#in that it was like ‘maybe the real satanism was the generational family brokenness we perpetuated along the way’

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

idk WHAT put it into my head that Devil in Ohio was based on a true story but this was me watching the end

#- HK #i was like FIRST OF ALL you’re telling me there was a satanic cult in Ohio since the 20s with multiple murders and i’ve NEVER heard of it #tho to be fair i’d never heard of Mark Hoffmann either and that really did happen #but SECOND OF ALL you’re telling me you’re gonna end it THERE?? and not tell me what happened afterward?? #well no Hadlai because nothing happened afterward because it’s all made up #mobile #x #I actually thought the ending was really interesting #in that it was like ‘maybe the real satanism was the generational family brokenness we perpetuated along the way’ #but without ever validating the actual satanism as some kind of legitimate belief system #and the MC was like ‘taking care of my family was a coping mechanism to distract from my real problems/self’ #and i was like I did NOT just watch this whole show for THAT to be the lesson #but the the show was like ‘sike lady you’ve been duped into litchrally replacing your family and they were right all along’ #nice #it was an inchresting watch for me given that I my previous job involved generational trauma AND satanic cults #I appreciated the theme of ‘yes mothers may be victims of abuse but they are also responsible for protection of their children’ #cause I was like ‘girl you canNOT take a traumatized satanic cult member into your home of three daughters r u NUTS’

[absolutepokemontrash]

MC’s Half Demon and They Look Awfully Familiar Part 4

(The side characters strike again!)

Part 1 Part 2 Lessons 1-5 Part 2.5 Group Retreat Lessons 10-12 Part 3

L!MC= Lucifer’s kid | M!MC= Mammon’s kid | A!MC=Asmo’s kid

Let’s get right to it!

The Uncle That Hardcore Simps For His Spouse In the Most Wholesome Way (Diavolo)

Gasp! More half-demon kids? Oh my! Maybe if he tried again next year a kid of his own would pop down! Hang on- he hadn’t slept with a human in almost a century... dang. No kids for him...

...maybe...

Remember when I said Diavolo would try to do those stereotypical dad (tm) things and be hip with the kids? Yeah he keeps doing that.

The number of broken windows related to wayward baseballs goes up 150%. At least that’s how they all figured out that M!MC is nearsighted like their dad!

M!MC had developed a bit of a habit of telling Diavolo about cool human stuff and making the Crown Prince even more interested in the human world than normal.

You may be thinking “what’s so bad about that?” well, the number of yo-yos at RAD went up so high that Lucifer had to ban them.

Belphie and Satan, being the rebels they are, became yo-yo masters specifically to spite Lucifer.

It was sort of like the fidget spinners craze if you were in school for that.

Oh, hi Lord Diavolo. What’s a fidget spinner? It’s this- I should stop talking...

Since no one learned their lesson from the previous incident, Diavolo threw another BBQ.

“Why are we doing this again?” L!MC asked to no one in particular.

“Don’t worry, L!MC. I’ve taken every precaution possible to make sure that what happened last time doesn’t happen again.” Diavolo said and continued in his crusade to cover the entire pathway with sidewalk chalk doodles.

L!MC, Luke, Diavolo, M!MC, Belphie, and A!MC were all busily drawing a wide variety of doodles and drawings with chalk while the other guests milled around nearby. A!MC was in the middle of drawing quite the nice looking Cerberus chibi, while M!MC and Belphie were drawing a lot of stick figures. L!MC and Luke had just finished a wonderful drawing of... an alpaca? Giraffe? Thing...? Hell, even they didn’t know what it was.

Diavolo looked over at M!MC’s stick figure army with a big smile on his face. “So what are all of them doing? It looks like that one’s flying!”

You could practically hear the Addam’s Family theme play as M!MC and Belphie looked at each other and grinned.

“Oh Belphie was just talking about L!MC’s flying lesson fails and I felt that an artist’s rendition was needed.” M!MC explained, he began to point out certain doodles. “Here’s L!MC getting up off the ground, then there’s them actually flying, and this is them falling in the fountain.”

L!MC looked over at the chalk and glared at M!MC. “It’s generous to call that an artist’s rendition. It looks like crap.”

“And what did you draw?” Belphie smirked at the alpaca-giraffe-thing, Luke protectively covered up the drawing (side note, Luke was wearing white and playing with sidewalk chalk, by the end of the day he looked like a walking pride flag).

“None of your business!” Luke huffed.

“And what about that one?” Diavolo seemed completely oblivious to the hostility brewing between the two groups, A!MC was completely used to this and walked away to grab a drink.

“Ah, good eye, Lord Diavolo!” M!MC chirped. “This is a drawing of the time L!MC almost burned down your kitchen.”

Diavolo laughed and gave M!MC a few pats on the head. “Very accurate!”

“You’re so lucky I followed the rules and didn’t bring a water gun...” L!MC growled as they slowly reached for their backpack.

“Yeah... lucky. Real lucky...” M!MC nodded as they tried to casually reach for their bag, Belphie followed suit.

“I’m so glad we all followed the rules.” Luke smiled, his own hand inching towards his bag.

There was a brief moment of stillness before the four of them whipped out their water guns and pointed them at each other.

“This BBQ ain’t big enough for the both of us!” M!MC’s terrible cowboy impression aside, their gun was poised to shoot directly at Luke and L!MC’s alpaca-giraffe-thing.

“Everyone, I know this is a human world tradition but-”

Belphie silenced Diavolo by pointing his water gun at him. “Sh, don’t talk unless you have a water gun as well.”

Deciding not to smite Belphie for treason, Diavolo pulled his own water gun out of his shirt. “Okay, what now?”

“Now, we’re in a standoff...” L!MC glowered at M!MC, the air was practically crackling with hostility...

Until a burst of flames got everyone to whirl around to see A!MC with hairspray and a lighter.

“No water guns! I refuse to go home shivering and covered in grass again!”

Crisis averted. Everyone went to go fail at throwing beanbags into a hole instead of shooting each other.

That was probably for the best... Belphie filled everyone’s water guns with paint.

The Uncle That Does All the Cooking for Family Dinners (Barbatos)

Remember how I said that Barbs liked smol Lucifer? Yea, he likes smol Asmo too. Smol Asmo is willing to admit that they don’t know how to use an oven and is willing to learn.

M!MC is formally banned from being within 50 feet of the kitchen. It’s for the best.

A!MC often tries to get Barbatos to look into the possible futures so they can see if they can avoid messing anything up and A!MC is just so adorable that Barbatos actually thinks about it.

He still says no every single time.

“Could you at least tell me if I have the possibility of doing something embarrassing in the near future?”

“My apologies, A!MC, but no.”

“P-please?”

“The answer remains the same.”

A!MC sighed and went back to helping chop vegetables. Under Barbatos’ tutelage, A!MC’s cooking ability had increased tenfold, they could now make as many burgers as they wanted without worrying about burning down the kitchen.

Pitying the anxious half-demon, Barbatos sighed. “I cannot confirm nor deny a future where your outfit gets ruined.”

A!MC perked up. “H-huh?”

“I cannot confirm nor deny a future where your outfit gets ruined.”

Quickly understanding what Barbatos was trying to do, A!MC quickly nodded and spent the rest of the cooking time carefully taking note of their surroundings.

“Hey! What’re you guys doin’?” M!MC had managed to get in... damn! Everyone must have been putting their best efforts in keeping Solomon away from the kitchen and forgot about M!MC...

“We’re just finishing up, M!MC,” Barbatos had on his ‘oh no...’ smile. “We don’t need any help.”

“Really? You guys sure?”

“Why are you so interested?” A!MC asked.

“Lucifer said that idle hands are the devil’s playthings and that I should go look for something productive to do.” M!MC huffed. “Very ironic phrase.”

“F-fine, I guess you can...” A!MC searched for the least destructive task they could give. “Take the utensils and set the table.”

M!MC gave them a mock salute and grabbed the utensils, as they turned to leave, they knocked a large bowl of chopped fruit over, sending the fruit pieces flying.

Remembering Barbatos’ prediction, A!MC didn’t bother to try and stop the fruit from falling, they only grabbed the nearest big plate they could find and shielded their outfit from harm. The fruit splattered harmlessly against the shield.

“Whoops... my bad. You alright, A!MC?” M!MC asked as A!MC inspected their outfit.

“Y-yes actually...” A!MC turned to Barbatos, who was already getting the cleaning supplies.

“Thank you!” A!MC whispered.

Barbatos smiled and nodded. “You’re very welcome, A!MC.”

Barbatos now has two sorta-children. A!MC and Luke!

M!MC means well, I swear! He just shouldn’t be allowed in a cooking environment!

The Cousin That Your Mom Points at and Goes “Look at Him, He Helps With the Dishes, Be More Like Him.” (Simeon)

Oh man... time for some more embarrassing stories.

“Asmo was the most adorable child, it’s a shame he was such a troublemaker...”

“Really? My dad?”

“What about mine?”

“I think you can guess.”

I cannot comment on Simeon’s help with flying lessons because I refuse to Headcanon what Simeon’s wings look like until canon gives us a GLIMMER. LIKE SERIOUSLY SOLMARE IM CURIOUS-

I have a feeling the children were quite curious as well.

“What do you think his wings look like?” M!MC asked A!MC as the two peered around the corner of one of the hallways in Purgatory Hall.

“I bet they’re super nice. But besides that...” A!MC leaned over and squinted. “Why is Simeon writing with a pen and pencil? He’s writing a book... shouldn’t he use a computer?”

“Bold of you to assume he knows how to use a computer.” M!MC snickered.

A!MC frowned. “Don’t be mean... I’m sure he knows how...”

Simeon picked up his DDD and took a picture of his face, seemingly by accident, with the flash on, causing him to drop the phone in surprise.

“Probably...”

The two surveyed their angel friend like two wildlife documenters, here we see, the Simeon, not in his natural habitat, surrounded by confusing technology...

“Do you think if we scare him his wings might pop out in surprise?” M!MC wondered aloud, A!MC shrugged.

“Maybe... but I don’t think we should bother him...” A!MC whispered. “He looks busy.”

“What are you two doing?”

It took literally every bit of willpower for the two half demons to not scream in absolute terror at the sudden interruption.

Ah... it was just Solomon... in an apron... Solomon... in cooking clothes...

Oh no.

“Spying on Simeon?” Solomon asked.

“N-no...” A!MC giggled nervously. “Just crouching casually in this hallway...”

“...smooth, A!MC.” M!MC rolled their eyes.

“Well, it’s great that you two are here, I made lunch!”

A!MC and M!MC looked at each other in pure horror, they needed to get out of there!

“Uh- um... we’d love to but...” M!MC looked around frantically before just pointing at a random spot behind Solomon. “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!”

A!MC and M!MC ran out of there as fast as their legs could carry them. Finding out if Simeon had wings was not worth being poisoned. Not at all...

Good ol’ Simeon... Mr. Cristopher Peugeot on the other hand- M!MC had some questions for him.

“TSL is literally the most popular book series ever, does that mean you’re completely loaded?”

“Oh, no I’m not, I don’t have any use for human world money in the Celestial Realm. All the profits go to charity.”

“...Dude really?”

“That’s nice of you, Simeon!”

“You didn’t keep any of it..?”

Wait... Who the Hell Are You..? (Solomon)

So A!MC basically has three dads; Fabulous-dad, butler-dad, and wizard-dad!

“So you just... have capes lying around?”

“Yes, would you like a cape?”

“Okay if they don’t take the cape I want it.”

Solomon shows up to RAD with his nails painted different wacky styles every week, courtesy of A!MC.

Though- the unholy combination that is M!MC and Solomon is feared by all.

“Road work ahead?”

“Uh, yeah I sure hope it does.”

Solomon and M!MC’s rampant quoting of vines elicited another glare from Lucifer.

Despite Solomon having literally been alive since the seven rulers of hell were angels, he had kept up with pop culture fairly decently. Decently enough that M!MC had someone that wasn’t Levi to bounce memes off.

“Pff...” M!MC suppressed a laugh at a seemingly normal water bottle advertisement. “Enslaved moisture.”

“I’m not going crazy, right Simeon? You’re hearing this too?” Lucifer tiredly turned to the angel, who shook his head.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg. Solomon quacked at M!MC earlier and they lost their minds laughing about it.” Simeon shrugged, unbothered by the sorcerer and the half demon’s rampant meme-ing behind them.

Lucifer on the other hand, was quite bothered. Incredibly bothered, if you will. “If you two don’t shut up right now I’m going to-”

“Quick! We must abscond!” Solomon turned and heelied away, followed by M!MC. The shoes that Mammon bought to replace the ones lost during the casino incident were apparently heelies as well...

The day was saved when a rock jammed one of Solomon’s wheels and he slammed face first into the concrete. Yikes... that had to hurt.

A!MC had fun glow in the dark bandaids for Solomon to patch up his face. Even though he he could heal himself with magic, he let A!MC do what they wanted because they were just too adorable to say no to.

Asmo has pictures

The Cousin Squad (tm)

(Luke, L!MC, A!MC, and M!MC)

Ah yes, the bab squad. The most adorable group in the Devildom. Surrender your candy immediately or face destruction.

M!MC teases the crap out of Luke, and A!MC tries to stop it, but L!MC is the one who manages to actually make M!MC stop.

Only L!MC gets to pick on the smol angel. GOT IT?!

A!MC and Luke are already baking buddies because of butler-dad so they get along swimmingly.

Poor Luke’s the victim of many of M!MC’s shenanigans.

Luke: Are you sure this is safe, M!MC?

M!MC (about to put mentos into the bottle of coke Luke is holding): No.

L!MC and A!MC get along really well, being honest, everyone loves A!MC.

A!MC makes sure L!MC gets some sleep because they don’t want their cousin picking up on Lucifer’s habit of living off of coffee and coffee alone. L!MC doesn’t get it but they’re very grateful anyway.

M!MC and A!MC were friends from the start. Well... M!MC decided they were friends right from the start and A!MC did not have the ability to fight the power of friendship.

M!MC: You are being befriended. Please do not resist.

Since M!MC is great and amazing like their pop, they took it upon themselves to be the friend that speaks up when A!MC is too nervous to do so.

M!MC and L!MC? Lucifer and Mammon 2 electric boogaloo. Sorta.

L!MC and M!MC bicker all the time but the babs bounce back from their fights way easier.

One minute they’re at each other’s throats and the next they’re showing each other memes.

“There’s no escaping this.”

Lucifer stood between M!MC and the door... their one way ticket to freedom...

“You need to go to the dentist.”

The entire HOL plus the Purgatory Hall crew were getting ready to go visit the dentist to get their teeth cleaned. It was the time of the year that Mammon dreaded most... and his child felt the same way.

“My teeth are fine! Lemme stay home! I’ll hold down the fort with dad!” M!MC smiled and nodded as enthusiastically as they could, but even the most unobservant person couldn’t miss the sweat beading on their forehead.

“Beel.” Lucifer snapped his fingers and before M!MC could do anything Beel had thrown them over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“Don’t worry M!MC, the dentist isn’t that scary.” Beel tried to assure them. By the way M!MC was still kicking and screaming, they were not convinced.

“Y-yeah kiddo, suck it up! Don’t be a baby! I’m just gonna take my car there-”

“MAAAAAAMOOOON?!”

“YIKES!”

Lucifer had the important task of keeping a hold of Mammon as the very large group made their way to the dentist’s office.

A devious little idea popped into L!MC’s head as they all sat down in the waiting room. They began to hum a familiar little tune.

“She said be a deeeentiiiist~ a dentist!” L!MC sang to M!MC, who’s attempts to escape increased tenfold after hearing the song.

A!MC began to hum along, not seeming to notice the commotion going on next to them.

“Son be a deeentiiiiiist~ people will pay you for causing them PAIN! She said be a deeentiiiiiist~”

Belphie perked up and smiled deviously as he realized what L!MC was doing, he began to sing along as well. The three were a veritable choir of terror to poor M!MC. Mammon did not understand his child’s terror and was more unnerved by what a great team Belphie and L!MC made.

Satan rolled his eyes and tried to focus on his book, Asmo was absorbed in his magazine, Levi was having a very in depth conversation with the fish in the aquarium, Simeon and Solomon chatted about school, and Luke was stuck watching the train wreck go down.

Thankfully, it was halted by Lucifer. “L!MC, A!MC, Belphegor, stop tormenting M!MC with show tunes.”

“You would have made a good dentist in another life, Lucifer,” Belphie cooed. “You know what they say, the only difference between a dentist and a sadist is that one has newer magazines.”

Asmo grimaced at his magazine. “Is it the sadist? Because I’m reading a magazine from 1843...”

The conversation was interrupted by one of the dental hygienists coming into the waiting room and saying that Mammon was up first. The Avatar of Greed’s final escape attempt was foiled by Satan (not even looking up from his book) clotheslining him.

Thirty minutes later, Mammon emerged from the forbidden dentist room, with the look of trauma in his eyes and eating a lollipop.

One by one, the group went in, A!MC took it upon themselves to try and make the rapidly panicking Luke feel better.

“It won’t be too scary, in the human world dentists are usually very nice.” A!MC smiled encouragingly.

“I-I’m sure that’s true but...” Luke looked around. “We aren’t in the human world...”

Asmo skipped back in and flashed a blinding grin to the group. “Absolutely perfect, no flaws! It’s your turn, A!MC!”

“If you die I get to say I told ya so!” M!MC shouted as A!MC walked into the dentist’s room.

They did not in fact, die because of the dentist. A!MC walked out and gave a thumbs up. “The dentist said they had never seen a kid with such perfect teeth.”

“That’s my baby!” Asmo chirped.

“M!MC, you’re up.” A!MC and Beel had to practically drag the poor kid out of the room and into the dentist area of doom.

“GO BE A DEEEEEENTIIIIIIST!” Belphie and L!MC shouted one last time as the doors shut. Wow, what dickheads...

Mammon probably would have tried to save his poor little bugger, but he was in the middle an impromptu therapy session with Simeon over the scary scraping dentist knife thingie.

Beel was the last to go, and he walked out of the dentist’s room with his face covered in blood, the dentist walked out after him, missing a hand.

“You tasted like toothpaste.” Beel sighed. “Not good.”

“Don’t worry,” The dentist said to Luke, who looked like he was about to pass out. “My hand will grow back in about four to five minutes.”

Luke, still terrified, nodded. L!MC patted him on the shoulder.

