The Letter Series :: Ascension Discourse on Love :: Post Script. Amera Ziganii Rao

Goddess XXV (Artwork) 

The Letter Series :: Ascension Discourse on Love :: Post Script. Amera Ziganii Rao

Lemurians Will Not Heal. Amera Ziganii Rao  

Amera Ziganii Rao:: Forced martyr healer and ascetic. Fighting my way out of the prison of cruelty and non love around me. 49 years so far and counting, despite huge skill in alchemy. We are bound to evil, and cursed by evil, until evil heals. Priesthood is cursed on this earth. It is not our earth and it is not our universe. The universe allows evil because it allows cruelty. Cause and effect. Free for all. Love is the only thing that can clear it up. The slave gladiators of the universe are the priesthood. Love is bound to evil, until evil heals. Or until love finishes its task. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Hierophant Self Discovery. The Disir 

In Norse mythology, a dís ("lady", plural dísir) is a ghost, spirit or deity associated with fate who can be both benevolent and antagonistic towards mortal people. Dísir may act as protective spirits of Norse clans. Their original function was possibly that of fertility goddesses who were the object of both private and official worship called dísablót, and their veneration may derive from the worship of the spirits of the dead. The dísir, like the valkyries, norns, and vættir, are almost always referred to collectively. The North Germanic dísir and West Germanic Idisi are believed by some scholars to be related due to linguistic and mythological similarities, but the direct evidence of Anglo-Saxon and Continental German mythology is limited. The dísir play roles in Norse texts that resemble those of fylgjur, valkyries, and norns, so that some have suggested dísir is a broad term including the other beings.

The basic meaning of the word dís is "goddess”. It is now usually derived from the Indo-European root *dhēi-, "to suck, suckle" and a form dhīśana.

Scholars have associated the dísir with the West Germanic Idisi, seeing the initial i- as having been lost early in Old or Proto-Norse. Jacob Grimm points out that dís Skjöldunga in the Eddic Helgakviða Hundingsbana II (v. 52) is exactly parallel to ides Scildinga "Scylding queen" in Beowulf (l. 1168). He also suggests that Iðunn may be a reflex of the original form of the word. However, except for the Second Merseburg Charm, in which they work battle-magic, idis only occurs with the meaning "lady," sometimes "maiden." The words are not assumed to be directly related by some scholars, although the resemblance evidently led to influence on Old Norse poetic usage.

Other scholars group all female spirits and deities associated with battle under the class of idis, dis, valkyrie and other names such as sigewif (victory-women, associated by the Anglo-Saxons with a swarm of bees) and find the commonalities both linguistically and in surviving myths and magic charms sufficient cause to group together all variations on this theme from various Germanic cultures. Stories from these other cultures survive from earlier dates than the Eddas and it is difficult to conclusively construct a clear pre-Christian mythology without conjecture. However, the Germanic languages appear to have had a northward rather than southward progression from the initial contact with the speakers of Indo-European languages near Denmark or Jutland. H. Davidson notes a similar northward progression of mythology where elements of Proto-Germanic concepts have morphed or been combined by the time of the recording of the Icelandic sagas.

According to Rudolf Simek, Old Norse dís appears commonly as simply a term for 'woman,' just as Old High German itis, Old Saxon idis, and Anglo-Saxon ides, and may have also been used to denote a type of goddess. According to Simek, "several of the Eddic sources might lead us to conclude that the disir were valkyrie-like guardians of the dead, and indeed in Guðrúnarkviða I 19 the valkyries are even called Herjans disir 'Odin's disir'. The disir are explicitly called dead women in Atlamál 28 and a secondary belief that the disir were the souls of dead women (see fylgjur) also underlies the landdísir of Icelandic folklore." Simek says that "as the function of the matrons was also extremely varied – fertility goddess, personal guardians, but also warrior-goddesses – the belief in the dísir, like the belief in the valkyries, norns, and matrons, may be considered to be different manifestations of a belief in a number of female goddesses.

Wikipedia

Hierophant Self Discovery 

.....The island sets a pattern for the cult of Apollo: when the god grows up, the Hymn continues, he travels to another daunting place, ‘a cliff hanging below Mount Parnassos, and a rugged glade below’. There, at Delphi, Apollo defeats a snake-like monster called Python, and decides to build a second temple for himself, where he will deliver oracles to enquiring mortals........

Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World

Michael Scott

The oracle and sanctuary of the Greek god Apollo at Delphi were known as the "omphalos"--the "center" or "navel"--of the ancient world for more than 1000 years. Individuals, city leaders, and kings came from all over the Mediterranean and beyond to consult Delphi's oracular priestess; to set up monuments to the gods in gold, ivory, bronze, marble, and stone; and to take part in athletic and musical competitions. This book provides the first comprehensive narrative history of this extraordinary sanctuary and city, from its founding to its modern rediscovery, to show more clearly than ever before why Delphi was one of the most important places in the ancient world for so long.

In this richly illustrated account, Michael Scott covers the whole history and nature of Delphi, from the literary and archaeological evidence surrounding the site, to its rise as a center of worship with a wide variety of religious practices, to the constant appeal of the oracle despite her cryptic prophecies. He describes how Delphi became a contested sacred site for Greeks and Romans and a storehouse for the treasures of rival city-states and foreign kings. He also examines the eventual decline of the site and how its meaning and importance have continued to be reshaped right up to the present. Finally, for the modern visitor to Delphi, he includes a brief guide that highlights key things to see and little-known treasures.

A unique window into the center of the ancient world, Delphi will appeal to general readers, tourists, students, and specialists.

Michael Scott is assistant professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick. His books include From Democrats to Kings: The Brutal Dawn of a New World from the Downfall of Athens to the Rise of Alexander the Great (Overlook). He has also written and presented a number of ancient history documentaries for National Geographic, the History channel, Nova, and the BBC, including one on Delphi. His website is www.michaelscottweb.com.

Review:

"Scott's passion and expertise are readily apparent. . . . An enjoyable resource for scholars and students. Additionally, prospective visitors to the modern site of Delphi will be interested in Scott's brief guide, which is included at the back of the book."--Publishers Weekly

"Tells you everything there is to know about Delphi."--Sam Leith, Spectator

Endorsement:

"Like the two eagles released by Zeus from opposite ends of the world who then met in Delphi, Michael Scott gets to the heart of antiquity's most celebrated and enigmatic oracle. A vivid and lucid study that reanimates the mentality of those who consulted Apollo more convincingly than any other I have read."--Tom Holland, author of Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West

"Learned and elegant, Michael Scott's Delphi offers an in-the-round study of the heart of ancient Greece, a focus of religion, art, athletics, intrigue, and treasure so potent that it still gives us an adjective for enigmatic--'Delphic.' Scott's irresistible narrative brings it all back to life."--Barry Strauss, author of Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and the Genius of Leadership

"Few scholars know the history of ancient Delphi as intimately as Michael Scott does. Apollo's injunction to 'know yourself' is as hard to obey now as it was in ancient times, but readers seeking enlightenment will surely be encouraged to learn that the unsettling Delphic effect is good for them. On a more earthly plane, they will find Scott's expert guidance to the site and its museum invaluable."--Paul Cartledge, author of After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars

Review

The Gods of Olympus. A History. Barbara Graziosi 

Birth:  Ancient Greece 

How the gods first appeared, how they became specific characters, colonised Olympus and formed into a family: answers to these questions can be sought as far back as the first migrations to the Greek peninsula, the earliest traces of cult, and the great civilisations of the Bronze Age. And, after that, they can be found in archaic Greece, where something happened between the eighth and the sixth centuries BC. It was then that the first temples were built, the first cult statues were housed in them, and Homer and Hesiod defined for the Greeks who the main gods were, how they were born, and how they behaved at Olympus. 

Homer and Hesiod were considered great authorities on the gods – but they were never above question. In fact, as soon as their poems started circulating in the Greek world, people expressed doubts about their theological claims. Even with the gift of immortality, the gods of epic seemed too human, and too specifically Greek, to command respect as universal powers. The cult statues housed in temples were vulnerable to similar objections. Radical early critics questioned the anthropomorphic visions of poets and artists, and thereby inaugurated a long tradition of debate – a debate that concerned not just the nature of the gods, but the interpretation of poetry and art. 

At Home in Greece 

Tall, broad and covered in snow for much of the year. Mount Olympus stands alone, fully visible from every side. It dominates the landscape for miles around; it’s dazzling peaks seem particularly incongruous when viewed from the hot low plains around. From the sea, the mountain sometimes looks like a cloud. 

In antiquity, Mount Olympus lay very much off the beaten track. People had little reason to go near it – and in turn they felt observed. The Greeks thought that the gods lived among the mountain’s peaks and watched what happened down below. Poets elaborated on this notion. Homer described Mount Olympus precisely, mentioning its ‘many summits’, ‘abundant snow’, and ‘steepness’, and giving an indication of just where it was. At the same time, he suggested that this mythical residence of the gods was not quite what it seemed: ‘Olympus is never shaken by winds, hit by rain, or covered in snow; cloudless ether spreads around it, and a bright aura encircles it’. So Olympus was both a particular landmark and a place of the mind. Greek communities could see the mountain, agree about its sacredness, and feel united by a shared sense of landscape; but they were also reminded that the gods did not live in our world and were never subjected to the indignities of bad weather. 

It is unclear when the mountain first became associated with the gods. In the poems of Homer, the most important deities are explicitly called ‘the Olympians’, but he was not necessarily the first to place them on the sacred mountain. The Iliad and the Odyssey, in the form in which we have them, date to the archaic period (roughly the eighth to the sixth century BC), and the Greek peninsula was settled long before that time. We can reconstruct, on linguistic grounds, that the Greeks were descended from speakers of a language also related to Sanskrit and Latin as well as to Germanic, Slavic and other linguistic groups, and which is conventionally called ‘Indo-European’. 

Migrating from central Asia, Indo-European speakers gradually settled in Europe, and introduced broadly shared notions of the gods. So, for example, the Greek Zeus is related to the Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar; they are both versions of the supreme god, ruler of the sky. It is unsurprising that in Greece this Indo-European god settled on Mount Olympus, the tallest landmark in the area. It is more difficult to establish just when this happened. Answering that question requires dating the Indo-European migrations and investigating the roots of Homeric epic – both of which are quite controversial subjects. 

Impressive civilisations were already flourishing in Greece around 2000 BC, more than a thousand years before Homer’s time: monumental remains at Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos testify to this. In the twelfth century BC, however, these civilizations suddenly collapsed. A long period of decline followed, generally known as the ‘Dark Ages’. 

It was only in the eighth century BC that people living in Greece began to flourish again: the next two centuries were characterised by a sharp increase in the population, the rise of the city-state (polis), the construction of the first temples and cult statues of the gods, an upsurge in travel and trade, the foundation of new colonies, the reintroduction of writing (a technology that had been lost during the Dark Ages), and the phenomenal spread of epic poetry. 

Scholars used to think that the Dark Ages corresponded with the arrival of Indo-European tribes from Asia. The impressive archaeological remains at Mycenae and elsewhere were thought to predate that migration, and therefore have nothing to do with Zeus and the rest of the Indo-European pantheon. The many written tablets found at the Mycenaean sites were assumed to record a language unrelated to Greek, perhaps an early form of Etruscan. This theory crumbled quite spectacularly in the 1950s, when Michael Ventris and John Chadwick (who had worked as a code-breaker during the Second World War) managed to decipher Linear B, the script of the Mycenaean tablets. To widespread amazement, they proved that the tablets actually recorded an early form of Greek. This made it clear that Indo-European people had been living in Greece long before the Dark Ages, and suggested that they worshipped essentially the same gods as later Greek communities, even though they did not have temples housing cult statues. 

Archaeologists had obviously misdated the Indo-European migration on the basis of the material record. Now classicists hoped to find some snippets of Greek poetry among the Linear B tablets, perhaps early versions of Homeric epic describing the Olympian pantheon. In fact, they discovered nothing of the kind: on imperishable material, Linear B was used exclusively for matter-of-fact lists and inventories. Mount Olympus never featured, nor did any stories about the gods. Still, even the dry documents of Mycenaean bureaucracy did reveal some surprising facts, by recording sacrifices and other offerings to specific gods, for example. 

Tablets from Pylos and Crete indicate, for instance, that Dionysos was already known in the second millennium BC. Homer barely mentioned him, and later Greek texts presented him as a newcomer to Greece, a recent import from the decadent East – but this was evidently not so. We now know that Dionysos was always considered a ‘new’ and subversive god in need of recognition, no matter how long he had actually been worshipped in Greece. His youth and exoticism are a matter of personality, in short, rather than age. 

Homer must have kept Dionysos out of Olympus not because he barely knew this god, as was once supposed, but because he was all too aware of his characteristics: Dionysos would have spoilt the party on Olympus with his drunken excesses. Linear B tablets produced other surprises too: the god Apollo, for example, was apparently unknown to the Mycenaeans. This ‘most Greek of the gods’, as a famous Hellenist called him, this paragon of beauty and measure, was in fact a rather late addition to the Greek pantheon, had no obvious Indo-European credentials, and was at least partly Semitic in influence. The Canaanite god Resheph was identified with Apollo early on in this history of this god. 

There were, then, some differences between Mycenaean portrayals of the gods and their later appearance in archaic Greece – but there were also some definite connections, and some suggestive echoes of old Mycenaean rituals in Homeric poetry. In the Odyssey, for instance, Poseidon receives special worship at Pylos in the Peloponnese, and that is precisely where most of the Linear B tablets concerning this cult have been found. 

Likewise, Hera is called ‘ox-eyed’ in Homer, and Linear B tablets reveal that she had received rich cattle sacrifices from Mycenaean worshippers, richer even than those offered to Zeus. Perhaps early Greek-speakers had looked right into the eyes of their sacrificial victims and seen in them a shadow of the goddess. Their impression was then passed on through the formulations of ritual and poetic language: ox-eyed Hera became a standard Homeric phrase. Beyond such poetic links, there was also an entirely solid aspect of continuity between the civilizations of the Bronze Age and archaic Greece: buildings. 

In the archaic period, people could still see the remnants of impressive fortifications at Mycenae, Pylos and – most importantly – Troy, on the coast of Turkey, a city that had once been a Hittite protectorate. The Greeks wove stories around those ruins, imagining the great heroes who had once lived and died there. In the case of particularly impressive remains, such as the walls of Troy, it was even suggested that the gods themselves had built them. 

One of the most remarkable features of archaic Greek poetry is how insistently, and precisely, it places its tales of gods and heroes in the Aegean landscape. It is as if, in the sudden explosion of travel and trade that characterised the archaic period, people wanted to exchange stories not only about their gods, but also about landmarks, ruins and sailing routes. Homer described the whole eastern Aegean, mentioning hundreds of place names, in a massive Catalogue of Ships in the second book of the Iliad. Hesiod, in his Theogony, revealed how the gods were born, and simultaneously placed them on a map. 

