20 September (Saturn) Liber VII, 2:17-26
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17. Thou art like a goat's horn from Astor, O Thou God of mine, gnarl'd and crook'd and devilish strong.
18. Colder than all the ice of all the glaciers of the Naked Mountain was the wine it poured for me.
19. A wild country and a waning moon. Clouds scudding over the sky. A circuit of pines, and of tall yews beyond. Thou in the midst!
20. O all ye toads and cats, rejoice! Ye slimy things, come hither!
21. Dance, dance to the Lord our God!
22. He is he! He is he! He is he!
23. Why should I go on?
24. Why? Why? comes the sudden cackle of a million imps of hell.
25. And the laughter runs.
26. But sickens not the Universe; but shakes not the stars. -
The lover has made himself ...well... a whore to whatever the god* is*.
In a way, it reminds me of those practices where a person will choose a discipline like keeping their left arm raised for a certain period of time. They just break their entire mind and body against that one goal. Here, the goal is love.
It must have first been a willed love, working through the non-understanding, to understanding and less effort. That process and his description of it frightens me a bit. But without him or such texts, I'm not sure I could begin even to imagine it.
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"19. A wild country and a waning moon. Clouds scudding over the sky. A circuit of pines, and of tall yews beyond. Thou in the midst!
- O all ye toads and cats, rejoice! Ye slimy things, come hither!
- Dance, dance to the Lord our God!"
My favorite passage in the whole book! (Nothing profound to say; just wanted to shout out.)
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17. Thou art like a goat's horn from Astor, O Thou God of mine, gnarl'd and crook'd and devilish strong.
18. Colder than all the ice of all the glaciers of the Naked Mountain was the wine it poured for me.
19. A wild country and a waning moon. Clouds scudding over the sky. A circuit of pines, and of tall yews beyond. Thou in the midst!
20. O all ye toads and cats, rejoice! Ye slimy things, come hither!
21. Dance, dance to the Lord our God!
22. He is he! He is he! He is he!
23. Why should I go on?
24. Why? Why? comes the sudden cackle of a million imps of hell.
25. And the laughter runs.
26. But sickens not the Universe; but shakes not the stars.That one little spark of truth that is an admixture of everything false is what survives.
The classical gods swear their most serious, absolute oaths by the icy river of Styx, whose primary attribute is hate; in other words they root themselves in an unchanging, mythic pathology.
At the center of Dante's hell, Satan and Moloc are frozen, solid and still in a mountain of ice—there is no change or movement of any sort.
The Jesuit priest, mystic, and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin recounts how as a youth he worshiped a large piece of iron as god until he discovered it too was subject to corruption. His search for the 'heart of matter,' as he called it continued.
Mythic fact, mythic foundation, mythic stability...
Love and Will