#the holy mother and infant god
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09. Mother of God by Jorge Sanchez Hernandez
Jorge Sánchez Hernández [1926 – 2016] was a Mexican Catholic painter and continuator of the style of 17th century Spanish Baroque painters. Collections include: Portraits of Colonial Nuns; Scenes from Ancient Mexico; the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Collection; the Mother of Jesus Collection; the Gospel Scenes Collection; the Collection with scenes from the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe; and…
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#"Jesus Christ"#holy infant#Jorge Hernandez#Jorge Sanchez Hernandez#mater dei#Mother of God#theotokos#virgin mother
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Mother's Day, 2023
Mother... She is a biological female. There is no debate or defense of the term in regards to gender or pronoun.
Ephesians 6:2-3: Honor your father and mother (this is the first commandment with a promise), that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.
Mother: μήτηρ, métér. Simply translated “Mother“. She is a biological female. There is no debate or defense of the term in regards to gender or pronoun.
Words have consistent meaning. There is an unstated social contract and…
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UNDERWORLD SAGA- MY THOUGHTS
My goodness you guys do I have thoughts.
FIRST- the way this is such an ensemble heavy saga the 'all i hear are screams' in the first song WOW. Its because they have the whole crew back. They're singing with everyone, and I hadn't realised how much independent and almost quiet it had gotten during the circe saga, which speaks as a metaphor in itself
SECOND- Polites is back!!! Thank youuuuu actual tears were falling, the way odysseus' voice breaks when he says his name, similarly to his mother (regarding his mum, holy moly [pun intended] he didn't know she was dead- the guilt he must feel 'i took too long' broke me) polities that sweetheart, I can imagine even his ghost is so encouraging to the crew that's left on the journey, they needed that guy for morale big time.
THIRD- aight onto the prophet, anyone who read the odyssey is screaming rn, the foreshadowing is soo good but mysterious and twisted enough that it fits greek prophecies soooo well. Piggybacking off that 'palace in red' when we get to the suitors that shit is going to POP OFF damn it I cannot wait. Mentions of penelope being under pursuit. The WHO?!?!?!? Oh. My. Gods YES THAT WAS BRILLIANT. he's so angry and he loves his wife so much, I will never stop gushing over the two of them. Perfect.
FOURTH- the third song, pretty sure I screamed. The tension. The foreshadowing. The regret. The guilt. IT HAS EVERYTHING. All the references back to previous events, giving perspective from the other characters to stop portraying them like the enemies is so so important for the legacy of greek mythology. Perspective is everything. Onto THE BRIDGE!! HELLO? THIS MAN IS BOTH A GENIUS AND ACTUALLY INSANE. HE IS A MADMAN AND I LOVE IT. Drop another infant from a wall..... I actually have no words that is insanely cool. Odysseus has changed so much. Athena needs to hit him up again, now he'd kill for his people, you can see just how tired he is and how much he wants to go home. He's scared for penelope and telemachus, literally nothing else matters anymore.
Overall. 10/10 and this is only HALF WAY can it even get better than this??
#pretty sure my jaw was dropped the whole time walking to school while listening#hed better hurry up because i cannot wait for where this is going#i need to re read the odyssey now#the odyssey#epic underworld saga#epic#epic the musical#polites#odysseus x penelope#epic musical
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What a Shooting Star Means in Traditional Witchcraft
A Banquet in the Skies
According to the old tales, when it is raining, the gods are weeping. When there is thunder, the gods are fighting. And when there is a shooting star, the gods are dancing. A falling star is like wine spilling from their cups. It means the gods are in great mood. So if you pray at this time, you are likely to receive a fortune.
A New Soul is Born
My mother’s family believes that there is a definite number of souls reincarnating in our world. My father’s family disagrees. They say that new souls are still being born. That right after its birth, a new soul rides a star to earth. And that a pregnant woman who sees this falling star is given the privilege to raise not just a human child but an infant soul.
A Soul Leaves Purgatory
The Catholic witches in my community tell a very different story. They believe that a shooting star is a soul exiting purgatory. That the Holy Trinity grants them light and flight, to show other trapped souls – both in purgatory and on earth – that they too can have such freedom if they are willing to do the work.
A Grieving God
Humans light a candle for a loved one who has passed. So do the old gods. Every now and then, they form a special bond with a mortal child. And in my family’s belief, when that soul reincarnates, it is unlikely to have the same faith, much less the same divine parent. And so the god sends down a candle to say farewell.
A God’s Promise
Speaking of the gods’ favorite children, we believe that a pagan witch catching sight of a shooting star means our divine parent is saying yes to whatever it is we asked. More abundance… new love… an enemy’s demise… A falling star carries with it the words: “Be patient one more day. Your wish is on the way.”
#Paganism#Pagan#Witchcraft#Witch tips#servantofthefates#Witchblr#Old gods#All About Paganism#All About Witchcraft
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I've said it before and I'll say it again, the fact that dean went through all the shit that he did and STILL chose to smile and make his silly little jokes everyday and still had the energy to find joy in simple things like children's shows and cowboys... jfc.
No wonder Cas fell for him and learned to love from him.
That man was love.
Straight up. He was so fucking full of love that even after all the shit that he went through, there still was love left.. and he gave it away, he shared it freely bc that's all he knew how to do.
But seriously. imagine being forced to become both a soldier and a mother to your infant brother since the age of FOUR years old. Imagine the psychological torture of being raised to be John Winchester's perfect obedient soldier. Imagine knowing that your father, your role model, the god you idolize, died to save you and gave you one last order to kill the brother that you raised. Imagine going to literal hell to save that same brother. Imagine being tortured for thirty years, then finally giving up and doing the torturing yourself but hating yourself (even more than you already did) every second that you do it. Imagine watching your baby brother become addicted to demon blood. Imagine watching him being possessed by the devil himself. Imagine thinking he's in hell with Lucifer and trying to move on but failing to. Imagine being betrayed by your best friend. Imagine being sent to Purgatory with him and fighting teeth and nails to get out of there with him but you still fail to save him. Imagine becoming a literal demon. Imagine watching your best friend the love of your life die time and time again in front of you without being able to stop it. Imagine after 30+ years, you get your mom back only to lose her again. Imagine every person you've ever loved dying at least once, and knowing 80% of those deaths were your fault. Imagine discovering you're God's personal little toy and nothing that's ever happened to you nothing you've ever done was your decision but rather god literally toying with you for his entertainment.
Imagine you live 40+ (80+ if you count hell) years of this..... Would YOU have the energy in you to keep smiling after going through that kind of shit?? I know I wouldn't.
Dean Winchester is the most loving human being to ever exist. The fact that after all crap that he still had love left in him?? FUCKKK.. I'd give up an entire army for that guy too, Cas. I'd fall for that guy too. I'd let the Empty take me for the joy of telling him he was loved back, at least once, too. Holy fucking shit.
#I gonna throw up#do you get it#do y'all get that???#fuck#I'd give up an entire army for that guy too#my best friend dean winchester#dean studies#destiel#otp: i did it all of it for you
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The Holy Child of Atocha (Santo Niño de Atocha)
13th century
Feast Day: December 25
Patronage: Mexico, children, pilgrims, prisoners, travelers
The devotion to the Holy Infant of Atocha originated in Spain during the Muslim invasion. In Atocha, the Moors kept the Catholic men imprisoned and would only allow children 12 and under to bring them food and drink. After fervent prayer from families of the town to the Mother of God under the title of Our Lady of Atocha, a child pilgrim miraculously appeared bringing a basket of food and a gourd filled with drink to the prisoners that never emptied. The townspeople realized that it was the Child Jesus. In the church, the shoes of the Infant in the statue of Our Lady of Atocha were worn and dusty. Each time the village women replaced them, they found them worn and dusty again.
Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase here: (website)
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Forever Starts Tonight
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley take on a whole new adventure!
Pairing: Aziraphale x Crowley, Nephilim!Daughter!Reader
Warning: Angst, fluff, the whole shebang. The use of Y/n. Mentions of torture and injuries. ALSO was written based on what information we had back when S1 came out, so this doesn't correlate with what happened in S2.
Notes: THIS WAS WRITTEN BACK IN 2019 and I just logged back into this account after Season 2 so I didn't even realize this was in my draft until now 🙃
It’s kind of a Supernatural!AU, given that their lore is different from Good Omens’ lore so I mixed it up a little. Read the narrative in our Frances McDormand's God voice. Enjoy!
~~~~~~~~~
This story all starts when the demon Crowley is waiting for his angel, Aziraphale, to return to his -now their- flat from ‘an expedition of finding the Holy Grail of exquisite books’... the angel’s words, not Crowley’s. The demon himself was bored while waiting up for Aziraphale, so he ordered Chinese and began to channel surf to see what was on television. It wasn’t long after that did he hear the door open and close within seconds of each other, causing Crowley to look up from the couch to see Aziraphale standing in the doorway with a bundle of pink blankets nestled in his arms.
“Oh, somebody's sake, no. Not again.”
“I can explain!” The angel squeaked out right away, clearing his throat nervously as Crowley just leans further into the couch while eyeing him expectedly through his shades, eyebrows raised in question.
After several moments of utter silence, Crowley’s lips caved into an amused smirk, “I’m waiting.”
