[-empyre-] QUEER PARANORMAL

[WhiteFeather]

Jess, you're so fresh, I love it - I appreciate your candor.
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.

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.

Efrén, I appreciate your words so much and find some resonance with what I
have been reading today about orgies of witches and cults of healing
through what I would call queer becomings - so I thought I would share.

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.

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 Călușari, a cult of men 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 *călușari
*consistently
implies *the merging of the opposite, through complementary,
magico-religious ideas and techniques.*" (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.
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." *-- Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions *by Mircea Eliade
(University of Chicago Press, 1976) p84-88

I appreciate this nuanced re-take - I hope some of you will as well.

WhiteFeather
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