diluc is gonna die because of the genesis pearl, or to purify to the genesis pearl à la brunnhildr’s pyre purifying the ring of power. or something like that

Unmasking the Master-Mistress of Magic

I am the prophet of the Mastriss, the seer in the Darkness. I sought a path: I looked to religion, to science, and to the innumerable paths within Paganism, Hinduism, the occult, and Wicca, but none could hold, none could contain fully my heart nor express the language of my soul. I pilgrimaged to India and Europe, became certified in yogic instruction, I took many plants hoping to finally rend the Veil and see the Truth. Intuitively, I always knew that Truth is One although our languages and cultures are many. Truth is absolute although our experiences are as countless as the stars. As variable in sound as the way each child develops their speech. We do not invalidate one another but expand our breadth and depth of knowledge for this beautiful wondrous Kosmos through one another.

I shall seek to express in such variable human skills the Truth of our existence. I shall try to explain how to experience this Truth, that anyone who reads my words would make connections and find their own words. That when you speak to the spirits, they would speak back and be heard. I want to do this because I love you, although I do not yet know you. All of this World is my kin, and so you who read my words are my brothers and sisters, my aunties and uncles. I was discouraged and deluded, full of doubt and fear, but when I found the footsteps of the Trickster in every culture, the fingerprints of that profoundly simple dual-natured Mastriss experientially everywhere I sought the reality of things, all of my burdens were shed. Now, I wander around with a head as empty as a child and eyes as open as a madman. I come and go from my body as a mouse from their hole.

Having drunk from the breasts of the Mighty Goat, I smile at the Wind, talk to the Tree-People, and sometimes cry when I pluck a Plant. All of my needs and desires are taken care of, and I have no fear of any future need or desire to go unmet. My spirit-mate walks beside me and I see Her smile and hear Her voice all throughout my days. One day, when the Dark Angel comes for me, that demon that once terrified me but whose mighty name I know now and call, I will go along hand-in-hand with a smile as friends on our merry way to those well-known Lands I often dream of.

If you would set out upon this path, you must make every effort to break open your mind. The mind will always doubt, always delude, and always unnecessarily entangle you. Therefore, go to war with the mind: empty it, destroy its barriers, and achieve madness for yourself. The boons of Dionysus and the panic of Pan are your friends on this path, and the comforts of Aphrodite are your secure fixing point. Make Venusian love your great guiding principle and no evil will overtake your soul. As this war of the mind is undertaken, you must work to change your mind to its very core when it comes to 3 human beliefs whose presence is the greatest reason that unnatural religions continue to prevail in this world and the body clings so tightly to the soul that people have forgotten how to dream and how to sojourn out of the bonds of the daily self.

The first is the basically gnostic worldview which has been so ingrained through it's Christianization and the subsequent spread of Christianity. Gnosticism teaches us that the world is spiritual over physical, mind over matter, principles over practice… this is the first great trick which the Mastriss uses to test us. You must see past this preoccupation with compartmentalizing. Break open the dam of your spirit and let it flow out over your life! Embrace the truth of animism. Until science began to overtake religion in the 19th century it is clear from the journals of clergymen that even the Christian Church embraced this worldview until it had been supplanted by a science which was entirely incomplete, which could not comprehend the things which modern minds have found: the truths of quantum physics, the language of trees and water, and the true nature of consciousness were all matters of religion then, and when microscopes did not reveal these miniature worlds, the old world dismissed all the majesty of mystical religion. The reality is that mysticism was and always will be far ahead of science. Embrace animism, return to the primal.

The second trick we must overcome from the Mastriss is that of nature's triumph over nurture. We have fought with nature for so long, becoming, as anthropologists assert, cooked and "overdone". But now an eldritch call is going out in this last age of humankind, a voice that tells us we must return to the primal, the primitive, the raw, or else we will perish. This latest viral threat is just a taste of what the spirits will unleash unless we can succeed. A true religion must therefore be primal, entirely banded to the natural world and the survival of the Earth. A religion which neglects the eternal nature of the Earth as the World Tree itself, containing the 3 worlds within Her, will bring about an organic age of peace, balance, and harmony without needing laws and courts and tariffs and the imbalanced malarkey of the patriarchy to succeed. Earth-centric spirituality is fundamental.