“Right! Yes, well, um,” Aziraphale cleared his throat again, “I heard rumors. Rumors around Heaven and I was curious, I couldn’t help it. What I’m saying is that it’s not my fault and I couldn’t just leave her there and-!”
“Alright alright, slow down, Angel. No need to accidentally combust and set the child aflame,” Crowley waved off while pushing himself to stand up, leaning on one hip lazily while eyeing the pink blankets, his hands digging into his pockets, “Now what rumor exactly are those panty-twisting winged bastards spreading up there?”
“Oh! Uh... well,” Aziraphale tries to smile, his free hand reaching up and unwrapping the blankets to reveal the tiny pink face that Crowley was expecting to be under the bundles but in all honesty, even he admits that he wasn’t prepared for how disgustingly cute she was. She was definitely cuter than Adam when he was a baby, and he could confirm that as Aziraphale continued, “What I heard was that Gabriel had been with a human.”
“He, what?” Crowley sputtered, utterly shocked, “Are you telling me that that’s a Nephilim? A child of a human and a bloody angel?”
“Technically, an archangel, but yes,” Aziraphale hummed, unknowingly swaying his own body to gently rock the baby in his arms, “I didn’t believe it at first. Gabriel is always against such things, but, now that I think about it, she was conceived around the time Armaggedon was supposed to happen and Gabriel was pretty furious at the time.”
“So he took his frustration out on some poor woman?” Crowley answered his own question with a deep whistle, “That’s low, even for me.”
“I know,” Aziraphale smiled softly, and Crowley wished he could take it back just to spite him, but quickly swallowed down that idea as he watches the angel practically beam down at the baby while whispering sweet nothings to the sleeping infant.
The fact that Crowley thought it was such a beautiful scene horrified him as he quickly clears his own throat to grab Aziraphale’s attention again, “So what exactly are you doing with the Nephilim?”
The angel sighs in defeat, “Well, unfortunately, Y/n’s mother... passed away after giving birth to her and, well, you know Gabriel, so I just thought--”
“Did you seriously name the poor thing Y/n?” Crowley smirked ever so slightly, walking around the couch to meet the angel in the doorway.
“N-No!” Aziraphale stammered, “Her mother did right before she died. I wouldn’t dare change it if that’s what her mother wanted.”
“And so you just decided that we would take her in, a Nephilim, and raise on our own like some normal human family?”
Aziraphale swallowed something sharp in his throat as he looked down at the baby instead of Crowley, absolutely terrified at what expression he might see. Although he will admit, he was curious about the wording of ‘we’ since he said no such thing of the two of them raising this child together. He knows that Crowley has always been about ‘us’ and ‘our side’ but Aziraphale wasn’t sure just how far Crowley was willing to go in doing things together. He would understand if Crowley was against this, given that if she wanted to, one day, Y/n could just burn a demon such as himself alive just by looking at him. Nephilim were extraordinarily powerful beings, and that is why it’s illegal for angels to procreate with humans. They’re extremely dangerous when provoked. Granted, not as powerful as the Antichrist but still, terrifying.
“I- I- I mean,” Aziraphale flushed, “My thoughts were that if she was left to be adopted by a normal human family, further down the road they would realize that she’s not normal and then we would have a lot of trouble on our hands from both of our sides.”
“Again, we’re on our side now,” Crowley stared down the bridge of his nose at the angel, “And do you remember the last time we tried helping a child?”
“Warlock was different. We thought he was a ticking time bomb.”
“This is a Nephilim. It’s not that much different.”
“But with Warlock, we were trying to force life lessons on him while trying to cancel each other out. We practically broke the poor boy in the process.”
“If you can even call that boy 'poor,'” the demon muttered, “So you’re saying that when a demon and an angel work together to raise a child it would have a much better outcome?” The grin on Crowley’s face was smug, Aziraphale knew it was, given that to counter his question, the angel would have to admit that they do, in fact, make a great team as Crowley’s been saying for 6,000 years.
“Yes,” Aziraphale blurts out sternly, lips frowning in defeat as he pouts, “Go ahead. Gloat. Say ‘I told you so’.”
“I could, but then it wouldn’t be as fun now would it?” Crowley beamed, “What sounds even more fun is pinning it against you for the next eighteen years of this little squirt’s life.”
~~~~~~~~~
And so it was that an angel named Aziraphale and a demon named Crowley took Little Y/n in and raised her as their own. Of course, there were a few bumps in the road along the way, but nothing the three of them couldn’t fix together. Over the years, they live the best life that neither angel nor demon could possibly believe could happen to them.
Crowley ends up being the best father a girl could ask for. When baby Y/n was hungry at night, Crowley was already up and ready to feed her. When she asked for a tricycle, in an instant, it was there against Aziraphale’s wishes. Even when Y/n fell off that damn thing time and time again, Crowley either pretended to fall with her so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed or he would encourage the best way that he could... through temptation. So what Y/n had some trouble sleeping those first few nights after getting that tricycle because Crowley had given her candy every time she succeeded?
She first started calling Crowley 'Dad' and Aziraphale 'Papa' by the time she was five, and it was around that time when her angel father consulted with her demon father about her powers.
“Perhaps this is a good age to teach her how to control her gifts?”
“Absolutely not,” Crowley muttered, practically pouting while leaning against the wall and glaring into nothing. And before Aziraphale could blink, that discussion was over.
When Y/n was old enough, borderline sixteen, she even dyes her hair to look more like Crowley than Gabriel, the girl only ever wanting to resemble the beings who raised her compared to the one who helped create her. When she went to her dads the next morning to show her work, Aziraphale was more fond than angry for dying her hair, commenting on how she looked so much like her father. Crowley, on the other hand, was falling off his chair while laughing, clutching his sides and yelling, “That’s my girl!” He always knew she was the rebellious sort. In secret, he was trying his best not to cry, touched by the influence he had on his child.
By the time Y/n was a teenager, Crowley still did not want to discuss the possibilities of teaching his daughter how to control her powers. And for the life of him, Aziraphale couldn’t understand why. Y/n knew of her abilities. Her dads didn’t hide her from any truths once she was old enough and understood what she was and what she was capable of doing by the time she was sixteen. By then, she had also wondered why Crowley did not want to teach her. After fruitless efforts into getting him to do so, Y/n had gotten angry because she believed that her father was wanting to hold her back from her true potential, or even worse, she believed that he thought she was a monster. And being that she was so close to her Dad, the thought of how he might fear her practically broke the teenager’s heart and she ran away, her special blood giving her the cloak she needed to hide from her otherwordly dads.
When they were unable to find her right away, Aziraphale and Crowley got into the biggest fight they have ever had in their shared existence, and it ended with the angel leaving in a huff to go and keep trying to find their daughter. In his rage, Crowley also left the house to try to blow off some steam and find Y/n.
He was walking for a while, unable to drive since Aziraphale took the Bentley. It was a little petty, maybe, but Crowley begrudgingly admitted to himself that he was proud of the angel's pettiness. As he turns the corner and walks down an alley, he scrunches his eyebrows and hears movement behind him, causing Crowley to turn around just as two demons appear directly behind him. Before he could react, Crowley is tackled to his knees and restrained, and, to his hidden horror, was restrained with chains that had definitely been dipped in Holy Water, as the cold feel of metal begun to sting and seep into his skin. Looking up, the rogue demon noticed a third figure with his attackers, and his upper lip twitched at the sight of him.
Hastur’s lips curl into a smile while having the pleasure of watching Crowley’s confident demeanor give way when those snake-like eyes look over his shoulder. Knowing what Crowley was seeing behind him, Hastur happily watched the restrained demon's face fall at the sight of two more demons dragging his daughter down the alleyway by both of her arms as she cries out, “Dad?”
Hastur laughs as Crowley’s first reaction is to fiercely fight against his restraints, ignoring the pain of the Holy Water bathed chains as he growls and hisses at the Duke of Hell, snake eyes blazing with hellfire, “You tell them to get their filthy hands off of her RIGHT. NOW! Or I’ll--”
“Do what, exactly? Die trying to get out of chains meant to burn through your fleshy form?" The demons all laughed at Hastur's joke and he just beams proudly, "It's nice to see you're not as immune to Holy Water as you claimed to be. I don't know how you managed to survive that bathtub, but I can assure you that we'll never make the mistake of that again."
Crowley ignores the fact that he's been exposed and tries focusing on his child, “Darling, where’s your father?”
"I don't know!" She cried helplessly, the grip the demons had on her arms slowly starting to cut off circulation, her fingertips growing numb. Her demon father wanted nothing more than to return the favor and cut off their own arms to see how they'd feel. Instead, he tried not to get violent and focus more on her little, sweet, snot-and tear-ridden face while she sobs, "I'm sorry--"
"Don't be, love," Crowley tried to speak as gently as possible, despite the fact he could smell his skin beginning to burn and give way to the chains, "It's not your fault."
"You've been keeping low under the radar for a while, Crowley," Hastur interrupted, "How long has it been? Sixteen years? Now that I look at her," he makes a point to stare at Y/n, causing Crowley's skin to crawl with the expression on Hastur's face, full of ill-intent and evil ideas, "I can see why we haven't heard from you. It’s remarkable, actually. You took in a disgraced offspring of some human and an archangel just shortly after betraying your own kind?"
"Don't listen to him," Crowley didn't mean to snap, immediately regretting it when Y/n flinched. He wasn't sure if it was from his hiss or Hastur's words, either way he wanted nothing more to hold and comfort his child.
