The Death Goddess Diaries

I think I've said everything I can about the Spiritscape in general. From here on, I can only talk about the individual levels. One of them we've already talked about at length; Hell. The Heavens and Purgatory are also parts of the Spiritscape. In fact, even the reality you live in is part of the Spiritscape, though most mortals are cut off from feeling it or being aware of it at all.

Recapping from my last post, The Veil separates most of the powers of the Spiritscape -magic and psychic abilities, etc.- and its' dangers -dragons, demons, fairies, the undead, etc- from humans for their own safety. Occasionally things still slip through and some people can see these things which they should no longer have the capacity to do. Consider these "glitches in the Matrix."

In conclusion, I suppose you can think of the Spiritscape as the intangible force which links and overlays all worlds and imbues creatures with the power to transverse and/or see them.

*Rereads above statement* Yeah, I think that's as clear as it's going to get.

(Writing through human incarnations is so tricky. There's so much to remember and their bodies aren't capable of holding it, even for the few moments it takes for me to pop in and jot this down. Maria's better than most but still, it's so frustrating when you KNOW you know something, but your human word processor lacks the RAM and language settings to hold and convey that knowledge.)

Did I promise a post about Possession? Oh right, I did. Hmm. I should probably get on that... Oh well. I plan to talk about the Veil next, since it's so important to the Spiritscape. Oh, and I have to tell you about the Heavenly Host. Okay, order of upcoming posts:

The Heavenly Host
The Veil
Possession.

(And completely unrelated, the Asshat Awards 2009 are coming in December.)

Happy belated Friday the 13th! Those of us working in the Elite squads and in or around the Hell of Scissors have the weekend off. Yay! Bring out the pancakes! Maria is entertaining house guests tonight, so you're spared from her blogging for the moment. Feel lucky; last I saw her, she was mumbling about some twit named Taylor the Latte Boy. Some days, Maria scares even me.

Back to the Spiritscape:

Even more interesting is the Spiritscapes role in human life. Magic is contained in it, separated from your reality by the Veil. This wasn't always so. Once, humans could control and understand the magic of the Spiritscape. While monsters and other horrors could come out of the Spiritscape, escaping from other skins or layers, humans had the tools with which to fight them. However, people eventually became careless with their use and study. Eventually, with the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages, people had only an instinctual understanding of the magic that came to them.

By the time of the Renaissance, magic had begun to fade from the world. Some people retained a bit of magic and the knowledge thereof. They became the witches and, nowadays, psychics. The Veil was a layer of Spiritscape which was created to try keep those creatures of the Neverworlds - dragons, hydras, leviathans, etc - from entering your reality of Earth and which also keeps humans from achieving the 'mass consciousness' foretold by the flower children of the 1960's and 1970's. If you view this as a negative thing, consider that whenever the Veil has trouble, collapsing in part and the like, there's some school shooting or mass killing, yada yada yada.

I have honestly been making an effort to update more frequently. But this is a problem when the nature of ones journal deals specifically with the intangible; accurate descriptions are at a premium. But I want at least SOMETHING on here vaguely related to, well, anything. So here it is, a brief, garbled description of the Spiritscape

Describing and explaining the Spiritscape is akin to describing or explaining creation. You know what it is, but when you sit down and try to put it into words, you are overwhelmed by the sheer hugeness and complexity of the question. To start, the Spiritscape is about the size of creation....maybe a little bigger.

You know what? I'm going to simplify this as much as possible.

You, yourself, a human, the person reading this post, lives in reality. Reality itself is subjective but you're in your version of it right now, there, the end. Now imagine your reality as a bubble, or better yet, an onion skin. Imagine that it's a really, really BIG onion, but with skins the size of a regular onion. I promise there's a point to this. There are, in this massive onion, innumerable layers of skins. Your reality is just one of those. The rest of those skins are layers and levels of the Spiritscape. Some are closer to you than others. The Dreamscape is one of the closest skins, thus almost everyone can reach it. Within the Spiritscape are the lands of faerires and other magical creatures. Magic itself resides within the Spiritscape.

Now to make this even more confusing, imagine that these layers aren't really separate. They overlap and interact with each others. Pockets and portals exist within your reality, linking the many layers of the Spiritscape to the place where you can reach them, even if you aren't aware of it. Thus you have your Pied Pipers taking children away to magical lands and Rip Van Winkle stepping out of his reality and sleeping it off for however many decades.

I will give this more thought later. We're still cleaning up after that meltdown over Samhain and while Maria has lain off the 20 Questions, I now have to contend with the up and coming 2nd Annual Asshat Awards. Oh so many nominations, so little time to beat them all.