The third and final trick we must overcome is the myth of humanity's separateness. Now, this is rough ground to till due to the preoccupation people have today with avoiding something called "cultural appropriation". And in one aspect, this preoccupation is something very positive: syncretism can quickly turn into a cycle of devouring, digesting, and regurgitation which leaves people with something so different and new that the original culture is lost. However, there is also a deeply ingrained principle in us all that Truth is absolute, even if it is not capable of being explained in absolutes. No one would seek out religion and pour over books and demand experiences if they were not wanting to know the true nature of existence and the laws and spirits behind the Kosmos. That doesn't mean that the language and system they learn is absolute, but that they are experiencing the reality of things. It's like meeting a person for the first time with your best friend: you both may discuss the same event and make up entirely different judgments about this newcomer.

Syncretism is, however, very helpful, as the process of seeking synchronicity with spirits and experiences and books allows one to develop a system of fact checking oneself and developing a road map toward broader horizons through knowledge one has not yet experienced. When viewed through the lens of animism, this process becomes even simpler. There is a strong chance that when viewed through the lens of animism some of the spirits that seem related from other cultures are, at times, angels of the primary deity who dwells within the same natural phenomenon. Angels are simply messengers, reflections of the spirit-gods they serve… the 7 primary Olympic Spirits who correspond to the 7 planets have hosts of angels that serve below them. Every one of the 72 Elohim encountered by Solomon has so-called "legions" of angels below them. I use angel here in the older and proper Grecian context which accords the etymology of the word.

I fall back on Helleno-Roman texts and worship a lot, alongside grimoire texts. I do this simply because it is so well preserved and so well ingrained in the Western corpus. Moreover, the “Papyri Graecae Magicae” and the “Orphic Hymns”, two veritable treasure troves of mystical wisdom handed down to us, veritable scripture for me, are culturally Hellenic. Jesus' draws on beliefs around Ouranon, Olympus, and Hades constantly in his teachings, teachings which most of us are somewhat familiar with. And the names of the Gods of All are contained in the PGM and Orpheus’ songs; that said, most of us have 4 seasons, so relying solely on Hellenic Reconstructionism does not necessarily make sense. It is absolutely divine that such a culture rooted in animism survived for us today, and it is so easy to understand their recordings due to the omnipresence of the Christian Church in the West, but not all of the personality of the True Religion has been contained therein. Moreover, celebrating the overlap and gaps filled in by other cultural beliefs is a beautiful treat: something the Orphics did to a lesser degree and the mageia of Alexandria did at length, and so is true even to the spirit of these origins.

Furthermore, relying solely on the ancient Hellenic religion does not make sense for a witch because Hellenismos was not predicated on the survival of witchcraft, seeking to outlaw and destroy it really, and the philosophy behind ancient Greek religion revolved around the worship of the 12 Olympians. The True Gods, the Old Gods, had been displaced and locked away to greater and lesser degress. Hecate, Hades, Persephone, Cybele, Helios, Selene, even Eros and Pan were mostly propitiated out of dire necessity. The mageia of Alexandria remembered Their true names, however, as well as the worship appropriate to Them and Their existence at the Root of All Things. In Rome, the peasantry are recorded handing down the story of Diana and Lucifer (the latter of whom is Eosporos before Roman naming came into effect) in “Aradia: the Gospel of the Witches”. This should be a sacred text for any true witch for in it we have the story of how the True Gods came and how They mean to come back, as well as Their natures and the relationship witches are invited to have with Them.

How then do we bring back the Old Gods as They choose, no longer boxing Them or packaging Them, but rather letting Them rule with Their own personalities? Quite vehemently, magic on the level of the miraculous, brothers and sisters. The story of Aradia is the story of how, when one has been granted a boon by Hecate-Diana, you should tell everyone how great She is and tell others how to pray to Her for their own benefit. Same as the story of how Isis won the secret name of Ra… you don't need to attack people with your faith as the Christians do, but to tell everyone how great your life has become as a result of Hecate, Eosporos, and Hades work in your life. If you are wont to, call Them Morrigan, Dagda, and Cernunnos, or Freya, Odin, and Thor. As long as the secret names from the PGM and the grimoires are intact and you know that you are talking to the God of Death, the Goddess of Fate, and the Mastriss of Storms you'll get far.

