledge.  This is a real long shot, but I hope one of you can help out.

When I was researching demons a few years ago, I randomly came across a book (on either google books or project gutenberg) purporting to be about folklore / legends / supernatural things from the Near East / Middle East / Orient / Araby / Turkdom / something like that.  This wasn’t the Arabian Nights so don’t bother mentioning that.  Pretty sure it wasn’t a different work by the same author.  I apparently failed to bookmark it and I’m pissed at myself.

Anyway, I don’t need the book if somebody can just give me any kind of source or citation for the idea I’m remembering from it.  Supposedly, per that author, there is an idea in the Middle East that this is not god’s first creation.  Basically, dude makes universes for kicks and destroys them when they don’t work out, and we’re up to the sixth or later version of reality.  Djinni are leftover from a previous world, in that paradigm.

So is this something anybody has ever believed or conjectured in the Arabic or Farsi spheres?  Is it some Theosophist ass-pull?  Was the author just being unusually creative for the 1800s?  Googling this is tricky because there is so much religious and scifi-fantasy BS (same diff?) polluting results.  Seems like there may be some ideas about cyclical creation and destruction from further east (India) but I’m pretty sure this was a book about Middle Eastern beliefs, even if it didn’t use modern terms for it.
–

The Satanic Temple is Still Bullshit

I remember this cute chubby wild-eyed dude breathlessly extolling satanic ideals when The Satanic Temple was newer, on some TV interview, I feel like it was in the great lakes area?  Principled blasphemy seemed their higher calling, something I can really get behind.  So when I found out they were egregiously exaggerating their ability to help people get abortions to snake funds from real abortion activists, that the founders are an unashamedly ableist eugenicist and a buddy to alt reich fucks, that they are shady as all hell on the business side, and that they are willing to dump millions of donated dollars into SLAPP suits against their detractors?  I was like.  Fuck.  I’m fed up with living in a world run by liars and thieves.  I gotta go take a nap.

But shitheads never sleep, so they’ve appealed the latest round of their repeatedly failed SLAPP suit against some queer satanic people in my home state, while still also suing a half dozen other people who don’t deserve it.  Give if you can, to my homies or to anybody who is opposing these crypto-fascist con artists.

edit to add: SRSLY THO

Anybody not bothering to read this for comprehension because it’s about those guys that made you chuckle one time, consider that if I had more traffic on this blog, they would already have hit FtB with another SLAPP suit, like the Richard-Carrier-ass hateful bitches they are.

 

Random Thunks

Happy Halloween ladies, and I mean that in the same way that Clancy Brown’s character in Highlander meant it, when he said it to those nuns.  It’s gonna be a busy one and I’ll probably turn in the last of my Spooktobers tomorrow, though they are in the works.  Tomorrow also the first day of NaNoWriMo, and I’m gonna be hella busy that day too.  In the meantime, allow me to share with you an example of my random thunks, from when I was on the john yesterday.

My cat came to meow for pets.  I called him “little duder” though he is little neuter.  As cat names spin out, I called him “Little Duderonomy,” a reference to “Old Deuteronomy” from Cats, which I’m only familiar with from videos mocking the film.  That got me thinking about Judi Dench playing Old Deut in the scary movie, and about the old testament book of Deuteronomy.

I don’t know from the bible, really.  I feel like Deuteronomy was a close neighbor of Leviticus, in the whole “this is still a religion of abject patriarchy and genocidal xenophobia” part of the works.  In that context, where “priestess” is a dirty word that will get you filleted like a salmon, Judi Dench as a cleric for cat religion becomes a bit amusing.

And that got me thinking about the differences between judaism and xtianity in how they approach their holy writ.  In studying demonology, I strayed into some rabbinical texts, and was struck by how much more scholarly they were than the xtian ones.  But that very density of thought, the layers and layers of analysis and (motivated) reasoning, was all in the service of adding mystique to harmful bullshit.  Bullshit that was, at its core, as simple as a total ass-pull.

As much as Agrippa would look like a basic bitch next to some of those rabbis, his system of categorizing and breaking down everything in the world into labels and spirits and numbers, it was just more appealing to me.  And that makes sense, because it was at least an indirect influence on Linnaeus, and subsequently all that ongoing work of piecing together the tree of life – the real tree of life, not the kabbalah – which is something I love to reflect on.

And that got me thinking about my own work in demonology, how I went searching for something like a canon of demons, found out it was a bullshitting free-for-all, and then hatched a foolish dream of bringing it altogether in a modern synthesis that irons out the contradictions.  If I did that, I would be putting reason and thought and structure onto a cartoonish mass of nonsense, which would make me better than those rabbis only in that I’m not also enforcing violent patriarchy.  I mean, that’s not nothing, but I wonder that I should be reiterating the errors of judaism and xtianity in my precious spare time.

That’s it, enjoy!

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Beaten but Possibly Not Unbowed

Somebody beat me to the publication of a translation of the demonology in the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum, which readers may recall I was playing at in 2020.  That does take some of the already pathetic wind out of my sails on that backburnered project, but I don’t think my work will be without merit as an alternative look at the same material.  There are judgement calls to be made in translation, you see, and I don’t agree with all of this translator’s choices.  Plus I intend to illustrate my book.

I don’t know.  Maybe I do it, maybe I don’t.  I’m not saying I’m giving up just yet.  We’ll see.

A highlight of that translator’s introductory section, for me, was the suggestion differences in the descriptions of the same demons from various grimoires could be the result of actual experience of communion with those creatures.  I thought that was charming.  My take on the same issues cannot help but be less generous to the possibility supernatural phenomena.  Philosophical materialism is in my bones.

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