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We dwell in the decay of a Great Industrial Age. We would like to think we are the first and last hi-tech era to blight this planet, but recent discoveries reveal that ours is neither the alpha nor the omega when it comes to humans harnessing the Earth’s energy for their own highly specific and intricate purposes. Recent lidar (light detection and ranging) discoveries reveal that not only were ancients up to something under those pyramids, they clearly understood currents and patterns of force far better than our mid-brained Scientism-ists ever will. Surely their approach to getting energy from sky, water, and ground was more sophisticated than oxen and plows.The end of this empire is here — the systems and infrastructures we depend upon are sclerotic, elderly, and clearly doomed. The upper middle class is a rapidly shrinking set of musical chairs accompanied by ever-quickening rounds of the monkey chasing the weasel. Despite the upper middle class ideal being a trap, there is no shortage of people willing to die trying to fall into its jaws. Conspiracy theories are quietly renamed conspiracy facts. The idea that a wholly corrupt, overarching System of pedophilia, murder, mutilation, and money laundering dominates the loftiest echelons of power is not as easily dismissed by normal people as it was even five short years ago. Nobody knows if the System and its participants are as diabolically hegemonic or powerful as they seem. What we do know is that regular life for the citizens of empire is not getting any better, that politicians are uniformly trash, and as the Rush song Freewill states:

If you choose not to decide,
You still have made a choice

Like it or not, we are in a phase of politics where the only effective political action is the kind that comes out of the end of an automatic weapon or at the edge of a sharp blade. Before anyone suggests I am advocating for violence here, no, I am not. I have no plans to go gonzo unless situations truly degrade to the point where I have nothing left to lose. I am nowhere near that point, but many are.

When political action of any sort becomes futile and all markets are rigged so heavily that the average person is laden with the burdens of Atlas to simply exist, choices present themselves. The first choice that most opt for is status quo, the second is to become a killer, and the third is to choose an alternative to the binary of status quo and killer. I plan on treating all of these themes to at least one essay a piece.

Briefly, status quo is the path of least resistance. To opt for status quo is to seek out the dwindling rewards of the System in order to amass more of them for oneself and potentially one’s brood. The status quo seeker wants popularity and clout within the dying system and hopes to exploit it as it has exploited him. He fails to understand that unearned wealth must come from someone who earned it and that by amassing unearned wealth, he merely agrees to pay for it somewhere down the line. Somewhere down the line could mean several or even hundreds of lifetimes of subsistence farming in times of famine. Perhaps it could come in the form of devastating illness and excruciating death. Or it might be several helpings of each. Perhaps it involves running the mazes of Purgatory for a glacial cycle or two until it becomes apparent that the hell world is of one’s own perverse creation. I believe status quo is by far the worst of the three choices, far worse and more likely to lead to hell than the Path of the Killer I am exploring today. Ironically, many who see themselves as killers are actually status quo seekers. They are little boys who fancy themselves as grown men.

Though mainstream System media is desperate to pretend it isn’t so, the Path of the Killer has arrived on schedule. The prognosis is doubleplus ungood for billionaire CEOs, grinning politicians, and status quo tops who make the mistake of being visible on the internet. Whoops! For many years, I wondered why school and theater shooters didn’t march into the boardrooms of Monsanto, Bayer, and Nestle instead of a fifth grade classroom. Many school shootings are false flags, meaning the government mass murdering real fifth graders in real time and then claiming the dirty deed was not done by the CIA in order to ram through anti-Second Amendment legislation.

Insurance adjustors

Luigi Mangione was, as we all suspected, the first in what will be a long line of adjustors to terrify and purge the political class that sits prettily above the common people on their heavy thrones. Luigi allegedly took out United Health CEO Brian Thompson in late 2024. A combination of lax security measures and good timing enabled Thompson’s gratuitous slaughter in front of the Hilton in midtown Manhattan. The opening ceremony of our new era of killers was brazen and showy. Mangione is supposedly being treated like a prison king, with nobody allowed to mess with him and his hair carefully crafted by another inmate in an expert fade. Sean Combs, a.k.a. P. Diddy, who is in the same prison at the moment, is reportedly very jealous, because his prison slop allegedly is full of bugs, poop, semen, and pubic hair. Awww.

There was a brief respite for status quo overlords and their media mouthpieces until June 6, 2025, when Nicholas Manning, the CEO of West Valley Medical Center in Idaho was found dead in a Baltimore, Maryland hotel room. It’s interesting that the Mangione family owns several hotels in Baltimore (though not the one where Manning was found) and is heavily involved in the politics in Maryland, but I digress. Manning was 46 when he was found dead, supposedly of a drug overdose. His family adamantly claims that he was murdered. West Valley’s parent company is the Health Care Corporation of America, which operates an 86 billion dollar network of for profit hospitals across the US and UK. Manning allegedly made 21 million per year. Manning’s family insists fraud was involved in Nicholas’s death, which is currently under investigation.