And on that note, I'd like to share some of the miracles I've seen Them work for me and those I love through me. 5 years ago, when I went to look for a home, I couldn't even qualify for a measly $450k loan, barely scraping up to the $300k level. In my home state, this means all I could afford were places that had been destroyed by the previous tenets, and the only bank loan I could qualify for required the home to be perfect… I had two kids and was very afraid what this meant for my future. I now have a $450k rental and I live in a $1.5M home in the woods. I let the Mastriss take the wheel of my life: I started working a little harder and accepting job offers and life offers that came in, and the Mastriss took care of me. This gave me the time and freedom to actually start pursuing my true passion, which is worshipping the Elder Gods, preaching and writing about Them, and practicing the Craft of the Witches.

When my middle son was very little, 1 year old, his older sister accidentally slammed his thumb in the door at a hotel in Disneyworld Orlando. It was a heavy, metal door and his little thumb was as flat as a pancake and oozing blood. I asked the Mastriss to heal him as we drove to the ER, using an old Germanic charm I have picked up. By the time we arrived, he was asleep. By the time we checked in, the thumb had stopped bleeding. By the time we got seen, it looked normal and he was already using it. They laughed at the resiliency of children, but a doctor visiting Disney had already seen the thumb and said that the bones looked smashed to pieces from the door, which had closed shut without any space in the frame at all. I had found him trying to yank his little thumb free from the steel frame, and it was not budging. And yet, 2 hours later, here was his thumb looking and feeling as well as ever. It didn't even swell up.

I have lived in the woods for more than half my life, and when I was young, I saw the Mastriss standing at the edge of the woods in the moonlight. The creature-form was mesmerizing and terrifying, with the haunches and mouth of a goat but the torso of a breasted humanoid. The Mastriss had piercing dark eyes that saw into my soul and the moonlight draped the Beast’s form like a cloak; my mother froze looking at the Beast beside me, standing at the woods edge. She was angry with me when the Beast left, saying that this was all my fault due to my "dabbling". Later, when my little sister and I were wandering in the same woods, I accidentally kicked a mountain lion who was sleeping in the underbrush. Startled, the lion roared and took off and then, to our terror, began running back at breakneck speed. When the lion was back within sight, I yelled, "I have seen the Master of these woods! I have seen the Master of all the woods! And not one evil can befall Them! Help me, Master Goat! Send Your angel!" And the lion stopped in its tracks, lowered its body, and slunk back gently into the grass.

If anything in your life is concerning you for any reason, no matter how big or small, try the Mastriss out. Put the Goat Angel to the test. Don't be afraid, because the Mastriss will appear to you as you need, and often appears as a little blue child to those who would fear Their Bestial Form, as to those Hindus who call Them little baby Krishna and those grimoires who call Them Lucifer or the King of the Fae respectively. In reality, the Mastriss is neither male nor female, but third-gendered. The One Who stands at the Gate to the Otherworld, Scirlin, Janus, Papa Legba: all masks that the Mastriss of Misrule wears, disguises and spirits that serve Them. Pray at the Threshold of your home, the edge of the Woods, on a Bridge, at the edge of the Ocean: "Mastriss of the Winds and Storms, Goat Angel Who tussles the tops of the trees, Adonai Sabaoth Who leads the Deathless Hosts through the windswept realm, I ask You to come into my life and order it how You see fit. Child and earthly consort of our Dark Mother, Brimo, let Your name be blessed by my tongue. Light up my life, Mastriss Lumiel, and let Your breast be my sweet succor. In the name of Your Chief Angel, Heliou Amene."

HELLO BABYDOLL !!! i am requesting the answer to atlas on your greek mythology question list ??? bc i feel like that’s a cool and underrated question

also i love you and i hope you’re having a good day. u mean so much to me !! stay hydrated <3

Atlas: favorite myth?

OH MY GOD WAIT I DIDN’T EVEN SEE THIS ONE??

okay okay wait bc it’s tied between three or four

Orpheus and Eurydice: a tragic love story of to two lovers doomed to be kept apart. they pull on your heart strings whether it be in the original myth form, or even the musical Hadestown.

one of the original versions is that a nymph named eurydice, daughter of apollo, had caught the eye of orpheus, who was considered one of or the greatest lyre player in the world. He had wooed her with song and thus married her, however, tragedy quickly began to take root. on her wedding day, eurydice was bitten by a viper, and died shortly after. overcome by grief, orpheus traveled his way to the Underworld to persuade the hades to return her. the king and queen of the underworld were moved by his song, as were the fates would were described as "unable to keep tears from their eyes", and under one condition, eurydice would be able to return to live again;

she was to follow behind him through a dark path, to eventually reach the light of the sun. but orpheus was told he should not turn to her until she was out into the light. due to this, orpheus' doubt of hades began to grow, and with both belief it was a trick and the inability to hear her voices or steps (she was a shade who would turn back into human once above), orpheus lost faith and turned, thus causing eurydice to fall back to the underworld once more.