Also, Maria is in the mood to guest post again. God help me.

I was working on a post for Halloween, but because I had plans, the Veil decided to collapse for a few hours. This did not help my already exhausted state, as Maria has been running me ragged asking about the Spiritscape and demons. Maria is writing a book. It might be good. I'll care after I've slept. And had some waffles.

Sometime this week I'll be posting my belated Halloween entry about possession.

Now to go find Zachary and curl up with him somewhere.

Ok, guys, this has been coming up lately, and since the Heavenly Host and its' associated hierarchy is taking a little more time to organize than I'd anticipated (Josh ran off with my notes, I just know it) I figured now would be as good a time as any to clear this up.

Yes, there was an Atlantis and Lemuria.

Yes, they were where you think they were. Atlantis was a floating, manufactured 'continent' in the Atlantic Ocean which then sank and briefly became an underwater city before it too collapsed. Ireland is where the smart Atlantian's went, briefly ruled, and then essentially said, 'fuck this world, let's go wreak havoc in the Spiritscape.' Lemuria was an actual continent in the Pacific Ocean which got its' fool self blown up. The last remnents of it's civilization live on, slightly distorted, in Indian, Japanese, and Chinese culture, as well as in parts of Southeast Asia and a very little in Russian folktales and architecture.

And the big question - Why Can No One Find Indisputable Evidence of Their Existence?

BECAUSE THIS WAS SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS AGO!!!! The fact that ANYONE remembers them is astounding (though the Atlantian's descendants, the Fey, have always been pretty good about slapping people into remembering whenever it seems like they're about to forget). You can say that 'oh, well, the dinosaurs left evidence and they were around even longer ago than these civilizations, so you must be wrong.'

My dear, stupid naysayer, the dinosaurs did not blow each other the fuck up with war machines that make the A-bomb look like a spark of a match. Added to that, there are oceans where these countries were. Think of the Titanic. The Titanic has been submerged for less than a century and is nearly completely deteriorated. There are other ships that have been submerged for longer that seem to be able to hold on considerably longer. Depth, temperature, and salinity all aid in the duration period of anything underwater. Added to that, the places that survived being blown apart sank into subduction zones; places where the ocean floor sinks under tectonic plates of the continents and is melted back to magma.

I'm attempting to persuade Mathias to write a brief history of Atlantis and Lemuria. He lived through them and was involved in their destruction while I was still a child during the wars.

Expect a brief overview of the Heavenly Host and the Spiritscape whenever I can get around to it.

So, in return for services rendered, Sachielle is forcing me to explain the term Japanified as used in her Hell; Yeah, It's That Bad - Part 1 post.
( So yes, we just insulted an entire culture just to make a point badly. )


Also, I'm writing a book! You should go read my scraps and not quite chapters and character stats and inane late night ramblings here. And please leave comments. It's nice to know I'm not just talking into the vast vacuum of internet space.

Picking up from my last post...

Hell As A Whole is not a source of evil...usually. This is not to say that things don't slip out from time to time, or that those in charge don't use their powers for personal gain and profit or, in my case, for the Hell of it. But Hell was devised initially as a depository for evil. This is still its’ primary function.

Normally, bad karma and the weights of sin are supposed to be worked off during the reincarnation process. As Neil Gaiman said in American Gods, it takes a LOT of sin to earn a ticket to Hell. But Souls of the Body can, especially when they've become independent of the Over-Soul, incur more bad karma than can be dealt with through life. These souls usually cannot be allowed to rejoin the Over-Soul, as they can warp the Over-Soul, and consequently the Soul of Essence with all that negativity. Purging/redeeming the Over-Soul of those transgressions can be a long and painful process, and the Over-Soul never comes out quite right. Case in point; my sisters’ idiot soul mate.

Also, many souls take what they consider the easy route, where they incarnate, live up 'the good life' with all manner of partying and debauchery, and delay purging themselves of their transgressions until after death i.e. Hell. The problem is, when they reincarnate, they rarely remember their past lives and almost NEVER remember Hell, so they make the same mistakes and incur the same karma over and over again, until the Hell Fire warps them so badly, the Over-Soul must be thrown back into the cosmic melting pot from which we're made and reconstituted. These souls, by the way, are the people we meet who are assholes but everything seems to go their way. That's because Hell burns off the bad karma, but leaves the good karma pretty much intact.