Zeus grew up in Crete, he said: Aphrodite came out of the waves near Cyprus. As well as listening to poems about divine travel, the Greeks were increasingly prepared to travel themselves in order to worship the gods. According to our ancient sources, the first Olympics took place in 776 BC: athletes, dancers, poets and musicians from many different Greek city-states gathered to compete against one another at the small village of Olympia, probably so named after the residence of Zeus. The games were put on precisely as a spectacle for Zeus, but they also attracted enthusiastic human crowds. At roughly the same time, the Delphic oracle opened for business, delivering Apollo’s prophecies to all who made the journey to it. 

Soon, Delphi also started to host competitions in athletics and poetry, in order to make sure that Apollo did not miss out on the celebrations his father enjoyed elsewhere. Criss-crossing the Aegean in poetry and sailing ships alike, the Greeks took possession of the landscape, and placed their gods in it. 

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a beautiful archaic poem telling the story of Leto’s search for a place to give birth, illustrates the process. After nine days of travel and labour, Leto finally delivers Artemis and Apollo on the barren island of Delos, holding onto a palm tree. A sanctuary is built near the sacred palm, and worshippers begin to visit the island, bringing their offerings and gifts. Rewarded for its kindness to the pregnant goddess, we are told that Delos becomes rich, despite its rocky soil. And, indeed, in antiquity Delos attracted pilgrims and worshippers from far and wide. The island sets a pattern for the cult of Apollo: when the god grows up, the Hymn continues, he travels to another daunting place, ‘a cliff hanging below Mount Parnassos, and a rugged glade below’. There, at Delphi, Apollo defeats a snake-like monster called Python, and decides to build a second temple for himself, where he will deliver oracles to enquiring mortals. 

The poem tells us that Apollo needs priests for his inhospitable sanctuary at Delphi and, while considering the problem, ‘becomes aware of a swift ship on the wine-dark sea’, sailing hundreds of miles away between Knossos and Pylos. Deciding to turn the Cretan crew into his priests, he transforms himself into a dolphin and leaps into the ship, rocking it fearfully as the Cretan sailors struggle in vain to catch him and throw him overboard. Terrified, they sail past Pylos, their destination, and farther north past Elis, until the wind bends their course eastward, into the gulf of Corinth, and they are finally stranded at Krisa, near modern Itea. There Apollo suddenly reveals himself in a shower of sparks: he tells the Cretan sailors that they must abandon their trade, climb the mountain looming above the coast, and tend to his newly founded sanctuary. They will make a good living, he adds, despite their unlikely location, because pilgrims will provide a constant supply of gifts. 

It seems that the actual priests who worked at the sanctuary in Delphi really did claim Cretan descent, and explained their life hundreds of miles from their ancestral home by telling the story of Apollo the dolphin. Strange as their tale may seem, it captured the spirit of the age. Everybody was on the move in the archaic period: trade flourished, new cities were founded, and communal worship became part of a quickly expanding economy. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo mentions scores of place names when describing the journeys of the Cretan sailors, Apollo, and his mother Leto, thus offering a virtual tour of the ancient Greek world. 

The Gods of Olympus. A History. Barbara Graziosi 

Werewolf (Artwork) 

Re Writing The History of the World

From Democrats to Kings. The Downfall of Athens to the Epic Rise of Alexander the Great. Michael Scott 

Athens, 404 BC. The Democratic city-state has been ravaged by a long and bloody war with neighbouring Sparta. The search for scapegoats begins and Athens, liberty's beacon in the ancient world, turns its sword on its own way of life. Civil war and much bloodshed ensue. Defining moments of Greek history, culture, politics, religion and identity are debated ferociously in Athenian board rooms, back streets and battlefields. By 323 BC, less than 100 years later, Athens and the rest of Greece, not to mention a large part of the known world, has come under the control of an absolute monarch, a master of self-publicity and a model for despots for millennia to come: 'megas alexandros', Alexander the Great. Michael Scott, Finley Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge, explores the dramatic and little-known story of how the ancient world was turned on its head from Democratic Athens to King Alexander the Great in this superb example of popular history writing. "From Democrats to Kings" also gives us a fresh take on the similar challenges we face today in the 21st century - a world in which many democracies - old and new - fight for survival, in which war-time and peace-time have become indistinguishable and in which the severity of the economic crisis is only matched by a crisis in our own sense of self.

Review 

'England's answer to Indiana Jones.' -- Daily Star 'The period after the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC often gets passed over by historians, so it is great to have Michael Scott's lively account of a period that has its own fascinations. States rose and fell, brilliant generals had their moments of glory, ill-considered foreign expeditions crashed to defeat. Lots of lessons for today. When the Greek states failed to get their acts together, the brilliant Philip of Macedon sorted them out. Scott's vivid narrative takes us through Alexander and then into the kingdoms that followed. Perhaps the Hellenistic period will be his next subject. It has just the sort of drama and big personalities that grip his, and our, imaginations so I hope he considers a follow-up as entertaining as this one.' -- Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity; Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean; Sites of Antiquity 'Dr Michael Scott, a research fellow at Cambridge, is making a big splash with his first book - it is on a major historical theme, the transformation of ancient Greek political practice and public discourse from a broadly democratic to a largely monarchical frame, and the storyline is handled with verve and original insights. The treatment is as accessible and punchy as its chapter-titles - 'The Vegetarian Philosopher and the Body-Building Philanthropist' is one of the tamer ones - and a wide readership cannot fail to be entertained as well as instructed about a world that is both familiar and alien, modern as well as ancient.' -- Paul Cartledge, Paul Cartledge is the AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, University of Cambridge, & a Fellow of Clare College 'You never know what you're going to get on a 'budget' tour of mythological Greece, but there was nothing cut-price when it came to Michael's knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject. He was able to bring to life the story behind the statues, temples, sites and myths of a long-gone civilisation, and present it with a freshness and relevance to contemporary society.' -- Daily Star Sunday 'A real-life Indiana Jones.' -- Sunday Mirror 'An admirably written chapter from the past that illustrates history's ability constantly, often tragically, to repeat itself.' -- Simon Jenkins 'Deft and accessible overview of one of the most crucial periods in Western history, covering from the fall of Athens to the rise of Alexander by Cambridge research fellow Scott.' -- Hardback, School House 'I really enjoyed Michael Scott's DEMOCRATS TO KINGS - fascinating and exuberant on Ancient Athens, bringing their politics to life and right up to date, making Ancient Greece relevant for today.' -- Simon Sebag Montefior

About the Author

Michael Scott, 27, is currently Moses and Mary Finley Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge. During 2007 and 2008 he was a guest lecturer aboard the easyCruise tour of Classical Greece. He is an on-screen historical consultant for the History Channel's new series of Ancient Discoveries, due for broadcast in March 2009. From Democrats to Kings is his first book. 

Amazon

Hierophant Self Discovery 

Daughter of the Goddess: The Sacred Priestess. Naomi Ozaniec 

Drawing on historical research and many original sources, this book examines the role of the Priestess at all levels of identification: as the voices of the goddess; as initiator into women's blood mysteries and the mysteries to the deity; as guardian of her group's sacred symbols and as keeper of tradition. 

The book redresses many of the perennial questions regarding the Priestess, past and present. Who was she; why does the goddess need her; why did she loose power; how did she survive during the eclipse of the goddess and where is she today? The author's search for the truth has led her to rethink and challenge some of today's accepted theories, resulting in many startling inspiring conclusions.

Review 

Naomi Ozaniec. A Message From Her 

I have been immersed in western esotericism since the 1970's, it's a long time and I have seen many changes in attitude and acceptability over the years. My books reflect experiences and for me writing holds an element of catharis. 

Initially I was involved in the writing of a number of introductory guides to spiritual subjects which were then new. I was aksed to write guides to the basic practical subjects:chakras,meditation,dowsing and tarot. However as my own interests began to arise, deeper and more complex questions came to occupy my mind. I became fascinated by the spiritual- magical role ascribed to women throughout history. This research led into a complex labyrinth of belief and competing spiritual authority. Shockingly I no longer subscribe to a commonly held views of an idyllic matriarchy exercised by wise women! Finding an answer begins with asking the right question: but 'What did priestesses do',its a question I am still asking (and righty so!)I dislike poor scholarship,bias and,unsupported herstory.The Goddess has indeed returned to human consciousness in my lifetime,yet I often wonder if she has just become The Goddess of Shopping! 

I have spent almost forty years enmeshed in a spiritual journey and if you are called to do the same do not be decieved by New Age propoganda;the long walk towards awakening is not cosy or for the faintheartened. If you prefer the safety of the group mind and the comfort blanket on offer at your local convenience belief-store, then simply buy into another soft option - the spiritual armchair!

Western esotericism holds a pathway to self-realisation, just like its counterpart, eastern esotericism. Yet for historical reasons, this path has been obscured and spoken of only quietly. It is beholden on all those who walk the path, to keep the route clear for others. I would like to think that, through my words, I have in some small way done this at least.  

Now I choose to transmit my work in digital format as an E-Edition. This gives me maximum flexibility and editorial control and it gives you the reader a minimum priced product. The Breath of Isis - Autobiography of a Priestess is now available as an E-Edition. Becoming Hathor - A Rite of Passage into the Retinue of Het-Her will be available in April.  

By journey into my own becomning has been full of suprises,not least to me! Happenstance and fate has led me to towards the rootstock of western esotericism in the Khemetic tradition where future words for me are probably germinating even now.

I have plans to carry on writing, especially if you are planning to continue reading. But in truth, you can only gain from my efforts if you are already hooked by the injunction to Know Thyself.' Its where it all begins.

with blessings,

naomi March 2014

Hierophant Self Discovery 

Priestesses Pythonesses Sibyls - The Sacred Voices of Women who speak with and for the Gods: 

An Anthology of Essays Regarding Trance, Possession and ... States. Women Who Speak with and for the Gods 

Priestesses, Pythonesses & Sibyls The Sacred Voices of Women who speak with and for the Gods Priestesses Pythonesses Sibyls lifts a veil to reveal the mystery of trance as experienced by female magickal practitioners today. Through happiness and sorrow, myth and legend, art and poetry, through ritual and dance each woman expresses her own unique and personal transformative experiences of trance. Whether through trance possession, mediumship, Drawing Down the Moon, oracular or mantic states, dance, dreams or formal ceremony the experiences and knowledge gained during trance states can bring dramatic changes to one's life. 

The practices represented in this volume are drawn from the experiences and research of more than twenty women from around the world, each providing a unique vision of their own experiences of the Divine. The book begins with "Ecstatic Histories" a section of three scholarly essays. The first, Mantic Voices by Sorita d'Este provides an overview of the role of mantic priestesses in the major oracles of the ancient world, with a consideration of the resurgence of the role of the priestess in the modern Western magickal traditions. This is followed by Caroline Tully's The Pythia exploring the history and role of the Oracle at Delphi and Kim Huggens' Silent Priestesses which looks at female priests and prophetesses in early Christianity. Then in "Sacred Utterances", the second part of this anthology, eighteen modern day Priestesses, Pythonesses and Sibyls share their own personal experiences, wisdom and research on the practice of trance. 

These women come from a wide spectrum of magickal and pagan traditions, including Goddess Spirituality, the Western Mystery Tradition, Thelema, Wicca, Candomble, Voudou and Seidr. Sharing, sometimes for the first time, deep spiritual experiences and insights gained through the work they have performed as Priestesses serving in their own unique way, they provide the reader with insights into their practices which could not be found anywhere else. 

This section includes essays by authors such as Janet Farrar, Naomi Ozaniec and Vivienne O'Regan, Wiccan Priestesses Galatea, Diane Champigny, Yvonne Aburrow, Emily Ounsted and Sorrell Cochrane, and Priestess of Avalon Jacqui Woodward-Smith. It also includes Seidr practitioner Katie Gerrard, Priestess of Apollo Bolina Oceanus, Cathryn Orchard a Priestess of the Gnostic Catholic Church, Voudou hounsi bossal Sophia Fisher, Orixa devotee Andrea Salgado-Reyes, Teacher and Priestess Connia Silver, and dancers Mariëlle Holman and Nina Falaise. Unique, powerful and insightful, this book expresses the liminal world of trance in an accessible way for the first time.

"A ground-breaking anthology, exploring the magick of trance as experienced through dance, divine inspiration, Drawing Down the Moon, dreams, formal ceremony, mediumship, possession and mantic states by twenty-one female magickal practitioners from the paths of Goddess Spirituality, The Western Mystery Tradition, Thelema, Wicca, Candomble, Voudou and Seidr"

Amazon Review 

.....The island sets a pattern for the cult of Apollo: when the god grows up, the Hymn continues, he travels to another daunting place, ‘a cliff hanging below Mount Parnassos, and a rugged glade below’. There, at Delphi, Apollo defeats a snake-like monster called Python, and decides to build a second temple for himself, where he will deliver oracles to enquiring mortals........

...serpent condemned to be flat on 'his' belly, Tree of Life to be banned from humankind and Adam to be morally irresponsible, cruel and ignorant, and looked after by the male god. As long as he fucks up the serpent and the tree of life forever. And of course, as long as he makes Eve a slave forever. 'Nuff said. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Hierophant and Werewolf Self Discovery 

The Snake - Chinese Astrology

The Snake is the master of heart-breaking. The same way he once charmed Eve, he now manages to make the people around him/her lose their head. Refined, amusing and seductive, the Snake is always in the limelight in society due to his/her intelligence and wit.

The Snake's wisdom is well-known and his/her life theory on life is special. Intuitive and rational in all situations, the Snake becomes reserved in conversations. (S)He prefers not saying much and keeping his/her thoughts to him/herself. However, if an abstract topic is being approached, the Snake doesn't hesitate expressing his/her opinion, amazing and attracting the audience with his/her knowledge.

The Snake is a cold-blooded being. (S)He takes pleasure in getting involved in intrigues and combinations, but (s)he also enjoys long periods of relaxation.

A Snake is able to solve in a few hours what would take days to other people to solve. When (s)he gets down to work, the Snake is very efficient, especially when (s)he works alone and at his/her own pace, as (s)he likes it. The Snake is faster than the others, because (s)he knows how to move around and over obstacles, just like a... snake in the grass.

If (s)he weren't poisonous, the Snake wouldn't be a real Snake. (S)He attacks his/her enemies with acid replies and (s)he doesn't get off their back until (s)he is avenged. The Snake is a fierce enemy, so you'd better try to make him/her your friend.

Astrolog.com 

The way of the warrior is to master the virtue of his (her) weapons. Miyamoto Musahi 

Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth. 

