“When the soul sees Azrael, it ‘falls in love’, and its gaze is thus withdrawn from the body as if by a seduction.”– Peter Lamborn Wilson

This is one of my favourite Coil Songs– I’ve received much comfort from it.  It, as well as the painting by Evelyn de Morgan, inspired the Azreal’s Trumpet earrings.

The Angel of Death by Evelyn de Morgan

Azrael's Trumpets by Feral Strumpet on Etsy

Nevermore illustration from AntiqueGraphique on Etsy

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allen Poe.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by the blog and has helped promote my shop over the last few days of this Poe-party.  The winner of the Poe Grimoire bookmark has been chosen by the whims of fate (out of a hat), and she is the inimitable Jo Taylor– fantastic dancer and member of the wonderful 400 Roses Morris side.

Beautiful Jo is in the back row, far left!

Another manifestation of the Nevermoore bookmark is, of course, still available in my Etsy shop!

Poe Nevermore Grimoire Bookmark by Feral Strumpet on Etsy

This is the second post of three in honor of Poe’s Birthday on Thursday.  I’m celebrating by having a giveaway in my Etsy shop!  Read on for details.

I can’t remember my first encounter with Poe.  I  know I had to read The Tell Tale Heart when I was about 9 and it seared itself in my consciousness– one of those moments where you feel the initial betrayal of the universe, the dispelling of childhood.  Yes, the world is a dark place!  But I also have a visceral memory of the Vincent Price hour-long dramatic interpretation– reproduced in the above Youtube video.  Though, I must have seen it as a re-run.  Watching this I remember Price’s profound effect on me– the camp in his performance– the perfect last facet of his persona– was lost on me as a child.  You could call it a crush, that feeling he gave me, but I told no one, of course!  Others were cutting out pictures of Shaun Cassidy from Tiger Beat.  Yeah, it explains a lot– I also had a thing for Dan Haggerty/Grizzly Adams.

In Angela Carter’s meditation on Poe, “The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe” she imagines him as a child.  His infancy is invented with her charateristic cynical compassion and narrative shifts, like facets in the void-world of the story.  (She no doubt learned a trick or two from Poe–taking his unreliable narrators one step further). His mother, a vaudevillian actor, is rendered vividly– to this day I can’t think of Poe without seeing the grease-painted ghost of his mother close behind.  Such is the power of Carter’s writing.

“Edgar would lie in prop-baskets on heaps of artificial finery and watch her while she painted her face.  The candles made a profane altar of the mirror in which her vague face swam like a magic fish….”

The Nevermore Grimoire Bookmark by Feral Strumpet on Etsy

And, perhaps the only thing that would make my Poe Nevermore bookmark more lovely is if it were between the covers of The Trials of Edgar Allen Poe, a collection of poems by one of my favourite poets and essayists, Ned Balbo.

Today is the last day to enter the Nevermore bookmark giveaway!  Blog, Tweet or click the “like” button on your favourite item in my Etsy shop to be entered to win.  Be sure to comment here so I know to enter you.  Winner will be chosen tomorrow by a highly random, Discordian approved process that may involve kittens.

16th century illustration of the Maelstrom off Lofoten, Norway

This is the first of 3 posts celebrating Edgar Allen Poe’s 203rd birthday on Thursday the 19th.

Lofoten is where my great-grandparents were from.  My great-grandfather was a fisherman, like the Old man in Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrӧm”.   The search for one’s roots always involves a bit of myth-making, and I find this a fortuitous geneology. (I live in a country that makes a fair bit of money from ancestral tourism, and it’s with some chagrin I admit to wanting to visit these islands.) But I first knew of this place from the Poe story.

Thanks to Dylan Carlson for reminding me of Harry Clarke's beautiful illustration.

The Maelstrӧm itself is exaggerated by Poe: it’s a swallower of ships and devourer of whales, appearing as “a smooth, shining and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily, round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice…”

For all his sentimentality and persistent melancholy, Poe’s work has been one of the earliest influences on my own writing.  I am indebted to him, not least for giving me a certain mythic vision of my roots, even if it is the howling, watery maw of hell itself!

The "Nevermore" Grimoire Bookmark by Feral Strumpet on Etsy

Beautiful Tattoo Designs by Sarah Antoinette Martin: http://sara-land.blogspot.com

Above is a collection of designs by tattoo artist Sarah Anoinette Martin– if you are lucky enough to live in Brooklyn!

Today is Friday the 13th, a day that always felt a bit lucky.  Maybe it’s just the contrarian in me!  Friday is Freya’s day. There are 13 lunar cycles in a year.  13 witches in a traditional coven.  In a baker’s dozen, it means that extra cupcake.

To celebrate, I’m holding a one day sale in my Etsy Shop– everything is 13% off.  Use coupon code FRIDAY13.

Lucky Cat Earrings by Feral Strumpet on Etsy. All profits from these go to the RSPCA.

A stand-in for the face of Mary Smith, hanged for witchcraft in 1616.

396 years ago today a woman named Mary Smith was hanged for witchcraft in Norfolk, allegedly after a falling out with other villagers over the price of cheese.  Just one of the thousands of women to die in such a way at this time, the details of her life are completely lost to us.  Margaret Murray’s “The Witch Cult in Western Europe” contains a long Appendix of just such a list of witches in England and Scotland.  Mary Smith, with her common, every-woman name, is not among them.