Thomas Gebremedhin, a VP at Penguin Random House, recently got in hot water when he tweeted about the alleged murder of Wesley LePatner, a female, Jewish CEO of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust and married mother of two. Gebremedhin pointed out that LePatner made $9000 per minute while making home ownership difficult to impossible for nearly everyone else and expressed that she should “rest in piss”. LePatner’s company was called out by none other than the United Nations for massively inflating rents and home prices around the globe more than six years ago, and of course the private equity firm’s response was to do much more of the same. LePatner and her family lived in a tacky, multimillion dollar penthouse overlooking Jay Z and Beyonce’s building in New York.

Many gods, and not half of them pacifists

Ours is not an openly warlike civilization, as that would take a level of honesty most of us do not possess. We like to hide our hatred and veil it with a veneer of virtue signaling. As John Michael Greer wrote, hate is the new sex, and the repression of hatred as a natural force has become a leitmotif in public and private life.

The most perfunctory of studies of ancient Greece reveal the rivalry between Athens and Sparta. Though we modernites like to stamp ancient cultures with our own generic brand of materialist atheism, Greek city states were deeply enamored and embedded with the gods they worshipped. In Athens, the primary deity being worshipped was obviously Athena, but the entire pantheon constantly occupied minds and hearts. The gods were involved in everyday Greek life in a way no modern person will ever understand. Ares was not the only god of Sparta as Hollywood might presume. Apollo, slayer of Tityus, was revered as well as Artemis the huntress.

Furthermore, the Greek gods weren’t nice. Niobe, the Queen of Thebes, boasted about her superior fertility compared with the goddess Leto, mother of Artemis and Apollo. Niobe had fourteen children and Leto only had two. A kinder, gentler pair of gods would have let it slide. Instead, Artemis killed each one of Niobe’s seven daughters with her arrows and Apollo caused Niobe’s sons to sicken, shrivel, and die. Niobe’s husband then died of plague. Niobe wept until she was transformed into a stone on Mount Sipylus.

Unlike monotheist retards, I don’t believe myths actually literally happened, however, this tale gives us some hints to the dark nature of a solar god and a lunar goddess. The gods killed Niobe and her presumably innocent children for her egomania. They slaughtered her and her family because she was an uppity, arrogant insect who became too annoying not to stomp, and personally I don’t have a problem with it.

There are more not nice gods than nice ones. The brutality of the Iroquois was legendary, and I guarantee they weren’t even close to atheist. Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas were also not atheist, and they had plenty of warriors, slaves, and human sacrifice. The Abrahamic religion’s gods are typically brutes as well, with Allah marrying a seven year old girl and considering it fine to force Islam on the rest of the world by any means necessary. Yahweh is no slouch when it comes to hideous murder, and despite his admonitions to be fruitful and multiply, it seems that deity has never met an abortion he didn’t like.1

To the Vikings, Hel was both a goddess and a place where people went after they were dead. Earth and incarnation was the third station between two afterlife worlds: Valhalla for warriors and those who died honorable deaths in battle and Hel for everybody else. This is not to say Hel wasn’t restful or pleasant for some souls, it is only to say it was not considered as special or grand as Valhalla. Valhalla’s etymology is “hall of the battle-slain”. For those who died brave deaths, it is a sort of heaven, much closer to the gods and their world than Hel. They rest in Valhalla, fighting, feasting, dying, being reborn, and repeating the cycle again and again until Ragnarok, the final battle. Hel, on the other hand, is a land of mist and shadows. Hel is a female goddess who reaps souls to populate her gray sepulcher underneath the earth. Valhalla is in the sky.

Different strokes for different gods and different peoples

Monotheism had a good run. The gods of the last two thousand years each tried to create their own monopolies: Buddha in the East, Christianity in the West and South America, and Allah in the Middle East and Africa. The trouble with monotheist gods is they are all seemingly vying to be Highlander. There Can Be Only One in the monotheist purview, yet it does not appear as if a one-god model is going to happen on Earth or her Universe. During each of their respective peaks, Buddha, Yahweh/Jesus, and Allah commanded large respective populations. None has proven strong enough to take the entire world for himself at this point, and I don’t believe it is going to happen. Of course I could always be wrong.