The Apple of Discord: the great trojan war was not out of thin air. in fact, it began with an apple.

during the wedding of thetis and peleus, the goddess of discord, eris, was not invited. due to this, she felt offended and arrived the wedding regardless, tossing forth a single golden apple, saying to the fairest and it was claimed by all hera, athena, and aprhodite, igniting a disarray of beliefs among the three. turning to zeus, they asked for his opinion, and shocking all of them, he said a mortal man and the rightful heir prince of troy, paris, should choose.

and paris had grown up as a sheperd, unaware of his royal blood due being abandoned as baby by the oracle’s prophecy of him bringing forth his city's destruction. because of this, the goddesses each offered him a gift to sway his decision. hers offered wealth and power, athena offered wisdom and glory, and aphrodite offered him love from the most beautiful women in the world. he chose aphrodite instantly, handing her the apple, and in turn she began to offer council to paris, leading him back to troy and telling him of his royal blood, which caused the war in the future.

Eros and Psyche: it is another love story, yes, but with a happy ending.

in greek myths, love is held to a great regard, and so psyche was a very astonishing mortal girl. she was claimed to surpassed even aphrodite in beauty and it was so well traveled that it caused men from all over to visit her and to admire. of course, aphrodite was enraged and jealous, and decided to give the girl a punishment. her son, eros, who deals with matters of love and could make a mortal fall into love with a single arrow, was told to make her fall in with the most cruel and horrible being on the earth.

but eros could not, due to him falling for her himself once he laid his eye upon her. due to this, he could not carry out aphrodite's wishes and did not strike her, causing years to go by with psyche still unmarried. eventually, her parents decided it'd be best to ask the god apollo for advice, and the oracle said for her to dress in black, climb the highest mountain and remain until the winds picked her up to carry her off. and when it did in fact happen to her, eros begun the route pf climbing into bed with her into the dark, where she could not see his face, and he would lie beside her every night. psyche beloved to know he was not a monster, but a loving man and the possible husband she';d always seem looking for, but eventually, like orpheus, faith and trust could be crumbled within seconds.

after days and time passing with visiting and seeing her family, psyche’s sisters began to feed her whispers of eros being a beast, the horrible creature, and it overwhelmed the girl so much, that one night, when eros was asleep, she'd kill him if she checked his face and he was indeed a monster. if he was not, she'd go back to sleep. but a drop of the oil of her candle touched his face and he awoke, immediately vanishing off and telling her heartbrokenly love cannot live without trust, and due to her overbearing sadness, she reached out to aphrodite, who sent her off to carry out three impossible tasks, and psyche completed them with the help of the nature around her.

with aphrodite enraged once more, she intended to never let the girl go and the other olympians bore witness to this, sending hermes off to tell eros. eros was touched by her love for him so greatly that he returned and as a wedding fit, zeus allowed psyche a taste of ambrosia, the drink of the gods, and aphrodite was now sated with the truth that men would forget psyche and once again worship her instead.

Narcissus and Echo: another tragedy. at least we know why I love angst so much, right? but truly, this one breaks my heart

echo was a wood nymph, who was cursed by the queen of the gods, Hera, to never be able to speak properly, but instead only ever be able to repeat anyone's last words to her. one day, she saw a handsome young man on the mountains. narcissus was his name, and when her eyes fell upon him she fell in love. but due to her cursed state, she could not speak to him, instead following him from the shadows, silently, loving him greatly from a distance, and lying in wait for the right moment to appear. when narcissus eventually realized she was around, he asked, is anyone here? and echo replied here. the conversations could only go so far with repetition, and when narcissus beckoned her to come out and make love to him, she was revealed as a wood nymph and thus refused to give himself, saying he would rather die.