“Anyway, almost all of you are fine, but I have to recommend M!MC to the orthodontist.” The dentist flipped through their notepad one-handed. “Their secondary set of fangs are coming out crooked and need to be corrected with braces immediately.”

M!MC sat calmly for a moment, then attempted to sprint out the door. “NO NO NO NO NO!” One of the dental hygienists grabbed them by the back of their shirt and halted their escape.

“Sucks to be you.” L!MC smirked.

“And L!MC needs to fix their cross bite, braces are a strong possibility.”

The colour drained from L!MC’s face as the news dawned upon them. “Pardon, but what exactly are you talking about..?”

“Your top jaw and bottom jaw aren’t properly lined up.” The dentist explained. “It will lead to problems later if it’s not fixed now.”

Lucifer rubbed his temples and sighed. “L!MC, if you try and run away I swear...”

L!MC stiffened and shook their head. “I’m not some coward, I’m not running away. Just... what exactly are you going to do to my mouth?”

The dentist pulled up a few pictures of the braces and explained what would be done. L!MC nodded, and turned to their father with a big smile on their face.

“It won’t be so bad, mind if I go to the bathroom before I get the mold for my teeth made?”

Lucifer nodded and almost audibly sighed in relief. He basked in the glory of having a child that wasn’t afraid of the dentist and faced their fears like an adult-

L!MC sprinted past the dentist’s office, they had busted out of the bathroom window.

“...Beel.”

“Yep.”

A few minutes later, Beel returned with a completely irate L!MC who was screaming their demands to be put down and be allowed to run for the hills. Taking advantage of the distraction, M!MC ran for the door again, only for Belphie to tap them on the forehead.

M!MC collapsed into a snoring heap on the floor.

“FATHER! DON’T MAKE ME DO THIS!” L!MC practically screamed as they tried to wrestle themselves out of Beel’s bear hug.

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “L!MC, calm yourself down. It’s just braces.”

“AS EVERYONE HERE AS MY WITNESSES I’LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR THIS! NEVER!”

The half-demons in need of braces were dragged right back into the dentist’s area... poor fools.

“They’ll be okay... right?” Luke asked.

“Of course they will be. It’s just braces.” Simeon patted Luke on the head. “They’ll both be fine.”

The scream that came from down the hall right after Simeon said that did not reassure anyone.

“Hey,” Mammon piped up. “How much do braces cost?”

“From what I know about dental procedures,” Satan rubbed his chin. “A few thousand Grimm.”

“Mammon if you try and run for that door I will cut your credit card into a thousand pieces.” Lucifer growled.

Overall, it was a fairly average trip to the dentist. 0/10 would not recommend. A few weeks later L!MC and M!MC were fitted with their mouth prisons- I mean braces, and the two cousins bonded over their horrific mouth pain...

Seriously- braces suck.

——————————————

So! Those are the headcanons! Four and a half whole parts... phew... To all the people who enjoyed this series, thank you so so much for reading! You guys have been so super nice!

Fret not, I plan on writing more for this universe! From what I know about season 2 of Obey Me things will get... interesting. Stay tuned for more! Or don’t, I can’t force you.

...or can I?

#Obey me #Obey me! #Obey me Headcanons #obey me shall we date #obey me! headcanons #obey me! shall we date? #Obey me Lucifer #Obey me Diavolo #Obey me Simeon #Obey me Solomon #Obey me Mammon #Obey me MC #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #Obey me Luke #Obey me Barbatos #Obey me Asmodeus #Obey me Fic #Lucifer’s Kid

[insingersfall]

Are dreamers descendants to fallen angels?

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the origin of dreamers, especially in relation to Ronan’s faith and his anxiety about creating life - a job he feels should be exclusive to God.

This is going to be long so the short story: Maybe dreamers are descendants to fallen angels?

Here’s my long ass thesis on why I think so:

Since CDTH I’ve seen this quote a lot:

In a wider sense it doesn’t have to mean anything, just a powerful ending to Bryde’s cheesy monologue about Ronan being too good for basic humanity, but I immediately read it literally.

-       do you long back?

And just two pages afterwards we get this:

Coincidence? I think not.

Bryde knows what Ronan is and where he comes from - the sky.

The question of “what am I” is something Ronan struggles with during the entire course of TRC and a vital part of his storyline.

And it’s always this:

Not who am I, What am I.

During the first four books Ronan struggles both with this huge existential dilemma of “what” and with more mundane questions regarding “who” he is. I think Ronan’s coming of age-arc, especially the “why do you hate yourself”/ “I don’t” - scene in TRK is one of the most moving scenes in YA. I read that as being about “who” he is. And In CDTH he���s older, he’s figured a lot of shit out. There are no negative feelings left about him being gay for example. Not in relation to his family, himself or to his religion.

But he still has a lot of negative feelings and anxiety about being able to create life. He still struggles with his identity as a dreamer alongside his identity as a catholic.

Ronan being religious adds so much to his character and this is why I can’t help but read A LOT into the religious symbolism. And it’s there.

Maggie herself posted this a while ago to clear up why Ronan gets so mad in BLLB when the copy of him dies. It clarifies multiple things - that Ronan is very much stuck in toxic masculinity and refuses to show vulnerability while also being very vulnerable, as well as how the situation mirrors his suicide-attempt, which is obviously triggering. But for this theme I want to highlight these two paragraphs:

“First, the setting. Adam is not religious, but Ronan is, and St. Agnes is a place he goes with the broken remains of his family. Now Ronan takes Adam — someone Ronan has only just allowed himself to admit internally that he likes, a lot — not just to the church, but to a private part of the church Ronan frequents on his own. “

And

“But to Ronan, it’s not just a copy. It’s a person who just happens to look like him. Remember that Ronan has spent his life loving dreamed people just as hard as real people. Ronan has spent enough time with Matthew and Aurora to know that even though they came from dreams, their feelings are real. They are not disposable. This other Ronan is really terrified, really in pain, and really dying.

And the real Ronan killed him. He’s killed someone.”

This is one of the very few times Maggie has explained something that isn’t explicit in the book. As we know Maggie is a major spokesperson for “the only things canon are the things in the book” but here she adds additional information. Why? Because it’s really, really important to Ronan’s character. Both the religion and his feelings about creating life. Especially these two combined.

He hates himself for a lot of things, and he hates himself for the ability to create -and therefore take away- life. Something only God is allowed to do.

Well yes Adam, maybe there are two gods in this church. Or something like it.

So - fallen angels? What does that mean really?

The story of fallen angels differ a lot from religion to religion, I’ll focus on the Christian tradition since that’s what our lord and savior Ronan Lynch would like. There isn’t a lot of Bible stories about it, it’s more of a tradition arising from later accounts in religious texts and poetry.

The Devil is a fallen angel who together with a bunch of other angels rebelled against God and was expelled from Heaven to Earth.

In some older interpretations the “angels” on Earth had children with humans and created giants, who in time became demons. Or, if you’re writing YA fantasy with a religious MC, maybe these descendants of angels became dreamers.

Lucifer rebelled against God because he too wanted the power that God possessed.

“Lucifer apparently became so impressed with his own beauty, intelligence, power, and position that he began to desire for himself the honor and glory that belonged to God alone. The sin that corrupted Lucifer was self-generated pride.” 

I sure think that sounds like Bryde, and it sounds a lot like the sin Ronan fears God will judge him for.

And on the subject of the Devil. Who in this series is often referred to as a “devil of a boy?”

It’s our man, Ronan.

A quick search of the word “Devil” in the Raven Cycle (1-4) led me to a number of passages, mostly as part of a saying, but at some occasion to specifically describe someone, or as a direct reference to someone.

Ronan, Niall, Kavinsky and Aurora. Dreamers and their dreams.

Coincidence? I think not.

The same search in Call Down the Hawk I would say really confirms this recognition of mine. It has for starters this wonderful paragraph:

But it also broadens the parable to all of the Lynch brothers.

The upper quote about the three brothers all being handsome devils is the only time not even Matthew can avoid the metaphor. A character who up until then has only been compared to an angel.

Contradiction? No, not in the question of descendants to fallen angels.

A creature who are - by definition - both angel and devil, savior and sinner, companion of God as well as a child of Satan.

We don’t know for sure yet how one becomes a dreamer. But we do know that it in some way it’s inherited. In some peculiar way from parent to child. From one devil father to one of his devil sons, the one he created together with another one of his creations. Because Ronan therefore is a clone of Niall? Is Hennessy a clone of her mother? Kavinsky one of his parents? Maybe the next two books will tell. Regardless I still like the idea that they all descend from the first angels on earth, mixing with humans.

I also just have to mention that Ronan not only dream of the sky, but also on multiple occasions dream about flying. Not as a bird, but with his own wings.

So what do I think this will mean in the big scheme of things?

Not a lot honestly! I’m not even sure I’m arguing that this will be a plot point.

But I do think the paradoxical identity in descending from something so torn between good/evil is fucking perfect for Ronan. Someone who’s constantly torn between his own fuck-ups and wanting to do the right thing.

Who creates marvelous life in form of magical animals, angelic brothers and light where there needs to be light, but who also creates monsters, horrors and dangers.

Who wants to protect the world from climate change and protect the people he loves from danger and for all we know might instead accidentally end the world.

Who turns to God and fears hell at the same time as he’s presenting himself to the world as a devil of a boy.

I just think it’s beautiful, whether Maggie has a storyline planned with this or not.

So I’ll just end this thread with the upper picture and with the quote describing Ronans’ birth.

#ronan lynch #cdth #call down the hawk #mister impossible #the dreamer trilogy #pynch #trc #the raven cycle #maggie stiefvater #my post

[lamortexiii]

Shades and Shadows: The Spirit of Influence

Any artist will tell you that life experiences often have a significant influence on a lot of their work. Perhaps the same could be said of witches and their practice. So what draws an individual to certain things? Of course, there is no black and white answer to this, but I want to dive into some experiences that may have helped shape my interest in the shades and shadows of life…

I developed a general interest in the unexplainable at a young age because the house I grew up in was haunted. I can remember thinking there was something wrong with me for the longest time because of the feelings I would get in that house. It was never a malicious feeling, but when you’re young and you feel like you’re never alone or that someone is watching you when no one else is around, it does feel uneasy.

One summer afternoon when my younger brother and I were home alone, I was in my room rearranging things and he was outside, likely playing in the driveway. As I was arranging model horses on a shelf, I got that eerie but familiar feeling that there was someone standing at the end of the hallway watching me. This time, however, it was particularly intense and I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to see someone standing there--my brother, a stranger, Satan, anybody but nobody. The silence was then broken by the unmistakable sound of footsteps running down the hall towards me. The strangest part, aside from the obvious, was that it seemed to happen in slow motion. There was a spot right before my door that would creak when stepped on and I remember hearing the footsteps, and then I remember hearing the creak in perfect timing with the footsteps--at which point I bolted out of the house (and through the ghost?) I’m not sure how long I sat on the front steps, but at some point, my brother came over and asked if something was wrong. I explained what had just happened, which unnerved him more than I was expecting it to. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing things. We eventually went back inside the house to call our dad at work. Although I’m not sure what I was expecting him to say, I certainly wasn’t expecting him to say what he did. He simply nonchalantly responded something along the lines of, “that’s been going on since we bought the house, it’s ok, we can talk about it when I get home.”

While we don’t know whatever backstory there might be, we all agreed that the presence seemed to be of childlike nature. I always felt as though it “lived” in the closet of the master bedroom. And interestingly enough, one of the experiences my brother had happened one night when he was home alone dog sitting two little Rat Terriers. His room was closest to the master bedroom, which is where he was with the dogs playing video games at the time. Without warning the closet door in the master bedroom, which was frequently left open, slammed shut. Both dogs immediately went running towards the sound, barking and attempting to paw underneath the door, only to return yelping shortly after with tails tucked between their legs. He swears there were no windows open, and the dogs refused to leave his side for the rest of the night. After I graduated high school, my dad purchased a different house and began renting our former one out. I was attending college in Chicago when my dad called to tell me about the family that was renting our old house. He informed me that they had a little girl who recently started playing with an imaginary friend, something she had not done prior and something she would only do in that closet.

Growing up with these experiences exposed me to the idea that there is something more to life than what we interpret with the physical senses alone. Life itself is abstract in a way, and yet we often limit ourselves to these concrete realities that we ourselves construct. We need those abstract experiences to help us question reality, because if life were simply concrete, then it would never expand and evolve. Being drawn to abstraction is something that’s become more evident to me as I’ve gotten older. Maybe because I’ve allowed myself more room to explore it without this desperate need to derive meaning from it.

The truth is, we ultimately give meaning to life. We give meaning to a piece of art, an emotion when it arises, a particular spiritual practice or belief, and we give meaning to an experience. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to get caught up in those meanings. The real trap is not so much in our need to derive meaning, but in our need for those meanings to be validated. That’s not to say validation doesn’t play a role in shaping our beliefs though. I can definitely say if my paranormal experiences had not been validated by others, they may have held a different meaning to me or been less significant altogether. However, if we allow others to invalidate our experiences, we sacrifice our ability to create meaning at the expense of outside validation. Consequently, I think this is also where we start to lose imagination and we start to lose touch with ourselves.

My own craft has been influenced by many things but, the foundation has been built on this idea that nothing is concrete. It’s why I consider myself more of an eclectic witch than anything else. The unexplainable lends itself well to the imagination and therefore creativity. Not limiting our experiences to black and white leaves us to navigate the gray area, but that’s where life really truly is, and that’s where we gain the experiences that become the layers we paint as life goes on...

Shades and Shadows Blog by @thecraftyvvitch @thecraftyvvitch

www.LaMorteXiii.com

<•Ø•>

#shadesandshadows #lhp #crypticmystic #occultblog #lamortexiii #wicca #pagan #highermagick #blackflame #coven #livedeliciously #satanism #luciferian #ecletic witch #knowledge #freedom #occultfashion #the more you know #third dimension

[lovemesomesurveys]

1. When you hear the word “satanism” what do you think of? Uh, devil worship.

2. If you are a smoker, how long does a pack typically last you? If you aren’t a smoker, does anybody you are close to smoke, & if so, are you against the fact that they’re a smoker? I have uncles who smoke. I’m not for it, personally. There’s no benefit whatsoever.

3. Think of somebody on Xanga that gives really interesting responses. What makes their answers so interesting to you? I’ll answer this about people on here, but there’s our little survey community on here that we each interact with in some way on a regular basis, whether it’s liking their posts, taking surveys from them, commenting, messaging, etc that I keep up with. My mutuals.

4. What is something that many people seem to have in life that you don’t? Does it bother you or does it not really affect you? It seems like everyone else around me just has it a lot more together and is able to get shit done. I’m just over here wasting away.

5. Have you ever wondered something about somebody on Xanga but didn’t want to ask in case you seemed to be getting too personal? Yes, definitely. I mean, on Tumblr. <<<

6. What was the last promise you made yourself? Have you broken it? To try and take better care of myself, but I just can’t seem to get it together.

7. Do you have more subscribers or more people that you are subscribed to? More followers, for sure. I have my main and this side blog.

8. Is there anything that has been drilled into your brain since you were young & you finally decided to stop listening to? How did it feel once you decided to listen to yourself over what you were told? Hmm. Not that I can immediately think of, but to be fair I don’t feel like spending much time thinking about it.

9. Do you ever feel like you have so much on your mind without a way to get it out? What do you do when this happens? That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling for a long time. I don’t know what to do. My mind is such a jumbled mess.

10. If you are currently in a relationship, what is one thing that seems to be unique or different about your relationship with this person, compared to other relationships in general? If you are currently single, is this more of a choice or is it more just the way things are going, not really something you chose? If you are neither “single” or officially in a relationship, what are your feelings on your current situation? I’m single by choice, though there’s no one lining up either ha. I just feel it’s best for me to remain single and focus on myself because of my health situation. I don’t feel I’m in the position to be in a relationship. I couldn’t give my time and energy to someone else right now.

11. Do you feel that it is acceptable to hang out with the preferred sex alone when in a relationship (besides with your significant other, of course)? Is this something that does or might cause problems in a relationship for you? You’re allowed to have friends that are of your sexual preference. It doesn’t mean you want to get with every single person of that preference; it’s quite possible to be just friends with people. It would be an issue for me if my significant other was hanging out with an ex or someone they have some kind of history with, like they hooked up or something before or someone they were once interested in. Or someone who is/was interested in my significant other. Now, all that being said I can’t say for certain I wouldn’t feel a little jealous or not, but if I trust my significant other then there shouldn’t be a real issue.

12. When you feel jealousy, how do you deal with it? I honestly haven’t felt that way in awhile, but whenever I have I just kind of... dealt with it? I didn’t really do anything about it, like what could I do? I just felt it and maybe died a little inside, ha.

13. Do you like the feeling of relying on or being emotionally attached to somebody or do you try to avoid that feeling? This doesn’t just mean in relationships, but being close with people in general. I like having close people to me that I can rely on and have in my life. It’s nice to know I have people who care and are there for me. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have my family.

14. Think of somebody famous that you have a lot of respect for. What is something that you really admire them for? They seem like a genuinely nice, good person who truly loves what they do and it shows. Somebody that people enjoy being around and have nothing but nice things to say about. 

15. Do you think you’ll ever get bored of taking surveys & give up on them altogether or do you think you’ll stick with them for a long time? Well, I’ve been doing them since like 2005 and still going strong, sooo.

16. If somebody were to leave a harsh comment on a survey you took, judging you on one of your opinions, how would you react? I’ve actually received a few judge-y messages before, but whatever.

17. What is one unhealthy way you tend to deal with stress? What about one healthy way? Shut down and not deal with it/try to do something to help calm down. I do the first one most, unfortunately. :/

18. Are there any other sites you use to find surveys to take on Xanga? What sites do you use? Well, not Xanga obviously, but mainly I get them from here and sometimes LJ.

19. Is it often that people tell you that you’re intelligent / smart? No.

20. Are you ever asked questions in person that are similar to those asked in surveys? Do you feel comfortable answering these questions in person like you are answering them on Xanga? I am not at all as open in person as I am on here that’s for sure. 