Hastur and the other demons continue to laugh, "You have two options. You can try fighting your way through your torturous bonds and allow your daughter to watch you slowly die in front of her. Or... you can tell us what we need to know.”
"Such as?" Crowley growled like a hellhound, pulling against its chains and ready to be released on its target.
"Where is the angel Aziraphale? Heaven has also reported his absence for sixteen years. One could wonder..." Hastur's eyes flick back to Y/n, "That isn't a coincidence. Did you finally move in with the boyfriend, dear Crowley?"
Crowley decided he didn't want to entertain this group of clowns any further, trying to conjure all his willpower and miracle a small, barely conceivable time stop, like the one he made to speak to Adam before Satan's arrival. It wasn't as strong due to his pain, but he immediately spoke directly to his daughter once he noticed Hastur's mouth stopped moving, and the other demons stopped laughing.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry."
Y/n's eyes briefly widen. She wasn't sure she could remember the last time Crowley apologized for anything. He sometimes did that little apology dance both he and Aziraphale created whenever they were wrong about something, but those were miniscule apologies compared to this.
Crowley's words were desperate and bled just as deep as the chains currently burning their way through his flesh, "I told Aziraphale that I never wanted you to learn how to use and control your powers because I didn’t want you to be anything like me, like him, or any angel or demon in this universe. I just wanted you to be... to be, like... like YOU."
Both father and daughter had matching tears falling down their cheeks, and through his desperation, Crowley found determination as well. Determined to get Y/n to see herself as he saw her. Strong and sure of herself, as confident as her papa, the very angel he loved dearly and hoped he would get to see again before the Holy Water reached his heart, "But I realize now that I was only holding you back in becoming you because those powers are what make you who you are. And right now, I need you to do that. I need you to focus. Burn away these bonds, and we can get out of here and find your father.”
"I-- I can't do that!" She exclaimed, her words shaking as she noticed the demons around them slowly beginning to move again, her father's intervention starting to fail due to his dying strength. "I don't know how!"
"You can!" Crowley had noticed, too, and the pain was becoming unbearable. He desperately wanted to be free of these chains, but more importantly, he desperately wanted his daughter free and running away, far from here and hopefully to Aziraphale, "You can and you will! Or else they'll take you somewhere your father can't follow. Aziraphale won't know where to look, and without me, he won't ever be able to get into Hell to save you! You have to try, Y/n!"
She was crying again, unable to breathe as the time was slowly beginning to restart. Hastur's movements were almost comically slow, snail-like as he full-bodied, turned to directly face Crowley. By the time Hastur was staring directly down at the rogue demon, time had fully restarted again, and the demons who ambushed Crowley were none the wiser.
Hastur grinned, "So what'll it be, old friend?"
"Even if I knew where the angel was, I wouldn't tell you," Crowley snarled, "I haven't spoken to Aziraphale in years."
"6,000 years on this planet, and you don't seem to know how to lie any better," Hastur snarled, turning back to stare at Y/n, "Very well. You're never too young to watch your dear old daddy turn into a puddle of goo."
"NO!"
A blast of light, blinding as the sun, bursts through the alleyway. Even with his shades, Crowley still had to close his eyes, his ears bombarded with a chalkboard-scrapping screech followed by men screaming in anguish. Even when the noises stopped and the light subsided back into a night sky, Crowley's ears still rang, and his vision was spotted. He blinked rapidly, faintly noticing that his shades were cracked and lopsided on his face. When he was finally able to look around, he couldn't find Hastur or the other demons. Instead, small piles of ash replace where they all once stood. The rogue demon's senses fully return, and he groans when hot, searing pain begins to make itself known. Looking down, he noticed the chains were now beating red and hot to the touch, sparking when the links rubbed together.
"Dad!" Y/n shouts, rubbing her sore arms as she runs to Crowley, who still knelt on the ground in shock.
Her voice snaps him out of it, and he raises his voice in warning, "Y/n, wait, you'll burn-!"
But, when Y/n touched the chains, nothing happened. She didn't pull away in pain, and he couldn't see any burn marks on her hand as she helped him shrug away the restraints. She's careful not to let the chains touch his skin anymore than they already were, and once the chains were removed, she immediately reverts back to crying as she sunk into her demon father's arms.
"Alright. Alright..." Crowley grunts, still in pain but holding his girl in his embrace regardless, taking deep breaths as he tried to relax, "It's alright now, love. You did it."
They stayed there, knelt on the ground of the alleyway for who knows how long, the only sound being a dog barking and car alarm going off in the distance, likely startled by Y/n's outburst.
The car and dog weren't the only ones her burst of energy signaled. Crowley picked up a different car sound, the rumbling of a familiar engine in the distance, quickly drawing closer. A smile finally emerges on his face, squeezing Y/n tighter and releasing her when he hears the sound of a car door slamming shut just down the alley.
"Y/n?!" Aziraphale appeared, eyes widening when he not only found his daughter, but his dearest as well, both collapsed on the ground and surrounded by ash and scorched earth. Immediately, the angel's footsteps pick up, "Y/n! Crowley!"
"Papa!" Y/n cried, sinking into Aziraphale's embrace when the angel sunk to his knees to join them on the ground. The teenager sobs into the angel's lapels, gasping between cries, "Dad... Dad's hurt."
Aziraphale's eyes immediately flick up to Crowley's, although it was proven difficult when the demon's cracked sunglasses got in the way. Keeping one arm around his daughter, Aziraphale leans into Crowley's space, taking the dark shades off to get a good look at those beautiful, snake-like yellow eyes, "My dear... are you alright?"
"Hm," Crowley's grin was lopsided, loopy like a lovesick loon, "Better now that you're here, Angel."
Y/n hiccups out a small laugh, and Aziraphale scowls while rolling his eyes. The sight of their reactions could fuel Crowley another 6,000 years if needed. Recognizing the burn marks of Holy Water, Aziraphale performs a quick miracle with the flick of his wrist, and before Crowley could blink, he's back to normal, tired but otherwise unharmed. He sinks into Aziraphale without a second thought, joining Y/n in tucking their faces into either sides of the angel's neck and staying there with no intent of leaving.
Aziraphale doesn't complain, unaware of what happened, but allowing his two loves to stay where they are, safe under his arms and wings.
#good omens#ineffable husbands#aziraphale#aziraphale x crowley#crowley#crowley good omens#good omens crowley#aziracrow#good omens season 2#good omens imagine#imagine#crowley imagine#crowley x aziraphale#aziraphale imagine
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Lore: Common Phrases and Words #2
Accuracy Disclaimer & The Other Stuff
[tldr: D&D lore is a giant conflicting mess. Larian's lore is also a conflicting mess. You learn to take what you want and leave the rest]
Abeir-Toril
Why it's called the "Forgotten" Realms
History | Time & Festivals | Lexicon [1] [2]| Languages | Living in Faerûn [1] [?] | Notable Organisations | Magic | Baldurs Gate | Waterdeep | The Underdark | Geography and Human Cultures
--- WIP
Some more random assorted Common vocabulary and phrases - including some LGBT+ terminology and yet more swearing.
An interesting note about insults in the Realms is that you're encouraged to be creative about them. Performers in particular, like playwrights and minstrels, keep a cycle of new and creative phrases coming and going among the population (Earth has social media for its memes, on Toril you can blame the bards).
'tis and 'twas are not uncommonly heard peppered into speech now and then, though the everyday variants we use are just as common.
Badauler - Nonsense, Hogwash
To be "Right darlburl" / "Proper darlburl" - Pissed off
"The thrust of it" - "the gist of it"
Galad! - Wow!
Anyhail - Anyway
Mayhap - Perhaps
"Perhaps" is used only in appropriate social settings as fancy etiquette, and only by the upper class and those who wish to affect such mannerisms (bards and the upper middle-class).
Casking - Vandalism (Sword Coast dialect)
a Nightblood - A thief
"The blood of the night" - Thieving, a phrase used by professionals in the trade.
a Sharpjaw - Juvenile delinquent
a Thruster - An aggressively ambitious social climber (not necessarily derogatory)
Brightbird/s - Lover/s
a Rose [Waterdhavian dialect] - Somebody you're in love with, anyone from a crush to a soulmate
a Rose [outside of Waterdeep] - A Submissive [BDSM].
a Fancyman/Fancylad/Fancylass - A partner whom the speaker disapproves of. (So, like, your boyfriend knocks on the door and your mother, who hates him, answers, she'll inform you that your "fancylad" is around again.
Power - Divine magic
a Tavernmaster - Barkeeper
a Clevershanks - Know-it-all (usually used for men)
a Clevertongue - Know-it-all (usually used for women)
a Highborn - Noble (polite)
a Highnose - Noble (rude), also means "has a stick-up-their-ass"
a Holy-nose - Priest; mildly rude, but more rough than offensive.
a Thruss - Lesbian
a Liyan - Gay man (elvish loanword)
a Praed - Gay man (gnomish loanword)
a Dathna - Twink
a Harnor - Butch
a Tasmar - Bisexual (masc.)
a Shaeda - Bisexual (fem.) (elven loanword)
a "No-thorn" - Asexual
a One - An agender term, similar to using they/them.
