Descent Woman Quotes

You can no longer see or identify yourself solely as a member of a tribe, but as a citizen of a nation of one people working toward a common purpose.

Most people write me off when they see me. They do not know my story. They say I am just an African. They judge me before they get to know me. What they do not know is The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins; The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people; The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community; The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance; The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it. Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning. So you think I am nothing? Don’t worry about what I am now, For what I will be, I am gradually becoming. I will raise my head high wherever I go Because of my African pride, And nobody will take that away from me.

The Times 2 July 1952 WAS BRITISH BARONESS WORKING FOR THE NAZIS IN PARIS? By Philip Bing-Wallace It was alleged that Baroness Freya Saumures (who claimed to be of Swedish descent but is a British subject) was one of the many women that entertained the Gestapo and SS during the occupation of Paris, a jury was told. At the baroness’s trial today, the Old Bailey heard Daniel Merrick-James QC, prosecuting council, astonish the jury by revealing that Baroness Freya Saumures allegedly worked with the Nazis throughout the Nazi occupation of Paris. There was a photograph of a woman in a headscarf and dark glasses, alongside a tall dark-haired man who had a protective arm around her, his face shielded by his hand. A description beneath the image read: Baroness Saumures with her husband, Baron Ferdinand Saumures, outside the Old Bailey after her acquittal. Alec could not see her face fully, but the picture of the baron, even partially obscured, certainly looked very like the man lying dead in the Battersea Park Road crypt. Alec read on. When Mr Merrick-James sat, a clerk of the court handed the judge, Justice Henry Folks, a note. The judge then asked the court to be cleared. Twenty minutes later, the court was reconvened. Justice Folks announced to the jury that the prosecution had dropped all charges and that Lady Saumures was acquitted. There was no explanation for the acquittal. The jury was dismissed with thanks. Neither Baron nor Baroness Saumures had any comment. Baron and Baroness Saumures live in West Sussex and are well known to a select group for their musical evenings and events. They are also well known for protecting their privacy. Alec rummaged on. It was getting close to lunchtime and his head was beginning to ache.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

He’d never felt this protective of a woman before. Only she brought that out in him. That powerful, odd mixture of independence and vulnerability completely melted him. The fact that she flew a Black Hawk and could talk shop with the best of them? Hot as hell. And her laugh. God, she had the dirtiest laugh he’d ever heard. Every time he heard it he thought of sex. Hot, sweaty sex, the kind that left a man exhausted and weak and his partner unable to move.

Freud's antique notion of women as diminished men is quite wrong. Biology instead reveals every man's battle to escape the woman within.

The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves. From time to time something happens to shake them out of that groove.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?

During this part of the journey, the woman begins her descent. It may involve a seemingly endless period of wandering, grief, and rage; of dethroning kings; of looking for the lost pieces of herself and meeting the dark feminine. It may take weeks, months, or years, and for many it may involve a time of voluntary isolation—a period of darkness and silence and of learning the art of deeply listening once again to self: of being instead of doing. The outer world may see this as a depression and a period of stasis. Family, friends, and work associates implore our heroine to “get on with it.

Because I am a transvestite, people often assume that this gives me a special insight into the opposite gender. But this is rubbish: how can I, brought up as a man, know anything about the experience of being a woman? It would be insulting to women if I thought I did. If anything, it gives me a sharper insight into what it is to be a man, since from the age of twelve I have been questioning my own masculinity.

‘You are your” “Past, Present,” “& Future,’ he said” ” ‘You divide into” “those components” “in this room’ ” ” ‘But I do not have” “components!’ ” “our three voices said,” ” ‘My secret name—” “Time’s secret name” “is Oneness,” “is One Thing’ ” “As I—the one” “in the middle—spoke,” “the one of us in front—” “who was the Past—” “had already” “finished speaking” “& was awaiting” “his reply” “He said,” ” ‘Don’t we seem” “to experience” “things somewhat this way?” “There is past, present” :& future’ ” “The Future then cried out,” ” ‘Where is my life?” ‘Where is my life?” “You have stolen” “my life!’ ” “There was a silence” “The man” “reached out &” “pressed a button” “on the cave wall—” “we three united” “into one again” “while he wrote words on” “a clipboard” “Then he looked up & said,” ” ‘Going forward?” “Going on?” “Death lies ahead, you know’ ” “Any woman” “may already” “be dead,’ ” “I said

Eurydice Speaks” How will I know you in the underworld? How will we find each other? We lived for so long on the physical earth— Our skies littered with actual stars Practical tides in our bay— What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical? Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls, By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him On the shore of a river written and rewritten As elegy, epic, epode. Remember the thin air of our earthly winters? Frost was an iron, underhand descent. Dusk was always in session And no one needed to write down Or restate, or make record of, or ever would, And never will, The plainspoken music of recognition, Nor the way I often stood at the window— The hills growing dark, saying, As a shadow became a stride And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight I would know you anywhere.

To protect patrilineal descent, men have for centuries tried to control women's sexuality. Although man needs woman, he tries to keep her power under control, legislating against women's free use of her sex in case she compromises the fragile but tenacious social structure of our patriarchal society.

The Fall, so often considered a terrible thing, is a fall into experience; like falling of the epileptic to earth, it may also have its other face, for then we fall into the embrace of our dreams and fears and know them for what they are, face to face. [...]the fearful face of the Black Goddess is really the veiled Sophia. The rebirth of the mystery initiation brings us into contact with our own power, which we have failed to take in our own time. Part of the reason for this is that we live in the shadow of the Judeo-Christian Fall for which Woman bears the blame. The experience of Psyche and Kore shows the vulnerable face of Sophia, who is not afraid to fall, to learn by seeming mistakes. They show that the descent into death is the only possible pathway to ascent or spiritual rebirth.

Does it hurt?" we finally heard her whisper, and in that moment, she was achingly beautiful, beautiful almost beyond belief: She was warmth, she was moisture, she was light, she was the adamant perfection of a million billion snowflakes in a split second's descent, she was tender, she was eternal, and she was memory, and she was love.

A woman discovers the way home to herself in a quiet descent into the richness of her own life. In the descent, she reunites with her essential self and natural resources.

The woman with the horned helmet—who had to be of Viking descent—spoke.

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband’s descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.

