kimberlysteele | Recent Entries

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones:

-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading

-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break. My next planned break is the week of Sunday, March 24.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal. If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Residence of the Collyer brothers, world famous New York hoarders.

The collective astral plane is a cluttered mess right now. Imaginations have become ghettoes: ramshackle, crowded urban hells that are prone to colonization and constantly fought over by corrupt powers. Those who do any form of genuine spiritual work do the equivalent of bodybuilding in extreme gravity. I say "genuine" because much of what poses as spiritual work or spiritual literacy is actually toxic pyramid-building in disguise. They want your money, they want your time, and they want the lifeblood of your children if you are willing to give it. We are living in a scary and dangerous world.

Autism is not a superpower. As someone who has autism, I think it is a disability that is part and parcel of the astral conditions of our time that make it harder to do spiritual work. Just as I won't pretend it is somehow more desirable to live in the worst collective astral conditions in human history, I won't pretend having autism makes me better than I would have been without it. Autism cripples us on the physical plane and easily render the autistic person as a lifelong dependent with a menagerie of wasted potentials. Plus, autism is exceedingly common. One in every thirty six humans are born autistic in 2024 with the 1970s numbers being more like one in ten thousand. I don't believe this is over-diagnosis, either. I work with children and if my 30 year career is to be considered as a cross-section of what is going on with the general populace, I can confidently say autism is more common now. Vaccines are probably to blame along with feminizing petroleum byproduct chemicals of the type discussed in the book Our Stolen Future.

Body Bleed

From this occultist's perspective, autism is a disorder of physical and non-physical body sensitivity. To better understand what I am talking about, I will invoke one of my Ogham tree cards called Saille, symbolized by the willow tree or Betula alba. In my system of Ogham, balance is represented by an upright card and imbalance is represented by an inverted or ill-dignified card. For every median point of balance, there are two extremes flanking either side that represent imbalance. Saille is Sensitivity or Flexibility. Imbalance comes in the form of excess sensitivity and flexibility or a lack of those things. Autistic people, when imbalanced, are both too sensitive and inflexible.

On the physical plane, autistic oversensitivity is easy to witness if you've ever seen it in action or suffered it yourself. Autistic people, especially children, are picky about food and can easily turn it into a battleground with parents and caregivers. The food has to smell a certain way, be served at a certain time, and it must be confined to a narrow range of "acceptable", often highly processed forms. The reason behind this kind of pickiness is that autistic people are extremely sensitive to the etheric plane, which is the energy plane where things like aesthetics, vibes, smells, and textures truly matter. Autistic perfectionism is at its most severe when it comes to food, and autistics want perfectly customized meals recreated from past "perfect" meals that alleviated their etheric starvation. As children, famous autists Beata and Greta Thunberg tortured their mother with food sensitivities and requirements. The poor woman had to cancel her career as a internationally renowned opera singer in order to constantly cater to her daughters' etheric demands.

Autistic people, including myself, often have trouble looking people in the eye. The reason for this is twofold: one is that to look someone in the eye is to forge an astral connection with them. For the normie, it's no big deal to connect some rando over the cash register, but for the autistic person with an oversensitive astral and etheric body, it is a potential disaster waiting to happen. There is a common thread among many ancient cultures that photographs steal a little bit of someone's vital essence or soul, and I think this is relative to what happens when an autistic person makes eye-to-eye contact; it is an intimate act. The second reason autistic people avoid eye contact is because they don't need to use their eyes. Autistic people do not "see" so much with their eyes as with their etheric bodies. In my own case, I know that I can remember people I know far more easily by their vibe and non-visual perception of their moods than I can their faces. The astral source underneath the etheric vibe is a much more reliable source of identification for me than physically seeing a face and a body shape. I think autistic people who can't look at you in the eye subconsciously know that Meatworld is an illusion and a fakeout. If they are anything like me, they close their eyes in order to get a true read of you and your feelings towards them without the distraction of visuals.

Sensitivity, like any force, can be good or bad. If the autistic person can sense the truest, most meaningful nature of the person without use of the eyes, I guess that can be categorized as Good. In the Bad corner, it is all too easy for the sensitive person to become overstimulated and suffer a partial or total shutdown due to sensory fatigue.

Autistic People and Their Mothers

The following is mere speculation because I have never been pregnant to my own knowledge in this incarnation.

Pregnancy is a profound bond where mother and child share a single astral body and etheric body along with sharing the physical body. The physical bodies of mother and child separate when the child is delivered. The separation of the etheric body takes much longer to diverge: I believe mother and child are etherically linked until the child reaches the age of six or seven. The astral body takes the longest time to separate and does not become fully separate until the child reaches puberty. Because the etheric body of a biological woman is male (etheric yang to her physical body's yin), the etheric bodies of children -- being the same as their biological mothers for a time -- are male until true gender development happens at puberty.

When you are adopted as I am and did not have a biological mother anywhere near the scene, the etheric bond is created with the primary caretaker. Though this isn't quite the same as the etheric homogeneity of a biological mother, it is more than adequate if there is love for the child. Fathers also create etheric bonds with their children if they choose to stick around and be part of their kids' lives. Additionally, there are plenty of times when the etheric bond is not created between biological mother and child -- there are plenty of stories of mothers who don't form the bond or children that reject it from babyhood. Interestingly, when a father (biological or otherwise) cheats on the mother of his child, he truly cheats on the child or children as well. If the child is under seven years old, he is cheating on both the astral and etheric planes, opening the subtle bodies of the mother and the child to parasites and mayhem on every level of their being.

Speaking of Infection and Disease...

The astral and etheric permeability of children is already what makes normal childhood risky. Adding autism and its accompanying hypersensitivity to the mix only makes it worse, opening avenues for the non-physical equivalent of infection and disease. With the clutter of the collective astral right now rushing in to claim autistic people as astral pyramid recruits, it's seriously not easy to be autistic.

Autistic children are often not raised with any form of diligence. For a long time now, parents have been asking children what they want to do... as if the kids honestly knew. Bribery is a common tactic. "You can have ice cream/a new toy if you'll concentrate for the next thirty seconds, buddy." Uh huh, whatever, mom. Children crave boundaries because boundaries prove to them that their parents are powerful and can keep them safe. When a child acts out, it is usually out of a subconscious fear that the parent is weak, cannot protect them, and is easily pushed around by outside forces. The child is sharing an astral body with at least one parent. In the case of younger children, the child shares an etheric body with mom, which is almost like sharing a physical body. The child wants to be reminded that their body is strong and impervious to assault. This is a natural instinct. If the parent is wishy-washy, the child will push to see how far the weakness goes. He or she has to assess how bad the vulnerability is by throwing a tantrum, crying, yelling, biting, and hitting. The castle walls must be tested to see if they will crumble.

Adding boundaries and hard limits gives the child what they need to feel protected and secure. A mother who says NO to ten minutes more of an iPad game or a request for tater tots and chocolate cake for dinner is the same protective, walled fortress who will say NO to the child molester who wants to date her in order to cover his agenda of raping her offspring.

Greta Thunberg failed to reach physical adulthood because she nearly starved herself to death during her pubescent years. (If anything, tween anorexics need to take this as a warning: if you starve yourself now, you could very well spend the rest of this incarnation looking like an overgrown little girl akin to the 2009 film The Orphan, or if you get the motherlode of plastic surgery, like 2022's M3GAN.) Greta nearly managed to emaciate herself to death despite putting her mother through a three ring autistic meal preparation circus at every meal. I cannot speak to Greta's astral development as I don't know her and I do not care to know her, but it seems abundantly clear that her etheric and physical development were curtailed somewhere near the age of twelve, and she has remained frozen in time. Cruel as it sounds, if I were Greta's mother, I would have given her two choices at the dinner table -- take it or leave it. Perhaps I would be in prison because of it and perhaps my autistic child would be dead of starvation; we begin to see why I chose not to have kids. I like to think my pretend autistic child would have grown tired of testing the limits upon finding they stood firm despite her autistic brat histrionics.

Of course I cannot speak for all people with autism, but from what I have perceived in myself and other autists, it takes autistic people longer to to master the etheric and astral skills normies take for granted. Sociability is prime example: autistic people are too busy being overwhelmed by the etheric and astral bombardment of other people's auras to figure out how to say what someone else wants to hear. Going back to maternal attachment, many autistic people turn into eternal children as adults, retreating into an antisocial bubble. Within this bubble, they depend on a parent, a set of parents, or someone who acts in loco parentis such as a spouse or relative. Autistic adults who depend financially on more "normal" heads of household suffer from stunted astral development. Their creative ability collapses into a set of fond dreams that is no more real than the games and TV/movie imagery they shovel into their minds.

As for adult autism and the salvaging of our unseen bodies, I tend to think autistic people require spiritual protection above and beyond so-called normies because of our oversensitivity issues. Whether this comes in the form of prayer, traditional religious forms, banishing rituals such as the Sphere of Protection or the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, or other unturned stones, I have no idea. For me, it's the aforementioned SoP, Ogham, and discursive meditation, day in, day out, with the kind of German-train-schedule-regularity to which only an autistic could happily commit.