Sildur - Trans
I didn't see much extrapolation on this one, so I assume it's an adjective: a sildur woman, a sildur man, a sildur one or just "I'm sildur" when providing your gender, I guess.
a Brightcoin - Nouveau Riche. Somebody rising through the social ranks.
a Highmantle - Old Money, or somebody with the etiquette and bearing of one
a Turncoin, Coin lass, Coin lad - Sex worker. Something of a generic term, but also refers more specifically to those unaffiliated with brothels and festhalls.
a Laughing-lad/lass, Highcoin lass/lad - A more affluent sex-worker
a Brightspear, Highcoin Lady/Lord - Sex workers who play the part of the noble and draw clients from that crowd.
"Sark!" - The impolite way to say "gods fucking damn it!" (in contrast to haularake - the polite way to say it)
"Bind me and tar me" - An oath of astonishment, milder but similar in form to "well, fuck me."
"Bind me" - short version
"Dark!" - "Damn it!"
"Straek" - "Go drown yourself, right now and painfully."
No, really, that's the translation given.
"To stlarn up" - to screw up
"Stlarning it up" - Screwing up
"Stlarn" - a mild "damn"
"Stlarning [thing]" - "Bloody [thing]"
"Tluin" - an emphatic "fuck off"
"Those of all the Nine Hells take you!” - the full version of "Hells"
"Happy Dancing Hobgoblins" - a curse used by the old fashioned and parents trying too hard not to swear in front of infants, rather like that old lady I once met on a train who unironically used "jiminy cricket." Hobgoblins are noted to be unimpressed by this particular phrase.
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There are not enough Mpreg Parent Akeshu fics
I must admit, I'm a bit disappointed.
it's not like there's zero. There are some, but not nearly enough or I'm not looking in the right tags.
There's especially HUGE missed potential that not enough people utilize.
I've seen wholesome Akiren as a parent. Seems everyone is in agreement he'd be the chillest, awesomest, father.
But what about Akechi?
Goro "I had a bad childhood, no father figure, Mom passed away when I was young leaving me to grow up in either Foster Homes or the closest living relatives the Social Worker could track down. Who took me in but didn't want me. so I grew up to mask my true nature by being polite on the outside and a celebrity to get some form of positive attention, and I tracked down my deadbeat father who I'm going to ruin the life and career of out of spite and vengeance, for me and my late Mother." Akechi.
The man has childhood baggage, who knows how many young children he's interacted with as an adult. So his experience would range from "limited" to "none existent"
If one of these boys wouldn't take to being a parent well immediately, it would be Akechi. Like, the man is having an external crisis, he's not okay.
"I am the LAST person that should be a father. Do I look like fatherly material to you? I can't even recall the last time I interacted or made eye contact with an infant. Maybe I never did! I can do research and read books, I'm good at researching, I'm going to read the books no matter what but that can only help so much. I know what not to do, from my childhood. I'm going to try my best to do the exact opposite of what Shido did, but no parent is perfect, I could still screw the kid up! Not to mention I'm still processing the fact that MY RIVAL HAS A FUCKING FULLY FUNCTIONING UTERUS.
I knocked up my Rival
I knocked up the man I once shot in the head
I knocked---holy hell what have I done?
I've never been interested in Women, so I never thought I'd have to worry about accidentally planting a little me inside someone. Do you realize how many women I have turned down?
So here I was, thinking I'd be safe. That obviously nothing would come from indulging in a night of passion with my frustrating, Idiotic sexy, alluring, Rival.
But once again, you are just full of surprises apparently in the internal organs sense too because you can carry children and now both of us are unironically FUCKED."
"I'm not going to force this on you, I just thought you deserved to know. If you don't want to we can--"
"Pfft, HAHAHAHA. You say that like it's an actual option. Do I need to remind you what my upbringing was like? I'm not repeating the same mistakes, I'm not leaving. Granted you are obviously in a better financial situation and have a proper support group unlike my Mother. But if I decide to leave now, or stay but run later down the line, what's stopping our child from living in a constant internal state of guilt and loneliness, which will eventually evolve into anger and spite and once they're of age to move out, make it their mission to hunt me down and enter a false work alliance so they can gain my trust enough to eventually betray and torture me. Or just flat out kill me. And You know what? I wouldn't blame them! I'd kill me too if I could. I can't let that happen, I refuse to put a child with my D.N.A. through what I went through. So we are moving in and getting married (oh my god, I have to move in and marry my Rival) Because that's what Japanese family laws all encourage. And I'm going to internally pray and wish that I don't somehow manage to fuck up an innocent being that belongs to us, even though I have no idea what I am doing. Did I mention I have zero experience with babies and children?"
Point is, parentGoro! Has so much potential and it should be a crime that there are so little fics exploring that.
#persona 5 royal#persona 5#goro akechi#akiren#ren amamiya#akira kurusu#akeshu#shuake#ren x akechi#fanfic writers away!#ao3 writers where you at?#calling all Akeshu/Shuake writers!#mpreg fic#reluctant parent#new parent#Akeshu child
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Holy Dogs— Catholic Folk Saints
catholicism has an insanely diverse history and culture. with more than 1 billion adherents across the world, there’s bound to be variance in worship and commemoration. one of the best examples of this is catholic folk saints.
simply put, folk saints are saints of the people. they are holy figures who are honored as patrons by a local population, but not officially canonized in the vatican.
some are legends. some were old gods from polytheistic religions. some were real people. and some, believe it or not, were dogs.
that’s right! a good boy can sometimes be so good, they’re saintly.
St. Guinefort of Lyon
feast day— august 22nd
patronage— infants
st. guinefort was a greyhound who was said to live in 13th-century france. according to legend, guinefort was a loyal companion for a knight who lived near the city of lyon. one day, the knight went out to hunt. he left his infant son at his house, under the watchful eye of guinefort. when the knight returned, he found the infant’s room in chaos— the cradle was overturned and blankets were torn. the son was nowhere to be seen, and guinefort was sitting in the corner with bloody jaws.
under the belief that his son was eaten by guinefort, the knight drew his sword and killed the dog. only then did he hear his son crying. turning over the cradle, the knight realized his son was alive and well. lying next to him was the body of a viper, covered in dog bites. guinefort had killed the snake to protect the infant, making a mess of the nursery in the process.
the knight, grieving his mistake, took guinefort’s body and dropped it down a well. he constructed a shrine out of the well to honor him. when the townsfolk heard of the dog’s martyrdom, he was venerated as a patron of infants. mothers would often visit his shrine if their children were sick, praying for his protection.
Negro Matapacos (Black Cop-Killer)
feast day— august 26th
patronage— protestors, street dogs
negro matapacos was a stray dog who lived in the streets of santiago, chile. he would most notably hang around university campuses. he didn’t technically have an owner, but he was cared for by a woman named maría campos. she would feed him and give him a place to sleep. every morning before he left, she would tie a red handkerchief around his neck and bless him.
from 2011 to 2013, nationwide student protests rocked the country. as the demonstrations persisted, police began to turn to violent forms of crowd control. to the student’s surprise, there was soon a stray black dog protesting alongside them. he would lash out aggressively at approaching police, but was kind and protective towards the civilian protestors.
he soon earned the name negro matapacos, which translates to “black cop-killer” in english. it was a title that reflected his job perfectly.
during his participation in the protests, he showed absolute resilience against police violence. he would accompany protestors into tear gas, and even endured getting hit with water cannons. as the protesting continued, matapacos never retreated.
remarkably, he survived the demonstrations. the black dog gained media attention, and was honored as a hero and revolutionary icon. matapacos went on to live a happy life. he died on august 26th, 2017, attended by his caregiver and vet staff. according to various sources, the canine sired 32 pups before his death.
in 2019, protesting once again erupted in chile. although matapacos was not able to be there, he certainly was in spirit. his image was drawn on countless signs, and he was the subject of street art by revolutionary artists. he was a patron saint for the working class of chile, and is honored as such to this day.
#the goodest boy#negro matapacos#exvangelical#ex catholic#ex christian#catholic witch#apostate#catholic guilt#santiago chile#chile protests#religious trauma#catholic paganism#saint guinefort#leftism#french history#lyon france#catholic witchcraft#folk saints#folk catholicism#progressive politics#catholic history#christian spirituality
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What does the myth of Medusa mean?
Medusa is not easy to talk about because she is not a single thing. Instead hers is a long, thin shape that worms its way through time. Once she was one thing, then this was repeatedly modulated by the various people to whom she has meant something.
The oldest form of the myth has her as one in a set of monstrous triplets, the product of incest between a titan and his sister. In this myth Medusa is virtually as old as the world itself and was born a monster to sea monster parents. Much, much later, in what they call the Archaic period of Greek history (800-480BCE) Medusa was promoted to having once been beautiful, but cursed by Athena for an unspecified insult. Eight years into the common era this strand was taken up in Rome by Ovid, just before his mysterious banishment to a town on the Black Sea.
Ovid makes the version of the myth that has become canonical. Medusa was a beautiful woman with fair hair who had taken a vow of celibacy. This sexual unavailability attracted the sea god Poseidon, who rapes Medusa in a temple to the goddess of wisdom. The virgin Athena, no stranger to violence, is so horrified at the sight of her home being defiled that she actually covers her eyes. The goddess then punishes Medusa for Poseidon's crime by making her hair a nest of snakes and her gaze capable of turning flesh into stone.