Mahatma Gandhi 

Conscious Uncoupling. The New Yorker 

Gwyneth Paltrow talks to Terry Gross about Conscious Uncoupling

TERRY GROSS: Hello, and welcome to “Fresh Air.” My guest this week is the actress Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s been in the “Iron Man” movies, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Emma,” “Sliding Doors,” and “Bounce,” which I watch every time Cameron Diaz and I have a sleepover. In 1998, she won an Oscar for “Shakespeare In Love.” She is also the founder of the life-style Web site GOOP, and, this week, she announced that she and the Coldplay frontman Chris Martin are “consciously uncoupling” after ten years of marriage. Gwyneth, welcome to “Fresh Air.”

GWYNETH PALTROW: Thank you, Terry. It’s always a pleasure to be here. Remind me that I have some Tracy Anderson DVDs and a few samples of Restorsea in my bag for you.

GROSS: Oh, thank you, thank you. I’ll try to put those to use. So, I gotta ask: Is conscious uncoupling anything like jazz?

PALTROW: You know what, Terry? I never thought about that, but it kind of is! Say I am a saxophone, and my estranged husband is a clar— Wait. You know, Terry, I think I’d like to be the clarinet. So I am the clarinet, and I have my solo for a while. My voice has to be heard, Terry. That is crucial. And then, of course, the saxophone wants its turn to speak, which is only fair, but it must wait for the clarinet to finish. And then the saxophone gets to have its turn. Of course, the clarinet has a more elegant, refined sound than the saxophone, and for that reason it might just organically end up taking a little more time.

GROSS: O.K., so what it sounds like is that conscious uncoupling is more comparable to free jazz than, say, bebop or swing. That’s very interesting. Is conscious uncoupling anything like really terrific opera?

PALTROW: No, Terry. In fact, I would say that conscious uncoupling is kind of the opposite, because really terrific opera is very dramatic, and conscious uncoupling …

GROSS: Is what? Poorly paced? Overtly experimental? Badly staged?

PALTROW: I was going to say that it seeks to be very undramatic.

GROSS: O.K. I wonder—could you maybe take, you know, like a typical scene from a break up and describe it as though it were an opera? And then, maybe, could you describe that same scene through the lens of conscious uncoupling? Could you … do you think you could maybe do that, for us?

PALTROW: O.K., so let’s say a couple is breaking up—this is the opera version—and the man is packing up his stuff. He might smash the vintage Louis Vuitton watch his wife bought him at a cute little flea market in the Eleventh Arrondissement. She might grab a first edition of “Nightwood” that he’s putting into a box and scream, “Like you ever even heard of Djuna Barnes before you met me!” He might, sarcastically, write her a check for $1152.73, which is exactly half the price of the La Spaziale Vivaldi II Espresso Machine he’s taking. Now, in conscious uncoupling, that man would say to his partner, “Do you think you could give me some emotional and physical space to pack up my things?” And she might just check in with herself. And then she might say yes.

GROSS: And what if she says no?

PALTROW: Well, then we might have a few minutes of that terrific opera, Terry.

GROSS: Oh! Invite me over for that! Particularly if Dolora Zajick plays you.

PALTROW: I think she might be a little old…

GROSS: What if I give her my Restorsea? And my Tracy Anderson videos?

PALTROW: I think you might be on to something, Terry.

GROSS: You’re good friends with Mario Batali, and you wrote a cookbook with him. I’m wondering what, if anything, he had to say about your conscious uncoupling?

PALTROW: You know, Mario and I, when we’re together, we are all about fun. So the night I told him, I cried a little. And then we rode around the Italian countryside in a convertible. Then we bought some fresh fish. And then we made a paella, and after my second glass of Tenuta dell’Ornellaia Masseto Toscana I said, “Mario, I feel like you need to consciously uncouple from those zippered vests you wear.” And we laughed. And the paella tasted more wonderful than ever that night. So fresh. So new.

GROSS: We’ll be back after the break.

The New Yorker

Rewriting The History of The World. Amera Ziganii Rao

Right. Enough of Lemuria. The research has begun, and it is as wild and traumatic and exciting, as I could have imagined and a hell of a lot more. 

Atlantis. Egypt, The Celts, and GREECE are NOT 5000 years old. I knew those figures were ridiculous. Try 100 000 years instead. 

Second, if my consciousness is this advanced and all I needed was the space and knowledge to set off my own Clair Cognisance, then what do YOU think of the fact that you can keep up? The emotional self, the belief systems that drive you to such cruelty and stupidity, are EXTERNAL. Like the eqivalent was with me.

Werewolf or Nymph, we are from the same place and always have been. Egypt, ANCIENT ANCIENT Egypt is Atlantis rebuilt. And indeed just an extension of Atlantis. 

You know. Now that means something new. The responsibility to go with greatness and the need to patron and support not only my greatness but yours too. 

'Nuff said. You are welcome. 

As I go through it now, it is immensely traumatic. Feel it and make the return. You are greatness too. You are SERPENT Priesthood too. You are me. I am you. 

Be the light. Use the dark. Make it work FOR you. You are almost there. 

Cruelty can heal. Because it's you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♧ 2014

other than this...not Werewolves and Nymphs. 

Werewolves and Goddesses. Advanced intuition. The dark and the light. The light and the dark. All in one. Both cocktails. Atlantis returned. Egypt is 100 000 years old. The whole world is a lie. We are not. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♧ 2014

The Druids 

Well now. So, apparently – this is the usual bollocks ‘official’ history to follow – all druids were men, no druid priests were female and druids loved human sacrifice and oh, they existed only 200 years before Christ. Such rubbish. Try 50 000 – 100 000 years. Again, Atlantis. The Celts are the Druids. Druids are the Celts. The Celts, The Egyptians and the Greeks are 50 000 – 100 000 years old. We have all been lied to. 

So women were the Serpent Female High Priesthood, condemned in ‘the bible’ to be flat on their belly for the rest of eternity, wiped out of existence in the Druids according to false history, or False History as I shall call it from now on, and were also of course, ‘the gateway to the devil’ from the recent research I have done and also of course, condemned to be wives and slaves and daughters for eternity. Motherhood to a sick people, in the worst possible way. With women earning, yes, you guessed it, 10 percent of the world’s income, because everyone is so sick. Flat on our bellies indeed. In fact, I am now beginning to sense that Satan itself may be all that is me and women (and men) like me. We are their Satan. They are most certainly ours. And they rule the world. Up to now. Satan does run the world. It’s male, establishment and official. And most definitely, the biggest clause is wife beating in physical, sexual, economic and psychological terms. And above all, vocationally and financially. Do not let the priestesses speak. You do that, and you join the right club. You don’t and you are out. Satan runs this world and it is most certainly not the Satan talked about. That Satan is me. The glory of The Triple Goddess on earth. All who carry humanity are therefore of Satan, according to official history. Official history can therefore fuck off. No wonder, history was the last subject I went near in scholarly studies. Now, I fucking love it. Funny that. Errr, no female Druid priestesses. So what the fuck are the Disir then? They are of Druid. Lies, lies, and lies. The normal world. 

The Roman Empire had a lot to say about Druids. A lot of bollocks history to write. I like to cover the False History as much as the true. False History calls writers and philosophers and historians like me, ‘alternative historians’. I call them False History. It’s all in the perspective. And yeah, right, I really believe that Druids are only 200 years BC. Please. Give me a break. They teach us this shit before we can even speak, along with the Nativity Play. 

If one had an idea of what 5000 years even meant, back then, we would all be saying, what a load of rubbish, thinking about how young I was when I learnt Egyptology. To think that ANCIENT Egypt is supposed to be younger than the beginnings of Judaism. What a load of rubbish. Propaganda starts early. The truth is forever. And today, it’s about England! And the UK. A good day for my relations with the country. I’m glad. Respect, and even lurve. AZR 

..... Very little is known about the ancient druids. They left no written accounts of themselves and the only evidence is a few descriptions left by Greek, Roman and various scattered authors and artists, as well as stories created by later medieval Irish writers.....yeah right. AZR 

The Druids 

A druid was a member of the priestly class among the Celtic peoples of Gaul, Britain, Ireland, and possibly elsewhere during the Iron Age. Very little is known about the ancient druids. They left no written accounts of themselves and the only evidence is a few descriptions left by Greek, Roman and various scattered authors and artists, as well as stories created by later medieval Irish writers. While archaeological evidence has been uncovered pertaining to the religious practices of the Iron Age people, "not one single artefact or image has been unearthed that can undoubtedly be connected with the ancient Druids."

Various recurring themes emerge in a number of the Greco-Roman accounts of the druids, including that they performed human sacrifice, believed in a form of reincarnation, and held a high position in Gaulish society. Next to nothing is known about their cultic practice, except for the ritual of oak and mistletoe as described by Pliny the Elder.

The earliest known reference to the druids dates to 200 BCE, although the oldest actual description comes from the Roman military general Julius Caesar in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico (50s BCE). Later Greco-Roman writers also described the druids, including Cicero,Tacitus and Pliny the Elder. Following the Roman invasion of Gaul, druidism was suppressed by the Roman government under the 1st century CE emperors Tiberius and Claudius, and it had disappeared from the written record by the 2nd century.

In about 750 CE the word druid appears in a poem by Blathmac, who wrote about Jesus, saying that he was "…better than a prophet, more knowledgeable than every druid, a king who was a bishop and a complete sage." The druids then also appear in some of the medieval tales from Christianized Ireland like the Táin Bó Cúailnge, where they are largely portrayed as sorcerers who opposed the coming of Christianity. In the wake of the Celtic revival during the 18th and 19th centuries, fraternal and Neopagan groups were founded based on ideas about the ancient druids, a movement which is known as Neo-Druidism. Many popular modern notions about Druids have no connection to the Druids of the Iron Age, and are largely based on much later inventions or misconceptions.

The modern English word druid derives from the Latin druides (pronounced [druˈides]), which was considered by ancient Roman writers to come from the native Celtic Gaulish word for these figures. Other Roman texts also employ the form druidae, while the same term was used by Greek ethnographers as δρυΐδης (druidēs). Although no extant Romano-Celtic inscription is known to contain the form, the word is cognate with the later insular Celtic words, Old Irish druí ("druid, sorcerer") and early Welsh dryw ("seer"). 

Based on all available forms, the hypothetical proto-Celtic word may then be reconstructed as *dru-wid-s (pl. *druwides) meaning "oak-knower". The two elements go back to the Proto-Indo-European roots *deru- and *weid- "to see".  The sense of "oak-knower" (or "oak-seer") is supported by Pliny the Elder, who in his Natural History considered the word to contain the Greek noun δρύς (drus), "oak-tree" and the Greek suffix -ιδης (-idēs). The modern Irish word for Oak is Dair, which occurs in anglicized placenames like Derry – Doire, and Kildare – Cill Dara (literally the "church of oak"). There are many stories and lore about saints, heroes, and oak trees, and also many local stories and superstitions (called pishogues) about trees in general, which still survive in rural Ireland. Both Irish druí and Welsh dryw could also refer to the wren, possibly connected with an association of that bird with augury bird in Irish and Welsh tradition (see also Wren Day) 

Practises and Doctrines 

According to historian Ronald Hutton, "we can know virtually nothing of certainty about the ancient Druids, so that—although they certainly existed—they function more or less as legendary figures." However, the sources provided about them by ancient and medieval writers, coupled with archaeological evidence, can give us an idea of what they might have performed as a part of their religious duties.

Societal role and training

Imaginative illustration of 'An Arch Druid in His Judicial Habit', from "The Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Islands" by S.R. Meyrick and C.H. Smith (1815), the gold gorget copying Irish Bronze Age examples.

One of the few things that both the Greco-Roman and the vernacular Irish sources agree on about the druids is that they played an important part in pagan Celtic society. In his description, Julius Caesar claimed that they were one of the two most important social groups in the region (alongside the equites, or nobles) and were responsible for organizing worship and sacrifices, divination, and judicial procedure in Gaulish, British and Irish society. He also claimed that they were exempt from military service and from the payment of taxes, and that they had the power to excommunicate people from religious festivals, making them social outcasts. Two other classical writers, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, also wrote about the role of druids in Gallic society, claiming that the druids were held in such respect that if they intervened between two armies they could stop the battle.

Pomponius Mela is the first author who says that the druids' instruction was secret, and was carried on in caves and forests. Druidic lore consisted of a large number of verses learned by heart, and Caesar remarked that it could take up to twenty years to complete the course of study. There is no historic evidence during the period when Druidism was flourishing to suggest that Druids were other than male. What was taught to Druid novices anywhere is conjecture: of the druids' oral literature, not one certifiably ancient verse is known to have survived, even in translation. All instruction was communicated orally, but for ordinary purposes, Caesar reports, the Gauls had a written language in which they used Greek characters. In this he probably draws on earlier writers; by the time of Caesar, Gaulish inscriptions had moved from the Greek script to the Latin script.

Sacrifice

Greek and Roman writers frequently made reference to the druids as practitioners of human sacrifice, a trait they themselves reviled, believing it to be barbaric. Such reports of druidic human sacrifice are found in the works of Lucan, Julius Caesar, Suetonius and Cicero. Caesar claimed that the sacrifice was primarily of criminals, but at times innocents would also be used, and that they would be burned alive in a large wooden effigy, now often known as a wicker man. A differing account came from the 10th-century Commenta Bernensia, which claimed that sacrifices to the deities Teutates, Esus and Taranis were by drowning, hanging and burning, respectively (see threefold death). 

Diodorus Siculus asserts that a sacrifice acceptable to the Celtic gods had to be attended by a druid, for they were the intermediaries between the people and the divinities. He remarked upon the importance of prophets in druidic ritual:

"These men predict the future by observing the flight and calls of birds and by the sacrifice of holy animals: all orders of society are in their power... and in very important matters they prepare a human victim, plunging a dagger into his chest; by observing the way his limbs convulse as he falls and the gushing of his blood, they are able to read the future."

There is archaeological evidence from western Europe that has been widely used to back up the idea that human sacrifice was performed by the Iron Age Celts. Mass graves found in a ritual context dating from this period have been unearthed in Gaul, at both Gournay-sur-Aronde and Ribemont-sur-Ancre in what was the region of the Belgae chiefdom. The excavator of these sites, Jean-Louis Brunaux, interpreted them as areas of human sacrifice in devotion to a war god, although this view was criticized by another archaeologist, Martin Brown, who believed that the corpses might be those of honoured warriors buried in the sanctuary rather than sacrifices.

Some historians have questioned whether the Greco-Roman writers were accurate in their claims. J. Rives remarked that it was "ambiguous" whether the druids ever performed such sacrifices, for the Romans and Greeks were known to project what they saw as barbarian traits onto foreign peoples including not only druids but Jews and Christians as well, thereby confirming their own "cultural superiority" in their own minds. Taking a similar opinion, Ronald Hutton summarized the evidence by stating that "the Greek and Roman sources for Druidry are not, as we have received them, of sufficiently good quality to make a clear and final decision on whether human sacrifice was indeed a part of their belief system."

