#immanency

[funeral]

With Nietzsche, everything is mask. [...] Nietzsche didn't believe in the unity of a self and didn't experience it. Subtle relations of power and of evaluation between different "selves" that conceal but also express other kinds of forces—forces of life, forces of thought—such is Nietzsche's conception, his way of living. ...His madness was his final mask. He had written: "And sometimes madness itself is the mask that hides a knowledge that is fatal and too sure." In fact, it is not. Rather, it makes the moment when the masks, no longer shifting and communicating, merge into a death-like rigidity. Among the strongest moments of Nietzsche's philosophy are the pages where he speaks of the need to be masked, of the virtue and the positivity of masks, of their ultimate importance.

Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life

#gilles deleuze #friedrich nietzsche #pure immanence #philosophy #excerpts #quotes #p

[hannahleah]

Stunning Imman for YSL 1988. Photo shot by Guy Bourdin 1988

#Imman #Guy Bourdin #yves saint laurent #ysl #80s #80s fashion #fashion editorial #fashion photography #photography #beauty #beautiful #fashion #vintage #celebrity #style

[y-rhywbeth2]

When Astarion is the only one actually paying attention to sensible things then your party has problems.

#Shadowheart: Ugh... heretics #Durge: Mmm... cannibalism. #Astarion: ...Could we maybe focus on the immanent threat to our existences please? #playthrough shenanigans #babbling #drama goth trio #has one braincell

[fierysword]

#st hildegard #fire of God #christian mysticism #christian mystics #air #creation spirituality #immanence #panentheism in christianity #panentheism #nature #world soul #lifegiver

[beauteousthings]

(If anyone knows the source for this awesome meme do tell, meanwhile I shall bask in its glory…)

BALROG IS LOADING…

#the vibes #balrog immanent #adventure energy #tolkien #lotr shitpost #lotr memes #lotr #gandalf

[thirdity]

All works of art are founded on a certain distance from the lived reality which is represented. [...] It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work. In the final analysis, “style” is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. [...] But the notion of distance (and of dehumanization, as well) is misleading, unless one adds that the movement is not just away from but toward the world. The overcoming or transcending of the world in art is also a way of encountering the world, and of training or educating the will to be in the world.

Susan Sontag, "On Style"

#art #representation #image #style #self #world #transcendence #immanence #quotes #Sontag #Susan Sontag #On Style

[haggishlyhagging]

The worship of animals is also indigenous to nature-based religious systems. Early people existed among animals, scarcely distinct from them. Through religious ritual, people differentiated themselves from animals and gave honor to them—they were food, sustenance. There was a respect for the natural world—people were hunter and hunted simultaneously. Their perspective was acute. They worshiped the spirit and power they saw manifest in the carnivore world of which they were an integral part. When man began to be "civilized," to separate himself out of nature, to place himself over and above woman (he became Mind, she became Carnality) and other animals, he began to seek power over nature, magical control. The witch cults still had a strong sense of people as part of nature, and animals maintained a prime place in both ritual and consciousness for the witches. The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought that the witches, through malice and a lust for power (pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. The witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats, mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawling conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy was organized and controlled by the wicked women. They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics of total paranoia—they developed the classic model for that particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically—they had a great respect for what worked. For instance, when they suspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock her in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room, that creature was identified as the woman's familiar, and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally, given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularly in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked.

Cats were particularly associated with witches. That association is based on the ancient totemic significance of the cat:

It is well known that to the Egyptians cats were sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis and there was also a cat deity. . . . Through Osiris (Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the "solar cat," who was portrayed as killing the "serpent of darkness" at each dawn, were believed to produce fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of fertility. . . . Cats were also associated with Hathor, a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and rain. . . .

Still stronger, however, was the association of the cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess—a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon-goddess she was inviolate and self-renewing . . . the circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the symbol for eternity, an unending recreation.

The Christians not only converted the horned god into Satan, but also the sacred cat into a demonic incarnation. The witches, in accepting familiars and particularly in their special feeling for cats, only participated in an ancient tradition which had as its substance love and respect for the natural world.

It was also believed that the witch could transform herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called lycanthropy, is twofold:

. . . either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or destroy; or, that they create an animal "double" in which, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or she can wander, terrorize, or batten on mankind.

The origins of the belief in lycanthropy can be traced to group rituals in which celebrants, costumed as animals, recreated animal movements, sounds, even hunting patterns. As group ritual, those celebrations would be prehistorical. The witches themselves, through the use of belladonna, aconite, and other drugs, felt that they did become animals. The effect of the belief in lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a stray dog, a wild cat, a rat, a toad—all were witches, agents of Satan, bringing with them drought, disease, death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous, demonic. The legend of the werewolf (popularized in the Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout, two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the next morning that a respectable town matron had been wounded in precisely the same way.

Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks, and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they annointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but genuine fact:

As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius Loyola, or St. Teresa. . . . In the Middle Ages it was regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one. . . . It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches were believed to fly . . . [though] the Church expressly forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief that witches flew.

With typical consistency then, the Church said that saints could fly but witches could not. As far as the witches were concerned, they trusted their experience, they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselves with Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions, in the realization of a phenomenon so ancient that it would seem to extend almost to the origins of the religious impulse in people.