The old gods seem to be on the rise, and there are many more of them than there are monotheist deities. As monotheism falters and its gods grow increasingly remote and distant, the appeal of gods who send help and comfort in our everyday lives is overwhelming. I don’t ask Jesus to help me communicate with my loved ones because I do not sense he is around or interested. I believe I have talked to Jesus about certain things and that he has illuminated me to great truths, however, for everyday pablum, he’s not my guy. Instead, I ask Hermes, Sul, or Lady Bastet (many of my loved ones are cats). As mainstream religions impale themselves upon their own hypocrisy, it is only logical that polytheism resurges to the place it once held for most people; nature abhors a vacuum.

I am not going to speak for my gods, however, I don’t believe they like the Brian Thompsons and Wesley LePatners of the world. I don’t believe the people who rained punishment on bigwig CEOs are going to hell… at all. Valhalla perhaps, but not hell. Samurais did not forgive their enemies. To forgive or yield to an enemy was considered much more dishonorable than death.

In order to die with honor, it is sometimes necessary to kill, or at the very least to allow death to do its natural thing. I once saw a video of an old Indian street woman eating her own barf because she was starving to death. I am glad I have never known that kind of hunger, but at what point is it not worth hanging on? Especially when you come from a culture that wholly considers reincarnation to be a thing?

In spite of the hordes of pudgy, suicidal, gamer-goomers, there will always be various groups and individuals who have not had their skills bred or cucked out of them. There may be a thousand hikkiko moris content to sleep until 2:46pm or until they get hungry enough to rise for whatever meal Mom provides for them at age forty-three but there will always be one or two with enough vigor to sneak a gun into the citadel. Even in less populous times, there was no way of controlling us all.

There is a whole culture in prison devoted to the sadistic torture and murder of child molesters and murderers. In 2018, Chris Watts allegedly killed his pregnant wife Shanann and their two daughters, four year old Bella and three year old Celeste. Chris tried to lie about the murders at first and later confessed. His motive for the crimes seems to be that he was having an affair with another woman and he and Shanann were in deep financial trouble. Rumors are circulating Chris Watts is not having a good time in prison. He has been transferred from a North Carolina penitentiary to a Wisconsin one because he was beaten up and lives in constant fear of being beaten, poisoned, or raped. In other words, his fellow prisoners are punishing him because the law is not up to the job. Jared Fogle of Subway commercial fame seems to have run a child porn distribution center since his young manhood. After making it as a sandwich actor, he still was dumb enough to get caught crossing state lines with the intention of raping a kid. In 2016, a fellow inmate in the Colorado facility where Jared was being detained beat the crap out of him, punching him several times in his face.

To my mind, it is pathetic that lifers in prison are the only ones responsible enough to zero out the recidivism rate of kiddy diddlers via the only way that is effective. When a pedo is killed in prison, it is a public service that benefits the taxpayer, who no longer has to fund that prisoner’s existence.

When human garbage is in a high place, holding his or her fellow humans in thrall and subjecting them to his caprice, I am not so sure it is the Devil acting when that human trash is taken to the curb. America and other nations have entered our Insane Roman Emperor era. No matter how many emperors were killed back in those days, new and often worse ones popped up in their place. Eventually the whole construct collapsed and gave way to different gods. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Humans do not make gods, no matter what Yuval Noah Harari or Richard Dawkins wants to believe. Humans perceive gods in our own image because we don’t know what else to do and frame of reference is not our strong point. Are the gods OK with it when we take matters into our own hands? I don’t know, but I would argue they don’t seem entirely adverse to it.

 


1Exodus 21:22-23, Numbers 5:11-28, Hosea 13:16
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This is REAL. It’s a 24K umbrella stand and it’s not even pretty. It looks like a toilet brush holder from 1978. That bottom repository is for filthy toilet water. Can you smell it from here?

I recently drew some flak when I said the way forward was gratitude, not Luigi-ing a CEO. Some dude tried to start a flame war with me while crying “Hopium!” and I blocked him. Little did he know or bother to find out that I have always had a curious killer instinct. I have a great deal of Pluto in my birth chart. Death is just where my mind goes. For me, the most Herculean achievement I have ever made was not building an independent music teaching career, completing several novels, staying married to the same man for 24 years, or achieving over 500 subscribers on Substack. No, the most incredible feat I ever performed with my own existing material was learning to look on the bright side.
 