Nora Chadwick, an expert in medieval Welsh and Irish literature, who believed the Druids to be great philosophers, has also fervently purported the idea that they had not been involved in human sacrifice, and that such accusations were imperialist Roman propaganda. National Geographic, recently revealed evidence that "[suggests] that Druids possibly committed cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice." But as Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol associated with these recent findings stated, even if cannibalism was practiced it was probably extremely rare and that it may be evidence of increasing hunger and desperation as Roman invaders closed in or even the result of battle atrocities. Guy G. Stroumsa, as well as Thomas Hartwell Horne, state that these practices were eventually halted with the introduction and spread of Christianity in Europe, as well as in the Mediterranean region.

Philosophy 

Alexander Cornelius Polyhistor referred to the Druids as philosophers and called their doctrine of the immortality of the soul and reincarnation or metempsychosis "Pythagorean": 

"The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among the Gauls' teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a fixed number of years they will enter into another body."

Caesar remarks: "The principal point of their doctrine is that the soul does not die and that after death it passes from one body into another" (see metempsychosis). Caesar wrote:

With regard to their actual course of studies, the main object of all education is, in their opinion, to imbue their scholars with a firm belief in the indestructibility of the human soul, which, according to their belief, merely passes at death from one tenement to another; for by such doctrine alone, they say, which robs death of all its terrors, can the highest form of human courage be developed. Subsidiary to the teachings of this main principle, they hold various lectures and discussions on astronomy, on the extent and geographical distribution of the globe, on the different branches of natural philosophy, and on many problems connected with religion.

—Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico, VI, 13 

Diodorus Siculus, writing in 36 BCE, described how the druids followed "the Pythagorean doctrine", that human souls "are immortal and after a prescribed number of years they commence a new life in a new body." In 1928, folklorist Donald A. Mackenzie speculated that Buddhist missionaries had been sent by the Indian king Ashoka. Others have invoked common Indo-European parallels.[39] Caesar noted the druidic doctrine of the original ancestor of the tribe, whom he referred to as Dispater, or Father Hades.

Greek and Roman records

The earliest surviving literary evidence of the druids emerges from the classical world of Greece and Rome. The archaeologist Stuart Piggott compared the attitude of the Classical authors towards the druids as being similar to the relationship that had existed in the 15th and 18th centuries between Europeans and the societies that they were just encountering in other parts of the world, such as the Americas and the South Sea Islands. In doing so, he highlighted that both the attitude of the Early Modern Europeans and the Classical authors was that of "primitivism", viewing these newly encountered societies as primitive because of their lesser technological development and perceived backwardness in socio-political development.

The historian Nora Chadwick, in a categorization subsequently adopted by Piggott, divided the Classical accounts of the druids into two groups, distinguished by their approach to the subject as well as their chronological contexts. She refers to the first of these groups as the "Posidonian" tradition after one of its primary exponents, Posidonious, and notes that it takes a largely critical attitude towards the Iron Age societies of Western Europe that emphasizes their "barbaric" qualities. The second of these two groups is termed the "Alexandrian" group, being centred on the scholastic traditions of Alexandria in Egypt; she notes that it took a more sympathetic and idealized attitude towards these foreign peoples. Piggott drew parallels between this categorisation and the ideas of "hard primitivism" and "soft primitivism" identified by historians of ideas A.O. Lovejoy and Franz Boas.

One school of thought within historical scholarship has suggested that all of these accounts are inherently unreliable, and might be entirely fictional. They have suggested that the idea of the druid might have been a fiction created by Classical writers to reinforce the idea of the barbaric "other" who existed beyond the civilized Greco-Roman world, thereby legitimising the expansion of the Roman Empire into these areas.

The earliest record of the druids comes from two Greek texts of c. 300 BCE: one was a history of philosophy written by Sotion of Alexandria, and the other a study of magic that was widely albeit incorrectly[citation needed] attributed to Aristotle. These mention the existence of Druidas, or wise men belonging to the Keltois (Celts) and Galatias (the Galatians or the Gauls). Both texts are now lost, but were quoted in the 2nd century CE work Vitae by Diogenes Laertius.

Some say that the study of philosophy originated with the barbarians. In that among the Persians there existed the Magi, and among the Babylonians or Assyrians the Chaldaei, among the Indians the Gymnosophistae, and among the Celts and Gauls men who were called Druids and Semnothei, as Aristotle relates in his book on Magic, and Sotion in the twenty-third book of his Succession of Philosophers.

—Diogenes Laertius , Vitae, Introduction, Section 1

Subsequent Greek and Roman texts from the third century BCE refer to "barbarian philosophers", possibly in reference to the Gaulish druids.

Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar, the Roman general and later dictator, who wrote the "fullest" and "earliest original text" to describe the druids.

The first known text that describes the druids is Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, book VI, written in the 50s or 40s BCE. A military general who was intent on conquering Gaul and Britain, Caesar described the druids as being concerned with "divine worship, the due performance of sacrifices, private or public, and the interpretation of ritual questions." He claimed that they played an important part in Gaulish society, being one of the two respected classes along with the equites (a term meaning 'horsemen' which has been usually interpreted as referring to warriors) and that they performed the function of judges. He claimed that they recognized the authority of a single leader, who would rule until his death, when a successor would be chosen by vote or through conflict. He also remarked that they met annually at a sacred place in the region occupied by the Carnute tribe in Gaul, while they viewed Britain as the centre of druidic study; and that they were not found amongst the German tribes to the east of the Rhine. According to Caesar, many young men were trained to be druids, during which time they had to learn all the associated lore by heart. He also claimed their main teaching was "the souls do not perish, but after death pass from one to another". They were also concerned with "the stars and their movements, the size of the cosmos and the earth, the world of nature, and the powers of deities", indicating they were involved with not only such common aspects of religion as theology and cosmology, but also astronomy. Caesar also held that they were "administrators" during rituals of human sacrifice, for which criminals were usually used, and that the method was through burning in a wicker man.

Although he had first-hand experience of Gaulish people, and therefore likely with druids, Caesar's account has been widely criticized by modern historians as inaccurate. One issue raised by such historians as Fustel de Coulanges[48] and Ronald Hutton was that while Caesar described the druids as a significant power within Gaulish society, he did not mention them even once in his accounts of his Gaulish conquests. Nor did Aulus Hirtius, who continued Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars following Caesar's death. Hutton believed that Caesar had manipulated the idea of the druids so they would appear both civilized (being learned and pious) and barbaric (performing human sacrifice) to Roman readers, thereby representing both "a society worth including in the Roman Empire" and one that required civilizing with Roman rule and values, thus justifying his wars of conquest. Sean Dunham suggested that Caesar had simply taken the Roman religious functions of senators and applied them to the druids. Daphne Nash believed it "not unlikely" that he "greatly exaggerates" both the centralized system of druidic leadership and its connection to Britain.

Other historians have accepted that Caesar's account might be more accurate. Norman J. DeWitt surmised that Caesar's description of the role of druids in Gaulish society may report an idealized tradition, based on the society of the 2nd century BCE, before the pan-Gallic confederation led by the Arverni was smashed in 121 BCE, followed by the invasions of Teutones and Cimbri, rather than on the demoralized and disunited Gaul of his own time. John Creighton has speculated that in Britain, the druidic social influence was already in decline by the mid-1st century BCE, in conflict with emergent new power structures embodied in paramount chieftains. Other scholars see the Roman conquest itself as the main reason for the decline of druidism. Archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green (2010) asserted that Caesar offered both “our richest textual source” regarding the druids, and “one of the most reliable.” She defended the accuracy of his accounts by highlighting that while he may have embellished some of his accounts to justify Roman imperial conquest, it was “inherently unlikely” that he constructed a fictional class system for Gaul and Britain, particularly considering that he was accompanied by a number of other Roman senators who would have also been sending reports on the conquest to Rome, and who would have challenged his inclusion of serious falsifications.

Cicero, Diodorus Sicilus, Strabo and Tacitus

It would not only be Caesar, but other (NEW GREECE, REMEMBER. AZR) Greco-Roman writers who would subsequently comment on the druids and their practices, although none of them would go into as much detail as he. Caesar's contemporary, Marcus Tullius Cicero, noted that he had met a Gallic druid, Divitiacus, who was a member of the Aedui tribe. Divitiacus supposedly knew much about the natural world and performed divination through augury. Whether Diviaticus was genuinely a druid can however be disputed, for Caesar also knew this figure, and also wrote about him, calling him by the more Gaulish-sounding (and thereby presumably the more authentic) Diviciacus, but never referred to him as a druid and indeed presented him as a political and military leader.

Another classical writer to take up describing the druids not too long after was Diodorus Siculus, who published this description in his Bibliotheca historicae in 36 BCE. Alongside the druids, or as he called them, drouidas, whom he viewed as philosophers and theologians, he also remarked how there were poets and singers in Celtic society whom he called bardous, or bards. Such an idea was expanded on by Strabo, writing in the 20s CE, who declared that amongst the Gauls, there were three types of honoured figures: the poets and singers known as bardoi, the diviners and specialists in the natural world known as o'vateis, and those who studied "moral philosophy", the druidai. Nonetheless, the accuracy of these writers has been brought into question, with Ronald Hutton stating that "All that can be concluded is that we have absolutely no secure knowledge of the sources used by any of these authors for their comments on Druids, and therefore of their date, their geographical framework or their accuracy."

The Roman writer Tacitus, himself a senator and a historian, described how when the Roman army, led by Suetonius Paulinus, attacked the island of Mona (Anglesey, Ynys Môn in Welsh), the legionaries were awestruck on landing by the appearance of a band of druids, who, with hands uplifted to the sky, poured forth terrible imprecations on the heads of the invaders. He states that these "terrified our soldiers who had never seen such a thing before..." The courage of the Romans, however, soon overcame such fears, according to the Roman historian; the Britons were put to flight, and the sacred groves of Mona were cut down. Tacitus is also the only primary source that gives accounts of druids in Britain, but maintains a hostile point of view, seeing them as ignorant savages. Ronald Hutton meanwhile points out that there "is no evidence that Tacitus ever used eye-witness reports" and casts doubt upon the reliability of Tacitus's account of events.

Irish and Welsh records

During the Middle Ages, after Ireland and Wales were Christianized, druids appeared in a number of written sources, mainly tales and stories such as the Táin Bó Cúailnge, but also in the hagiographies of various saints. These were all written by Christian monks, who, according to Ronald Hutton, "may not merely have been hostile to the earlier paganism but actually ignorant of it" and so would not have been particularly reliable, but at the same time may provide clues as to the practices of druids in Ireland, and to a lesser extent, Wales.

Irish literature and law codes

The Irish passages referring to druids in such vernacular sources were "more numerous than those on the classical texts" of the Greeks and Romans, and paint a somewhat different picture of them. The druids in Irish literature—for whom words such as drui, draoi, drua and drai are used—are sorcerers with supernatural powers, who are respected in society, particularly for their ability to perform divination. They can cast spells and turn people into animals or stones, or curse peoples’ crops to be blighted. At the same time, the term druid is sometimes used to refer to any figure who uses magic, for instance in the Fenian Cycle, both giants and warriors are referred to as druids when they cast a spell, even though they are not usually referred to as such; as Ronald Hutton noted, in medieval Irish literature, "the category of Druid [is] very porous."

When druids are portrayed in early Irish sagas and saints' lives set in the pre-Christian past of the island, they are usually accorded high social status. The evidence of the law-texts, which were first written down in the 7th and 8th centuries, suggests that with the coming of Christianity the role of the druid in Irish society was rapidly reduced to that of a sorcerer who could be consulted to cast spells or practise healing magic and that his standing declined accordingly. According to the early legal tract Bretha Crólige, the sick-maintenance due to a druid, satirist and brigand (díberg) is no more than that due to a bóaire (an ordinary freeman). Another law-text, Uraicecht Becc (‘Small primer’), gives the druid a place among the dóer-nemed or professional classes which depend for their status on a patron, along with wrights, blacksmiths and entertainers, as opposed to the fili, who alone enjoyed free nemed-status.

Welsh literature

While druids featured prominently in many medieval Irish sources, they were far rarer in their Welsh counterparts. Unlike the Irish texts, the Welsh term commonly seen as referring to the druids, dryw, was used to refer purely to prophets and not to sorcerers or pagan priests. Historian Ronald Hutton noted that there were two explanations for the use of the term in Wales: the first was that it was a survival from the pre-Christian era, when dryw had been ancient priests, while the second was that the Welsh had borrowed the term from the Irish, as had the English (who used the terms dry and drycraeft to refer to magicians and magic respectively, most probably influenced by the Irish terms.)

Archaeology

As the historian Jane Webster stated, "individual druids... are unlikely to be identified archaeologically", a view which was echoed by Ronald Hutton, who declared that "not one single artefact or image has been unearthed that can undoubtedly be connected with the ancient Druids." A.P. Fitzpatrick, in examining what he believed to be astral symbolism on Late Iron Age swords has expressed difficulties in relating any material culture, even the Coligny calendar, with druidic culture.

Nonetheless, some archaeologists have attempted to link certain discoveries with written accounts of the druids, for instance the archaeologist Anne Ross linked what she believed to be evidence of human sacrifice in Celtic pagan society—such as the Lindow Man bog body—to the Greco-Roman accounts of human sacrifice being officiated over by the druids. 

An excavated burial in Deal, Kent discovered the "Deal warrior" a man buried around 200–150 BCE with a sword and shield, and wearing a unique crown, too thin to be a helmet. The crown is bronze with a broad band around the head and a thin strip crossing the top of the head. It was worn without any padding beneath, as traces of hair were left on the metal. The form of the crown is similar to that seen in images of Romano-British priests several centuries later, leading to speculation among archaeologists that the man might have been a druid. 

History of reception

Prohibition and decline under Roman rule

During the Gallic Wars of 58 to 51 BCE, the Roman army, led by Julius Caesar, conquered the many tribal chiefdoms of Gaul, and annexed it as a part of the Roman Empire. According to accounts produced in the following centuries, the new rulers of Roman Gaul subsequently introduced measures to wipe out the druids from that country. According to Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s CE, it was the emperor Tiberius (who ruled from 14 to 37 CE), who introduced laws banning not only druidism, but also other native soothsayers and healers, a move which Pliny applauded, believing that it would end human sacrifice in Gaul. A somewhat different account of Roman legal attacks on druidism was made by Suetonius, writing in the 2nd century CE, when he claimed that Rome's first emperor, Augustus (who had ruled from 27 BCE till 14 CE), had decreed that no-one could be both a druid and a Roman citizen, and that this was followed by a law passed by the later Emperor Claudius (who had ruled from 41 to 54 CE) which "thoroughly suppressed" the druids by banning their religious practices.