#personal #text #survey #surveys

[tokumusume]

tokumusume’s list of best and worst movies and dramas watched in 2019:

There’s a new category this year. Inspired by kpopalypse, welcome the Honorable Mentions! Movies that weren’t exactly bad but also weren’t good. Movies and dramas are qualified to enter if I watched them for the first time this year, not that they were released this year. Click on ‘keep reading’~~

Best Movies:

1.      Parasite

Another masterpiece from the director of Snowpiercer (let’s pretend Okja never existed). A poor family con their way to a rich household. Choi Woo-Shik from The Witch (see below) is the eldest son and mastermind, fabulous as always. Definitely the best movie of this year. For me, movie of the decade.

2.      The Witch Part 1 The Subversion

This movie is amazing, hard to describe without spoilers. A perfect mix of Stranger Things and Hanna. Choi Woo-Shik can come to my house and kick my ass anytime. I can’t wait for part two.

3.      Death Trance

Visually stunning, kinda like Amemiya Keita’s style in early Garo or Mad Max. I wish the movie was longer and the characters were better fleshed out, Ryuen the monk and the little girl had so much potential... The most interesting thing about this movie is how sexualized the main male character is compared to the female ones, and apparently, the swords were designed to look like veiny penises (can’t find a source for this info), and yes, they do look like veiny penises. The final showdown is heavy with sexual energy. Have I already said that Ryuen deserved better? #RyuenRights

4.      Gintama 2: Rules are made to be broken

The barber shop scene is a fucking cinematic masterpiece. I never laughed so much like I did with this movie. The way it doesn’t take itself seriously, the meta jokes, everything is perfect. Even better than the first one.

5.      Kingdom

While I think that some fight scenes were way too long (like the bamboo forest one), the dynamics between Shin and Hyou/Eisei were highly entertaining, at least in my shipper eyes. I like that (SPOILER) the King of the Mountain People is a woman and not once they try to call her Queen. She is a King. Hashimoto Kanna is adorable as a Ten, Kanata Hongo does a great job as Eisei’s psycho brother, Sakaguchi Tak waves his sword around, the usual stuff but with added layers of dirt and sweat.

6.      Bravestorm

A movie I lovingly call “Japanese Pacific Rim”. Full of Kamen Rider stars (Hino Eiji! Misuzawa Haruka! That girl from Heisei Generations, the one with a sword! She has a sword in this as well!) and giant robots (god, I love giant robots!), I waited so much for this movie and it exceeded my expectations. I just wish I could’ve watched in theaters, it had a limited showing in my country.

7.      Twelve Suicidal Children

What begins as a murder mystery ends with a twist you won’t see coming. All of the actors are amazing, but special mention to Sugisaki Hana and that guy from that one boy group I forgot the name but can’t be bothered to Google.

8.      Gakkou Gurashi

Four girls and their teacher try to survive the zombie apocalypse trapped inside the school. This one destroyed me for days.

9.      Forest of Love

I’ve watched some Sono Sion movies but nothing prepared me for this. Be aware of extremely gory sequences and sensitive topics. Hinami Kyoko is so amazing as blue-haired, punk girl crush Taeko that I totally didn’t notice she was AkibaBlue in Akibaranger.

10.  The Host

After watching Parasite I decided to go on a Bong Joon Ho binge and watched this horror movie. Not as good as Snowpiercer and Parasite in my opinion but heart-wrenching nevertheless. The little girl is the star of the movie.

11.  The Hungry Lion

A story about the dangers of social media and slut-shaming. I want to punch Mizuishi Atom in the face.

12.  Cromartie High

A little absurd comedy about yakuza-style high school boys (played by middle-aged men lol) forming a club to battle aliens summoned by themselves just because. It made me laugh like a child. A hidden gem.

Honorable Mentions:

1.      River’s Edge

Depressing as fuck. Warning: the cats die. It’s not graphic but it’s traumatizing. Yoshizawa Ryo is a gay boy who sleeps with old men for money. There’s a graphic sex scene (not Yoshizawa, sadly) where my only thought was “That thing is gonna get stuck in there! Use a condom!” Can’t remember much from it except for these three scenes.

2.      The Disastrous Life of Saiki K

Yamazaki Kento has the acting chops of a dead fish but it comes handy for playing a teen with psychic abilities and zero social skills. Hashimoto Kanna is one of the prettiest girls in Japan. Yoshizawa Ryo with white and blueish hair looks more like Sakata Gintoki than Oguri Shun in the Gintama live action. The end is a huge let down but the fun ride is worth it.

3.      Ano ko no, Toriko

Congratulations to Yoshizawa Ryo, he has FIVE movies in my list of favorite movies this year! This is to make up for crowning GIVER as the biggest waste of time of 2018, this list is totally not biased, lol. “Ano ko” could be just another romance movie but the (very) little insight into how the entertainment industry works and not focusing on school life made me love it. Poor Sugino Yosuke being left behind again, when will this boy get the main girl?

4.      Monstrum

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it’s pleasant enough to fill a rainy afternoon with a lot of blood and spilled guts. Hyeri of Girl’s Day is the heroine and Choi Woo Shik is the commander she falls in love with.

5.      Weirdo Go

I confess I watched this one just to see Ji Li (aka my snake son Nie Huaisang) dressed as a woman but it was enjoyable and not that problematic.

6.      Real - Kanzen Naru Kubinagaryu no Hi

Directed by the same guy that did “Creepy” and “Before we vanish”, there are lots of twists you won’t see coming. And a dinosaur. A fucking dinosaur.

7.      Tomodachi Game: The Final

The movie loses its focus halfway through then picks up again minutes before ending. Yoshizawa Ryo delivers again as the sadistic Yuuichi, much like his role in Gintama. The plot twists are the star of the movie.

8.     The Living Dead

Sorry Wen Ning. I saw the plot twist coming in the first 30 minutes of the movie, not very smart of the writer. His personality did a 180° turn for worse and I’ll demote the movie to an honorable mention for it. Gao Han is cute though, I would like to see him as a better character.

9.      Backstreet Girls

Some recycled scenes from the drama to situate the viewers, a completely new story for the movie, it is certainly funny and enjoyable, if you can get past the forced gender reassignment surgery background and transphobic jokes (you shouldn’t get past it btw). I like the soundtrack.

Best Dramas:

1.      The Untamed

Do I need to say more?

2.      The Tale of Nokdu

This Korean romance had everything to be a mess but it wasn’t!!! *claps* I don’t hate the main female character and the whole palace politics actually kept me interested until the end. The complete shift of atmosphere mid-season was strange at first but ultimately very welcomed.

3.      The Naked Director

Netflix original Japanese content is amazing. This one is a look at the life of a legendary porn director in the late 80s, I learned a lot about the history of Japanese porn and censorship (yay pixels!) and went looking for his, erm, works. Very graphic, 69/10 don’t recommend watching with people in the house.

4.      Channel wa Sonomama!

I don’t remember it well but it’s about a news station and what is like to be a journalist and it was very interesting and funny.

5.      SCAMS

Forgettable. Sugino Yosuke with black hair cons old people via phone calls.

Worst Movies and Dramas:

1.      The cat in their arms

The cats spend 90% of the movie in human forms, and halfway through it they simply abandon the cats’ plot to show a fucking long montage of a weird guy painting a picture of a nude girl. It’s also super creepy to see a grown-up man acting like a cat, getting belly rubs and eating cat food from a bowl. Yoshizawa needs to choose his roles more wisely.

2.      Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun

A waste of Suda Masaki’s talent. Can Japan stop casting Tsuchiya Tao already?

3.      Samurai Marathon

Almost two hours of dirty men running through a forest. Maybe Japanese History experts will enjoy it, because I certainly didn’t.

4.      Lady Vengeance

While there are legit great moments, I didn’t find this “classic” to be anything special. The animal cruelty was too much for me.

5.      Hot Gimmick

This movie makes Bohemian Rhapsody’s editing look like a work of art. There are more flashing cuts than a T-ARA music video. I have no idea who likes who, who’s banging who, what even are they saying. Too much poetic shit for my like. I wanted to see Shimizu Hiroya naked. I was bamboozled.

6.      The Divine Fury

While some parts were interesting, at the end I still don’t know if the protagonist is possessed by a demon (if yes, then why would he help a priest destroy his friends?) or if he was blessed by God when his father died and talked to him (the glowing hand thing, why and how??). The exorcism parts are really, really scary, or maybe I’m just a chicken, but I had to avert my eyes. The best (only) part is that the protagonists are hot. Hello Woo Do-Hwan, you can sacrifice me to Satan any time…

#tokumusume awards #2019 #Parasite #Gintama #The Untamed #The Tale of Nokdu #Yoshizawa Ryo #long post #jdrama #kdrama #jmovie #kmovie #cdrama #cmovie

[peri-crone-al]

Family

Here’s my first offering for Obey Me week. 

Chapter 16 spoilers... sort of, so be aware if you’re not that far into the story. A snippet from a longer piece I’m working on.

2161 words

If you choose to read, thank you, and I hope you enjoy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

              With a nod to the demon butler, she stepped through the door and into the past. It was strange, walking through the gray mists, but she could see the shape of a door up ahead.

               She put a hand on the knob and pressed her ear to the door, but she couldn’t hear anything on the other side.

               Barbatos had been clear in his warning – do not be seen.

               A deep breath, and she opened the door softly, blinking a little in the bright light inside the room.

               Mammon’s room.

               Where brothers two through six stood chattering, congratulating themselves on leaving her alone with Lucifer.

               “Oh shit,” she swore quietly, Barbatos’ words loud in her mind.

               Asmo turned, his eyes wide.

               “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be getting closer with Lucifer! Get back out there before he realizes you’re gone!”

               “Yeah, Maeve,” Beel added, taking her by the shoulders and turning her around. “This is to help you reach your goal.”

               He pushed out the door unceremoniously, patting her on the head before closing it quietly behind her.

               She leaned against the wall, breathing heavily.

               “That was close. Barbatos, why do you have a door into Mammon’s room?”

               She shook herself and started walking down the hall, toward the stairs that would take her to the attic.

               She was nearing the library when she heard voices again, this time Lucifer and herself, discussing where all of the others had gone to.

               “Let’s go to Levi’s room,” Lucifer suggested. “This all started with him.”

               Crap and double crap! They’re gonna see me…

               Turning back toward the brothers’ rooms, she started walking as quickly and quietly as she could, looking for a place to duck out of sight.

               Her attention was drawn to the section Beel had shown her, back when they were searching for Luke.

               Almost of themselves, her fingers reached out to stroke the spot with the hidden phrase.

               “Lilith,” she whispered.

               A strange charge shot through her body.

               Suddenly, she was in Lilith’s room again, but it was different, somehow. Sheets weren’t draped over everything, and it felt lived in.

               She felt a strange twinge of sadness, but it wasn’t her own.

               The door opened and Levi walked in, wearing a gentle smile she’d never seen.

               “You should probably go find Belphie,” he said, reaching out to ruffle her hair. “Your game has been going on so long, who knows who’s supposed to be ‘it’ anymore, right?”

               The gamer demon smiled, and a feeling of mischievous happiness flowed through her. And again, they weren’t her own feelings. It was like she was an observer in her own body.

               Not-Maeve turned and headed out the open door.

               Maeve was in the House of Lamentation again. She concentrated, listening for Lucifer and past-Maeve, but heard nothing.

               “That’s weird. I wasn’t gone that long. Oh well.”

               She shrugged and turned in the direction of the stairs that led to the attic and hurried that way, focusing on getting to Belphie.

               She reached the bottom of the stairs, and heard steps coming down.

               Worse yet, she recognized the footfalls.

               Lucifer.

               Looking around quickly, she ducked under the stairs just as he reached the bottom steps.

               The eldest of the seven stopped, his shoulders slumped, and he sighed.

               “I wish you would listen to reason, Belphegor,” he muttered. “There’s no reason for you to hate them so. It’s not their fault.”

               He shook himself briefly, his back and shoulders straightening, once again the vision of pride, and left.

               Maeve breathed lightly until she could no longer hear his footsteps.

               “He must be talking about how Belphegor hates humans,” she spoke quietly to herself. “I’d like to know his reasoning for that, too. Maybe he’ll tell me.”

               With a shrug, she ducked out of her hiding spot beneath the stairs and headed up.

               The door to the attic room was closed, still locked.

               She reached out to touch it and felt another jolt, someone’s memory playing through her mind.

               Lucifer stood in front of Belphegor, confrontational.

               “You’re so different than you used to be, Lucifer,” Belphegor sneered. “You led an army in rebellion in Heaven. Now you’re nothing more than Diavolo’s lap dog. Bring that human to me, Lucifer. I’ll enjoy killing them. I’ll enjoy letting you watch me kill them. Then you can explain to Diavolo about why you lied to him.”

               The small muscles in Lucifer’s jaw tightened, but otherwise he looked unperturbed at his brother’s rant.

               He shook his head, once.

               “No, Belphegor. You need to let go of the past. You’ll stay here until you see reason.”

               He turned and left the room, walking past her, unseeing, the door locking behind him.

               Her body shuddered, and she looked into the room again.

               Belphegor was nowhere in sight.

               She pulled at the door, yanking her hand away in surprise when it opened.

               She entered the room slowly, treading lightly, until she could see a lump on the bed.

               Belphegor, asleep.

               She stopped at the side of the bed.

               “Belphegor,” she spoke quietly. “Wake up.”

               His eyes fluttered open at her voice, and he sat up.

               “You did it,” he whispered. “I didn’t think you’d be successful but look at you.”

               His small smile made her uneasy, and she took a step back as he stood up.

               “I’m truly impressed. I never thought a mere human would get even close to making pacts with all of my brothers.”

               He slid an arm around her waist, pulling her close. His other hand closed around her throat, a cruel glint in his eyes.

               “I’m grateful, Maeve, I really am. But you see, I have a promise to keep. I promised myself I would get revenge for my sister.” His fingers tightened inexorably, cutting off her oxygen. Spots appeared before her eyes, and her fingers scrabbled at the hand squeezing her neck.

               “You should be grateful, Maeve. You won’t live to see me destroy the human world. Call that my thanks for setting me free.”

               Her body shuddered in his grasp, her vision darkening. Someone else spoke through her mouth.

               “Belphie, no…”

               She saw a momentary flash of surprise in his eyes before the blackness took her.

                 It was the end of the dream again.

               Diavolo stood beside Lucifer, who cradled a woman’s – Lilith’s! – body in his arms, his expression broken.

               “I can save her, Lucifer, but you must swear your fealty to me, forever. Make your choice.”

               Barbatos stood to one side.

               “She won’t last much longer.”

               Silvery tears streaked down Lucifer’s cheeks, as he held Lilith close, bent to touch her forehead with his own.

               “No matter how far apart we may be, no matter how much time passes, even if someday you’re no longer yourself, I’ll never forget you. And I’ll always pray that you find happiness…always…I love you, Lilith.”

                 “Please, wake up. I need you to wake up.”

               Light and breath and sensation returned all at once.

               “Thank you,” the unfamiliar voice continued. “I’m sorry. I’ve been waiting so long for someone who could help my family. Waiting for you.”

               “Why me?”

               “Because you are my family, too. I’ve waited through all the distant generations, until someone could hear me. Of all my descendants, you are the first.”

               “And you couldn’t help?”

               “I can’t hold a corporeal form for long enough to have any real effect. Please, there’s not much time left. Please help them.”

               Maeve grimaced as she clambered to her feet, and then grinned at the spirit of the demons’ long-lost sister. Her own many-times-great grandmother, apparently.

               “That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?”

               She couldn’t hear Lilith’s voice anymore, but she felt a gentle breeze across her face.

               “All right. Let’s do this.”

               She made her way to the stairs, descending them as quietly as she could.

               At the bottom, she could hear raised voices, arguing, but couldn’t make out any words.

               She crept slowly to the toward the entrance of the house, stopping at the top of the left-hand set of stairs that led to the front door.

               All seven demon brothers were gathered there, yelling.

               Her heart broke a little, seeing Mammon cradling her body and pleading with her to live. Lucifer and the others with whom she had pacts stood by helplessly.

               Belphegor was another matter. He laughed, seeing his brothers in pain. Especially Lucifer.

               Asmo, watching the life drain from the other Maeve, looked up toward the top pf the stairs, and gasped.

               That drew the attention of the rest of the demons.

               “Well, shit. There goes the whole ‘don’t let anyone see you’ part of this adventure.”

               Sighing, hoping this didn’t fuck things up too badly, she started down the stairs.

               As she walked, the body held by Mammon disappeared in a puff of smoke. He jumped up, mildly panicked.

               “No!” Belphegor yelled. “How is this possible. I killed you!”

               He moved toward her, his face a snarl.

               “Belphegor, stop!” Lucifer demanded, moving to intercept.

               “Wait.” Maeve faced Belphegor, unflinching.

               “Why should I?”

               “Because Lilith would want you to.”

               “How dare you say her name with your filthy human lips!”

               “She lived. She lived out her life as a human, with the man she loved.”

               Belphegor’s arm dropped.

               “You lie.”

               “No,” Lucifer shook his head. “That was the only way Diavolo could save her, by turning her into a human.”

               The eldest turned his attention to Maeve.

               “How do you know this?”

               “She told me.”

               “What?”

               “Since her mortal body passed away, she’s been here, watching over her family.”

               “How is any of this possible?” Satan demanded.

               At that moment, Diavolo and Barbatos arrived.

               “Because Maeve is a distant descendant of the human Lilith,” Diavolo explained.

               Lucifer was the first to recover from his shock.

               “And you know this how?”

               “Lord Diavolo and I have researched it. Once she was chosen as the exchange student, we began our search,” Barbatos answered.

               “The great Celestial War was many millennia ago,” Diavolo continued, “and human lives are very short, so I had to search far back into the mists of time. But there’s no doubt. Maeve is one of Lilith’s descendants.”

               “One of?”

               “As I said, Lilith the human lived long ago. Perhaps you can explain?”

               Diavolo looked to her.

               “Lilith told me that once her human lifespan ended, she remembered everything. She chose to come here, rather than return to the celestial realm, so that she could watch over all of you. She watched, unable to do anything, as you all drifted apart, cut yourselves further off from each other, and it broke her heart. She figured out, some time ago, that the only way to help  was to get one of human family members here, and started searching through all of her progeny, all over the world, until she finally found one of us who could hear her.”

               She grinned at Diavolo.

               “When Diavolo announced his plans for the exchange program, she knew she had to ensure that I would be brought here. So, the day you were looking through all the lists of possible exchange students,” she looked back to Lucifer, “you opened the window. A breeze gusted in, blowing the stack of papers all around your study. Except one. That one landed right at your feet.”