I can intimately understand why the hopium crier was pissed. Hopium proliferates from every corner of our daily lives, hopium and false transcendence syndrome. They’re both constantly being shoved down our throats. American culture has always immersed itself in hopium/false transcendence — fake it until you make it, suck it up, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, face it with a grin, It Gets Better. No, it doesn’t get better. Meatworld sucks, everybody dies, fade to black. Yet hopium and false transcendence are problematic because they are the binary of black-pilled nihilism. Neither of the poles represent balance. On one side, we have New Age wellness gurus attempting to shame anyone who holds autistic people accountable for their mea culpas. Such is the situation of the Rainbow Unicorn Glitter Fart Starchild(™) whose mindframe revolves around chakra obsession and health food fads. She insists that mass enlightenment is just around the corner. She is already there, of course, and waiting for the rest of us dirty peasants to catch up. On the other side, we have nihilist atheists and evangelists of various stripes, counting down the seconds until CEOs everywhere are forced to flee to their Bluemont bunkers for fear of a random fusillade of custom-engraved ammunition landing in their scalps.

As usual, sanity resides somewhere between the two poles, and though it goes unrecognized by those pushing the two extremes, it is a present-and-accounted-for alternative.
 

It feels GOOD…


And now for Two Minutes Hate: CEO Edition

I hate CEOs and I hate the way they live. I hate all of the Kardashians. I hate Mark Zuckerberg. I hate Joel Osteen and I think he is a de facto Satanist. Speaking of de facto Satanists, I hate Dave Ramsey despite using some of his better advice. I hate people who travel around in private jets. I hate their multi-million dollar divorce settlements, their surgery and injection enhanced faces that stare from every screen and magazine cover, and their stupid attempts at trying to be relatable. I hate their trophy wives so much that I envision them going on shopping sprees to redecorate their luxe foyers with Farrow and Ball wallpaper that costs more than a year of university tuition and a $24,000 umbrella stand. Think of what that money could do for someone in dire need and the umbrella stand becomes an obscenity. Kim Kardashian redecorated her entire 8,000 square foot house in pink and green for a Wicked-themed slumber party. “No expense was spared” and future landfills were also not spared. Eff these people.
 

What we hate, we imitate

The trouble with unexamined hatred is that it molds us in its image. Our Rainbow Unicorn Glitter Fart Starchild(™) is as full of hatred as her incel shooter-in-training counterpart on the other side of the equation. Unexamined hatred has a spirit of its own along with an astral pyramid. These things exist independently of any one person or group. Like the egregores of cocaine or alcohol, the hatred egregore sucks weak humans into the bottom of its pyramids as worker bees and mines them for energy. They don’t feel it happening. Before they know it, they are snorting lines out of the carpeting or swallowing their own decayed, broken death while pissing themselves on the barstool with no memory of how they got there or why they are still alive. Hatred is much, much more addictive than cocaine or alcohol. It can take multiple lifetimes to work out an anger addiction.

Honestly, like many, I am glad Brian Thompson was executed. He deserved it. If I said I believe we need to leave the CEOs alone in order to be better people or avoid bad karma, I would be lying. If that makes me a bad person, I am OK with that. I would rather be a bad person than lie to myself to insist my thoughts are cleaner than they actually are. For instance, if the globalist goons ever come for me, I will relish falling back into my old habits. Going gonzo on them will feel like homecoming.

Seems a bit excessive to send her back a few hundred million years, no?


Were the gods truly against Brian Thompson’s assassination?

The Greek gods were not goody two shoes. They were downright vengeful, petty, and vain on the regular. For instance, was it truly necessary for Athena to transform the weaver Arachne into a spider? The human girl boasted she was a better weaver, and instead of saying “No, you’re not,” and ignoring her, Athena entered into a weaving contest with Arachne. When Athena saw that Arachne had woven a tapestry depicting the gods in various extramarital indiscretions, she ripped Arachne’s work to shreds. Arachne then kills herself and Athena’s version of “pity” is to transform her into a spider. In Druid parlance, the spider was always Arachne’s cydwil, otherwise known as the animal she originally evolved from via hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The little spider soul that ascended through form after form to finally become human was sent back again to Square One as punishment. I am a devotee of Athena who has written her a song to go with her Orphic hymn but even I cannot see this as a particularly mature set of actions. Athena was hardly the only vengeful Greek god: compared to the curse of Atreus, Athena’s punishment of Arachne hardly stirs the water.
 

The Christian god isn’t exactly just or moderate in his punishments of terrible human beings, otherwise being gay would not be libeled as an abomination and we would be able to suffer a witch to live. The urge to have it both ways does not excuse what is supposed to be the infallible Word of God. Which part of the Bible are we to believe and model our lives after? The one where God takes delight in ripping babies from the womb and crushing the heads of babies? The one where a father offers his daughters to be raped to spare his houseguests? You can’t cherry pick… it’s in there. Also, the Christian god is clearly vengeful, and putting his own son up to receive the vengeance due to others does not make him less vengeful.
 

