Desired Goddess Quotes

Alas," said Aslan, shaking his head. "It will. Things always work according to their nature. She has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.

I want you, Anastasia,” he murmurs. “I love and I hate, and I love arguing with you. It’s very new. I need to know that we’re okay. It’s the only way I know how.” “My feelings for you haven’t changed,” I whisper. His proximity is overwhelming, exhilarating. The familiar pull is there, all my synapses goading me toward him, my inner goddess at her most libidinous. Staring at the patch of hair in the V of his shirt, I bite my lip, helpless, driven by desire—I want to taste him there. He’s so close, but he doesn’t touch me. His heat is warming my skin. “I’m not going to touch you until you say yes,” he says softly. “But right now, after a really shitty morning, I want to bury myself in you and just forget everything but us.

Athena called, "Annabeth Chase, my own daughter." Annabeth squeezed my arm, then walked forward and knelt at her mother's feet. Athena smiled. "You, my daughter, have exceeded all expectations. You have used your wits, your strength, and your courage to defend this city, and our seat of power. It has come to our attention that Olympus is...well, trashed. The Titan lord did much damage that will have to be repaired. We could rebuild it by magic, of course, and make it just as it was. But the gods feel that the city could be improved. We will take this as an opportunity. And you, my daughter, will design these improvements." Annabeth looked up, stunned. "My...my lady?" Athena smiled wryly. "You are an architect, are you not? You have studied the techniques of Daedalus himself. Who better to redesign Olympus and make it a monument that will last for another eon?" "You mean...I can design whatever I want?" "As your heart desires," the goddess said. "Make us a city for the ages." "As long as you have plenty of statues of me," Apollo added. "And me," Aphrodite agreed. "Hey, and me!" Ares said. "Big statues with huge wicked swords and-" All right!" Athena interrupted. "She gets the point. Rise, my daughter, official architect of Olympus.

Endeavors that help me satisfy you, my goddess of desire, pleasure, and corny one-liners.

Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do.

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was Lilith Eve Hagar Jezebel Delilah Pandora Jahi Tamar and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was Kali Fatima Artemis Hera Isis Mary Ishtar and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was Bathsheba Vashti Cleopatra Helen Salome Elizabeth Clytemnestra Medea and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was Joan Circe Morgan le Fay Tiamat Maria Leonza Medusa and they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired, and worshiped.

I met Anne in the autumn... Autumn, that wild season when rural men rack orchard trees with sticks and weep with the desire to kiss faraway Demeter’s supple breasts—to set lips to her travel-swollen eyes. They seek goddesses, but I desired only Anne.

Every love does not have to be made of desire. Some loves are kept for the people who stand by you through everything. Some soulmates are sisters not lovers. Some loves are for those who give you hope. And some for the strength, for wisdom, for dreams.

This is what men risk so much for; this shiver, this acute heat and desire. This is what they think eternity feels like.

Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe.

When you see a man struggling financially, usually it's because he simply lacks a perfect muse.

The Goddess falls in love with Herself, drawing forth her own emanation, which takes on a life of its own. Love of self for self is the creative force of the universe. Desire is the primal energy, and that energy is erotic: the attraction of lover to beloved, of planet to star, the lust of electron for proton. Love is the glue that holds the world together.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.

Then you my goddess with your immortal lips smiling Would ask what now afflicts me, why again I am calling and what now I with my restive heart Desired: Whom now shall I beguile To bring you to her love? Who now injures you, Sappho? For if she flees, soon shall she chase And, rejecting gifts, soon shall she give. If she does not love you, she shall do so soon Whatsoever is her will. Come to me now to end this consuming pain Bringing what my heart desires to be brought: Be yourself my ally in this fight.

The mirror sighed and spoke in a tone tinged with melancholy. Its language was old and not of any of the worlds known or unknown. What you dream, what you darkly desire, Find it by trial or by fire. Seek it high and seek it low, Search the skies or the realms below. Look everywhere but beware, The deepest magic, the strongest spell Will not change what the stars foretell.

The White Goddess All saints revile her, and all sober men Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean - In scorn of which we sailed to find her In distant regions likeliest to hold her Whom we desired above all things to know, Sister of the mirage and echo. It was a virtue not to stay, To go our headstrong and heroic way Seeking her out at the volcano's head, Among pack ice, or where the track had faded Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers: Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's, Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips, With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips. The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir Will celebrate with green the Mother, And every song-bird shout awhile for her; But we are gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the—

What I desire desires me.

This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, to Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, to Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who such the blood of men since they desire to become men, to the Lalussu, who haunt the places of men, to Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of Courage and Bravery, to Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire, to Ix Tab, Goddess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, twin brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook, the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins. To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested…. NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

She has won her heart’s desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.

Among my greatest loves is the act of being pinned and invaded – not by one, or two or three, but by many, one after the other. What it is to lose yourself among many, so that your identity exists only as ‘woman’: a goddess of flesh and desire. No names, no promises, no social niceties, no conversational conventions: only lust and fulfillment.” Mademoiselle Noire - in The Gentlemen's Club

The willow is full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendevous, it says. Terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire... Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I'm a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness.

A defense strategy favored by many “spiritual” people is an elaborate form of denial, an assertion that the individual has “gone beyond” the shadow qualities of sexuality, anger, passion, desire, and self-interest. Many religions cater exclusively to this strategy. Priests, ministers, gurus, and “enlightened masters” who adopt a posture of transcendent superiority have great appeal to people with similar defense systems, who are able to escape their personal confrontations by identifying as members of an elite, 'enlightened' group.