Sometimes you encounter Over-Souls who are older and/or stronger than the average, who tough it out and work their karma off in a series of truly terrible and difficult lives. The purpose of these lives is almost solely to work off the sin and avoid Hell; any additional goodness achieved is a sign of true skill. But there aren’t many Over-Souls that incarnate on Earth who can withstand that sort of life without getting into more trouble. Adding to the difficulty setting is that, as I mentioned above, very few people remember their past lives and what they did, so they don't remember WHY their lives are so hard or why they're 'being punished by God.' The fast is, God has very little to do with karma and the principles surrounding it. Karma and balance are older than God and God, in whatever form you envision it, is subject to the rules of cosmic balance like all things.

One of the trickiest and most annoying things about decoding and deciphering heavenly mandate is that there are very few, if any, hard and fast rules. There is always an exception; someone or something for which the rules must be bent or outright ignored in favor of fixing the problem. Believe me, this annoys the minor gods and goddesses something fierce and it will pop up again and again over these lessons. Luckily, it applies to you too, so take heart. But Karmic Law, or whatever you want to call it, is constant and immovable. You can change when you get rewarded or punished. You change how you get rewarded or punished. But you can't avoid it forever. It's older than forever and it will get you.

But I digress. Back to Hell.

Hell does it's job, but it has a habit of doing it sloppily  if not downright badly. Satan has gotten a weeeee bit lazy over the millenia. Also, there are A LOT of people involved in the running of Hell. Anubis is the only one who has been there as long as Satan and is really the only deity with a clear head on his shoulders down there. Hades does a fair bit of work too, but he's involved more with souls who wander in certain spheres of the Spirit Scape; even more so since he and Persephone hooked up. Cute couple, by the way. He really gets a bum rap for how that whole courtship went down.

The Maxians and the demon are frequently at odds with one another. The Maxians are among the Heavenly Host as mortals like to call it, while demons are, well, demons. And then there are the second and third generation Aberrations. And the COFFEE. The LAST thing ANYONE working those hours wants or needs is overheated decaf.

So, in summation: Hell is really really really REALLY big x infinity. Being that it's huge, there are a lot of employees. These employees tend to clash on a regular basis. Upper management is asleep at the wheel.We all go to Hell at some point, though the usefulness of visits is questionable in the long run. Karma is gonna get ya, instant or otherwise.

To be tackled next:

The Spirit Scape and Other Places In Between
The Heavenly Host

Any and all questions should be directed to the comments. Will be answered when Maria stops pestering me for details about demon possession.

Stow your whining. I'm here, I'm posting. The rest will be posted whenever the Hell I get around to it. You want more posts, find me two more editors by September. Onwards:

Before I begin, let's set a few things straight:

• Hell is one of the few places which human mythology has had the courtesy to get right. Dante, Lovecraft, the Twilight Zone, you name it, has captured and portrayed a small piece of Hell. In fact, anything you see, read, or hear about that has to do with the horrors of Hell is correct. We'll get into the hows and whys of this below.
• That being said, Hell is BIG. People frequently underestimate just how big Hell is. In fact, trying to compute the sheer dimensions of it would probably cause your minds to implode, or at the very least ooze some form of Hell jelly.
• There is a Satan. Ever seen that Keanu Reeves movie, Constantine? Satan is a lot like that. He is also the only full time staff as he hates having anyone else around long enough to learn the ropes.
• On that note, Satan also has sons. Quite a few of them. Most of them are blithering idiots.
• Like Egyptian mythology states, Hell is guarded by cats. Cat people, actually. They're called Maxians. We'll talk about them in another post.
• Bleach and Death Note have some truth to them too, but they're ... Japanified. Maria will explain what I mean later.
• All the Death gods and goddesses which you read about do exist. They don't all serve at the same time, however, nor is it the only job they do. Over-Souls aspiring to higher level jobs in the celestial hierarchy -captains in the Heavenly Armies, Sentinels, Elites, Demi-Gods, etc - often do temp work in Hell, myself included.  Usually, we tend to the admittance of sinners, maintenance, record keeping, and dumping the coffee.
• The coffee isn't as bad as you might imagine. But it's close.
• During my brief stint temping in Hell, I was known as Belit Sheri, the book keeper, and my older sister was Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld. Feel free to check the Epic of Gilgamesh for references.
• There are evils in the universe which even Hell is not equipped to deal with.

Hiiiiiiii people of the internets! Before you start complaining, Sachielle has, not one, but TWO posts almost ready to go. But she and Mathias got into a little disagreement about stuff, so they're reworking the posts to avoid....well, a repeat of what happened two weeks ago. I'm filling in for the moment, coming to you with another real life tale of oddity and annoyance.