A woman once told me that, for a time after her husband died, her grief was as constant as breathing. Then one day, while pushing a shopping cart, she realized she was thinking about yogurt. With time, thoughts in this vein became contiguous. With more time thoughts in this vein became sustained. Eventually they won a kind of majority. Her grieving had ended while she wasn’t watching (although, she added, grief never ends). And so it was with my depression. One day in December I changed a furnace filter with modest interest in the process. The day after that I drove to Gorst for the repair of a faulty seat belt. On the thirty-first I went walking with a friend—grasslands, cattails, asparagus fields, ice-bound sloughs, frost-rimed fencerows—with a familiar engrossment in the changing of winter light. I was home, that night, in time to bang pots and pans at the year’s turn: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” It wasn’t at all like that—this eve was cloudy, the stars hidden by high racing clouds—but I found myself looking skyward anyway, into the night’s maw, and I noticed I was thinking of January’s appointments without a shudder, even with anticipation. Who knows why, but the edge had come off, and being me felt endurable again. My crucible had crested, not suddenly but less gradually than how it had come, and I felt the way a newborn fawn looks in an elementary school documentary. Born, but on shaky, insecure legs. Vulnerable, but in this world for now, with its leaf buds and packs of wolves. Was it pharmacology, and if so, is that a bad thing? Or do I credit time for my healing? Or my Jungian? My reading? My seclusion? My wife’s love? Maybe I finally exhausted my tears, or my dreams at last found sufficient purchase, or maybe the news just began to sound better, the world less precarious, not headed for disaster. Or was it talk in the end, the acknowledgments I made? The surfacing of so many festering pains? My children’s voices down the hall,

Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,’ recalled one British soldier, ‘holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could.

their footfalls? Finally some combination thereof, or these many things as permutations of each other—as alternative vocabularies? However it was, by January I was winnowed, and soon dispensed with pills and analysis (the pills I was weaned from gradually), and took up my unfinished novel again, Our Lady of the Forest, about a girl who sees the Virgin Mary, a man who wants a miracle, a priest who suffers spiritual anxiety, and a woman in thrall to cynicism. It seems to me now that the sum of those figures mirrors the shape of my psyche before depression, and that the territory of the novel forms a map of my psyche in the throes of gathering disarray. The work as code for the inner life, and as fodder for my own biographical speculations. Depression, in this conceit, might be grand mal writer’s block. Rather than permitting its disintegration at the hands of assorted unburied truths risen into light as narrative, the ego incites a tempest in the brain, leaving the novelist to wander in a whiteout with his half-finished manuscript awry in his arms, where the wind might blow it away. I don’t find this facile. It seems true—or true for me—that writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’s reading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity—The Metamorphosis, or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered. In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life. * * * Like

Here, finally, was a woman on a quest for her own identity and, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich black soil, wild cane, and communal life representing immersion into black traditions.

I opened the window to let some fresh air into the room and was surprised to see that the rain was not just falling, but that it formed an actual wall of water, as if the whole sky were falling. While I was staring at the strange phenomenon, the form of an angel began to appear before me… It was Matariel, the Angel of Rain, whom I had not seen since my descent and who on this occasion appeared in a shiny, blue-grey form. She was only an arm’s length away and stared straight at me. She looked like a young woman floating on enormous wings -not a single drop of rain touched her. The smell of the cool rain swept the room as Matariel began talking to me. She never once moved her lips, but her every word was clearly audible in my head.

Among the Mediterraneans,” wrote Seltman, “as a general rule society was built around the woman, even on the highest levels where descent was in the female line. A man became king or chieftain only by a formal marriage and his daughter, not his son, succeeded so that the next chieftain was the youth who married his daughter … Until the northerners arrived, religion and custom were dominated by the female principle.

Taking the ring from her, Sebastian slid it onto his own hand. His hands were so much larger that the circlet would only fit the tip of his smallest finger. Grasping her chin in an intractable hold, he glared into her eyes. “I’ll take your bet,” he said grimly. “I’m going to win it. And in three months, I’m going to put this back on your finger, and take you to bed, and do things to you that are outlawed in the civilized world.” Evie’s resolve did not shield her from the heart-thumping alarm that any rational woman would feel upon hearing such an ominous statement. Nor did it prevent her knees from turning to jelly as he jerked her against his body and fitted his mouth to hers. Her hands, suspended in mid-air, went to his head in a trembling butterfly descent. The texture of his hair, the locks so cool and thick on the surface, so warm and damp at the roots, was too alluring to resist. She slid her fingers into the gleaming golden layers and pulled him even closer, helplessly reveling in the urgent pressure of his mouth. Their tongues mated, slid, stroked, and with each slippery-sweet caress inside the joined cavern of their mouths, she felt a hot coiling deep in her belly… no, deeper than that… in the tightening, liquefying core where she had once taken his invading flesh. It shocked her to realize how much she wanted him there again. She whimpered as he pulled away from her, while frustration washed over them both. “You didn’t say that I couldn’t kiss you,” Sebastian said, his eyes bright with devil-fire. “I’m going to kiss you as long and as often as I like, and you’re not to utter a word of protest. That’s the concession you’ll give in return for my celibacy. Damn you.” Giving her no time either to agree or to object, he released her and strode to the door. “And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m going to go kill Joss Bullard.

What it adds up to is that, with the advent of the pill, woman is beginning to get her finger on the genetic trigger. What she will do with it we cannot quite foresee. But it is a far cry from the bull who gets to be prolific just because he's tops at beating the daylights out all the other bulls. It may be that for homo sapiens in the future, extreme manifestations of the behaviour patterns of dominance and aggression will be evolutionary at a discount; and if that happens he will begin to shed them as once, long ago, he shed his coat of fur.

One of the most dangerous classes in the world,' said he, 'is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory. She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel. She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of obscure pensions and boarding-houses. She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed. I much fear that some evil has come to the Lady Frances Carfax.' I was relieved at this sudden descent from the general to the particular.

When I say I am Black, I mean I am of African descent. When I say I am a woman of Color, I mean I recognize common cause with American Indian, Chicana, Latina, and Asian-American sisters of North America. I also mean I share common cause with women of Eritrea who spend most of each day searching for enough water for their children, as well as with Black South African women who bury 50 percent of their children before they reach the age of five. And I also share cause with my Black sisters of Australia, the Aboriginal women of this land who were raped of their history and their children and their culture by a genocidal conquest in whose recognition we are gathered here today.

I was fortunate, my life did fall apart, I was lost. The journey into Her story, means a participation in Her descent and return, it means a shattering of what went before. How does a woman stop being object, and become subject? How does she become the body in her own mind? It requires more than a headtrip, it requires the descent of Inanna, a falling apart. I was still a product of patriarchal narrative, and still seeking the Beloved (the Mother) outside myself. What did it take to move from that, to allow a fertile darkness within, from which the Self could begin? The regaining of integrity, and an understanding of why we lost it, or did not have it, can require a great darkness.

Jules Verne was born on 8 February 1828 on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the Loire river located in the town of Nantes, in the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe, in No. 4 Rue de Clisson. His father, Pierre Verne, was an attorney originally from Provins. His mother was Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe, a Nantes woman of Scottish descent. She belonged to a local family of navigators and ship owners. The Verne family moved away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart in 1829, where Verne’s brother Paul was born the same year. Verne also had three sisters named Anne, Mathilde, and Marie, who were born in 1836, 1839, and 1842, respectively. In 1834, Verne was sent to the boarding school located at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes.

