Tag: witchcraft

A Discovery of Witches – Thread

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Whilst I was in hospital I came upon this UK TV series on Netflix. It seemed that I had already started watching it according to Netflix. I did not recall this.  So I started to watch again. So far it is enjoyable.

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A Discovery of Witches is a British fantasy television series based on the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness, named after the first book in the trilogy.

Diana Bishop, a historian and reluctant witch, unexpectedly discovers a bewitched manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. This discovery forces her back into the world of magic in order to unravel the secrets it holds about magical beings. She is offered help by a mysterious biochemist and vampire Matthew Clairmont. Despite a long-held mistrust between witches and vampires, they form an alliance and set out to protect the book and solve the mysteries hidden within while dodging threats from the creature world.

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Discovery of Witches is a 2011 historical-fantasy novel and the debut novel by American scholar Deborah Harkness. It follows Diana Bishop, a history of science professor at Yale University, as she embraces her magical blood after finding a long-thought-lost manuscript and engages in a forbidden romance with a charming vampire, Matthew Clairmont.

When Diana Bishop returns to Oxford University, her life is flipped upside down. While researching in the library, Diana requests a book called Ashmole 782. This manuscript, also known as the Book of Life, has been missing for over 150 years. As soon as Diana touches the ancient manuscript, her powers are activated. Frightened by her clear cosmic connection to Ashmole 782, Diana returns the book. It appears, however, that her discovery had already caught the attention of other creatures, which results in a series of events that slowly brings her witch heritage and family back into her life.

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Diana is  cast as a young academic investigating Alchemy partly autobiographically inspired on behalf of the author. The first few episodes are very good for Oxford university tourism. The photography is top notch.

Ashmole was a founder member of The Royal Society and this is his coat of arms.

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Note Hermes bearing the golden Caduceus top right. Note also the Breton symbol around the lower central panel.

Aside from founding the Ashmolean museum he is famous for collecting things like this:

Theatrvm chemicvm britannicum : containing severall poeticall pieces of our famous English philosophers, who have written the hermetique mysteries in their owne ancient language

by Ashmole, Elias, 1617-1692; Cross, Thomas, fl. 1632-1682; Vaughan, Robert, 17th cent; Goddard, John, fl. 1645-1671

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Given where I did my Ph.D. and my interest in things witchy and Alchemy related I have found something to look into a bit while I recuperate.

A new thread to explore?

Volcano Islands – DNA – Nirmāṇakāya- Warrior Girl Dream 23-08-2025

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Here are last night’s dreaming sequence. It is a little “bitty” and is in three parts.

The dream starts on a mediterranean-like island. I am walking along a trail with the wife. We are carrying rucksacks; it is sunny but not hot. We are on a cliff side path far below is an azure-blue sea. Ahead of us is a port town from which we aim to take a ferry to our next destination. In the middle distance we can see a rocky island with fertile splashes of green farming land. It is less cliffy but dominated by a peak which I know is a supposed extinct volcano. We start to have a drone’s eye view over the island. Small volcanic vents open up around the island venting first smoke and then the occasional pyrotechnic of red hot lava. The central volcano starts to smoke and vent too. We can hear the rumble of pre-eruption. It is pretty clear that the island is unsafe and that we will have to alter our plans. If the volcano blows the island will cease. We cannot go to that island yet.

I say that we need to find a hotel for the night. We walk into town as night falls and the nightlife starts up. There are bars and clubs. It is Greek. We find a large hotel on a central plaza. The wife thinks it too expensive but I know they like to fill all the rooms. I go to reception where the hotel manager / owner is. He is an oily man with yet black hair. I ask him for a room it is £50 per night. This he says is because the pool is out of order. I accept and ask what time breakfast is. The hotel is in need of TLC.

The dream fades.

I am now in a medical centre come hospital on another island which feels like Jersey but may not be it. I am in a waiting room with many others. My name is called and I am taken into a consulting room by a woman of similar age to me in a dark navy-blue nurse practitioner uniform. She does blood pressure measurements and listens to my chest. I gesture to her where I have had my chest hair shaved for a recent ECG. For some reason we both find this funny. She takes down some historical details. Then she gets an envelop out of her desk drawer. She proceeds to take a lock of my hair which is much longer than it is this morning. She places this in the envelope. She then proceeds to trim all my finger nails with scissors. Collecting the nails and placing them too in the envelope. I say that I hope she is not going to use these for voodoo or witchcraft on me because everyone knows that these are key ingredients. She says no, the samples are for DNA tests, the government wants to test my DNA to check if I am normal or not. I say to her that I have had a normal birth and not a different Nirmāṇakāya manifestation vehicle. It was not thought created. I came out of a womb. The DNA results should come back as entirely human.