               “How do you know all of this?” Lucifer’s voice was quiet, his expression pained.

               “Lilith told me,” Maeve answered, then recited Lucifer’s last words to his sister.

               He gasped, took two steps forward, and enveloped her in his arms.

               “Thank you,” he whispered into her hair.

               The rest of the brothers joined in the hug, laughing and crying.

               “Perhaps you shouldn’t all mob Maeve at once like that,” Barbatos suggested.

               Maeve laughed.

               “It’s okay. This is no different from Friday night movie night.”

               After a moment, they all backed away.

               “This does explain that dream I’ve always had, though.”

               Diavolo tilted his head to one side.

               “Dream?”

               She nodded.

               “I was going to talk to you about it during the party, but never got the opportunity. All my life, I’ve had a dream. All of you are in it. It always starts with a war, and then falling. Then it’s Diavolo, Barbatos, and Lucifer, who was holding someone. I know now that that someone was Lilith. Diavolo takes Lilith, and that’s where the dream ends. That’s why, my first night here in the Devildom, I thought it was all just a continuation of the dream.”

               She shrugged.

               The group turned as one when they heard Belphgor gasp.

               Guilt and shock clear on his face, he turned away, heading up the stairs.

               Beelzebub moved to chase him, but Maeve reached out.

               “Let him be for now, Beel. He has some stuff to come to terms with. But, I promise, we’ll make it better.”

               “How?” the large demon wore a look of concern.

               “That’s what family does, right?”

               A slow smile crossed his face, and he wrapped her in a bear hug.

               “That’s right. Thank you, Maeve.”

#obey me week #obey me week 2020 #obey me spoilers

[londontantric-blog1]

Sex, Drugs, and Rock

The area that is now known as Turkey played a major role in the Mystery Religions. The use of drugs to create "religious" experiences was developed to a fine art by various occult fraternal mystery religion groups in the Turkey area. The Assassins from where we get the word hashish controlled parts of Turkey and Lebanon in Medieval times. They used drugs to gain the allegiance of their recruits. Some of the most powerful figures for the Illuminati have been Turks. The Grand Orient has had some powerful figures in Turkey. For instance, at the Masonic Congress of all the Grand Orients' (that's European Freemasonry- although several American presidents have been members of European Freemasonry) Grand Lodges, Bou Achmed came from Turkey. The Grand Lodge of Asia was represented by Sebeyck-Kadir from Asia. Bou Achmed took a big role in the Grand Orient's decisions.

As an aside, let me explain one example of the power of the Grand Orient in America. The Grand Orient was originally strong in Louisiana but spread itself to many other US. locations. Garfield, a very powerful man in the Grand Orient, managed to become US. President because the political process got deadlocked at the convention and the Masons suggested him as a compromise candidate. Although Garfield was an extremely powerful Mason, had been perhaps the youngest general in the US. Army during the Civil War, the Illuminati ordered him shot after he had served about a year in office as President. Garfield was reported by an eye-witness to Satanic rituals to have participated in the cannibalistic rites of Satanism done to gain the spiritual power of the eaten person. The Grand Orient Freemasonry has been linked to other orders of Freemasonry that are also called Rosicrucians. Pope John XXIII joined a Rosicrucian group that had links to European Freemasonry when he was in Turkey.

While the secret Grand Orient Freemasonry was very strong in Turkey in spite of its small numbers, the regular American Freemasonry granted a dispensation for a Masonic Lodge to operate in Smyrna, Turkey in May, 1863 but the charters were withdrawn on Aug. 27, 1880. However, it is interesting that of all the Turkish cities, Smyrna was definitely the best place for Freemasonry to gain recruits. Men like Achmed Pasha and many of the other Pasha family have been leaders within Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Achmed Pasha was a Satanist and had a large harem. Mehmet Talaat Pasha (1872-1921) was a Freemason and part of the Turkish revolution of 1908. He was the leader of the Young Turks, which was a joint project of the Sufis and the Frankist Satanists. (The type of Satanism led by the Frank family has had connections to Turkey for hundreds of years.) Mehmet Talaat Pasha was the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Turkey. He was held the political position in Turkey of grand vizier of Turkey (1917-18). Another Turkish Pasha was part of the Turkish royalty running Egypt when Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire. His name was Khedive Ismail Pasha and he was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Egypt. It was this Turk, Khedive Ismail Pasha, who gave the famous Obelisk to the United States. This Obelisk was called Cleopatra's Needle and was originally erected in the city of the sun, Heliopolis, about 1500 B.C. The Obelisk is a representation of a human penis, because sun worship, worship of regeneration (sex) and worship of the sun god Satan were all tied together. Masons helped with the moving of the obelisk, and its dedication when it arrived in New York City. Large obelisks have been erected by Masons in New York, Washington D.C., Paris, the Vatican, and London. (If my memory serves me correct Berlin received one too at one time.)" (1)

Notice the importance of Smyrna as a source of Freemasonry here. That is where the Onassis family has operated potion-pushing or altered consciousness drugs for millennia.

Sometimes, when my tiny head is spinning with disinfotainment and other artifacts of the mediasphere, I try to think what archaeologists and social historians 2,000 years from now might make of our particular little epoch. How, for instance, would they parse the word "drug"?

Is a "drug dealer" a pharmacist or a petty criminal? When we talk about "reasonably priced drugs for seniors," are we discussing marijuana or Lipitor {or Levitra}? What would they make of the fact that the last four American administrations have declared a "war on drugs" while taking money from drug companies?

Why is it bad when residents of Colombia build mansions from profits on the sale of drugs, but it's good when residents of Newport, R.I., do the same thing? When one person cannot live without "lifesaving drugs," we express great sympathy, unless that person is a "drug addict," in which case we may even throw him in jail. When a mood-altering drug is sold in pill form in stores, it's called an antidepressant and hailed as a medical breakthrough. When a mood-altering drug is sold on the streets, it's called felony drug trafficking and subject to stiff criminal penalties. see here london tantric

Because we are native speakers of Americanadianese, we can wend our way through the contradictions. We know that the bad drugs are the ones the cause euphoria and impair judgment, unless the drug is alcohol, but that's not ever called a drug, so there's no confusion there. We know that the good drugs are the ones that cure diseases or relieve symptoms, except sometimes the good drugs are ineffective or even counterproductive in achieving those goals.

Street dealers do not finance experimental trials on the effectiveness of the drugs they sell. Drug companies do, but they fudge the results. Street dealers have a small feedback loop because customers can tell pretty quickly whether they're loaded or not. Drug companies have a long feedback loop because human beings can't instantly tell whether their cholesterol is being lowered or their blood thinned or their insulin production stimulated. A drug with a long feedback loop is clearly more profitable than one with a short feedback loop because the dealer can keep an ineffective drug on the shelves much longer.

Interestingly, the people who sell ineffective drugs are generally said to have made "honest mistakes." If a street dealer sold you an ineffective drug, you could take five of your friends and go back and have a brisk conversation with him. If a behind-the-counter dealer sold you an ineffective drug, you'd have to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit and maybe, maybe, 10 years later you'd get some money, although probably you'd be dead by then.

Street dealers don't have patents on their drugs, which means that they'll always have plenty of competition. Drug companies do have patents, so they can set their prices without worrying about market economics. And when their patents run out, they can put out a drug with a slightly different formulation, promote it like mad and sell the new drug in a monopolistic setting {With government mandated market support in order to manage the 'money-trees' while building bureaucracy.}. You have to wonder when street dealers are going to come up with Cocaine XR or LSD Reditabs.

Since the street dealer works in a competitive atmosphere, he has to keep his prices relatively low. In order to increase his profitability, he can "step on" his product, that is, dilute it. It would be unwise for a drug company to adulterate its product, but since it owns a monopoly, it can set prices artificially high and achieve the same profitability levels. A street dealer who knowingly poisons his clientele is called "the scum of the earth." A drug corporation that knowingly poisons its clientele is called "a tobacco company." People who sell illegal drugs often rot in jail for 20 or 30 years. People who sell legal drugs are often forced to attend tedious daylong board meetings. People who take illegal drugs are called "losers." People who take legal drugs are called "everyone in America."

Glad I'm not an archaeologist in 4040; my brain would ache a whole lot.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill puts you in jail, and please do not operate heavy machinery with the ones that mother gives you. {My ex-roommate was being told to apply for his old job as a forklift truck operator while being given drugs for Schizophrenia which he did not have. He was no liar and could not expose a potential employer to the insurance risks or his fellow employees to the life threat this would entail. Many drugs people use are impairing their driving prowess, and there are laws to take away their license that go unenforced.}

Driving that train, high on ethyl 4-1-piperidinecarboxylate.

Homeopathy:

It is a wonderful thing to have the Joy of Learning and to make a career that you find is related to your studies. There are so many ways to get a Doctor label and thus claim expertise in the many fields and disciplines which we have broken knowledge into. Some of this is counter to real expertise and much of it just sets people apart from knowledge and each other. But people are also being segmented into classes within the hierarchy of government backed by and for elites in all so many ways. Medicine has been one of their more dastardly tools alongside religion. This next little factoid reminds me of how Edward Gibbon almost died because the British Medical system would not approve vaccinations through use of scabs as had been done by the likes of Paracelsus or others in antiquity and which was approved in the France of his era.

"When the Cholera epidemic reached England, it provided another opportunity to compare homeopathic treatment with the conventional methods of the day. Regular allopathic medicine yielded a mortality rate of 59 percent compared to only 16 percent for the Homeopaths. (2) When these statistics were collected, the information was so startling that a medical commission was sent to the London Homeopathic Hospital to check the records. Though the data were duly verified, it was decided not to make them public, and the facts were not released until a hundred years later." (3)

The formation of the American Medical Association is a major issue against alternative healing or real care for people. In the late 19th Century as these issues were becoming apparent there were many who knew that the allopaths or medical doctors selling laudanum and the like were actually the 'Killing-trade'. There are signs that stress management (don't fret - sweat or exercise) and the connectiveness to the 'all' around us are again making a play to be considered in health maintenance. Vitamins and supplements are able to prove to even the most duped person receiving medical care that they work and yet some doctor's groups and the governments that back them still disqualify doctors who advise their usage.

Academics are subject to a 'Knowledge Filter' (Berkeley Law Professor - Johnson) or Literary Theory (UBC English Professor Graham Good) and the outright suppression of creative or thoughtful and meaningful potentials. (4) The concept of Bucky Fuller called 'the observer of the observed' and his more detailed 'creative realization' is part of what operates as we 'project' upon reality. For example the things we see are actually a mixture of fields of energy from the dross and less excited to the highly excited or vibrational energy inside the atomic structures. One way of visualizing this includes an aura, which is the field of energy not usually visible but associated with the solar body and integrative centers called chakras. Perhaps we could contemplate a time when all people had the ability to see or sense auras. In our socially normed 'projections' that include telling our children certain things do not exist, we have lost the conscious integration or incorporation of these fields of reality.

Psychic surgeons in the Philippines and Brazil have had their energy measured during operations at the same vibration rate of 7.8 cycles. It started me thinking about how we can alter our state and how others might perceive us in these altered states. Clearly if anyone could see all the spaces between our electrons and the nuclei or between the different atoms and molecules we wouldn't seem solid by a long shot. Thus these surgeons who use no utensils would be able to energize the infected or diseased body part or tumor to remove it at an altered vibration level. There have been solid documentaries with such credible support as X-rays before a San Francisco businessman had such a tumor removed and X-rays a year later showing it hadn't returned. In the end you must decide who has the most to gain from the arguments and whether or not you want to actualize your own potential. Once you do a few things the debunkers say are impossible - then a smile will come to your face; and the intellectual conflict loses all import.

String Theory knows about the harmonic forces that are less than solid which somehow combine to make what we perceive as a solid. The astrophysicists now have told us that 95% of the universe is 'Dark Matter' or 'Dark Energy' - so get with it before you are invisible and don't know it! Just kidding! We fear that which we cannot fully comprehend and our experts or priests and doctors include many enablers of our fears. We even allow fear to pre-empt love; which is ironic because at the end of our lives it's not the fears or the differences that matter the most but whether we loved and allowed ourselves to be loved as much as possible.

"Every new perception of knowledge is always based either directly or indirectly on older knowledge. InteliTapping allows us to connect with the oldest, yet most complete source of knowledge." (5)

Nature produced a show on the origins of music and the biological and archetypal impact it has had on our evolution and emotional wherewithal. Along with reed instruments from as long ago as 60,000 years that obviously show sophisticated development of technology, they had the cave operas of those who rubbed and drummed on stalactites. They posited that the tree-swinging hominid that like the Sumatran Gibbon co-ordinates community for protection through territorial chants, is not so much less aware as most of our great Lockean influenced academics seem to be. These animals also learned what plants are dangerous and what plants alter your spiritual consciousness. You can see it when your puppy goes outside for the first time and chews on some grass to settle its tummy. Our genes contain a lot of information or the ability to tap-in to much knowledge. The buzz you get from 'weed' is the buzz coming from your Thalami and Third Eye or Pineal gland that has a crystal radio receiver and grains or crystalline structures. Crystalline structures like quartz were known to be useful in the Lost Chord of the Druids and more ancient shamans. There are magnificent quartz caves in Central America and other places that would have been used by early hominids for a certainty.

The Best Body Language - Sex:

Long before Tantra or Bhakti Yoga there were many things ancients probably learned from intercourse, even more than most people do today. Today we have drugs like Viagra to enhance the longevity of the sexual encounter. The Mayans have natural drug for this. There are so many things which keep us busy or deflect us from spiritual insight as is noted in many Eastern systems which refer to the 'busy-mind' or samsara and the illusion of Maya.

Second degree Wiccan students who have advanced through a rigorous training in esoteric knowledge begin a quest that many would regard as perverse pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification. The partners are often involved in other committed relationships. When a man and a woman who are interested in spiritual growth combine to experience the Tantric or Bhakti (Yoga) or ritualistic growth potential to free more than just their personal self or ego to reach the heights of spiritual or psychic possibilities; who can say what is real and what is imagined. This effort to commune with spirit is termed 'working partners' and the allies or guides is who they really seek to merge or work with. The imagination is undoubtedly a part of the dynamic. It isn't necessary for them to care for each other in the way lovers do. I have not done this 'work'.

Many people talk about 'soulmates' or 'dual flames' and the words become mere shadows of the real potential. At the same time sex is a dirty 'word', and act, in much of society.

What can a writer say to convey the essence of all these things?

If I absolve myself from the challenge of integrating these concepts, rituals and soulful realities I would simply say trust your soul and know that wherever you may go you will find something more than whatever you thought was real to begin with.

If I talk about 'la petite mort' or empathic attunements with the soul of the partner that allows the self to disintegrate and become part of something larger than one person; and almost dissolve in the vastness of spirit - it will only seem like prose and poetry. The phrase 'la petite mort' or 'the little death' can in fact lead to a Kundalini type experience which can cause death.

Of course, one can wax eloquent and carry on at length about any of their hopes and desires. The essence of a great working partner most probably has little to do with these aspirations and more to do with the way the soul interpenetrates all people. The glimpses of insight gained through empathy and love with those who shared my needs are special to me and will forever stay in the part of my soul (if there is such a part) that cherishes all we were and hungers for what we could have been.

To deprecate the witch who 'draws down the moon' into their partner on the path to worship of things no one can fully know is the stuff of fearful and insecure people. That kind of bigotry without actual experience is rampant in all areas of society. It is truly just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when one contemplates all the ways mankind has developed to separate himself from what we are collectively and what god truly wishes for us to realize. No amount of constant seeking or obsession with these pursuits will ever get a man any closer to his soul than what he was while in his mother's womb.

The joy and creativity of the challenge to know is as great a gift as our maker can give us - except perhaps the acquiescence to the soul within the loved one you are blessed to have the chance to know and share your life with. In the moment of creation each day as we grow and learn to be, we are forever drawn by some force that seeks greater harmony and purpose for all energy.

Many (if not most) people think the 24 hour orgasm is like alien abductions but the EEG and other ways of measuring physical responses would convince them otherwise. A similar number of people find the misuse of Tantric Yoga by the likes of Crowley and Hubbard is tantamount to whatever is evil in man. I say they are right, but that is not the fault of Tantric Yoga. These techniques are very seductive and in some ways the participants would choose to have the experience even if they knew a great deal about it because it is a sad truism that Masters and Johnson or Kinsey are right. They say a full third of women never have an orgasm through intercourse.

Many people seldom enjoy sex and some significant number of the rest of us are in varying stages of poor to decent ability and openness to what great learning sex can provide. It could be said that our sexual relations are a good barometer of the state of society. I favour sex education and all the opportunities and responsibilities that go with the natural and soulful functions of the act. It is easy to understand why some people are hesitant to have strangers teach their loved ones about sex. But Father Leo Booth is right when he notes that parents who repress their children or foist suppressive behavior upon them are just as guilty of abuse.

#london tantric

[cherryfloyd-blog]

Jimmy Page - Behind Closed Doors

There are so many cookie crumbs to this story and I truly put as much research into this as my brain could handle. What started as a fun idea, soon turned into a late night adventure of notes sprawled across my bed, snacks to keep the energy going, glasses on; with a pen sticking of my mouth as I thumbed through as many pages of literature that I could get my hands on. There are several parts of this but for the sake of remaining unbiased I will keep it as straightforward and simple as I can. There has been a rumour floating around for fifty odd years, that Led Zeppelin; more specifically Jimmy Page, had made a deal with the devil. In this article, I will break down the events that have lead people to believe such things. In the end, it will remain impartial and will be open to interpretation which we can discuss further.

 To begin, let’s talk about Jimmy’s growing idolisation and obsession with Aleister Crowley, famous for being an occult leader and magician. For more back story, Crowley was a British occultist who became known for pioneering the practice of black magic (or magick as he would call it). Aleister called himself Beast 666 and wrote literature on black magic and the occult, making him a major cult figure. He joined a few popular organizations to begin with, but ventured off into his own self created philosophy. Crowley believed himself to be the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into  the Eon of Horus, thus founding the Religion of Thelema. 