Homo sapiens is a creature that over vast areas of the earth, in the countries and continents and centuries that the history books and the newsreels neglect because nothing ‘interesting’ has happened in them, has succeeded in living the moderate and mainly cooperative life to be expected of cousins of the hedonic apes. Almost all men spend most of their lives in this way. Most men spend all their lives in this way. But because all our governance is based on male bonding, and male bonding on at best a low-powered rumbling of aggression, accompanied by the hallucinatory visions which keep that aggression alive, we are constantly in danger of seeing our communities revert at intervals into the horrible agonic semblance of a troop of baboons. Baboons, moreover, with their finger on the button that can fire off an H-bomb.

In the very beginning of life, you were acquainted with the exquisite natural resources of your breath, body, and inner life. You breathed deeply into your belly. You loved your body. You were in touch with the wisdom within your own life. Over time, however, the girl-child becomes disconnected from the “home” within her. Caught in the swirls of others, twisted in the shapes of others, depleted by the demands of others, she becomes outer-directed and loses touch with herself. Her breath becomes shallow. She ignores her body. She looks to saviors outside of herself for salvation and validation, forgetting the rich resources within her. In the fullness of time, we become dizzy from swirling; our lives ache from being twisted out of shape; and our spirits become depleted from servicing others with our energy and attention. Weary, we reach out to a counselor, spiritual community, or self-help group. We are offered information, insight, and tools of support. We are inspired by the experience, strength, and hope of others who are turning toward their own lives with vulnerability, courage, and truth. Insight, information, and camaraderie point us in the right direction, but the journey begins as we turn toward our own lives and look within to re-connect to our natural resources: breath, woman-body, and inner life. Home is always waiting. It is as near as a conscious breath, conscious contact with your woman-body, and a descent into the abundant resources of your inner life. The meaning, recovery, and transformation you seek ‘out there’ is found within your own heart, mind, body, and life. It is accessed in the present moment and released into your experience with each mindful breath. Return home often—you have everything you need there.

Instead of ascending to enlightened states of being that involve the denial of the self, we have discovered that ours is a journey of descent: we look deep within to reclaim forgotten aspects of ourselves. In our descent, many of us rediscover “Sophia,” which is the Greek word for wisdom. She is a feminine aspect of the divine found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Her presence in the male pantheon of gods has been obscured, but not completely eradicated. In the Gnostic writings, considered heretical by the “orthodox” church, Sophia was present at creation and escorted Adam and Eve toward self-awareness. Women are reclaiming Sophia as a representation of their own inner wisdom. No longer is “god's will” imposed from outside of their lives—wisdom unfolds from within them and is in sync with their own natural gifts and capacities. No longer available to turn their lives and wills over to gods, gurus, and experts, they’re refusing to surrender except to Wisdom's urgings. No longer abdicating responsibility for their lives, they are employing their own willfulness in harmony with Wisdom's ways.

A mother" "& child" "were both on fire, continuously" "The fire" "was contained in them" "sealed them off from others" "But you could see the flame" "halo of short flame all about the" "conjoined bodies, who sat" "they sat apart" "on a seat for two" "at end of car" "The ghost" "of the father" "sat in flames" "beside them" "paler flames" "sat straight ahead" "looking straight ahead, not" "moving." "A woman" "another woman" "in a uniform" "from above the ground" "entered" "the train" "She was fireproof" "She was gloves, & she" "took" "the baby" "took the baby" "away from the"" "mother" "Extracted" "the burning baby" "from the fire" "they made together" "But the baby" "still burned" ("But not yours" "It didn't happen" "to you") "'We don't know yet" "if it will" "stop burning,'" "said the uniformed" "woman" "The burning woman" "was crying" "she made a form" "in her mind" "an imaginary" "form" "to settle" "in her arms where" "the baby" "had been" "We saw her fiery arms" "cradle air" "She cradled air" ("They take your children" "away" "if you're on fire") "In the air that" "she cradled" "it seemed to us there" "floated" "a flower-like" "a red flower" "its petals" "curling flames" "She cradled" "seemed to cradle" "the burning flower of" "herself gone" "her life" ("She saw" "whatever she saw, but what we saw" "was that flower")

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Arms flailing, Lincoln fought his rapid descent. Mud gave way beneath his feet, and he landed with a splash in Union Park’s lake. Shocked to his core, he looked up into Hannah’s laughing face. “W-why did you do that?” “I decided to take a risk.” She giggled, backing away, almost daring him to retaliate. “And if you’re going to spend time with me, you might as well learn there are going to be some surprises.” “Is that so?” A smile tugged at the corners of his lips, and his chest warmed. So, she was accepting his offer. “Well, Miss Gregory, you’d better expect some surprises as well.” He rushed toward her, creating a spray in his wake. She squealed and dove out of his reach. He caught her waist and pulled the laughing woman into his arms. With her hair hanging in damp rivulets around her face and her eyes alight with anticipation, she took his breath away. She shivered against his chest. “Lincoln Cole, if you douse me again—” She squirmed in his arms, then looked into his eyes and stilled. She licked her lips. “What are you doing?” He raised his hand, removed soggy weed from her hair, and cupped her cheek. “Giving you the surprise you deserve.” She shivered again, and he noticed a bluish tinge to her lips. Good grief. She was freezing, and even if he wanted to warm her up as only he could, standing in a lake was hardly the place for a first kiss. Before desire won over practicality, he bent and tossed her over his shoulder. “Put me down!” She squirmed and pounded on his back with her fists. “It would serve you right if I did toss you back in.

Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.” “What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked. “You do?” Ben sounded surprised. “I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said. “Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said. “I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something? “I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.” “Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said. “Deal ‘em,” Ben said. Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy. “Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?” “European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.” Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?” “I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.” Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions. “So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles. “Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?” “Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.” It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird. After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them. For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.

You're certainly not dressed like you're running a business." Eyes blazing, she glared. "What's wrong with how I'm dressed?" "An apron and a pink tracksuit with Juicy written across the ass are hardly serious business attire and they certainly don't scream swipe right on desi Tinder." Sam didn't know if there was such a thing as Tinder for people of South Asian descent living abroad, but if it did exist, he and Layla would definitely not have been a match. Layla gave a growl of frustration. "You may be surprised to hear that I don't live my life seeking male approval. I'm just getting over a breakup so I'm a little bit fragile. Last night, I went out with Daisy and drank too much, smoked something I thought was a cigarette, danced on a speaker, and fell onto some loser named Jimbo, whose girlfriend just happened to be an MMA fighter and didn't like to see me sprawled on top of her man. We had a minor physical altercation and I was kicked out of the bar. Then I got dumped on the street by my Uber driver because I threw up in his cab. So today, I just couldn't manage office wear. It's called self-care, and we all need it sometimes. Danny certainly wouldn't mind." "Who's Danny?" The question came out before he could stop it. "Someone who appreciates all I've got going here-" she ran a hand around her generous curves- "and isn't hung up on trivial things like clothes." She tugged off the apron and dropped it on the reception desk. "I'm not hung up on clothes, either," Sam teased. "When I'm with a woman I prefer to have no clothes at all." Her nose wrinkled. "You're disgusting." "Go home, sweetheart." Sam waved a dismissive hand. "Put your feet up. Watch some rom-coms. Eat a few tubs of ice cream. Have a good cry. Some of us have real work to do.