Outside the hospital I go down a hill to where the ambulance entrance is. I see the nurse posting the envelope into a bright red old-school UK mail box. I wave at her, she waves back.

The dream fades.

I am now in a large metropolitan building which has been subdivided into a number of flats. The building has a common room area with a watercooler and seating. I am standing there when a tall man comes in. He is holding is mouth. He says that he has broken a tooth. I know he is Hungarian because we have been out for a few beers. I say that I can drive him to a dentist and explain how things work in England. I ask him to show me his EU health card. He does. I say show this at the dental clinic and they will reduce the amount you have to pay. We are joined by a young woman who has recently moved into the block. She is around mid-twenties and has jet black pig-tailed hair and is heavily made up. I know that she considers herself trendy.

I take the Hungarian to the dentist in my car and drop him off in reception I give him the number of my mobile ‘phone in case there is difficulty. Neither of us foresees any. He will have to wait for hours. I go back to the block of flats where I am some kind of custodian.

The young woman is still there in the communal rooms. She wants to go into town and asks me to accompany her. There is a mild sexual frisson from her part towards me which is completely unexpected by me. She takes my arm in hers and we walk out into the night. I am quasi-paternal.

It is very urban and under the yellow street lights she starts to tell me how she is trying to change. She has a lot of piercings and several large tattoos. She is of mixed race a real melting pot of nationalities but speaks pukka English, posh. She says that she is a warrior girl, that she is striving to be a warrior girl. In a London accent I ask if she means warrior gall or warrior gell, innit. This makes her laugh. My accent is unexpected.

I say to her that being a warrior is harder than she might imagine and that whatever her preconceptions are, they are wrong. I say to her that is a  good thing to aspire to be a “warrior gall”. This makes her happy and she tries to skip. I cannot. I look at her and we both laugh.

The dream fades.

Granny Was a Gwrach…

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Gwrach y Rhibyn

The legend of the cyhyraeth is sometimes conflated with tales of the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn or Hag of the Mist, a monstrous Welsh spirit in the shape of a hideously ugly woman – a Welsh saying, to describe a woman without good looks, goes, “Y mae mor salw â Gwrach y Rhibyn” (she is as ugly as the Gwrach y Rhibyn) – with a harpy-like appearance: unkempt hair and wizened, withered arms with leathery wings, long black teeth and pale corpse-like features. She approaches the window of the person about to die by night and calls their name, or travels invisibly beside them and utters her cry when they approach a stream or crossroads, and is sometimes depicted as washing her hands there. Most often the Gwrach y Rhibyn will wail and shriek “Fy ngŵr, fy ngŵr!” (My husband! My husband!) or “Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach!” (My child! My little child!), though sometimes she will assume a male’s voice and cry “Fy ngwraig! Fy ngwraig!” (My wife! My wife!).

If it is death that is coming, the name of the one doomed to die is supposed to be heard in her “shrill tenor”. Often invisible, she can sometimes be seen at a crossroad or a stream when the mist rises.

Some speculation has been asserted that this apparition may have once been a water deity, or an aspect of the Welsh goddess Dôn. She is the wife of Afagddu, the despised son of Ceridwen and Tegid Foel, in some retellings of the Taliesin myth.

From Wikipedia

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If I were to show you the autocorrelation traces of two femtosecond laser pulses on an expensive oscilloscope in a dark laser lab it us unlikely that you would be thinking of the witch, the hag of the mist, Gwrach-y-Rhibyn. The two things do not correlate for most.

A part of my maternal family hails from Snowdonia, the foot of Snowdon,  in North Wales and the family legend has it that at least one of my maternal relatives, a granny of sorts, was a Gwrach, a witch, perhaps a seeress. In that context then there is a chance that I inherited the bloodline and hence the “gift” so to speak. As such it was entirely natural {and perhaps inevitable} that I would be interested in shamanism and shamanic ritual.

Of course in terms of someone able to write Fortan programs to calculate Franck Condon factors for anharmonic oscillator molecular vibronic photon excitations that seems far-fetched.

Contextually the vice versa might apply. Why would a shaman piss about with fancy lasers and science?

In Brittany there remains an interest in {and perhaps practice of} witchcraft. This is no way freaks me out. It is possible the practises here were sourced in the Welsh diaspora arriving. They are of similar roots.

I’ll speculate that a blog post like this would not enhance my promotion prospects were I still institutionalised in science academia.

