Friday, May 31, 2019

Whose Demons? Yours, Mine, Ours.

"I was thinking about my thirteenth birthday," Melia said. Her father had telepathically interrogated her that night. Since then, during every dark moon phase, gruesome images intruded on Melia's mind—gruesome images that she'd never seen or imagined before. It was all connected: her father's psychic trespass, the horrific visions, and the black nights when the enchanted world's two moons offered zero illumination. Tears welled in the half-faerie's eyes. She rubbed them away.

"What?" Tatou asked.

"When Melusine taught Plantine and me how to block Father's telepathic intrusions, I became the best at building interior walls. I was certain that would stop everything."

"But it didn't?"

"No." Melia's heart hammered in her chest. No matter how many psychic walls she threw up, or how thick the walls were, when Faerie's moons were dark the visions came. The most logical explanation made her uneasy. They weren't coming from outside of her, they were bubbling up from within.

"Try the ylandria one more time," Tatou said.

Melia slumped with her back bowing out, her elbows on her thighs, and her chin on the flats of her fists. They used to chase glow sprites on the shores of the Undine, but now they experimented with faerie herbs.

natural beauty, nature inspiration,

Maybe the ylandria wasn't working because she didn't want to know the truth. Her father's trespass had violated some inner boundary, one from which there was no retreat. It was a disturbing thought, to be forever transformed for the worse through no fault of her own, and at such an early age. — Excerpt from Chapter 1. Ylandria, Half Faerie

Melia's INNER WORLD, her psychic terrain, has been invaded in a troubling way. Who is responsible for said invasion, the sudden introduction of violent images that now recur according to a lunar rhythm?

From The Uses of Enchantment, On the Meaning and Significance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim: "There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures—the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, our of anger and anxiety. Instead we want our children to believe that, inherently, all men are good. But children know that they are not always good, and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be. This contradicts what they are told by their parents and therefore make the child a monster in his own eyes.

The dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly where children are concerned, that the dark side of man does not exist, and professes a belief in optimistic meliorism." 

Bruno Bettelheim, fairy tales, the search for meaning

Not only do "CHILDREN know that they are not always good, and even when they are, they prefer not to be", children ALSO know the same about ADULTS!

As Melia's story opens she struggles with that universal question: Whose demons? Hers? Her Father's? Or ... someone else's? If they're not hers, how are they being/could they be transmitted into her mind? Through some INVISIBLE but potent connection, energy, field? Electromagnetic forces interacting with plasma?

The half faerie just wants to stop them and get on with her life. Meanwhile, if she could sprout a pair of wings and be like all the full-blood faeries!

desires of your heart

Imagine Dragons cover of Demons by Gareth Bush & Morgan Kingdon:


Demon Lyrics:

When the days are cold
And the cards all fold
And the saints we see
Are all made of gold

When your dreams all fail
And the ones we hail
Are the worst of all
And the blood's run stale

I wanna hide the truth
I wanna shelter you
But with the beast inside
There's nowhere we can hide

No matter what we breed
We still are made of greed
This is my kingdom come
This is my kingdom come

When you feel my heat
Look into my eyes
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide
Don't get too close
It's dark inside
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide

At the curtain's call
It's the last of all
When the lights fade out
All the sinners crawl

So they dug your grave
And the masquerade
Will come calling out
At the mess you made

Don't wanna let you down
But I am hell bound
Though this is all for you
Don't wanna hide the truth

No matter what we breed
We still are made of greed
This is my kingdom come
This is my kingdom come

When you feel my heat
Look into my eyes
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide
Don't get too close
It's dark inside
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide

They say it's what you make
I say it's up to fate
It's woven in my soul
I need to let you go

Your eyes, they shine so bright
I wanna save that light
I can't escape this now
Unless you show me how

When you feel my heat
Look into my eyes
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide
Don't get too close
It's dark inside
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide

As a half-faerie, Melia is an outcast in the enchanted world where she lives with her two sisters and full-blood faerie mother. The girls' father has been exiled to the mortal world for breaking his faerie troth. When a tragic accident destroys what's left of Melia's fractured family, her mother is unforgiving. The punishment she metes out will leave her daughter torn between guilt and ecstasy, challenge the bonds between three sisters, and complicate Melia's relationship with a young priest who’s come to the Realm of Faerie on a mission of his own.