Possible late survival of Insular druidism

The best evidence of a druidic tradition in the British Isles is the independent cognate of the Celtic *druwid- in Insular Celtic: The Old Irish druídecht survives in the meaning of "magic", and the Welsh dryw in the meaning of "seer".

While the druids as a priestly caste were extinct with the Christianization of Wales, complete by the 7th century at the latest, the offices of bard and of "seer" (Welsh: dryw) persisted in medieval Wales into the 13th century.

Phillip Freeman, a classics professor, discusses a later reference to Dryades, which he translates as Druidesses, writing that "The fourth century A.D. collection of imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta contains three short passages involving Gaulish women called "Dryades" ("Druidesses")." He points out that "In all of these, the women may not be direct heirs of the Druids who were supposedly extinguished by the Romans — but in any case they do show that the druidic function of prophesy continued among the natives in Roman Gaul." However, the Historia Augusta is frequently interpreted by scholars as a largely satirical work, and such details might have been introduced in a humorous fashion. 

Additionally, Druidesses are mentioned in later Irish mythology, including the legend of Fionn mac Cumhaill, who, according to the 12th century The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn, is raised by the druidess Bodhmall and a wise-woman.

Christian historiography and hagiography 

The story of Vortigern, as reported by Nennius, provides one of the very few glimpses of possible druidic survival in Britain after the Roman conquest: unfortunately, Nennius is noted for mixing fact and legend in such a way that it is now impossible to know the truth behind his text. He wrote that after being excommunicated by Germanus, the British leader Vortigern invited twelve druids to assist him.

In the lives of saints and martyrs, the druids are represented as magicians and diviners. In Adamnan's vita of Columba, two of them act as tutors to the daughters of Lóegaire mac Néill, the High King of Ireland, at the coming of Saint Patrick. They are represented as endeavouring to prevent the progress of Patrick and Saint Columba by raising clouds and mist. Before the battle of Culdremne (561) a druid made an airbe drtiad (fence of protection?) round one of the armies, but what is precisely meant by the phrase is unclear. The Irish druids seem to have had a peculiar tonsure. The word druí is always used to render the Latin magus, and in one passage St Columba speaks of Christ as his druid. Similarly, a life of St Beuno states that when he died he had a vision of 'all the saints and druids'.

Sulpicius Severus' Vita of Martin of Tours relates how Martin encountered a peasant funeral, carrying the body in a winding sheet, which Martin mistook for some druidic rites of sacrifice, "because it was the custom of the Gallic rustics in their wretched folly to carry about through the fields the images of demons veiled with a white covering." So Martin halted the procession by raising his pectoral cross: "Upon this, the miserable creatures might have been seen at first to become stiff like rocks. Next, as they endeavoured, with every possible effort, to move forward, but were not able to take a step farther, they began to whirl themselves about in the most ridiculous fashion, until, not able any longer to sustain the weight, they set down the dead body." Then discovering his error, Martin raised his hand again to let them proceed: "Thus," the hagiographer points out, "he both compelled them to stand when he pleased, and permitted them to depart when he thought good."

Romanticism and modern revivals

From the 18th century, England and Wales experienced a revival of interest in the druids. John Aubrey (1626–1697) had been the first modern writer to connect Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments with the druids; since Aubrey's views were confined to his notebooks, the first wide audience for this idea were readers of William Stukeley (1687–1765). It is incorrectly believed that John Toland (1670–1722) founded the Ancient Druid Order however the research of historian Ronald Hutton has revealed that the ADO was founded by George Watson MacGregor Reid in 1909. The order never used (and still does not use) the title "Archdruid" for any member, but falsely credited William Blake as having been its "Chosen Chief" from 1799 to 1827, without corroboration in Blake's numerous writings or among modern Blake scholars. Blake's bardic mysticism derives instead from the pseudo-Ossianic epics of Macpherson; his friend Frederick Tatham's depiction of Blake's imagination, "clothing itself in the dark stole of mural sanctity"— in the precincts of Westminster Abbey— "it dwelt amid the Druid terrors", is generic rather than specifically neo-Druidic. John Toland was fascinated by Aubrey's Stonehenge theories, and wrote his own book about the monument without crediting Aubrey. The roles of bards in 10th century Wales had been established by Hywel Dda and it was during the 18th century that the idea arose that Druids had been their predecessors.

The 19th-century idea, gained from uncritical reading of the Gallic Wars, that under cultural-military pressure from Rome the druids formed the core of 1st-century BCE resistance among the Gauls, was examined and dismissed before World War II, though it remains current in folk history.

Druids began to figure widely in popular culture with the first advent of Romanticism. Chateaubriand's novel Les Martyrs (1809) narrated the doomed love of a druid priestess and a Roman soldier; though Chateaubriand's theme was the triumph of Christianity over Pagan druids, the setting was to continue to bear fruit. Opera provides a barometer of well-informed popular European culture in the early 19th century: in 1817 Giovanni Pacini brought druids to the stage in Trieste with an opera to a libretto by Felice Romani about a druid priestess, La Sacerdotessa d'Irminsul ("The Priestess of Irminsul"). The most famous druidic opera, Vincenzo Bellini's Norma was a fiasco at La Scala, when it premiered the day after Christmas, 1831; but in 1833 it was a hit in London. For its libretto, Felice Romani reused some of the pseudo-druidical background of La Sacerdotessa to provide colour to a standard theatrical conflict of love and duty. The story was similar to that of Medea, as it had recently been recast for a popular Parisian play by Alexandre Soumet: the diva of Norma's hit aria, "Casta Diva", is the moon goddess, being worshipped in the "grove of the Irmin statue".

A central figure in 19th century Romanticist Neo-Druidism is the Welshman Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg. His writings, published posthumously as The Iolo Manuscripts (1849) and Barddas (1862), are not considered credible by contemporary scholars. Williams claimed to have collected ancient knowledge in a "Gorsedd of Bards of the Isles of Britain" he had organized. Many scholars deem part or all of Williams's work to be fabrication, and purportedly many of the documents are of his own fabrication, but a large portion of the work has indeed been collected from meso-pagan sources dating from as far back as 600 CE. Regardless, it has become impossible to separate the original source material from the fabricated work, and while bits and pieces of the Barddas still turn up in some "Neo-druidic" works, the documents are considered irrelevant by most serious scholars.

In 1927 T.D. Kendrick sought to dispel the pseudo-historical aura that had accrued to druids,[83] asserting that "a prodigious amount of rubbish has been written about druidism"; Neo-druidism has nevertheless continued to shape public perceptions of the historical druids. The British Museum is blunt:

Modern Druids have no direct connection to the Druids of the Iron Age. Many of our popular ideas about the Druids are based on the misunderstandings and misconceptions of scholars 200 years ago. These ideas have been superseded by later study and discoveries.

Some strands of contemporary Neodruidism are a continuation of the 18th-century revival and thus are built largely around writings produced in the 18th century and after by second-hand sources and theorists. Some are monotheistic. Others, such as the largest Druid group in the world, The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids draw on a wide range of sources for their teachings. Members of such Neo-druid groups may be Neopagan, occultist, Reconstructionist, Christian or non-specifically spiritual.

Modern scholarship

In the 20th century, as new forms of textual criticism and archaeological methods were developed, allowing for greater accuracy in understanding the past, various historians and archaeologists published books on the subject of the druids and came to their own conclusions. The archaeologist Stuart Piggott, author of The Druids (1968), accepted the Greco-Roman accounts and considered the druids to be a barbaric and savage priesthood who performed human sacrifices.This view was largely supported by another archaeologist, Anne Ross, author of Pagan Celtic Britain (1967) and The Life and Death of a Druid Prince (1989), although she believed that they were essentially tribal priests, having more in common with the shamans of tribal societies than with the classical philosophers. Ross' views were largely accepted by two other prominent archaeologists to write on the subject, Miranda Aldhouse-Green[88]—author of The Gods of the Celts (1986), Exploring the World of the Druids (1997) and Caesar's Druids: Story of an Ancient Priesthood (2010)—and Barry Cunliffe, author of Iron Age Communities in Britain (1991) and The Ancient Celts (1997). 

Druidess (Celtic Mythology) 

Irish Mythology is populated by a number of female druids, or druidesses, who often share the magic and prominent roles of their male counterparts. Bodhmall and Tlachtga are two such examples. Bodhmall, featured in the Fenian Cycle, is one of Fionn mac Cumhaill's childhood caretakers and Tlachtga, the daughter of the druid Mug Ruith according to Irish tradition, has attached to a hill, possibly the Hill of Ward, which was the site of prominent festivals in Tlachtga's honour in the Middle Ages.

Another female druid was Biróg, a druidess of the Tuatha De Danann who plays a key role in a folktale recorded by John O'Donovan in 1835, where the Fomorian warrior Balor, to frustrate a prophecy that he would be killed by his own grandson, imprisons his only daughter Eithne in the tower of Tory Island, away from any contact with men.

Though sometimes classed as a sorceress rather than druidess, Bé Chuille - daughter of the woodland goddess Flidais of Tuatha Dé Danann - features in a tale from the Metrical Dindshenchas where she joins three other of the Tuatha Dé to defeat the evil Greek witch Carman.

Further female druids

Relbeo - Nemedian druidess featured in The Book of Invasions, daughter of the King of Greece and mother of Fergus Lethderg and Alma One-Tooth.

Dornoll - Druidess in Scotland, who normally trained heroes in warfare, particularly Laegaire, Conall and Cu Chulainn. Daughter of Domnall Mildemail.

Wikipedia    

Mistake. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Yeah. I was wrong. Misogynists do not qualify. You are not worthy of anything to do with Atlantis. None of you are. Misogyny does not qualify. 

Mandela found peace because he negotiated with FW De Klerk. You are Eugene Terreblanche, as is all your kind. 

Misogyny does not qualify and never will. 

Lemurians are scum. The scum of this earth. You. 

.....Ahahh, I thought this was not delivered. It's so significant, I'm posting it again. Ta. AZR 

Rewriting The History of The World. Amera Ziganii Rao

Right. Enough of Lemuria. The research has begun, and it is as wild and traumatic and exciting, as I could have imagined and a hell of a lot more. 

Atlantis. Egypt, The Celts, and GREECE are NOT 5000 years old. I knew those figures were ridiculous. Try 100 000 years instead. 

Second, if my consciousness is this advanced and all I needed was the space and knowledge to set off my own Clair Cognisance, then what do YOU think of the fact that you can keep up? The emotional self, the belief systems that drive you to such cruelty and stupidity, are EXTERNAL. Like the eqivalent was with me.

Werewolf or Nymph, we are from the same place and always have been. Egypt, ANCIENT ANCIENT Egypt is Atlantis rebuilt. And indeed just an extension of Atlantis. 

You know. Now that means something new. The responsibility to go with greatness and the need to patron and support not only my greatness but yours too. 

'Nuff said. You are welcome. 

As I go through it now, it is immensely traumatic. Feel it and make the return. You are greatness too. You are SERPENT Priesthood too. You are me. I am you. 

Be the light. Use the dark. Make it work FOR you. You are almost there. 

Cruelty can heal. Because it's you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♧ 2014

WRONG. Misogyny and torture and imposing political imprisonment on the woman you 'love' does not qualify. You are simply disgusting as is your whole kind. 

Misogyny does not qualify. 

Love is therefore, extreme male cruelty, enforced female martyrdom/political imprisonment and male madness. 

You do not qualify for Ascension. Because you do not qualify. 

And you are not going to kill me. You never will. You have been trying to make me disappear for four years. You will die before I do. That's a promise. You will never kill me and love is now nothing more than a political war. A war on you. A war on misogyny and a war on your cruelty. You will never kill me. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Extreme Male Cruelty, Enforced Female Martyrdom and Male Madness. Amera Ziganii Rao 

In other words, there are no Werewolves. There are only Goddesses and pigs. Misogyny will never qualify. You will never qualify. You will never change. You are not a man. You are a misogynist. There are no men. There are only misogynists. And you will not kill me. I’m done. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Extreme Male Cruelty, Enforced Female Martyrdom and Male Madness. Amera Ziganii Rao 

And this is my last emotional comment to you, as Hierophant Goddess and FEMALE VOCATIONAL PROFESSIONAL. Your misogyny makes my father's look like candy floss. And I rejected him at the age of 8. And he's a liberal backward Pakistani, whose mother and sisters wore hijab. Your evil transcends him by reservoirs. You're white and qualify to extreme levels, for the Taliban. Like my brother. Your generation is pure evil. You, however lead the field for all. 

You are conscious evil. A man who refuses to fulfil his destiny and who has been happy to torture a woman and hold her ransom to his apparent love. For SEVEN years. You are conscious evil. And can take pride in the fact that you are too good at it. 

Evil. You were the best at it. And you represent a whole people on this earth. A people of evil. 

As TE Lawrence said, 'nothing is written'. Now I know why. You are the irredeemable. Evil. 

Thank you and goodbye. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Misogyny is therefore just one thing. Be what you want as long as it is neither financial nor professional. Men are disgusting thieves and I have known the best. Be brilliant but ONLY as an accomplished chattel. Always for them. With nothing in return but emotional, physical and financial violence. In the West in the 21st century. Goddesses and pigs. And nothing in between. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♧ 2014

...oh and look. The Saudi Princesses. Timing. Says it all. My very own Saudi king. My decade of hell. Men. Excuse me while I spit and spit big. Disgusting. And that followed the women. Mothers and Husbands. You go in the same concentration camp. Lemurians. Should not be allowed. 

And as for fathers. Mine LIKES Saudi. You are all fucking mad, bad and sad. 

Freedom calls. And it's sweet. Because it is without you mad fuckers. 

AZR ♢ 2014

Extreme Male Cruelty, Enforced Female Martyrdom and Male Madness. Amera Ziganii Rao 

The relief finally, to have nothing more to do with men. The legitimate hate and hurt. The relief. The magnificent survivor therapy that will have to be mine forever. 

The hope, finally, that peace can be found. Because it will be without anyone else. 

Alice Walker's The Color Purple indeed. 

Peace to everyone. Always stand up for yourself. Because no one else ever will. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♧ 2014   

ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

I believe in the human capacity to change and evolve into the best we can be and to re-programme the mind from any state to another, even from the lowest emotional intelligence you can possibly think of, to the highest emotional intelligence you’ve never thought was actually possible. The process is real and attainable by everyone. Whatever background, experiences, teachings or life that we come from. The process of alchemy works and I do not ask anything of anyone that I have not done and do not continue to do myself. The mind is infinite and the human soul is real. Whether you believe in God or not, the higher mind is real and the inner heart is real. And universal intelligence is most certainly real. This is alchemy. And it is available to all. The mind is our playground and personal genius computer, if we put the work in. The rest is education and re-programming. As adults, forever. This is God on Earth. Re-creation. Us. And for those of us who are spiritual, this is co-creation. Human and Divine. Everything is up to us, whether you believe in the unseen or not. This is mastering one’s destiny. Changing. Evolving. Becoming. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

No nation can ever be worthy of its existence that cannot take its women along with the men. No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women......No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live. 