I have always loved the mist and the fog. I nearly died on The Old Man of Coniston once. I was alone and following crows up a trail in the snow deep into the fog, alone on the mountain. It was exciting. Luckily before I got completely lost in the otherworld, I turned back. I have had much similar fun on Kinder Scout in dense fog. There is something womb-like and enveloping.

Of a still and misty night, when the full moon is partially veiled and you heard a voice at your window calling your name, what would you do.

Could you take secure refuge in the omniscience of your infallible reason?

Or would your blood run cold?

Magic Fayre Dream 8-1-23

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The memory of this was prompted by one of the checkout ladies at the supermarket who has large witchy tattoos. There are quite a few women with tattoos like that around here. It makes me feel at home…

This is an extensive dreaming sequence whereby I woke up and then went back to sleep, re-entering the same dream.

I arrive at a middle size country mansion constructed in red bricks. There is a temporary car park roped of at a distance to the mansion and signage saying “Magic Fayre” pointing along the drive towards the mansion. The gardens are immaculate and it is a fine summer’s day. Many of the people are dressed for an English country garden party. I walk along to the entrance and wait in line.

When it is my turn to enter the gentleman on the door gives me a red plastic circular token with the number 16 printed upon it in raised yellow lettering. He says that I am getting a kind of VIP pass. All the other guests have pale yellow tokens with numbers starting at 200.

I go in and there are various exhibition style booths. At the first one there are two young women. Their stand is called “Modern Witchcraft”. On the stand there are examples of handicrafts and immaculate calligraphy. The two women are dressed in very smart stylish outfits without a trace of goth. They tell me that they are white witches and want to bring witchcraft into the 21st century. They are tired of the skanky image of witches and want to smarten it up. They say that the lost of art of spell calligraphy needs to be reborn and brought up to an impeccable level. I comment that I fully support what they are doing, the image needs to change. They beam with joy.

On the next stand there is a woman with long dark hair selling exotic candles of all shapes and sizes. Several of them are alight and the aroma is spiced and not unpleasant and manufactured like that of Yankee candles. It seems the woman has manged to make candles smell like exotic incense. I take the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and extinguish one candle between them. I am left with a light blue drop of oily liquid on my thumb. The drop is perfectly shaped. The woman claps her hands and says, “bravo”. She asks me to manually pleasure her which I do quietly beneath her table. She is wearing brown bikini bottoms which I push to one side.

I decide that I need to go back outside. There are a few people sat on the large stones which demarcate the drive. I find an empty one and take out an herbal marijuana joint which I spark up. A1, a man, arrives and looks surprised to see me doing this. We chat briefly. The organiser of the event wearing a trilby and a beige suit comes over. He says that smoking weed is not allowed. I apologise. He says that I owe him a “sitting” in the basement if I can hack it. I agree to try.

I go back int the building and arrive at some demonstration area. There is a large head in a glass tank. The head is very much alive and the fluid which surrounds it is pulsating. He asks me to sit down on a chair at a distance from him and we tune into each other a little. Then he sends various articles towards me using telekinesis. The idea is that I must catch the objects with my hands. I manage to catch about 80% of the things he sends at me. The ones that I drop are all made of plastic. He notes this and thinks it funny that I cannot feel the plastic, whereas glass, metal and wood are easy for me to “pick up”. He is really happy and a sparkle appears in his one eye which is facing me.

He says to me in a booming telepathic voice, “you need to work with groups.”

I move on to the stairs and down into the basement. There is a well lit library there with light wooden shelving and several librarians there. I know this library to be a library of white magic. I ask one of the librarians where to go for my “sitting”. She motions me to an armoured door in the corner of the room, in which there is a small glass window. She asks me to please close the door behind me until the “sitting” is over.

I go over to the door open it and walk through. I get my bearings and I am in a whitewashed medieval style cellar. I go back to the door close it and sit cross legged in the middle of the room. It very dark and quiet. The only light comes from the small window in the door. I start to meditate and close my eyes sinking in the darkness. Slowly a glowing rod of light appears. It is about 30cm long and less than 1cm wide. It is slowly alternating from white through pink to red and through pink back to white. I know that I cannot pick it up with my hands. So, I elevate it and bring it within my Anja centre. I absorb it and understand that I now have to radiate it out into the room. I do this for a fair time radiating a pinkish light into the otherwise dark cellar. I am aware that the librarian can see the pulsing glow. When I leave the room, the librarians are smiling I have fulfilled my task.