At this point an illegitimate son of Zeus called Perseus enters the story. By a complicated chain of events Perseus and his mother Danaë are sealed in a box and tossed into the sea by her father, Akrisius, the king of Argos. Zeus asks Poseidon to save his lover and son, which Poseidon does by making the ocean as glass and gently delivering the box to Seriphos, a hundred miles away. Here Perseus is adopted by the local king, Polydektes, as an opening gambit in the king's designs on Perseus' mother. Danaë spurns the king. Perseus, being the son of Zeus, is not thrilled by the prospect of her marriage to a mortal stepfather either.
Polydektes hatches a plan to kill Perseus and marry his mother without offending Olympus. The king announces a fake marriage to a noblewoman as an excuse to extract congratulatory gifts from everyone he knows. In his attempt to be clever, Polydektes demands the head of Medusa from Perseus. In response, Zeus recruits most of the Olympic pantheon to equip Perseus with magical armament, including Athena's own shield. Perseus uses these advantages to find and behead Medusa, approaching her by watching her reflection in the polished inner surface of the goddess' shield. Perseus then defends his mother's right to choose a spouse by turning Polydektes and his entire court into stone after they ask to see Medusa's head.
Back at the stump of Medusa's neck two "grandchildren" of Poseidon wriggle out of her body and into the world. The first is the famous winged horse Pegasus and the second is a human infant called Khrysaor, born holding a golden sword in his hand. Reflecting Medusa's original purity as well her curse, these offspring lead radically different lives. Pegasus gives long and devoted service to Olympus while Khrysaor's fate is to be the progenitor of most of the monsters that populate Greek mythology.
According to Hesiod's Theogony, Khrysaor sleeps with a sea nymph who then gives birth to a three-headed son named Geryon and a daughter called Echidna. That daughter is "half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth." Echidna in turn has children by "the terrible, outrageous and lawless" serpent called Typhon.
This union first produces a hound named Orthus for her uncle Geryon. Orthus is soon joined by another brother, also a dog, the fifty-headed Kerberus who ends up guarding Hades. The third child of Echidna, Hydra, also has a huge surplus of heads. The fourth is Chimera and the fifth is actually the product of Echidna having sex with her first son, Orthus. That incest creates the Sphinx, who takes the suppression of the city of Thebes as his life's purpose, as well as the Nemean Lion, who does something similar on the peninsula that would become Sparta.
In thinking about the rape of Medusa by the sea god and her punishment for his transgression it would be easy to rattle off things like,
"Don't rule out spite. Poseidon made it extremely personal when he forced Medusa in Athena's home—and not just home, the place where Athena is fed. You can imagine for yourself the additional layers of disgust and violation you might feel to find your home not just broken into and robbed but used to stage a sexual assault."
Or that,
"Medusa's particular curse makes sense to me as a punishment, but only as a punishment of Poseidon. It takes her off that god's roster for good, then mocks him by ensuring that Medusa is forever untouchable—forever "his", and never another's. If there is a rapist's punishment in the myth, this is where it is."
And then to remark, grimly,
"You get an all too clear image of Mycenaean Greece through this keyhole."
But there's a good deal to think through before I could take seriously anything this concrete. After all, what wisdom is being expressed when Athena punishes a woman for having been raped? And what does the first version of the myth mean, where Medusa is a survivor from an era of monsters?
There are endless ways to play cat's cradle with the Greek myths until they have whatever shape you like. In one sense that sort of constrained mental fiddling is the purpose of any comprehensive mythological system—To provide a brake on revolutionary thought by denying this thought the one thing it must have to proceed: a vantage point from without to properly view the social contradictions that give it rise. You could argue that having such a vantage was what made Jesus a revolutionary compared to say the Maccabees, whose vantage on Judea was firmly rooted in an imagined past.
This brake gives the society that labors under it a special intellectual and cultural stability, a stability for which we have no real reference nowadays. I think you can see it very hard at work in that letter Ptolemy wrote for his patron Syrus, with which he opens his astronomy textbook, the Almagest. The one where Ptolemy implies that astronomy is a tool of moral self-cultivation even more than it is an attempt to depict reality from an independent point of view. Even the most advanced astronomical textbook ever written could not then be completely separated from the ends of piety, or for that matter the requirement to flatter your patron. (It goes without saying that "exegetic meaning" and the rest of the Straussian decoder ring project stems from a craving for the various stabilities [political, cultural, intellectual] granted a society with such a mythological system at its core.) That is to say, when you're interested in an individual myth I think it's helpful to imagine the conditions under which its first patterns were woven.
It is extremely important to remember that the Greek myths—and even the religious pantheon itself—are a Bayeux Tapestry. I mean that they were made for one set of people by another, who had established themselves hierarchically above the first. If the Greek myths are a shared cultural heritage covering everyone from Thrace to Crete, then the real heritage is the slightly more ancient domination that united them all in the first place.
What we call Greek mythology and its pantheon date to a thousand formative years. These are the years between the Indo-European conquest of the Aegean and the beginning of a Mycenaean world, that is, 3000-2000BCE. This was the millennium when at least three waves of invaders on horseback permanently disrupted the Neolithic farmers who had occupied the Aegean.
The entry of the Indo-Europeans—and their decision to stay—set in motion a series of events that culminated for our purposes with horse-riding, Indo-European-speaking invaders from the North (the Greeks) storming the Aegean peninsula. Their invasions set off a thousand years of tribal warfare, and the final wave of Dorians triggered a cultural dark age that lasted another twelve hundred years, until 800BCE. These invasions shifted the egalitarian indigenous social arrangement into something far more hierarchical, and eventually centralized.
Greek mythology and its pantheon are processed remains. They're all that's left of the indigenous Neolithic culture. The Greeks later called the people they overran the Pelasgoi. The name has no known origin and if it comes from anywhere it's probably like Basque or Etruscan—a relict of the Neolithic Europe that was all but erased by the horsemen and their language in the 2000's BCE.
The actual Pelasgoi were an egalitarian (and probably matrilineal) group of agriculturalists. They lived on the Aegean peninsula as the Indo-European invasion reverberated through their corner of late-Neolithic Europe. They'd probably been thereabouts for 10,000 years. The Greeks conquered and then settled among (or rather, "above") the locals. This dominion created a successor culture to that of both the local Neolithic and the invasive, Indo-European-derived Greeks.
As far as the Greek pantheon and its myths are concerned, this successor culture was Mycenaean (c. 2600-1177BCE). You can think of it as a Neolithic culture that has been digested to suit the requirements of pacifying and administering a particular group of conquered people. This much goes a long way to explaining why Agamemnon (c. 1700BCE) was still notable as a giant prick for Homer one thousand years later.
You could go even further if you wanted to, and see the martial fate of the Peloponnesus itself as a kind of runaway-refinement of the obsessive hierarchy, domination and paranoia depended on by every conquerer. At the very least you should think of Classical slavery, and Spartan slavery in particular as direct consequences of the Indo-European invasion.
Slavery is something like the culture of conquest itself and is not attested in the Aegean by low-status burials before the Greeks invaded. Further, you don't have to be a sociologist to see Sparta's secret police (the Krypteia) and their annual war on the enslaved Helots as a kind of domestic, institutionalized conquest. I realize there are 2,300 years separating the Indo-European invasion of Greece from the reforms of Lycurgus in Sparta; I'm only noting that there was a 10,000 year old, egalitarian Neolithic social fabric, that it was utterly destroyed by the men on horses and then replaced in waves by something far more violent. A process that terminated, in the case of Sparta, with something you could call ur-fascism without the slightest fear of anachronism.
There is a quality of succession (as opposed to "fusion") in Greek mythology. This comes from its absorption of a previous vision of the world. The easiest way to see how Greek mythology is the result of one thing consuming another is the genealogical rat's nest of its early denizens. There are primordial versions for almost all of the Olympian gods. There are even duplicates of these primordial gods: two sea gods, Pontus and Poseidon, two sky gods, Ouranos and Aether, and so on. There's also an extremely unclear line of succession connecting them all to the Olympic pantheon—the foundation of which, we are told, hinges on Zeus' rebellion against his father, Kronos, himself a usurper of his own father. This is all very strange for someone used to the forever-supremacy of a Judeo-Christian deity. To me, it reflects a requirement to absorb an indigenous culture for the purpose of administering "civilization" to its members.
Succession is also a feature of the history internal to Greek myth. Overt fertility imagery, something that certainly animates indigenous Neolithic agriculturalists, is banished to a world that was ancient even to the people telling the myths. Among other things, this is why Ouranos gets to spray cum left, right and center as he populates the primordial world but the origins of Theban aristocracy lie in Kadmus sowing dragon's teeth.
Medusa and her sisters take part in this successional process too. Each, we are told, is descended from the titans whom Zeus overthrew. As everyone knows, all three sisters have euphemisms instead of proper names: the Greek name Medusa means "the Protector", Euryale is "the Far Ranger" and Stheno is "the Robust." These are probably the epithets of pre-Greek female deities, reused as euphemisms once the women they named were demonized in the strict sense.