She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.

When you dance, sister, you feel in your heart the blessing of the Goddess, her peace, her kindness. But when you are with him, then the power of the Goddess is in your heart, crashing through you. The Goddess is no thing of stone. The Goddess is breath, desire, despair. She is the green of the brushing leaf, the baby's cry, the lovers bite, the fragrance of the rose. You feel the Goddess moving through you.

The goddess in you slowly dies each time you choose to be liked or reasonably considered over being overwhelmingly desired and passionately chased after.

Ladies, your sensuality is our divinity. #men

This goddess is a candescent creature - and all that brings light will bring shade.

If it will give you any satisfaction in the end, I still care for you. Either there is no such thing as love, or the word does not mean what I have thought it to mean on many different occasions. It is a feeling without a name, really—better to leave it at that. So take it and go away and have your fun with it. You know that we would both be at one another's throats again one day, as soon as we run out of common enemies. We had many fine reconciliations, but were they ever worth the pain that preceded them? Know that you have won and that you are the goddess I worship—for are not worship and religious awe a combination of love and hate, desire and fear?

When we create a life based on what we think we are supposed to do rather than from our own heart's desire, we always feel like something is missing, that we are not quite free. There is a deeper longing that keeps calling us to stop conforming, to break the chains of our fears, to jump the fence of people's opinions and find our innate wild happiness. Inside,

LYSISTRATA By the Goddesses, you'll find that here await you Four companies of most pugnacious women Armed cap-a-pie from the topmost louring curl To the lowest angry dimple. MAGISTRATE

When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes

In life, if a door closes, all you need to do is move to the window; as long as your whiskers can clear the space you will move through effortlessly. quote by T.G. the "Feline Goddess of Everything and Everyone

That was seven years ago—a day after she lost all her memories. Also, the day that started it all. The day that kicked off her desire to speak that kept growing, and it will keep growing until she craves to become a goddess one day. Either to save the world as a hero or to destroy it, crafting a villain’s ballad.

Goddess,” he rasped, running his hands over her hips, up her legs. “Lover,” she whispered back, threading the fingers of her right hand through the fingers of his left and moving his hand to her breast. It was heavy and swollen and ripe with desire. He scraped his thumb over her nipple, loving the way she closed her eyes and hummed in appreciation. He loved that she was in charge. He loved how she took pleasure from his body with such confident leisure. He loved how she squeezed her innermost muscles in pulse after deliberate, exquisite pulse as she rode his length. He loved how he was just that to her, her lover, not Nick Blackthorne rock star, but just the man she gave her body, her heart, her soul to. He loved her. Everything about her.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.

The deep Feminine, the mystery of consciousness, She who is life, is longing for our transformation as much as we are. She holds back, allowing us free reign to choose, nudging us occasionally with synchronicities, illness, births and deaths… But when we make space for Her, she rushes into all the gaps, engulfing us with her desire for life and expression. This is what She longs for, this is what we are for: experiencing the Feminine through ourselves. We simply need to slow down, and find where to put our conscious attention. And it is this, this willingness to look again, this willingness to put consciousness onto our places of unconscious, to express what we have always avoided, which starts the process of unblocking, so that She may flow through.

Sing, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us.

She and I will become one someday soon. So much so, that none will know where I begin and she ends. This I know…

she worked and prayed for the welfare of humans for over ten million years. Then she was transformed into a goddess whose only desire was to ease the world’s pain.

When we create a life based on what we think we are supposed to do rather than from our own heart's desire, we always feel like something is missing, that we are not quite free.

A spell is a symbolic act done in an altered state of consciousness, in order to cause a desired change.

She was holiness and blasphemy all in one. A goddess of desire and innocence.

How did you… never mind. I keep forgetting you are a demon and can travel anywhere in the blink of an eye.” “And don’t you forget it. Anything you desire can be yours in a matter of moments.

The hunter who consistently brought meat back displayed daring and courage, two qualities that females desired in a potential mate. Thus hunting possessed an erotic overtone: meat was an aphrodisiac.

I'll be honest with you, the number one reason for all of my past break ups was too much complacency. I'm not perfect, but I just know I'm not cut out for mediocrity in any shape or form. Moreover, I think this has a lot to do with my life purpose as well. I believe I was not brought into this world to turn complacent women into passionate women, but rather to turn passionate women into goddesses.

Izanami - over the long years that she had handed out death - had become a true goddess, and not just that: the quintessential destroyer […] she was the goddess who invited our desire and also our defilement; she bore the weight of the past and lived on into the future for ever. The realisation filled me with overwhelming awe.

The love of the Goddess is unconditional. She does not ask for sacrifice—whether human or animal—nor does She want us to sacrifice our normal human needs and desires. Witchcraft is a religion of self-celebration, not self-abnegation.

Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worst suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most. This, and the pretense that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slam of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meaning are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mothers was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look - my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

When kindled was the fire, with sober face Unto Diana spoke she in that place. “O thou chaste goddess of the wildwood green, By whom all heaven and earth and sea are seen, Queen of the realm of Pluto, dark and low, Goddess of maidens, that my heart dost know For all my years, and knowest what I desire, Oh, save me from thy vengeance and thine ire That on Actaeon fell so cruelly. Chaste goddess, well indeed thou knowest that I Desire to be a virgin all my life, Nor ever wish to be man’s love or wife. I am, thou know’st, yet of thy company, A maid, who loves the hunt and venery, And to go rambling in the greenwood wild, And not to be a wife and be with child. I do not crave the company of man.