-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading

Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break. My next planned break is the week of Sunday, March 24.

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

There must be something in the air because I suddenly have the urge to talk about etheric and astral pyramids. Human language is a faulty, lousy way of trying to express abstract concepts of this sort, especially from such a flawed source as me. I was a staunch atheist ten years ago. It has been a short and strange ride into my current polytheistic faith, which as I explained in a recent podcast, involves a great deal of discursive meditation, divination, and daily banishing rituals. Somewhere along the way I put my own spin on old Western occultism theory of the subtle planes, and this writing reflects a portion of my current thoughts on that topic.

For a quick breakdown of what the planes are, permit me to quote one of my own essays on the astral plane:

“If each human’s existence is likened to the Everlasting Gobstopper/Jawbreaker, the material plane is the sour candy shell on the outside. One layer in, there is a different flavor called the etheric plane. This plane of energy is what Chinese people call “chi” and Indians call “prana” and is what feng shui, acupuncture, and Ayurveda works with. The etheric is invisible to us humans while we are awake in our stodgy plane, but some sensitive people can see it and most can feel it whether they realize it or not. The next candy layer in is the astral plane, which is most easily understood as the world of dreams you go to when you sleep. The dream world is part your own brain and part collective, meaning, other peoples’ dreams are part of your world/vice a versa and you can interact with them and they with you. Dreams are not what you choose them to be: just like other people’s emotions or the weather, they aren’t controlled by the dreamer. There are rules and limits to them just as there are rules and limits on the physical plane. Of course these rules and limits are different than the ones on the physical plane. The next layer in is the mental plane, which is the plane of learning and mastery that separates humans from other animals. For instance, being able to figure out how fast an object falls to the ground because of scientific laws falls under the mental plane category. Another layer into the Gobstopper is the spiritual plane, which is the primary reason you were incarnated and is the core from which all of the other layers of the Gobstopper emanate and cannot exist without. Take note that all the planes are the same Gobstopper, they are just different layers of a whole candy.”

Another metaphor I have made about the subtle planes one I call the Stick Figure Family analogy. If you are familiar with the kind of sticker that shows up on SUVs depicting family members and their pets, that is what I am talking about. On the physical plane/Meatworld, the window cling film is made of plastic, which is the long-decomposed parts of plant and animal matter we have processed into a sticky film. The etheric plane is where the sticker gets the static electricity that gives it the ability to stick. Though static electricity is invisible, we recognize it as present and we can feel it if we shuffle across the carpeting in a cold and dry room. The next plane "upwards" or "inwards" is the Astral Plane, the plane of ideas and images. When we see a crude stick drawing and associate it with a family of four with a dog and a cat, it is our Astral Plane development that enables us to perceive the drawing as a depiction of a family. Non-human animals do not have the same ability to translate that sort of visual symbolism, and that is the main thing that separates us humans from them. The Mental Plane is the concept of family and the ancient force that causes humans to band together in the first place. Humans do not understand this level of existence very well, but the few who do are often perceived as masters, gurus, or yogis. The Causal Plane is the divine force that created all of this stuff to begin with, and I won't even pretend to understand the first thing about it except that it is there.

As I mentioned, the Astral is the realm of images and the Etheric is the plane of of electricity and energy. The Spiritual lasts longer than the Mental. The Mental lasts longer than the Astral. The Astral lasts longer than the Etheric and the Etheric lasts longer than the physical. As we descend towards Meatworld and below it to the Demonic, phenomena become more temporary and short-lived. For example, let's say someone we know is lazy; we will call him Lazy Larry or Larry for short. In the physical world, Larry has a messy room, a bunch of clothing piled on the floor, and terrible breath from sleeping until 2:47pm and generally not brushing his teeth on a regular basis. Larry's etheric energy is troubled: he always feels tired, despite sleeping from 5am until 3pm every day. On the Astral Plane, his imagination is stuffed full of images from the games, movies, and television series he entertains himself with during his waking hours: he often thinks of the fictional people and situations presented in entertainment as more real than people and arrangements he must deal with in day to day life. On the Mental Plane, Larry's lack of drive and refusal to take life by the horns will recur in his future lives, so when he is reborn as Lazy Lisa, former Larry will be thrust into worse circumstances and a harsher environment until the lesson of "just do it" is internalized and learned. The Causal/Spiritual plane is the timeless part of Larry/Lisa's soul that caused him/her to be incarnated in the first place.

The Pyramids

Humans are always either building or participating in astral and etheric pyramids whether we like it or not. Anytime there is an official or unofficial hierarchy, an astral pyramid has been erected with its apex being the chosen leader. The base of the pyramid is comprised of "everyone else". We can witness astral pyramids everywhere. All families, whether there are children or not, are astral pyramids. Corporations, churches, organizations, fanbases, towns, cities, and countries are astral pyramids. Communism and socialism, both of which claim not to be astral pyramids, are absolutely astral pyramids. Energy flows upward in an astral pyramid towards the top most of the time. The reason creating an astral pyramid is desirable is because of the upward flow of energy. Astral pyramids are essentially feminine in this respect because they always seek to absorb, siphon, and intake energy into their beings in order to alchemize it with their own energy.

Etheric pyramids are an inversion of astral pyramids, which is to say they draw their power from the astral and distill it into individual points as a means of distribution. This makes them essentially masculine because they scatter their seed throughout the physical and provide energy via a spouting effect. Two different examples of this phenomenon are cooking and nostalgia. In the case of cooking, the cook accesses the astral plane of images for what dish to create. Then the energy work begins of manipulating physical plane ingredients. The etheric plane work of the chef imbues the food with potent life force, which is then distributed to whomever eats it. In the case of nostalgia, the astral plane's images from the past touch the etheric, creating a vibe which is felt deeply and uniquely by the individuals subjected to it. Collected images from the astral are distilled into an overwhelming feeling or sensation in the individual which captures the essence of being transported into the past on the etheric plane.

Please Join My Cult

Though non-human incorporeal entities also build astral pyramids, the ones we are concerned with in this limited discussion are human-created astral pyramids. Humans, as stated earlier, either create or join astral pyramids all the time. Some humans prefer to be part of the pyramids of others to building their own. Some only want to build their own. Any given astral pyramid can only exist if there is energy at the bottom in the form of joiners. For this reason, most people want others to join their pyramid regardless of their status as creator or participant. There is strength and power (and size) in numbers.

When I was in my childbearing years, I felt unduly pressured to have children despite my own wishes not to have children. I believe this happened because of the pyramidal force of people who had chosen to have children. When people have children, they join the pyramid of those who have made similar choices. Whether they personally are happy or miserable, they love company because it reinforces their decision and gives it power on the astral plane. That is why the Child-free movement used to be appealing to me -- an astral pyramid of childless people was built to counter the force of the Child-full people.

Religions are always seeking recruits in order to sustain and expand their pyramids. Christianity especially seeks to seduce people into its pyramid and has even been known to coerce or force its pyramid upon others who have zero interest, hence its bad reputation. People sell the merits of their chosen town, country, or lifestyle because of the unseen pressure to build pyramids they are part of or have created themselves.

Parties: The Hostess with the Mostess Wins!

Any type of party, from the tiniest group of seven year olds at their friend's house to the grandest of televised Oscar bonanzas, operates in order to build astral pyramids via the etheric plane. When people gather in groups, they create etheric energy bonds that bind them together as a pyramid base. That energy is siphoned up by the host, who in turn gathers astral plane energy and distributes it to the party's guests.

In exchange for material (physical plane) gifts and temporary shelter, energetic interaction with other guests, and potential connections, the party's host receives a huge pulse of energy from everyone at her party. Her astral pyramid increases in size and power, and if she does her job correctly as hostess, people repeatedly attend her soirees and increase her status.

Let's say things don't go according to plan. If the hostess is negative and abusive and fails her guests, she accesses the negative part of the astral or poisonous images and emotions. She ends up filling the guests with dread, fear, and anger, potentially pitting them against one another. In this case, her pyramid will fall apart or worse: it will grow as it attracts others of like mind who fill their imaginations with hatred, fear, and animosity.

School and work cultures were irreparably damaged by the lockdown and isolation hysteria of 2020-2022 because the etheric links between humans were kneecapped by social distancing, masks, and staying home. To this day, help wanted signs litter every storefront and JOIN US! entreaties litter every churchyard because of the damage inflicted by the absence of human gatherings for two years. Once people realized they didn't have to go back to work, school, or church, they took their energy away and the bases of those pyramids became riddled with holes.

If you've ever experienced live music versus its recorded counterpart, you most likely understand the power of music on the etheric. Music, although mental and astral in the way it lives in our brains, is primarily an etheric or energy plane phenomenon. When someone performs or sings music live and in person, etheric energy pours out of them and into you. For this reason, people who inflict loud music upon others are much like those who wear strong perfume: it may be what they like, but when you are forced to hear or smell it, it is obnoxious and causes a headache.

