🍷devotional reboot🏺

the mask is from the 1984 production of “The Bacchae” by Euripides at the Valencia Rose Cabaret in San Francisco. queer witch and co-founder of the Radical Faeries Arthur Evans directed his own translation of the play for the production, which featured a queer cast and played for a primarily queer audience. Pentheus’s drag look at the end of the play was based on then-mayor of San Francisco Dianne Feinstein.

We sing and make noise. One of us is tasked with keeping the original song going, while the rest of us are encouraged to diverge after a while and sing what comes to us. Kula, gala, shout to the heavens. Sing with and to the spirits of the place.

The völva's face is veiled in saffron, only their mouth is visible. They hold a forked staff of birch and sit on a stone beneath the ash tree that has shaded us during the day. We sit on the ground in front of them, and we sing. The song, the repetition, the breakdown of coherence as other sounds and songs come through, they all do their work. The staff drops, held now at an angle. The spirit has arrived.

We ask who we are speaking to and the voice of the spirit is low, coming from far away and long ago. We all lean in to hear, kneeling, supported on our hands or forearms. Attention, supplication.

I am the horned one.

I use the pronoun he as that is the way I first got to know him – though I suspect the reality is far larger and stranger. His posture is stiff, hands holding the staff in a firm grasp – a little like the way one would hold a single oar. He radiates power. We tell him about the ceremony we have planned for later, a work of galder, of song magic, and we ask if he would like us to direct our galder to a specific purpose.

We all hold our breaths as we listen. Even the wind in the trees stills for a moment. No birds sing.

Galder has been sung here before, a long time ago. It pleases me that it will be sung again.

We are given clear directions. They are about that time and place, but they still make sense to share: sing to call in bravery. Sing to call in others to your cause, and sing bravery into them.

And dance. I like to see you dance, paws soft on the ground. I am dancing with you.

We all have our personal questions as well. The answers are clear, but from someone who isn't used to putting their thoughts into human language. The word for obstacles is rendered first as mountains, then walls. I get the sense of a picture language, of trying to translate the world itself into words.

My own question is about my task of reawakening a sleeping land. When I ask it, the horned one’s head turns towards me and his gaze is piercing through the veil. When he smiles, I feel very small indeed. Awed, but confident that I asked the right question. A test passed.

I love... what humans do with words, he says. He gives me an answer that is part advice, part warning. And then the suggestion, perhaps you should dream with the land.

The last question is about approaching and strengthening our relationships with the beings of the land. It applies to all of us. We are told to strip off all the layers, let go of all the threads. Go out and meet them with open hearts, as they are waiting. They want contact. There is only love. The sense of love runs deep, and the spirit makes it clear that it is not something we have to be deserving of.

Afterwards we fill the völva in on what happened while they were gone, and they tell us what they experienced. Their description of the horned one as he approached matches my own experience from long ago very closely: huge, cloaked in black, face like an antlered horse's skull. A comment about his eyes giving me the sense that the skull is a mask.

The völva tells us that he was ready for us even before the actual seiðr, when we were still practising the song. They had to ask him to hold off, that we were still learning. He was so eager to meet us. He told us that he’d been watching us.

Drowsy god, slow the wheels of my thought so that I listen only to the snowfall hush of thy circling. Close my beloved with me in the smoke ring of thy power, that we may be, each to the other, figures of flame, figures of smoke, figures of flesh newly seen in the dusk.

Delicate, deadly

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Happy Pride Month !!! Happy Venus Day!!! Happy Friday the 13th!!!! 💕🖤✴️

The patron and protector of the dolls herself: Lady Aphrodite!

This was so so much fun to paint! I’m so glad I finished it today! I hope I did her justice!

Details!

Big fan of that tummy

If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in thesame way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond.

Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Some-thing is always far away."

- the blue of distance