Credomancy may seek to exploit the human desire for a tidy narrative where an unblemished romantic hero vanquishes all obstacles, but such ideals have very little to with reality. Reality requites pragmatism and compromise. Men fail. Women fail. There are no heroes, only human beings who somehow find the strength to behave heroically, no matter how many times they have been unable to do so in the past. If you understand that, Miss Edwards - if you truly and deeply understand that, then you will understand the most powerful thing anyone with a heart can understand.” “And what’s that?” Emily said softly. “That love is not enough. But it’s a start.

Not to waste the spring I threw down everything, And ran into the open world To sing what I could sing... To dance what I could dance! And join with everyone! I wandered with a reckless heart beneath the newborn sun. First stepping through the blushing dawn, I crossed beneath a garden bower, counting every hermit thrush, counting every hour. When morning's light was ripe at last, I stumbled on with reckless feet; and found two nymphs engaged in play, approaching them stirred no retreat. With naked skin, their weaving hands, in form akin to Calliope's maids, shook winter currents from their hair to weave within them vernal braids. I grabbed the first, who seemed the stronger by her soft and dewy leg, and swore blind eyes, Lest I find I, before Diana, a hunted stag. But the nymphs they laughed, and shook their heads. and begged I drop beseeching hands. For one was no goddess, the other no huntress, merely two girls at play in the early day. "Please come to us, with unblinded eyes, and raise your ready lips. We will wash your mouth with watery sighs, weave you springtime with our fingertips." So the nymphs they spoke, we kissed and laid, by noontime's hour, our love was made, Like braided chains of crocus stems, We lay entwined, I laid with them, Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea, Our bodies draping wearily. We slept, I slept so lucidly, with hopes to stay this memory. I woke in dusty afternoon, Alone, the nymphs had left too soon, I searched where perched upon my knees Heard only larks' songs in the trees. "Be you, the larks, my far-flung maids? With lilac feet and branchlike braids... Who sing sweet odes to my elation, in your larking exaltation!" With these, my clumsy, carefree words, The birds they stirred and flew away, "Be I, poor Actaeon," I cried, "Be dead… Before they, like Hippodamia, be gone astray!" Yet these words, too late, remained unheard, By lark, that parting, morning bird. I looked upon its parting flight, and smelled the coming of the night; desirous, I gazed upon its jaunt, as Leander gazes Hellespont. Now the hour was ripe and dark, sensuous memories of sunlight past, I stood alone in garden bowers and asked the value of my hours. Time was spent or time was tossed, Life was loved and life was lost. I kissed the flesh of tender girls, I heard the songs of vernal birds. I gazed upon the blushing light, aware of day before the night. So let me ask and hear a thought: Did I live the spring I’d sought? It's true in joy, I walked along, took part in dance, and sang the song. and never tried to bind an hour to my borrowed garden bower; nor did I once entreat a day to slumber at my feet. Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o'er crests of trees, to none belong; o'er crests of trees of drying dew, their larking flight, my hands, eschew Thus I'll say it once and true… From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

Close your eyes, Matt, and focus on third eye, the second chakra of your being. Open third eye and you will feel energy of other river as it flows. And energy of Goddess.” He closed his eyes. He could sense the energy of the woman next to him and the power of desire. He felt warmth and a sense of belonging here. But that was all.

She loved Patroklos, she loved Meryapi, and it had nothing to do with desire, only joy—to see them was joy; to breathe with them was joy; to ride with Patroklos on a cattle raid was joy; scanning the pines for ambush was joy; holding the shield to protect them from Anyasha’s arrows was joy. If she failed, they would die together, and that too was joy.

When we chase a body. When we chase a goal weight. A dress size. A physique. It’s not the body itself we truly desire. It is the feeling.

We know that love and desire can play havoc with our lives, but we are human and complicated.

Something burned in the pit of my stomach. A desire to do well, to live up to my father's name. Even if no one ever knew it but me.

To Hera O Royal Hera of majestic mien, aerial-form'd, divine, Zeus' blessed queen, Thron'd in the bosom of cærulean air, the race of mortals is thy constant care. The cooling gales thy pow'r alone inspires, which nourish life, which ev'ry life desires. Mother of clouds and winds, from thee alone producing all things, mortal life is known: All natures share thy temp'rament divine, and universal sway alone is thine. With founding blasts of wind, the swelling sea and rolling rivers roar, when shook by thee. Come, blessed Goddess, fam'd almighty queen, with aspect kind, rejoicing and serene.

Goddess-nurse of the young, give ear to my prayer, and grant that this woman may reject the love-embraces of youth and dote on grey-haired old men whose powers are dulled, but whose hearts still desire.

She could sense the desire pouring off the man in front of her, and to be wanted so obviously, so fiercely, went to her head like moonshine. He made her feel like a goddess. Provided goddesses got this horny.

  With Goddess-like demeanour forth she went;   Not unattended, for on her as Queen   A pomp of winning Graces waited still,   And from about her shot Darts of desire   Into all Eyes to wish her still in sight.

Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong. Istanbul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hashish eaters. In truth, there was no Istanbul. There were multiple Istanbuls – struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that, in the end, only one could survive. There was, for instance, an ancient Istanbul designed to be crossed on foot or by boat – the city of itinerant dervishes, fortune-tellers, matchmakers, seafarers, cotton fluffers, rug beaters and porters with wicker baskets on their backs … There was modern Istanbul – an urban sprawl overrun with cars and motorcycles whizzing back and forth, construction trucks laden with building materials for more shopping centres, skyscrapers, industrial sites … Imperial Istanbul versus plebeian Istanbul; global Istanbul versus parochial Istanbul; cosmopolitan Istanbul versus philistine Istanbul; heretical Istanbul versus pious Istanbul; macho Istanbul versus a feminine Istanbul that adopted Aphrodite – goddess of desire and also of strife – as its symbol and protector … Then there was the Istanbul of those who had left long ago, sailing to faraway ports. For them this city would always be a metropolis made of memories, myths and messianic longings, forever elusive like a lover’s face receding in the mist.