I’m not a god and I don’t know how gods operate except that they work in mysterious ways. When Luigi Mangione gunned down one of the worst human beings ever to waste the air of this planet, perhaps it was the will of a god working through him. How the hell would I know? All I know is that the circumstances lined up in a peculiar way that humans usually associate with gods.
 

Nevertheless, if we round up all of the CEOs right now and put them in a gulag, laughing as we watched them beg for their lives on a livestream, it would not make a whit of difference unless we changed ourselves and our aspirations into something truly different than a CEO. I will be discussing what I believe about effecting those differences in a future essay.

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One of the reasons I was a lousy Christian is I am far too eclectic to worship only one god.   The colorful pageantry of polytheistic religions can seem extremely foreign and a little scary to a born-and-bred Protestant Midwesterner... not this Midwesterner.  From nearly day one, it looked like the other religions were having a great deal more fun than Protestants.  One of the reasons I made a lousy atheist is that even Protestant Christians appeared to have much more fun than atheists.  If I had a twenty for every bitter, lonely, childless, vegan, apocalypse-immanentizing atheist I ran into in my first decade of being vegan, I could easily buy a building to house my music studio again... in cold, hard cash.

Technically I am a Druid of about six or seven years ever since starting a daily habit of discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection, and Ogham divination.  I started these practices under the aegis of the Ancient Order of Druids in America but quickly siphoned my energy into my own little corner as usual and did my thing.  Nobody was more surprised than I was when the Greek pantheon entered my life via the Orphic Hymns.  I still tend to think I did not entirely have a hand in it.  Considerable meditation leads me to believe that my past experiences as a musician, including possible experiences in past lives, have led to this.  

To make a long story short, I have come to believe it is time for a revival of the Greek gods and Greco-Roman ideals of balance, discourse,  respect for nature, and beauty, including the prioritization of beauty in our built environments.  We have gone too long as a civilization into extremes and the fetishization of extremes.  We have allowed the collective conversation to fall into utter disrepair, and the ugly result is stark division among class lines, normalized violence, and broken families and friendships.  Our disrespect for nature has rendered the average person an atheist drudge no matter how religious they claim to be -- this is why we have Catholic priests who have no idea how to banish a demon and Hindu devotees of Dhanvantari getting themselves shot up multiple times with government subsidized MRNA-hijackers at Walgreens.  

Hating on all of these problems and imbalances is unproductive at best and toxic at worst, so the remedy is not to try to stop the violence but to throw energy into nonviolent pursuits.  Enter Aphrodite.  The benefit of multi-god worship is the specific tailoring the lowly human can use the relationship with the god to remedy his or her own particular problems.  Astrology can easily pinpoint the specific troubles of any one human incarnation with laser accuracy and the human can take it from there, throwing energy into the god or goddess best suited to overcoming those issues.  The gods of the Greek pantheon are reaching out to us in this demonic age of collective astral trashiness to lift us out and heal us, one by one.  Just as collapse happens one person at a time, redemption happens one person at a time.  Through the gods we can broaden our perspectives to include better things than the pursuit of material impulse-gratification and false transcendence.  We can learn how not to be so small and petty.  

Of all the gods and goddesses, including many deities outside the Greco-Roman tradition, Aphrodite is by far the easiest to work with and the hardest to piss off.  This is not to say that she has no wrath: it is my opinion that Christianity and other monotheistic sects are doomed to obscure, fringe religion status in a few hundred years because of what their followers did to piss off Aphrodite over the last couple of millennia.  The virgin/whore complex and the uglification of the built environment were two biggies that ensured Aphrodite's wrath, and though she is very forgiving, there is a rubicon that was crossed long ago that I believe wrote the doom of monotheistic dominance into the package.  Aphrodite plays the long game.  Of course I could be wrong, but I don't think Christianity, Islam, or Judaism will be the big bullies on the playground when the twilight of industrial civilization fades permanently to black.

With that in mind, I get to the point of this article, which is how I believe we humans can at least attempt to please Aphrodite.  

Cooking and Cleaning

These two very mundane tasks may not seem to suit the Goddess of All Beauty, but when you scratch the surface, the alchemy of cooking and cleaning is the creation of harmony, beauty, and health within the home.  All of the above are sacred to Aphrodite.  Learning to cook a healthy, well-balanced meal while keeping it affordable, simple, and seasonal is no small task and I think Aphrodite recognizes the effort.  The good cook has a knack for using what is on hand and improvises hearty meals and delicious snacks at a moment's notice.  The energy brought to the kitchen and put into the food heals all who are lucky enough to eat it.  True health begins with food and the appreciation of the etheric labor necessary to provide nourishment.  