(Below is the logo of Thelema)

Pictures of Crowley have since been discreetly used in pop culture, as if a small tribute. For example; The Beatles featured Crowley on their album cover art for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, he can be seen in the back row, if I’m correct. Building off of Page’s affinity for Crowley, which began to noticeably build by the mid to late 60’s, Page financed to own a bookstore in Britain which specialized in selling publishings of the occult and black magik. Needless to say, Jimmy was in deep at this point but still only scratching the surface of infatuation. The bookstore was named “The Equinox” which was also the name of a book that Crowley himself had written on the occult and magic. To this day, Jimmy Page has the second largest collection of Crowley memorabilia and literature, which is no small expense. His bookstore is now closed, but back in the day had been in stock of some very pricey and hard to come by black magik publications.

Another thing I found interesting, was Page being heavily influenced by very iconic blues artists, such as Robert Leroy Johnson (okay, maybe not that interesting, everyone in rock cites him as being the backbone of rock n roll today) nonetheless, Johnson died at the age of 27 from unsolved and suspicious causes. He never became famous while he was alive, but rumour has it that Johnson had also sold his soul to the devil in return for fame, at a crossroads, which Robert mentions in a few songs. A very small, unrelated tidbit of information, but it makes you wonder if our rock star idols gave up more than a normal life, to become internationally loved and recognized.

Around the year 1970, Jimmy had supposedly asked the band to perform a ritual with him, one that would bring them power and something along the lines of everlasting life? I know right, no biggie, just dabbling with some dark forces. Anyone that knows black magik, can tell you that spells like this are not something to be taken lightly or messed with. John Paul Jones was allegedly the only one to not take part in this pact, which you’ll later realize why that makes all of this so much more strange than it already is. If you think about it, had they made such a pact it would make sense. Robert Plant has made it to the list of top 100 best singers of all time in Rock history, not only that but made it to number one (1). Jimmy Page? Well he’s seen as a god and legend by almost every guitar player in the modern world, and has been ranked number two, only one spot behind Jimi Hendrix. John Bonham has been recognized as one of the best double kick drummers in history, quite literally, every drummer looks up to him as also an almost god like figure. As for John Paul Jones? There is no doubt the man is wicked talented, but not nearly as talked about or famed. We can all acknowledge the man has serious talent, and yet seems to be left in the shadows of his peers.

The first evidence of this pact can be seen with the album Led Zeppelin III, between the end of the last song and the paper label is the outro groove written into the vinyl was “So mote it be” on one side and “Do what thou wilt” on the other. The are basic phrases that are the core of Crowley’s belief system. By this point people were determined that Jimmy had become a member of O.T.O , and organization and cult who’s most influential and iconic member was none other than Crowley. More about the organization can be read about in a link below, but it should be noted that they have four pillar rules; one of which is to not speak of the organization to others or discuss the practices of which they studied. A rule, that Jimmy Page is believed to have broken at one point.

The second piece of evidence was apparent with the release of Led Zeppelin IV, when symbolism became a driving force. Inside the album is a painting of the hermit (a powerful tarot symbol), later in life Jimmy would refer to himself as being something of a hermit despite being a major public figure. The album provides no title, and shows no band name on the cover, but on the inside are four brightly printed logos across the sleeve. From left to right, these symbols represent Page, Jones, Bonham and Plant. Page has said in interviews that the symbols (for the most part) were taken from Rudolf Koch’s 1955 Book of Signs. Plant’s symbol is probably the easiest to decipher - as it is the feather of truth and courage, from the origins of Egyptian goddess Ma’at. John Bonham’s is believed to be either a drum kit, or the symbol of trinity of a family unit (meaning father, mother, child). John Paul Jones, which was likely picked by Jimmy, was the a celtic sigil for confidence and competence. However, Jimmy’s logo has always been the hardest to breakdown and figure out. While most people believe his logo represents saturn (which controls the Capricorn sign, Jimmy is a Capricorn so it would make sense), there is a certain level of mystery behind it. Page has famously said he will never tell anyone what it means. Thought Plant has once said that Page revealed the full meaning of all four signs, including a detailed discussion of what Zoso meant. Admittedly, Plant expressed he was too drunk to remember by the next morning, and when he had asked Page about it again, page replied with saying he couldn’t/wouldn’t discuss it. Now this could very well be Jimmy’s antics, or just general mysterious persona, or perhaps he simply cannot discuss or reveal information. Perhaps, this is the one of the four pillar rules of O.T.O that Page had broken. Jimmy is an all around very private person, who very rarely, if at all, talks about his religious or spiritual beliefs or practices.

It is worth noting that Sandy Denny (pictured below) of Fairport Convention, the voice on The Battle of Evermore track, was given her own sigil. The logo is translated to Godhead or the power of female.

According to Pamela Des Barres, Pages girlfriend of this era, has said that at this point Jimmy got very deep into the studying of Crowley, and had even asked her to search San Francisco and Los Angles for Crowley memorabilia. She had not fallen short on this task, and managed to dig up some very impressive artifacts, manuscripts, and even “magical” robes that Crowley has worn. In 1970, around the time of the ritual, Page had dropped a large chunk of cash to acquire Crowley’s mansion, Boleskine, located on Loch Ness. The home, once owned by Crowley, had a large history of suicides and an even bigger turnover rate of employees as they found the home to be no doubt inhabited by dark entities. Regardless of what one may believe, the house holds a sinister vibe. Page later sold the home in 1992, and had actually been very wary of ever living there and had left the estate in a caregivers possession. Of the 22 years that he had owned the house, he only spent 6 weeks in total living there. In 2016, the house unexplainably burned down. (pictured below is Jimmy at the mansion) 

 Now this next part is where shit gets bonkers, so to speak, the rest so far has been rumours and back stories and alleged encounters. Just a man with an obsession, and depending on your personal beliefs, you may find that he took his practices too far. Perhaps his intentions were pure, but looking at his life in general, what did Jimmy have to sacrifice to become quite literally a noteable person in history. Well let’s see.

Introducing Kenneth Anger; a fellow Crowley disciple and filmmaker, drug taker and subversive. He spent most of his time drawing magic circles, burning incense and chanting spells in Enochian - trying to do a real ritual exorcism. Plans for his film Lucifer Rising began to fall apart when Bobby Beausoleil (lead actor) - had to quit. Bobby, who later stole rough cuts and cameras from Anger would soon regret this. To take revenge, Anger supposedly made a talisman to curse Bobby. Within a year, Beausoleil had ended up convicted of murder with a life sentence for the murder of Sharon Tate as part of the Manson family murders. Wild, I know. Possibly just a coincidence, or even just a tall tale.

Cue Jimmy Page, who had agreed to do the soundtrack for Angers film, and the music Jimmy had produced is exactly what you’d expect. Dark, eerie, and perfect for a film of satanic proportions. Some of which can actually be heard in the intro for “In The Out Door”, his melancholy and devilish sound coming through in the song “In The Evening”. Kenneth and Jimmy had a love/hate relationship, and what started as a mutual appreciation and dedication to Crowley’s practice and image, soon turned to ugly turmoil just as quickly. Anger moved into Boleskine, where him and Page shared a love for Crowley memorabilia. However, as their friendship deteriorated, Anger was asked to leave the Crowley mansion. At the height of Led Zeppelin’s career, Jimmy had pulled out of the film project in 1975. Allegedly, Anger soon stated that he had cursed Page and Zepp with a major spell, a spell so big that it took all of Crowley’s teachings he could muster up, to cast upon them.

 Almost immediately, the band started to experience turbulence and the eventual downfall of their career as one tragedy after another struck them to the core. Robert Plant was in a car crash, plunging off a cliff in Greece in 1975, nearly killing himself, his wife and his son Karac. Which meant cancelling the Physical Graffiti tour and having to record in a wheelchair. The make up tour was littered with negative events starting with Plant getting Laryngitis. Followed by ticketless fans in Cincinnati rioting and storming the gates. In San Francisco, manager Peter Grant and John Boham had gotten into a fight with Bill Graham, and nearly beating a Bill Graham employee to death. Both Grant and Bonham narrowly escaping serious charges and incarceration. Karac eventually fell ill, and no amount of money would make him better, as doctors had no idea what was wrong, by 1977 Karac had passed away and the tour was cancelled. At this point, Plant had quit the band and music in general in response to Page and Jones not showing up to his sons funeral.

Around this time, Page was nearly comatose on a daily basis due to a crippling Heroine addiction, and Bonhams alcoholism was raging out of control, becoming increasingly violent and unpredictable. In 1978, Sandy Denny, the goddess of the Battle of Evermore, drunkenly plunged down a flight of stairs; breaking her neck and died. The tip of the iceberg was the incident that occurred in September of 1980. Handlers had tucked Bonzo into bed after a band rehearsal, following a night of heavy drinking; assuming he would be okay, he’s done it a million times before, right? But as well know, John tragically died in his sleep from asphyxiation. It’s worth mentioning, that in the middle of all of this mayhem, John Paul Jones had remained completely untouched. While the loss of Karac and Bonham had affected John, being as they were family, he was never really directly affected. Could this be because he stayed as far away from the pact as possible? Could these events be natures way of taking something, in return for giving something such as power? Is this all the work of Angers alleged curse?

Robert Plant once addressed these very claims, as some people point fingers at Jimmy being the cosmic reasoning behind the passing of Karac and Bonham. Though, he says it’s a cheap shot. This is what Plant had to say about the matter - “The comments about how it was all connected with Jimmy’s dalliance with the dark side or whatever, that was cheap. I’ve never shared the preoccupations with him and I don’t really know anything about it. Fate is already written”. I suppose it has less to do with whether Page “sold his soul” and more to do with the possible repercussions of playing against nature, and whether such practices have a domino affect. The piling strange circumstances does make one wonder how involved Page really was, and how much the involvement took a toll on the band. Just how much of it can account for Led Zeppelin’s massive success, to the point of making history in music forever (everlasting life?). At the end it could all very well just be a bunch of mumbo jumbo non-sense. I am curious as to what you all think, feel free to leave comments or shoot me a message!

*Note; Do not take this too seriously, it’s all speculation and open for interpretation. Below are some interesting sites that I used in my search!

Resources:

https://forums.ledzeppelin.com/topic/15027-jimmy-and-crowley/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley

https://carwreckdebangs.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/aleister-crowley-jimmy-page-and-the-curse-of-led-zeppelin-when-myth-magick-and-weird-facts-collide/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordo_Templi_Orientis

https://zososymbol.com/

#uhm I think I covered all the basis #im SO nervous to post this omfg #jimmy page #led zeppelin #robert plant #john paul jones #John Bonham #myposts

[semirahrose]

I hear some people are accusing Sam and Cas of abusing Dean to get him to do what they wanted, what do you think about that?

 My reaction: Utter befuddlement.

(gif credit: sebstans)

I haven’t seen the latest episodes, so I can’t go in and take a critical look at whatever supposedly “abusive” behaviors Sam and Cas are displaying, but I’m gonna guess—as has been the pattern for a long while now—that one or both of them vehemently expressed their disagreement with Dean’s plan, probably more than once. They were probably sad. They might have even *gasp* shown their emotions. (How very dare they) And Sam punched Dean. ** Not something I’m comfortable with, to be honest, but that’s personal and is neither here nor there.

Part of why I love Sam so much is this: as much as he can, to the very limits of his endurance, he tries to trust in people and respect their decisions. He is (despite his lack of faith in himself) slow to wrath—or at least outward expressions of wrath. He is calm, and he is faithful, sometimes even to his own detriment. (Sam has never been able to deal well with losing Dean, though. That’s a long established canon fact.)

But: 

Not being able to pretend everything is all right is not abuse. Telling a person (even repeatedly, even convincingly) that you really don’t want them to do something is not abuse. People are allowed to have emotions and reactions that do not mesh with my own. Wanting something or even needing something  and showing you need it is not abuse.

Being broken, unstable, or on uncertain footing is not abuse. Needing and seeking support is not abuse. Needing and seeking support even when the person you are seeking support from is, himself, broken and in need of support you are unable to provide is not abuse. It’s tragic, but it’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, abusive.

Hitting a person is not abuse. Here’s where it gets sticky. Hitting a person is violence. It is not a healthy response and should never be encouraged. But abuse, by its very definition, is more than violence. Abuse requires a pattern (whether of violence or of financial, emotional, and/or social control) that is enacted specifically to achieve a desired result: to put the abused person under the abuser’s control. 

(Under a cut because this gets long and no one should have to deal with my disconnected rambling unless they wish to. Analysis below of whether Sam [and Cas, to the best of my limited knowledge and ability, since he’s unfortunately not part of my hyperfocus] meet the criteria. tl;dr they don’t)

So. A pattern. And an unequal dynamic. 

A pattern?

Sam is very, very rarely violent when he is in control of his actions (i.e. not possessed or under the influence of a supernatural substance). The instances where he has initiated physical violence in all 14 seasons can be counted on one hand. It does not create any real sort of pattern. 

I could talk for a long time about how Castiel’s occasional violence does not also constitute a pattern of abuse, but though I like him, I haven’t spent as much time poring over his scenes word for word and am not sure how clear it would be, and additionally, it’s a little questionable to expect a being who has been brainwashed and molded for thousands of years to be a perfect soldier to a) understand and b) act in accordance with human relationship dynamics without a lot of trial, error, and patient explanation (which he didn’t get with any consistency from the person whose ideals he clung to when he first appeared [Dean].) I lived abroad in a country whose customs and social expectations were a bit different from my own, and I had the opportunity to do extensive research in advance. I still had pretty intense culture shock and an adjustment period. There were some things I simply couldn’t fully wrap my mind around, and some things I disagreed with. And it was only some thousands of miles of land and ocean that separated us. Arguably, it can’t even be applied to Castiel in those first seasons. Asking him to relearn in days, weeks, or even years things that have been beaten into him over millennia is… ambitious, to say the least, and something that needs to be considered in any nuanced analysis.

Then the show humanized Cas. It made him make some well-intentioned mistakes while trying to seek a leader and do what he believed to be good for his family…the family he has grown up with, again, for millennia. The show took away his powers, his memories, his sanity. But it did not change his role. Castiel’s arcs over the season have specifically emphasized his discomfort and inexperience with being perceived as a leader. When he was unstable after having taken on Sam’s overflowing trauma from his broken hell wall, he was very much not in a position of power, and… if anyone was being abusive, it wasn’t Cas.

But perhaps people are talking about emotional/psychological abuse? Again, both Cas and Sam have expressed desires and tried to explain differing positions from Dean and have been under powerful supernatural influence (the Siren, demon blood, Leviathan, etc), and have made decisions on their own without seeking Dean’s permission—and, oops, that just highlighted our second criterion.

An unequal dynamic (specifically, abuser in a position of power).

Neither Sam nor Castiel is in a position of power over Dean. Only in season 11 did Sam and Dean’s dynamic start to level out a bit. The big struggle in early seasons, the one that literally carried us to the season 5 finale, was that Dean treated Sam as a kid/subordinate, not as an equal, and Sam felt he needed to seek permission to do anything. Actual quote from “Swan Song” (and I admire this development in Dean so much, even if the later seasons dismantled it):

DEAN: The whole “up with Satan” thing. I’m on board. SAM: You’re gonna let me say yes? DEAN: No. That’s the thing. It’s not on me to let you do anything. You’re a grown – well, overgrown – man. If this is what you want, I’ll back your play. SAM: That’s the last thing I thought you’d ever say. DEAN: Might be. I’m not gonna lie to you, though. It goes against every fiber I got. I mean, truth is… You know, watching out for you… it’s kinda been my job, you know? But more than that, it’s… it’s kinda who I am. You’re not a kid anymore, Sam, and I can’t keep treating you like one. Maybe I got to grow up a little, too. I don’t know if we got a snowball’s chance. But… But I do know that if anybody can do it… it’s you.

Some people will try to claim that Sam is in a position of power because he tried to go to college or because he can leave Dean and (somehow??) holds that over Dean’s head repeatedly (??????????), but if someone is in a position where, for even their own education or mental health, they’re not allowed to be apart from someone or even think about seeking something for themselves, that’s not abuse on the part of the person who seeks separation. And when Sam (young, so young), left for college, the only control he had was his own autonomy, his own two feet that brought him out that door. He was disowned for choosing to do what he needed for himself, after growing up in a family he had a hard time feeling a part of. That’s not abuse on Sam’s part. Maybe Dean did need Sam there beside him. But doing something for his own mental health and personal growth is not abuse by any stretch of the imagination. I call that courage.

The same goes for Castiel, especially considering that, despite his greater physical strength (when he was a fully-powered angel), he still tends mostly to act as if he is a subordinate or inferior, possibly from the millennia during which he was a soldier in a garrison: he was looking for a leader, a superior officer, even when he left. He found Dean.

“But what about when Sam and Cas do things behind Dean’s back??” Some people might ask. Again, I feel like (especially in the case of the Mark, where, due to its powerful influence, Dean was significantly altered and violent/controlling) if characters are so afraid to seek permission/understanding that they fear that they have to do something completely in secret… that just…. that’s not evidence that these people scurrying around in breathless terror are somehow the ones in a position of power?? Quite the opposite, I’d say. I mean, MoC!Dean literally said they weren’t a team; it was a dictatorship.

I’m sorry there are so few examples. Honestly, I could go on for hours and for pages and pages and pages, but I don’t have the time or the brainpower to make that post, so this is what I have. I’m sorry it’s not as complete as it could be or that it doesn’t include examples from s14, since I haven’t seen anything since pretty early in the season.

In short/tl;dr: Sam and Cas neither display a pattern of control nor find themselves consistently in a position of power over Dean. (And I cannot stress enough that Sam trying to seek his own path/seek education/do things for himself does not count as abuse and it disturbs me that people think it does.) 

In fact, the opposite is most often the case: Dean is generally in the role of the leader. Recent seasons have begun to change that dynamic a bit, but neither Sam nor Cas have reversed the dynamic.

** Re: Sam punching Dean:  I understand the circumstances and his reaction makes sense to me, but I’ll be honest: I’m personally uncomfortable with violence as a problem-solving method. So I don’t like that Sam did it, but I understand that both brothers grew up in an environment where less destructive/self-destructive methods were not consistently modeled for them. I understand that there are situations in which people might feel like words are useless and their only recourse is a physical response. I get pain and tragedy and desperation and terror and loss… but it doesn’t mean I’m any more comfortable with it.

#bittersamgirlclub #sam winchester #castiel #negativity for ts #my meta #my stuff #sam and abuse #sam and fandom #sam and family #dean winchester #moc!dean #sam and cas #anonymous #semirah replies

[austenpoppy]

Slughorn needs to hear this one day

I don’t hate him. Nope. Generally I even like him, and look at him like an old uncle with an odd behaviour.

