Around 2 AM this morning, I was watching and looking for more of Marina Abramović's performance art, when I happened to come across a picture of her bottle-feeding a baby tiger. My mind was instantly transported to the Wiccan Charge of the Goddess. For those who may not know what the Charge of the Goddess is, it is a poem written by Doreen Valiente, for use in Esbats and Sabbats, and most usually spoken by the High Priestess presiding over the ritual after having drawing down the Moon. The version I'm using here is Starhawk's adaptation of the Charge, because her version was the first I ever read.

Listen to the words of the Great Mother, Who of old was called Artemis, Astarte, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Diana, Arionrhod, Brigid, and by many other names:

Whenever you have need of anything, once a month, and better it be when the moon is full, you shall assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit of Me Who is Queen of all the Wise.

You shall be free from slavery, and as a sign that you be free you shall be naked in your rites.

Sing, feast, dance, make music and love, all in My Presence, for Mine is the ecstasy of the spirit and Mine also is joy on earth.

For My law is love is unto all beings. Mine is the secret that opens the door of youth, and Mine is the cup of wine of life that is the cauldron of Cerridwen, that is the holy grail of immortality.

I give the knowledge of the spirit eternal, and beyond death I give peace and freedom and reunion with those that have gone before.

Nor do I demand aught of sacrifice, for behold, I am the Mother of all things and My love is poured out upon the earth.

Hear the words of the Star Goddess, the dust of Whose feet are the hosts of Heaven, whose body encircles the universe:

I Who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters,

I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.

For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe.

From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return.

Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.

Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.

For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.

I'm not sure why I've latched on to Ms. Abramović, connecting her with the Divine Feminine, but I can say this is the closest I've felt to the Great Goddess since 2011.  It could just be that I resonate with the archetype Marina's carriage emanates.

I'm nowhere near acknowledging the existence of any sort to any deity, but I have to admit to myself that I'm not an atheist.  By the same token, the revelations and theories that seem to have exploded in the science communities over the past few years give rise to a kind of wonderment of existence, of being a part of living, sentient organism.  It is believed that information is never lost.  It can be transformed into something we can't see, but it is not gone.  In some form, everything is still cradled within the cosmos.

Combined with that theory, the line in the Charge, From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return, has given me a level of comfort I thought I would never feel again.  Not since 2011.  How long will this last?  I do not know.  Could it magnify and allow me to return to the Craft?  I do not know.  Is it simply a fleeting subconscious attempt to cling to the memories of a time when I felt much more in control of my life than I am now?  Perhaps.  Still, I do not know. Will I ever know?

I do not know.

Spirituality, however, is not something you know.  At least it shouldn't be.  Unwavering certainty is the pathway to religious extremism, which is about as far from spirituality as a person can get, in my opinion.  A person has to believe enough to engage in spiritual practice of any sort, and I know deep in my bones that I am not there yet, and may never again be.  Some may suggest I cast or find a Circle and see where it takes me, but I can't do that.  I always took my responsibilities as a High Priestess very seriously and I feel being involved in a ritual of any sort would be hypocrital of me.  I tried to explain this - unsuccessfully - to the Mother Unit and Matt, when they tried to get me to attend a full moon drum circle.  Since rhythm and song were intrinsic in my own rituals and the ones I led in Hecate Triskele, and this drum circle is held on every Esbat, my conscience won't allow me to get involved.  I would feel like a phony and a liar to myself and everyone with whom I've practiced since embracing Witchcraft, and everything I'd ever believed or done within that context would be worthless, devoid of any sincerity.  That's something I cannot and will not do.

That said, I think it would be wise of me to avoid Marina Abramović for a while.

Edit:  The background image I used for the Marina Charge is an artist rendering of what scientists believe the universe looks like.

When I was still in The Pit, enjoying the interactions I had with a handful of sane music business homies, I often entertained a scenario where a snorkel of voracious, pissed-off weasels methodically skinned her alive, leaving her ravaged, bleeding form to get all manner of unwanted attention by creatures in the forest, who take their janitorial duties quite seriously.  To be honest, that’s too good for her.  Some people who are reading this post, can attest to a lot of what I’ve been saying about her since 2002, and I will attempt to communicate my memories of that. Essentially, we were at war with one another, not just work-wise, but creatively, business savvy (she had it all over me on that), and every single worldview to which each of us clung up to this very day).

