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hanging out in my evil lair (bedroom)

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Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself. Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.

Your Body is an Ancestor, Sophie Strand

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to Saturn are appropriated for fumes all odoriferous roots, as pepper-wort root, etc., and the frankincense tree; to Jupiter, odoriferous fruits, as nutmegs and cloves; to Mars, all odoriferous wood, as Sanders, cypress, lignum balsam and lignum aloes; to the Sun, all gums, frankincense, mastic, benjamin, storax, ladanum, ambergris and musk; to Venus, sweet flowers, as roses, violets, saffron, and such like; to Mercury, all the peels of wood and fruit, as cinnamon, lignum cassia, mace, citron or lemon peel, and bay- berries, and whatsoever seeds are odoriferous; to the Moon, the leaves of all vegetables, as the leaf indum, and the leaves of the myrtle and bay-tree... But Hermes describes the most powerful fume to be that which is compounded of the Seven Aromatics, according- to the powers of the Seven Planets—for it receives from Saturn, pepper-wort; from Jupiter, nutmeg; from Mars, lignum aloes; from the Sun, mastic; from Venus, saffron; from Mercury, cinnamon; and from the Moon, the myrtle.

From Agrippa’s Philosophy of Natural Magic

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“I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.”

— Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. (via wordsnquotes)

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mentally im friends with a lot of u guys even if we dont talk or never have talked and probably will never talk directly. its ok. the warriors bond transcends words

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Total eclipse of the Sun, July 1860, illustrated by astronomer Warren de la Rue.

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“source?” divine intuition, gut instinct, and cryptic symbolism from my dreams

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blood test came back haunted

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Musings from Anna Fusco

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WIP - Dionysus in bull form

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The Calling of Samuel (1877)

— by Gustave Doré

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babswebb

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Roman magic hand to ward off bad luck.

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by Cathy Inaba

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Magic Circle from The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot, 1584, Wellcome Collection, London.

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Wall Fragment with Winged Victory (Nike) (c. 50-79 CE, Boscoreale, Italy)

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Feeling Normal