Cleaning is a form of gratitude.  A spoiled child leaves his toys strewn on the floor or sloppily crams them into an overflowing closet or under the bed, not caring about them once their newness has worn off.  When we leave our piles of stuff lying all over the desk and let the bathtub walls become caked in scum, we are nothing more than overgrown, spoiled children who not appreciate their wealth of toys.  Everything is sentient, including the plants I eat as a vegan, the car I drive, the cats in the yard and the squirrels they chase, and the computer, keyboard, and mouse I am writing this article on.  If everything is sentient, it can all be thanked and appreciated.  There is no better way of thanking a door for keeping you safe than oiling its squeaky hinges and cleaning off the scuff marks and dirt from filthy human hands.  Aphrodite is the queen of the sentient home.  When you clean the door and put your shoes away on a special shelf, you engage in a form of conversation with Aphrodite: "I thank you, Aphrodite, for all of these wonderful gifts."  Whether you say it aloud or simply put it into practice by thinking it while you clean your living space, the result is the same.

Pets

Aphrodite is the queen of domesticated animals, especially cats.  I believe Aphrodite and Bastet may be the same deity or potentially have some overlap.  To care for animals in your home is another recognition of non-human sentience.  Anyone who has properly cared for domesticated animals knows that even the allegedly low-maintenance ones take a huge amount of energy, time, money, and love to thrive.  Every time you train your dog to do a new trick or buy a new, improved sun lamp for your lizard's habitat, it can become an expression of adoration for Aphrodite.  

Beauty

Modern civilization and the legacy of monotheism has earned Aphrodite's ire because of its embrace of the hideous and the ugly.  From the ugliness of 20th century "art" to sprawling one story malls and office parks to the horrific results of too much plastic surgery, tattoos, body mods, and piercings, our culture has a lot to answer for.  Once again, the sheer ingratitude of not appreciating what one has is responsible for the new strip mall (the old one could have been rehabbed, or never built in the first place) and the body mods (the perfectly healthy, attractive person did not appreciate intact, functioning ear and nose cartilage).  Putting honest effort into improving the appearance of things in ways that don't involve massive overhauls are the domain of Aphrodite, and she is often kindly willing to help out if your self-improvement efforts come from a place of humility.  The person who takes a wrecking ball to an already palatial kitchen in order to replace a builder's new $625 stove and oven range with a $5000 designer oven range is not showing gratitude for the gifts of Aphrodite.  I tend to think people who do that create terrible karma for themselves, but again, I could be wrong.  To my mind, it is far more appreciative to keep remodeling costs to the minimum necessary, always using what you have and only buying what you need, not what you need to show off to snobby neighbors and people on Instagram.  Making the most of what you can by leaning into the good things already present in the space makes far more sense.  A coat of paint or stick on tiles can work wonders, and by not going gonzo, you show that you appreciate Aphrodite by not trying to start over by clearing out all she has provided for you.  When you beautify a space by cleaning it up and giving it some modest decoration, it shows you care.  You aren't blind to the details of what Aphrodite has generously provided for you.  You invoke her through your use of color, your creative re-use of what you have, and your eye for design.  

The same conservative principle holds when it comes to improving your appearance.  There are many ways to lose weight, and one of them involves reducing the stomach to a tiny pouch and getting pounds of cellulite sucked out and turned into biowaste using a cannula.  The other one is eating fewer calories and exercising.  I believe Aphrodite wants us to be healthy, and surgically quartering and re-routing the stomach is not a road to health.  The dysmorphia of our age, once again, is the legacy of monotheism and its hatred of the flesh.  When the flesh is a source of temptation that only exists to damn the soul to eternal hellfire, it follows that some will react by mortifying their flesh as they still live.  This is the secret reasoning of obesity and anorexia both: they are extreme sides of the same coin of mortification.  Aphrodite wants you to find a balancing force in your flesh and even take pleasure in it on occasion.  

Courtesy

We live in a rough age.  Since I stopped swearing a couple of years ago, I cannot help but notice that everybody swears except me.  Everybody in my family swears, including the members of the tribe who are technically elderly.  My husband often swears.  My teenage students swear.  If I listen too carefully or engage them in conversation, the store workers swear.  Every time my husband swears, I silently give thanks for three things.  I counter his curse with three blessings.  This often becomes exhausting, but it is far less tiring than swearing myself.  By carefully limiting my language, I am the change I want to see in the world.  I want a more genteel world where traditions are maintained and not a source of anxiety and hysteria.  I want to go back to a time when you didn't see certain things in polite society.  It is easy to be rude.  It is much harder to be deferent, kind, and polite.  When grandma starts talking a blue streak about an old, half-remembered scene, we can either correct her (rude) or let her go on at length so she can get the benefit of whatever fractured memory she has left.  When I am cut off by another driver on the road, I can either honk at them and chase them down into a parking lot somewhere in order to make them pay (rude) or I can mentally walk away from it and curb my anger, which after all emanated from the fear of being hurt.  Every time I do a considerate act, such as cleaning up a household mess or doing something gracious, it is an opportunity to devote myself to Aphrodite.