This is someone who used the collective office phone to have a raucous conversation with a sales rep about she would have no clue on how to live on a $20-30K yearly budget, where all of her employees who were managing just that, listened on in disgust.  This is someone who began threatening me with termination if, for the next 6 months, I had to drop out of work for even a half day.  Aunt Tudi's doc appointments were a mess to reschedule and find other transport if I couldn't figure out how to work around the situation.  On top of that, since my cube was right outside her office door, I was always the first one she'd come to each morning to say "G'mooooooorneeeeeeuuuunnn" and pretend civility.

And she loved to stand outside my cube and laud conservatives and everything they've ever done.  One of our bitchiest fights was one night, when we were working over on promo campaigns, news came on the radio that Ronald Reagan had finally dropped dead.  The Mistress had a sad.  I said, "Thank fucking god.  It's about time that piece of shit dropped dead.  The world suddenly seems lighter and happier."  She was scandalised, and began chanting all the good things he supposedly did for America.  I shut her arse down with no mercy when I interrupted her to state that I was part Jewish and to watch a POTUS lay wreaths on SS officers graves after doing a PR tour of Bergen Belsen.  "I was glad when I found out he was losing what little fucking mind he had, and I'm glad he's dead.  I hope he suffered before the end, and I hope he's rotting in hell now."

We didn't speak for a couple of days.

Then a few months later, she was complaining about all the immigrants to me and the lady behind me, Joanie, who is Laotian.  Being appropriate is a foreign concept to the Feudal Mistress.  I let her say her self-inflated piece, which she ended by saying:  "Besides, if they want to come into this country, they need to speak its language!"

To which I replied, "Oh, wow!  I didn't know you could speak Cherokee!  Let's hear you say something."

I was rewarded with two more days of peace and quiet. Before I left BMG, I purchased a special tee shirt I wanted to wear in a photograph with the Feudal Mistress. Politically, she may be a 9-volt battery, but she was pretty sharp when it came to passive-aggressive innuendo.The expression on our faces say it, don't you think?  What I want to try to write about regarding our ongoing war that ended with the day the tee shirt I bought specifically to have a farewell taken with the Feudal Mistress, leaving no doubt in her mind that the entire front of my body is screaming murderdeathkill in a mild-mannered public service announcement.  Whoever said that a picture speaks a thousand words should be honoured, or sainted, or given a So Good and True You Are, We Wish to Bestow upon Your Person, this Cliché Master's Medal of Honour.

"What is this all about?" You might ask.

Honestly, I haven't felt this Sithly in a way too long.  Maybe the Duggars are good for something after all.

Shriekback
The World’s Second Best Pop Group with a Bald Singer
By Dave Segal (‘Creem’ June 1987)

“…Shriekback have opted to make a different kind of music – one which exalts human frailty and the harmonious mess of nature over the simplistic reductions of our crude computers.” – liner notes to Big Night Music. This thing called Shriekback is a strange beast. Trying to describe them gives me one hell of a headache. The new Shriekback music (it’s called Big Night Music but it could just as easily be called Small Morning Music) screws with rock critics’ rote jargon. If you wanted to be crass, you could label ‘em an intellectual funk band with gospel/cocktail lounge pretensions. Unlike most Anglo-Caucasians who funk around with black styles of music, Shriekback throw a skewered light on what, in pedestrian hands, can be a brain-numbing genre. You can attribute Shriekback’s uniqueness (no lie) to keyboardist/singer/lyricist Barry Andrews.

Andrews has full control of Shriekback now that Carl Marsh has departed with his Fairlights and drum computers for solo obscurity. Pared down to a trio (Dave Allen, he of the Zeus-like bass playing on Gang of Four’s first two LPs, and Martyn Barker on percussion toys), Shriekback have for the most part ditched Marsh’s vision of a “harsh disco reality” and gone for a rococo/eclectic sonic gumbo that’s as slippery to grasp as Eno’s skull in a bathtub. There’s a slickness to the Andrews/Gavin MacKillop production on Big Night Music, but don’t let that trouble yer noggin. It’s a good kind of slickness; Andrews has a Byrne-Enoesque aesthetic that enables him to craft exotic pop of excessive fussiness (‘Black Light Trap,’ ‘Running on the Rocks,’ ‘Sticky Jazz’) or of severe sparseness (everything else). You could call this The Soft Album without too much controversy.

Oddly, some of the songs sound better with the volume turned down. Perhaps because he can’t sing very well, Andrews often resorts to an intimate whispery delivery. Very nice and relaxing, this voice. And he’s a clever gump, too. It’s not by accident that wispy, gentle toons sit cheek by jowl with swollen brassy epics; and then out of nowhere will sprout a pretension-deflater like ‘Pretty Little Things,’ which sounds like Prince on helium and dexies. I tell ya, listening to Big Night Music is more fun than working in an abattoir on a humid day.