This is something that also happened to Pazuzu, the Babylonian demon who was the ultimate antagonist of "The Exorcist." Pazuzu was probably a god of fair weather out of the Neolithic world that was overrun by the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia. The mythology of that area is complex and successional in a way that recalls what I've been saying about the Greeks. Tellingly, Pazuzu is the brother of Humbaba (another demonizee) whom the notable avatar of civilization, Gilgamesh disposed of in the wilds of Lebanon. The upshot is that nobody knows what Pazuzu's real name is because he was so thoroughly euphemized by his culture's successor as to have been rechristened. This is likely also the case for many of the things that get called monsters in Greek mythology.
It seems important to note that the collective term for Medusa and her sisters, "Gorgons," is an Indo-European word meaning "those with grim gazes." This is to say that if Medusa and her sisters do represent pre-Greek deities then it was certainly the Greeks who renamed them. The use of gorgons as protective architectural features right up into the Classical period also strongly reflects the original and benevolent forms taken by Medusa and her sisters. Forms bent to Greek purposes after subjugation to the new, Olympian order.
It's also important not to go overboard when it comes to Medusa's original form. Trying to recover the original nature of feminine deities is an extremely large and sticky trap for modern people. Ever since the beginning of the Modern era there has been an intense desire to see prior societies as somehow antidotes to the way our own has developed. The prospect of ancient matriarchies excites this desire. For example JJ Bachofen and his Der Mutterrecht (1861), or Otto Gross and his idea that the Freudian superego is identical with patriarchy.
Gross said explicitly what many women (and a few men) still feel: that my self-consciousness, the means by which I regulate my desires and impulses by measuring them against what is "expected of me," is where patriarchy lives and my awareness of "what is expected" is the means of patriarchy's transmission through time. Gross thought the organization of the human mind not only changed though history but that its present organization recorded this history in the same way as ocean sediments. Gross believed that the unconscious was the psychological correlate to life under matriarchy and the superego its comparatively recent lid—a lid that covers our collective memory of what it was like to live in a society modeled on the benevolent dominion of child by mother. Gross' determination to remove this lid in himself through a rigorous program of polyamory and cocaine was a mixed success. The close association of patriarchy with a zealously applied, regulatory self-consciousness (the type required when one has a specified place in a male-dominated, urban hierarchy) is much more difficult to dismiss.
I said before that Medusa was probably a pre-Greek deity before she was "demonized in the strict sense," but this is not quite right. Greece didn't have demons, only monsters. I find this fascinating. I would never refer to the Gorgons, and much less Scylla or Charybdis or Python, as "demons," no matter how much their appearance or behavior fit the term. Why is this? Is it just because of the rehabilitation performed on ancient Greek culture by everything from the Renaissance to the D'Aulaires? Or is it a real distinction?
In Greek myth monsters seem to be checks on progress or development because they impede notable figures from completing their stories (Oedipus, Herakles, Kadmus etc.) On the face of it this is very different from a demon's purpose, which is to reassert the Natural or Divine order for the benefit of anyone foolish enough to challenge it. Is it just that monsters are alive, i.e., mortal, in a way demons are not? Is a monster just a demon who can be killed? Even if that's true (and mortality is a trait that basically every single monster in Greek mythology shares) what does it mean that creatures who would be eternal menaces in any other culture are, in Greek mythology, seemingly there to be vanquished?
Unlike demons, each monster in Greek myth is a holdover from the primordial world. Nobody says that Mephistopheles or an Oni is an isolated renegade from some prior era. Even if both are extremely ancient they each have an obvious and divinely ratified dominion over their corner of the present world: You see it in their respective licenses to tempt Faust and eat Buddhist pilgrims. But it is exactly a questionable dominion over the world and a loss of divine ratification that unite all the monsters of Greek myth.
One way to understand this is to say that a monster is a demon who has had its spiritual existence scraped out. The result is not just mortality but exile to the same plane of reality that humans inhabit. Monsters can be killed—and their deaths serve as capstones to heroic acts of faith—in a way that even the fight against a demon will never yield. Demons have an intact spiritual existence, granted them by divine ratification. This gives them the ability, or rather, the right to escape attack via their non-physical form (as Pazuzu does at the end of "The Exorcist.") That "right of spiritual escape" is the substance of a demon's immortality, and its loss in the case of monsters is sometimes the only obvious difference between the two. This is best seen in the fact that Greek monsters cease to exist once killed, and their shades are never encountered in Hades. When a monster loses the right to escape via a spiritual existence they acquire their other major distinction from demons: unnaturalness.
A demon can certainly be terrifying, but the terror it causes is embedded in, indeed terrifies on behalf of the Natural order. This is to say that demons terrify, but that this terror is not personal. Humans, the variety of soul indigenous to this plane of reality, are terrorized as a class by demons, not as individuals. In fact one could argue a direct connection between this and, for example, the millions of ticketholders who made "The Exorcist" such a fabulous box office success.
On this understanding, demonic terror is felt not by individuals but by their bodies, the thing all humans have in common with each other. This terror is each body reminding its occupant of the order of things. That's the nature of the enforcement performed by a demon's fearsomeness. This is easier to see in the pre-scientific account of altitude sickness: the way you feel the higher you climb is a direct experience of your assigned place in the hierarchy of Nature. Altitude sickness is your very body speaking to you, saying, in the voice of Nature, "You aren't supposed to be here dummy; This is for the gods." Every hair raised by a demon retrenches a hierarchy to remind humans that they are not at its summit.
When a demon (or for that matter a god) "loses its license" and must become a monster, unnaturalness and a type of criminality is what follows. The terror created by the Theban dragon or the Sphinx was chaotic. It served no purpose except to constrain human destiny, by keeping Kadmus from founding Thebes or Oedipus from ruling it. What does it mean that Ancient Greece had a disordered spiritual landscape filled with monsters who live only to thwart the aims of destiny and Nature?
It's very tempting to think that this is because the rule for what was 'Natural' and what went against 'Nature' had been recently changed—namely by the Greeks, their gods and the new order. You could call Greek monsters "heretics under polytheism"—recently-mortal refugees from a divine war, shorn of immortality but with their actual coups-de-grace left as tests of faith for the most pious and violent humans. The heroes (in Greek the word means the same thing as Medusa, "protector.") Hence the ensouled champions of Olympus slaughter the soul-less and unnatural monsters. This slaughter concludes a monster's demotion from the spiritual realm and it then enters the least permanent plane of existence, that of corpses and human memory. This is the fate of all casualties in a war of mythological succession.
The hero in the story of Medusa is successional in several ways. Perseus has a mandate to kill monsters from the ancient world, and so recreate (in acceptable miniature) his own father's rebellion against the titans. This may only be a fancier way of saying that Perseus is a minor son of Zeus and is assigned a mopping up operation at the tail-end of his dad's throne war.
But there's also a successional quality in the way Perseus is made heroic. Perseus is heroic because he is the very tip of Olympus' will: he is sired by them, clothed by them, armed by them and disguised by them. The hero is a human, composited into semidivinity by the gifts of the pantheon. Any which way Perseus presents himself, whether visibly or not, he's a reflection of Olympus. And this is to say nothing of his shield, whose literal reflection of Perseus is presumably the only place Medusa ever sees her killer's eyes.
Perseus is not only protected by Athena's shield: his face appears inside it. Medusa's head is later put on the outside of the shield. This is a little parable about fucking with Athena: "There are two sides to this goddess, an inside where you are defended from apparently invincible enemies and an outside, where Athena becomes an invincible enemy herself." That may be the the full extent of the "wisdom" on display in the Medusa myth, which is really an Athena myth: the wise live long because they don't screw with Athena. (The fact that Perseus defeats the barbaric Medusa through his powers of reflection, and in the name of the goddess of wisdom, is a cerebral valence the story probably acquired later on, in Roman times.)
You can also think of Medusa's death in the light of succession. The stump of her neck yields two "grandchildren" of Poseidon, Pegasus and Khrysaor. One is a giant man born holding a golden sword and the other is a domesticated animal who conquers the air. Pegasus becomes a kind of mercenary in Olympus' war against the primordial past, as when Athena lends Pegasus out to Bellerophon so they can wax Chimera (who is in fact the grand-nephew of the flying horse Bellerophon uses to kill him.) Khrysaor's real legacy is of course as donor of the human phenotypes that add another layer of monstrousness and perversity to the creatures Herakles must dispatch during his labors. It is intriguing that the human component of Medusa's existence finds expression in Khrysaor, progenitor of a dozen mythological monsters, while everything noble in her body comes out as a beast of fabulous utility.
In a word, the Olympian order mandates divine violence against the remaining chaos-monsters. Further, these monsters are refined by that violence into something that benefits mankind. Seen from this angle, Medusa's death at Perseus' hands (or the dragon's at those of Kadmus) is something close to a sales pitch for a Greek world: "We're getting rid of those monsters. We're harnessing their primordial energy for the benefit of the city-founding horse-lords!"
When you look at it this way the early version of the myth shows Medusa as a bridge to the chaotic, primordial world. In fact it is precisely her status as a monster of the ancient world that provokes Polydektes into selecting Medusa as a challenge. Polydektes thinks he's being extremely clever by asking Perseus for Medusa's head. He imagines he's dooming an irritating rival by telling him to go tete a tete with the daughter of a titan. But his turns out to be exactly the kind of backward, even heretical thinking that doesn't understand how overmatched the primordial, barbaric world is when it squares off against Olympus. It's worth remembering that by the end of the myth Polydektes and his entire court become all too firm believers in what can be achieved with Olympus' backing.
