The Rogue Stitch

From the pages of Alighieri's Inferno, again:

To Hell and back. (Must have bought the stygian rail pass.)

Deep in the bowels of Beelzebub's abode, Dante and Virgil come across the fortune tellers and diviners, walking backward with unnaturally-turned heads and eyes unable to see. (4th Bolgia)

Wonder if the Cumaean Sibyl wound up down there.

Probably not since the Medieval Church (the long-standing arbiter of God's decisions) held her to be a prophet of Christ's birth based on an obscure messianic phophecy contained in the fourth of Virgil's Eclogues.

Ah, that explains the tour guide choice. And the cameo on the Sistine Chapel.

Sibyl herself was something of a guide in the Aeneid:

Then thus replied the prophetess divine:
"O goddess-born of great Anchises' line,
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.


So, recently I met up with some friends and made the acquaintance of filmmaker (perhaps better described as a struggling artiste) who asked me two initial questions:

Have you seen any avant-garde films?

What's your birthday.

Interesting, right? Small talk, lovely small talk. Naturally, we had a conversation about what "avant-garde" means and how to apply it. Suppression of horrible memories meant that I could only come up with Cocteau's Orphée as a reference. How uncouth of me to better recall the finer moments of Le Diner de cons.

The birthday question went like this:

Me: December.
Her: December what?
Me: The **.... Why?
Her: I'm into astrology... just sizing you up.

You can imagine the sardonic comment I had lined up, just waiting to get in the game like a fat kid on the bench. But I held off; she was serious and came off as intelligent.

So for shits and giggles, I hit the web and came across a free tarot reading. Course, after that conversation, I had to choose the Palladini Tarot, which claims to "bridge the ancient and the future" using elements of Medieval, Egyptian, and modern art. I also opted for the Celtic Cross spread like a good Mc with a drinking problem. And without further ado, I give you the result:



What does this all mean? Beats the hell out of me. What to follow when so much of the reading contradicted itself. But I did like the last card, which claimed to predict "the ultimate outcome should you continue on this course." The Hierophant:

Hierophant--from the Greek ta hiera (the holy) and phainein (to show).

In Attica the hierophant was the chief priest in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

To go off on a tangent for a moment, participants in the Mysteries were said to drink kykeon during the culminating ceremony. This was an odd mixture of barley, water, herbs, and ground goat cheese. Mmmm. Some suggest that the barley used was infested with ergot, a fungus containing the psychedelic agent LSA. Visions ensued. Afterward, the participants gathered in a field to celebrate the pannychis--an all-nite feast accompanied by dancing and merriment. Probably some knockin' boots in there too.

Funny, I knew a kid who took LSD at a concert and saw Jesus.

Ergot posioning has also been blamed for the paranoia associated with the Salem witch hunts.

So, getting back to the tarot reading, the hierophant represents a guide toward knowledge, insight, and wisdom. There was also something in there about faith in tradition and the "old school."

Yeah, how fitting. Like I said, shits and giggles.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 at 10:37 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.