Even as the feminine principle was venerated for its fertile, life-giving properties, there are also many examples of Goddesses who embodied the entire life process: birth, life, death, and regeneration. This is important because it can be tempting to romanticise the Goddess as a sort of angelic Fairy Godmother or abundant Good Mother. The feminine principle is more complex and more powerful than that. There are many stories from mythology that tell of the different faces of the Goddess. One such myth tells of the ancient Sumerian goddess who “outweighed, overshadowed, and outlasted them all . . .Inanna, Queen of Heaven.”[xxvi] This story originated in ancient Mesopotamia, five or six thousand years ago. In the myth, Inanna, who rules as queen over the upper world (birth and life), decides to visit Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld (death and transformation). As Inanna descends into her sister’s realm, she is stripped of all the symbols of her upper world sovereignty, so that she comes before Ereshkigal naked and bowed low. Her enforced stay in the Underworld and the return after three days predates the Christian story by thousands of years. It is one of the first stories of ritual descent from the realm of life to the realm of death and the return to life after a time of incubation in the Underworld. This is also the theme of most ancient initiation rituals like the Orphic mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, and of much of the Egyptian sacred teachings. At the time when the story of Inanna’s journey first appeared, the increasingly male dominated Sumerian culture was separating from earlier matrilineal forms. Before the descent myth, another story tells how Inanna, in order to rule, had to take power from the God, Enki, assuming his symbols of sovereignty as her own. Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld, represents the archaic feminine, the dark mysteries of the older religion which had been sent underground. The descent story can, therefore, be understood as Inanna balancing her heroic victories in the upper (masculine) world by reconnecting with the rhythms and cycles of the under (feminine) world. Based on clinical experience, one analyst called this a “pattern of a woman’s passage from cultural adaptation to an encounter with her essential nature”.

Reaching the door of his mother’s apartments, Marcus found it locked. He rattled the handle violently. “Open it,” he bellowed. “Open it now!” Silence, and then a maid’s frightened reply from within. “Milord… the countess bade me to tell you that she is resting.” “I’ll send her to her eternal fucking rest,” Marcus roared, “if this door isn’t opened now.” “Milord, please—” He drew back three or four paces and hurled himself against the door, which shook on its hinges and partially gave with a splintering sound. There were fearful cries in the hallway from a pair of female guests who happened to witness the astonishing display of raging frenzy. “Dear God,” one exclaimed to the other, “he’s gone berserk!” Marcus drew back again and lunged at the door, this time sending chunks of paneling flying. He felt Simon Hunt’s hands grasp him from behind, and he whirled with his fist drawn back, ready to launch an attack on all fronts. “Jesus,” Hunt muttered, retreating a step or two with his hands raised in a defensive gesture. His face was taut and his eyes were wide, and he stared at Marcus as if he were a stranger. “Westcliff—” “Stay the hell out of my way!” “Gladly. But let me point out that if our positions were reversed, you would be the first to tell me to keep a cool—” Ignoring him, Marcus swerved back to the door and targeted the disjointed lock with a powerful, accurately aimed blow of his boot heel. The housemaid’s scream shot through the doorway as the ruined portal swung open. Bursting into the receiving room, Marcus charged toward the bedchamber, where the countess sat in a chair by a small hearth fire. Fully dressed and swathed in ropes of pearls, she stared at him with amused disdain. Breathing heavily, Marcus advanced on her with bloodlust racing through his veins. It was certain that the countess had no idea that she was in mortal danger, or she would not have received him so calmly. “Full of animal spirits today, are we?” she asked. “Your descent from gentleman to savage brute has been accomplished so very quickly. I must offer Miss Bowman my compliments on her efficacy.” “What have you done with her?” “Done with her?” Her expression taunted him with its innocent perplexity. “What the devil do you mean, Westcliff?” “You met with her at Butterfly Court this morning.” “I never walk that far from the manor,” the countess said haughtily. “What a ridiculous asser—” She let out a strident cry as Marcus seized her, his fingers wrapping around the pearl ropes and tightening them around her throat. “Tell me where she is, or I’ll snap your neck like a wishbone!” Simon Hunt seized him from behind once more, determined to prevent a murder from occurring. “Westcliff!” Marcus closed his hand in a harder grip around the pearls. He glared without blinking into his mother’s face, not missing the flicker of vindictive triumph that lurked in her eyes. He did not take his gaze from hers even as he heard his sister Livia’s voice. “Marcus,” she said urgently. “Marcus, listen to me! You have my permission to throttle her later. I’ll even help. But at least wait until we’ve found out what she’s done.” Marcus tightened the tension of the pearls until the elderly woman’s eyes seemed to protrude from their shallow sockets. “Your only value to me,” he said in a low tone, “is your knowledge of Lillian Bowman’s whereabouts. If I can’t obtain that from you, I’ll send you to the devil. Tell me, or I’ll choke it from you. And believe that I have enough of my father in me to do it without a second thought.

This is what we’ve uncovered about the matrilineal descent of witches. There are four lines of descent, or clans. We numbered them in the order we found them, although the woman who was mother to Clan Aleph—the first clan we discovered—lived more recently than the others.” “Define ‘recently,’ please,” Em requested. “Aleph lived about seven thousand years ago.

Cliff looked around for the woman he’d seen helping the others and saw no sign of her. Swearing, he tore through the wreckage in search of her. An explosion took out more of the ceiling. Rubble rained down on the other side of the pile he dug through. “Come on,” he whispered. “Where are you?” A moan reached his ears, followed by a cough. Leaping toward it, he grabbed slabs of concrete and flooring and tossed them aside, reducing the pile until he found her. Dust coated her like ash, powdering her braid and turning her skin a grayish white. She blinked up at him. Her forehead glistened with blood that oozed from a gash on one side. “It’s okay,” he told her. “I’m here to help. Don’t be afraid.” Her chin dipped in a brief nod. Another explosion hit what was left of the ground floor. Cliff swiftly leaned over to shield her as flaming bits rained down around them. As soon as it stopped, he knelt beside her. “Y-Your eyes are glowing.” “It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. I just want to help. Are you injured?” He swept his hands over her in a quick, impersonal search for injuries, concerned by the splotches of blood that marred her clothing. “Th-there’s a woman,” she said. “Sadie. Sh-she’s old. She can’t make it down the stairs.” “I already got her to safety. Are you Emma?” Surprise lit her dark brown eyes as she nodded. “I think your arm is broken, Emma. I need to bind it.” Tearing a strip of cloth from his T-shirt, he wrapped it around a deep gash on her arm. Then he tore another and—preternaturally fast—fashioned a sling. She moaned. “Sorry,” he said, knowing every movement caused her pain. Nodding, she gritted her teeth. Her lips pressed tightly together as he lifted her into his arms, spawning even more pain. “I’m sorry,” he said again as he dashed over to the elevator shaft. She looped her free arm around his neck and looked over his shoulder. Her hold tightened. “Mercenaries,” she whispered in his ear, her warm breath sending a shiver through him. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll keep you safe.