We now know most of what can be known about the witches: who they were, what they believed, what they did, the Church's vision of them. We have seen the historical dimensions of a myth of feminine evil which resulted in the slaughter of 9 million persons, nearly all women, over 300 years. The actual evidence of that slaughter, the remembrance of it, has been suppressed for centuries so that the myth of woman as the Original Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure. Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture, woman-centered, nature-centered —all of their knowledge is gone, all of their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes of their own pasts) found the massacre of the witches too unimportant to include in the chronicles of those centuries except as a footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance of those centuries—they did not recognize the centuries of gynocide, they did not register the anguish of those deaths.

Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that the myth of feminine evil lived out so resolutely by the Christians of the Dark Ages, is alive and well, here and now. Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth, to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

-Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating

#andrea dworkin #witchcraft #witch hunts #female oppression #misogyny #patriarchy #anti christian #male violence #nature vs culture #immanence vs transcendence

[brechtian]

this thesis literally better meet her standards this time it has everything it's formalist with a dash of deconstruction it incorporates my research into the occult i can fold in a quick comparison to the end of her favorite woolf novel (dalloway) it even includes my original (REJECTED !) idea of exploring bernard and authorship as divine creativity. if she says no to it literally don't know what i'll do

#my first proposal was to focus on bernard as the character most closely intertwined with the cut narrator from the waves and the language/ #subjects of the interludes but she didnt like it bc she said author as god was overdone and i was too smart for that. sigh which is fine. #the thesis im proposing is going to be about how a) the waves central tension/conflict surrounds the characters striving towards a spiritua #oneness and univocity that feels distinctly both occult and deleuzean and how the form forces the characters apart from each other and the #action while also forcing distance between the reader and the text (a series of unconventional not-quite-soliloquies directed at no one. ch #racters who are always talking but can never speak to each other) and the ending merges characters and forms to create an essential oneness #that is distinctly creative in nature (see deleuze and pure immanence) #yes a lot of these ideas have been remarked upon separately by scholars but they havent quite been married in this way . i think its really #solid

[woolandcoffee]

As the daughter of a grouchy computer engineer, and also as someone who is a bit of a stickler for calling a spade a spade, it irks me to not end that these newly popular data aggregating programs are getting called "artificial intelligence." ChatGPT isn't "artificial intelligence." It's a software program designed to collect and sort data so that it can generate what the program recognizes as the most appropriate response to a text input. It isn't "intelligent," it isn't "thinking," it isn't goddamn magic. It is a software program that is computing data the way that it is designed by humans to do. Which is why there will always, always be flaws. It cannot discriminate between data for factual correctness the way that humans can. Calling programs like ChatGPT "artificial intelligence" is annoying, arguably dangerous, and an insult to anyone with half a brain who can see right through the marketing gimmick.

#woolly rambles #extremely tired of people who seem to actually literally believe that the rise of the machines is immanent because a glorified chat bot #gave them a half-correct answer garbled together from a quick trawl of thousands of online sources after performing a google search

[thecat-inthehat]

got a comment on that insane xiv/batman thing i wrote and they were like "i don't know anything about final fantasy but this is So Good" and i'm like. Oh You Poor Thing. you're being thrown into the deep end of 4+ expansions of lore with my assorted headcanons and plot bending. Anyways have you heard of the critically acclaimed mmorpg--

#creator writes #fic: immanent apotheosis

[funeral]

But we shouldn't enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn't just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.

Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life

#gilles deleuze #pure immanence #philosophy #excerpts #quotes #p

[celtos]

To know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself.

G.W.F. Hegel

#hegel #philosophy #quotes #quote #german idealism #gwf hegel #g.w.f. hegel #idealism #transcendence #immanent transcendence #sacrifice #limit #limits #dialectic #dialectics #phenomenology of spirit #the phenomenology of spirit #self-transcendence #transcendent #transcendental

[queenlucythevaliant]

Another important point from Jane Eyre: love is not enough.

Again and again he said, “Are you happy, Jane?” And again and again I answered, “Yes.” After which he murmured, “It will atone—it will atone. Have I not found her friendless, and cold, and comfortless? Will I not guard, and cherish, and solace her? Is there not love in my heart, and constancy in my resolves? It will expiate at God’s tribunal."

It does not atone. There is love in his heart and there is constancy in his resolve and it is not enough. Love is good, love is important, but love in itself does not make you clean. Only grace can do that.

#unquiet souls #pontifications and creations #jane! eyre! #reread immanent I can feel it #literature makes us more human

[searchsystem]

Forthcoming Studio / Immanence Studio / Letterhead / 2020

#forthcoming studio #immanence studio #letterhead #2020 #printed matter #stationery #typography

[fierysword]

Love can flow toward you in every moment: through a flower, in a grain of sand, in a wisp of cloud, in any one person whom you allow to delight you... Spiritual joy has nothing to do with anything ‘going right.’ It has everything to do with things going, and going on within you. It’s an inherent, inner aliveness. Joy is almost entirely an inside job. Joy is not first determined by the object enjoyed as much as by the prepared eye of the enjoyer. When the flow is flowing, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing... It’s all inherently sacred and deeply satisfying. As the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.” All is whole and holy in the very seeing, because you are standing inside the One Flow of Love... This is the Ground of all Being out of which all things—and especially all good things—come. The river is already flowing, and you are in it whether you are enjoying it or not.

Richard Rohr

#living spirituality #God is Love #in whom we live and move and have our being #immanence #Richard rohr #christian mysticism #creation spirituality #panentheism

[panentheology]

#god #ecstatic #immanence #transcendence #panentheism #mysticism #meme