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Founder of Pakistan) 

Modern Misogyny. The Oppression Update for The 21st Century. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Misogyny is therefore just one thing. Be what you want as long as it is neither financial nor professional. Men are disgusting thieves and I have known the best. Be brilliant but ONLY as an accomplished chattel. Always for them. With nothing in return but emotional, physical and financial violence. In the West in the 21st century. Goddesses and pigs. And nothing in between. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Free Will. Amera Ziganii Rao 

No one can change without wanting it. Free will is the choice to choose destiny. Spiritual Existentialism™. Misogyny will never reform on the planet earth. There is no future for men and women. There is no future for Werewolves and Goddesses. There is no collective future. There never was. No one can change without wanting to. No one can change without loving. Love is the only thing that can move mountains. If there is no love, misogyny remains. The truth of ‘true love’. Nothing. Pure, unmitigated male evil. As then, so it is today. So it will always be. The only future for women is what is the present. The life of a suffragette or cutting out one’s heart to fit into the human race. Earth is not ours. Earth belongs to the mad. The inmates indeed, running the asylum. With the biggest characteristic being abject cruelty. Male and female Werewolf cruelty. One can only be an exile. Exiled from The Judas Principle™. Exiled forever from evil. Men and women outside The Temple will not change. 

The tragedy is that everyone will have to find out for themselves. Atlanteans have to experience to believe. Experience and then tragically believe. And then, be free. The only way that a person of love can be free on this earth. By just being. By just being, without them. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Wherever power rears its ugly head, resistance will come to crush it. The Protest Movement 

Feminists (any woman) must organize for a total seizure of power by the people for the people. Simone de Beauvoir 

Rap is for the people, for the power of the people, for the aspirations of the people. Tupac Shakur 

When you discover a way to make people unhappy with their slavish lives in (misogynistic) capitalist society, stick with it. Agitation Tips

(Misogynistic) Capitalism craves passive nihilism, because this ensures it a weak, unrevolutionary, populace. Friedrich Nietzsche 

(Misogynistic) Capitalism has murdered the lives of millions of (Women) African Americans through brutal labor exploitation. Malcolm X 

You're ignored emotionally. Reasons to Revolt 

Millions of (Women) African Americans are conditioned by the (misogynistic) capitalist mass media to hate their self-image. Malcolm X 

The investment bankers feel entitled to as many bail-out as it takes to keep them thriving. J. P. Morgan 

The capitalist system is inherently sexist, patriarchal, and hierarchical. The only true path to women's liberation is all out revolution. Simone de Beauvoir 

Voltaire 

Religious texts are not divine or sublime, they are stories designed to control the actions and behaviors of humanity. Voltaire 

Revolt against religion and you will find yourself no longer living in a prison of religious fears. Voltaire 

There's no hell, it's just a system of fears and anxieties, designed to condition the populace into behaving submissively. Voltaire 

God (the god that is usually known) is a metaphor for patriarchal hierarchies. Voltaire 

Fight for humanity, instead of fighting for the rights of religious leaders to screw humanity. Voltaire 

While your religious leaders are working once a week for a couple of hours, you're working like a dog 9-5 for 50 years. Voltaire 

Religion inspires you to hate people (WOMEN) on the basis of absurd myths and beliefs. Voltaire 

Religious institutions are frauds that want you to believe in the fraud known as religion. Voltaire 

God (the god that is usually known) is a metaphor for exploitation, corruption, collusion. Voltaire 

Illegal Wolf lll (Artwork) 

Uncovering the Shame and the Madness l. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Misogyny or male supremacy therefore, is the demand for female slavery. The terms that have been applied to it so far just will not do. Misogyny is the generic, worldwide demand for female slavery and the whole world is run by it. Earth is a planet of misogyny. The demand for female slavery. 

Earth is also a planet of vibrant and gorgeous women. Vibrant and gorgeous women, unless they are female patriarchs – the so called by myself, Werewolf pigs. Vibrant and gorgeous women, vibrant and gorgeous men who are similar, and a vast mob of people who demand our slavery. 

And we loved them. We love love. We love sex and we love friendship. They love nothing. The pain on earth, whether it is economic, health related or emotional is all from one source. Misogyny and the demand for female slavery. 

And I thought he would be my friend, because he loved me. There is no friendship in a system of demand for female slavery. In a system of misogyny. There is nothing. 

A man I was involved with a long time ago, made me see how I hoped – misguidedly – that my father would love me, despite him being an extreme misogynist, because I was his daughter. 

That just about sums up the whole female dilemma. You would hope that love would make the difference. It didn’t and it doesn’t. 

Men are too busy enjoying the demand for female slavery to love anyone. Earth is hell because earth is a planet of misogyny. Misogyny is the generic, blanket demand for female slavery. All slavery can end. The idea of being a woman is therefore totally similar to the apartheid system that was in South Africa. To be a woman in a household is to have a pass to the places in the home where she serves during the day. She might as well have servant quarters to retire to after her work. There is absolutely no difference. In fact, to be female, that must be preferable. The night raids by the vicious south African police that were such an integral part of the apartheid system, can be likened to a man ‘making love’ to a woman, after a day of enforcing her slavery. No wonder it feels like rape. No wonder women kill themselves and no wonder women disappear from life. 

Misogyny is the demand for female slavery. Misogyny is nothing less and every man carries it. Earth is hell, because earth is male. Ergo, male means only one thing. A demand for female slavery. 

No wonder men earn 90 percent of the world’s income and do a third of the entire work in the world. Misogyny rules earth. Misogyny is the demand for female slavery. Misogyny is male. Female does it well too. Earth is run by fascism. And we loved them. The turning point is belligerent. Love apparently does not heal. Nothing can heal evil. Earth is a planet of evil, because earth is male. 

That is misogyny. That is male. That is ‘love’. As true as a bucket of shit. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Uncovering the Shame and the Madness ll. Amera Ziganii Rao  

Non Vocational Domestic Slavery. The World of Men. So why don't you just leave me the fuck alone. Frankly, not only do I not give a damn, you make me sick. You want a Non Vocational Domestic Slave who has taught you esoteric genius for four years, while you promote your teenage daughters into vocation. I ain't no Tribe Mummy and I told you four years ago that I would not watch the usual barbaric husband behaviour of indulging daughters (which is a lie) while shitting on the wife and making her a Non Vocational Domestic Slave. And still you persist. Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off and fuck off. 

I don't want to watch frankly, incestuous 'friendship' with daughters while you make me watch as a Non Vocational Domestic Slave. Fathers lie to daughters. You don't want their vocational selves either and the men they are doomed to love will torture them just as you have tortured me. Or women of Werewolf pig if either of them are gay in the future. Same thing. 

You can lie to them. No one can do anything about that. I am no longer 15 years old. You will not lie to me. I have made my decision. Men will not change. This is not about healing. It's about human decency. You don't have it. Face it. You are 'no officer or gentleman' and never will be. Any of you. 

I'm convinced thank you. I am done. 'Darcy' and his redemption was a dream. Now, it is a relentless nightmare. 

I am truly, the most fortunate woman in the world. I never got your love, because you want me to be a Non Vocational Domestic Slave. But I got your desire. I am the lucky one. Men do not love. Men want Non Vocational Domestic Slaves. You will never get me. And I am glad. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

I'm always doing things I can't do. That's how I get to do them. ~  Pablo Picasso 

African Americans (Women) continue to be wage-slaves with no property, with no economical future, with no communal hopes. Malcolm X

Uncovering the Shame and the Madness. Non Vocational Domestic Slavery. The World of Men. Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Paradise is not a place, it's a state of mind. Tim Fargo 

In life you are either a passenger or a pilot, it's your choice.  ~ Unknown 

Long live the brilliant power of the (women) people! Huey P Newton 

The class system is an idea which justifies the exploitation of millions by a few. Martin Luther King Jr 

Idleness is the mother (FATHER) of all vices. Russian proverb 

Religious worship devours your desire to rise above your political oppression. Voltaire 

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.- Eleanor Roosevelt 

Uncovering the Shame and the Madness lll. Amera Ziganii Rao 

So, just to clarify in this ridiculous public charade of Werewolf Pig isolation, I reject The World of Men and you owe me four years work. You are a thief. 

And just to clarify again, my vocations are the only things that have ever deserved me. MY GLORIOUS AND WONDERFUL AND HUGE MIND. I am most certainly in love and always have been. And it's not with you. Men want Non Vocational Domestic Slaves. Men can fuck off. Families can fuck off and 'mothers' can fuck off too. Oh, yes, done. 

G'nite, cruel fucker. There are no fathers. There are only mothers and we are slaves in your world. Thanks, but no thanks. 

Happy Mothers Day indeed. 

Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity. It only works for my kind. Sorry. No amorals allowed. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Uncovering the Shame and the Madness lV. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Right. I now join the greatest team on earth. The team of women who are showing and BEING the way to power on this planet. 

Non Vocational Domestic Slavery (Lolita or wife) can go fuck itself. 

What it means for us is this. I am going to focus on the fact that there is no other man alive who would have put himself through what you have done. That is HOW you love me. That has to be valued. Our psychic gifts mean that we are indeed the family we always wanted to be. 

What it also means however is that I no longer have to 'beg', teach, persuade or appeal to your better nature. You don't have one and if you grow one, that is your journey now. Apparently you will. Good luck with that. Love is the motivation and your desire can at least help you with that. 

And if you truly can become a decent human being as a Werewolf Pig, I will maybe one day, forgive your immense cruelty, madness and inability to do anything else other than beat up women. 

Forgiveness is easy for me. I am a supernatural, advanced being of light. What is not is respect. I will never respect anything that you or your people are. I put that disrespect on hold for seven years. Because you are the only human being outside the temple that I have ever loved or will love. That disrespect and contempt has returned completely and will never go again. You are the scum of this earth but I accept who you are. 

This country gives me independence. Not just as a person with a long term disability, but as a woman who has been in abusive relationships all her life. That is a miracle. THAT I respect. 

The rest is business. Anything that is not Non Vocational Domestic Slavery. If you ever want to join MY world in the future, you can. As long as you never expect respect again. I cannot and will never respect evil. And let's face it, now we know what evil is and what you and your whole kind are. And now the story is to be told. My story. MY story. ME, ME, ME, ME, ME, so that everyone LIKE ME, can heal, and ATTAIN POWER, as is our purpose on this toilet of a planet. Your world is over. The new century indeed belongs to women. Because women are no longer to be slaves. 

There will be no more Non Vocational Domestic Slaves on earth. Fascism will have nowhere to go. That is my pledge and my mission and it starts with you. 

And for you, the only thing I offer you is this. You are the first abusive family that I will tolerate as a continual existence in my psyche. I offer nothing else. 

I have turned enforced martyrdom into political revolution. And I don't want to cut your balls off. That is greatness. That is love. 

The rest I leave to you. 

Oh, and I have discovered the only couple that is our archetype and that exists. Daniel Craig (Werewolf AND JAMES BOND) and Rachel Weisz. A pig species with a powerful woman. It works. Remember that. You will not be the first. I don't know what her work has been since their relationship began and will be examining that in the social scientific approach. But at least it exists. You will not be the first, if indeed, you do. 

Peace. With no respect. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

....and first off, before I do the research and the communing, I would say that is what The Hopi Prophecy is truly about in esoteric terms. Fascism will have nowhere to go. The world belongs to love and love will inherit this earth completely and utterly. The two tribes are the people of love and the people of fascism. Fascism will have nowhere to go. Love has EVERYWHERE to go, as long as love is accompanied by the will to war and self sufficiency. The ATTAINMENT OF POWER for the 'meek'. 

The prophecy for the new world. A world that is not run by you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

By Any Means Necessary. Malcolm X 

And guess when he gave this speech. The day of my birth. The year and the day of my birth. Love that. Destiny. Fascism has nowhere to go. The Non Vocational Domestic Female Slave will no longer exist. Get ready. Your time is over. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014  

Most appropriate. Petty Fascism as I will now call it, is dead. And I happily march to my own 'death'. By any means necessary. Non Vocational Domestic Slavery is over. Goddesses and Werewolf Pigs. The declaration of war. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant Avatar Valkyrie Wizard Monarch Society™

Normal speak. Vocational Female Society. A society of equality, humanity and alchemy. A society where women are loved for who they are and not for what they are. A society where women honour The Triple Goddess. All that is the true Divinity. The true society. 

A society without fascism or gender terrorism as it will now be called. 

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant Avatar Valkyrie Wizard Monarch Society™

Misogyny is gender terrorism. Men are the Draconian agenda's greatest weapon. Against all that is High Priestess. The society of Adam. The High Priestess killing society. The one that believes in a male god. 

Yawn. G'nite all. Love yourself. No one else knows how. She however loves all of you. She is love. 

And remember this. If you don't love people, you cannot love yourself. If you hate, you are in a state of self hatred. If you are a fascist, you are a fascist with yourself. If you don't love women for who they are, you cannot love women, and therefore you cannot love yourself, and if you want dominion over other human beings, you cannot respect yourself. Self worth is very logical. Be nice and you will love yourself. Be horrible and you won't be able to love yourself. Love is not discerning. Either you have it or you don't. 

Redemption is always in your hands. Love. And love the Female Divinity of this Universe. Her Universe. She loves you. 

Happy Mother's Day. 

Respect motherhood. It is all that you are. No more slavery allowed. She is watching. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 201

Misogyny = Gender Terrorism™ = Non Vocational Daughter Mother Domestic Slavery™ = Gender Terrorism™. 

Not nice. Don’t be Draconian pawns. Be nice. Women are worth it. Women are so worth it. Much more than you. Honour women. They honour you. To love women is to love them for WHO they are. Not WHAT they are. In other words, giving a shit about the person you are in love with. It helps. It’s called love. They give a shit about you. 

Misogyny = Gender Terrorism™ = Non Vocational Daughter Mother Domestic Slavery™ = Gender Terrorism™. 

Or don’t. And if you don’t, The Hopi Prophecy is for you. You have been warned. Stay in the mire or ascend. Be a terrorist or be a man. Don’t be both. A splintered life will get you nowhere. Which is where you are. 

