I Am Not Taking Questions At This Time

Akali Sikh warrior wearing the distinctive Akali turban, India, 1860. 

The natural method involves seeking consistency and equilibrium among different modes of analysis applied to the study of some mental phenomenon…In the case of dreams, phenomenology, will supply us with first-person reports about how dreams seem, especially how particular dreams seem from the point of view of the person who has the dream.

The mental sciences—psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience—are needed to provide answers to a host of questions that are not answered by how things seem, even if we take how they seem to be as how they really are for the dreamer. The mental sciences will tell us about the objective side of dreams.

—Owen Flanagan, Dreaming Souls

Sophie Woodrow

Sea Creature porcelein - approx. 45cm

A silver talisman from the 6th or 7th century, inscribed with words similar to abracadabra. #magic

Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist and mystic, held that the soul of a man was a 'spiritual fluid' diffused throughout the body, and that the medium for its diffusion was the blood, which was thus imbued with power from the divine source. On the other hand the French occultist Eliphas Levi spoke of blood as 'the astral light made manifest in matter', the astral light in this context being the vital principle of the etheric world.

Blood was regarded by all peoples throughout history as a magic substance of tremendous psychic potency and was therefore universally hedged in by taboos. It was the sign of supreme sacrifice; it sealed covenants; it betokened both maidenly virtue and the magic power of virgins. If split on the earth blood cried aloud for vengeance...'There is scarcely any natural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as blood'.

Benjamin Walker, Beyond the Body: The Human Double and the Astral Planes

archetypes are rendered by increasing the passage of time's speed which reveals a given figure or subject matter's most distinctive & consistently recurrent traits as they reappear & reinforce a distinction over time. any perceived archetype in the present is, thus, the very countenance of primordial history itself since the beginning, looking back.