Of course I could be wrong, but I feel these forces are coming at us all of the time, and many pyramids have become utterly septic. Pyramids morph, bleed, and bump into one other in a tumultuous sea. Though I cannot help anyone in any direct way, I hope that being able to see some of these otherwise hidden aspects of the world can ameliorate the confusion that arises from dwelling in Meatworld. As a former atheist, I think I can safely say that being unable to perceive anything beyond the material sucked almost as much as Meatworld itself.

New podcast where I chat with Jasun Horsely! Topics include Rudolf Steiner, the quaxx, spiritual discipline, past lives, and more. Full 2.5 hours if you subscribe to Jasun's Jobcast.

-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading

Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break. My next planned break is the week of Sunday, March 24.

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Like a Prayer 2023 -- same edgelord Catholic/Eyes Wide Shut imagery 30 years later.
At least she is consistent!

To her credit, Madonna co-wrote the song Like a Prayer that would become the title track on her Like a Prayer album in 1989. The song launched her long, protracted, now-overcooked edgelord era, with a video featuring a controversial and sexualized black Jesus. Madonna still uses the song and its fetishized Christ in her current schtick, which are three ring circuses of air-humping Satanic Illuminati imagery and seizure-inducing lights. At its best, her voice is irritating and whiny. Her songwriting is middle of the road -- she's not terrible, but she's no Max Martin. The only things she ever had in abundance was sex and the exploitation of the outré. As we speak, Madonna is being laughed at and pitied for her desperate antics and ratchet appearance -- if adrenochrome actually works to keep anyone young and fresh, then it would follow that she is not on it.

Dullsville stinky vanilla BDSM lite LOONG before 50 Shades. But at least
she looked good in pictures back then!

By the time Madonna's book Sex came out in 1992, shock literature had nearly jumped the shark. I worked as a shelver at the town library at the time and the librarians had to order dozens of copies, all of which stayed checked out with wait lists for most of a year. The appeal of the book was greatly aided by the controversy surrounding it. Sex was packaged in a way that was accessible to curious suburbanites and it wasn't graphic enough to be actual porn; nonetheless, it was banned by the same legions of Tipper Gore pearl clutchers who got warning labels stuck on 2 Live Crew and Beastie Boys CDs. Getting banned, of course, was the best thing that could have possibly happened to Madonna's career. In his book The Satanic Witch, Anton LaVey reminds aspiring seductresses that there is nothing so appealing as "that which was not meant to be seen". Madonna was also in her early 30s at the time and at the peak of her physical beauty and stardom. She wasn't exactly hard to look at; people wanted to see what she looked like naked and she showed them.

Sex and the Etheric

The etheric plane is the plane of life force. I consider the etheric or energy plane one plane more subtle than smell: that is to say it rides right on top of the physical plane. Lightning and electricity are etheric plane phenomena. All beings, objects, and places are surrounded by their own unique etheric field, sometimes generally referred to as an aura. Clairvoyants can see this aura -- personally I cannot see it as I am not clairvoyant. Martial artists manipulate their own etheric force in order to defend themselves and to do cool tricks such as breaking chunks of wood. Feng shui is the science of manipulating etheric flows via house orientation, furniture placement, and home decor. Traditional Eastern medicine and Ayurveda both work mainly with the etheric plane. Traditional Western medicine used to do that too, and back in the day it was called humoral medicine.

The etheric exchange of sex, whether willing or unwilling, is one of the most powerful forces on Earth. During sex, the etheric body expands and contracts, exchanging energy as the physical body exchanges fluids. In intercourse, biological females find that their etheric body releases like a dam overflowing or a pressurized spigot losing pressure. For biological men, the etheric body is pierced and the sensation is like a vacuum being filled or like eating when you are extremely hungry. In our era of endemic etheric starvation, humans routinely become trapped by the allure of sexuality from cradle to grave, and this is unfortunate because though sex is neither inherently good nor bad, being obsessed with it is predictably negative.

Off With Their Heads!

If I was appointed Queen of the World, I would punish pedophiles with immediate death by decapitation upon being found guilty in a court of law. The reason I believe pedophilia should be punished with such extreme severity and finality is primarily etheric. Children have very strong etheric bodies. All children, regardless of organs, are etherically male, which is to say they are physically female just as they are as fetuses. The child's etheric body is shared by its parents (often just one parent, the mother) until it reaches the approximate age of seven, when the etheric body begins to separate and morph in order to make way for puberty a few years later. If we put this in the context of Eastern etheric science, children possess yang or active principle life force in excess. The elderly are the opposite: they are for the most part etheric females regardless of biological gender.

Let's look at the child as etheric male and elder as etheric female in more detail: Children are needy and selfish, existing in their own bubbles until they are socialized and taught to "play nice". As etheric males, they love bright colors, noise, and the energy of the playroom. They are exhausting and they are loud. They are yang energy personified: constantly exploring, creating, and learning how defend themselves. Astrally, children reverse sexes again and regardless of actual gender are astrally feminine. Their imaginations are fertile, ripe, and easily influenced.

The elderly, on the other hand, are yin energy personified. Nursing homes and hospitals are scary because of their yin excess. Dusty corners, decay, darkness, and a sense of going back to the dirt from whence you came are all horror movie tropes, synonymous with the old and dying. Our civilization, which pathologically fears the yin influence, is also terrified of aging and death. The old person becomes stuck in their ways or male on the astral plane, wanting to influence and not open to outside influence. Though this may superficially sound like a bad thing, it can also be construed as "owning your s**t" as an old person. The old crave the company of the young because they are deficient in yang energy. The young need the old in order to contain and limit their yang energy.

Returning to the idea of the child as sharing an etheric body with 1-2 of its parents until the approximate age of seven, we begin to understand why human children are so lost without good parents. Even when the parent is not a genetic relative, such as my own case because I was adopted at ten days old, there is a profound etheric bond between a child and its parent or primary caregiver for the duration of the formative years.

Pedophiles

Pedophilia is about physically, etherically, and astrally breaking a child into a consumable form for a temporary, addictive high off of its abundant yang energy. The pedophile seeks to pop the child's protective bubble and steal its contents. At its core, pedophilia is a pursuit of unearned wealth. Once the egg is cracked, scrambled, and devoured, the pedophile finds him or herself addicted as pedophilia is a Wendigo that demands greater and greater sacrifice. The New York Times conservatively estimates the sexual exploitation of children is a 20 billion dollar industry, but that number seems hopelessly naive and underestimated to me. In absence of deeper human relationships, regular porn addicts become child porn addicts. Some even get to the point where they want to turn fantasy into reality. Lather, rinse, repeat: new addicts become new pedophiles and new pedophiles become old pedophiles.

This poor girl. I do not envy her.

Peak Perversion

When I was a child in the 70s, pop culture was deep into the chase of the puerile. Jodie Foster starred in Taxi Driver as a child prostitute at age 12 in 1976. Brooke Shields starred as a child prostitute in 1978's Pretty Baby. Poor Brooke, however, was the subject of pornographic photo shoots and likely sexual abuse at the age of ten. A casual Yandex search of Brooke Shields at age 10 reveals young Brooke in full makeup posing provocatively in a hot tub. It is patently obvious that the plot of Pretty Baby wasn't just a fiction set in the Gilded Age for Brooke Shields.

The aforementioned Madonna upped the ante in the 80s. With every new release, we could all count on Madonna to bring sexy back before Justin Timberlake was out of grade school. Most girls of my era confidently assert that Madonna and her "music" were their first initiation into being sexualized at a young age. Before you think I am on some kind of Victorian high horse, keep in mind I was personally all for it and wanted to be sexy and sexualized at a young age, I just had no idea how to do it because I have always been a complete nerd. Madonna was a welcome influence for me and plenty other Gen X women.

The 90s were a turning point. By time the Sex book made the rounds, every envelope had been pushed and children were routinely sexualized as a spectator sport: the 90s were the era of child beauty pageants and JonBenet Ramsey. It's odder at this point to have a childhood that is free of being sexualized. You really do have to live in a cave or at least some kind of media-free zone where normal internet and gaming is not allowed. Millennials grew up knowing virtually no sexual limits where Gen X at least had a few -- it is no wonder Millennials embraced hook up culture.

Sexxy Red

There are a couple of viral videos going around where two teachers respectively lament the educational state of their four and five year old students. The children act up, do not listen, and their parents are uppity, entitled jerks who question the teacher rather than disciplining their progeny. Apparently, these precocious little ones sing and twerk to songs by hip hop artist Sexxy Red. The songs, if you can call them that, are Pound Town and Skee Yee. Pound Town's lyrics drop the N word about eight times per sentence and go into graphic detail about anal and oral. Skee Yee combines the N bomb with the F bomb and is mostly about anal. Though the teachers ask how a group of little kids came to know such mature music and scratch their heads, consider that these kids have spent the last three years (ages 2-5) mostly locked indoors with iPads and the answer is clear: they sing and twerk what they have been brought up on. They parrot what they know.