Andrews has the serene monkish demeanor of the Keith Carradine character in the Kung Fu TV show. Before Shriekback, he was in XTC from ’77 to ’79, and he also played with Robert Fripp’s League of Gentlemen in 1980. He’s a peace-lovin’, broad-minded intellectual dabbler wearing a black floppy hat and a long black coat. We had a civilized chat amid the delicately bubbling jacuzzi water inside a swanky Detroit hotel. Andrews proved to be more stimulating than a week’s worth of The Dick Cavett Show.

CREEM: Why did Carl Marsh leave Shriekback?
BARRY ANDREWS: He wanted to do solo things, really. Carl’s quite a self-contained sort of bloke I don’t think he ever found it easy working with other people. The band was becoming a two-headed beast that was tearing itself in half. Oil and Gold (released in ’85) suffered from that. A bit of schizophrenia between the Carl direction and my direction. I like things when they’re soft and vulnerable and maybe even a bit maudlin. I like a certain amount of crying into my Guinness.

Did Marsh’s departure cause a change in your sound?
Definitely, there was a sort of opening of the sluices. When Carl left, I felt like, firstly, I’ve got this huge canvas to work with on the whole record. It’s all gonna be my words, my tunes. So instead of it being this common denominator area we could inhabit with Carl, what the three of us could agree on was actually a bigger area because there were fewer things to filter out. I wanted to try doing something very simple and direct and emotional, like ‘The Cradle Song,’ Just trying out every option and seeing what’s possible. There’s a certain amount of experimentation that doesn’t work, but a whole lot that does. Normally we wouldn’t have even dared to try. Big Night Music is diverse. I don’t think anyone could complain about it being too homogenous. I think there is a coherence to it that we’ve never achieved on a record before, with the possible exception of Care (released in ’82)

Does everyone have creative input into the words and music?
I’m the sole lyricist. On the new album, Dave confined himself to bass playing, Martyn did a whole lot more than he’s ever done. He plays all the drums and does lots of percussion. So he’s actually responsible for quite a lot of the textures. I’m really responsible for the way the whole thing sounds and the structure of the songs. I can’t imagine collaborating with someone on a song. It would be like having somebody advise you while you’re having sex with somebody (laughs). There’s so much that just happens in your head. It’s quite a fragile process and it’s not something I could easily involve someone with.

Your lyrics have a stream of consciousness to them…
A stream of unconsciousness…(much laughter).

Sometimes it’s brilliant and at other times it leaves the listener baffled. Maybe they’re too oblique for universal understanding.
Maybe that’s a valid criticism. I don’t go in for any kind of broad political commentary.

You write more about personal things?
I don’t know if they’re even personal things, really. What I try to do is create an entity with sound that has not existed before. The songs are meant to be things you can walk into and walk around, that have their own kind of smell and atmosphere and texture. They’re not meant to be billboards or television programs. Or newspapers. The lyrics aren’t the point any more than the bass drum pattern’s the point. You might have a very good pair of kidneys but that’s not your whole story, is it?

If I asked you what ‘The Reptiles and I’ is about, could you tell me?
I can tell you what I was trying to do. It’s what it is for you definitely. That’s a nice fatuous answer, I suppose, and it’s what it means to me. And that’s about as far as it goes. I had this idea of using a lot of lists that I found in Webster’s Dictionary. A list of languages, elements, proverbs. I liked the idea of a bunch of verses that were lists. I was trying to create a nursery rhyme that would work in an adult way and would have that sort of darkness about it, that sinister kind of thing that the best nursery rhymes have. I’m really a little kid sitting at the foot of the great god Language. I’ve really got no command over it. I pretty much take what it gives me. I get excited by all the different ways people speak in the same way. I get excited about all the different cultures people can have, all the different ways of being in the world. It seems very rich and diverse and brilliant. And it inspires me.

Were you influenced by any writers?
I steal a lot. I’m a complete bastard for that. I’ll tell you the dead ones. I’ve ripped Shakespeare off something rotten. I’ve had my way with T.S. Eliot. Martin Luther King. The Bible. Certainly bits of the Koran. Complete verbal beachcomber.

At least you’re taking from great sources.
Oh yeah. That’s what they’re there for. To get crunched up and recycled. I don’t do it in any cynical way. It’s like doing a cover of a band’s song that you really think is a good song. It seems silly to wrack your brains when somebody else’s said it so well. I just rip it off. Shameless, really.

