thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
people of treachery and fraud,flatterers, hypocrites and oath breakers. Lucifer always served as the greatexample of hubris in that one thing of believing that he knew better thananyone else. It doesnt matter if he did or not, what matters is his attitude,namely over confidence born from an exalted idea of self-importance and so inthe case of the monkey falling from the tree and those judging it we areperhaps speaking of the presence of hubris on both the part of the monkey andthose who judge the reasons why and declares truth. In analysinghubris I have found that there is some difference here between the Englishpride or vainglory in how hubris was understood in Antiquity. Commonlyhubris was ascribed to the Olympic gods and to rulers and political advisorsfrom Aristotle to Seneca to Machiavelli was always warning against theconsequences of hubris, it would always lead to fall, lest the erroneous traitor attitude was recognized and altered. Sun Tzu advices in his the art of warthat if your opponent suffers from pride or believes himself to have to upperhand, feed his arrogance so you can strike like thunder in the blackest night. Like monkeyssometimes fall from the trees we also fall in the journey of life, we commiterrors and mistakes, some born from foolishness and others from hubris. Thecorpus of Ifa is full of stories about orisas committing mistakes of bothsorts, it be about refusing to make the sacrifice necessary because they findit unnecessary or because they know better. Hence we find the orisa of purity,Obatala in complicated and demeaning situations as we do with the majority ofthe orisas. Somehow it seems that the only one not prone to hubris is the orisaEsu, the man at the crossroad, Lord of transformation, choice and opportunity. Errorscommitted in hubris must always been corrected and this ranges from the simplethings like let us say you stopped smoking and in turn you demand your partnerto cease the habit as well. You do this from the best of reasons, yet since youare over confident and portray yourself to know better this might be an act ofhubris performed in such situation. From such small matters as this to the widearray of aesthetic, and political opinions, judgements, bickering and fights fortruth and right in opinion, verdict and judgement of all kinds. From the perspectiveof Ifa hubris is considered a trait or attitude born from praise and flattery,success and increase in social station and not necessary as a character flaw.The orisa of justice, Sango, being the power often used to represent thedownfall of hubris. In the case of Sango it all starts with good intention, hecame from the invisible realm wanting every human being to be rich. Findinghuman beings to be fickle and inconsistent, prone to quarrel and judgement heinterfered because he knew better the ways of abundance (and indeed as theauthor of abundance he knew what he was speaking of) yet imposing hissupremacy led to his downfall. Judgement isanother form of hubris and I feel the story from sura 18 in Al Quran where Khidirmeets Moses is illustrative in this regard. Briefly told
the sura speaks abouthow Khidir met Moses at the junction of two seas and intended to teach him theright knowledge of what he has been taught. Khidir asks from Moses that hemust have patience and avoid questioning his actions. They set out on thejourney and enter a boat. Here Khidir when they are out on sea damages the boatso it will sink. Moses shocked by the saints behaviour questions him and isimmediately corrected and reminded he promised to be patient and dontquestioning him. After this Khidir kills a young man and after this they arriveto a town where they are denied hospitality, here Khidir restores a broken wallfor the villagers. Moses in shock of his conduct breaks his oath on all threeoccasions whereas Khidir tells him:Many acts which seem to be evil, malicious or somber,actually are merciful. The boat was damaged to prevent its owners from fallinginto the hands of a king who seized every boat by force. And as for the boy,his parents were believers and we feared lest he should make disobedience andingratitude to come upon them. God will replace the child with one better inpurity, affection and obedience. As for the restored wall, the Servantexplained that underneath the wall was a treasure belonging to two helplessorphans whose father was a righteous man. As God's envoy, the Servant restoredthe wall, showing God's kindness by rewarding the piety of the orphans' father,and so that when the wall becomes weak again and collapses, the orphans will beolder and stronger and will take the treasure that belongs to them."My point being an actwith its judgement is often rooted in hubris, a hubris born from a desire tounderstand how something not in conformity with what we assume or think is thelogical or correct way or outcome of a situation. It is Moses in bewildermentnot figuring out the reasons for a saint to behave unsaintly or a monkeyfalling from the tree judgement always occurs and this judgement is instinctiveand born from our personal history and expectation. And so if my judgement ofthe monkey falling from the tree is because he is stupid or bad well maybe Iam wrong maybe he was just in error and took a jump on a broken branch. Wealways confer judgements and judgements born from jealousy, envy and self-hatredalways lead to gossip as judgement born from bitterness and hubris lead toslander... and still monkeys will from time to time fall from the tree and wewill keep on wondering why and pass our judgements.
