Transgender Hypocrisy

While I have known a few to be genuinely androgynous, it’s the fanfaring wannabes that really annoy me with their stereotypical role models, as if all that cosmetic fakery is really going to play the part. Of all things I despised in my youth, it’s petty-minded conspiring girlie types with their jealousy and adultery issues, as if all those cosmetics and fashion statements can really hide that kind of ugly. Sure, there will always be the fools that take things for face value, but they’ll be a long time waiting for any sympathy from me. I’ve been watching that circus for years and quite frankly; can’t see the difference in sexual posturing between them and any other simian, no matter what role they try to assimilate... and then there’s the shysters eternally trying to lament with that old “more feminist than thou” as if I should have some part in this charade. Well guess what, I don’t, for obvious reasons of genetics. Nice try but no banana.

And then there were none...

Those of us who grew up in the no-zone of the Cold War regime are certainly a messed up breed, but at some point one has to burn those bridges and leave them far behind. While my life has been one long battle with that enemy within, there are still some things that amaze me to no end. Among all the MK ultra victims, there was one particular family that tried to take me under their wing- assuming I really needed that kind of parental misguidance. The mother came from utter destitution in post-war Holland whereas the father came from very rural New Brunswick. They were clearly trying to overcompensate this with the kind of bogus glam typical of any social-climbing wannabe. Always trying to model me into some pretentious mannequin of this unlikely social norm, I don't think they had any idea of where I was really coming from. Good grief, her husband was just a sergeant, a mundane desk job to put it bluntly. The eldest was a radio DJ in Kelowna; and having been through the Okanagan Valley, it's not like I missed anything. The other tried to follow in his footsteps- that was until he got nailed for black-marketing in Mallorca, then lost Lamborghini and all to some conman allegedly from London. Finding himself skint in Heathrow, he gets the bright idea to call in a bomb threat on the Tube for want of a million pounds in a briefcase. Of course he goes for the briefcase, thinking there's nobody around. That landed him in an asylum for one year, until the authorities granted his mother custody, only to send him back to Mallorca. Indeed, some people just have more luck than brains. Hence the younger brother wound up a perpetual peter pan, DJ-ing for want of an eternal teen age following, to make up for his own mundane desk job. I remember the fury when he got nailed for possession back in our teens when one of his enemies tried to set me up for selling cannabis. His mother slapped me for being „such a bad influence“ as if he were so innocent and I was the one supposed to set an example. Don't ask me how, seeing as I had grown distant, spending much of my time among fellow Germans my age; out of sight and definitely out of reach. I was neither in possession nor selling, rather, always in the habit of giving it away before returning to that stupid military community, so the case got dropped. Of course, they didn't like the fact I was „hanging around the Germans“, like I was supposed to deny being one myself. No surprise that they finally got banned from the town by the Polizei.

What irony.

As for the sister, she was never anything I could understand much either. Her obsession with UFOs was really down a dark and twisted path. After all failed efforts to peer pressure me, I had become her nemesis for demonstrating graphic skills superior to hers, especially when it landed me a job in HQ, heaven forbid. She became a „special“ member of NICAP, which at the time was notorious for CIA experiments in false memory implants through hypnotic regression. I'll never forget when Jacques Vallee called Hynek's bluff at the symposium in Geneva. She never did get over that one. Her needless diatribes against the Air force were utterly meaningless rhetoric. There was a cold war on with all kinds of shit sneaking around, say nothing of experimental technologies behind that masquerade of cosmic hocum. Then she got married to some tank maintenance sergeant, raised a family, moved to Nanaimo and fell into anonymity along with rest.

The last I'd seen of that lot was on some obscure website in Mallorca. The wayward brother had apparently tried to launch his own TV show on cosmic paranormal shit, while still side-lining as a DJ and selling holiday flats. He died last year of Leukemia. It makes me wonder if all that superficiality was really worth it. As a psychologist friend once put it; „We had to create new terms to describe these bizarre cases of social maladjustment“.

Cognitive Distortion and Selective Abstraction

This pretty well describes the fashion statement of Wicca these days. Its all about the gospel of Llewellyn authors and pilgrimages to the esoteric shops of Sedona, Salem or Glastonbury; cherry-picking the ancient mysteries of foreign culture without having to go the distance. A convenient subterfuge for identity crisis, seeking to be exceptional, beyond the mundanities of social norm, while resorting to the same politics of sycophancy and exclusion as the evangelism they allegedly oppose- grasping at the straws of forbidden grimoires on much the same quest for the holy grail. Coming on like they fell out of a Shakespearean prop room just doesn't cut it with me, especially spouting that dogma they call the „rede“ like some kind of holier than thou. Oh really? 