Literally Devoting Yourself to Aphrodite

Sometimes the best way of working with a god or goddess is to do magic in order to get their attention.  Aphrodite seems to like candles and incense, so if you want to work with her, grab a candle, preferably green, and burn it during the hour of Venus on a Friday while focusing your thoughts on Aphrodite.  You could recite the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite, or if you want to one-up your approach, you could listen to the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite.  If you want to up your approach even further, you could go full throttle and learn to play and/or sing the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite yourself.  Interestingly, the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite is the most popular arrangement among all of the Orphic Hymns I have arranged so far.  At the time of this writing, it has 39,000 views on YouTube. 

Music in general is sacred to Aphrodite, and as a musician, I can guarantee that you need to make practicing a daily habit if you want to be any good at music.  Music, as I will assert in my upcoming book Sacred Homemaking, is one of the easiest and best ways for a human to pray.  

Plants

Aphrodite seems to love green, especially in the form of plants.  Growing a garden, helping in someone else's garden, and caring for indoor plants are all ways you can beautify a space and worship Aphrodite at the same time.  Being in gardens and in wild and semi-wild spaces opens the door for Aphrodite to enter your life.  The Japanese have a practice of shirin-yoku or forest-bathing that uses the awareness of the plant ecosystem to cleanse the aura.  Shirin-yoku is not rocket science: just go to the garden, the forest preserve, or the wild space and take a deep breath while opening yourself to the other consciousness around you.

Speaking of Bathing...

People often misconceive Aphrodite as being entirely about sex and sexuality, specifically feminine sexuality.  She certainly has sexual aspects, but you don't have to be sexual whenever you are thinking about her.  Dedicating your bath to Aphrodite could involve some self-pleasure, but it does not require it.  All that is required is an appreciation of how wonderful it is to have running water inside the home or a clean lake or pool in which to take a dip.

All Etheric Labor is Sacred to Aphrodite

Etheric labor, often called emotional labor, is the mundane work that makes life bearable.  Skeptics like to dismiss the flurry of planning, cooking, cleaning, and organizing that is mainly handled by women as unimportant, but a world that has a problem with etheric labor also has a problem with etheric starvation, and etheric starvation happens to be the most common malady of our times.  For this reason, the simple act of folding clothes and linens is one of those basic etheric labors that puts you in the good graces of Aphrodite.  Beautifying anything that would otherwise be disheveled, plain, and thrown in a corner shows your love for both the object and Aphrodite herself.

 

 

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The Georgia Guidestones, that hideously ugly brutalist monument to population control and the one world government in a small town near Atlanta, GA, has been leveled. It was reported yesterday that the guidestones were hit and a bomb squad was put on the task.

The guidestones were so structurally damaged that authorities saw fit to fully dismantle the rest of them by crane. I know the Christians are going to think their god did this, but if you ask me, it bears the mark of Zeus the Thunderer. I believe Hera answered my (and other people's) prayers for rainstorms to douse the fireworks and save the night for the animals and PTSD sufferers. Interesting how the Georgia Guidestones got hit right around the same time.

Happy Independence Week and Praise the Gods! Video showing the strike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58jc6OZE6Ik
kimberlysteele: (Default)

 Hi Everyone, 

I'm taking a little break from my Seven Deadly Sins series before I return with the final Sin, Gluttony.  Let's have a little fun with non-embodied creatures.  And to think less than a decade ago, I used to be an atheist who didn't believe in any of them...

A is for Angels

Angels are not pretty glowing humans with wings from what the old sources say!  The Bible routinely describes angels as bizarre creatures with multiple sets of wings, entire egg-crates worth of eyes, and floating animal faces amongst all the other stuff... Yikes!

B is for Brownies

They really do come out at night and help... The ones in my house returned a lost S hook from underneath our rickety porch (fixed since then) to the seat of my locked car to thank me for feeding the neighborhood animals.  I never had a single doubt they existed after that event!

C is for Cthulu

He's a fictional cosmic deity who escaped the confines of H.P. Lovecraft's imagination to become more than just imaginary.  Strange how a character from a book can become sentient via the fuel of fertile reader imaginations.