in Platos dialogues. Philiawas related to Philautia, or self-love,however, narcissism was not a part of the understanding of what self-love wasabout, yet the ecstasy of being who you are in calm acceptance and satisfactionalong with a willingness to transgress and transform the entire landscape thatyou are strikes the cords of self-love.Hence in thislandscape if you find yourself void of worth, a lone outcast wolf, a seductressof no victories... do you have sufficient self-love to call upon love?In this fieldwhere the hunger for love is frustrated we nurture desire and we nurture egoand fantasy, it is as Austin O Spare wrote in The Book of Pleasure: The Ego is desire, so everything is ultimately desired and undesirable,desire is ever a preliminary forecast of terrible dissatisfaction hidden by itsever-present vainglory. And so, whenwe ask for love, to bind an object of desire to us, to call back a wayward wifeor husband, what is the love in this desire we seek to bind?We canexclude ideals such as pragma, the love that grows over time through deepunderstanding of one another as we can exclude ludens, the playful flirtatious love of passing moments (yet, attimes such moments sow the seed of perpetual desire and haunting memories) aswe can exclude agape, the unconditionaland selfless love for everyone, due to the person exercising agape being truly full of love and voidof self-doubt. Quite often agape is translated into charity, but I find theword generosity to be a word more proper to describe this form of love mostdifficult to attain. Generosity is about giving freely and willingly because itaffirms Love, and if we are generous we also become kings and queens of loveand in the spirit of love we can become architects and masters of our own Fate.And so, whenwe think of love in a greater scope, the love between parents and children,between friends, the love in a flirting moment, the agape that happens with naturein meeting with rain and dew, that moment of true connection, passing orlasting, it be in sharing a common understanding, a shared preference... love islike the Devil, it all rest in the details.And if we payattention to the details many of us will find that there is much more lovegoing around than what we care to notice because we tend to focus on thatprimal, passionate love, eros.Eros, child of Venus,spirit of desire and also the daimon of divine desire was always viewed as irrationaland volatile, a mercurial Venus that with his arrows and rosy cheeks couldinspire passion and creativity wherever he went. The arrows of Eros piercingRomeo and Juliet led to death and tragedy as it did with St. Cyprian and Sta.Justinia and it is this love, eros,the erotic and sexual passion, that divine glue, that tend to be at work whensomeone ask for a work of love being done. In this I would saywith Epicur that It is folly fora man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain byhimself. Because ifwe dont have Philautia,how can we expect to be the object for any kind of love?I believe
love,no matter the type, is bound by some form of generosity. To be generous is notonly about giving because you have; it rests in some selfless nobility thatrest in your heart. It is that love that speaks good words to the lover thatleft you, the love that holds on to what was good in what is not anymore withfond memories, avoiding the abyss of want, desire and depression. Love isabout giving and in giving we attract the same. Desire is about having and in exercisingdesire we also exercise this very same possessiveness desire is in our want forthe other, often because of our own lack of self-love or misplaced love forself that makes us feel unwanted, unsuitable, unlovable and what not.And so,with love, it is tied in with the mystery of the erotic, which is theenchantment and passion of merging, it is something of an expansive andcreative dynamic that happens in the field of eros, but love have at least six heads... the seventh is your own...And then; when you are there seeking to bind someone, is it an object of desire? Is it apersona filled with love? Why would you bind what is not naturally bound toyou?As aspirit worker, I am so reluctant to make love workings, because they are sooften desire workings, and desire is irrational, volatile and floating. We arespeaking of eros, not any other formof love. Eros is the cosmic glue,that is true, but the nature of this force makes everything like he is, unpredictableand volatile. Working with desire is a complicated thing and I must confessthat magical works tied into the mystery of Erosare amongst the most unpredictable workings any spirit worker can do.Sometimesit works well, because there is a bond between the one asking for the work andthe object of desire, we are speaking of a certain generosity made possible bymutual self-love. Other times the implicated parties rekindle love for somepassing moments, just to the dissatisfaction of one or both and there are ofcourse effects like the wayward husband desiring his wife who closed allconversation with him and after the work is done he she opens her heart,her door just to be beaten once again by that abusive SOB... And there I am, as afacilitator, knowing very well that Maria Padilha was teaching a lesson... butstill... is it love when you want to mark that soft skin purple and blue just becauseyou are in a frenzy of erotic desire that calls the truth out of who you areand what this love is about? No, it is desire in its pure and undirected way,it is the frenzy of Eros, unpredictable angel of love and desire that makes warriorssweet with the taste of fervent blood... the same blood that makes a dick hardand the heart to beat faster in the embrace of passion, it be of pain, anger orlust... It is not eros calling upon philia or neither agape nor even ludens, itis love turning into self-hatred exercised in the world, so we can all witnessthe pain of the desirous one. And there is in this the most
common of cases,the lost love returns, but upon his or her return the desirous one dont wanthim or her anymore... so in the end, as Epicurus wrote: why spoil what we havewith what we have not?
