Sedlec Bone Church

Have you seen the very calcerous Sedlec Bone Church in the Czech Republic, decorated with the bones of 40,000 people? I was fascinated when I first discovered it. Until the advent of the 'New Cemeteries' in the early 19th century, people used to be buried in churchyards and under the flagstones of churches - apparently the decomposing corpses could create quite a stink too! When a churchyard got too full, bodies would be removed and the bones either chucked into a charnel house, or sometimes, as in this case, made into fetching decorative arrangements. As I said in a previous post, the ancinet Romans were really puzzled at the early Christian habit of bringing corpses or bits of bodies into their holy spaces - as 'relics' - as the Romans would never have brought death inside the House of the God. You can see in the Sedlec church, the corpse-in-church habit taken to the extreme. What a morbid religion!

The Skull

Skulls make quite nice images, don't you think? Here are a selection of my favourite skulls. The last is a diamond-encrusted skull by artist Damien Hirst.

Miniature bronze altar to Hecate.

This is a miniature bronze altar to Hecate for use in magic. It is from Pergamon (Pergamum) in Asia Minor, now Turkey, and dates to around 200-50 CE. You can see the real thing in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. I happen to have been to Pergamon in the last 6 months, so I'll include some images from there as well. Pergamon is a Hellenistic hilltop city which had probably the steepest theatre in the entire ancient world, you can see it here, embedded into the hillside - talk about vertigo! The second shot is taken from standing at the top of the theatre, looking down - you wouldn't want to be drunk whilst watching a play, you'd fall straight down. The next pic is a temple of the Imperial Cult on the top of the Pergamon citadel. Books were also invented in Pergamon, they couldn't get papyrus for some reason, so had to make pages out of vellum and this turned into what we know of as the book - they used to read scrolls before that you see.

Musing on Aradia

And ye shall all be freed from slavery,

And so ye shall be free in everything;

And as the sign that ye are truly free,

Ye shall be naked in your rites,...

-Aradia, Ch.1.

Infinite Space and the Infinite Stars thereof

But to love me is better than all things: if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me invoking me with a pure heart with the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all..

Goin' a grave-hunting.

I'm going a grave huntin' this weekend and I'm a comin' back with a picture of billiards champion, Walter Lindrum's grave. Its shaped like a billiards table, complete with cue and balls. Meanwhile, here's a photo of something I prepared earlier...

Witchery, also an art experience?

I may as well go on and say that I think my identification as a Witch also has a lot to do with musing on visual imagery, including art. We Witches do love our real-world ritual objects and our "be here now" physicality in the exercise of our religion, don't we? Here's a picture I used to spend a lot of time looking at, and relating to the way I *wanted* to be as a Witch. It comes from a Black Sabbath album cover (you know, they used to be good way back when...). My love of this image had to do with my romanticisation about living in the country (near a cool town though), indulging in a fantasy world of costume, herb cultivation and posturing amongst other like-minded souls. I also love how the photo has been taken with infra red film. A friend and I did once take a lot of infra red photographs in Kew Cemetery, trying to achieve something like this image. I'm not sure we were able to get our pics grainy enough however. I don't get the reverie I used to from this image, although I still really like it.