The Star of Azazel - Azazelin Tähti

[The !Kung] tell the tales of =Gao!na's doings without restraint, say his name aloud, howl and roll on the ground with laughter at his humiliations, whereas, when they speak of the great one of the east, they whisper and avoid his name. Yet they think that somehow in the rightness of things these two beings must be the same, or so they are said to be.

- This extraxt is from Marshal. L.'s "!Kung Bushman Religious Beliefs" (1962). I took tho quote from Mathias Guenther's "Tricksters & Trancers - Bushman Religion and Society" (Indiana University Press, 1999; page 96).

Consider Satan at the start of Paradise Lost, moments after the Fall. Milton describes Satan’s position in absolute terms: “a dungeon horrible” that consists only of “sights of woe, / Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace / And rest can never dwell, hope never comes / That comes to all, but torture without end.” “Such place,” Milton says, “Eternal Justice has prepared / For those rebellious.” It is as brutal a display of formalist power as exists, and yet in its face Satan jumps up and takes charge and issues one of the most famous speeches in English literature, proclaiming that for all of God’s strength, “Not for those, / Nor what the potent Victor in his rage / Can else inflict, do I repent, or change,” proclaiming that there is nothing God can do that will make him “bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee, and deify his power.”

Clearly unacceptable. But in some ways more horrifying is Satan’s monologue in Book Four in which he contemplates redemption, asking, “Is there no place / Left for repentance, none for pardon left? / None left but by submission; and that word / Disdain forbids me,” and noting that even if he did repent, “How soon / Would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay / What feigned submission swore? Ease would recant / Vows made in pain, as violent and void.” In other words, Satan’s defiance goes beyond any mere choice. He did not vote for revolution. Rather, he is an intrinsic and inevitable force of revolution, incapable of doing anything but defying authority. As he puts it, in the speech’s most famous line, “Myself am hell.”

Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk

The particularity of the actual in a moment of time is a hieroglyph of the universal, timeless dimension of spiritual realism.

- Susan Sandford Friedman on the poetic worldview of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) -

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times.

- Walter Pater (1839–1894) commenting on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa -

To those eternal Yoginis by whose glory
The three worlds have bee established,
To them I bow down, to them I pray.


* * *

Wether fierce or gentle, terrible to behold, all-powerful, Residing in the sky, on earth or in the vastness of space,
May those Yoginis always be well-disposed towards me.


- Kularnava -

O Devi! Your breasts are adorned with slender garland of beads, carved from the frontal knobs of the elephant demon vanquished by Siva. Although white, they seem red due to the reflection of your lips. How delightful!

- Saundaryalahari (translated by Minati Kar). The quote is from "Moulding the Void" (Mapin, 2019) by Peter Bjorn Franceschi. It is a photographic exploration of the making of Durga statues from clay.

Finally, scientists will never solve or prive anything relating to foretelling the future; it is a work for 'artists'. Science may subsequently prove more fully what the artist have already discovered.

- Austin Osman Spare -

These are the ending words of AOS's text "Mind to Mind and How, by a Sorcerer", published firs in 1959 - 51. I read it from Jonathan Allen's (ed) "Lost Envoy - The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare" (Strange Attraction Press, 2016; page 64). This reminds me of William Blake, and how he says religion was first like poetry, of which prophecy was a sort of by-product. In this way, one could replace AOS's word science with religion that teach how prophecy has ended. These solidified structures tend to be most divorced from even a hint of poetics, and instead tend to marry power politics with charismatic hysteria - a thing that manifests, I think, most of all a desperate lack of faith.

I see men, as it were trees, walking.

- The first words of the blind man cured by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark (8:24) -

An excerpt from Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

Polyhymnia wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 8:11 am An excerpt from Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

I have for long felt that the perfect idea of manifest Satan (as I see Satan) is the wind in the trees. And as I remember Kathryn Lindskoog’s reconideration of the Zephyr as Satan in Botticelli's painting Primavera (discussed in our topic on LHP in art)... Well, Shelley's verses take for me a true form of a religious hymn that make my spine shiver in most concrete ways.