Hip Hop is a genre obsessed with displays of unearned wealth, especially etheric wealth. Yang energy is to be amassed and displayed in the form of golden teeth, fancy cars, mammoth McMansions, and curvy young women. The envelope has been pushed to the breaking point as it has in all mainstream media. There is no longer anything worth gawking at. Hardcore porn is just an internet connection away. Mainstream TV (not that anyone watches anymore) is cozy with the F bomb and nudity. Cinemax has been soft porn since forever: we used to call it Skinemax back in the 1980s. Of course five year olds are getting thrown under the bus: when all the boundaries are erased, little kids get thrown into the pit until the last child is consumed by the last demonic pedophile. I am reminded of the plight of the Gelflings in Jim Henson's animatronic/puppetronic wonder The Dark Crystal.

Truth be told, pedophilia is boring because at this point it has been done to death, often literally. There is something very off about the whopping majority of alleged travelers to Epstein's Pedo Island -- it's as if it is a psychic stain that won't wash off. Like a subtle but bad smell, you don't notice it until someone alerts you to it, but once you know, it's all you notice. I used to enjoy movies and music by those people a great deal more before I knew about the allegations.

Maybe I am just getting old, but I can no longer bring myself to care about the output of artists who deliberately try to shock or titillate with sexuality. It's boring. They can throw all of the five year olds under the bus and make Sesame Street into a full on drag show -- I'm done and I don't care. Every time Madonna does her OK Boomer geriatric gyrations onstage, it makes me grateful I was shepherded down the path of earned wealth, modesty, relationships that are based on deeper things than looks or money, and cleaning my own damn toilet.

Hello... New Year, new Ogham readings!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. I take reading requests until 8pm Central Time (Chicago Illinois USA) on Sunday night. Though I am flattered that people want readings after the deadline, I decline reading requests made after 8pm Central Time on Sunday night without exception.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break. My next planned break is the week of Sunday, March 24.

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Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

A vegan acquaintance of mine named herself Woke as part of an avatar in the 2010 Facebook era. She wore the banner proudly, feeling that her self-adopted moniker promoted her desire to be a champion for non-human animals. Like most woke vegans of the era, she descended into an increasingly isolated bubble of mental illness as the years went by. She replaced the animals in her diet with a subsistence upon hatred of the people who eat animals. She reaped the bitter rewards and now marinates in the same toxic stew, just with fewer human friends. She tends to bite the hands that feed her. I wish her story was a rarer occurrence.

I was surprised when wokeness finally began its decline in 2023. Wokeness peaked in 2020 and showed no signs of stopping as late as 2022. I believe the first major stumble was marked by the Bud Light Boycott, which was a general kneecapping of the awful American lite beer after its corporate masters decided to stick Dylan Mulvaney on its cans, boxes, and ads. Woke defeats began happening at a much faster rate after the Great Trans Pisswater Boycott: the once-mighty Disney corporation began to go into seizures, with its roster of insufferably woke actresses facing the music for their crappy PR. Disney’s sloppy CGI and seemingly AI-written movies and series that nobody asked for resulted in the company taking several nuclear hits.

The Battles of 2020-2023

The Woke scored major wins in early 2020, when the custom of wearing a Satanic symbol on the face was legally and illegally enforced by battalions of ex hall monitors, fear mongers, and self-righteous Karens. Fear is a hell of a drug, and even I owned and wore a mask for a short time in 2020 before starting the mask choice and medical freedom group, Speakeasy Illinois. Though the Woke claimed that masks and vaccines were about protecting Granny, it quickly became apparent to anyone who was paying attention that the hubbub over masks and vaccines served occult purposes and agendas. One of them was hiding election shenanigans. I have never thought Joe Biden was elected fairly, though had it been up to me, there would have been a viable alternative at the time to both Biden and Trump. Another reason for masks was to brainwash both people who had taken vaccines and people who had gotten them with regrets into feeling like they had made the right choice. To this day, the only people who sport masks in my area of Chicagoland are vaccinated and constantly sick with symptoms that either resemble or are tested as Covid-19. My unvaccinated friends and I who do not wear masks do not seem to get Covid, and we are far less prone to flus and colds than the vaccinated.

Once mask hysteria died down and people who got the MRNA vaccines learned the hard way about the phrase “sudden and unexpected”, trans rights began its leg of the relay. Predictably, the plight of transpeople distracted from the increasingly woeful Ukraine debacle, the three to seven sigma uptick in mass mortality from the quaxxed, and various craters in the weary economy.

Something about this does not seem right.

Suddenly, woke drag queens dragged the non-woke drag queen majority into the gutter by popping up in kindergartens and library reading rooms. Adult entertainment that since time immemorial confined itself to those of drinking age only became de rigueur among audiences whose main vocabulary consists of “goo” and “gaa”. The cherry on the pop out cake was the insinuation that children can and should choose their own gender apart from the inconvenience of natal chromosome makeup. To translate from the Bullshitese, the medical profession realized the gig was up with its dancing nurses and deadly vaccines, so the last move in the cannibalization of the rest of civilization was to go after the children to trick them into a lifetime of surgeries and medications. Whether a child or an adult surgically flips his or her gender, the result is the same: trips to the doctor become constant and permanent until death. Sex was not meant to be changed and it seldom works out. The same is true of stomach stapling, butt implants, and a laundry list of Western allopathic offerings, and that’s not even skimming the surface of allopathic drugs.

Personally, I have not physically seen a doctor in ten years. I am fifty. I did have to get antibiotics prescribed for a cat bite via telemedicine around 2021. At any rate, I don’t seek out the company of doctors and I don’t trust their advice, and I believe that is the reason I am in better health than 99% of of my fellow Americans. Medicine is a racket. I am no more willing to trust a “man of God” who molests children or a mechanic who never has a working car than I am a doctor who cannot heal himself, let alone others. I would literally rather die than put my faith in these people. I will happily commit seppuku if the only choice is between a quick, self-inflicted death and a long decline of complaining vociferously all the way about health problems that I partially caused due to my laziness and lifestyle choices. As you can see, nobody could ever accuse me of having a mild personality, LOL.

The Laughable Antics of the Modern Day Satanist

One of the reasons Woke is failing so hard is its inability to laugh at itself. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the case of Sam Smith, a corpulent pop singer who started out around 2014 or so with modest, self-deprecating lyrics like “But I still need love ‘cause I’m just a man”. Those famous last words… Smith ramped up the LGBT gimmickry with 2023’s Unholy, a forgettable tune with a video almost expressly designed for spoofing. For those not in the know, Unholy is a three chord jam using the oh-so-edgy harmonic minor scale. The video features Sam Smith’s ample gut in a black corset and a face-full of questionable, potentially-appropriated Princess Padme makeup surrounded by the S&M D List gyrating and licking their lips to a synth beat. The ostensible plot is a vanilla rich boy playing around on his wife by going to a low rent Eyes Wide Shut bondage orgy equipped with a single Durex (product placement) condom for “protection”. It’s boring and it is what I would describe as Peak Madonna, but since Madonna has surgically rendered herself into an alien life form, her role has been taken for the time being by Sam Smith. To add insult to injury, Smith and his trans woman bandmate Kim Petras inflicted their bit of Stalinist/Satanist theatre on dwindling audiences during the 2023 Grammy Awards, and of course the prominent tagline on the TV following their farce was SPONSORED BY PFIZER.

There Goes Jimmy Kimmel

Long before Epstein allegedly didn’t kill himself, every truther worth her weight in Durex condoms knew the names of Epstein’s friends, including the ones on his flight logs. Unlike Sam the Shock Satanist and all of the pop/hip hop duos before and after him, the names on that list were shocking: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, Oprah, Alan Dershowitz, Tom Hanks, Sting and his wife, Trudy Styler, Ralph Fiennes of Voldemort fame, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, hairstylist Frederick Fekkai, Tom Pritzker (cousin of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker), John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, etc. There is nothing new about the latest threat of release. Before 2020, the elites were panicking about what Virginia Guiffre knew. The frustrating part of the list I have included here is that it was scrubbed of many of the names I know I saw on it when the flight logs were first released. Nevertheless, the Lolita Express flight logs are old news; I have no idea what the hidden reasons are for trotting them out at the moment. Feel free to speculate why if you have any idea.

Jimmy Kimmel shot himself in both feet when he went into blackface on multiple occasions on the Man Show, so the fact he has not been cancelled like Ellen Degeneres seems to show how much crueler the Woke are to their own when the heretic in question is a biological female. The Woke hate biological women even more than the Christian Right, and that is truly saying something. I guess we could have figured out from what is going on with MTF trans women in women’s sports, but that is a topic for another day.

There are a thousand other anecdotes and trends that herald Woke is soon to be demoted to woke. There will always be a place for political correctness. I am not against many of the principles of wokeness so much as their execution. There is a significant part of wokeness that needs to be preserved: it’s not entirely bad to shame religious bullies of the Christian variety, though I would argue that the same tactics need to be adapted for any and all overbearing religions, including Islam, which the Woke tend to shy away from criticizing. Sometimes there are segments of the population that genuinely act as oppressors and they need to be outed and taken to task; the problems happen when the Woke spend all their time shouting OPPRESSOR when they need to be pointing fingers back at themselves.