Have any current songwriters influenced you?
David Byrne’s approach – when I was a bit more uncertain about writing lyrics – he seemed to offer quite a good little cubbyhole to hide in, where you could get away without saying anything at all as long as it sounded all right. But on this LP, I got less and less satisfied with what you could do with that and more interested in what would happen if you pushed the thing up toward the light a little more. So things like ‘Cradle Song,’ ‘Reptiles,’ and ‘Gunning for the Buddha’ are like little narratives, stories, which I’ve never attempted before. Getting into the old Tin Pan Alley thing. People like Gilbert and Sullivan and the English music hall singers. Popular Victorian kitsch. Edwardian parlor songs.

Shriekback is often labelled an intellectual band.
It’s high time we burst that bubble.

Are you college-educated?
No. It was between making a choice of being in a rock’n’roll band or going to university.

Are you religious?
I don’t belong to a religion. I don’t have any faith, in that way. I do have a strong religious sense. It’s difficult to say without it sounding pretentious. I have a sense of awe of a kind of religious veneration or worship in the presence of what is around – people, mainly, the rush and energy of people and what they can do and build and keep going on and having babies. Just what it is to be alive. There’s definitely a force that moves us on in a mysterious way. I said to someone once that I feel about religion the way I felt about sex when I was 12. You know there’s something going on, but you don’t know what the fuck it is!

To read more about Shriekback's music and career, please visit their website (sign up for the newsletter for free downloads) and Tumblr. You can also join in our conversations over on Facebook. And, while you're at it, pick up a copy of their new album, Without Real String or Fish!

Here is a passage from a manuscript I never incorporated in the Relics Trilogy. It's the last entry in a journal found on a bank of the Po in Turin, Italy. The entry is incomplete and the Canadian journalist and paranormal investigator, Isaac Steugler, has yet to be found.  I was considering making it a sub-plot of 'The Augury of Gideon', but I think it may better fit the new book. We'll see. In the meantime, here is Isaac Steugler's last known writing.

Rarely does an investigative journalist have the honour to stumble across something so incredible that he questions his own sanity at discovering such revelations.

Such is the joy and plight of this writer.

In the past, I’ve investigated and written texts about the hidden mysteries of The Talmud and Kabbalistic traditions. I’ve researched the source of the majority of our modern belief systems: the Sumerian society and their interactions with beings they considered to be gods. I’ve delved into the many traditions of Celtic worship and their latterday descendants, Druidism and Witchcraft. And I have walked the secret halls of the Freemasons and their Hermetic and Enochian brethren.

I thought I knew all there was to know about the occult, the arcane, the obscure. But I was wrong.

Since I found some ancient scrolls tucked away in one of the Cathedral's caverns, my life and all in which I thought I believed has turned upside-down. If these scrolls are legitimate (and all evidence points to the fact that they are), I have found absolute proof that Vampires exist, and have long been a part of some arcane conspiracy that reaches all the way to the world governments and dominant religious institutions. They may even solve the mystery of the Shroud, given their close proximity.

I'm returning to Ontario tomorrow, getting in touch with an associate of mine who should be familiar with this text. She can hopefully translate what I can't, and twig me onto someone who can run tests on the scrolls' antiquity.

These are exciting times for

Perhaps Mr. Zeugler ran afoul of Cadmus Pariah...

To learn more about and, if you wish, purchase The Vampire Relics, please click on the picture below.

A practice most often encouraged by an extremist minority found in any religion, who are not satisfied to be alone in their struggle to fully embrace and encourage fatuous mythology, which eventually results in participating in unsavoury activities of which this list is but a small portion:

• Vote rigging.


• Rewriting history.


• Picketing for the sole purpose of badgering the people around them


• Rewording or omitting passages in their own holy book to better reflect their own dogma.


• Threatening and defaming naysayers, most especially if the targeted individuals are often in the public eye.


• Obstruction of people’s rights with which they disagree

Supporters of and participants in this movement work toward manifesting their primary agenda, which is to remake their nation(s) into a theocratic state that will impose the ruling minority’s dogma on the vast majority who wouldn’t otherwise take notice.

Adherants to Aggressive Stupidity are present in every religion and, unfortunately because they are the most raucous, they get the most attention, and even get their way, if it means they would just shut the fuck up.  Other than the title by which they identify, these groups are almost identical with one another, even if groups under the Stupidity umbrella often fight one another, and do so publicly, accusing their enemy du jour of crimes both feuding parties enthusiastically commit.  (Tea Party, please meet your brothers from another mother, the Taliban.)

They seek out the weak to use as proof of god’s displeasure with man, to further bills criminalising homelessness and poverty, giving free rein to those keen on dehumanising them, and eventually manipulate some of them, most of whom were suffering from a religious variation of Stockholm Syndrome into becoming agents dedicated to perpetuating propaganda, which serves to justify the totalitarian occupancy of already defeated nations, and increase the crusade budget with the intention of instituting a global theocracy.  When you're hungry and desperate, you're more prone to accept the tenets of those who give you bread.