But there are moments all I want to do is slap him really hard. And yell at him like a mad woman.

I mean, of course I can be angry with other characters, even characters I absolutely love. Because they are human beings and so are flawed and make mistakes. Nothing more normal.

But him, he really gets on my nerves !

Yes, I speak of you, Horace Slughorn. Nobody really dislikes you, right ? They all look at you fondly, kindly. Nobody says how much you were wrong. Nobody says how much your little elitist club was despicable.

Some even don't realise it.

That is right, a good slap on your chubby cheek would be fine with me. Then I could eventually forgive you.

Because Dumbledore saying you have a natural talent at finding exceptionnal people, people with someting special, makes me want to tear something apart.

Because people finding you are a good judge on these matters makes me believe there is no justice down there.

Because your behaviour towards students like Marcus Belby, whom you invited to the first reunion of your club because his uncle was famous and extremely clever, but rejected once you realized he had no connections with this member of of his family, once you judged him as uninteresting because of his manners and his shyness, makes me want to scowl you forever.

He had probably great qualities, but you dismissed him, you judged him not good enough for your club, so you’ll never know them.

You even tried to forget him after your conversation with him, making pass a snack to all your guests except him.

You spoke to him with a tone of false politeness full of scorn and disdain.

You turned your head.

And you probably never looked at him again.

He would maybe have blossomed if you had encouraged him enough, if you had taken the time to make him grow and improve, if you had taken the time to really look at him.

Which means, if you had done your job seriously.

You are a Potions Master, but a teacher is sometimes more like a gardener. A gardener who plants a seed in the ground, waters it, takes care of it, looks at it grow and turn into a beautiful flower. However, this flower is fragile, and a tempest, winter, or even a simple gust of wind can reduce it to ashes.

The way you turned your head this day was like a gust of wind, the way you treated him with disdain and indifference and even ignored him was like winter’s arrival, the way you humiliated him a tempest.

You’re wrong, though, Horace, if you think that it’s more important, rewarding and relevant to look after the students you find interesting.

Because each student is interesting. You may have preferences, of course, it’s not something you can help, but showing them so blatantly and ignoring totally the other students, who can have something to bring, something to exchange, something to make shine, is an awful mistake.

Moreover, if you believed your judgement unerring, you were greatly mistaken.

You know what ?

One of your favorites, Cormac MacLaggen, whom you liked because his family spent week-ends hunting Nogtails with the Prime Minister, is, though brave, arrogant, presomptuous, so conceited it is sickening, and spent an entire evening talking about himself to Hermione Granger, and visibly harassed her so much, trying to make her kiss him, that she fled away from him. What a wonderful boy !

Of course he had qualities, but you overestimated him. He’s not the future Prime Minister, or else he really has to change.

You have such a great understanding of people, such a great judgement, Horace, that’s really impressive. I’m awed.

Hang on a second, what does this mean, “even the greatest spirits can be misled.” ? You really thought that your false opinion of Cormac was your only mistake this year ?

(Yes, we’re only speaking about this year, when you were Harry’s teacher, because we’re not going to talk about Tom Jedusor, I promise you; I don't hold a grudge against you because you let yourself being dazzled by his charm and wits; this boy was one of the biggest manipulators who ever existed, the spark of evil, the shadow of the hell, Satan’s laugh, and a lot of people felt into his golden but bloody traps.)

Let me laugh.

Your precious little Harry, whom I love by the way, your little prodigy, was not the creator of all those inventions you were praising. He was - almost - cheating (yeah, I know, that was not really cheating) with a manual with scribbled notes written by another pupil years ago on it.

You know who this pupil was ? Severus Snape. You were wrong, Harry was not better than Snape at potions. (Following a very true comment, to be fair with Slughorn, he did know Snape was very good, it is just I think he did not realise how much).

You know how Harry got your worst memory ? He drank the Felix Felicis you had given him. But you know who suggested the idea ? Ron Weasley.

Ron Weasley. Ronald Bilius Weasley. Ron Weasley.

I repeat his name because apparently you had some problem with it.

Because yes, we arrive at the moment you deserve your slap on your face. So you did not think he was worth remembering his name ? You looked at him as if he was “nothing more than a shed of Doxies” ? You wondered why the genius Hermione Granger and the Boy-who-lived befriended a “mediocre pupil with average skills” -that’s not what you said but you thought it didn’t you ?- ? You didn’t indulge him ? You let him out of your stupid club because you thought he was not good enough ? You invited nearly all the people he was closed to -his two best friends, his sister- except him, letting him behind (oh, you left someone like Luna behind too by the way. What a mistake) ?

(By the way, Harry, Hermione, Ginny, why have you not refused clearly his invitations when your dearest friend and brother was so humiliated by this teacher ? Oh, that’s right, Harry, the memory. But Hermione ? Ginny ? Why have you not tried to tell Ron he did not deserve all this contempt ? I would have thought that you, of all people…)

Screw you, Horace Slughorn. Despite all your contempt, despite all the people believing he was average and even mediocre, despite his own very low self-esteem, he became one of the most wonderful persons you could have ever met. He became a wonderful Auror.

You were really deluding yourself. He has always, and will always, been a far greater man than you.

When you have met him, he had, at the age of twelve, led and won a fantastic chess match qualified by Dumbledore as “the best-played game of chess Hogwarts has seen in many years”, in which he had sacrificed himself and got knocked out by a chess piece in order to reach his goal : allow his friends carrying on with the battle.

When you have met him, he had, at the age of thirteen, followed a troop of spiders in the dark Forbidden Forest, to find a clue about what was happening in Hogwarts and save petrified pupils, especially his dear Hermione, and met Acromentulas, although he is arachnophobic ! Spiders were his worst fear at that time, but he did not hesitate.

When you have met him, he had found where was the Chamber of Secrets and how to open it.

When you have met him, he had shoved Harry out of the way of a furious dog and got bitten in his place.

When you have met him, he had stood on a broken leg to tell firmly somebody everyone thought was a mass murderer, somebody he had seen months before with a knive above his bed, that if he wanted to kill his best friend, he would have to kill him too.

And, during a fight, had jumped with his broken leg on this person you knew (yes, Sirius Black) to get their wands he had taken.

And then, always with this broken leg, had wanted to be one of the people chained to the real mass murderer, who was his former rat, to get him to the castle.

When you have met him, he had been part of the battle of the Department of Mysteries, following Harry without questions. He had to fight three Death Eaters on his own, and got hit with a dangerous spell that led him to be scarred for life by a brain.

When you have met him, he was already this self-sacrificing, selfless, brave, kind-hearted, compassionate, clever, witty as hell, extremely funny and loyal to a fault guy you never saw but without whom Harry and Hermione were incapable to live or even function.

Their heart, Horace, you missed the heart of this little trio.

And after, Horace ? After that ?

I won't tell you everything, use your web of personalities to get a little information !

But you know what ?

This guy, Horace, disarmed Bellatrix Lestrange.

This guy, Horace, defied Voldemort and broke a spell you-know-who had done.

This guy, Horace, hit Death Eaters from a broom.

This guy, Horace, dropped everything to go on a horcruxe hunt.

Yes, Horcruxes. You heard me.

The very Horcruxes you were so afraid of.

And he wore around his neck a part of the soul of Voldemort after he nearly died, after a massive blood loss, for months, with Harry and Hermione.

And because he wears his heart on his sleeve, because his heart is so open, because he thinks he is nothing, he went through mental torture for months.

And even got possessed, got manipulated by Voldemort, but never broke. He got rid of it.

And you know what else he did?

He begged Bellatrix Lestrange to torture him instead of the girl he loves. Don’t tell me he was unaware of what she had done, he had seen it with his very eyes and had been utterly moved. Yet he was ready to go through that for Hermione, was ready to suffer beyond the believable, was ready to become insane.

He wanted to go kill Nagini, Voldemort’s snake if you did not know it, alone, despite the known presence of Voldemort.

He found how to get rid of one of the last Horcruxes, and opened the Chamber of Secrets without even speaking Parseltongue.

He had not planned to go through the war.

You know what is the worst ? What you thought was maybe exactly what the Horcruxe tortured him with.

I like you, Horace, but you really deserve some slaps.

#anti ron hate #anti ron bashing #horace slughorn #hp #ron weasley

[cinephiles-delight]

Guilt, Grief, and the Inescapable Nature of Family in “Hereditary”

     Before today, I had never known what it feels like to sit staring at a movie screen with a gaping jaw for two hours straight, locked in a permanent state of complete shock and amazement.  Today I had the privilege to watch Hereditary in theaters, and it is not an understatement to say that this movie will become known as “this generation’s The Exorcist”.  I have never before seen a film so seamlessly blend painfully beautiful family drama with a truly grotesque and devilish horror story.  For me, the film breaks down into those two basic elements–the horror plot and the family plot–and quite possibly the most amazing feat that Ari Aster accomplishes in this film is that not only is neither plot dominant or more interesting, neither plot works without the other.  Horror is the vehicle Aster uses to tell the story of a family that falls apart at the seams when besieged by the forces of grief, guilt, and hereditary insanity, and it is the vehicle by which he gives the audience a truly terrifying, personal, and heartbreaking film.

     One of the most prominent themes in the film is guilt and the transference of guilt.  We are introduced to this theme explicitly when Annie goes to grief counseling for the first time, and she, in a tearful confession, declares that she feels guilty for “all of it”.  Annie expounds on this rather cryptic confession later in the nightmare/sleepwalking sequence when has an imagined conversation with her son, Peter.  In her dream, Annie screams at Peter that she never wanted him in the first place, that it was her grandmother’s idea to have him, and that she tried to have a miscarriage to prevent his birth.  The fact that this comes out only in Annie’s dream, her moment of psychological vulnerability, represents just how deeply she represses her guilt in relation to her son, and how much she fears having to accept the reality of her own actions.  The “reality of her actions” also includes trying to set fire to her daughter and son using paint thinner and a box of matches during a sleepwalking episode, something Annie laments doing while conversing with Joan, saying that she fears she can never win back her son’s trust.  Annie’s guilt, and her avoidance of it–think about the dinner table scene in which she rants about no one accepting blame, to which Peter responds by pointing out her own blame that she vehemently denies/represses–acts as the driving engine for the family drama story, but she is far from the only character who must struggle with feelings of remorse and helplessness.  

     Probably the most tragic victim of psychological scars is Peter himself, who must cope with the knowledge that he was directly responsible (on several levels) for his sister’s death.  Peter’s speeding, inattention to the road, letting Charlie roam the party on her own, not bringing her epi-pen, smoking weed while ignoring Charlie, etc. all contributed to her death and were all Peter’s fault, something Charlie’s ghost will not soon let him forget.  Peter is haunted by visions of Charlie, appearing in his room, and in one scene her head even falls off, rolling towards him across the room as it turns into a toy ball.  Peter is literally being haunted by the consequences of his actions.  Later, as Peter is smoking marijuana under the bleachers at school, he begins to have a serious allergic reaction in which his throat swells and he struggles to breath.  The audience will immediately recognize this as strange, because for one thing we have seen Peter smoking weed before with no ill effects, and for another as the reaction reaches its climax he begins to weep and asks his friend to “hold his hand”.  This suggests that (barring any supernatural explanations), Peter’s reaction was a physical manifestation of his own feelings of guilt in relation to Charlie’s death.  Here, the manifestation of his grief is an allergic reaction to marijuana because those are the two contributing factors that Peter links most closely with his culpability in Charlie’s death: his leaving her alone and allowing her to eat the cake with nuts in it, and his driving while high on marijuana.  The fact that Peter collapses in an hysterical fit as he has the reaction further lends weight to the idea that it is a direct consequence of his emotional distress.  (Side note: another interesting break in Peter’s psyche occurs when he sees his own reflection in a closet door smiling back at him in class one day.  The “real” Peter is frowning, while the reflected Peter–the one everyone else sees–is smiling: a visual representation of Peter concealing his own grief and guilt.)  

     Finally, and maybe most importantly, both Peter and Annie’s guilt are the driving forces behind the father’s distress throughout the film, and through his character the audience is offered a perspective from which to view the events of the film removed from any supernatural elements.  The husband is a skeptic, and any time that we are given a glimpse into his point of view we are allowed to see the effect Annie’s erratic behavior and Peter’s descent into hysterics have on a normal person removed from the horror elements of this movie.  This is because, as the story progresses, and Annie descends deeper into her own madness and exasperation, her husband is the one who must bear the brunt of its most immediate consequences.  He is resigned to watch helplessly as his wife, in a desperate attempt to alleviate the pain of her grief, resorts to bizarre and insane occult rituals, dragging innocent Peter into her madness in the process.  For example, in the scene where Annie attempts to conjure the spirit of Charlie in the presence of Peter and his father, the father is forced to watch his son grow increasingly terrified and emotionally hysterical as his mother talks about crazy cult ideas and begins to speak in a vocal imitation of his dead sister.  Not only does this incident throw Peter into a fit of convulsive sob-screams, it breaks the father’s heart as we watch him helplessly bear witness to not only his wife seemingly losing her mind, but also witness his son’s psyche torn apart in the process.  As the movie goes on, and he receives more and more frequent calls from Peter’s school reporting erratic and emotionally unstable behavior from Peter, the father begins to lose the last shred of self-restraint he has left with regards to his wife and her neurosis’ influence on the family.  His ultimate frustration and anger is shown to the audience in the quiet and restrained image of him pulling into the driveway, having picked up Peter from school after an episode resulting in a broken nose, and completely ignoring the shouts of his wife at the car window, pounding and trying to get his attention as he simply drives on by.  Finally, after spending the entire first act and most of the second act being consumed by the roaring inferno of his family’s dysfunction, the father’s character arc comes to an end in spectacular and symbolic fashion: as Annie tosses Charlie’s journal into the fireplace he spontaneously bursts into flames, burnt alive on the spot.  The father ends his journey in this film as he spent most of it: being consumed in the flames produced by the disintegration of his family.

    This leads me to the film’s most obvious, and probably most important, theme: the inescapable nature of family.  The audience begins to notice, that in this movie the most terrifying place to be is, in fact, in the home (and not just because of the scary, naked, old people)–I’m borrowing that phrase from another critic.  The dread that accompanies the image of the home is a product of its association with what lies within it: family.  Homes represents our ties to the past, our ancestors, and the vestiges of our parents and grandparents.  Homes are where the most tragic dramas are acted out by unwitting players just trying their hardest to make a family work.  Home represents for Peter the battlefield on which were fought all the altercations with his mother, it represents the presence of a combative, possibly psychotic mother who once tried to murder him.  For the father home represents being trapped with his wife and her delirium.  And for the mother, home represents the place that once was inhabited by her beloved Charlie, and that is still inhabited by the insidious influences of a manipulative mother.  Images of homes pop up all over the place in this film; whether it be the very stately treehouse, the several dioramas displayed in the family room, or the miniature house being constructed in Annie’s workshop, the motif of the house plays an important role in this film.  The images remind us of the associations I listed above, and the repeated image of the miniature house harkens back to the idea of the home being a place of oppressive familial claustrophobia.  Specifically, there is one display right near the entrance to the real house that features a small home on a plot of land on top of a tower of dirt  in which are embedded several more miniature houses.  

     In my opinion, this display is a symbol for the central theme of the film as a whole, and the one that is featured in the title: hereditary traits and what we receive from our parents and grandparents.  Just like how the house on top of the patch of land could not have been built without the several houses buried beneath its foundation, no member of the family in Hereditary–and indeed, no family member ever–can exist completely independent from the quirks, idiosyncrasies, and little insanities of their parents and relatives.  People are irrevocably shaped by their experiences in the home, and the most significant shapers of a person’s psyche are most always their mother and father (take Norma Bates from Psycho, for example).  In Hereditary, several characters are doomed to their fates by the actions of their forebears, especially Charlie, Peter, and Annie.  Charlie and Peter both fall victim to the satanic plots of their grandmother, groomed from before birth to be the human hosts of a biblical, hellish entity.  This idea of being destined to some predetermined fate is explicitly hinted at towards the beginning of the film, when Peter’s literature teacher tells the class the story of Pericles going to the Oracle and having his tragic fate pronounced.  The teacher posits: “Does it make it more tragic, then, to know that no matter what he does, he cannot change the ending?” (paraphrasing, of course).  This idea applies most topically to the horror plot of Hereditary, since it is obviously reflective of the set-in-stone nature of the events that unfold according to the sinister machinations of Annie’s mother and her cult, but it also applies to the family plot as well.  To some degree, Annie’s susceptibility to emotional distress and extreme, hysterical behavior is a direct result of the mental health issues of her family.  In one of the grief counseling sessions we learn that Annie’s father died by starving himself to death during a severe bout of depression, and her schizophrenic brother hung himself in his mother’s bedroom, blaming his mother for “putting people in his head”.  (An interesting observation about that line: Annie prefaces that by saying that her brother “of course, blamed his mother”, suggestive of her own feelings of regret and guilt towards her son’s distrust of her)  These psychologically traumatic childhood events shaped Annie into the women we see in Hereditary, and her inability to cope appropriately or effectively with the violent death of her daughter most likely stems directly from those defining childhood moments.  The emotional constipation exhibited by Annie is part of what makes her such easy prey for both the spirits of Charlie and Paimon to possess, and what makes her such an easy target for Joan to lure into the world of occultism and spiritualism.  In these examples we see how the characters of Hereditary are haunted not only by the spirits of dead relatives and the 10th Prince of Hell, but more poignantly by the specters of grief, guilt, and the painful legacies left by those that came before them.

#movie review #movies #Movie Reviews #review #critique #analysis #hereditary #ari aster #horror #horror movies #family #essay

[shitthehousessay]

Ok. Since you all *insist*... (Also I saw this and was like ok cool I’m bored and didn’t realize till I read through some of them that some were references to a series I have yet to read, so excuse me, I just answered these as myself.)

1. Melody is my full name. I’m not giving my last name for privacy reasons and I don’t tell anyone my middle name, but I’ll tell you the first initial is C.

2. I’m a Taurus.

3. I’m a tiny 5′3″ and 100 lb person with curly shoulder length red hair and bangs, hazel eyes, and I’m honestly really pale.

4. I’m 17.

5. I don’t have any set style. It depends on my mood, the weather, and if I’m going anywhere. But my summer aesthetic has been shorts and crop-tops, rompers, and these big golden sun glasses.