QUEENIE MUSIC LINKS

YouTube channel with Orphic Hymn livestreams: https://www.youtube.com/@queeniesongs

Artist website with Orphic Hymns sheet music: Queeniesongs.net

Free, high-quality Queenie song downloads: Queeniemusic.bandcamp.com

Remix Queenie stems: https://ccmixter.org/people/queeniemusic/profile

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It's time to check in with the Clean Toilet Challenge! As a quick recap, the Clean Toilet Challenge is an informal, ongoing experiment. By cleaning our toilets everyday, we take part in an ancient belief that staying humble and cleaning your own toilet everyday brings money luck and good fortune.

I think I can safely say my own bottom line has improved since June 2023. I still have some credit card debt -- nothing extreme, but there have been expenses because I lost a family member in October. In spite of some setbacks, I am as busy as I was in 2016-9 when I still had a commercial location and was actually putting away money with zero debt for one of the first times in my adult life. Then the mismanagement of corona devastated my business and threw me from modest savings back into debt. I am not at the point where I have any savings, but I am slowly starting to pay my credit cards off.

In my own case, I see my clean toilet helping me to continue coming up with alternate streams of income. One big win this year was the launch of my Sheet Music By Kimberly Etsy store in late October 2023, which has already brought in $150 worth of revenue with less than 20 pieces of music for sale. I am looking forward to adding more pieces to the store over my winter break.

As I mentioned in the Fall Update, I have been able to relax a bit and because of generous donations to my Bandcamp and BuyMeACoffee sites, I now regularly enjoy a matcha latte or mint hot chocolate on the town at least once a week, and I often get a sandwich at Panera, NafNaf, or McAlisters without sweating it like I used to.

Have you noticed any improvements or strokes of luck that could be owed to a clean and appreciative toilet? Let me know in comments.

Happy Alban Arthuan/Winter Solstice!

To notice other things is to escape programming. Nobody is as programmed (without knowing they are programmed) as a teenager. I don't remember starting out in life as a materialistic, paranoid, insecure twit but I certainly became one. Ironically, certain teachers (I believe it may have been Social Studies class) warned us that television and advertising was evil. In one of the study units, we were tasked with identifying specific methods TV was using to brainwash us: bandwagon, emotional appeal, association, repetition. It got me anyway. By my 20s, the names of Hollywood actors and famous supermodels were more familiar to me than those of my second and third cousins.

Soap Opera Life

The term "soap opera" spells it all out rather plainly: the soap opera is clearly not an actual opera, but it is designed to sell soap. In the case of those TV shows I used to watch so religiously, like soap operas, they appealed to the basest and most melodramatic instincts of women: cattiness, perverted lust, lying, and cheating against the flamboyantly bogus backdrop of materialist gluttony as normalcy. Since their inception, soap operas have been used to indoctrinate women into general dissatisfaction as a lifestyle and to trick them into blowing up their lives. Does anyone remember when Luke raped Laura in a 1979 episode of General Hospital? Or the messed up "everybody hooks up with everybody" mess that was Melrose Place? Now that daytime/primetime TV is basically no longer a thing and the soap opera crowd has long since aged out, we have the Hallmark channel, which supplants cookie cutter prurience with Happily Ever After stories. The trouble with Hallmark is there is no darkness -- instead there is Mary Sue and Marty Stu, predestined to find each other and pair off in towns with no Walmarts or McDonalds. Said romances are sandwiched between copious Big Pharma commercials that always end in the phrase "Ask your doctor" with a list of terrifying side effects that are worse than whatever disease they were meant to treat. Also, it is always Christmas.

I once knew a woman who grew up in an awful, fundamentalist Christian setting. She hated cats and most likely abused them when she owned them, though the reports were hearsay, so I won't go as far as to incriminate her. At any rate, her hatred arose because as the victim of violent sexual assault herself, she had major issues with the imprudence of animals. She hated the way cats stretch, arching their backs and sticking their butts out. She saw this as obscene. She could not see beyond the fact that cats are animals: everything she perceived was tainted by her dogmatic upbringing and multiplied by her warped, stunted sexuality. I once knew another person, a man this time, who constantly judged others by their appearance, including the elderly. He did not seem to notice his own failures in deportment as much as the failures of others. It struck me as odd that someone of his advanced age at the time would care about the stain on someone's shirt or an unzipped fly. In the case of these two people, they had no ability to get out of their own heads. In the woman's case, she was forever locked in the trap of sexual abuse, unable to free herself from the notion that sex is dirty and abhorrent. In the man's case, he was not able to perceive other human beings beyond the most superficial of appearances, and his capacity for meaningful thought was amputated as a result.

Voice in Your Head

Talking to the disembodied beings generally called spirits is all about noticing other things. By paying attention and ignoring the outrage du jour, sensitivity and awareness increases. I believe anyone can talk to the spirits. I am not special. If you have ever talked to yourself, and this includes talking to yourself both silently and aloud, you have most likely talked to spirits. I don't mean to freak anyone out here, but you've probably spoken to at least one dead person. The difficulty is not in talking to fairies, elementals, dead people, demons, gods, and everything in between. No, the hard part is discerning who you are talking to and when you are doing it. Mostly via discursive meditation, I have discovered how dumb I am, and to a lesser degree how smart I am. Too little sleep and I become irate, depressed, and nihilistic. Too much caffeine causes delusions about how great things will be in the near future. My own voice is recognizable by the jokes, a habit passed down from my late Dad despite not having the benefit of heredity (I am adopted). I am always making jokes at inappropriate times, which invokes my father but also is because I was a traveling court jester in one of my more memorable past lives. Just as you can learn the tolerances and symptoms of your body, you can learn to pick out your own voice in the crowd of voices in your head if you work at it hard enough. In my own experience, my own voice is only dominant twenty percent of the time. The other eighty percent of it is the crowded ecosystem of entities I speak with on a daily and nightly basis.

Who You Callin' Pollyanna?

In the 1913 novel Pollyanna, a young orphan girl is taken in by her grumpy aunt and made to sleep in a threadbare room in a forgotten area of the aunt's house. Instead of sulking, Pollyanna teaches the denizens of her aunt's town a game of her own invention, the Glad Game. When someone, including herself, starts getting down on their situation, Pollyanna gets them to consider the positive aspects and to build upon them by focusing on the good. Pollyanna's Glad Game soon gladdens her town and her aunt, inspiring love, acceptance, kindness, and grace. Pollyanna was a popular bestseller in its era with lasting legacies: it was made into two films and its message preceded the 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. To play the Glad Game, you must first understand that humans are biologically wired to remember and fixate on the negative. This evolutionary mechanism helps us to physically survive. In the meantime, however, our evolutionary feature eats at the mind, causing misery, drama, and mayhem. Enter looking at the bright side. True occultism is Pollyannism. The bright side is often the most occulted and hidden thing. Negativity? That's obvious.

I was atheist for twenty five years. Atheism is nihilistic. As an atheist, I believed in the Void. The Void was the thing that swallows all humans up when we die, erasing our sins and feeble triumphs. Atheism made it easy to see humanity as a failed and unworthy project. I viewed the Earth itself as horrible, brutal, and essentially dead. There is hardly a leap from not being able to see the good in human existence and not wanting humans to reproduce. When we look at the members of VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, we see plenty of angry atheists who are not content for the human race to end naturally. They would rather see the process sped up.

I believe televangelists are atheist materialists because only an atheist materialist cold fail to notice the awfulness of McMansions. The worship of one god in a dead, human-centric system that flows towards whatever the worshipper wishes to be resembles atheistic Satanism than it does traditional Christianity. The televangelist says GIMME GIMME GIMME until he disappears into the Void. His ungratefulness makes him into a Wendigo of consumption and greed; the more he eats, the more hungrier he gets.

Pollyanna is often used as an insult: to be Pollyannish is to suffer naivete and credulity. I disagree. An entity that I swear was not me because I am simply not this bright said to me that gratitude transforms everything it touches by the power of seven. Generosity that comes from the heart sublimates on seven planes and is returned with seven times the power with which it was sent. By getting others to play the Glad Game, Pollyanna got people to see the beauty all around them. Beauty of the true kind (not the surface kind) is hidden where ugliness seems plain.

The most occulted truth of all is the silver lining to the cloud. To take an example from my mundane and average life, let's say I have to go grocery shopping. I can easily find a hundred reasons to make grocery shopping into an unbearable burden. If I play the Glad Game, however, I can be grateful for all the people who produce the food, bring it to the store in a truck, load it onto shelves and into bins, and stand all day at a register so I can buy it. I can be grateful for the honest work I did to get the money to buy the groceries. I can be glad for the working infrastructure, town, and country management that enabled me to get to the store without having to cross a minefield or dodge bullets to get there. I can be grateful for my generous donors at various sites who are the reason I can afford little luxuries and perks such as bubble tea and gourmet cat food for my kitties. Finally, I can be grateful for the bountiful Earth herself, which is anything but dead and without a voice. The Glad Game is exceedingly difficult until you get used to it. Like its negative counterpart, it is an invocation. The Glad Game is a constant choice, and because of the way evolution works, it is very much an exercise. It is a muscle that starts out flabby and atrophied, but when nurtured and challenged, becomes a force to be reckoned with.