Listed below are some of the tools and weapons used by the Aggressively Stupid to aid in the forging of a government based on the idea that the minority has the right to exercise authority over the majority:

• Support of and/or participation in discriminatory behaviour, claiming that some actions, opinions, or beliefs are ordained by God.  Such discrimination polices and many others instituted by the new government are often brutally enforced by an increasingly militarised policing body.




• Monetary contributions to political campaigns that are sympathetic to many, if not all, hot button issues about which the Aggressively Stupid obsess.




• Erasing the lines that separate Church and State by passing out voter guides in church and pamphlets sharing the “Good News” at secular events such as concerts and conventions.  Another example of these tactics used by extremists is the funding of lobby groups that will help advance the budding theocracy’s influence over the population.




• Unabashed recruitment and conversion to assist in either growing the controlling body or encouraging unwavering loyalty alongside compulsive witness bearing, all in the name of God.




• Bullying and shaming in the attempt to silence rebellious individuals, omit from history any behaviour or activities deemed deviant by the ruling elite, and making nonconformity illegal.




• Attempts, some of which have actually been successful, to reinstate the old pecking order originally blueprinted by god himself, that affirms man's dominance over anything else that is not human or does not have a penis.  Of course, this declaration is referring to white men only, according to the extremists.  Everyone else is subject to the whims of the future theocracy's officials.

It was Aggressive Stupidity that led to Yeshua’s death, which is, in equal measure, tragic and ironic, considering today’s coteries and megachurches full of Aggressively Stupid acolytes, some of whom use his name to promote their agenda, would doubtlessly be the first to scream for capital punishment of this heretic who dared to challenge the authority established in his name.

It's been one of those days.

Everything is irking me right now. Frustration levels are in the plaid zone.

I can't access very old video files with the tools I have at hand, and won't be getting any help via the two PCs in the house. Not without a 4-hour long sermon on everything I'm doing wrong from someone who seems to not know diddly-shit about Mac and how different it can be from the realm of PC-dom. I did find the original VHS tapes, though, so I'm biding my time until I can get them converted to DVD and MPEG. I need to do that to preserve them anyway. There's a place in LA that charges $10 for the conversion, but I'm not certain I want to send the tapes away. I'm gonna hunt for someone local, so the vids will be in my possession at all times, or most of the time.

Yesterday, I read an article about that dick cheese, Pat Robertson. I shared it on Facebook. Earlier, I got a comment from a long-time friend, a lady with whom I worked at BMG, who found me on FB a couple of months ago. She was a titch defensive, not of Pat Robertson, but of the church as a whole, and its tax exempt status. We got into a tiff about it. I don't mind differing opinions or beliefs, but the whole religion thing is one of those hot-button topics that will send me spinning into a fury.

So, yeah, I'm enjoying an emotional repast of Sithly rage today. This might help me write today, though, so I'm just gonna ride the wave, and see what happens.

In my late teens I began to fashion out of my perception of the world and the people that inhabited the world an idea of how souls fit in the the Great Scheme of Things. It was at this time I began to actively seek some sort of spiritual path that would allow me to explore the nature of souls in the way I saw fit. The only path that even remotely met my needs at the time as Wicca, the Temple Hecate Triskele of the Caledonii Tradition to be exact. Quite the mouthful, eh? I was a dedicated Dedicant and faithfully adhered to the tenets of my Fluffy Bunny phase. In short, I was intolerable. But there had always been a part of me even when I wanted to be a Christian preacher (before I knew girls weren't really allowed) and had full intention of boozing it up every Sabbath at Temple, that needed to have an active part in ritual. A girl tends to become conflicted when she's raised in both the Jewish and Protestant faith. A girl become agnostic.

And this girl remained agnostic even throughout my education as a priestess in the Caledonii Tradition. There were always two things that never failed to fascinate me: Angels, and their different incarnations that spanned human faith, and the nature of souls. The apocryphal writings of Enoch held a particular fascination for me and it was Enochian Magick that brought me to the Book of the Law. From there, I became even more conflicted. My Fluffy Bunniness was burned away by the introduction of Chaos Magick and the tenets of a more practical form of viewing the world and Creation itself. Gnosis, Thelema, Chaos, and the accounts of Angels as written by Enoch began another quest for knowledge and understanding that I came to realise resided only within myself. That's hard to come to grips with, considering I held little faith in myself. But enough of that.

( The Soul Train rolls on )