6. I have these lined leggings I love and this olive green off the shoulder romper that’s so cute I’m honestly in love with it.

7. Just my ears so far.

8. I have a ring and I usually wear some sort of pendant but my last one’s chain broke and I have yet to get a new one so.

9. Not yet.

10. Same as number 4.

11. I always smell like oranges. I use orange essential oil as perfume. I have for the past like 2 years and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

12. I always have a notebook I carry everywhere and a favorite pen of the moment, so I guess that’s one (I’m just counting them as a pair). Right now I have a Polaroid I’m obsessed with and I guess the last two are the notebook I have our summer bucketlist and movie bucketlist in and my relationship scrapbook type notebook.

13. Ummmmm... literally no clue ?? I don’t even exactly have a favorite animal so like fersona ???

14. Dude. I’ve got all the psychic bullshit down. Seeing ghosts and telling the future and auras and shit? I got it; Looked into it and I guess that would be Divination primarily.

15. I don’t know if it counts as magic but I am like *sooo* unlucky. I would also suck at any sort of spell casting just cause luck/lack of coordination. 

16. Air? I love storms and rain and stuff.

17. Maybe I’m missing a reference here but I have like no clue what this is asking. (Feel free to enlighten me.)

18. Dude. A hedgehog. They’re super cute and I’m thinking about getting an emotional support hedgehog and it’s gonna be a little black one named Shadow so yeah.

19. No comment but if I had the power to do so... Well. There are some people I do not like.

20. Dude. Excedrin is great for migraines. 

21. I couldn’t pick one so Death, The Hermit, or The High Priestess. 

22. I was in Tennessee actually.

23. My favorite color is blue.

24. My least favorite color is yellow.

25. I’m right-handed.

26. I was a little princess who wanted to wear dresses and shit and had a ton of dolls. Hyperactive as hell- as far as I know- too.

27. Can I skip this one? My dad is mean and controlling and my mom is... immature? I don’t know the word for it. Next question.

28. I have a whole brother, two half brothers, a half sister, an adoptive sister, and 3 adoptive brothers.

29. I mean my aunt and uncle who basically adopted me. I wouldn’t use ‘close’ for anyone else.

30. I’m scared of spiders, deep water, clowns, heights (though I’m mostly over it now), and closed spaces.

31. I am bisexual and demisexual.

32. Nope, no allergies. 

33. I have my familial adenomatous polyposis thing I’ve talked about before.

34. Depression and anxiety man.

35. I literally shower everyday, showers are the best.

36. I just like pretty rocks tbh, but I like emeralds (mostly cause they’re my birthstone).

37. I like willows I guess. I’ve always wanted to have one in my yard so I could just sleep under it and just be like hidden by the leaves.

38. Sunny and warm or rainy and stormy. There is no in between and it all depends on my mood.

39. I don’t like the cold just because I am small and have body heat issues.

40. I love summer.

41. I speak English and really broken French.

42. I can sing and I can kinda play piano.

43. Man self-depreciating humor is *everything*.

44. Hot shower and a depression nap. Alternately when I’m staying with my love we cuddle and watch movies.

45. Dude I like what I like, nothing guilty about that.

46. I bite/tug my lip when I’m thinking and spin my ring when I’m nervous. There’s nothing else I can think of really off the top of my head, besides random things I say like double words (”fun fun” or “cool cool”) and so I mean. I also have a thing for pet names/nicknames. All of my close friends have a nickname and I just use pet names generally.

47. Dude I hate people but if you can succeed in making me laugh I’m sure to warm up to you which entails making bad jokes and pocking fun at you but also being there when you need me. It can take a while or like no time at all it all depends on the person and my mood when I meet them.

48. Love, money, knowledge, power, fame.

49. Write, take pictures, cuddle my boyfriend, watch movies.

50. School work, meeting new people, getting up in the morning, and dealing with high school drama.

51. “I’m like a marshmallow that tries to be a cactus and fails repeatedly.” “I’m small but that doesn’t mean I won’t find something to hit you with.” “I’ve never been wrong about anyone.” (Referring to my gaydar.) “I love you, I mean as a sibling. That’s the only time I’ll ever actually say that to you btw.” “I won’t say anything. Then if I’m right I can be like ‘called it bitch!” but if I’m wrong I won’t ever have to live it down.” (About two friends I ship.) “That baby is so cute, I’m actually crying! I just wanna hold that baby, I’m so upset!”

52. Verbal conflict makes me super uncomfortable and as much as I am willing to hit someone, I don’t usually react well to being touched.

53. I suck at  (I know, I know) remembering to brush my teeth.

54. Dude. I have bad self-esteem and I hate conflict so I’m bad at talking to people about things and I’m bad about admitting when I’m wrong because I have a crippling fear of people leaving me and that if I make mistakes or have flaws or whatever they’ll leave me. That’s a start.

55. I’m good at reading people/I can talk to (or make friends) with just about anyone.

56. I have good and bad days. Sometimes I think I’m pretty and others I can’t stand how I look, but it’s gotten/is getting better.

57. I won’t lie, I don’t do well with authority figures.

58. I actually don’t remember if I had any role models or who they were.

59. I love (most) kids. Babies love me- like I am The Baby Whisperer- for no real reason and (most) little kids do too.

60. I do want kids of my own some day. We want 3. We actually want twins and we want to adopt one. 

61. Nope. Not at all religious. 

62. I think as long as you can say you don’t have any regrets at the end of your life- or at least make your peace with them- and you learn to love yourself and hopefully someone else, you’re doing something right.

63. I don’t know. I’d hope it was either meaningful or made someone laugh. If things go how I want, my last words will probably be “I love you.”

64. I want to get married, have kids, and finish a novel before I die.

65. I’d just hope to be remembered fondly by those who knew and loved me.

66. Depends. I send most people memes and things that remind me of them. I occasionally give hugs or lay on people, but physical contact is a weird thing for me so very few people see physical affection as my way of showing I love them and it’s usually when they’re upset/need it. It’s even rarer to hear verbal affection- excluding compliments.

67.  I usually don’t eat breakfast but I have become fond of smoothies.

68. I like spicy occasionally.

69. My favorite fruit is pineapple and my favorite veggie (I count it as a veggie, fight me) is avacado.

70. I love sweets.

71. I’ve had it before, but no I don’t drink.

72. I like herbal tea with honey and coffee that doesn’t taste like coffee. (Ex. white chocolate mocha or frappuccino.) 

73. I refuse to eat seafood besides sushi (makes no sense, I know) and tomatoes. 

74. I like chicken nuggets and grape jelly (also cheIese sticks and jelly) but other than that I can’t think of anything that I eat that makes most people cringe.

75. I need Slim Jims and/or pepperoni and cookies for my plane rides.

76. I don’t know that any foods make me nostalgic, but mozzarella sticks and Chinese food are comfort foods for me.

77. I like to dance and sing and occasionally use hairbrushes as microphones.

78. If anyone stole something important of mine, I’d hunt them down and probably hurt them and get it back.

79. If I won the lottery I’d buy a house and probably a car so I wouldn’t have to get loans.

80. I want to invent a silencer for microwaves so they don’t wake people up- and don’t any of you dare steal that. I want my money.

81. I tend to cling to walls or people I know when in new places or situations. 

82. If someone threatens me I will- depending on the situation- I will either get out of there or threaten them back. But more than likely the latter.

83. Ok, look, I’m no saint. If some rich lady dropped her purse I can’t act like I wouldn't be tempted to give it back a wad or two lighter. At the very least I’d be hoping she’d give me a reward for returning it.

84. Ouch. I’ve had some pretty awful things said to me, but I think the worst was when someone told me it was my fault that they sexually assaulted me.

85. Strangest thing I’ve come across in general? I’ve come across some weird shit man. The internet is strange. There was a video where a guy shoved a glass jar up his ass. That was pretty strange.

86. If someone takes my food what I do depends on who it is. I either just glare or I forcibly take it back and/or smack them. (There are also a few people that I don’t care if they take my food, but they are rare.)

87. If some sketchy-ass person meets me a crossroads and tells me I can have everything I want, I’m not trusting that shit. I’m not selling my soul thanks, not today Satan.

88. When I was younger I wanted to be a singer or an actress when I grew up. 

89. I’m Chaotic Neutral.

90. What’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done? That’s a long list. Maybe this one time I tried to John Cena (aka running jump) onto a stage. It didn’t end well. 

91. I’ve never been arrested but when I “left” my dad’s it was *technically* “running away” so I was kind of in trouble with the law there for a while.

92. Yes I know how to win a fight. I’ve been in a fair few.

93. I can throw a punch so I’m gonna say yes, I’m good at hand-to-hand combat.

94. Yup, I’ve stolen stuff before. 

95. No, I’ve never killed anyone.

96. Man I find a fair few of things disgusting. Tomatoes are awful for one. 

97. I have a couple triggers, for lack of a better term. I hate conflict, it makes me really uncomfortable. I also hate being touched, that sets me off pretty bad. I don’t know if I have a “worst one” though. 

98. I have no clue what anime character I would be, but feel free to tell me what you think.

99. I have no clue what Disney character I would be either. (I don’t think it’s accurate if I pick myself.) Once again let me know what you think.

100. Dude. Same answer as 99.

101. Same as 99. Again.

102. The only song that comes to mind that I think describes me is Hot Mess by Cobra Starships.

Ok. There you monsters. I did it. Are you happy? That took me like 3+ fucking hours to answer and type out.

-Mel (the Slytherin)

#mel #about me #about mel #omg #never again #why would you guys do this to me #asks #also yeah i need to read ask things before i'm like hell yeah #but there #done #long post #tldr #tldr: a bunch of facts about mel

[paraclete0407]

All the books I read in Korea, ‘Vita Nuova’ and ‘On Love.’  IDK why I became such a miniaturist later as well as pornographer.  I literally realized today people love pornography, love isn’t too weak a word.  It’s dear to them.  It really warms some people’s hearts.  I remember reading in a magazine from NY I don’t look at anymore how old men love it so much.

Sexual frankness was en vogue for a long time when I was a kid in the Bill Clinton era and everyone found it funny till they realized Clinton, Epstein, Dershowitz and pedophilia isn’t really funny.  Later K-wave put a different spin on it since it’s so raw as if to say ‘I’m above this all and can say anything’ but it’s still violent and it trample’s people’s valid dignities and decorum.  

I literally spent so long hung up on Houellebecq and regressed; ‘Elementary Particles’ is visionary if flawed but some part of me decided it was too sweeping so I concentrated on ‘Whatever / Extension of the Struggle’ and the figure of the lonely stranger girl in the nightclub, exemplar of a ‘sacrificed generation.’  I wrote so much impertinent fiction fascinated with these sacrificed girls without ever grasping that they have better options than to become object-lessons in the callousness of society.  Timothy Keller’s ‘The Meaning of Marriage’ is revelatory as it reminds, the nightclub sexual liberation culture can be escaped not through Romantic individualism or self-esteem / -regard but remembering husband and wife are one flesh - it’s secure, invulnerable.  I always thought about running away.  

My family are mad at me and my dad still appears to want to know something about my inner life which I’m afraid is a lingering ghost or recapitulation of the now-decades-old Boomer-v-Millennial college culture thing where all these dads were like ‘drmdrmdrm free oral sex on campus?! - I hate my son let’s execute him and steal his co-ed friends.’  Chad Kultgen stuff but even more psychopathic, homicidal-suicidal.  I didn’t even do that; I just heard about it in the magazine from NY I don’t read anymore because its whole message was, ‘I’m going to go on observing myself abusing myself and consuming myself and analyzing my consumption of experience forever as if nothing will ever change.’  People who never did the math on the pandemic and ‘water.’

I truly feel as if right now Saint Augustine of Hippo is watching over the whole world which, John Piper reminds us, was ‘cursed in hope.’  What is at the bottom of the pandemic, the sudden questioning of freedom, the openness to communism and totalitarianism, the ambivalence regarding all private life and private ownership and proprietary supply-chains and chains-of-care (such as ‘my child you leave him or her alone’ it does not take a village), if not the rediscovery of Original Sin, the tragic cursedness of sexuality or ‘woundedness’ of sexuality, that it was supposed to be great but it led to all this dejection and grief and actual permanent loss.

I remember many pieces of piano-music which I hoped to learn but in a way the most personal piece to me is Beethoven’s opus 109 / Sonata 31 final movement, ‘Gesangvoll mitt Innigster Empfindung.’  To me this is the ultimate statement on a couple’s tearing each other apart and ending where they began with the same beautiful yet vain regret.  How many times do you have to punctuate the same sentiment?  Just walk away; toward the new day.

‘After that I moved out of there.’  I really did give up on the details of man-woman love-relationships after 2011; I decided I would get a wife-in-a-box or just be single forever.  There was a Korean girl I liked in 2010 who made me change my mind about Shanghai-Beijing-and/or-Harbin v. Seoul and I was friends with her friend too but said something really terrible that in retrospect prefigured my teaching-career’s failure as well.  ‘She is a complicated woman 23.5 years of history.’  ‘I can simplify her.’  

I was like some communist social engineer.  I really flattened out my own character into an .XLS of sorts and believed I could do the same for others.  Years later I regarded how Lee Sooman had studied robotics in America, became hung up on more non-religious non-Christian ‘special electric sauce’ books like Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Love of the Last Tycoon.’  

I feel as if all of this is in some distant way, ‘mental North Koreanness.’  ‘Love is broken, people are fools, Dad hit Mom, Dad is a man-child, cannot face himself, doesn’t know his own intentions or motives, obsessed with being understood sans understanding, Mom was bricked in the head, the priest molested my sister, Ki Hyungdo, I will eliminate freedom with a colossal everlasting permeating Monolithic Ideology and give everyone precisely what is right for them.’

IDK whether I ought to say this but ‘Last Tycoon’ crystallizes and incipits(?) at Palm Springs International Airport which is a place where something happened to me.  But North Koreanness appears almost totally Faustian, samurai-like in the worst sense.  

IDK if I should say but someone I respect and admire and esteem immensely is the CEO of NKNews who supports food-sanctions (that at other times I think is a form of US state terrorism as well as diametrically anti-biblical) and I could almost understand in one way why America would choose to feed Soviets in the past but starve North Koreans b/c something truly went horribly wrong.  During my last (intellectually) intimate love-relationship we touched on the Pyongyang Revival & why did all of that get blown away?  It’s truly a testament to the power of Satan and the fragility of human purity and innocence.  

There’s a novel someone else I really love was translating for free about ‘pleasure squads’ and these women being daughters of someone and I took this scholar to task for his ‘Japaneseness,’ his oneiricity, his vagueness, begging the question when he could actually answer with guns blazing.  I get mad at Hwang Sokyong and want BR Myers to stomp Bruce Cumings for being a hippie as well as for constantly trying to correct American East Asia Studies when soon enough Western EAS won’t really matter because Asians are no longer yoked to traditional blinkered methods of scholarship or historiography.  Like just give up, Asians are figuring themselves out and Western EAS is also highly mercenary and in many cases naively enamored of Confucianism, Maoism, platonistic messianic communism.  Every scholar’s convinced he knows ‘the one thing other Westerners don’t know about China’ but a lot of it again comes down - I realize - to the same quality which makes me a mental North Korean; namely men being hung up on the little points that made them money, special, competitively edged.

Maybe it’s neither here or there.  I’m time-traveling.  The best book I saw recently before my life fell apart was ‘I Am Kim Jieun’ whose specificity astonished me.  It was a mystic experience to look at, searing, black and white; I felt something similar when translating Ku Sang.  I realize however that this ‘absolute specificity’ itself became an idol, to me - heart-idol, soul-idol - that exacerbated my intellectual belligerence and rendered me even more severely mentally North Korean than ever before.  ‘David Johnston Global Offensive.’

Everyone I care about in any case seems to be dreaming of Saint Augustine of Hippo, this man who wanted his little wife, his happy students, caring Mom, silly but avoided Dad, son Adeodatus (’God-given’), but ended up rebelling against liberal education and realizing that infants are evil and depraved in many ways.  Christianity today hesitating between a new engagement, a farewell to ‘cultural Christianity’ and ‘Christian nationalism,’ the question of freedom of religion or, as John MacArthur points out, acknowledging that religion and freedom are incompatible in the in the American secular understanding of the word ‘freedom.’  Freedom to die, freedom of death, perhaps a hundred million or more abortions.  But was St. Augustine a quietist who turned his back on the world?  Did he say go home?  He was advising the Roman general Beliarius and provided an immortal pastoral reflection on traumatic sociohistorical upheaval in ‘City of God.’

I still feel wrapped up and flattened out.  Today I remembered ‘The Teacher of Creative Writing’ which was my too-late apology to a former student for whom I wrote a good-but-not-great essay-letter and game good but not the best advice.  I wanted to tell her Cambridge UK has fewer anti-Korean rapists than Harvard but I wish that I had simply talked about God.  She turned up on FB a while back doing all these ‘luminous ampoule face-gel’ bed-pictures which Russian men commenting and stuff(?!).  ‘Tis part of why I turned my back on institutional Christianity - to my very abiding regret - and started thinking in ‘Baudelarian’ terms again with songs like f(x)’s ‘Butterfly.’  ‘I want to get inside your twisted logic / white-faced mysterious you.’

I sigh.  Thank God today kids maybe can get the specific wisdom they need from devices or something instead of wanting to believe in someone like me who as more of a image of a leader-teacher-priest than the real thing.  I really am in more trouble than these kids who simply allowed themselves to be vulnerable, I feel.  No less had I been more pertinacious and decisive and staid I might have had that room full of books in Itaewon with the spiral staircase instead of being so far away in a place where no one’s really interested or apt.  Another matter of which I have been tragically slow to take cognizance is the inferiority of creativity and conceptualization to redemption and Resurrection.  Today I guess AI can create almost anything but I keep trying to crack ‘Hope in Times of Fear’ and truly hold fast to the knowledge that I can weather what’s coming and give up whatever I will need to give up if I remember that I don’t have to keep inventing and scheming and imagining and surprising everyone.  I keep hearing the word ‘Sadducee’ in my head.  The methods of Christianity are available to all and everyone is talking about Thomas Jefferson doing vaccine-experiments and a guy whose slave’s name was ‘Onesimus’ though the NPR reporter didn’t know about St Paul and his spiritual family; but the lynchpin of Christianity is still the Resurrection and Yeonmi Park may have a point about America becoming mentally North Korean if the methods of Christianity are catholically and rigorously implemented without conviction in the mystery and miracle of Christ’s being ‘first born of the dead.’