Some claim the epidemic of witch burning during the 17th century was a systemic extermination of a certain kind of woman, or it was a mass hysteria. It certainly was singular consolidation of power– of supposed medical science over herb lore, of Christian customs over ancient, inherited Pagan ritual and the written word over oral history.  And the losers in it all were women folk.

Now, it’s big in the tourist trade, this particular bit of history.  Ghost tours make their rounds every night, the guides competing fervently for the tourist dollars. They might visit Tyburn on the Knavesmire near the race track, where executions once took place.  Many women who died there were accused of killing their husbands– considered high treason at the time.  The “Terrible Tales” bus makes its rounds, its sides painted with garish atrocities, and there’s the York Dungeon’s new attraction– “See Witches Burned Alive.” The ads promise “the witch hunt is on! Hear the screams and feel the heat as the accused are burnt alive before your eyes.” I can’t say how much I hate this aspect of the tourist trade, this sentimentality in reverse– the indulging in the sufferings of others.

Looking back at history will always be like looking into a shattered mirror.  How much more if one is a woman, picking up the shards and finding so many missing, deliberately destroyed.  And yet the impulse to wholeness is human, and we persist. As mothers of invention, we fill in the blanks, courting ghosts and making do– mending, as we have always done.

Today marks the new year in the old Julian calendar and in a small fishing village in Scotland this occasion is marked by an old fire ritual called the Burning of the Clavie.  A tar barrel is set alight and carried through the old boundaries of the village– the construction of the clavie is guided by strict tradition– no “stranger” may touch it; nothing must be purchased to make it.  No modern matches are used; the peat for ignition must already be alight. Tar is then poured over the blaze before it is carried by the initial bearers.  As the procession winds through the town, the barrel must change hands, as no one could stand the heat for too long.  Were the bearer to stumble or fall it would be a bad omen.  Once the procession arrives at Doorie Hill, the flaming Clavie is put into a stone pillar, where more tar is poured over it. The fire spreads and grows tall. Onlookers chase after the flaming fragments flying out from the blaze, as streams of flaming tar pour down the hill.  If one is lucky enough to catch a piece of the blaze, and risk burnt fingers for a charred relic– it’s put up the chimney to ward off meddling spirits.

Little Embers, earrings by Feral Strumpet on Etsy.

A Cold Moon Treasury on Etsy

As part of Esbat celebrations, I’ve created a treasury for the Cold Moon with some of the beautiful handmade items available on Etsy.  With this moon in mind, it’s time to hibernate, conserve energy and respect the rhythms of the seasons.  Now is the time for delicious sleep, embracing the lush darkness and the latent excitement of the threshold to spring.  Small changes, now– sage smudging round the place, epsom salt baths with olive oil and an apple tea bag thrown in. Reading, dreaming of Imbolc. Some black out curtains for the bedroom to block out the jarring yellow street lamp!

Blessed Cold Moon, dear reader!

The Green Man and Queen Pea, from the Twelfth Night celebrations at the Globe in London, a few years back

It’s the Twelfth Day– do you know where your golden bean is? Traditionally, the head of revelry for this day was chosen by a bean secreted away in a slice of cake, distributed at random or in some cases by a child hiding under the table.

Twelfth Cake-- once a work of confectioners art.

This custom is still celebrated in New Orleans but is no longer part of the seasonal celebrations in the UK, except in some instances of folk revivals.  A king chosen by whim– it’s the stuff of fairy tales as well as the Roman Saturnalia.  It was difficult for me to imagine the psychic necessity of such a celebration, coming from a land where everyone is presumed equal.  Even if the reality in the US is very different, the philosophical idea rules many interactions between people.  Not so in the UK, where rigid ideas of class permeate the culture.

Today is considered “Old Christmas Day” and the last hurrah of the Yule celebrations.  Traditionally, all the decorations are taken down– it’s bad luck to leave them up.  And, in the village of Haxey in Lincolnshire, the Fool and his Boggans corral the inhabitants and bystanders in the mad Hood Game, but that is the subject for another post.

Coffee with your twelfth cake? Queen of the Bean set by Feral Strumpet on Etsy.

Who is that at the door?  A horse skull for a face, with green bottle-glass eyes, covered in a sheet, draped with motley ribbons.  Is there a man beneath? You almost recognize the shoes, the only human thing about him, as your neighbor’s, but not really.  And now, singing.  The spring hinged jaw opens and shuts.  The company he keeps is familiar, you know them from the village, they carry his jingling reins.  They had started out at dusk, you heard them farther out by the church, singing through the night, door-to-door. asking permission. And now it is midnight, and they are here.

In many UK folk traditions, the festival of Christmas carried on for 12 days after, and in Welsh tradition this is when Mari Lwyd, Grey Mary, Grey Mare or simply the Mare went wassailing.  Though today it may be seen as some kind of artifactual party-bringer, it is not hard to see in this strange being a skeletal, ghostly remnant of the “Great Mare” Epona, the ancient Roman-Celtic horse goddess once widely worshiped on this island.