D is for Dryads

Tree spirits are there for all those willing to listen.  Try doing a Tree Energy Exchange and find out for yourself!

E is for Egregores

An egregore is a thoughtform that arises via collective consciousness.  It is the atmosphere or personality of a group that develops as a result of its members, and odder still is that it develops (much like Cthulhu above) a consciousness separate from its members.

F is for Fairies

From my encounters with them, they are not Tinkerbell in any way, shape, or form... they can often be terrifying and they often do not wish us humans well.

G is for Ghosts

By ghosts I am talking about the spirits of recently dead people who have not yet gone through the Second Death as described by Dion Fortune in her book Through The Gates of Death.  Most people have seen or at least felt one, yet science keeps screaming "deny deny DENY!"  Personally, I see them sometimes and talk to them frequently.  It's not a big deal and it's not scary.

H is for Hauntings

Hauntings are looped impressions of events, often traumatic, that are occasionally visible to people during episodes of clairvoyance.  They are typically harmless, much like watching a video tape.  They often happen on former battlefields or old houses.  One chilling example of a haunting was the 1901 encounter with the ghosts of the Petit Trianon.

I is for Intelligences

Looking for someone to make lemonade out of lemons in your messed up natal chart?  Perhaps some planetary charity directed towards one of these guys is in order... it couldn't hurt!

J is for Jesii

Is he the kind Jesus who drives the Good Samaritan to open his doors to the homeless or is he the vengeful, hateful Jesus of Westboro Baptists?  He certainly doesn't seem like one single god, no matter what some of his adherents would like to claim.

K is for Kek

How did an ancient Egyptian frog god resurrected by a bunch of basement-dwelling meme dweebs manage to redirect the preordained 2016 election, birthing a populist revolution that is nowhere near finished?  Only time will tell.  

L is for La Llorona

Her wailing can still be heard along highways and near lakes and rivers.  Like other urban legends such as Resurrection Mary or the Candy Man, hers was allegedly based on a tragic true story. 

M is for Manitou

The Algonquian Indians used the term manitou to both refer to the Great Spirit that permeates the world (like Chinese chi, Japanese ki, or Indian prana) as well as specific spirits in the wild or of manmade objects.  

N is for Nymph

Nymph is the general ancient Greek term for a nature spirit.  Much like the dryad is the astral embodiment of a tree, the nymph is the astral embodiment of a part of nature, such as a lake or a particular patch of woods.

O is for Orang Minyak

Orang Minyak means "oily man" in Malay and refers to a spectral rapist that targets women, especially virgins.

P is for Poltergeist

The noisy ghost is usually a harmless prankster who goes away upon the children of the house aging out of puberty, but every now and then is the prelude to demonic infestation. 

Q is for Qliphoth

That is to say, demons.  The creatures of the Qliphoth beckon from the periphery, eternally yearning to draw us into their scrim of hatred, perversion, and despair.  

R is for Ra 

Norweigan myth recognizes the spirit of place by assigning non-embodied keepers to various locations and landforms.  Different species were defined by the kind of landform they protected, such as water, forest, and mountains.

S is for Succubus

The slightly more pleasant version of Orang Minyak doesn't resort to rape, but this spectral night terror gets what she wants at the expense of her human victim all the same.

T is for Trolls

Norwegians call them Mountain Kings.  They are often portrayed as big, dumb, and mean with a taste for human flesh.

U is for Undine

Neither god nor intelligence, an undine is a water elemental more aligned with the manitou mentioned earlier.

V is for Vampire

Probably the scariest of all non-embodied creatures, because they are real and as common as dirt; the best trick vampires ever pulled off was convincing people they don't exist.  They don't have fangs and cheesy Transylvanian accents.

W is for Wendigo

The last word in hungry ghosts, the Wendigo is a spirit who eats and eats and eats and can never be full.  Oh no, the people of our civilization wouldn't know a darn thing about that... Nothing to see here...

X is for Excalibur

Are there creatures who are straight up X words?  Yes, nevertheless I wanted to mention Excalibur here because it is such an important phenomenon among talismanic objects.  Many swords have had spirits and Excalibur is the classic example; it was a sword that changed history. 

Y is for Yuki-Onna

Yuki-Onna (Snow Woman) is a creature from Japanese folklore who visits people living in isolation, occasionally choosing to mate or live with them much like the selkies of Scottish myth.

Z is for Zeus

The Greek god is still going strong, long past his Hellenic heyday.  You can hear a livestream of my version of the Orphic Hymn to him on Sundays around 1pm central time at my Queenie Songs Youtube channel.  

 

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