I’m 100% certain at this point there are people who want to murder me but Yeonmi Park has a very big point to make and I’m concerned for her as well as her way of conveying the message. So many people think she’s a huge harlot and Kim Jong Il is a sympathetic anti-hero; they hate her for having a few million dollars.  My dad’s furious at John MacArthur for having a net-worth of like 15 million dollars and a nice watch; Bill Gates still has like 70 billion or something and is bragging about saving lives while 100 million kids are backsliding into poverty, starvation, possible trafficking due to   I used to be this way as well, always having good ideas then worsening them deliberately.  I remember reading on Wikipedia how love-shyness destroys careers; of all the things to be ashamed of, true love, holy love, an augury of Eternity and immortality, recognition of the Imago Dei (Image of God) in the other.  ‘Why hold your beloved friends and family fast when you can talk about spaceships to Venus?’

Covid and the people on the street 100% love Bill Gates.  Everyone’s afraid of Christianity; they’re love-shy; they’ll always take the second-best thing.. 

The world is really mentally ill and I wish I were living on an airplane writing speeches for JD Vance 20hrs a day but JD Vance is a brand too dueling people about Tucker Carlson and I can’t message him on Twitter (’100 million kids? - that’s something but first establish yourself and pay your dues in the profession by writing a 1,000 page dissertation about Tucker Carlson’).  I’m about 1.5 years too old to join the SJ (Society of Jesus / Jesuits) by my last investigation.  I just wish I had given my best over the last year and a half instead of ‘tracking’ matters for so long and gathering so much evidence without replying or responding.  

[soul-music-is-life]

More About Me Than You’ll Probably Ever Want to Know...

Came across this questionnaire at the bottom of my drafts (right beneath a thread I started ages ago titled “PLL plotholes that were never resolved” that I plan to finish before the world ends) and since it’s another sleepless night and I need something to occupy my brain, I figured...why not?

1) Do you have a good relationship with your parents? This would be the first fucking question. I have re-evaluated how much I used to take them for granted. Nothing like a family tragedy to slap some sense into your head.

2) Who did you last say “I love you” to? My mom. Or my dad. Probably both of them. Or it may have been one of my friends who called to check up on me. Hell, I’m just saying it to everyone at this point. Because you just never know, man.

3) Do you regret anything? Regrets are just lessons learned. And I could write an entire school decade of lesson plans with what I’ve learned.

4) Are you insecure? “You’re insecure. Don’t know what for. You’re turning heads when you walk through the dooooor…” Jesus, I just started singing a One Direction song. What the fuck is wrong with me?

5) What is your relationship status? Single, cuz don’t nobody want this crazy dorky mess.

6) How do you want to die? Happy. So the key to immortality is to be all emo.

7) What did you last eat? Salted milk chocolate caramel. Actually, I think that’s the only thing I’ve eaten all day.

8) Played any sports? Awkwardly and badly.

9) Do you bite your nails? It’s a horrible habit I’ve had since I was a child.

10) When was your last physical fight? I do get distracted and run myself into the wall a lot, does that count? I may have done it ten minutes ago.

11) Do you like someone? I like a lot of someones. No, I’m not a whore. I just like people.

12) Have you ever stayed up 48 hours? Ha. Hahahahahaha, I am an insomniac whose mother is currently in the ICU. I’m going for the record of staying up for 48 days.

13) Do you hate anyone at the moment? Mostly myself, because I’m really good at self-loathing, especially when I’m editing my writing. Which I’m doing tonight.

14) Do you miss someone? My mom. I miss her annoying me constantly with her stupid emojis and talking to me about our TV shows and just being ridiculous in general.

15) Have any pets? I have a very bossy cat.

16) How exactly are you feeling at the moment? The weather is being a bitch, so my head is currently about to explode.

17) Ever made out in the bathroom? Public or private? Because, like, ew, public toilets are filled with so many disgusting germs that the last thing I want to do in there is roll around in those germs. Private? No comment. Heh.

18) Are you scared of spiders? No. I rescue them when I find them, because my hatred for mosquitoes far outweighs any fear I might have and they eat mosquitoes. So, house spiders and I are homies. But Brown Recluse and Black Widows? I’ll burn those motherfuckers to death.

19) Would you go back in time if you were given the chance? The older I get the more I answer yes to this.

20) Where was the last place you snogged someone? Ohhh, a Brit came up with this questionnaire and I just love that. And actually, to answer the question, I’m not really sure. I haven’t dated in a while.

21) What are your plans for this weekend? Read. Write. Pretend reality isn’t real. Maybe I’ll remember to eat and sleep. Who knows?

22) Do you want to have kids? How many? Yes, but I don’t know how many. Depends on how much I like the first one I guess. *glances at future first born, puts weight of world on that child’s shoulders*

23) Do you have piercings? How many? Yes. I think. Maybe. It’s been a while since I’ve worn earrings, but I’m pretty sure they’re still pierced.

24) What is/are/were your best subject(s)? Lunch and recess. I was great at sneaking food off to the playground and then hiding from my teachers. My teachers hated me.

25) Do you miss anyone from your past? I do.

26) What are you craving right now? Relaxation. But since that’s not happening, I’m just gonna go for like…pizza or something instead. Take THAT arteries!

27) Have you ever broken someone’s heart? Not intentionally.

28) Have you ever been cheated on? Yes.

29) Have you made a boyfriend/girlfriend cry? I don’t think so, because unlike Shonda Rhimes and George RR Martin I don’t need the tears of my relationships to survive.

30) What’s irritating you right now? Adulting. Just being an adult in general. It’s so hard. I want to go back to the days where I was stealing from the cafeteria and hiding on the playground.

31) Does somebody love you? I like to think so.

32) What is your favourite color? Purple and royal blue.

33) Do you have trust issues? Majorly.

34) Who/what was your last dream about? My mom.

35) Who was the last person you cried in front of? My neighbor. We hugged it out. She is good people.

36) Do you give out second chances too easily? I do not. See the question about trust issues.

37) Is it easier to forgive or forget? Neither, unless you have memory problems, then I guess it’s easier to forget.

38) Is this year the best year of your life? *guffaws, falls over laughing* 2018 and I are having creative differences and I have decided that it’s best for the both of us if we just mutually split.

39) How old were you when you had your first kiss? Five. Ah, playground shenanigans.

40) Have you ever walked outside completely naked? Is that…are you not supposed to? *whistles while carefully backpedaling to room to put on clothes* Come on, I live in the south where it gets hotter than Satan’s butthole in the summer.

41) Favourite food? Chocolate. Tomatoes. Not together, of course. Ew. Although… *leaves to try something* …nope ‘ew’ was right.

42) Do you believe everything happens for a reason? You know, I like to believe so, but there are just some things I’m not so sure about. Like…Beiber. Why? Don’t @ me.

43) What is the last thing you did before you went to bed last night? I never went to bed. See the question about staying up for 48 hours/days.

44) Is cheating ever okay? Personally, I don’t believe in it, but I’m not going to judge anyone for how they choose to live their lives. Just wrap your tool when you do.

45) Are you mean? I’m a sarcastic asshole, so that can be taken as mean sometimes, I guess.

46) How many people have you fist fought? I have lost count. I did not grow up in a stable neighborhood.

47) Do you believe in true love? Call me an idiotic dreamer, but I do.

48) Favourite weather? This is a trick question, because no matter what I say mother nature is going to attack me. Winter = black icy death. Summer = death by heat. Spring = death by tornadoes. Hmm, maybe Fall is the way to…nope, Fall = leaf piles of fiery death.

49) Do you like the snow? I do. But do we get snow? No. We get 8 fucking inches of ice.

50) Do you wanna get married? Maybe some day.

51) Is it cute when a boy/girl calls you baby? Eh, I could take it or leave it.

52) What makes you happy? My TV. My TV understands me.

53) Would you change your name? I would consider it. I would consider changing literally everything about me. I’m going to start a new life in Canada where no one knows me. I will adopt a moose.

54) Would it be hard to kiss the last person you kissed? If it was, why would I have kissed that person in the first place?

55) Your best friend of the opposite sex likes you, what do you do? “Listen, when my (future) husband dies, you and I can get a condo at the beach and grow old together like we planned, and oh, wait a second, you just started plotting my (future) husband’s death, didn’t you? Well, let’s just skip that then. I don’t feel like burying any bodies.”

56) Do you have a friend of the opposite sex who you can act your complete self around? I do. He’s a good homie to have. Listen, I’m here to tell you, if you can’t be your true self around someone (regardless if they are the opposite or the same sex) then they may not be as good a friend as you think. Just be you.

57) Who was the last person of the opposite sex you talked to? See above question about my good homie to have.

58: Who’s the last person you had a deep conversation with? You know, considering neither my dad, nor I, are good with talking about our emotions and shit, the fact that my mom has been in the hospital for over a month has spawned some really in depth conversations. And my best friend, because my best friend just gets me. We all need that Thelma to our Louise to keep us from hot-rodding a car over a cliff. You find you your partner in crime and you hold on to them.

59) Do you believe in soulmates? Absolutely. Mine is just apparently lost as hell.

60) Is there anyone you would die for? Many people. I would throw myself in front of many buses for many people. But to be fair I’d also throw myself in front of a bus to get out of paying my student loans. And to get away from the current government. And to just finally get some goddamn sleep.

Alright, I’ll quit flooding your feed with my nonsense now. Hope I entertained at least one of you. Peace out.

#Asks #Questionnaire #this is so long #why do I do these things #about me #random tumblr #Man I ramble #If you read this whole thing I salute you #that's a lot of words

[dfroza]

A simple “hello”

is seen at the conclusion of Paul’s Letter of Romans that was sent to his friends.

[Chapter 16]

Be sure to welcome our friend Phoebe in the way of the Master, with all the generous hospitality we Christians are famous for. I heartily endorse both her and her work. She’s a key representative of the church at Cenchrea. Help her out in whatever she asks. She deserves anything you can do for her. She’s helped many a person, including me.

Say hello to Priscilla and Aquila, who have worked hand in hand with me in serving Jesus. They once put their lives on the line for me. And I’m not the only one grateful to them. All the non-Jewish gatherings of believers also owe them plenty, to say nothing of the church that meets in their house.

Hello to my dear friend Epenetus. He was the very first follower of Jesus in the province of Asia.

Hello to Mary. What a worker she has turned out to be!

Hello to my cousins Andronicus and Junias. We once shared a jail cell. They were believers in Christ before I was. Both of them are outstanding leaders.

Hello to Ampliatus, my good friend in the family of God.

Hello to Urbanus, our companion in Christ’s work, and my good friend Stachys.

Hello to Apelles, a tried-and-true veteran in following Christ.

Hello to the family of Aristobulus.

Hello to my cousin Herodion.

Hello to those who belong to the Lord from the family of Narcissus.

Hello to Tryphena and Tryphosa—such diligent women in serving the Master.

Hello to Persis, a dear friend and hard worker in Christ.

Hello to Rufus—a good choice by the Master!—and his mother. She has also been a dear mother to me.

Hello to Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and also to all of their families.

Hello to Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas—and all the followers of Jesus who live with them.

Holy embraces all around! All the churches of Christ send their warmest greetings!

One final word of counsel, friends. Keep a sharp eye out for those who take bits and pieces of the teaching that you learned and then use them to make trouble. Give these people a wide berth. They have no intention of living for our Master Christ. They’re only in this for what they can get out of it, and aren’t above using pious sweet talk to dupe unsuspecting innocents.

And so while there has never been any question about your honesty in these matters—I couldn’t be more proud of you!—I want you also to be smart, making sure every “good” thing is the real thing. Don’t be gullible in regard to smooth-talking evil. Stay alert like this, and before you know it the God of peace will come down on Satan with both feet, stomping him into the dirt. Enjoy the best of Jesus!

And here are some more greetings from our end. Timothy, my partner in this work, Lucius, and my cousins Jason and Sosipater all said to tell you hello.

I, Tertius, who wrote this letter at Paul’s dictation, send you my personal greetings.

Gaius, who is host here to both me and the whole church, wants to be remembered to you.

Erastus, the city treasurer, and our good friend Quartus send their greetings.

All of our praise rises to the One who is strong enough to make you strong, exactly as preached in Jesus Christ, precisely as revealed in the mystery kept secret for so long but now an open book through the prophetic Scriptures. All the nations of the world can now know the truth and be brought into obedient belief, carrying out the orders of God, who got all this started, down to the very last letter.

All our praise is focused through Jesus on this incomparably wise God! Yes!

The Letter of Romans, Chapter 16 (The Message)

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is chapter 6 of 2nd Samuel where David recovers the sacred Ark of the Covenant to the sound of music:

Once again David gathered the elite soldiers of Israel, some 30,000, and they went down to Baale-judah to bring back the covenant chest of the True God, called by the Name: the Eternal One, Commander of heavenly armies, who sits enthroned above the winged creatures who protect the chest.

They carried the covenant chest of the True God on a new cart from the house of Abinadab on the hill where it had rested, and Abinadab’s sons Uzzah and Ahio directed the new cart, with Ahio walking in front of the chest. David and all the Israelites were joyous before the Eternal; and they were accompanied by wooden lyres and harps, tambourines, castanets, and cymbals.

When they came alongside the threshing floor of Nacon, the oxen stumbled, and Uzzah put out his hand to steady the covenant chest. The Eternal burned with anger against Uzzah, and the True God struck Uzzah dead on the spot for daring to touch the covenant chest.

David was angry that the Eternal One had broken through to strike Uzzah, so the place was named Perez-uzzah, meaning “Breech against Uzzah,” to remember that act. David was also frightened of the Eternal that day.

David: How can I be responsible for the covenant chest of the Eternal One?

So he decided he did not want to take the chest of the Eternal into the city of David, and he left it there in the care of Obed-edom, a man from the Philistine city Gath. The covenant chest of the Eternal One remained there for three months; and in that time, the Eternal One blessed the household and farms of Obed-edom the Gittite.

When news was taken to King David that the Eternal had blessed Obed-edom and all his household because of the covenant chest of God, the king went down and brought the chest from Obed-edom’s house up to the city of David, again accompanying it with rejoicing and ceremony. When the people carrying the chest of the Eternal had gone six steps, David sacrificed an ox and a fattened calf; and he danced before the Eternal One with all his might, clad in a priestly vest.

So David and the house of Israel carried the covenant chest of the Eternal One up to the city of David with shouts and the sounding of the trumpet. When Michal, the daughter of Saul, looked out the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Eternal without thought for how he looked, she hated him.

They carried the covenant chest of the Eternal One to its place inside the tent David had pitched to house it, and the king offered burnt sacrifices and peace offerings to the Eternal. When he had finished with the sacrifices and peace offerings, he spoke a priestly blessing over the people in the name of the Eternal One, the Commander of heavenly armies; and he gave all of the Israelites—every man and woman—a loaf of bread, a date roll, and a raisin cake. Then they all returned to their homes.

On David’s return, he wanted to bestow good favor on his household, but Michal, the daughter of Saul, came out to meet him.

Michal (sarcastically): The king has distinguished himself today in front of his servants’ maids. He revealed quite a lot, just as the lowest of the low might expose himself.

David: It was for the Eternal One that I danced. The Lord chose me in place of your father Saul and all his descendants; He appointed me to rule over Israel, the Eternal’s people. I will lower myself even further—maybe I will even shame myself in my own eyes—but in the eyes of those maidservants of whom you speak, I will receive honor.

And to her dying day, Michal, the daughter of Saul, was humbled before God and did not bear a child. Therefore no descendant of Saul ever regained the throne of Israel.

The Book of 2nd Samuel, Chapter 6 (The Voice)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for monday, October 26 of 2020 with a paired chapter from each Testament along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

A post by John Parsons about this week’s reading of the Torah by Jews around the world:

Shavuah tov, chaverim. Last week's Torah portion (i.e., parashat Noach) introduced us to Abram (אַבְרָם), the descendant of Noah's son Shem, who was the great-grandson of the patriarch Methuselah - a man who who personally knew Adam and Eve and upheld the original promise of redemption given in the Garden of Eden. Just as there were ten generations from Adam to Noah, so there were also ten generations from Noah to Abram (see Gen. 11:10-32). And just as Noah became the father of 70 nations, so Abram (through Shem) would become the father of the Jewish people, through whom the Promised Seed - the Messiah and Savior of the world - would eventually come.

In our Torah portion for this week (Lekh-Lekha), we read that Abram was 75 years old, married to (his half-sister) Sarai, and guardian of his nephew Lot (his deceased brother Haran’s son) when he received the promise of divine inheritance: “And the LORD said to Abram, "Go from (i.e., lekh-lekha: לך־לך) your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. In Hebrew, the phrase lekh lekha means "go for yourself" (lit. “walk [הָלַךְ] for yourself [לְךָ]”), though it can be interpreted it to mean "go to yourself," that is, "look within yourself" in order to begin walking out your own journey into the promises. The realm of divine promise is only attained when we venture out in faith. Like our father Abraham, we are called to "cross over," leave everything behind, and take hold of God's glorious promise for our lives. [Hebrew for Christians]

10.25.20 • Facebook

A message from the Institute for Creation Research:

October 25, 2020

Christian Metaphors

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)

Christian believers and their characteristics are described in terms of many colorful metaphors in the Bible. In our text, Christ calls us “my sheep” and has also said: “I am the good shepherd,...and I lay down my life for the sheep” (John 10:14-15). If we are truly His sheep, then we will surely follow Him, receiving safety, peace, and nourishment.

He has also said: “Ye are the salt of the earth:...Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14). We are therefore expected to bring the salt of preservation and joy to a bland, tasteless, and otherwise decaying world, and the light of salvation to a dark, sinful world.

In another beautiful metaphor, the Lord Jesus has likened us to fruitful branches: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit” (John 15:5).

The apostle Paul compares us variously to soldiers, to athletes, and to farmers: “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ....if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive lawfully. The husbandman that laboreth must be first partaker of the fruits” (2 Timothy 2:3, 5-6).

With regard to our Christian life and witness, Christ said we must be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). The apostle Paul compares us to individual members in a great body (1 Corinthians 12:27). Peter says we, “as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house,” and also are like “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5, 9) to offer up spiritual sacrifices.

There are many other beautiful and meaningful figures of speech in the New Testament, all of which help us to appreciate the richness and fruitfulness of the Christian life. HMM