Yeah, we all come from the god-ass or didn’t you know?

If divine intervention or some similar empowerment is what you're really looking for, then go back to your church where you belong. I don't need all that spook to summon what my mental faculties are already capable of, and that in fully practical application.

Cunning craft vs. Witchcraft

I'm not much into esoterica as some would like to believe. It is simply too rooted in a medley of fashionable attempts to push the boundaries of religious taboo and I'm obviously not god-fearing enough to see any challenge in it. While its artifacts are a hodge-podge of medieval manuscripts scavenged from the remote reaches of forgotten monastic archives, their information is purely interpretive, bent on bringing anything that mystifies them into their own superstitious perspective. This is plain to see in its interpretations of ancient Middle-Eastern and Judaic mysticism, for example; John Dee's Enochian magic. That, along with Greco-Egyptian alchemy and a host of geomantic spins on cosmic order, scarcely scratch the surface of causality in present day terms. This is why I prefer to avoid such psychobabble as it seems more a subterfuge for those who just can't handle higher reasoning.

Hence my work with causality is actually an applied science using whatever faculties happen to be at my disposal in whatever time and place. As far as the German mentality is concerned, it's all mind over matter, regardless whether you write a sonnet, dig a garden, build or repair something or form a gathering; its an empowerment of will into physical result. In all my travels and wilderness experience, I learned that communication with others is not just on the verbal level. There are subtler aspects of the senses that also communicate, although with most people, quite unconsciously. This is where I've employed shape-shifting, invisibility, and other forms of telepathic hypnosis. By the same reasoning, you can ward people and animals off, influence their moods or even their dreams. This sense of causality is by no means linear, rather like a spider on a huge web, senses every motion and disturbance coming one's way; after all, everything is relative. I could go on and on, but this is generally how cunning craft works. The best part is that it requires little in the way of conjuring, let alone summoning things better left undisturbed.

The Temple of Diana at Nemi

What aspires to be the cult of Diana in neopaganism, draws its sources from the Roman poet Ovid's account of the Nemoralia festival. This was a torch bearing procession on the first full moon of August- from Rome to a temple at Lake Nemi, headed by a high priestess and her entourage dressed in garlands. Pilgrims of this procession brought with them votive offerings of fruit, flowers and clay effigies of their wishes. This much was found in archaeological digs of the site. However, the tradition has a darker side when it comes to the high priesthood's rites of succession, namely a fierce and bloody fight to the death, that no less inspired Caligula to take it to the Circus. As for the temple itself, it was apparently Etruscan in design, dating back to roughly 300BC and probably devoted to the goddess Artume, well before she became associated with the Greek Artemis. In fact it seems every poet or philosopher who came along after that, had their own romantic spin on it. This is the problem with Roman culture, it's a fashion statement of every ethnic group it invaded, more often than not; introduced by foreign slaves. In essence, the three goddess figures, found among the ruins, each represent a different ethnic aspect in an attempt to appease the whole. The cult ended with being converted to „Maria Assumption“ by the Council of Nicea to keep it a harvest holy day. It was not until the republication of Ovid's „Metamorphosis“, during the Italian Renaissance, that occult interests were piqued, aside from its phenomenal influence on western art and literature for generations to come. Nonetheless, Rosicrucian claims to its secret traditions is undermined by the fact that Ovid's works took a great deal of scavenging for enough old manuscripts to make a tangible publication. Still, the question remains of how much artistic license was used to please the public fancy. The same can be said of Charles Leland and Gerald Gardner.

The temple fell into ruin since the rule of Emperor Constantius II, who had ordered the desecration and destruction of such temples. Pagan sacrifices became punishable by death, while any use of "Magic" or divination was regarded with extreme prejudice. This was even worse during the rule of Theodosius, when it became legal doctrine and continued well throughout the Middle Ages, especially the Crusades. Then came the persecutions for heresy and blasphemy in plague ridden Europe, against anything that deviated from the dictates of Christian dogma. It was not until the Italian Renaissance, with new trade opening up to the Atlantic and the Silk Road, that an interest in the ancient was reawakened Hermeticism grew as a secret practice, a polyglot of forbidden ancient ritual and mysticism gathered along the way. Of course they would revive any lost traditions found in old manuscripts, whereas the rest tends to be passed off as the folklore of illiterate peasants. This is what us well-versed pagan traditionalists refer to as the "It is written" brigade, as it is too Aristotelian in its academia and fails to recognize oral tradition as a learning tool of craftsmanship. This is why so many trade secrets become allegedly "lost". The same argument persists in debates about Celto-Germanic culture, often referring to written accounts by such historians as Tacitus, who paid well for their information second hand. Traditionally, in the Celto-Germanic mentality, to write certain things down was a revealed disclosure that could undermine its potential, hence runes were originally meant to be used as magical symbols, rather than form words. An example of this is well illustrated on the Franks Casket of Wieland the Smith.