Free eBook
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Buy the Paperback

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Nightmares and Daydreams

When the Dark Master rises from the mists to breach the Veil, and a Daughter of Light, denied the throne by virtue of birth, stands alone, beware.

The blood of innocents will soak Illialei's meadows, and dreamlessness will snuff all hope from the mortal world.

The Old Texts, Appendix VII — Excerpt from Idonnic Prophecy, Half Faerie

There are three significant themes in the Idonnic Prophecy. The first one is: dreams. Night dreams and daydreams, these states when we're not quite present to the visible material world, and yet our hearts keep beating and our lungs continue their rhythmic inhaling and exhaling of breath ... while our awareness is somewhere else.

Where is it?

meaning of dreams, spiritual meaning of dreams

In THE INVISIBLE realm, attuned to the imaginal, lost in our inner world.

What do I mean?

There are layers, layers of consciousness, layers of energy in the WHOLE that we live in. Things must be envisioned, imagined, thought of in THE INVISIBLE realm before they are realized in the visible material realm.

I first began to contemplate THE INVISIBLE realm decades ago when I was exposed to the I Ching.

"The beginning of all things lies still in the beyond in the form of ideas that have yet to become real ..." — Hexagram 1. The Creative, The I Ching

"The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus the visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves." — Hexagram 61. Inner Truth, The I Ching

The cosmology of Daughter of Light, the Whole,  incorporates this concept of a layered reality through the Primal Essence, the invisible point of all beginnings; the Parallel of Shadows, invisible but accessible energetically and through visions; the Enchanted World, visible to it's inhabitants and to some mortals; the mortal world, visible; the Hidden City, also visible to its inhabitants but largely invisible to the rest of the creatures of the Whole; the Unknown Beyond, largely invisible but perhaps accessible or visible during altered states of consciousness or on the threshold of death or after, and the Void, invisible but accessible through energy and sensing.

Blogging Isolt's Enchantment, the focus was on quantum musings (quanta being largely invisible to the naked eye!). Now I'm going to move on to the themes of: fairy tales, The INVISIBLE (encompassing the IMAGINAL and INNER WORLDS), and the death of mechanistic science.

Why do fairy tales persist? Might they be efforts to verbalize the power inherent in crossing the threshold between the visible and THE INVISIBLE? Acknowledging that there is, in fact, a threshold to cross? Thus the promise of transformation through gifts of insight, "knowing" beyond the scope of intellect, psychic rejuvenation, etc.

fairy tale retellings ya, fairy tale novels, fairytale fantasy books

If dreamlessness — an end of travel to THE INVISIBLE REALM — was to occur, what would that mean? Perhaps endless wars and tyranny? Maybe the destruction of the natural world in the name of technological advance?

global destruction, pollution

In other words ...

"The nightmare I built my own world to escape" —Evanescence, Imaginary



Lyrics:

Ah-ah-ah-ah, paper flowers
Ah-ah-ah-ah, paper flowers

I linger in the doorway
Of alarm clock screaming monsters calling my name
Let me stay where the wind will whisper to me
Where the raindrops, as they're falling, tell a story

In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby (paper flowers)
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me (paper flowers)

Don't say I'm out of touch
With this rampant chaos - your reality
I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge
The nightmare I built my own world to escape

In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby (paper flowers)
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me (paper flowers)

Swallowed up in the sound of my screaming
Cannot cease for the fear of silent nights
Oh, how I long for the deep sleep dreaming
The goddess of imaginary light

In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby (paper flowers)
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me (paper flowers)

Ah-ah-ah-ah, paper flowers
Ah-ah-ah-ah, paper flowers


As a half-faerie, Melia is an outcast in the enchanted world where she lives with her two sisters and full-blood faerie mother. The girls' father has been exiled to the mortal world for breaking his faerie troth. When a tragic accident destroys what's left of Melia's fractured family, her mother is unforgiving. The punishment she metes out will leave her daughter torn between guilt and ecstasy, challenge the bonds between three sisters, and complicate Melia's relationship with a young priest who’s come to the Realm of Faerie on a mission of his own.

Free eBook
Amazon  |  Amazon (UK)  |  Amazon (Canada)  |  Apple  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Google play  |  kobo
Buy the Paperback