Well, I've been writing too much in Spanish for my list but at least I've got a little something to hang in here and pretend I'm writing a lot. My article "Three Points on the Trident" has just been uploaded at The Witches' Voice! And it goes like this:

"I have a Trident that I always place on my altar. I love the way it balances the various objects I place around it with its symmetry. It is small, about the size of my hand, and made of forged iron. Yes, I know, iron is supposed to be bad to have around in ritual, but I think few rules are universal; you certainly cannot rule out iron when you do, as I do, the Blacksmith’s Works."

...To be continued at http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=&c=words&id=11021

Btw, in the stamp above, Daimon Hellstorm is bragging about the size of his trident, sort of a security token he desperately held to wayyy back in the corny days when he went around dressed like a bad xerox of Professor Zovek the late Mexican escapist, before Warren Ellis revamped him out of his misery (all hail Warren! www.warrenellis.com). I asked him to stand around just to scare off any peeking christian fundamentalists!

So, DeckHand has kindly left a nice story of a pagan who found Jesus as a reply to my Call of the Blacksmith Lord post.

Well, Deck, I will not reply in your own blog simply because it would be very rude and intrusive to post something from a different religious viewpoint, a respect which you obviously lack. I want to say, however, that I did read what you posted in my blog in full. In fact I even could say that relate to this Kathi Sharpe's experience - just as she was very attached to paganism and had very skewed assumptions on christianism, I used to be very attached to chistianism and used to have tis skewed notion of paganism. Until, just as she heard Jesus actually call her, I heard my Gods call me in a distinct way. And just like she found in him the answers she needed for her plight, I found in them the answers I needed for mine.

So, each of us hopefully gets what they need. Which makes me wonder why Jesus, who seems to be a quite decent fellow to me in the gospels, gets such imposing, bible-wagging believers.

Now, I doubt that this Kathi Sharpe even exists, and I will be very thankful if -no, I DEMAND that you refrain from posting any further christian views in my blog or my mail, because proselityzing and evangelization is very rude, lowly and offensive and any decent God must be ashamed of having proselityzing followers, which is why I NEVER invite anybody to join my faith. I only ask you to respect it and leave me alone. And do NOT pray for my soul, because I consider that an attempt to tamper with my free will. Don't mess with my soul, I won't mess with yours.

May my God drops by to say hello to you, all horns and fire, if you even THINK about posting anything else to me.

So Hallowtide is not a time for playful horrors and frights? So the turnip got replaced by the pumpkin, and Jack's grin a plastic bulb, so what?

Beside the witching stuff,  I was, and I guess I still am, a horror writer. I guess I am now seeing a lot of things from the other side, and many things that used to horrify me were in actuality, as it often happens, mirrors I found too revealing for my safety of mind, and I have since learned to gaze deeply into them.

Will I write more horror stories? Or is that field dead for me, now that I have learned to see the Unknown through its own eyes? I simply don't know; I'll find out when I see what comes out of my typing. But I'd like to, I'd like to do a different nuance of horror, one that will be a harder challenge, because it must reflect another view, my current view. All in all, I guess my greatest fear is slain: that of cosmic horror, the fear of pointlessness. The idiot chaos at the center of all things, of which the mad Arab and the weird writer from Providence were so fond of, has been eradicated, by its counterpart: Fate. she is, therefore it is not.

But that is too ambitious; humanity is petty, it worries about smaller, more immediate things. and more importantly, there is a limit to what we can hope to learn and know. And beyond that borderline, there lies fear. The oldest strongest and strongest kind of fear, quoth Lovecraft- the fear of the Unknown.

But fear lies also in the unexpected.

There is this quaint article by Neil Gaiman on the New York Times today, addressing this very thing, about how fear hides everywhere, not in vastness but in nuances. I'll quote a little piece from it, leave the link as a hook for spirits that may follow its cue...

"Why do you write ghost stories? Is there any place for ghost stories in the 21st century?

"As Alice said, there’s plenty of room. Technology does nothing to dispel the shadows at the edge of things. The ghost-story world still hovers at the limits of vision, making things stranger, darker, more magical, just as it always has ....

"There’s a blog I don’t think anyone else reads. I ran across it searching for something else, and something about it, the tone of voice perhaps, so flat and bleak and hopeless, caught my attention. I bookmarked it.

"If the girl who kept it knew that anyone was reading it, anybody cared, perhaps she would not have taken her own life. She even wrote about what she was going to do, the pills, the Nembutal and Seconal and the rest, that she had stolen a few at a time over the months from her stepfather’s bathroom, the plastic bag, the loneliness, and wrote about it in a flat, pragmatic way, explaining that while she knew that suicide attempts were cries for help, this really wasn’t, she just didn’t want to live any longer.

"She counted down to the big day, and I kept reading, uncertain what to do, if anything. There was not enough identifying information on the Web page even to tell me which continent she lived on. No e-mail address. No way to leave comments. The last message said simply, “Tonight.”

"I wondered whom I should tell, if anyone, and then I shrugged, and, best as I could, I swallowed the feeling that I had let the world down.

"And then she started to post again. She says she’s cold and she’s lonely.

"I think she knows I’m still reading ...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/opinion/31gaiman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

These are the fascinating items that Scottish author Graham Masterton shared with me on April, 2005 when I questioned him on his research about Isobel Gowdie, the famous XVII-Century witch of Auldearn, the small witch-haunted village in the Scottish Highlands.

Graham Masterton, horror novelist best known for his Manitou series and some Cthulhu Mythos works, also authored a novel titled Night Plague, part of his Night Warriors serials, in which his oneiric adventurers face none other than Isobel Gowdie, who -we are told- escaped execution (something that has actually been suggested by a few researchers) intending to embark for the New World, granted wicked dream-inducing powers by her all-too-christian diabolical Master. While I love some of Graham's works, I strongly recommend pagans and crafters to stay away from this particular novel; in spite of the masterful initial sequence where the protagonists visit what seems to be Isobel's old house, full of eerie pictures of her, blindfolded and tormented through several lives, the treatment given to Isobel by the so-called heroes is truly unbearable to read. These "heroes" are psychos! But that does not mean other works by Graham Masterton are any less for that. Let's not judge all books because of just one of them! Graham was very helpful when it came to lending me this info:

Isobel Gowdie was indicted by a Scottish court on April 13, 1662, charged that "thou received honors from the Devil they master and was appointed by him at all times thereafter his special domestic servant." She confessed to her sins, and although there is no record of it, it is extremely likely that she was put to death. Isobel was asked in court if she wanted to repent but said, "I will not be other than I am; I find too much content in my condition; I am always caressed." She said she had met the Devil in the churchyard at Auldearne and made a pact with him. She renounced her baptism and her Christian faith, and then gave her body and soul to him. "I did put one of my hands to the crown of my head, and the other to the sole of my foot, and then renounced all betwixt my two hands to the Devil." She said that the Devil sucked her blood and baptised her with it. She also said that she went out at night and destroyed houses and the people inside them, and that she could create storms by hitting a rock with a wet rag. For this she was rewarded by the Devil copulating with her. Very little more is known about her, so I did slightly embellish her story...but that's fiction for you!