Like almost all the great monsters of Greek mythology Medusa's existence symbolized an intolerable check on the progress of Hellenization. Olympus therefore facilitates her murder. The easy answer as to why Medusa was the sister chosen for death is that she was, for some reason, the only mortal one among the three. But this seems extremely post-hoc to me, like the rest of the Ovidian interpretation. To my mind Medusa was always a gorgon, because she was always a Neolithic deity; Ovid was the person who could translate her Bronze Age fate into more urban, even modern terms.
I think you can see what I'm getting at here: the Medusa story is a single battle in a much longer-running war between what Olympus represented and the indigenous world of chaos-monsters it aimed to replace. This had enormous consequences for the Western world.
That replacement occurred along an axis which had never before existed in Mycenaean society: The axis with "Barbarian" at one end and "Greek" at the other. Their whole mythology is a snapshot of this process of replacement. This probably dates, as I said, to the beginning of the Mycenaean world. And as the Mycenaean world became more centralized and urban you can see something of the mechanism that produced this "successional" mythology:
The foundation of cities is a major consequence of killing monsters in Greek myths. Perseus founds Mycenae after killing Medusa. Agamemnon only has a city to lord over because Atreus inherited it from the line of Perseus, to say nothing of the case of Thebes, its dragon or the Sphinx.
This new axis was a force majeure opposition between Greek things and Barbarian things. When laid over the imperative to found cities, this axis set up a kind of cultural siphon. Under this mechanism all the things emphasizing order and what we would call centralized government eventually became "Greek" (whatever their actual origin). On the other hand, the uncivilizable elements of human life were mythologically deported to a barbaric past, the one that preceded the conquest and domination of "Greek" religion by Olympus.
It's important to point out that this was a synthetic process. I mean that the things which facilitated hierarchical, settled civilization were drawn from both Greek and "Pelasgian" sources, while those that did not became associated with a primordial world whose successor was at hand. This is how barbaric Greek raiders of the 2nd millennium BCE went from unwashed nomads of Thrace to the first word in philosophy. In fact it is one of the ways cultures do what they call "schismogenesis," the sociological equivalent of speciation.
Of course, human beings are not perfectly suited to civilization, and this mechanism could only proceed (indeed, has only proceeded) so far. Perhaps reflecting this, the Barbarian-Greek axis had become the Irrational-Rational axis by the time philosophy first got written down. Nevertheless, right into the Classical period it's easy to see an uncivilizable residue lending its ineradicable tint to Greek life. Sophocles' Bacchae is more or less solely concerned with this tint, and is one of the biggest milestones on the road to a Western idea of "humanity." That is, "humanity" as something not only shot thru with irrational, Bacchic chaos, but "humanity" as this way by nature. It can be a very crooked path to get to a concept as obvious to us as the "Natural."
Or at least this is one of journeys I take myself on to imagine the birth of our concept of "irrationality." To recap this journey's stages,
A. Settled Neolithic agriculturalists are dominated by barbaric horse-riding invaders & their patriarchal deities.
↓↓↓
B. Settled Greeks and their contempt for anything that stands in the way of centralized, hierarchical power.
↓↓↓
C. The mental tendencies of life under civil order gathered into a concept of 'rationality.'
↓↓↓
D. And finally the conversion of civil order's antagonist from 'barbarism,' the thing outside the city walls, to 'irrationality,' the barbaric element latent within each human.
(I should say that seeing the intellectual dynamism of Classical Greece as rooted in, or even kicked off by, an invader's mentality toward their conquered subjects is a whole other can of worms.)
Perhaps the idea that Medusa is "mainly" a casualty of Olympus' war on the barbaric past is disappointing to you. I would also like Greek mythology to have a level of internal consistency such that you can turn the crank of thought and arrive at an internally consistent explanation (a "lesson.") But Greek mythology is the collision of at least two cultural systems—a collision that reflects an agricultural, matriarchal, and egalitarian way of life complexly overlaid by another, whose sources lie with nomadic, horse-riding raiders from the North.
Medusa's story seems to me one that straddles the interface between those two, often-incompatible systems of cultural understanding. Hers is a story about how the fight for mythological supremacy takes place along the fault line separating—depending on which era of the myth's development (ABCD) you find most eyecatching—subject from master, heresy from piety, barbarians from Greeks, chaos from order and, in its final form, irrationality from thinking as we "ought to."
Many of the Greek myths are an account of cultural conflict transposed to a mythological plane. The ahistorical "moment" from which most of these stories are told dates to some point after the outcome of this conflict, and the victory of Olympus became a foregone conclusion. But the arrangement of forces in this conflict continued (continues!) to reflect something long, long after the thing it originally reflected—the conquest of Neolithic farmers by horse raiders from Asia—had passed from view. The Greek concept of irrationality is still utterly essential to us and still contains within it the coiled historical elements outlined above.
I realize that arguments from history are often only another kind of argument from myth, and sometimes even easier to puppeteer. Even so I think we all have to live in hope that Al Hirschman is right when he says the most we can expect from History, and from the History of Ideas in particular, is not the retirement of issues but only a raising of the level of debate.
Having thought through all of this, and with the qualification that I don't think any of what follows is historically justified, I do have a few thoughts about the particular myth of Medusa. These are what you might call literary observations on her story as we get it from Ovid and the Romans. Their version of the myth shifts focus away from the, by that point long-settled question of mythological supremacy. The Roman myth of Medusa is far more social, more urbane and even what I would call humanistic. It's about a particular woman being raped in a particular place and how these facts and their consequences dominate the rest of her life—indeed, collude to end it.
Medusa's petrifying gaze is much more complicated than I thought as a kid. For example, Medusa does not have the equivalent of laser beams shooting out of her eyes. That is, getting turned into stone by Medusa is something that occurs essentially by the victim's choice. In order to become a stone of yourself you must: 1) look directly at Medusa while 2) she directly meets your elective gaze. I think we can deduce this much from the story of the polished shield. In other words her "petrifying gaze" is really an automatic and unstoppable consequence of choosing to look at Medusa and of then receiving her eye contact. There is something close to a supercultural (that is, "humanistic") understanding of us at work here: we are the animal that can't not look.
Formerly, the beautiful Medusa was subjected to many more gazes than she could personally meet. That's what it is to be a beautiful person among others. In a certain type of society, which, for Ovid, Greek mythology was taken to represent, a woman's role among others is to be the object of those gazes. From a public perspective a woman is someone who cannot return every gaze that falls on her, in fact modesty decrees she shouldn't even try.
What would it mean to use this state of affairs as the basis for a curse? First, the obvious ironic reversals and perversions. Medusa goes from a woman (whose status as a woman—and again this is Ovid's world—is predicated on her inability to return every gaze that finds her) to a monster who compulsively seeks out the gaze of anyone she comes across. There's also an obvious gender reversal, whereby the cursed Medusa becomes both the pursuer in and the victor of non-consensual encounters with men. But also a more subtle reversal, aimed at somebody's idea of feminine pride, whereby once-beautiful Medusa becomes famous, indeed pursued, for her ugliness.
This gender reversal shades into the punitive "blessings" built into Medusa's curse. First among these is of course the petrifying gaze that "protects" Medusa from ever being raped again. (The snakes presumably defend against kisses from the blind.) Eye contact often betrays a man's intention towards a woman. This is one of the reasons modesty discourages it. And so what was once the place and moment where a woman understood her vulnerability, and a man his power, becomes an instant of unpleasant surprise for Medusa's victim.
You could go further with this and say that the rocks of men Medusa leaves behind are in fact statues. And that each models the same man in a parody of arousal. A parody of the moment when a man, and you have to imagine a Roman man here, first sees a gorgeous woman: wide eyes, slack jaw, ah-wooogacus forming on his lips and so on. The fact that the visage of lust is identical to that of terror probably says more than you'd like to know about Roman sexuality.
There is also a quality of being damned-to-fame in Medusa's curse. This goes beyond her famous ugliness. Medusa leaves a trail of sterile human pillars behind her. It mocks the way she once made men hard—an overtone I don't think would have been lost on a Roman audience. Medusa is the nightmare of a certain idea of female modesty.
In that vein, I think there is also a message about the Roman conception of men and women latent in Medusa's hideousness. This, Ovid is saying, this is what would be needed to protect a woman from the way men are. Only by permanently immobilizing him and covering your face with snake venom for good measure could any woman have stopped a man from raping her. The fact that Medusa's curse is presumably an effective defense against future encounters with Poseidon is probably beside the point. What matters is that Medusa's terrible, bestial appearance shows how much women would have to change to end the phenomenon of rape. There's a dark and inverted humanism at work here, one that is very much still with us. One that sees rape as a supercultural phenomenon descending from a male's presumed helplessness when it comes to looking at certain things.
This is to say that Medusa, by being presented as a woman who is finally safe from rape, telegraphs the inevitability of men raping any woman who is less ugly than the ugliest woman who has ever existed. In the world this myth was meant to service the kind of woman who won't get raped is the kind who can't even be looked at in the first place, let alone approached.
Living out this inversion of holiness is also part of Medusa's curse. As is her soullessness, and the mocking, second virginity Athena forces on her. Medusa being made too ugly to rape probably had ironic overtones to a Roman audience, who would have seen Athena as having metaphorically abducted Medusa to keep as a temple virgin ("raped" as in Sabines.)