Hi Everyone,

Please note I will be taking off the weeks of December 24, 2023 and December 31, 2023. Readings will resume as usual January 7, 2024.

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Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Nostalgia is a powerful emotional force that must be held in balance. Advertisers know the power of nostalgia and constantly manipulate it in order to make the masses dance to their will like so many puppets. Burger King's current ads use the garish yellows and browns and puffy, multicolored font I remember from 1980. I have no doubt this is intentional: the success of the TV series Stranger Things opened the floodgates for everything 80s to be resurrected in its kitchy-yet-nihilistic glory. As we speak, chain stores are blaring Christmas music, and most of it is from eras long past despite the ocean of available re-makes of Wham's Last Christmas alone. The onslaught of what I long ago dubbed Exmass Musick began sometime in October. Some stations play it all year, much like the Hallmark channel celebrates Christmas all year. Nostalgia is used as a weapon to overcome the customer's will. Burger King seeks to improve its own bottom line by creating a glamour of the early 80s, when many of us were young and never worried about the quality and quantity of what we ate because we were ten... or we burned it off playing in the snow or at the roller rink.

Nostalgia creates the sense that the grass was greener in the past. Perhaps it was in the Truman Show manufactured astral stage of the imaginary past. Those of us who actually remember the 80s and early 90s (the latest in fetishized eras) recall epic freakouts by Tipper Gore and the Christian Right over 2 Live Crew CDs. Hypocrisy was in full swing as Dee Snider and Gene Simmons pranced about in more makeup than a drag queen has ever worn at one time in single place; these guys were seen as the epitome of straightness. Outside the music scene, every female teenage peer of mine binged, purged, or went for weeks hardly eating at all. One friend ate less than 800 calories a day. She was 5'5" and weighed 95 pounds. I was 4'11" and weighed 110. The young men of my era invented the most awful and hopeless form of slacking: the forgettable Winona Ryder film Slackers was art imitating life, not the other way around. The 80s sucked, and it wasn't for lack of money. If anything, the 80s proved you can have tons of cash and property and be wholly miserable.

Running Away From the Known: The Relocation Phenomena

One of the curious traits of modern life is the tendency to relocate. Before I continue, a disclaimer: relocating far away in the most literal sense from where you were born and/or grew up can be necessary. Perhaps there were toxic people or a bad environment that essentially forced you to leave for a better life. I'm looking at you, Venezuelan refugees. Seriously, there are many situations where staying put is the worst thing you can do. If you have a stalker, an evil family, or the place where you come from is a bunch of dead ends because you have no affinity for it (nor it for you), then MOVE.

Sometimes it is a matter of the grass looking greener on the other side of the fence. One of the most hilarious anecdotes from my husband’s farmer relatives is the phenomenon of two cows sticking their heads through a railroad tie fence in order to eat the grass on the other side. Clearly the grass is not significantly different on either side of the fence, but try telling that to the cows. Nostalgia paints the past as better than it was, but the shunning of nostalgia combines with mercilessness and almost inevitably results in relocation. I am one who lives in the same geographical area I have lived in since I was born. My parents bought their house in 1965 and my mother, now a widow, still owns and lives in that house. Everyone I knew from my childhood, with very few exceptions, has relocated. My own birthmother, a third-generation Japanese American, now lives in Thailand with her third or fourth husband. My brother's mom was from Thailand. My husband's relatives scattered across the US; not one still lives in Illinois. Many of my students were either born in India or have parents who were born in India.

People do not stay put if they can help it, but maybe they should. Running away from nostalgia refuses to see the past for any of its good aspects. One of the challenges of incarnation (as I see it, anyway) is to appreciate the good more than we hate the bad. Humans are not wired to remember the good and the positive: this is a function of evolution. If we only remembered the positive, sweet, happy moments of life, we would never have made it out of the savannas of prehistory. Without the painful memory of a mother, sister, father, or brother getting chomped by a sabretooth tiger, we too would quickly end up as an obligate carnivore's lunch. So we remember pain, suffering, and negativity because we must in order to survive. When times aren't as dangerous, the evolutionary fixation on the negative acts like a booby trap. Negativity loves to build and avalanche, and the soft modernite who has no tiger to escape faces down other beasts in the form of inner demons.

To run away is to create a boogeyman of nostalgia: the old ways become abhorrent, the old place a hell from which one must escape. Yet every Mexican in my neighborhood, years after hopping the border legally or illegally (I neither know nor care; not my circus, not my monkeys) celebrates Mexican Independence Day like that s**t is about to be illegal. Flags, full mariachi bands, catering. Why? If that place was so great, why did they leave? Don't get me wrong, I love those celebrations despite not being invited or participating. I wouldn't have it any other way. Mexican Independence Day reveals the complex emotions of nostalgia: as the spirit of the North American land seeps into their children, they recreate the traditions of the lands they left behind.

When imbalanced, nostalgia triggers fear of death and dying. Whether someone runs away from nostalgia or wallows in it, there is often a deep fear of intimacy and loss. To run from home and never come back means that you don't have to face the sinking feeling of angst when you see the school building where your best friend betrayed you. You don't have to turn a corner to face a familiar vista that was your constant view when you were severely depressed. You don't have to stay involved on a day-to-day basis with family who disappointed you or who failed to defend you as they should have. They are remote; though you may talk to them every few weeks, they might as well live on a different planet as you will never see them again outside of the occasional visit, Zoom call, or funeral.

Nevertheless, those who run away, whether this is done literally or figuratively, fail to understand what their own roles were in their own problems. There is an old saying "Wherever you go, there you are", and by running away, it often means that because those old triggers are out of sight, they are out of mind. By avoiding past sorrow, the runaway is not truly handling it, and that means emotion is still lord and master, no matter where she travels.

Collector Guy: The Nostalgia Freak

The equal and opposite problem of avoiding nostalgia involves wallowing in nostalgia. Depression can easily have its roots in excessive nostalgia, or that idea that the grass used to be greener back in the day. Once again, there is a deep fear attached to intimacy and loss, but it spins towards the opposite affliction of sentimentality. During ostensibly happy moments, the nostalgia addict cannot live in the now because he is far too busy worrying about a future that will never be quite as good. He is highly likely to be a packrat, hoarding mounds of stuff both in his home and perhaps in storage facilities. He is quick to jump into human relationships and exceptionally sad and bitter if they do not work out. Because he is so quick to attach and so passionate in throwing himself away for the sake of the other who represents his dream, he becomes vampiric without knowing it. He wants his perfect vision of nostalgic paradise and will force the foot into the slipper with or without toes and heels (or bankruptcy). He spends untold amounts of time and money trying to recreate an imagined past. He is the best of consumers; he is the dude all those ad execs at Burger King and the Exmass Musick labels want as their customer. When it comes to being manipulated by the clever, he has precious little in the way of will. Because of his lack of will, he is likely to stay moored in the same geographical area where he grew up even if it is not the best choice for him and whatever family he has chosen to create. His unaddressed emotions may manifest in eerily similar ways to the nostalgia denier of the above paragraph, with a propensity towards binge-eating. He never fully understands his own role in his problems because he never bothers to think about it: he is too busy collecting and organizing more stuff.

One of the saddest nostalgia freaks of all time was the late Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of ~~Edgelords~~ ahem I mean Satan. He invented the hypothesis of Erotic Crystallization Inertia, which postulated that the fashions of one's own youth were revitalizing when re-created in one's surroundings and/or seen on young people in the current era. In plain English, the old goat liked seeing buxom young girls in garters and pumps to the point where he thought it was keeping him alive. He only lived until age 67, which leaves us to wonder if he saw enough hiked up dirndl skirts and nylons on Marilyn Monroe lookalike nineteen year olds. I remember reading somewhere that he believed in LARPing the decor and general vibe of one's halcyon youth in one or two adjacent rooms and then hanging out in those rooms in order to preserve one's youth.

If nostalgia has a proper place, I would say that like most things it is somewhere in the middle. The toughest thing, I think, is seeing nostalgia for what it is: an illusion. Nostalgia can be wielded as a tool. When I do my daily Sphere of Protection, I use the powerful feelings evoked from places I have been in the past to summon the four deities of the four corners. For the East corner, I often call up memories from when my Dad would get the family up at four in the morning to travel to Michigan. Though most times I would deliberately sleep through the journey, there were many times when I was awake and watched the sunrise outside the car window or when we went to a rest stop. It is easy enough to call up the feeling of being in that car again, young and taking it all for granted as I squashed my pillow into different formations or tried to ignore my brother while Dad drove and Mom watched worriedly for bad drivers. The more I do the Sphere of Protection, the more I lend credence to the idea that our entire world is some kind of illusion or test and nostalgia is one of the many traps by which we can fall by the wayside. Nobody said it was easy!

Hi Everyone,

Please note I will be taking off the weeks of December 24, 2023 and December 31, 2023. Readings will resume as usual January 7, 2024.