His gaze held hers, making Emma feel as if she was the most beautiful and most loved woman in the world. Tonight he even sang, his deep voice joining Nat King Cole’s in professing her unforgettable as they danced beneath the moonlight. It was magical. He was magical. “I’m so in love with you,” she murmured. Smiling, he swiveled slightly and lowered her in a gentle dip. “You’re the love of my life, Emma.” She had never been happier than in that moment.

Athena was a pre-Greek divinity, honoured by the native Europeans whom the Greeks called Pelasgians, ‘neighbours.’ Like Medusa, she was originally a great cosmic Goddess of heaven and earth, the deity of life, death and regeneration who was venerated in Old Europe for thousands of years. She is connected by some with the North African Goddess Neith and with the Mesopotamian Inanna, known for her descent to and return from the underworld. Patriarchal portrayals of Athena emphasize her warlike aspect (and there is evidence that her warrior traits were later acquisitions), and some pacifist feminist scholars find Athena problematic for this reason. It is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt to resolve the question of the origin of Athena’s warrior nature—Medusa may also have been a woman warrior, perhaps a North African Amazon priestess and queen.

*I have gone to seek out the nature of justice. Somewhere in this world there must be a good true way to live.* I knew very little about what she did after that. But I do know what turned her. I know where she began her descent toward the killing woman in the marsh.

But Manila was another life. It was another time. It was universes behind me. The woman who lived there, sheltered and shackled and dreaming of another place, such as this, this magical spot under the start-of-autumn sky adorned with brown leaves preparing for their eventual descent to the earth, this quiet side street near the busy, bustling Old Port in old Quebec, was no longer me.

In the Neolithic period, throughout Europe and the Near East, there appear figurines which represent bird/women, snake/women, and bird/snake/woman hybrids. Since Goddesses with bird and snake iconography appear in early historic religions, such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it has been theorized that the figurines represent powerful divine female figures in the Neolithic cultures of Europe and the Near East. The “stiff white nude” figures of the Cyclades, Anatolia, and the Balkans may be death figures, but a pregnant Cycladic figure demonstrates that the Goddess serves regeneration as well as death. Early historic textual evidence of this may be found in the Sumerian Descent of Inanna, where the Underworld Goddess and Goddess of death, Ereshkigal, is in the process of giving birth. Just as the more ancient figures, Medusa too is winged, and she has snaky hair: that is, she embodies both the serpentine and the avian aspects of the Neolithic bird/snake Goddess, even though she does not have these characteristics in her earliest depictions. The bird/snake Goddess represents the continuum of birth, life, death, rebirth. The realms of the bird and snake cover all of the worlds; the realm of the bird is the heavens, while waterbirds also occupy the waters. That of the snake is the earth and Underworld, and likewise water snakes occupy the waters. Both bird and snake embody graphic depictions of birth, since both are oviparous. Both creatures are graphic depictions of regeneration as well, since birds molt and snakes shed their skin. In Neolithic Europe, death and rebirth were tied together in the tomb which served as a ritual place for rebirth: the tomb was also the womb. In her death aspect, a Goddess such as Medusa turns people to stone—a form of death, since all human activity ceases for those thus ossified.  Read against the iconographies of the bird/snake goddesses, one can identify ways in which the Underworld Goddess, the death Goddess, gives birth to life. Like Ereshkigal, with her leeky hair, Medusa with her snaky hair is also a birth-giver. But in Medusa’s case, she gives birth as she is dying, whereas in the earlier, Sumerian myth the process of death led to regeneration; the Goddess of the Underworld did not have to die in the process of giving birth; she who presided over death presided over rebirth. The winged snake Goddess, before her head is severed by Perseus, is whole; in prehistory she would have been a Goddess of all of the worldly realms. When Medusa’s head is severed, she becomes disembodied. Disembodied wisdom is very dangerous. Hence, she becomes monstrous. It is her chthonic self which the Classical world acknowledges: Medusa becomes the snaky-haired severed head, a warning to all women to hide their powers, their totalities. This fearsome aspect goes two ways: she can destroy, but she also brings protection.

The process of retrieving the treasure and figuring out how to replenish oneself develops four vital constructs in the psyche. When this dilemma is met head-on, and the descent to the Río Abajo Río, river beneath the river, is made, it fiercely strengthens our resolve to strive for conscious reclamation. It clarifies, over time, what it is that is most important to us. It fills us up with the need to have a plan for freeing ourselves psychically or otherwise and to enact our newly found wisdom. Finally, and most importantly, it develops our medial nature, that wild and knowing part of psyche that can also traverse the world of soul and the world of humans. The archetypal core of the “Sealskin, Soulskin” story is extremely valuable, for it gives clear and pithy directions for the exact steps we must take in order to develop and find our way through these tasks. One of the central and most potentially destructive issues women face is that

Young woman, kindly leave that noise to horses. I am not accustomed to such a response in polite society, least of all when I am speaking. But I daresay that, considering your descent, one cannot expect much better. So,

When the woman parted from her group and went up a side chute away from the river, he thought she had gone to defecate. It was a racial perversity that the humans always went alone like this. At their moment of greatest vulnerability, with their bowels open and ankles trapped by clothing and clouds of odor spreading through the tunnel, just when they most needed their comrades gathered around for protection, each insisted on solitude. But to his surprise, the female didn’t void her bowels. Rather, she bathed.

She was mortal, wasn’t she? The woman who brought the food to us?” Cutting up his roasted meat into neat pieces that all appeared to be the same size, he nodded. “She is.” Then she must be a Descenter, a mortal of Solis. I used to wonder what sort of hardships someone had to face in their life to lead them to support the Dark One and the fallen kingdom. But that was before I knew the truth. Now, I wondered what hardship had awoken her to the truth.

In front of the woman, there was a white ceramic plate with a chunk of bloody meat on top. There was a bloody fork and knife on the right side. Russell's bottom lip quivered from the shocking sight – a woman reduced to a slab of bloodied flesh for a man's sick appetite. He was utterly appalled by the discovery. The descent was never-ending. He was being led to the pits of hell – torture, rape, murder, incest, necrophilia, and cannibalism.

