Supernatural golem

[While this post may be something that seems more suitable for my seldom updated nerd blog, I am posting it here...because if you read this blog on a regular basis, you should be a Supernatural fan...or at least, golems and Nazi necromancers.]

Tonight, I had a rare chance to watch one of my favorite television shows--Supernatural. The scheduling of this show conflicts with my wife's need to have quiet in the house by a certain hour of the night, so that she can sleep (long story...do you really want to hear about my wife's sleeping disorder?); therefore, I have only seen first three espisodes of the season (...because people tell me that it is wrong to download the show from the torrent sites). And those three espisodes only because they were the ones that I found for free on Hulu.

We were watching Arrow tonight (the only espisode that I have seen all season--again, my wife has more control over what I watch than I do) when I saw the ad for tonight's Supernatural espisode, and I just had to see it.

A golem! Nazi necromancers! How could I possibly miss it?!

Oh, my wife wanted to watch the news...I decided to watch it anyway on the TV of fuzz (cheap TV that I might have grounded a black magic attack though a couple of years ago...provided that it was a black magic attack...it just might be a c*** TV and a super-duper delusion that I annoyed someone special).

And it was a great espisode!!!

Yes, I know--Supernatural never gets the lore right. But it is television--when did TV ever ever get anything right.

Especially their version of a Jewish descendent of a Rabbi, who loves bacon and smoked up a mystic instruction book...there is no way that could be a honest representation of the grandson of a Jewish mystic, right? That character in no way resembles any of the Jews that I have ever worked with (*wink, wink*).

Anyways, if you haven't seen the eighth season espisode of Supernatural "Everyone hates Hitler," I suggest that you do provided that you like tales about talking golems and Nazi necromancers. And if you don't--well, why are you reading this blog?!

As if we need a Hatfields and McCoys reality show

The feud between the cat and dog just got serious.

[File this under "It is only funny if you spent any time watching the feud between the various GD leaders--no one else will get the joke."]

The History Channel has decided to develop a reality show starring the modern-day descendants of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy blood feud. I am sorry--we need this, why?! If I wanted to watch a blood feud, I have the internet and twenty years of prime time feuding among Golden Dawn members to amuse myself with.

Or I could get involved in the little feud that two of my (biological) sisters are engaged in. There is no way that is going to end well any time soon. (Hey, I trained to feud with the best--my biological family. Sorry to any family member that might be reading this--of course, I have no idea why my biological family would be reading this.)

Seriously, why would I want to watch this? Has the History Channel ran out of Nazis and little green pyramid building aliens?! (Again, one needs to have watched our little occult community to get the joke.)

The only thing missing from this idea is cameras in badly ran restaurants that are named after something that front rhymes with McCoy--and I don't think that anyone can get Gordan Ramsey to step into one of those fast food places...oh, wait, I thinking of FOX, ain't I? Or am I thinking Golden Dawn?! (Yes, another in-joke for the people who watch the train wrecks in our esoteric community.)

So yes, I am looking forward to this reality series--just like I am looking for the next outbreak of the Black Death and the flames of the next internet occult war. How about you? Are you looking forward to it?

QoD Xander Harris on the importance of secrecy

Xander Harris reveals the real reason to keep a secret.

"The more people who the secret, the more it cheapens it for the rest of us."--Xander Harris.

[Yes, I am watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and yes, I know that no one really believes that is the real reason why we keep secrets. Nevertheless, I thought it was a cute quote.]

Most read month ever



I am not even as cool as Morgan Grimes.

One of the hazards of being a blogger is that one cannot help looking at the traffic figures. Well, I suppose that you could prevent yourself from looking at your traffic figures with a couple of rolls of duct tape. And honestly, it is probably one of the worst things you can do--look at your traffic figures that is; duct tape is perfectly acceptable for most household chores (babysitting kids, fixing furniture, getting that annoying neighbor across the street to shut up and stay on their side of the street).

Why is it the worst possible thing you can do (look at your own traffic figures, that is)? Because you can find out that you are less popular than Morgan Grimes. (Sorry, I am busy rewatching the entire Chuck series--I am sorry that it is not Shakepeare or something else high-brow...my readers do not actually come here for educated dialogue, do they?)

Or worse, you can look at your traffic figures and think that you are more popular and successful than Morgan Grimes. (For the one reader who does not know, Morgan Grimes was a supporting character in the TV show Chuck--a show about a Buy More Nerd Herder who downloaded the Intersect, a government data base into his head. Morgan Grimes is, well, a nerd into comic books and science fiction and not terribly cool. I have mentioned the fact that you are not here for intelligent conversation, right?)

Anyway, yes, I forgot to duct tape myself to the other side of the room far away from my computer...and therefore, I looked at my traffic figures for last month. The bad news--I am not even as cool as Morgan Grimes. The good news--last month was my most read month ever.

And this is despite several people deciding that they will never give me any traffic ever again. I am not sure that they realize that I haven't gotten any traffic from them for months...yes, I check my traffic figures on a regular basis. Makes me suspect that my audience is completely different than theirs. (Hmmm, I wonder if they get the smart Shakespeare audience...or maybe they actually get the people that Shakespeare was really writing for...sorry, that is a literature joke--after all, Shakespeare was writing for the commoners in the pit; you know the type of person who actually likes watching bear-baiting and men dressed up pretending to be witches and young maidens.)