Misogyny = Gender Terrorism™ = Non Vocational Daughter Mother Domestic Slavery™ = Gender Terrorism™ = the single reason why relationships don’t work. Love is not love without friendship and respect. Your respect.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Goddess XXVl (Artwork) 

Misogyny = Gender Terrorism™ = Non Vocational Daughter Mother Domestic Slavery™ = Gender Terrorism™. Amera Ziganii Rao  

I felt that reaction from you just now Marcus Vinicius. You know you cannot hide from me. Not good enough. I've got a better suggestion. Don't bother coming back at all. We are done. 

Too much abuse, too much madness and too much just not giving a shit. It just goes to show, mastering one's destiny is truly the most detailed, insane and tortuous process. You and I are done. 

Completely, utterly and belligerently. 

You are truly shocking. The whole world of men. Truly, terribly shocking. At least I know I made the best decision I could today. I have mastered my destiny at last. And it has nothing to do with you anymore. 

Extraordinary. What a story. Thank you for finally freeing me. Soul communication does not lie. The truth is finally told. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Pursuit Of Freedom + 'Hell is other people' (Jean Paul Sartre) + The 'Love' Story. Extreme (Male/Family/Group) Cruelty, Enforced (Female) Martyrdom and (Male/Family/Group) Madness. True Love. How To Live Without It. Leaving The World Of Slavery. The Amera Ziganii Rao Force Of Individuation. A True Life And What It Costs. Everything. The Female Experience Is To Overturn All Slavery. And To Reject Love. It Does Not Exist. On Earth. We Do And That Is It

The Sterile Heart. Amera Ziganii Rao 

A sterile society. No humanity and no joy. No kindness and no joy. Nothing. Sterile. The society, to leave forever. To create one's own. The rest, one can finally have in death. At last. Life, then, for a warrior is killing time and making the best of working hours. The thing that is usually called life. Mine will come at death and I can't wait. I will however do the time. There is a job to do. Killing anyone who stands in the way of individuation and sharing the secrets with anyone else who needs or wants to do the same. 

What is normally called human rights. Life, I leave to you. Sterile, boring and hollow. What the fuck am I missing anyway. There is no love on earth. The love of any kind only exists in The Temple. And there is no Temple on this planet. 'You' made sure of that. And 'you' make sure of that everyday. Yawn. So what. I am joy, I am humanity and I am sex. I keep it all for myself. I've got a job to do. 'Life' and all the bullshit that goes with it, I leave to you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Everyone has gone through something that changed them in a way that they could never go back to the person they once were. Phil Crackin 

A REAL RELATIONSHIP: has fights, trust, faith, tears, pain, arguments, patience, secrets, jealousy and LOVE. Love and Life 

Could not this very Socratism [Sokratismus] be a sign of collapse, exhaustion, sickness, the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? Friedrich Nietzsche 

"Women, the sick, survivors—they deserve fair treatment in our health care system." President Obama 

Friends just can't be found. Simon and Garfunkel 

I really need to get all these negative people out of my life. Common White Girl 

When you love what you have, you have everything you need. Epic Women 

"Nearly eight million seniors have saved almost $10 billion on their medicine." President Obama 

35,000 people starve each year because of Starbucks' corporate hijacking of third world coffee supplies. Why Starbucks Sucks 

The pride of youth is in strength and beauty, the pride of old age is in discretion. Democritus 

It's not too bad being me. Eeyore 

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. Writings. True Love. The Quest. Amera Ziganii Rao

Right. Time for me to stop sulking and accept that you and I are on the mammoth of mammoth journeys to something called true love.

Apparently.  

I reckon the prophecies are pointing to nine years. To 'relationship' per se. So as I search in the mire, for a new bedsit type flat in the most sterile of sterile countries in the world, without any support or friendship from anyone whatsoever, let alone you, and you enjoy the spoils of your life, I have to accept that I got the raw end of the deal and to just appreciate the glory of the fact that my vocational life is the only thing I need to think about for the next two years - if not forever - other than the unloved mediocrity of having to fend for myself yet again because you are still trapped in ego and also still deep within your belief in slavery of the female species. And of course, the callous, greedy, selfish, male 'heart'. 

So what, we all have our burdens. Your inner pain matches my outer pain. Such is the way. There is nothing unique about you. All of your kind are the same. At least I no longer have to focus on you. 

I am a soldier and soldiers have no needs. Strange. I have to fight for my needs to be allowed as a human and my needs as a spiritual soldier are non existent. The stupid ironies of a high life. Who cares. I don't care about anything as I say, other than the day I die, so to kill time constructively, is to thrive. It's all work and I release any joy that could ever have come to me. 

It is only people/nutters/creatives/prophets like me who give a shit about the state of the world and for that we have to pay. 

I just didn't know I would be so unloved and now I am bored of being so sad about it. Fuck you and fuck the world. I will do it all by myself, for myself and from my self. I am simply a guide showing how women have to truly, do it all for themselves and why. 

Hence, the mindless, mediocre details, which mean that yet again, I have no place to be or to work or to live. 

At least I will never have to give anything to anyone again. You can finally show me what you can ever give, if and when you are ready to give. 

Whatever. So bored of you and this and it. 

Boredom being a synonym for profound grief. You are useless and cruel. I accept that. And I am glad I don't have to give anything to anyone ever again, other than in a pure, professional MALE female way. 

Time for a new life. I just have to get over the rage of having to start from the bottom again. Because of you. 

It will take two years for me to get over my fury. You might finally be ready for the real human race by then. The race of Atlanteans. Me. 

I meanwhile have to integrate complete self responsibility and the knowledge that I am completely alone on earth and a pure soldier. Maximus of course. Like Carl Jung, I intend to build a fortress against the human race and to give as and when I want. Then, I will finally be free. And by then, you might finally be ready to be with a woman, without demanding your homicidal form of stupid slavery. 

New journeys. I am not afraid. I have never needed anyone in my entire life. I just wanted. Now, I want nothing and in that is my freedom. I want nothing and I love nothing. And indeed, I may never want anything or anyone ever again, by the time you are ready to do more than you currently do. 

I am just here to do a job and do it well. Destiny belligerently promised me everything. Who gives a fuck anymore when it comes. Fuck process and fuck life. And fuck The Universe too. 

A new flat in a city I now hate, in a country I am so fucking bored of, is my only dream. My end of this stupid journey. In the face of human non love,madness, sterility and slavery. It is joy I am not allowed. Joy it seems is only for evil. So what. Fuck joy and fuck you. 

It all feeds the work. And the work is the only thing that is true. As Samuel Beckett said, it's only the writing that has ever been worth anything. For real. Fuck everything else. It's worth nothing. 

And at least I have never been a slave. That ridiculous lifestyle, 'I leave to you'. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/writings-true-love-quest-amera-ziganii.html 

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. Writings. True Love. The Quest. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Of course my purpose is always forgiveness. You have it always. Grow well as will I. See you on the other side (in life, not the afterlife). 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The Brave New Inclusive World. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Male wizardry. So, my sweet, and all other sweets, as the horrendous misogyny of old falls away and your true beauty of being emerges in your soul – esque Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™, of course, my warring nature can also be tamed back into balance. At last. 

Let’s go back to the healing programme as it began four years ago, almost exactly to the day, in April 2010. As a natural, inclusive person and indeed healer, I began to educate you in the way I was educated and the way I educated myself. 

We all have psychic gifts. We are all massively psychically talented. We have all been cut off from our psychic gifts. 

As I look back over this immense cleansing of your male supremacy and my own erection – good word – into my own spiritual and non domestic mother greatness, my vocational greatness, my right to be a whole person as a woman, and my fine tuning of war skills to levels I didn’t even know I had to reach, of course, on one level, it all feels ridiculous and a little embarrassing. Of course, it is not. 

I especially feel the truth of it, when I consistently am reading great spiritual knowledge and texts and there is absolutely no mention of female priesthood or female seer or female anything, anywhere. By so called, enlightened other healers. Ain’t nothing enlightened in any healer, writer or seer, if they do not include the OBVIOUS truth. Women were the High Serpent Priesthood and the society was spiritually and ESOTERICALLY led by us. I don’t care who they are. 

A renowned Romanian spiritual and writer, Mircea Eliade for instance, has written a biblical proportion work called Shamanism. All his Shamans are men. I am just not impressed for one second anymore. Even the modern day seers just do not focus on this truth. Which just goes to show that shaman or seer is like anything else. There are good ones and bad ones, incredibly competent ones and incredibly non competent ones. And that all healing is also interfered with by personal perspective, unless the highest of the highest mind is accessed, with the discipline that is required. And indeed, the humility and belief in truth. Going with one’s highest feelings, however weird or scary or completely resistant anyone else is to them. That is HIGH Integrity, if you like. Advanced Integrity™. 

Competence is facing the truth that the Sacred Whore Society, The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant Avatar Valkyrie Wizard Monarch Society™ is the OBVIOUS truth. To go with the obvious truth that The Universe is primarily a FEMALE Divine Divinity. To go with the obvious truth that mother is a lost soul on earth and that is just in the non spiritual, domestic sense, let alone in any other context. Woman does not exist. She is just a slave in society, let alone, it seems, apparently in The Temple too, according to so many male seers and writers. Incompetence. 

So, saying that, so what. I look forward to happily ramming it down everyone’s throats for the rest of my life and representing the ‘unfashionable’ truth until it becomes fashionable. That’s what real seers and visionaries do. 

Meanwhile, I have to watch, while primarily female seers and writers – Hierophants of all levels – talk about Female Sacred Priesthood as if it is a secondary area, to the ‘regular’ field of shamanism or priesthood, and deal with it. 

My agenda is global domination for Female Priesthood. I don’t need anyone else’s to be that. I am more than capable of focusing on that enough for everyone. 

So, that’s me and the part of you that has been gone so long. The part of everyone that has been gone so long, embodied so beautifully by the big fleshy female statues of the real, ancient world. The real reason why obesity just happens to include anyone over a size 12, I was going to say, but these days it is zero isn’t it. Case and point. All that is over-yin – the over voluptuous female who is only really honoured culturally in black peoples cultures -  is hated as her largeness or voluptuousness or POWER is a junk food obesity in itself. There is a big difference between some lovely and misguided and unhappy and society poisoned kid who has a food addiction and a voluptuous woman. The onslaught against my kind will always be sustained in whatever form it comes. Whatever. I am most definitely ready to never stop seeing the signs of genocide against my kind. 

You are most definitely ready to see the same too and there is nothing in the world that could ever give me more peace or joy than that. It is your love that gives me strength in this horrendous and woman killing world, let alone the High Priestess killing world that it is. Which is why we had to take four years to cleanse that soul of the horrors of male supremacy and the Non Vocational Daughter Mother Domestic Slavery™ and Gender Terrorism™ that is the norm on this corrupt planet. 

It’s done. As I can now, start releasing all the hurt and rage and violence that is not appropriate anymore, the judgment and contempt, I am also being allowed to as the Anuncier. I salute you my king mate and I love you. 

I also have beautiful news for you, as you have already I am sure begun to know yourself. It is a complex picture and I have been exploring and writing up reams on it, but here’s the short version. 

Of course male is priesthood as well. Of course, the advanced male that you are, that all the men I have been involved with are, are male priesthood. The differences in hierarchy or specialisation or areas of expertise is that my kind, female and male, are the CONSCIOUS Anunciers and Communers. 

Anunciation and communing of course, however comes in many many different forms. Interpretation of the Universe in CONSCIOUS and spiritually logical and higher mind WORDS AND THOUGHTS is my thing. The guidance, the psycho analysis, the ideas, the concepts and the instructions. What is called intuition in normal male spiritless society. What you and I now know is Disir and Hierophant. As well as the Sacred Whore, the SACRED Whore. 

All our kind have it however and that includes you. The SACRED of the Sacred Pimp™. The SACRED of any sacred title of healer that is outside the remit of the normal male spiritless world. Our kind as opposed to my kind has now become the possible to speak about. The DIVINE connection that you and I have and that I and all OUR kind have with each other, even if we just meet through our eyes once in a lifetime in a moment on our travels through life. 

In other words, not just The Warrior Class™. We are, WE are, The Wizard Warrior Class™. 

Now, first off, the biggest issue for any of us on our path to enlightenment and consciousness is that we are all terrified of facing those gifts and we are also angry. These are generics. I recall how you resisted before our work had even begun. In telling my own story, you will see how I was more male than you. I thought alternative medicine was a joke and that anything outside the normal sphere of ‘power’ was not to be respected or even looked into. I was as male and spiritless as the best of them. 

So, getting over that fear, as I know you are now, it is time for you to celebrate and also take responsibility for the fact that you are Wizard Warrior too, as is anyone else I have been involved in AT THAT LEVEL. 

Now, what does that mean? Sounds very non inclusive and it is. My job it seems is to talk about our people first, before talking about everyone. I don’t think there is one person I have been close to in some way or other who is not part of the psychic peoples on this earth. Debatably and there is a serious debate about it, everyone is. Well, yes and no. 

We are talking about leadership and why some people shine and lead and we are talking about the single thing that has plagued our whole class, female or male. Jealousy, envy and being misunderstood, whether it is about our level of passion, intelligence, compassion or anger. In other words, we are the ones who ALL want to change the world in some way and all want to contribute to the world and to make things better and we are the ones who have always been GIVEN the task to do that whatever group we have been in. People look to us for leadership and we invariably fall flat on our faces somewhere along the line and then disappear. We hide our true selves and we are the ones who one could say need to reclaim them the most, because we have one thing that the group, the mob – said without negativity in this context – do not have. COURAGE, COURAGE, COURAGE AND COURAGE. 

Leadership comes from those who have the courage. 

You don’t think you have courage. None of OUR kind think we have courage. You have courage. Every man I have ever been close to, has courage. This is why we have been involved with each other for so long. Two things; courage and intelligence. Advanced intelligence. Leadership. 

But because the spiritual gifts have been cut off TO ALL OF US in the Wizard Warrior Class™, we are weak and angry because everyone is expecting something of us and we most certainly expect something of ourselves but we just find ourselves not being able to deliver. 

This is the damage and wounding of not knowing who we are. It’s like public speaking. As someone who would have died, rather than getting up and saying anything in front of anyone, now I am gagging to speak anywhere and everywhere. I do not have any confidence problems anymore and that is beyond stunning. Why? First off, because I know the rule now is true. It’s the material that makes the confidence and not me. Second, it is me who makes the material, not someone else. In other words, the information has to be real and solid and worthy of being spoken about, and the time has to be taken to develop it so it’s not lazy or crap or superficial or something that has been heard of before or indeed, that has been stolen! The information has to be detailed and researched and worth, speaking about. Second, it is the authentic self that speaks or not at all. 

