Month: August 2012
I mean, what I’m trying to say is, sometimes a negative review of a highly-praised cultural product from the first world—the kind that enjoys wide distribution and robust marketing—is a necessary intervention by readers at the margins, at the borders, from other places and spaces.
Subashini Navaratnam on Nice Book Reviews
A negative review is a reminder that, hey, this thing we’re all supposed to love doesn’t actually speak to everyone.
(via rachelhills)
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A-freakin’-men!
Chaospheres by CircleArt
“The Chaosphere is the prime radiant or magic lamp of the adept – a psychic singularity which emitteth the brilliant darkness. It is a purposely created crack in the fabric of reality through which the stuff of Chaos enters our dimension. Alternatively, it may be considered as a demonstration of the axiom that belief has the power to structure reality.” – Peter Carroll, Liber Null
The images above are my interpretations of the Chaosphere. They are sigil-like images that represent a state of mind that is losing its “state” entirely. It is the state of psychic disintegration, a rushing away from the center, a dissolution of thought. It is what I consider the phenomenological state of pure chaos. It is a state that holds both horror and awe, which I represent in the embellished arrows.
“The Bacchae of Euripides gives us the most vital picture of the wonderful circumstance in which, as Plato says in the Ion, the god-intoxicated celebrants draw milk and honey from the streams. They strike rocks with the thyrsus, and water gushes forth. They lower the thyrsus to the earth, and a spring of wine bubbles up. If they want milk, they scratch up the ground with their fingers and draw up the milky fluid. Honey trickles down from the thyrsus made of the wood of the ivy, they gird themselves with snakes and give suck to fawns and wolf cubs as if they were infants at the breast. Fire does not burn them. No weapon of iron can wound them, and the snakes harmlessly lick up the sweat from their heated cheeks. Fierce bulls fall to the ground, victims to numberless, tearing female hands, and sturdy trees are torn up by the roots with their combined efforts”
Painting- Károly Lotz – Sleeping Bacchante
Eros -in Greek mythology, was the Greek god of love. His Roman counterpart was Cupid (“desire”). Some myths make him a primordial god, while in other myths, he is the son of Aphrodite.
Eros appears in ancient Greek sources under several different guises. In the earliest sources (the cosmogonies, the earliest philosophers, and the mysteries), he is one of the primordial gods involved in the coming into being of the cosmos. But in later sources, Eros is represented as the son of Aphrodite whose mischievous interventions in the affairs of gods and mortals cause bonds of love to form, often illicitly. Ultimately, in the later satirical poets, he is represented as a blindfolded child, the precursor to the chubby Renaissance Cupid – whereas in early Greek poetry and art, Eros was depicted as an adult male who embodies sexual power.
A cult of Eros existed in pre-classical Greece but it was much less important than that of Aphrodite. However, in late antiquity, Eros was worshiped by a fertility cult in Thespiae. In Athens, he shared a very popular cult with Aphrodite, and the fourth day of every month was sacred to him.