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

So you should continually keep in mind the great humiliation which the Lord took upon Himself in His ineffable love for us: how the divine Logos dwelt in a womb; how He took human nature upon Himself; His birth from a woman; His gradual bodily growth; the shame He suffered, the insults, vilification, ridicule and abuse; how He was scourged and spat upon, derided and mocked; the scarlet robe, the crown of thorns; His condemnation by those in power; the outcry of the unruly Jews, men of His own race, against Him: 'Away with him, away with him, crucify him' (John 19:15); the cross, the nails, the lance, the drink of vinegar and gall; the scorn of the Gentiles; the derision of the passers-by who said: 'If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross and we will believe you' (cf Matt. 27:39-42); and the rest of the sufferings which He patiently accepted for us: crucifixion; death; the three-day burial; the descent into hell.

When I read and watch Donald Trump shrug off or Twitter away that global warming is a hoax, his brushoffs don’t have the fire and passion of other things he off-handedly rejects. It’s a good sign recognizable to anyone loving Geminis in his or her life. I have a dear elder brother who’s an intellectually vibrant Gemini. I’ve also delved deep into the romantic and psychological depths with a lover born under the sign of “The Twins.” Thus from long and first-hand experience I contend that I can correctly sense the moment a Gemini’s stance on something is going void of course. There’s a little less feistiness. A tone of indifference grows. I can detect the subtle disengagement growing in Trump’s voice. If I’m not being fooled that there isn’t a new descent into deeper disinterest, the change in tone foreshadows a Gemini minded man or woman is about to shift gears

subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: ’I called my donkey a horse gone wonky.’ Throughout most of the

holy scripture was believed to justify her subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: ’I called my donkey a

as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: ’I called my donkey

The essence of the tribal lineage was the descent of property through the male line. But producing a male heir under medieval conditions of short life expectancy and high infant mortality was far from a sure thing. So the tribes had various strategies for keeping wealth within the lineage. These included cousin marriage, divorce if a woman bore no heir, adoption and the levirate (marrying of widows to their husband’s brother). In addition, women were not allowed to own property.

The Church cooperated fully with the Nazis "in sorting out people of Jewish descent. . . . "A priest wrote in the Klerusblatt, "We shall do our best to help in this service to the people." The Church continued this diabolical "cooperation" all through the war, even when being Jewish meant "deportation and outright physical destruction."9 The Church was well aware of the Jews' dread fate. In a speech on January 30, 1939, only months before his attack upon Poland began the war, Hitler had declared that if war broke out it would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race.

There is a misperception about black women in society. When a black woman presents expectations to a man, she is seen as needy, bossy and a gold digger. When a woman who is not of African American descent expresses the same thing from a man, she is seen as a trophy wife. When a woman of European descent presents the same thing, she is viewed as a classy woman with standards. When a woman of European descent presents the same standards as a black woman, the Caucasian woman is credited for implementing rules of dating when she expects a man to pay for dinner or when she tells a man what she desires out of a relationship. The value of African American women is reduced not only by dominant culture and society, but by men, particularly African American men. The media, radio, music, television, newspapers and movies have devalued African American women when in reality African American women are honorable, respectable, classy, elegant, beautiful, educated and hardworking women. Dark skin women are viewed as angry, unattractive and uneducated within modern society. African American women are seen as loud, irate, insensitive and angry women as a result of labels from some African American men, media, movies and music. Television, magazines, social media, internet, videos and some music present Hispanic, Latino, White and Armenian women as trophy wives, idols and models while presenting African American women as mistresses, one night stands, casual sex, gold diggers and “baby mamas.” Latino and Dominican women are viewed as physically beautiful while Caucasian women are viewed as ideal and classy within media, music, music videos and movies. Media presents black women as bitter, scorned, ghetto, ratchet and promiscuous as if women of other races do not exhibit those characteristics. Women of other races are on television and the internet using profanity, fighting, engaging in sexual acts and cheating, however, there is an emphasis on African American women who exhibit those behaviors” (McEachern 85).

but herself. The small woman doctor walked ahead of him. Her brother walked on the other side of the bed and a man she didn’t

Women in this stage often begin to feel both desperate and adamant to go on this inward journey, no matter what. And so they do, as they leave one life for another, or one stage of life for another, or sometimes even one lover for no other lover than themselves. Progressing from adolescence to young womanhood, or from married woman to spinster, or from mid-age to older, crossing over the crone line, setting out wounded but with one’s own new value system—that is death and resurgence. Leaving a relationship or the home of one’s parents, leaving behind outmoded values, becoming one’s own person, and sometimes, driving deep into the wildlands because one just must, all these are the fortune of the descent. So off we go down into a different light, under a different sky, with unfamiliar ground beneath our boots. And yet we go vulnerably, for we have no grasping, no holding on to, no clinging to, no knowing—for we have no hands.

There was no physical violence in Nadia’s home, and much giving to charity, but when after finishing university Nadia announced, to her family’s utter horror, and to her own surprise for she had not planned to say it, that she was moving out on her own, an unmarried woman, the break involved hard words on all sides, from her father, from her mother, even more so from her sister, and perhaps most of all from Nadia herself, such that Nadia and her family both considered her thereafter to be without a family, something all of them, all four, for the rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would ever act to repair, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of bafflement at how to go about doing so, and partly because the impending descent of their city into the abyss would come before they realized that they had lost the chance.

A white woman born in 1900 would have been among the first able to vote nationwide as soon as she turned twenty-one. Many immigrants of Asian descent born that same year wouldn’t have their citizenship approved until the year they turned fifty-two. An African American born at the turn of the twentieth century and living in the South may not have cast a ballot on Election Day until she was sixty-five years old.

It is one of those circular facts of history that, in the three great receiving cities to which southern blacks fled—the cities that drew Ida Mae, George, and Robert—blacks had been among the first nonnatives to set foot on the soil and to establish settlements centuries before. Black mestizos were among the forty-four Mexican settlers arriving in 1781 at the pueblo that would become Los Angeles. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a fur trader born of an African slave woman in Haiti, built, in 1779, the first permanent settlement in what is now known as Chicago.43 Jan Rodrigues, a sailor of African descent working for and later abandoned by Dutch merchants on an untamed island in the New World, created the first trading post on what is now known as Manhattan, in 1613.

For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband's descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.

Indeed, much of what Inanna symbolized for the Sumerians has since then been exiled. Most of the qualities held by the upper-world goddess have been desacralized in the West or taken over by masculine divinities, and/or they have been overly compressed or overly idealized by the patriarchal moral and aesthetic codes. Thus most of the Greek goddesses were swallowed up by their fathers; the Hebrew goddess was depotentiated. We are left with particularized or minimized goddesses. And most of the powers once held by the goddess have lost their connection to a woman's life: the embodied, playful, passionately erotic feminine; the powerful, independent, self-willed feminine; the ambitious, regal, many-sided feminine.