It is not easy for us to equal the goddesses in beauty of form [...] Adonis desire and Afroditi poured nectar from a gold pitcher with hands Persuasion the Geraistion shrine lovers of no one I shall enter desire

What he was referring to is the fact that there are two worlds: the true glory of Sophia and the false world of the Demiurge. The false world of the Demiurge seems the same as the world of Sophia, except that it is, to use a metaphor, colorless. The world of the Demiurge is the world as it seems to people obsessed with material possessions, attracted by the desire to control the realm of the Goddess Sophia, people who prefer the artificial to the authentic, people in the clutches of delusional poisonous drugs, people with addictions to other people and alcohol, as well as food, spending, pornography, gambling, angry people who are fixated with politics and financial issues; people who are full of illusory worries about possible future events rather than living in the authentic present now, people who see the world through the eyes of the media and people who are completely isolated from themselves emotionally. These people never 'see' and never 'hear' the real world around and within them. They live in the false duplicate reality of the Earth manufactured by Yaldabaoth. This facsimile is an illusory world.

The word shakti means “power.” Shakti, the innate power in reality, has five “faces.” It manifests as the power to be conscious, the power to feel ecstasy, the power of will or desire, the power to know, and the power to act.

She is the thing that I need right now. It pains me to admit it. That I’ve succumbed to such libertine ways. At the end of the day, I am a mere mortal. A slave to my hedonistic desires. And she is a goddess on pointes. A goddess I want to debase in every imaginable way.

You die, O thrice desired, And my desire has flown like a dream. Gone with you is the girdle of my beauty, But I myself must live who am a goddess And may not follow you. Kiss me yet once again, the last, long kiss, Until I draw your soul within my lips And drink down all your love.

His body is a masterpiece, inked in stories I long to trace. Each muscle, carved like a goddess’ desire, tempts my fingertips to linger. His smile disarms me, melts my doubts into longing. His voice—low, smooth—sends shivers down my spine. And his touch… oh, his touch—electric, addictive, unforgettable. Against his chest, I find solace, the rhythm of his heartbeat my lullaby. His ambition is wildfire, a force that builds empires— Yet in my arms, he is simply mine. Imperfect, yet perfect in every way that matters. I don’t yet know his love, but I crave the way it would feel. And something tells me, maybe, he craves me too.

That reminded him of how thrifty she was, and he promptly decided-at least for the moment-that her thriftiness was one of her most endearingly amusing qualities. “What are you thinking about?” she asked. He tipped his chin down so that he could better see her and brushed a stray lock of golden hair off her cheek. “I was thinking how wise I must be to have known within minutes of meeting you that you were wonderful.” She chuckled, thinking his words were teasing flattery. “How soon did my qualities become apparent?” “I’d say,” he thoughtfully replied, “I knew it when you took sympathy on Galileo.” She’d expected him to say something about her looks, not her conversation or her mind. “Truly?” she asked with unhidden pleasure. He nodded, but he was studying her reaction with curiosity. “What did you think I was going to say?” Her slim shoulders lifted in an embarrassed shrug. “I thought you would say it was my face you noticed first. People have the most extraordinary reaction to my face,” she explained with a disgusted sigh. “I can’t imagine why,” he said, grinning down at what was, in his opinion-in anyone’s opinion-a heartbreakingly beautiful face belonging to a young woman who was sprawled across his chest looking like an innocent golden goddess. “I think it’s my eyes. They’re an odd color.” “I see that now,” he teased, then he said more solemnly, “but as it happens it was not your face which I found so beguiling when we met in the garden, because,” he added when she looked unconvinced, “I couldn’t see it.” “Of course you could. I could see yours well enough, even though night had fallen.” “Yes, but I was standing near a torch lamp, while you perversely remained in the shadows. I could tell that yours was a very nice face, with the requisite features in the right places, and I could also tell that your other-feminine assets-were definitely in all the right places, but that was all I could see. And then later that night I looked up and saw you walking down the staircase. I was so surprised, it took a considerable amount of will to keep from dropping the glass I was holding.” Her happy laughter drifted around the room and reminded him of music. “Elizabeth,” he said dryly, “I am not such a fool that I would have let a beautiful face alone drive me to madness, or to asking you to marry me, or even to extremes of sexual desire.” She saw that he was perfectly serious, and she sobered, “Thank you,” she said quietly. “That is the nicest compliment you could have paid me, my lord.” “Don’t call me ‘my lord,’” he told her with a mixture of gentleness and gravity, “unless you mean it. I dislike having you address me that way if it’s merely a reference to my title.” Elizabeth snuggled her cheek against his hard chest and quietly replied, “As you wish. My lord.” Ian couldn’t help it. He rolled her onto her back and devoured her with his mouth, claimed her with his hands and then his body.