Evolution 101

In researching the latest archaeological finds and theories, I also explore any forensic DNA studies involved. This gives me a pattern of population shifts I can compare to environmental changes, for a bigger picture of causality. Just as animals tend to migrate for more favourable conditions so do people. For instance, the Y-DNA haplogroup R appears to have once centered in the Black Sea area. That they dispersed in all navigatable directions in fits and starts to such far reaches, suggests erratic enviromental changes, making even agriculture unsustainable. The effects of climate change tend to vary with the nature of whatever the geophysical construct. In the Black Sea area it was two fold: one being its innundation by tectonic shifts subsequent of glacial withdrawl hence rising sea levels. This, in turn. changed weather patterns, hence putting it in the rain shadow of the Balkans. Of course the added salinity to the sea put a damper on it as an irrigation source, whereas the loss of oxygenation in that murky flood washed brine didn't help sea life much either...and so these ancestors pulled pegs and moved on. 

Taking the digs at Gobekli Tepe into consideration, many theorists had to revise their ideas of „civilization“. In fact, it seems our quest for meaning goes back to even before painting the Lascaux caves. Despite popular belief, ingenuity was not necessarily born out of comfort, rather wherever sheer desperation needed it to survive, and that includes preserving one's sanity from a bleak outlook in life. Take the case of zookeeping for example; it is not enough to feed animals, nurse them and provide them a habitat. They need to be amused, entertained, interactive in some way or another. They are learning, evolving, like any other creature on this planet, otherwise they lose the will to live. 

Now having said this, I come to the subject of genealogy, that too many still try to idealize in racist terms. Evolution does not occur by heredity alone, but by the challenges it has to face. Changes in environment or circumstance have always been the test of time. It can turn any number of genes on or off even within a generation, reviving old genetic templates thought to have long gone extinct. I have my suspicions this could be the case for those latent neanderthal genes. As for the term „haplogroup“, it implies decendants that are more or less related, but not necessarily to just that group- unless they were extremely isolated, or dramatically reduced by some form of disaster; essentially doomed to inbreeding if they couldn't find a viable mate elsewhere. So, forget stupid ideals of „racial purity“ or keeping it all „in the family“, let alone eugenics. These are sure ways to guarantee the extinction of your own future generations. 

These days, the biggest tomfoolery is DNA tests that evaluate in terms of nationality. While certain genetic variations can be typical in certain areas, its markers can only serve an estimation of geographical origin. Nationalities come and go as collective needs and circumstances change over the course. I've had my share of head bashing with numpties who take Celtic or Germanic as some kind of race marker...and then there's the bunch who think Celtiberians were their only true forefathers. Maybe they need to read the Irish Chronicles a little more thoroughly and be done with it. It only goes to show you that racism can come in forms far subtler than the arrogance of Aryanism. Does being a German citizen immersed in Alemannic culture make me a Nazi? Rubbish. „Alemanne“ is an ancient term „allmen“ refering to people of no specific clan who came about through travel and trade along the Rhine.

Activism in the Bizarro World

As much as I may feel inspired by some form of altruism, too many people are simply putting on airs for want of peer worship. It has become such an unfortunate sham of protagonistic narcissism, either riding the moral paradox of good versus evil, or crusading some Utopian ideal as if it were really all that simple. Given the opportunity to plaster their mugs all over the world wide web, the fashion statements are insurmountable to what's going on in the real world, and that without the least effort to fact check their sources. I see health icons secretly gorging themselves with fast food, misogynists pretending to be pro-feminist, alleged naturalists living in the urban sprawl who can't even grow their own petunias in window boxes. Say nothing of animal lovers who freak out when their pets bring home a fresh kill to return the favour. Then there's the ones who plaster your FB wall with all kinds of graphic horror in their vain attempts at emotional blackmail for donations, and do I really give a shit what your sexual orientation? I mean, seriously... So please don't come onto me with your pseudo-spiritual RPG, proverbial holier than thou, and theatrics for tribal dilettantes. I am not inclined to take things for face value. I reserve my altruisms for those who really mean it on the home front. Now go and nail yourselves to a cross elsewhere.

End of rant.