It gets better,” Dahlia promised. “This time you’re in—this is the descent. Every woman descends at least once in her life. She walks into the darkness, into the unknown, and she must strip herself of her old life before she can become something new. This is what the goddesses have done, and it is what we must also do to become better. To grow.

then, after her death, to Natalya Naryshkina, a woman of Tatar descent,

then, after her death, to Natalya Naryshkina, a woman of Tatar descent, who bore three children.

A wise woman keeps her psychic environ uncluttered. She accomplishes such by keeping a clear head, keeping a clear place for her work, working at completing her ideas and projects. For many women, this task requires that they clear a time each day for contemplation, for a space to live in that is clearly their own with paper, pens, paints, tools, conversations, time, freedoms that are for this work only. For many, psychoanalysis, contemplation, meditation, the taking of solitude, and other experiences of descent and transfor­mation provide this special time and place for the work. Each woman has her own preferences, her own way.

Darwin moved on from islands and tortoises in 1871, with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this work, Darwin stated his long-held belief that man and ape shared a common ancestor, which pissed off the churches and honest Godfearing folk He also argued that the male desire to excel was driven by female choosiness in selecting a mate (sexual selection) and that men choosing bigger and better weapons and tools over the years had caused them to "become superior to woman", which, unsurprisingly, pissed off a lot of women. Darwin also challenged the dominant view of the time that the human races were separate species, which pissed off the Confederate Americans, who argued that it was their inalienable right to own black folk who picked cotton for free.

Spokeswoman for the Dark Goddess is the crone. Her presence in a woman’s life is usually easy to spot. She appears whenever we experience any drastic and dramatic changes—the death of a loved one, loss of a job, disfiguration. She is the teacher who guides us through the transformation that is demanded of us. She is there in our deepest despair and at times when we connect most powerfully with our own creative fire. She is the handmaiden that nurtures us through dark nights once we are willing to make the descent into our own psyche and connect with whatever forms are sleeping there so that we can begin to live our own power. When these connections are made, she is present, too. She teaches us by her presence alone to become deeply and spontaneously sexual, assertive, straight, incorruptible, prophetic, intuitive, and free. All of these qualities are asking to arise at menopause, and all are gifts of the crone. They are, it must be said, also the qualities that most terrify the patriarchal culture in which we live.

The New Yorker, July 25, 2022 Issue When Tribal Nations Expel Their Black Members - Clashes between sovereignty rights and civil rights reveal an uncomfortable and complicated story about race and belonging in America. By Philip Deloria In 1979, an Oklahoma woman named Johnnie Mae Austin stopped getting mail from the Muscogee Nation. There were no more announcements of meetings, notices of elections, or news of monetary settlements. The problem wasn’t postal. Austin’s Muscogee citizenship had been erased by a new Muscogee constitution in which citizenship was defined “by blood,” words that named a fraught crossroads in Native and African American histories. The Muscogee people, also referred to as Creeks, were among the tribes that once enslaved people of African descent and that were required, in the wake of the Civil War, to accept them as tribal citizens. A tribal-enrollment census around the start of the twentieth century split the Muscogee citizenry into groups that were separate but by no means equal. One roll—the “by blood” roster—listed people of Creek heritage, while a second, “freedmen,” roll named Black Creek citizens, the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Austin’s ancestors appeared on the second roll. With the new constitution, Muscogee citizenship was reserved for those on the first roll, or their lineal descendants. And so Austin, after forty-seven years of being Creek, found her tribal identity legally and politically erased.

What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books. I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.

I always had a tender heart for the afflicted and especially those suffering in like manner, or the drug victims, of which there are over sixty thousand in Chicago—opium, morphine, laudanum, cocaine, chloral, hasheesh, etc. They are not alone in the slums, but you will find them in the palatial homes of our fair city, and the only institution that is holding out a helping hand is The St. Luke Society, where hundreds have been cured and both the slum and palace homes made happy.

In 1894, while attending to some legal matters, my lawyer, who noticed that I was suffering from a severe cold, advised me to try Birney’s Catarrh Remedy. He gave me a bottle and that started me on my downward course. From a well-balanced Christian woman, I became a haggard and wretched physical and mental wreck.

These and other incidents only go to show that drug fiends have a sort of superhuman smartness in evading the detection of crime.

I never used any other drug but the clear cocaine and I believe that I am the only living person in the world to-day who ever took two hundred grains in twenty-four hours and survived.” Annie C. Meyers The autobiographical Eight Years in Cocaine Hell (1902) recounts in shockingly straightforward style the transformation of Annie C. Meyers, affluent and well-connected Chicago widow, to junkie, thief, forger, inventor of the ‘Cocaine Dance’, and ultimately authoress of the first drug confessional written by a woman.

Her book established a literary genre, and her case helped to outlaw cocaine.” Stuart Walton, Intoxicology

The victims of these drug and liquor habits need care and sympathy and should be gathered into such places as The St. Luke Society, of which I shall speak more further on, instead of sending them to the Bridewell, or jails where they are hardened and every good impulse is soon forgotten.

* Behind him, Lex’s pursuers held their guns sideways on and low. They kept them down by their hips, hidden in the folds of their jackets. Both of them fired, but even with their specialised training, their shots were off-target by too great a margin. One round blasted a discarded water bottle sitting on a step, the other blew up a puff of rock dust a few inches from the target’s feet. Again, the faces of bystanders started to turn in his direction. ‘He is going to kill himself,’ said the male assassin through the wireless communication node adhered to his throat. This was unexpected. ‘No,’ said the woman, her reply tickling him through his skin. ‘I don’t think so . . .’ The target’s arm came down in a sharp motion, and the object he had strapped to his back snapped open into a blossom of bright orange fabric and fine white cords. The thin material immediately caught the steady breeze and inflated into a narrow rectangle with a kite-like cross-section. ‘A parachute?’ The man disregarded protocol and launched forward, hoping to get to the target before he could step off the ledge. The compact canopy filled with wind, drawing shouts of surprise from the assembled tourists in the square, and the target pushed off the side of Mdina’s battlements and into the air. The woman grabbed her partner by the shoulder and pulled him back. ‘Wait.’ She was already putting her weapon away. He resisted, irritated at the idea of missing the kill. The chute was little better than a gimmick, a toy that would barely slow the target’s descent. If he got to the edge, if the woman covered him, he might still be able to hit the mark. It was galling to think that this civilian would escape them. ‘Both of you stand away,’ said a third voice. ‘I have this.