Invoke Parvati for: • strength and commitment • unbreakable willpower • devotion • finding a desirable mate, getting married • success in relationship • conceiving and bearing a child • creative activity • uniting the masculine and feminine polarities within yourself • breakthroughs in yoga practice • will and power in athletic training

Those eager to grasp opportunities for their betterment, do attract the interest of the good goddess. She is ever anxious to aid those who please her. Men of action please her best . "Action will lead thee forward to the successes thou dost desire." MEN OF ACTION ARE FAVORED BY THE GODDESS OF GOOD LUCK                                                

By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human. He cries at the end. Aethon steals into the garden in the center of the cloud city, talks to the gigantic goddess, and opens the Super Magical Extra Powerful Book of Everything. The academic articles among Zeno’s papers suggest that translators arrange the folios in such a way that leaves Aethon in the garden, inducted into the secrets of the gods, finally freed of his mortal desires. But evidently the children have decided at the last moment that the old shepherd will look away and not read to the end of the book. He eats the rose proffered by the goddess and returns home, to the mud and grass of the Arkadian hills. In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.

She’s also showing us a deeper truth about spiritual life: that if we’re willing to make the necessary sacrifices, we can have it all. We can have enlightenment and intimacy together. We can know our transcendent bliss-self, and we can realize that bliss in passionate relationship. The secret Parvati shows us is that the relational form of self-realization requires just as much conscious effort as to realize the transcendent self. Both paths begin with self-cultivation. Parvati has realized that she can’t “have” Shiva unless she cultivates in herself the qualities of stillness, stamina, and devotion. To embody love requires absolute commitment, radical courage, and rigorous self-cleansing. The great desire has to be separated from smaller desires and tested in its own fire.

But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own. [She] had her dwelling in [his] heart, though concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self sacrifice. How he would work--how toil to raise funds, propagate reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

…if divinity, which is the goddess, is intrinsic to her being, something she caries around with her all the time, something she is, then her status in general shifts. Then one would need to be vigilant, constantly maintaining an attitude of listening to her, as ordinary woman, which affords a shift in the normative discourse between the genders and that allows for a recognition of her as a subject, as a person to whom one should listen.

And even, later in the season, those glorious evenings when the sculleries and the girls’ boarding schools, like chapels with their doors ajar and bathed in a golden dust, allow their demi-goddesses to garland the streets and bring their private conversations so close to us that we feverishly desire to penetrate their mythical existence, now recalled nothing more than Albertine’s affections, whose presence by my side prevented me from approaching them.

The cult of the Virgin Mary enabled the worship of the Goddess to flourish, albeit in a cauterised form. As I keep repeating in a mantra, sex is power. The Virgin was a method of turning the sexual impulse of Christians back into the Church and onto the figure of the crucified Christ. I would describe this as a particularly unsavoury form of magick. This is the use of repression and misery as a spiritual battery. This enslavement of the worshipper’s natural desires is the exact opposite of the natural and healthy lust for Babalon. With the resolutely chaste Mary in position, churches had a surrogate Goddess back in the house. Christ knows, they needed one. To sell Christianity to the fans of the God who dies and is reborn (like the crops in the fields) the Church used statues of Mary and Jesus that were rather close to those of Isis and the Child Horus. This mother/son icon propaganda was like a Pepsi taste test for the wavering pagans. They failed. It requires other women to keep women as slaves stripped of their sexual power. The BVM did that job. She was the only role model that you could fixate upon. As a Goddess she is a clitoridectomy. If you lift her skirt you can see the coarse black thread where she has been snipped and stitched. The thread is plaited from the beard of Jehovah himself. This is not a woman anymore. Look under the hem and learn.

A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That’s the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful—they are goddesses—and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser’s name? Paris. C’est normal.

To have a goddess like you in his arms and not appreciate it…” He kissed her, unable to resist the lush, succulent mouth so close to his. He put everything he felt into it, so he could wipe out any hurt the Neds of the world had given her. When he broke away, realizing he was treading dangerous ground, she said hoarsely, “You weren’t always so…appreciative. When I said that men enjoyed my company, you said you found that hard to believe.” “What?” he retorted with a scowl. “I never said any such thing.” “Yes, you did, the day that I asked you to investigate my suitors. I remember it clearly.” “There’s no way in hell I ever…” The conversation came back to him suddenly, and he shook his head. “You’re remembering only part, sweeting. You said that men enjoyed your company and considered you easy to talk to. It was the last part I found hard to believe.” “Oh.” She eyed him askance. “Why? You never seem to have trouble talking to me. Or rather, lecturing me.” “It’s either lecture you or stop up your mouth with kisses,” he said dryly. “Talking to you isn’t easy, because every time I’m near you I burn to carry you off to some secluded spot and do any number of wicked things with you.” She blinked, then gazed at him with such softness that at made his chest hurt. “Then why don’t you?” “Because you’re a marquess’s daughter and my employer’s sister.” “What does that signify? You’re an assistant magistrate and a famous Bow Street Runner-“ “And the bastard of nobody knows whom.” “Which merely makes you a fitting companion for a hellion with a reputation for recklessness.” The word companion resonated in his brain. What did she mean by it? Then she pressed a kiss to his jaw, eroding his resistance and his reason, and he knew precisely what she meant. He tried to set her off of him before he lost his mind entirely, but she looped her arms about his neck and wouldn’t let go. “Show me.” “Show you what?” “All the wicked things you want to do with me.” Desire bolted in a fever through his vein. “My God, Celia-“ “I won’t believe a word you’ve said if you don’t.” Her gaze grew troubled. “I don’t think you know what you want. Yesterday you gave me such lovely kisses and caresses and then at the ball you acted like you’d never met me.” “You were with your suitors,” he said hoarsely. “You could have danced with me. You didn’t even ask me for one dance.” Having her on his lap was rousing him to a painful hardness. “Because I knew if I did, I would want…I would need…” She kissed a path down his throat, turning his blood to fire. “Show me,” she whispered, “Show me now what you want. What you need.” “I refuse to ruin you,” he said, half as a caution to himself. “You already have.

