Month: June 2013

FREE BOOKS!

Mid-World Arts is not a company, it’s not a traditional publisher, we call it an “authors’ studio” where writers can come together and share resources and cross-promote each other’s books. Please help us out by downloading FREE books. Just by downloading a book you move it up in the Amazon rankings making them more visible to others.

On June 11th, until 3 AM, June 12th, the following will be FREE

My Babylon – Book One: Body, the first in my series of novellas about the occult and dark desires.

Last Days and Times, an apocalyptic thriller by Stephan Loy.

Harmonic RES, Steve’s excellent sci-fi short story collections.

Don’t forget to leave a review and please re-blog!

crimesandkillers:

A time slip (also called a timeslip) is an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which a person, or group of people, travel through time via unknown means. As with all paranormal phenomena, the objective reality of such experiences is disputed.

Cases

Ghosts of Versailles

One of the best-known, and earliest, examples of a time slip was reported by two English women, Charlotte Anne Moberly (16 September 1846 – 7 May 1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924), the principal and vice-principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, who claimed they slipped back in time in the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles from the summer of 1901 to the period of the French Revolution.

The Vanishing Hotel

A widely-publicised case from October 1979, described in the ITV television series Strange But True?, concerned the Simpsons and the Gisbys, two English married couples driving through France en route to a holiday in Spain. They claimed to have stayed overnight at a curiously old-fashioned hotel and decided to break their return journey at the same hotel but were unable to find it. Photographs taken during their stay were missing, even from the negative strips when the pictures were developed.

Other cases

More recent reports include a series of accounts of apparent time slips in the area of Bold Street, Liverpool from the 1990s to the present day. Andrew MacKenzie, of the Society for Psychical Research, investigated several British cases, including an experience in which three naval cadets appeared to travel back in time to Kersey in Suffolk at a time when it was a medieval plague village, and one in which a Scottish woman experienced the aftermath of the Dark Age Battle of Nechtanesmere in 685 AD. Sir Victor Goddard claimed to have seen, in 1935, the Drem, Scotland airfield as it would be in 1939.

Characteristics

Feeling of unreality

Many time slip witnesses report that, at the start of their experience of the phenomena, their immediate surroundings take on an oddly flat, underlit and lifeless appearance, and normal sounds seem muffled. This is sometimes accompanied by feelings of depression and unease. In some respects, this facet of the phenomenon is similar to the Oz Factor identified by British UFO researcher Jenny Randles in some reports of encounters with supposed extraterrestrial craft.

Moberly’s account of her experience at Versailles records:

We walked briskly forward, talking as before, but from the moment we left the lane an extraordinary depression had come over me, which, in spite of every effort to shake off, steadily deepened. There seemed to be absolutely no reason for it; I was not at all tired, and was becoming more interested in my surroundings. I was anxious that my companion should not discover the sudden gloom upon my spirits, which became quite overpowering on reaching the point where the path ended, being crossed by another, right and left…Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.

Jourdain’s report of the same event states that:

there was a feeling of depression and loneliness about the place. I began to feel as if I were walking in my sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive.

Ability to interact

Reports vary as to whether those experiencing time slips can take an active part in the event, interacting with the time being “visited”. In the Versailles case, the two ladies were apparently seen, and spoken to, by people they saw. The British holidaymakers in 1979 went further, staying in a hotel and eating dinner and breakfast in the course of their experience. Both these cases are also unusually prolonged experiences, taking place over at least several hours.

In other cases, the subject is a passive observer of the “past” scene, and it seems that the “typical” time slip lasts only a matter of a few minutes.

In Voodoo, food is one of the many offerings ceremoniously given to the Lwa (Spirits) and is usually shared afterward as a communal meal. In a meat-eating society, animals are food. In small-scale cultures, people slaughter animals at home rather than buying meat at the grocery store. Animal sacrifice is not about a morbid fascination with death of an animal; it is the offering of life-giving energy in the preparation of sacred food.

Here in the USA, most of us are ambivalent about animals. In our minds, the act of killing an animal is morally charged, but the act of eating one is morally neutral. The absence of death in our lives makes death compelling and mysterious. But in other cultures and in our rural areas, it is an unremarkable aspect of existence; slaughtering an animal is as neutral and necessary as putting a can of soup in a grocery cart.

Some Voodooists in the U.S., including my community in New Orleans, don’t consider animal sacrifice culturally appropriate and do not practice it, preferring to offer store-bought food to Lwa and community. (For the record, I am vegetarian.) My mentor and friend Sallie Ann Glassman once suggested that if someone wishes to perform animal sacrifice, they should slaughter and butcher their own food for a year before considering offering it in ceremony. But to other Voodoo communities, animal sacrifice is natural and integral to their tradition. They take animal life with reverence, cook the meat and eat it.

As long as hunting and the slaughter of animals for meat is accepted in our country, less familiar cultural practices that take animal life must also be respected.

Saumya Arya Haas

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saumya-arya-haas/what-is-voodoo-part-2-mak_b_832729.html

(via sisoula)

larkfall:

Pages from a triangular magical book attributed to Le Comte de St. Germain, from the Manly Palmer Hall collection.

A helpful comment on the host page from one AMHall: 

“This manuscript bought from Frank Hollings, a London antiquary, after 1933 (he apparently was unaware of the Hauser St. Germain manuscript) came from the occult library of Mme. Barbe, who had it from the bibliographer Stanislaus de Guaita, who in turn bought it at the auction of the library of Jules Favre. It is a copy made from one of the magical texts in the possession of St. Germain by the owner’s permission. A number of such copies were executed for the members of his Masonic lodge in Paris, and the following manuscript, as different in style as it is, may be one of the copies too. It is unclear in both cases whether the Comte St. Germain wrote the magical formulae or owned a copy of an ancient text. This manuscript was made for Antoine Louis Moret, a French emigre to America active in Masonry and in politics.”