In the way of all literary analysis you can keep cats-cradelling away with this myth and its history, but I am unsure as to how helpful these somewhat facile reflections are to a person trying to think deeply about Medusa and her story.
Gorgons were often carved on temples, where their petrifying gazes drove home a very practical theological doctrine: behave in this place or become part of it. The myth of Medusa explodes this arrangement with a floridness typical of pre-Christian ideas about divinity. Medusa walks the earth as Athena's involuntary virgin and leaves statues behind her everywhere she goes. Each pillar that used to be a person is another monument raised to Athena, or at least to the wisdom of not testing her where she eats.
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@ all you folk who didn't vote for The Carnivorous Lamb: Antonio plays with Ignacio's butthole while Ignacio is being baptized. The Democratic Republic of Tumblr is in shambles . . .
Excerpt:
My brother took me in his arms, and held me out to the priest like an infant. Spreading his legs to take my weight, he held my back up with his left arm, and skillfully slipped his right under my thighs, so his open palm was glued to my behind.
Through clenched teeth, don Gonzalo started rattling off the holy words with bad grace. He consecrated me a son of God, named me for my saint’s day, and after Mother whispered him my name, added it mechanically, consecrating me her son as well. He instructed my brother in his duty as a good Christian and godfather, and said a few loaded words to Mother about how important it was for proper Catholic parents not to keep their offspring from the bosom of our holy mother Church, then solemnly administered the salt and holy oils (I was being baptized and confirmed at the same time), and made the sign of the cross on my forehead with his hot thumb.
While all these rites were being performed, Antonio was gently stroking my behind, one of his fingers carefully probing my asshole. I was burning with pleasure, and a kind of ecstasy must have shone from my face, because the priest said, “My son, I can see you are beginning to believe in God. You are becoming His creature.”
My brother pressed harder with his finger. On the point of fainting, I murmured, “Yes,” which made everybody happy, each in his own way. Then Antonio set me down. Completely drained, I leaned weakly against him for a few seconds, feeling his body throbbing all over.
WHAT???? HE WHAT????? OH MY FUCKING GOD THAT EXCERPT?????
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Isaiah 9:6-7 (NIV). “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”
“Give Christmas Presence” Advent Devotional - December 24th - By Words of Hope:
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” (v. 6)
“In 1615, Anthony van Dyck finished painting Adoration of the Shepherds. One version shows the shepherds kneeling in the stable, all straining forward to see the infant Jesus, snug in his mother’s arms. And the shepherds’ wives are present—a nice touch! One of the women is stretching out her hand to offer the holy child an egg. The wise men, we are told, gave fantastic, opulent gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But this woman gives a simple, practical, and very useful gift.
There are gifts we can give at Christmas that cost little or nothing, yet they can be very useful, and profoundly meaningful. I’m thinking about things like the gift of encouragement (1 Thess. 5:11). And then there’s the gift of prayer. In my last church, there was a group of people who met early on Sunday mornings to pray for me, their pastor. That meant the world to me.
Perhaps most important, we can give the gift of ourselves, our presence. The irony of the Christmas season is that we get so busy that we have little time for the people in our lives. This Christmas, don’t just give presents, give presence. That’s what Christmas is all about: God giving the gift of himself. God gives us his presence, in the form of a child, born in a manger. “To us a child is born, to us a son is given.”
Today’ s Activity: Give the gift of your presence to a friend, family member, or someone at church. Take time to listen, or play, or do something together.”
#isaiah 9:6-7#advent#advent devotional#christmas#birth of jesus#following god#the word of god#bible#christian blog#god#belief in god#faith in god#jesus#belief in jesus#faith in jesus#christian prayer#christian life#christian living#christian faith#christian inspiration#christian encouragement#christian motivation#christianity#christian quotes#keep the faith#make him known
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Group E, Round 3, Poll 3:
Propaganda under the cut
Lady Rhea
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME AHEAD This lady gaslighted, gatekept, and girlbossed for a little more than 1000 years. Her story starts in ancient Fódlan where she was a member of a magical dragon race called the Nabateans, children of Sothis. After Sothis was killed and her corpse desecrated by a bandit named Nemesis (who believed himself to be fighting for the freedom of humanity), he made a sword out of her body to arm his allies and massacred the Nabateans. Rhea gathered the last few Nabateans left and some human allies and, under the name 'Seiros', waged war on Nemesis and his army. Victorious, Saint Seiros rewrote history to cover up the existence of the Nabateans and created a religion around her mother, now calling Sothis the Progenitor God. As the years go on, Lady Rhea used her holy influence to give rise to the Adrestrian Empire. It's implied that her church, the Church of Seiros, played a part in wars that resulted in the creation of the Holy Kingdom of Faergus, a nation that broke off of Adrestria, and the Leicester Alliance, another nation which broke off of the Kindgom. FE16 makes a point to note that she continues to censor history up to the present, including limiting technological advancements for 'blasphemy'. Her advisor, Seteth, once served her as Saint Cichol and even he has shown shock and horror at how far she has gaslit, gatekept, and girlbossed. The protagonist of this game is the child of Sitri, the 12th human vessel in a project that Lady Rhea personally conducted to try and revive her mother. Rhea never admits this to the protag's face until she is either in a weakened state or an enemy of the protagonist. She even tries to restart the experiment on the protag without their knowledge. The game splits into four routes and in one of them the protagonist turns on Rhea. In this route Lady Rhea girlbosses so hard that she turns into a dragon and reclaims her Saint Seiros persona as she tries to kill the protag and reclaim her mother who, at this point, exists as a weapon the protagonist wields and as an organ Lady Rhea implanted into them as a baby. In two of the routes where the protagonist sides with Lady Rhea she'll accompany them to combat the forces that orriginally allowed Nemesis to attack her peeople (who have turned into a highly advanced underground race at this point). This girlboss moment is so cool to me because Lady Rhea had been a prisoner for 5 years but still manages to turn into a dragon and take a literal ICBM to the face to protect the protag. TL;DR: Lady Rhea has gaslit society and made a fake history. She gatekept by personally executing members of her own church she made because she disagreed with their ways. She girlbosses by being the Archbishop of her religion for 1159 years and turning into a dragon to KILL "
She created a thousand year old church to control an entire continent. She rewrote history to be able to control the continent and keep the power she gained, under a belief that she was all that could protect humans from themselves.
The ULTIMATE example of gaslight gatekeep girlboss!! (((Major FE3H spoilers))): Gaslight: constructs an entire centuries-old religion centered around her dead mom with herself as the leader, hides the identity of herself (secretly the founding saint and namesake of said religion) and her compatriots (secretly other major saints), rewrites continent’s history as well as the origin of the nobility’s hereditary crests and holy relics, hires homeschooled mercenary seemingly for nepotism/skill reasons but doesn’t tell them that she actually implanted her mother’s heart into them as an infant in hopes to revive her dead mom. Gatekeep: intentionally withholds continent’s secret history, church covers up and censors some of humanity’s technological/medical advancements in order to obscure aforementioned history as well as to prevent the development of more efficient weapons of war/destruction, instructs faculty and students not to leak dangerous side effects of powerful holy relics to the wider public, executes rebels/assassins/conspirators that seek to remove her, literally hires a Gatekeeper known only as Gatekeeper. Girlboss: Canonically bisexual pope with hips for days and de facto leader of an entire continent. Powerful warrior. Proficient in instructing hand-to-hand combat. The first cutscene of the game shows her sword-fighting in heels with a muscular man and, after being disarmed, beating the shit out of him in hand-to-hand combat and stabbing him to death with a dagger. Girlboss.
Morag Ladair
She is an inquisitor for a despotic colonizing empire, who is ruthlessly efficient, a master manipulator, and also a genuinely charming characters. She creates a rumor of the execution of a party member to successfully lure out the rest of them, and they only escape because she chooses to let them go
#round 3#group e#fe16#fe3h#Rhea#Archbishop Rhea#Fire Emblem#lady rhea#fire emblem three houses#morag ladair#xenoblade chronicles 2
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𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟐, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟑 𝐆𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐥
Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Lk 1:39-47
Mary set out
and traveled to the hill country in haste
to a town of Judah,
where she entered the house of Zechariah
and greeted Elizabeth.
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting,
the infant leaped in her womb,
and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit,
cried out in a loud voice and said,
“Most blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And how does this happen to me,
that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears,
the infant in my womb leaped for joy.
Blessed are you who believed
that what was spoken to you by the Lord
would be fulfilled.”
And Mary said:
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;
my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”
#jesus#catholic#my remnant army#jesus christ#virgin mary#faithoverfear#saints#jesusisgod#endtimes#artwork#Jesus is coming#Gospel#word of God#biblevisuals#bible verse of the day#come holy spirit#bibleverse#bibletruth#Our Lady of Guadalupe#pray for us#pray the rosary
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The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Elizabeth
Feast day: May 31 (New) July 2 (Trad)
And it came to pass, that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost: And she cried out with a loud voice, and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed art thou that hast believed, because those things shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord. And Mary said:
My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because he that is mighty, hath done great things to me; and holy is his name. And his mercy is from generation unto generations, to them that fear him. He hath shewed might in his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath received Israel his servant, being mindful of his mercy: As he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed for ever. Luke (1:41-55)
Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase here: (website)
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