About 3 years ago, I began the tradition of harassing an old, college aquaintance of my mother's who now lives in Taiwan. Before you judge me, allow me to tell you why I started heckling him. You'll see it's all for the greater good.

I found Mr. T in December of 2006, a month before my 18th birthday. I was wandering the depths of Google images, looking for really weird Hello Kitty merchandise(I was a teenager; Sanrio products are still acceptable at 17-18). Among the thousands upon thousands of pictures, there was one of a woman in a giant Hello Kitty costume...and I recognized the URL beneath it. Tales of the tragic Mr. T had peppered my childhood, as he'd been a huge influence on my mom's life as a friend and school mate. So when I saw that this bizarre photo of a giant Hello Kitty costume was in his gallery, I had to know why.

At the time, he lived in Taiwan(I think he's still there, though there was some government pressure to remove all foreign workers from Taiwan a year or two ago) and kept a sizable gallery full of sites and scenes from all over Taipei. Included in this gallery was a folder full of images like the Hello Kitty costume and numerous stuffed toys. In short, the gallery was geared towards kids. And while I thought the gallery as a whole was pretty artsy-fartsy and pretentious as I explored the other folders, for 5 seconds I didn't really have a problem. Until I found out that directly after the 'childrens' folder was another full of some tackily done nudes. Were it not for the folder preceding it, I wouldn't have had too much of a problem. Was the nude folder tacky? Yes. Inappropriate for a business sight? HELL yes. But it would be his problem, not mine. My mother had warned me that he was more than a little oblivious *cough*stupid*cough* about common sense stuff.

As it was though, he had positioned kiddy stuff next to, let's just say it, porn. I had to say something. So in a somewhat snarky but very straightforward email, I let him know that if another young person like myself stumbled into his gallery like I had, and had a watchful parent notice the successive nudes, said parent might not appreciate his organizational skills or respond as kindly as I was, not to mention that a man in his late 40's with a doctorate is going to have a hard time getting anyone to believe that the positioning was accidental or not made with some ill intent. Because, quite seriously, the content matter and the placement thereof made him look like a total pedophile. He didn't appreciate my commentary of his art and blocked me, but at least he put a lock on the pr0n gallery. I think I was proved right though, since less than six months later he removed that folder completely.

Anyway, after this, I began the annual tradition of alternately mocking him and pointing out really stupid errors on his websites. Which in turn ended up strengthening a latent psychic connection between us( I said he'd influenced my mom's life? Well, he influenced mine too. Pop-tarts is all I'm saying). It made it's strongest appearance earlier this year, with the not-quite-death of my - wait for it - Hello Kitty alarm clock.

(I got the alarm clock when I was 14! Lay off!)

The clock had been on the fritz for a little over a year, so I was anticipating that I'd need to go shopping for a new one soon enough. However, since my mom and I are/were on the same schedule, I could procrastinate and rely on hers to get us both up. There my alarm clock sat, set but unnecessary, allowed to go off whenever it wanted regardless of the  time appointed. It wasn't until my school vacations that I began keeping track of when the alarm went off. The time periods were usually the same. 

Now, I have a habit of playing with the World Clock tool on my cell phone. I don't really use it for anything, but every now and again, I'm struck with the urge to check what the time is in various parts of the world. No reason, just an odd quirk. But I recall that, sometime in April, while I was playing with the world clock, I had to get up and turn off the alarm on the defective Hello Kitty clock. It had been set for 7 that morning (I think). And the time in Taiwan was (take a guess, I dare you)


7!!!!

My first reaction was not wtf, but, unbelievably, annoyance. I was annoyed that he dare intrude on my life through my clock. Because, of course, the tragic Mr. T was behind it. He felt my thoughts bend towards his existance as I plotted new ways to heckle him. I was a month or two behind my usual heckling time period when the clock started malfunctioning. It could only have been him. and to test my theory that Taiwan and it's resident(s) was trying to possess my clock, I tracked that every time my alarm clock went off at a time other than what I'd set it for, it would go off at the Taiwanese equivalent!!! 7 AM state side would go off at 7 AM or PM Taiwan zone. And ditto for any other time I set it out.

Oddly enough, I was not, at the time, freaked out by this. Now, looking back, I think this deserves a healthy batch of fear. The Hello Kitty clock has been given away and all desires for Sanrio Products have been sanguined from my soul. Even the adorableness of this
could not inspire me to get another one. No, as it is, I have postponed buying a new alarm clock, waiting until I found that perfect blend of cute but stylish and (vaguely) mature. But in light of my mother's now dead alarm clock, I must make my decision faster than I would've liked. And that, boys and girls, to make a short story long, is why I was so late to my first class this morning.