According to pre-Columbian legend, the Cihuateteos . . . were the spirits of pregnant women who died in childbirth. They immediately became warriors because they had died in battle--the struggle in life to produce "a new life for the empire." This deified the women's souls, since their spiritual role complemented that of the male warrior, who assisted the sun in its journey across the sky. The spirits of these females supposedly carried the sun from its midday zenith to the west, it's place of descent. The spirits of male warriors carried the sun from daybreak to its zenith. The grieving husbands were expected to safeguard the bodies of their deceased wives, becaise young warriors would mutilate and steal the middle finger from the left hand of a Cihueteteo as a talisman. These feared women were associated with bodies of water, the transformative element of the journey of death, and crossroads. They were believed to return to earth on five special days each year to torment children. Thus the legend ofmthe Llorona, the weeping woman, emerged from this ancient myth.

Before leaving the city I purchased $75 worth of cocaine. Had the whole police force been at my back I would not have left the city until I had my cocaine.

Cocaine gives an exhilarating feeling, brightens up the intellect for the time being, and makes one very fluent in conversation. I am informed that a great many of our speakers use cocaine before they step on the platform, and many of our best writers do their best work while under the influence of the drug. It is commonly reported that Edgar Allan Poe was an opium eater, and Dante’s Inferno was written while under its influence.

Cocaine has only been used about twenty years and has made more wrecks and caused more havoc than all the other drugs combined, as it is the only drug that will soften the bones and eat the flesh. It is worse than leprosy and many thought I had leprosy, as the bones were coming out and I lost my teeth and part of my jaw bone while using it.

While patent medicines are largely responsible for the increase of these pernicious habits, reputable physicians are not by any means free from blame. Most of them are altogether too ready to prescribe them for the relief of pain, even when it is but a slight twinge, and the habit of flying to this temporary relief soon be comes confirmed and cannot be shaken off. It was indeed recently asserted in an eastern paper that a large number of physicians are victims themselves to the cocaine and morphine habit. A large percentage of the patients treated at The St. Luke Society are physicians in good standing.

Eight Years in Cocaine Hell was published in 1902 and is viewed by historians as the first memoir of addiction to be written by a woman.

found her lying on the bed, turned over on her face, frothing at the mouth and in spasms. I sent for Doctor Rittenhouse. He came and said, ‘she has taken some deadly poison.’ He administered all the aid in his power, but thinking the case hopeless, made out a death certificate, so that I would not have any trouble, and she lay in this condition one week before she recognized me.

Families are important in all societies, and their core is a mother and her biological children. All societies have marriage. A man and a woman enter a publicly acknowledged alliance whose primary goal is children; the man has a “right” of exclusive sexual access to the woman; and they both are obligated to invest in their children. The details vary, often according to the patterns of blood relationships in the society. Generally, when men can be confident that they are the fathers of their wives’ children, nuclear families form, usually near the husband’s extended kin. In the smaller number of societies where men are not so confident (for example, when they are away for long stretches of military service or farm labor), families live near the mother’s kin, and children’s principal male benefactors are their closest blood relatives, their maternal uncles. Even then, biological fatherhood is recognized and valued. Both sides of the extended family take an interest in the marriage and the children, and the children feel solidarity with both sides, even when the official rules of descent recognize only one side (as in our own surnames, which are reckoned according to the father’s family).

I don’t have her saved in my phone as Mercy Cock Gobbler Lewis for nothing. The woman knows how to suck a fucking cock.

I entered "a car" "in which I seemed" "to see double" "Each person I" "looked at seemed" "spread out" "as if doubled" "Gradually" "I perceived that" "each person" "was surrounded by a ghostly" "second image" "was encased in it" "&& each" "of those images," "those encasings," "was exactly the same" "each was in fact" "the tyrant" "Though colorless," "a gray ghost of him" "But he bent & swayed" "& walked with" "every person, his" "expression" "always" "the same:" "mild & benign" "And he encased many" "men not so" "uncomfortably" "But others," "especially women," "looked as if they" "suffered from" "trying" "to fit inside" "this other" "As if his form" "squeezed theirs," "their breasts & hips," "very painfully—" "his long thin streamlined form" "One woman" "tried to cast him off," "shake him off" "Writhed & jumped" "Then I felt him" "begin to encase me" "He sank down" "into my head" "into my thoughts," "which instantly" "separated" "assumed a terrifying" "strict order" "unfamiliar" "to me" "Each felt distinct" "from each," "arranged" "in a progression" "My head" "contained an army" "of separate" "same-shape thoughts" "Soldiers" "soldiers marching" "Never touching each" "other" "It wasn't" "wasn't" "like a mind" "No thought felt true" "Thoughts felt efficient" "He squeezed on me" "would squeeze away" "my shape" "I cast him off" "& ran" "from the car

After I wrote about my engagement, the “manosphere” blog Free Northerner declared me “The Archetypal Modern Woman.” The post detailed at length my “descent into absolute sluttery,” only to emerge with a fiancé in my late twenties. This was, the post argued, so often how it went these days. Women slept around with “alphas” only to eventually marry poor “betas,” who acted as the burdened financial providers for their “ex-slut” wives, as one commenter put it. “Alpha fux, beta bux,” they called it. Never mind that few of the men I’d either slept or relationshipped with fell into stark survival-of-the-fittest categories.

As for me, I have a quiet respect for a woman who sees what she wants and goes after it.

Her golden wolf-woman

The patriarchal ego of both men and women, to earn its instinct-disciplining, striving, progressive, and heroic stance, has fled from the full-scale awe of the goddess. Or it has tried to slay her, or at least to dismember and thus depotentiate her. But it is towards her-and especially towards her culturally repressed aspects, those chthonic and chaotic, ineluctable depths-that the new individuating, yin-yang balanced ego must return to find its matrix and the embodied and flexible strength to be active and vulnerable, to stand its own ground and still to be empathetically related to others. This return is often seen as part of the developmental pat tern of women-what Erich Neumann calls a reconnection to the Self (the archetype of wholeness and regulating center of the personality) after the wrenching away from the mother by the patriarchal uroboros and the patriarchal marriage partner.2 But Adrienne Rich speaks for many of us when she writes, “The woman I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.” Unfortunately, all too many modern women have not been nurtured by the mother in the first place. Instead, they have grown up in the difficult home of abstract, collective authority-"cut off at the ankles from earth,” as one woman put it-full of superego shoulds and oughts. Or they have identified with the father and their patriarchal culture, thus alienating themselves from their own feminine ground and the personal mother, whom they have often seen as weak or irrelevant. Such women have all the more necessity to meet the goddess in her primal reality. This inner connection is an initiation essential for most modern women in the Western world: without it we are not whole. The process requires both a sacrifice of our identity as spiritual daughters of the patriarchy and a descent into the spirit of the goddess, because so much of the power and passion of the feminine has been dormant in the underworld—in exile for five thousand years.