this book and for me personally the fact that this booksomehow follows in the footsteps on a long time favorite book on this subject,namely Nigel Pennicks East Anglian Magic (Robert Hale. London 1995) just makesme treasure this book even more. Nigel is giving much attention to the devil,to witchcraft saints and in general to how the land itself with its inhabitantsshould and could be understood and worked. We are speaking of dual observance,or the worship of both hands as an integral mystery of the very understandingof the art that so naturally is applied and acted upon by the witch traditionalin pact and concord with the blood of its land. The book isnot only a generous sharing of the witching ways with is spirits, herbs andmysteries, both diurnal and nocturnal but it is also a celebration of a landNigel knows so well and in this the book becomes a testament giving voice to themighty dead still alive under rocks and creeks, in wind and leaves in EastAnglia and with that I praise myself fortunate to include yet another worthytome in the library of witchcraft and look forward to Nigels next offering in praiseof land, spirit and night!
My book about Ifa is finally out and yes Isay, finally. This book took around two years to compose and nearly the sameamount of time with the wonderful Peter and Alkistis at Scarlet Imprint tomanifest in the form of ink, paper and talismanic design. It could not have been in any other way. Ifadeems patience as a virtue that lies at the root of blessings and in thisnearly 1500 day project patience have been the virtue of writer and publisheralike. And speaking of patience, I met the Araba Olayinka Babatunde Ogunsina Adewuyi for the first time in 2003 and shortly after I started studytraditional Ifa with this sage and it was only a good decade later I felt I had somesort of idea of the complexities of Ifa sufficient to write a book about thistraditional African philosophy. Prior tothis I went to Cuba and made Ifa there as well, but it was traditional Ifa thatcaptivated me, because here I found philosophy and here I found traditionexpressed in a timeless manner befitting every living soul in profound and mysterious ways with the overarching aim of making sense of life and attract good fortune in all its variety. In the upcoming interview with Gordon atRunesoup, Gordon pointed out that the marvel with Ifa is not that it is a modusof divination, but a tradition that have a divination system and theprofundity in that observation lies at the root of Ifa as a practicalphilosophy that includes the invisible realm and the visible realm related tovibration, effect and solution born from knowledge and wisdom. The word Ifahave no straightforward translation but it means to pull or to attract andif the development of good character is the axis that ensures attraction wewill reap blessings or lessons that enables the cunning that turns lessons intoblessings. To develop good character is key here, becauseit means that character is something that is forged through the journey of lifewith its pull to do good and its pull to curse, like carbon turns into diamondsunder pressure. The insistence on imperfection and the joy ofthis imperfection spreads out in Ifa through thousands of poetic meters andproverbs that speaks of situations replicating themselves in difference and repetition, always aimingtowards solutions. These situations and solutions are not bound to Africa ormore specifically the Yoruba speaking people, but speak of the human conditionat large and touches any and every living being they be on the visible orvisible side of the veil that separates the worlds. I can go on and on with this, but a bookcounting 400 pages cant hardly make a blog posting justice to the richness ofIfa, so I will only state that with this book my attempt was to compose anintroduction to Ifa that would also benefit practitioners in demonstrating therhythm and essence found at the core of Ifa philosophy as revealed in itsverses that unveil a profound metaphysics as well as a practical wisdom.On a more personal note this work presents myconcept of what tradition is through its practical philosophy and I believethis book is something good, a book that will aid
towards making sense oflife and also answer the big questions concerning meaning and reason. We aredivine beings on a human journey, we are bound to fail and succeed, ifcharacter is the goal and if character is what attracts all possible fortune,well you might find something of worth and resonance in the page of this book.The book can be ordered directly from Scarlet Imprint by a click on the link