I come to

Next, I am outside the mansion again it is later towards the end of the afternoon. I am outside with A2 also a man.  We are standing near a rucksack on the floor. He says that he is changing his ways and is going to participate in a practise called Yeshe*-lam. I ask his if him if he knows what Yeshe means. He admits that he does not. I keep quiet. For some reason he is trying to impress me.

We go into the Magic Fayre. Several of the stands are closing up. At the back there is a table with three men in business suits going over some paperwork. I go over to ask them what they are doing. One of them says that they work for Samsung who have sponsored the event. I see that he has some accounts and joke that he should hide them from A2 who is an accountant. He plays as if to hide them. He asks me what I thought of the event. I say that it was well run, meticulously organised and very good. He comments that he is pleased that their investment has worked.

He says that he is going to work with lama Yeshe. I ask him how long he has been working with Tibetan Buddhism and the Bardo teachings. He comments intermittently. He takes one third of the year sabbatical to do this. He cannot work full on for Samsung and do Bardo at the same time, they do not mix well.

We go back outside to the ruck sack. Out of the corner of my eye I see two giant figures, one a mediaeval king {with crown} and the other some kind of knight they are over five metres tall and the same height as a big water tower. The king is fighting with the knight and is trying to kill him with a sword. They fall over knocking the tower to the ground. I motion to A2 to come with me into a stone built folly. Which he does.

Soon a number of larger figures come into the property. They start to fire arrows at us but I can deflect them with my mind.

I come to.

Next, I am outside my flat in North London. I know it is a bit of a mess. I open the door and on the floor in the corner of the room is sat an Indian “guru” in saffron robes and with long flowing grey hair. He smiles. I apologise for the mess. He says that it is of no import.

A2 turns up and says that he is hungry. I say that I have no food but that there are plenty of restaurants, nearby. I reel off the types of restaurant and we decide to go to a fish restaurant nearby. I say to the “guru” we will be back soon.

After we have eaten, I leave A2 at the restaurant and head back to the flat. When I open the door there is another “Indian” man sat on the floor meditating he is dressed in a 1950’s style suite with a black Muslim cap. He feels serene.

I come to.

I do drift back off but I can’t recall accurately what happens next.

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*Yeshe (Tibetan: ཡེ་ཤེས་, Wylie: ye-shes, ZYPY: Yêxê) is a Tibetan term meaning wisdom and is analogous to jnana in Sanskrit.

Homunculus – Homuncule – Children – Hidden Doorway Dream 25-01-24

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I had this dream between 7:07 and 7:30 this morning. I checked the clock on the way back from the loo and went back to bed. I was woken by the central heating clicking on at 7:30 AM.

The dream starts in the living room of a house in France. I am there with the wife. I can see the cat ferreting around on the top shelf of a bookcase. It is trying to get into a black plastic container. I get a small step on stool and reach the black plastic container taking it off the shelf. The cat is very curious and tries to get into the box and I have to shoo it away.

I take the container over to the window. There is no lid. In it I can see a small ~20cm high homuncule {homunculus}. It is curled up and seems to be dead. It looks a bit like an alien “grey”. I prod it gently with a pencil and it does not move.

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{The dream is specific homuncule in French.}

I move away from the window. The cat nearly trips me up and I spill the contents of the container onto the floor. The homuncule lands and the carpet is covered with a shiny silver-grey powder from him which glistens iridescent. The homuncule stands up and walks off to the kitchen. As it moves small mouse like turds fall from off its back. It has been asleep for a very long time. I know that he is very thirsty and is going to get some water. The cat watches but seems too startled to do anything.

I turn around and there are a few, around half a dozen, children standing behind me. They are boys and girls aged around 7 or 8. They are dressed like children in a 1950s US TV programme. The have freckles and are clean and tidy.

I ask them, “quelle langue parles-tu?”

One of the girls say, “um, English, we are from Kivingden in Kent. We have been here a long time.”

I follow the path of the homuncule towards the kitchen. I notice a new white painted metal door has appeared. The door is reminiscent of a naval door designed to prevent water ingress. It has a white metal lever clamped shut which I lift to open the door. I open it and lock the door fully open with a metal rod.

It is a kind of portal.

I can see an industrial metallic staircase spiralling down. It is painted white. The bunker below is very well lit and also painted white. I know it to be extensive and to be a nuclear shelter. I know it is well provisioned and that the homuncule has made it appear and that it is from whence the children came.

I call the wife to come and inspect.

Dream ends.  

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Homuncule : Homme de taille réduite auquel les sorciers ou les alchimistes prétendaient pouvoir donner la vie.