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

As a privileged, upper-middle class child, I was taken to see the Nutcracker ballet more than once. The Nutcracker ballet is one of those annual bits of culture that aptly represents the frenzy of the holidays: when you are caught in a materialist web as I was, it becomes more about dressing up and going into the city than the actual music or performance. I did not appreciate the magnificence of a live orchestra playing Tchaikovsky back then, despite him being (IMO) the most underrated composer in all of Western music. The music of the Nutcracker is transcendent in that it reaches across gulfs of time, space, and circumstance to evoke both the era from whence it came as well as unique, divinely-inspired genius. If you've ever been lucky enough to witness live music played by the best of professional musicians, you know that it is a mind-blowing experience. There is no comparison between hearing a recording and being in the same room as an orchestra or band. The effect of the live music experience is electrifying and addictive. I personally became so addicted to listening to live music in the perfect acoustic environment of the Auditorium Theater, I did a stint as an usher in college. I wonder if Andy Frain is still only paying their employees seven dollars an hour? I am going to bet it is still in the same ballpark.

Despite being treated to the live music and ballet Nutcracker as a child, one of the first truly inspiring experiences I had with Tchaikovsky's score was not at the ballet but parked in front of a Betamax tape-recording of a 1973 animation from the USSR simply entitled The Nutcracker. Maybe my limited attention span had something to do with my enjoyment, but the weird gravity of that little 25 minute cartoon has always stood out in my mind as more magical as the "real" experience of seeing the Nutcracker as a live ballet.

Once Upon a Time in Pre-Revolutionary France

In the original Nutcracker ballet, the story follows Marie, a young, rich girl. Marie's family throws the Christmas party to end all Christmas parties in what seems like end-of-empire France, like right before the bloody beheading phase for royals and their sympathizers. Marie and her brother, Fritz, are the pampered subjects of an extravaganza of gifts and entertainments in the great parlor. At the center of the parlor is the magical Christmas tree. A brief aside -- as a child, the kids down the block had the most amazing birthday parties. Their mom would hire a magician and if it was summer, there was always an ice cream cake, meaning a cake in which ice cream was essentially built in. It was delicious. At any rate, Marie's parents' party put my suburban neighbors' fete to shame. Marie is gifted with a Nutcracker. She falls in love with the toy. Her bratty brother grabs it and starts cracking nuts in its mouth. One nut is so large, it breaks the Nutcracker's jaw. Marie bandages her toy. When the party ends and everyone goes to bed, she sneaks out to see her toy and falls asleep with it under the Christmas tree.

Meanwhile in Czarist Russia...

In the 1973 Russian animation, an unnamed girl protagonist I will call Tatyana is not the daughter of the master of the house. Instead, she is a humble servant who is clearly not invited to partake in the Christmas party at all. Her role at the party is to clean up the messes left behind by the rich people. Nobody notices or cares she exists when she appears late at night with her broom to clean up under the Christmas tree. (If you'll forgive another aside, as a daughter of privilege myself, I can attest that real Christmas trees shed a terrific amount of needles no matter how well they are watered and humidified. My Dad used to insist on getting a real tree from a Christmas tree farm every year throughout my childhood and young adulthood.) Tatyana sweeps those pesky needles and other detritus and her broom becomes enchanted and dances with her. She finds a nutcracker on the floor with a giant nut stuck in its maw, the result of some brutal rich kid who tried to crack a nut, got bored, and threw it on the floor. Tatyana dislodges the nut and kisses the toy. The toy's eyes light up. It has been brought to life by her kiss.

I will let Wikipedia take the wheel from here:

When she kisses him, he comes to life and is devastated when he sees what he has become. It is then and when the Nutcracker decides to tell the girl his story of how he came to be:

A long time ago, there was a party at a royal castle to celebrate the prince's birthday, which was interrupted by the arrival of the three-headed mouse queen and her spoiled brat son, who both behaved very rudely and refused to leave or improve their manners. In exasperation, the king entered a secret chamber to obtain a poison against the mouse queen, but was locked in by the mouse prince. The mouse prince then started harassing the queen and the baby prince, and when the prince hit the mouse prince, its tail got stuck under the cradle and was hurt. In retaliation, the vengeful mouse queen had cursed the baby prince, turning him into a nutcracker, just before she was vanquished by the king. The king and queen were devastated, and the entire hall was petrified while the mouse prince escaped, taking his mother's crown with him. Now the Mouse King, he declared revenge on the Nutcracker. Eventually, the Nutcracker came to be hanged as an ornament on the Christmas tree within this house.

Just after the Nutcracker has finished his story, mice soldiers begin to appear in the hall, followed by the King of Mice. The soldiers try to get the Nutcracker, but the girl stops them, leading the Mouse King to shrink and capture her. The Nutcracker brings the toys around the Christmas tree to life, and a war is fought between the toys and mice. The Nutcracker is captured, bound and about to be whipped to pieces by the Mouse King when the girl throws her wooden clog at him, knocking off and smashing the iron crown, the source of the Mouse King's powers. The Mouse King's magic backfires, making him vanish in a puff of green smoke which also decimates his army the moment they inhale it and start sneezing.

The clog transforms into a glittering shoe. When the Nutcracker takes up the shoe, his shell falls away and he is restored to his human (and now young adult) self. He puts the shoe on the girl's foot, and her maid's uniform is transformed into a princess gown. The two dance to the royal castle to the music of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy; the king and queen are brought back to life through the Waltz of the Flowers, and the girl and the prince pass into the realm. All that is left behind of them in the human world are the girl's wooden clogs and the crumbled remains of the Nutcracker's shell lying before the Christmas tree.

Watch on YouTube

In the Nutcracker ballet as well as the original E.T.A. Hoffmann short story it was based upon, the rich, young female protagonist rescues the Nutcracker by bandaging its broken jaw. In the Hoffmann version, a seven-headed mouse king wages war on the Nutcracker and his ornament gang because the nephew of the hired magician/entertainer at the party, Drosselmeyer, once pissed off the Queen of Mice. The backstory in the E.T.A. Hoffmann is frankly quite boring: it's a soap opera and not a compelling one. The King gets mad because the mice have eaten the fat from his royal sausages. He enlists his court mage, Drosselmeyer, to make traps which kill the mice. The Mouse Queen gets (understandably) mad and hexes the King's daughter, Princess Pirlipat, making her into a nutcracker. The desperate king promises Princess Pirlipat in marriage to whoever can break the enchantment. Drosselmeyer's nephew ends up being the one to break the enchantment via a convoluted fairy tale arrangement by which he accidentally kills the mouse queen by stepping on her tail. He breaks the enchantment, but upon becoming her gorgeous self again, she rejects Drosselmeyer's nephew and the nutcracker curse falls upon the young suitor, turning him into a nutcracker toy until Marie finds him. The Mouse Queen's son is the one who takes up his mother's crown and continues to wage war on the Nutcracker.

The Nutcracker ballet skips all of the Mouse backstory and cuts directly to the war, which basically happens for no reason as far as we the audience are concerned. The war goes the same way, with all seeming lost until the girl protagonist hurls her shoe at the last scion of Mouse and kills him. The Nutcracker then whisks Marie off to a magical land where she enjoys even more exotic entertainments from Russia, China, Arabia, etc. in Sugarplum fairyland. Tchaikovsky himself considered the Nutcracker the most boring and worst of his ballets, remarking to a friend in a letter that he thought of it as "infinitely worse than Sleeping Beauty."

An Almost-Lost Letter from Tchaikovsky

Yet for a child of the 1980s, the Nutcracker was the only window to the world of Western art music besides Looney Toons and the occasional school trip to the symphony orchestra. I doubt Tchaikovsky knew how very lost the Western art music scene would become, descending into atonalism and the stuntlord, non-musical nonsense of John Cage with his infamous 4'33. He could not have foreseen Autotune, a music-editing software that came from submarine technology that now dominates and curses every song it touches with the buzzsaw sound of bogus proficiency in singing. He had no idea that it would be a sad, grainy cartoon from the former USSR that lifted his own beauty out of obscurity for a depressed eight year old. His music has shaped many a composer's life, including this composer's life. Without him, there would be no Orphic hymns, and even the silly tunes I make up for my cats would be worse for the wear.

Let's get back to the story of the Nutcracker though, shall we? The 1973 animation is a much better story than the byzantine soap opera of the E.T.A Hoffmann or the edited claptrap of the Nutcracker ballet. For one, the protagonist as a poor maidservant instead of the already-rich daughter of decadence makes the animated story several orders more special.

Disney has a Mary Sue Problem

As we speak, Disney is losing millions and millions of dollars with each new release. Disney, for those not in the know, owns the entire Star Wars franchise as well as the Marvel Universe. Not only was Disney's latest animated feature, Wish, a total flop; its most recent disaster, The Marvels, has basically ended any former legitimacy the brand possessed. The trouble with Disney is not just its woke, Bud Lite-ish, creepily-sexualized agenda. Disney no longer tells stories of any substance. Like the Hoffmann and Nutcracker ballet stories, the young, female protagonists have no challenges in their lives. They earn nothing via any sort of hardship, yet we are supposed to love them because they exist. They are Mary Sues. They are Bella Swan in Twilight -- though to Stephenie Meyer's credit, at least she gave Bella a few issues to deal with, including dueling boyfriends and a difficult pregnancy later on. Nobody cares about Mary Sue. She is dull.