sea shore of the West Country since the 18thCentury. Patterson isin this presentation of spells and arsenal also occupied with time and worldview and is using this presentation to also enter into the significanthistorical transition that marked the modern idea of Witchcraft through thefriendship and eventually alienation and parting ways between Cecil Williamsonand Gerald Gardner. Patterson is merely highlighting the differences of perceptionand vision between the two men as explanatory for the modern day continueddiscourse and disagreements concerning witchcraft and what a witch truly is.And it is inthis depiction and description of the wise womans cottage and the book ofspells Patterson allows the image of the wayside witch to rise and take form asa contrast to the idea of the witch embodied within Gardners religious child,Wicca. In doing this Patterson contributes clarity to our understanding of whata witch is and for him the integral and vital part is, as it was for CecilWilliamson, about the familiar or famulus and this is in truth an element ofvital importance for the witch and in highlighting this factor it also makes itmore understandable to understand where the dividing lines between the witchand the cunning one is to be found.And speakingof the famulus, Troy Books also released Giles Watsons A Witchs NaturalHistory in 2013, which I will also comment on in extension of the familiar. Theessays in this book were originally published as a series in The Cauldron andwere such refreshing and stunning account of exactly the many familiars of thewitch. Watson takes us through crows and slugs, bugs, veneficum and adders analyzingbehavior, virtue and meaning in cunning depth. In doing this he give voice tothe secret movements of nature and enables a deep and marvelous understandingof nature, her works and her inhabitants.I adoredthese articles when I first read them and it was the same pleasure in readingthem again, this is simply one of those books that is amazingly rewarding toread due to how it expands your horizons and deepen your understanding andprovides avenues for magic and mystery in how we look at nature after the pageshas ended in such way that we are more able to marvel in the mysteries ofnature possessing these perceptions Watson has shared with the reader.
themselves and those who are destinedto also guide others. For those destined to guide others, lay down inanticipation of death at the feet of Exu Mor, might be the road to take, butfor most, it is really not necessary.Can Ipurchase a guia, patua or statue even if I am not initiated?Guias, patuasand statues are charged objects that hold the virtues of particular spirits. Inmy case I do offer these items quite freely for whoever is in need of them,expecting that some discernment and consideration has led the person to seek toacquire an object of power. In the past I was far more restrictive with thesepower objects, but in questioning myself to what extent I was my brother (orsisters) keeper, I decided to make this option more open and less restrictivefor those in need. This is partly rooted in the realisation that we are dealingwith living spirits capable of guiding us in ways as mysterious as the ways ofwhatever god.A guia is aspecially prepared necklace. It is made under ritual circumstances in such waythat the process of beading is made with the attending spirit present. Then theguia is washed and left with the Exu/Pomba Gira it is made to attract for threenights. In this process the guia is then turned into holding the virtues of thespirit guide and can be used in ceremony or when situations of guidance in theworld are desired.A patua isholding a similar direction as the guia, but with the addition of more materiamagica that typically gives it a more solid rooting in a given kingdom linkedto beast, mineral and herbs of a specific virtue and attraction that turns thepatua into a charm linked both to spirit and kingdom that should be carried onthe body when need be and when not in use be left in the firmeza or tronco.In the caseof guias and patuas it is good to offer them cigar fumes and spray them withstrong alcohol from time to time to maintain their vigor and attention. Statues arethe most dramatic access point to spirit we offer to the general public. Ourstatues are charged, washed and crossed and in practice it means that they arefilled with what would go into a patua as well as other secret ingredientsconnecting the particular Exu or Pomba Gira to the charge. They are then washedin herbs and are presented for offerings to invite in the spirit to benaturally attracted to its magically embedded form. This meansthat these items provide access to spirit in a personal way and can constitutea personal firmeza or shrine dedicated to ones personal spirits. If we acceptthe premise that we are here dealing with daimonic spirits that are naturallyinclined and tied to us in unique and mysterious ways there is really no needfor initiation as such to work with them as our personal Exus and Pomba Giraswill behave in a way similar to our ancestors, namely in being tied to us bynatural affinity and in this opens for direct access. How should Iwork with Exu and Pomba Gira?In this it isonly about understanding how to work them, how to