I want you, Anastasia,” he murmurs. “I love and I hate, and I love arguing with you. It’s very new. I need to know that we’re okay. It’s the only way I know how.” “My feelings for you haven’t changed,” I whisper. His proximity is overwhelming, exhilarating. The familiar pull is there, all my synapses goading me toward him, my inner goddess at her most libidinous. Staring at the patch of hair in the V of his shirt, I bite my lip, helpless, driven by desire—I want to taste him there. He’s so close, but he doesn’t touch me. His heat is warming my skin. “I’m not going to touch you until you say yes,” he says softly. “But right now, after a really shitty morning, I want to bury myself in you and just forget everything but us.” ― E.L. James, Fifty Shades Darker

Jeremy fixed her with a dark look, full of reproach. A hot blush singed the tips of her opal-adorned ears. For a moment, Lucy felt as though she were sitting in the breakfast room wearing only her nightgown—or less. But if he meant to shame her, he would be sorely disappointed. Her lips tingled, and she slowly wet them with her tongue before flashing him a bold grin. He quickly looked away. Oh, what fun it was to vex him. He made it so easy to do. Hunting and fishing were all welland good, but truly, Jemmy-baiting had always been her favorite autumn sport. Lucy viewedhis staid countenance as an unending challenge. A smooth, thick-shelled egg that begged to be cracked. Any rearrangement of his features constituted a victory, be it a wince, a scowl, or that rarest of expressions—a smile. A smile that showed teeth counted double.Last night had shown her an entirely new way to bedevil Jeremy Trescott. Not with girlish pranks, but with womanly wiles. Oh, yes. She ‟ d cracked the egg last night, but good. Hisexpression of befuddled desire was far more amusing than a wince or a scowl, or even asmile that showed teeth. That last kiss had to count at least ten.She lifted her cup of chocolate to her lips. Closing her eyes, she pressed her tongue againstthe cool china rim, remembering the power of a proper kiss. Drinking in the hot, sweetrichness, feeling delicious warmth spread down her throat and pool in her belly. And lower.She sighed into the cup. If Jeremy ‟ s kiss could rival chocolate, Lucy shivered to imaginehow it would be to kiss—

As for the genitals, just as he first cut them off with his instrument of adamant and threw them from the land into the surging sea, even so they were carried on the waves for a long time. About them a white foam grew from the immortal flesh, and in it a girl formed. First she approached holy Cythera;* then from there she came to sea-girt Cyprus. And out stepped a modest and beautiful goddess, and the grass began to grow all round beneath her slender feet. Gods and men call her Aphrodite, because she was formed in foam,* and Cytherea, because she approached Cythera, and Cyprus-born, because she was born in wave-washed Cyprus, and ‘genial’,* because she appeared out of genitals. Eros and fair Desire attended her birth and accompanied her as she went to join the family of gods.

A religion going back to the beginning of time and before the beginnings of history (or herstory), the Goddess movement is highly relevant for women of today. Its foremost idea is that the Earth is alive and a Goddess and that all who live are a part of her. Everything that exists participates in Goddess, in the creation of life on the planet. Each Be-ing on the Earth creates and influences the conditions and qualities of all life. Divinity is female, and is birth-giving\creative; all are a part of Goddess and are divinity. Where patriarchal values have submerged the Goddess, abuses to women and people of color and to the earth have created a less than desirable quality of living for too many. Where women's Goddess values are returning, women are validated, all people are honored as equal and free, and the planet begins to heal. From the Introduction to The Goddess Celebrates: an Anthology of Women's Rituals, Edited by Diane Stein, published in 1991.

It Is the Rising That I Love" As long as I struggle to float above the ground and fail, there is reason for this poetry. On the stone back of the Ludovici throne, Venus is rising from the water. Her face and arms are raised, and two women trained in the ways of the world help her rise, covering her nakedness with a cloth at the same time. If this continues, she, goddess of beauty and love will have accomplished the earth where I stand. She from water to land, me from earth to air as if I had a soul. It is the rising I love, in no matter what element, to the one above. As I ascend, helped by prayers and not by women, I say in all my sexual glamor, see my body bathed in light and air. See me rise like a flame, like the sun, moon, stars, birds, wind. In light. In dark. But I never achieve it. I get down on my knees this grey April to see if open crocuses have a smell. I must live in the suffering and desire of what rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding of gears against our bodies and lives.

Laurel stood on stage. She was very still. Her lovely blue eyes were lowered modestly. Her silver blonde hair fell in disheveled curls around her face, white roses and strands of pearls woven artfully throughout. A necklace of what looked like diamonds clasped her slender throat while white kid gloves were drawn up to her elbow. She held a fan of frosted silver in one hand, dangling at her side. Her dress was a shimmering sapphire blue, and it fit her exquisitely, molding to her form, hugging her small bosom and lifting her breasts until they appeared ready to spill from the satin bodice. A silver braided sash cinched her waist, emphasizing its narrowness. And then, she lifted her head, raised the hand that held the fan, then the other one and, tipping her head back, opened her eyes. They were haunting and luminous, soft in the candlelight. Her skin was pale and smooth. The crowd was utterly quiet, watching her. And then, she began to sing. If Dare had thought Laurel Spencer beautiful before, now she became goddess-like to him in an instant as a melody so heart-wrenching and lovely spilled forth from her lips.