So what strange things did I find in my figures? (You didn't want to know--how rude...of one of us...I am guessing it is you, dear reader, who thinks Morgan Grimes is cooler than I am.)

Surprise number one was that both Japan and Brazil made my top ten countries list for readership...I am not sure what I am writing that attracting them.

Surprise number two was that one of the top ten posts last month was about the blogs that I were reading a year ago (and they are not even occult blogs)--I am guessing it has to do with the fact that I mentioned one star Amazon book reviews in that post (but they had nothing to do with those one star Amazon book reviews that erupted last month).

Surprise number three is that one of my Christmas Kitty posts is still getting traffic. (Really? A Xmas post?)

Oh, wait...surprise number four is that my post about not warring against Christmas is also getting hits. (Don't ask me to explain it...I can't.)

I gained a new number two all time most read post last month "What is Griffin trying to accomplish?" It shot up and passed last year's favorite about Robert Zink being expelled from his own Order. Well, shot up and passed it by 123 views. And there is really no chance of it becoming my all time number one post--it would need about sixteen times the number of views to surpass my all time number one post on Understanding Search Engines. And no, I have no real idea what traffic would be like on a Morgan Grimes post, but I am guessing that Morgan Grimes would be more popular. (No?!)

As for my next blog post, well, it will be my 777th post on this blog. I wonder what it could be about. Maybe I will write about Morgan Grimes and how he should have been the star of Chuck.

In case you would rather be watching Dharma and Greg

For the people who had no idea what the I was talking about when I mentioned "Good luck with your meat fight!", it is the beginning of the second clip here from the fourth episode of the first season of Dharma and Greg, "Then there was the wedding."

First clip



Second clip--the one with the meat fight scene :)



Third clip

Sasquatch and the law

I learn something new everyday. Today, I learned that it is illegal to kill a sasquatch (Big Foot) in several parts of the world. In Skamania county (Washington), if you plan a "premeditated, wilful and wanton slaying of such creature," it is a gross misdemeanor and can get you a year in jail and a thousand dollar fine. There is also a Whatcom county law (again Washington state) declaring Whatcom county to a Sasquatch protection zone---I am not sure what the penalty for capping a Big Foot in a protection zone would be...but I am guessing that you will no longer be allowed to eat pizza. It is also illegal to kill a sasquatch in Britsh Columbia (Canada). So if Dean and Sam Winchester ask you to help them kill a murderous Big Foot, just say no.

Scotsman in Ancient Egypt

A Scotsman in Ancient Egypt.

The other night I was watching the first Blackadder series. For those of you who have no sense of humor, Blackadder was a British comedy done back in the Dark Ages of television. In the episode, I was watching the main character, the infamous Blackadder (played by Rowan Atkinson) is busy trying to get a Scotsman killed. One of his ploys is to involve the Scotsman in a play set in Ancient Egypt.

One of the audience members watching the play turns to another and asks, "What is a Scotsman doing in Egypt?" At this point, I just lost it. You see, I have occasionally wondered this myself about someone else. Yes, I am talking about Samuel L. Mathers.

The short answer is that Mathers like many in his generation was enchanted by the lore of Ancient Egypt. Periodically, Egyptology has surges of renewed interest. The late Victorian period was one of those times. And unlike previous times, the late Victorain Age had the advantage that they could actually consult the actual words of the Ancient Egyptians.

After the closure of the last temple of Isis around 400 BCE, the ability to read the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs was lost. The lore of Ancient Egypt was lost beyond those parts that had already made their way into the Hermetica and Greek histories. Periodically, someone would claim to have broken the code behind the ancient hieroglyphs, but today we know that they were completely wrong.

This all changed in 1799, when French soliders found the Rosetta Stone while dugging a defensive trench duing one of their many wars with the British. After the war, the British claimed the Rosetta Stone as part of their war spoils. Over the next fifty years, scholars used the Rosetta Stone to figure out how to read the Ancient Egyptian language.

One of the changes in the esoteric scene brought on by the decoding of the Ancient Egyptian language was that for the first time in two thousand years, actual Ancient Egyptian ideas could be used in the Western Mystery tradition. The Cipher Manuscript of Golden Dawn has a reference to the images from Ancient Egypt (the subject of a future blog post), and Golden Dawn would be the first esoteric Order to use actual Egyptian words in their rituals since the time of the Ancient Egyptians.

This fact attracted students who were interested in such things to the Order. One of these students was Macgregor Mathers, which passion led him and his wife, Moina, to create a set of rituals celebrating the Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses while they were living in France.

Of course, using the first generation of translations resulted in the Golden Dawn lore being hopelessly out of date by the time you get to our day and age. This has led the Golden Dawn being looked at with contempt by the modern-day scholars...then again, the modern day scholars tend to also frown on magical experiements, so it is not like we were going to get any of them as members in the first place. But it has also led to Golden Dawn (RR et AC) Egyptian lore and techniques to function differently than those used by the Ancient Egyptians. The gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt tend to "speak in an English accent" (not literally), or maybe it is a Scottish accent, when they are filtered through the Golden Dawn matrix. Parts of the Golden Dawn system, to use the modern insult for the method used, started out as a "recreation" of the long dead Egyptian mysteries.

So what was a Scotsman doing in Egypt? Simple, he was busy looting the tombs of the dead, just like the English and French were doing. Sad, but true.

(If you feel the punchline is wrong, you know the drill---leave your comments in the comment section. Not all comments are approved, but I do read all of them.)