Adversity and Meatworld

One of the main reasons Meatworld (my pet name for the physical plane) sucks so hard is that nothing can be built without work. The "magical" computer I type upon was produced by elements probably brought out of the earth by enslaved children in Congo. It was probably put together by Chinese slaves. It was probably sold by some dullard milling away in the Apple store, hoping for a lucky creative break as an influencer or an entertainer. It did not just appear here in front of me because that is not the way Meatworld works.

Every morning, I do about 50-65 jumping jacks, between 30-50 squats, and anywhere between 20-40 military style push ups. I have no desire to do this routine. It leaves me huffing and puffing. At the end of the pushup routine especially, my shoulders and arms threaten to quit a bitch and drop me on my face. Yet if I don't want my belly and hips to grow well beyond their current proportions and if I want all the other benefits such as a mental boost, improved breathing, digestion, I had better jump and plank without fail every morning. When we exercise, we literally rip our muscles, which causes the body's energy to heal them and make them larger. If we don't use it, we lose it. When I am on those last three pushups, I imagine what kind of spaghetti my arms would become without them.

The Mary Sue/Marie Sue of the Nutcracker and other stories doesn't have to suffer pushups, squats, and jumping jacks in order to have buff arms and a flat stomach. In her badly-written fantasy, all she has to do is exist and kinda sorta choose the right thing and she will be blessed with magical riches and a beautiful life.

Compare Grimm's fairytale Mother Hulda, a story about a maltreated young girl who falls down a magical well and lands in the world of the elderly snow queen. The young girl makes the best of her circumstances, working hard and helping Mother Hulda shake her featherbed, which causes it to snow in regular old Meatworld. At the end of her tenure, Mother Hulda gifts her with gold for all her diligent labor and helpful demeanor. The girl returns with her gold. Her jealous, mean mother sends her ugly, fat sister down the same well. The sister also encounters Mother Hulda, but instead of working, sits on her giant behind and complains that she is bored. The ugly sister fails to help Mother Hulda, so the crone is left to shake out her own featherbeds. At the end of her tenure with Mother Hulda, the ugly sister expects gold simply for existing. Mother Hulda gives the girl the gift she earned, which is to coat her with tar and send her back where she must dwell in personal filth and poverty for the rest of her life.

Brie "Captain Marvel" Larson is a plain Jane who got extraordinarily lucky, as is the current Disney incarnation of Snow White, Rachel "Weird, weird, WEIRD!" Zegler. They are privileged, ugly (mostly on the inside) sisters who go down the well expecting a prize for nothing. They are finding out that Meatworld can be extremely harsh, despite their past lucky streaks. Their movies do not have the beautiful music of Tchaikovsky to redeem them, so my guess is that those movies will sink into obscurity almost as quickly as they were created.

The moral of the story is not that Meatworld is fair: clearly it is not, or at least it is not fair in any way we humans can hope to understand. The moral is also that for whatever reason, expressing an archetype via a story can only happen by including dark along with light, pain with reward, struggle along with triumph. Like Tchaikovsky's music, there must be an interplay of light and dark, of major and minor, of dissonance and consonance. The key to uplifting the human spirit via a story seems to involve being honest about how difficult it is to suffer at Getting Better at a Thing, including becoming a better person. And if you are going to tell a good story, it does not help to have the gorgeous music of Tchaikovsky as your musical score.

New Substack!

This essay is the one I have used to launch my new Substack! I hope you will enjoy it in either place! If you join Substack as a free or paid subscriber, Substack will email you every time I publish a new essay, usually 1x a week on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

Hi Everyone,

Please note I will be taking off the weeks of December 24, 2023 and December 31, 2023. Readings will resume as usual January 7, 2024.

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

I have some new releases!

My adaptation of the Orphic Hymn to Melinoe is available for free at Bandcamp:

Listen at Youtube:

Watch on YouTube

And there is also my cover of Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas/Disney:

Watch on YouTube

I have a going hypothesis that I have dubbed the LCD or Lowest Common Denominator Effect that goes a little something like this: any group of people that physically gathers with the intention of channeling spirits is subject to the lowest and worst person's astral state dragging the rest of the group down to its level. So yes, what I am saying here is that any given group that tries to channel spirits, including groups of Christians who worship in church, is subject to the lowest, scummiest, and worst-intentioned person dragging the group's egregore down into the astral gutter.

I am not sure how long the LCD Effect has been in play. I am going to guess it has been a very, very long time, but it does seem to have gained a great deal of ground in the last two hundred years. I think there are quite a few factors contributing to this phenomenon.

Three Strikes of LCD

1. This is not an easy time to be spiritual. That's the thing about our current Demonic Age: this is a difficult time to be spiritual or achieve any kind of spiritual understanding. People are more materialistic than they have ever been as a function of being at the bottom of a glacially long cycle and because of cheap petroleum wealth.

2. Holy buildings are not holy. Another contributor to the LCD effect is a lack of structures, both literally and figuratively, that help connect humans with the Divine. In his book The Secret of the Temple, John Michael Greer discusses how ancient temple structures all over the world were eerily similar and how they may have been conductors and transducers of a now-misunderstood form of energy. In his book, he offers a provocative speculation that perhaps ancient temple architects knew exactly what they were doing and perhaps they were able to channel the kind of energy that made both crops and human minds extremely fertile. Compare the brutalism of modern so-called holy buildings. They are sterile, unproductive places where the only miracle that occurs is the creation of wealth from the wallets of the gullible.

3. Our holy men and women are 90 pound weaklings. Yet a third reason the LCD effect happens is the absence of holy men and women with enough astral "lift" in order to overcome the LCD effect.

The Bad Apples

What tends to happen in an LCD situation is a group of people is spoiled by the "bad apple" and despite the best efforts of good apples, the bad apple turns the egregor into a mirror of his or her own septic self until the group either sinks down into the morass or disbands.

In the case of the vegan group I used to run, it was the second one. After going vegan in 2010, I ran a group for vegans for many years. We met at restaurants and ordered vegan options. I threw potlucks in my old commercial space. I showed movies, hosted bake sales, and generally spent a great deal of my energy trying to make veganism a thing in my local area the only way I knew how. The group was generally very good and we helped lots of people and animals, however, the LCD effect was a constant scourge. One of the first LCD creeps it attracted is someone I will call Creepazoid Chris. Chris decided I was the one for him despite my wedding ring and obvious married status. He took everything nice I said to him as an invitation. When he began suggestively texting me late at night, I told him to buzz off and blocked his number. He proceeded to stalk and harass me online. He was not the only person who came to my meetups hoping to find a date and turning his fractured affections towards me, the hostess. "Laura" wasn't into other girls, but she was a bad apple extraordinaire. Laura went to a restaurant meetup at a cheap, fast-casual place and proceeded to lecture everyone at the table about how the restaurant was in the wrong for not offering oil-free options. Laura's bad behavior ruined several of my gatherings, but by the time she had made herself an obvious pest, the fissures breaking the group apart were en route to dismantling it on their own.

I used to belong to a group of houseplant and garden aficionados online. I say "I used to" because the group has now been canceled by its leader. The founder/leader of the group hosted huge plant swaps at the local mall out of the goodness of her heart. Many of my rare houseplants and a few of my prized garden plants are from the few swaps I was able to attend. Though most of the group was a harmonious bunch of amateur botanists, there were a small but vocal cadre of drama queens who insisted that the founder was pocketing money from fundraisers. The leader's final message before disbanding the group was "I'm tired of breaking my back just to have people accuse me of being about the money; this has never been about the money".

In the past, I think it was easier for a charismatic and motivated leader to lift his or her group out of LCD-ville. I have a great deal of chutzpah and etheric energy, but when Creepazoid Chris and Laura entered one of my meetups, there was no way I could inspire the kind of power necessary for them to feel alienated. No matter what I did, they clung like boogers. I made rules to attempt to dissuade Creepazoid Chris, saying that my group was not for dating and mating and that anyone who sexually harassed another group member would be immediately booted. This worked about as well as you suspect it did. I wrote Laura a scathing message or three telling her to grow the hell up -- I highly doubt she took that advice.

Now take the average, medium-sized Protestant church in my area. Not only do they lack charismatic leaders, there is nothing holy about anyone in the congregation. One medium-sized Protestant church near me sports a Starbucks style café along with the usual worship band. One of their meeting rooms is larger in square footage than my house. The crass materialism of the place is glaringly obvious from the (huge) parking lot. Once you go into the building, it is quite clear they are not worshipping Jesus no matter how many Bibles they quote during service. Multiply the bland, uninspiring elevator music-scored bloviations of the Protestant pastor by a million and we begin to understand how the LCD Effect drags us collectively lower and lower still.

Hi Everyone,

Please note I will be taking off the weeks of December 24, 2023 and December 31, 2023. Readings will resume as usual January 7, 2024.

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

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