The Buddha, too, goes into the forest and has conferences there with the leading gurus of his day. Then he goes past them and, after a season of trials and search, comes to the bo tree, the tree of illumination, where he, likewise, undergoes three temptations. The first is of lust, the second of fear, and the third of submission to public opinion, doing as told. In the first temptation, the Lord of Lust displayed his three beautiful daughters before the Buddha. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regrets - Future, Present, and Past. But the Buddha, who had already disengaged himself from attachment to his sensual character, was not moved. Then the Lord of Lust turned himself into the Lord of Death and flung at the Buddha all the weapons of an army of monsters. But the Buddha had found himself that still point within, which is of eternity, untouched by time. So again, he was not moved, and the weapons flung at him turned into flowers of worship. Finally the Lord of Lust and Death transformed himself into the Lord of Social Duty and argued, "Young man, haven't you read the morning papers? Don't you know what there is to be done today?" The Buddha responded by simply touching the earth with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, "This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense." Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism. p171-2

(Lament about the Evils of Darkness) Night thou foule Mother of annoyance sad, Sister of heauie death, and nourse of woe, Which wast begot in heauen, but for thy bad And brutish shape thrust downe to hell below, Where by the grim floud of Cocytus slow Thy dwelling is, in Herebus blacke hous, (Blacke Herebus thy husband is the foe Of all the Gods) where thou vngratious, Halfe of thy dayes doest lead in horrour hideous. What had th’eternall Maker need of thee, The world in his continuall course to keepe, That doest all things deface, ne lettest see The beautie of his worke? Indeed in sleepe The slouthfull bodie, that doth loue to steepe His lustlesse limbes, and drowne his baser mind, Doth praise thee oft, and oft from Stygian deepe Calles thee, his goddesse in his error blind, And great Dame Natures handmaide, chearing euery kind But well I wote, that to an heauy hart Thou art the root and nurse of bitter cares, Breeder of new, renewer of old smarts: Instead of rest thou lendest rayling teares, Instead of sleepe thou sendest troublous feares, And dreadfull visions, in the which aliue The drearie image of sad death appeares: So from the wearie spirit thou doest driue Desired rest, and men of happinesse depriue. Vnder thy mantle blacke there hidden lye, Light-shonning theft, and traiterous intent, Abhorred bloudshed, and vile felony, Shamefull deceipt, and daunger imminent; Foule horror, and eke hellish dreriment: All these I wote in thy protection bee, And light doe shonne, for feare of being shent: For light ylike is loth’d of them and thee, And all that lewdnesse loue, doe hate the light to see. For day discouers all dishonest wayes, And sheweth each thing, as it is indeed: The prayses of high God he faire displayes, And his large bountie rightly doth areed. Dayes dearest children be the blessed seed, Which darknesse shall subdew, and heauen win: Truth is his daughter; he her first did breed, Most sacred virgin, without spot of sin. Our life is day, but death with darknesse doth begin.

Few things once seemed to me more frigid and far-fetched than those interpretations […] of the Song of Songs, which identify the Bridegroom with Christ and the bride with the Church. Indeed, as we read the frank erotic poetry of the latter and contrast it with the edifying headlines in our Bibles, it is easy to be moved to a smile, even a cynically knowing smile, as if the pious interpreters were feigning an absurd innocence. […] First, the language of nearly all great mystics, not even in a common tradition, some of them Pagan, some Islamic, most Christian, confronts us with evidence that the image of marriage, of sexual union, is not only profoundly natural but almost inevitable as a means of expressing the desired union between God and man. The very word ‘union’ has already entailed some such idea. Secondly, the god as bridegroom, his ‘holy marriage’ with the goddess, is a recurrent theme and a recurrent ritual in many forms of Paganism […] And if, as I believe, Christ, in transcending and thus abrogating, also fulfils, both Paganism and Judaism, then we may expect that He fulfils this side of it too. This, as well as all else, is to be ‘summed up’ in Him. Thirdly, the idea appears, in a slightly different form, within Judaism. For the mystics God is the Bridegroom of the individual soul. For the Pagans, the god is the bridegroom of the mother-goddess, the earth, but his union with her also makes fertile the whole tribe and its livestock, so that in a sense he is their bridegroom too. The Judaic conception is in some ways closer to the Pagan than to that of the mystics, for in it the Bride of God is the whole nation, Israel. This is worked out in one of the most moving and graphic chapters of the whole Old Testament (Ezek. 16). Finally, this is transferred in the Apocalypse from the old Israel to the new, and the Bride becomes the Church, ‘the whole blessed company of faithful people’. It is this which has, like the unworthy bride in Ezekiel, been rescued, washed, clothed, and married by God—a marriage like King Cophetua’s.

In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues, built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them. For all these reasons, the diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism. Many of these were wellborn women who presided over substantial households and who had likely tried out some of the Eastern mystery cults before settling on Judaism. (Nero’s wife Poppea was almost certainly one of these, and probably the person responsible for instructing Nero in the subtle difference between Christians and more traditional Jews, which he would otherwise scarcely have been aware of.) These gentiles did not, generally speaking, go all the way. Because they tended to draw the line at circumcision, they were not considered complete Jews. They were, rather, noachides, or God-fearers, gentiles who remained gentiles while keeping the Sabbath and many of the Jewish dietary restrictions and coming to put their trust in the one God of the Jews. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, could turn out to be a difficult test of the commitment of the noachides. For here in the heart of the Jewish world, they encountered Judaism enragé, a provincial religion concerned only with itself, and ages apart from the rational, tolerant Judaism of the diaspora. In the words of Paul Johnson:

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

If someone left you, you had to answer with silence. She bore the scent of a mixture of oriental spices and the sweetness of flowers and honey. Dreams are the interface between the worlds, between time and space. He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use. Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them. Saudade. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture. They say that men who are at one with their bodies can sense and smell when a woman wants more from life than she is getting. Another woman found it incredibly erotic when I backed pate en croute. Aromas do funny things to the soul. Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do. Books can do many things but not everything. We have to live the important things, not read them. It was the season for truffles and literature. The countryside was redolent of wild herbs and glowed in autumnal rust reds and wine yellows.