;-)

-Maria

Yes, I'm back. Feel free to express your gratitude and elation in the form of Belgian waffles.

Back to business as usual.

There are four types of souls; (in ascending order) the Soul of the Body, Over-Souls, Souls of Arch-type, and Souls of Essence. There are a few others, but trying to define and explain them is more work than they're worthy of and routinely gives me a headache. The important thing to remember about the others is that they aren't important to you. The other four, however, are fairly critical when it comes to understand the afterlife and our relation to God.

When the topic of souls comes up, most people think of Souls of the Body. The Soul of the Body is our conscious mind, the force that moves and motivates us, acts as our conscience, and acts as the first link from the world of the incarnate to the worlds of the discarnate. The Chinese and Japanese refer to it as 'chi' and 'ki' respectively. New Ager's call it Spirit. And when we die, if we don't go to Hell or the Heavens, the Soul of the Body is what becomes a ghost. Most people have Souls of the Body, but not everyone. We'll talk about those people later.

Over-Souls are the next step up. If you have a Soul of the Body chances are good that you have or at least had one. People are connected to their Over-Souls to various degrees; the average being that tingling awareness urging you to get off the highway and backroad it home, just before you find out there's a three car pile up a few miles ahead, and the more than average being psychic. There are some people who have no connection to their Over-Soul whatsoever and, though some people try, there is nothing that can be done to change that. In established theology, Over-Souls fill the role of Angels, with some choosing never to incarnate and spend all their time acting as gaurdians or fighting in the Armies of Heaven. The best analogy I can think of to describe the Over-Souls relation to the body incarnate is to compare it to playing video games. Life as we know and understand it is a video game to Over-Souls, and they play it with certain objectives in mind. These objectives differ based on what is being played for and, yes, what level the 'player' is on. Some players are better than others. People with psychic abilities or even magic have Over-Souls who are more in sync with their bodies. Most people's Over-Souls are good enough players to at least guide them in the direction of their desired goal. Then there are those people whose Over-Souls are horrible players and either stand back and watch the train wreck or abandon ship and leave the Soul of the Body to fend for itself. We can these 'wasted lives.' Also, Over-souls can play as more than one person or character at a time. Most have one or two, some talented Over-Souls play more than three people at a time, and I've met some VERY talented Over-Souls who played five incarnates at a time. Perhaps my youth and inexperience is showing, but it gave me a headache to watch. Consider this also: Over-Souls are not so very different from humans. We feel the same emotions, think the same thoughts, make the same stupid jokes and eat the same food. For the most part we even look and dress the same. Our largest difference is our proximity to the creation(God/Goddess/Source/ whatever). We feel and cannot ignore the divinity of our center as we are that much closer than you to the God within ourselves. And so, when we turn to evil, it is so much bigger and the distortion is so much more permanent. Often, the evils that distort us are brought about by the evils commited by our human selves, whom we often have so little control over. We'll go into greater detail with this later.*

Souls of Archetype are self-evident. Much like literary archetypes, these souls are not so much people but roles. The hero, the heroine, the maiden, hunter, crone, sage, trickster, etc. Every Over-Soul corresponds to a role, whom they are at core. ** Because there are only so many roles, there are obviously FAR more Over-Souls and even MORE Souls of Body than there are Souls of Archetype. This is not to say that there is only one soul per role, however. There are at least three souls who are Tricksters, and a half dozen Heroines and Heros respectively. Souls of Archetype lack the nuances of personality inherent in Souls of Body and Over-Souls; as they move closer to the creation, they loose those traits of individuality, embodying a more uniform nature before becoming one with God/Goddess/whatever.

Which Literary Archetype are You?

Souls of Essence can be best imagined as Dust from Phillip Pullman's His Dark Material. There is no individual. There is no seperation of us from the divine source of our creation. We are a swirling mass of golden light at the center of everything, holding the universe in place. We move to the edges and sing and dance, and when we grow tired we retreat into the mass and rest while other beings in the light move forward to take our place. In this place, we are God.

Next time - Hell: Yeah, It's That Bad

*For the record, I am an Over-Soul. And I'm in sync with my person to the point that she had to give me a live journal to express myself with. Take pity on her, readers. I'm even more annoying in person than I am on (electronic)paper.

** A trickster named Mira. I hate her so very, very much.