<div dir="ltr"><div>Jess, you're so fresh, I love it - I appreciate your candor. <br></div><div>I once had a year like you describe: It was 2008, a very bad economic year, if everyone remembers. I had finally filed a workplace harassment charge against my boss, who had for three years in a row, cut my teaching hours in half at the craft college where I'd been teaching for seven years. She told me it was part of her personal workplace equity policy to hire more men and get rid of more women, since there were "too many damn women" working at the college (perverse, I know). The result was that she was essentially 'fired' very quickly following the complaint but in government that means 'reassigned' to a policy desk job in another department, at another building, and never allowed to return - effectively banished. <br></div><div><br></div><div>At the same time this was occurring, my crystal ball lit my apartment on fire and I lost almost everything I owned.
Folks, it's not just a Twitter meme. That meme is me.
It was late October, when the sun is very low in the sky and quite potent from that angle. My niece had been playing with my crystal ball the night before and left it sitting on my couch - a beautiful, 102-year old, 6ft couch in chocolate brown and caramel
velvet brocade. I came home from work to find the couch smouldering from the sun magnified through the crystal ball, and as soon as I opened the door to my living room and the air flowed in, it very quickly progressed into flames. The apartment itself was not structurally damaged (thank all my stars), but because the old couch was filled with rubber foam cushioning, it produced a thick, toxic cyanide smoke which poisoned everything. The crystal ball cracked in half and the hex was done. There were more grief-causing episodes that occurred at the time as well, and that apartment was crazy haunted, but I'll stop here with that story by concluding that my generous community supported my quick recovery. <br></div><div><br></div><div>
<font size="2"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span id="gmail-m_-3422300609844595405gmail-docs-internal-guid-edf3d5ad-7fff-b9c4-8d6b-94845a6276f5"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Efrén, I appreciate your words so much and find some resonance with what I have</span></span></span></font> been reading today about orgies of witches and cults of healing through what I would call queer becomings - so I thought I would share. <br></div><div><br></div><div>With regards to supposed satanic orgies that witches were accused of during the era of the European witch-hunts, the text I've been reading provides an interesting assessment of these orgies as openly queer ('bisexual' is the word used to indicate a lusty free-for-all), boundary-less rites that were not necessarily purely fabrications of the inquisitors, but rather, reframed by clergy/ inquistors/ medical doctors as demonic behavior in light of their sexual freedom. The actual context of such underground gatherings was, the text explains, rooted in rebellion against the observed corruption and conservatism of the church, and in the persistence of older folkloric/ occult traditions. <br></div><div><br></div><div>In terms of those traditions and perhaps less explicit, one example provided discusses Romanian fertility cults that featured supernatural 'fairies' of an ambivalent nature that could not, out of respect/fear, be named but were instead referred to reverentially as "they" or Holy Ones. There were also "cathartic dancers" called the
<span>Călușari, a cult of men</span>
who healed diseases (inflicted by the fairies) through acrobatic movement. They used their dance to give an impression of flying through the air like the fairies: "...their cathartic and therapeutic techniques are based mainly on a particular choreography, which imitates the mode of being and the behavior of the fairies... the scenario actualized by the <i><span>călușari </span></i><span>consistently implies <i>the merging of the opposite, through complementary, magico-religious ideas and techniques.</i>" (emphasis in the original) By opposite, the author is referring to the two oppositional types of supernatural beings, one becoming the other, reconciling through conjoined energies. <br></span></div><div><span>The broader point he makes is that such magic-makers and artists were "radically assimilated to witches" by inquisitors and that their orgiastic shenanigans, "were not at all improbable... As a matter of fact, it is this type of ritual orgy, undoubtedly the most archaic, which discloses the original function of promiscuous collective intercourse. Such rituals reactualize the primordial moment of Creation or the beatific stage of the beginnings, when neither sexual taboos nor moral and social rules yet existed." <span></span>
</span><i>-- Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions </i>by Mircea Eliade (University of Chicago Press, 1976) p84-88<br></div><div><br></div><div>I appreciate this nuanced re-take - I hope some of you will as well. <br></div><div><br></div><div>WhiteFeather<br></div></div>