…there are two worlds: the true glory of Sophia and the false world of the Demiurge. The false world of the Demiurge seems the same as the world of Sophia, except that it is, to use a metaphor, colorless. The world of the Demiurge is the world as it seems to people obsessed with material possessions, attracted by the desire to control the realm of the Goddess Sophia, people who prefer the artificial to the authentic, people in the clutches of delusional poisonous drugs, people with addictions to other people and alcohol, as well as food, spending, pornography, gambling, angry people who are fixated with politics and financial issues; people who are full of illusory worries about possible future events rather than living in the authentic present now, people who see the world through the eyes of the media and people who are completely isolated from themselves emotionally. These people never ‘see’ and never ‘hear’ the real world around and within them. They live in the false duplicate reality of the Earth manufactured by Yaldabaoth.

The general creation story contains within it two aspects that are crucial to understanding all of the myths of ancient Egypt: maat and isfet. Isfet represents chaos or disorder, generally speaking, and it was seen as a fundamental element of everything in existence. There was no notion of trying to eradicate isfet from their general lives in ancient Egypt; after all, it was said to be one of the elements that was present in the limitless ocean at the dawn of creation. The only desire for ancient Egyptians was that isfet never became more prevalent than maat, its opposite: justice. Maat was often depicted as a goddess wearing a feather on her head, which was also the hieroglyph that represented her.[8] She, or simply the concept of justice, was believed to be present in all aspects of life and if it was broken by anyone, there would be a punishment. According to the Middle Kingdom “Coffin Text” it was believed that Atum, the “Great Finisher” of creation,[9] inhaled maat in order to gain his consciousness: “Inhale your daughter Maat [said Nun to Atum] and raise her to your nostril so that your consciousness may live. May they not be far from you, your daughter Maat and your son Shu, whose name is “life” … it is your son Shu who will lift you up.

Concentrate on the herbs and your intention and repeat these words: Goddess of the earth, hear my call. Listen to my heart, let my intentions be true, and may my wishes and desires find a way to you.

The world of the Demiurge is the world as it seems to people obsessed with material possessions, attracted by the desire to control the realm of the Goddess Sophia, people who prefer the artificial to the authentic, people in the clutches of delusional poisonous drugs, people with addictions to other people and alcohol, as well as food, spending, pornography, gambling, angry people who are fixated with politics and financial issues; people who are full of illusory worries about possible future events rather than living in the authentic present now, people who see the world through the eyes of the media and people who are completely isolated from themselves emotionally. These people never 'see' and never 'hear' the real world around and within them. They live in the false duplicate reality of the Earth manufactured by Yaldbaoth.

Brigid's fire is akin to the soul's internal fire—what we crave, what we desire, what we must endure. As the flame that never dies or destroys, Brigid fire motivates and leads.

BOOK OF THE GODDESS (P. 10): HOW TO CALL THE GODDESS The Goddess waits, she watches, and she is open to hearing your call. To bring her to you, simply recite your desire and set out an offering pure of soul and intention. Be mindful of the call, for if your intention is not pure, the Goddess’s wrath is swift: If you call me, I will hear you. If you need me, I shall free you. If you harm me, I will end you.

The eulogists of work. Behind the glorification of 'work' and the tireless talk of the 'blessings of work' I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work—and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late—that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.

The ceremony of Mexican baptism, which was beheld with astonishment by the Spanish Roman Catholic missionaries, is thus strikingly described in Prescott's Conquest of Mexico:--"When everything necessary for the baptism had been made ready, all the relations of the child were assembled, and the midwife, who was the person that performed the rite of baptism, was summoned. At early dawn, they met together in the court-yard of the house. When the sun had risen, the midwife, taking the child in her arms, called for a little earthen vessel of water, while those about her placed the ornaments, which had been prepared for baptism, in the midst of the court. To perform the rite of baptism, she placed herself with her face toward the west, and immediately began to go through certain ceremonies....After this she sprinkled water on the head of the infant, saying, "O my child, take and receive the water of the Lord of the world, which is our life, which is given for the increasing and renewing of our body. It is to wash and to purify. I pray that these heavenly drops may enter into your body, and dwell there; that they may destroy and remove from you all the evil and sin which was given you before the beginning of the world, since all of us are under its power.'.... She then washed the body of the child with water, and spoke in this manner: "Whencesoever thou comest, thou that art hurtful to this child, leave him and depart from him, for he now liveth anew, and is BORN ANEW; now he is purified and cleansed afresh, and our mother Chalchivitlycue [the goddess of water] bringeth him into the world.' Having thus prayed, the midwife took the child in both hands, and, lifting him towards heaven, said, "O Lord, thou seest here thy creature, whom thou hast sent into the world, thus place of sorrow, suffering, and penitence. Grant him, O Lord, thy gifts and inspiration, for thou art the Great God, and with thee is the great goddess.'" Here is the opus operatum without mistake. Here is baptismal regeneration and exorcism too, as thorough and complete as any Romish priest or lover of Tractarianism could desire.