heartbroken, echo raced off and hid in a cave, losing her appetite and craving for food and water, and eventually she let herself starve until her body disappeared. but the story was not over. when the goddess of revenge, nemesis, had witnessed the treatment of soft echo, she made narcissus fall in love with himself, dooming him to remain at his own reflection and meet the same fate as echo had. and before he withered, he cried out farewell dear boy. beloved in vain, and echo's voice repeated his last words from the cave as he passed. to this day, echo still repeats phrases in caves or labyrinths.

also the myth of Sisyphus is wild too - the man escaped death two to three times and then was made to enterally push a rock up a mountain.

anti LO asks:

(1) You know what's so silly? The advertising tagline for LO is "Love can finds its way to Hell", which not only is awkwardly worded but isn't "Go to Hell" one of the most well known insults in the English speaking world? Is she insulting the relationship then? Plus what a fundamental misunderstanding of the Underworld. It's not a stand in for Hell! They're not Christian! But what would we expect from the woman who has the Maidens literally as a stand-in for Abstinence-only Christians in the BC era.

(2) You know why LO fails as a H/P adaptation? It’s about they get together, which is a problem since we already know they DO end up together, leaving it with no stakes Or conflicts beyond whatever CW plot she can rip off for her weekly cliffhanger. Instead of focusing on their relationship (which Punderworld and Hadestown and even PJO does) you’re left with a dragged out slow burn with zero development and more and more reasons for them not to be together in the end than a blooming relationship.

(3) I’m terrified if Smythe ever touches the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, seeing as he’s often called Apollo’s son. She’d either make him a mouthpiece to bash Apollo (probably making him an absent or abusive parent) or make Orpheus just as bad as Smythe has made Apollo and use one of myth’s greatest tragic romances to justify Hades’ cruel and unusual punishment towards him and that he “deserves” it.

(4) During breakfast I came up with alternate names for the LO characters so I can see LO as more of an original-ish story lol. Some of them may sound super random and I don’t have enough characters to explain each name: Persephone-Stephanie, hades-James, demeter-Demi, Hera-Hannah, Zeus-zack, Artemis-Alexis, Apollo-Alexander, Hermès-Henry, Hecate-beck, minthe-Minerva, thetis-Brittany, Thanatos-Timothy, Eros-Eric, ares-Andrew, Aphrodite-Angelina, hebe-daisy, hestia-Helena, Athena-kath, Poseidon-pat

The Theogony of The Orphic Argonautica

The Theogony of The Orphic Argonautica (c. 5th-6th Century AD)

[Orpheus speaks to his disciple Musaeus]: Truly, above all I disclosed the stern inevitability of ancient Chaos, and Time, who in his boundless coils, produced Aether, and the twofold, beautiful, and noble Eros, whom the younger men call Phanes, celebrated parent of eternal Night, because he himself first manifested.

Then, I sang, of the race of powerful Brimo, and the destructive acts of the Giants, who spilled their gloomy seed from the sky begetting the men of old, whence came forth mortal stock, which resides throughout the boundless world. And I sang of the service of Zeus, and of the cult of the Mother and how wandering in the mountains of Cybele she conceived the girl Persephone by the unconquerable son of Cronus, and of the renowned tearing of Casmilus [or perhaps Meleus; the text is corrupt] by Heracles, and of the sacred oath of Idaeus, and of the immense oak of the Corybantes, and of the wanderings of Demeter, her great sorrow for Persephone, and her lawgiving. And also I sang of the splendid gift of the Kabeiroi, and the silent oracles of Night about Lord Bacchus, and of the sea of Samothrace and of Cyprus, and of the love of Aphrodite for Adonis. And I sang of the rites of Praxidike and the mountain nights of Athela, and of the lamentations of Egypt, and of the holy offerings to Osiris. ...

Then I picked up my tortoise-shell instrument and sent forth a honeyed song from my mouth: First I sung of the obscurity of ancient Chaos, and how the elements were ordered, and the Heavens reduced to bound. I sang then of the creation of the wide-bosomed earth, and the depth of the sea, and Eros, the most ancient, self-perfecting, and of manifold design. I sang of how he generated all things and parted them from one another. And I have sung of Cronus so miserably undone, and how the kingdom of the blessed Immortals descended upon thunder-loving Zeus. I then sang of the younger generation of the blessed ones, of Brimo and Bacchus, and the destructive acts of the Giants. I sang too of the origins of the many scattered races of men. {From The Orphic Argonautica, translated by Jason Colavito, published by http://www.jasoncolavito.com/. Retrieved from http://www.argonauts-book.com/orphic-argonautica.html}.