This is a tall order. Not only do the Wizard Warrior Class™ of both High Serpent Female (Male) Priesthood™ AND Serpent Male (Female) Priesthood™ - the High refers to CONSCIOUS Hierophant Clair Cognisance Interpretation of The Universe – prophetess communing to a conscious and lucid thought level as a FIRST AND GREATEST skill – In other words, all that is REAL motherhood, female or male – have to find the confidence and knowledge to become authentic, they also have to stop hiding. In a male, spiritless, world. 

Self knowledge is ruthless. To know one’s self totally is also to know who everyone else is. Leadership is very precise and logical. To create the rapport of leadership, to define why we are the ones who are always being looked to and never allowed to be led ourselves for instance, is to know our leadership. If you don’t know who you are, how can you lead yourself? 

I had to tell you who you are not. You are not a male supremacist, you are not a pig. You are a Wizard Warrior like me. A member of the Priesthood. You know this and my pleasure is today, to be able to tell you and tell you big. 

And I can tell you like this. THE TREE OF LIFE. 

The Tree of Life, as in Genesis, is THE NERVOUS SYSTEM of the body. 

I’m going to leave you with that for now. The Tree of Life is the nervous system. We went from a thousand years a piece, WHEN THE BODY WAS IN THE HANDS OF SERPENT HIGH FEMALE (MALE) PRIESTHOOD AND SERPENT MALE (FEMALE) PRIESTHOOD, and indeed, all that is Atlantis and true crystal healing to the mortality rate of 23 or something, because The Tree of Life was suddenly taboo. We were suddenly not allowed to handle our own bodies or health systems. 

Why is why chiropractor is still regarded as an alternative medicine. And why, with my particular, deliberate spiritual purpose disability, the medical establishment had thousands of operations on my body as the only alternative to 16 years of phenomenal, self creating, re-aligning chiropractic and podiatrist work. It is the nervous system they took out of our hands. Everyone is sick for that one reason and everyone hides for that one reason. 

A complex picture but a good one to start us all off. In other words, you are hands on healers, in the many different official or non official forms, just as you lead in expression as a people while mine don’t. We all have different angles on the same gifts in other words. Of course, we all have intuition, of course, we all have Clair Sentience – the ability to sense and feel our way just by vibration or atmosphere – it depends how advanced each of these many gifts are. 

My chiropractor – the most important man in my life other than you – is a Wizard Warrior. There are two things that single him out from any other healer I have worked with on my body on the physical aspects. He is neither jealous of me nor is he unafraid of exploring his own version of my Hierophant work. We’ve had our misogyny fights, believe me. But he is not JEALOUS of me. 

90 percent of people I have met, who do have psychic gifts of some kind, many of whom were my ‘best friends’ have been rampantly jealous, in need, secret enemies and people who just didn’t give a shit about me, only what I could give them. My whole family is like that, through to so many many people. Why? 

Because my sweet, we are the Wizard Warrior Class. We lead. We lead and it is ALL OF US who do not know that it is our job and privilege and gifted duty and right to do that. And we resent it – no one more so than female domestic slaves / wives and girlfriends – because there is no honour or recognition for what we are and also, because EVERYONE wants and needs us so much. 

In other words, we are spiritual superstars and have no idea. As the new dawn finally breaks on this disgusting world and consciousness is finally allowed again and the integration of the dark and the light respected and honoured and enjoyed, as equality and harmony and love and humane love is bursting through at last in its sacred and sexual and liberated and HUMANE way, we need to define a new Hollywood. A Spiritual Hollywood and give ourselves those accolades, even indeed, if we enjoy the true Hollywood in our professional life, of whatever kind. There is a spiritual power leadership on earth and you, the men I know are part of it. The women I have met are different. Not because there are no women in your part of the class we are talking about, but because I don’t seem to have met them, which is interesting. I have only met women who are further down the hierarchy. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, but according to them there is. Hence my own Cinderella journey. 

Of course they exist. The women at the top of professional society, whether they are negative Wizard Warriors or positive. If I was gay, maybe I would have attracted them. But strangely, so far, I have not met many. Or any. 

Anyway, that’s enough to go on with. New times and new joys and many areas of exploration to do, for you as now, or in private as the work progresses. The Wizard Warrior Class™, Goddess and Werewolf. Why, we are only not alone, with each other. Why it is so profound and why we are all so highly charged and desperate to connect with each other and why there are, comparatively, so few of us. Spiritual Leadership, Goddess (God) and Werewolf (Male or Female). Our real purpose to serve the community and a vital knowledge for both of us to have. The authentic self, to help everyone else, who beats on us, tells us we are shit and who want to just steal from us and put us down at the same time. Our secret enemies and our co-dependents and why, in non healing, we always feel so guilty, at having to leave them behind, or having to allocate them into a particular type of friendship. For you obviously so relevant with you leaving your old life behind, just as I had to. This is the authentic reason. You are leaving because you are Priesthood. No one else around you is. WE are that rare, all of us. And we deserve, too, not to feel alone. We deserve it because we give so much. The truth of being that responsible Tribe person. I was once too. Now, I serve the real Tribe. The Universe. 

Welcome. We love you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Esoteric Journey To Spiritual, Political and Psychological and Sociological Truth™ = Consciousness. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Siren XXll Pt ll (Artwork) 

Our Tragedy. Amera Ziganii Rao 

You know it and so do I. We've always known it. Who knows the why, but it's all very high isn't it....maybe we have ensured our after life just as we have previously thought. 

This time, it's not for anything negative. It is, my twin, mutual, sacrifice for the higher purpose of our lives. In other words, our lives don't belong to us. High life, the advanced life is not a choice and there is no 'mastering of one's destiny' as there is for middle ground alchemists. 

We are not middle ground alchemists. We are high ground sainthood. 

Let's just leave it at that. Anyway, nothing else is happening for a while, I am sure. We knew when he came along, that he was just too conveniently big for us to ignore. It serves the purpose and is more about that than any other difference. You are both Lemurian as it were - let's leave that analysis of it for now - and you both struggle with exactly the same thing. 

And we are both being forced into the supreme level of unconditional love. You and me. We always knew. And we can only be grateful that we even knew each other and that we will always know each other. 

And for me, I am glad for you for one thing. I don't want to force you to live a life you don't really want to live, because you love me so very much. 

You are however my muse and I don't want another. You are the giant of my life and I don't want another. 

So, basically, all this time, we have been forced to take the blows because we can't let go. 

You know what? I am proud of both of us. And so is She. At this point, I guess all we can remember is this. We are part of the Earth Angel group, including him too. We are all here to serve and to carry out higher purposes. It's all temporary and it's all for the planet. We do not matter and never have done. 

The afterlife is where it is at. Where the real party is at. 

We are allowed to love each other for the rest of eternity. 

The rest is just work. 

We've always known. And you are not ready in this life, to show and live by your spiritual gifts. You know that and so do I. He is in a different way. He's been waiting for me to recognise the equality of priesthood of the Werewolf type. And he's right and so are you. 

Your cleansing is his. We are all in this together. 

But for now, I am still stuck in the same place anyway. But you and I have to prepare now. We are not meant to be. 

Dr Zhivago. Grace. Higher Purpose. Transience. 

Went to my real home this week, to get healing and guidance. You know where. And did you know that the College of Psychic Studies (South Kensington for anyone who is interested in the most profound esoteric centre of learning on the planet) was started by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? 

We are all in it. It is all in us. We just don't get to hold hands again. On earth. We have to let go. 

You will always be my companion in the work though. Don't forget that. My silent partner, before I, perhaps, am with him. 

And always, long after. 

The Higher Purpose. I am at peace with it. And so are you. And this time, it's not about anything negative. On the contrary. It was just not Her plan. And I, fortunately am now married to my work. Hopefully I can find a home within an actual book. They are after all, my only companions:) 

Fucking tragedy. I think we should be proud of how long we tried for. We deserved each other so much. But no. We are not meant to be. Now, I have to wait all over again. And you have to watch, all over again. 

Because my sweet, we are that good. Let's just leave it at that. 

xx

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Our Tragedy. Amera Ziganii Rao 

And let's however not forget why. Your relentless misogyny. So, to sum up: Men can't have sex because they hate women as anything other than pussy and women can't be happy because male pussy dehumanisation runs the whole world. Done. 

Whatever my 'relationship destiny' purports to be, I am GLORIOUSLY not interested anymore. And never have to be again. What's next? Oh yes. My GLORIOUS Esoteric and humanitarian and sexual self. 

Without men. 

Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity™. 

'Hell is other people' and so is The Universe and so my sweet are you and he. Done. 

I am off to make love to you all with mind. My way. Alone. You are all fucklessly insane. My work on faith is done. I don't have it, never did and now I know why. 

But thanks for the silent love. Insane it may be but it gave me strength. It always will. The misogyny you can ALL keep for yourself. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♧♧ 2014

Our Tragedy. Amera Ziganii Rao 

And let's not forget the why. Your relentless misogyny. The biggest crime against humanity. Men. 

Just remember that men can't have sex because they hate women as anything other than pussy and that women are miserable because pussy prejudice runs the whole world. 

Whatever. My time with all men and relationship is over. My mind and its esoteric genius is the new sex. Love, terrestrially or celestially, can go fuck itself. 

Ta. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♧♧ 2014

On Being a Man-hater. A Men of Misogyny Hater. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Proud to be that for sure. Clean lines. Separatism. Working now to regain my part of the 90 percent of the world's income that men hog. Proud to be a man hater. Proud to be a pig species of either gender hater. Proud, proud, proud and proud. 

Proud and grateful. Grateful for all the love that was. Grateful for the alchemical gift of using it so well in myself. Grateful for all of it. Grateful it was you. Proud now, of what I am going to do with it. 

And as I delve deeper and deeper into the real history of the world, it is hardly any wonder. The idea of convergence between men and women in any real aspect of love or indeed sexuality, or convergence between woman and woman of your kind, or man and  man of your kind is, frankly, ridiculous. 

There are a people on earth who believe in slavery and there are a people who do not. And the two will never merge, never commune and never be together. Any respect for The Temple is completely non existent and to think that I even invited your kind to share the gifts. Fuck off. You are not worthy. You can do it from a distance. 

It's not personal. It's business as your iconic clone, Michael Corleone in Mario Puzo's The Godfather says. 

Misogyny is the scourge of the earth and to be burnt, devastated and thrown on the scrap heap, just a rite of passage to freedom.

Proud to hate men of misogyny, just as I hate racists, homophobics, fattists, and all the rest. Men of misogyny are the enemy and I declare permanent and endless war. 

A self manifesting war. To just fuck off and be now. Forever, on my own other than the odd sexual encounters. There is no friendship between men of misogyny and women. And I thought I had so many male friends. It's all desire. Desire works too. But only at a distance. Without friendship, there can be no human relationships again. 

The beauty is this. As Paulo Coelho says, The Alchemist's journey, the shepherd's journey is to find his personal treasure. Believe me, I have found it and I thank you. 

My greatest personal treasure is the ability to be completely alone and self reliant in life, however long it takes to get my personal wealth. I no longer need any single human being around me. I no longer need any personal life of any kind. 

I want to help women now. I want to love (er, platonically) women now. They need it so much. You do not. You have the whole world at your fingertips. Women have nothing and as Malcolm X taught, a people who are oppressed do not appreciate each other nearly enough. 

It's also about desire. Desire has no place on earth. Desire on earth  can only lead to emotional rape. 

Not personal, just business. Men of misogyny are now my direst enemy. And that is the whole world. 

Thank you and goodbye. 

My real work is to finally begin.

And on a soul level, it is always love. We have ensured our place in eternity. Fuck the rest. Earth will never catch up. 

Peace. The rest is pure war. War on you. And all that you are. 49 years of experience. I think I’m going to be busy and that gives me orgasms. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

It's going to happen: women are taking over. 

Pharrell Williams

"He (she) who rejects change is the architect of decay. 

Harold Wilson 

Pablo Picasso 

The revolutionary artist wants freedom for humanity, not profits and petty recognition. Pablo Picasso 

Private art collections are nothing more than an attempt by the upper class to further control and suffocate the flow of human creativity. Pablo Picasso 

Every art piece must create power in the minds of the masses. Pablo Picasso 

The revolutionary artist does not spend his (her) life searching for the Pygmalion ideal in his (her) art, revolution is the reality he (she) works towards. Pablo Picasso 

Every artwork must create the sense of a historical movement towards all out revolution. Pablo Picasso 

Long live the revolutionary artist, for he/she are the heart of the human struggle. Pablo Picasso 

Revolutionary art speaks and creates for the people, with the people, in the presence of the people. Pablo Picasso 

The revolutionary artist is never bought out by the enemy class, he/she never goes out to dinner with upper class buyers. Pablo Picasso

"A beautiful woman who is pleasing to men is good only for frightening fish when she falls into the water." ~Zen Proverb 

JG Ballard: five years on – a celebration. The Guardian 

Disaster zones, warped modernity, fetishised sex – welcome to the world of JG Ballard, who died five years ago this month. His complete works are being reissued: here seven admiring writers explore what makes particular books so memorable, and so strange. 

The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) by John Gray

To anyone who thinks of JG Ballard as a dystopian writer obsessed by images of catastrophe this book will come as a surprise. One of his least-known novels, it is also one of the most powerfully lyrical. Ballard's stories depict disaster zones: London drowned by the effects of climate change, an ultra-modern high-rise in which human beings struggle to survive, an American continent covered by desert and rainforest that a ragged band of explorers must cross. Yet the central thrust of his work is that disaster is not always an entirely negative experience. A seemingly destructive alteration in the outer world – geophysical or sociopolitical – may be the trigger for a process of psychological breakthrough. Instead of being destroyed, Ballard's characters are liberated by catastrophe. Far from being a type of dystopian prophecy – though at times it is that too – his work has at its core an experience of inner transformation and renewal.

The Unlimited Dream Company is a succession of images held together by a single landscape, a succession more brilliant and more hallucinatory than anything else in Ballard's fiction. Surrealist painting is a pervasive influence in his work – more influential than that of any writer, he used to say – and he followed the surrealists in believing that the world could be remade by the human mind. The exotic landscapes he conjures are often as important as the characters who inhabit them. Where The Unlimited Dream Company differs from his other novels is in its strongly poetic quality. With its short chapters, some only a page or two long, it reads at times like modernist verse. Only Hello America (1981), where he pictures New York swathed in golden sand-dunes and Las Vegas as the jungle capital of an almost deserted country, is similar in style. But whereas Hello America is full of deadpan humour, the mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.

Early this year when the floods hit Shepperton, where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death in 2009, the town became for a time like one of his disaster areas. The Shepperton that appears in these pages is that same Thames suburb more magically transmuted. Hosts of brightly plumed birds – "flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross" – have flocked into the town, and when the narrator leans against a pillar box, trying to straighten his flying suit, an eagle "guarding these never-to-be-collected letters snaps at my hands, as if she has forgotten who I am and is curious to inspect this solitary pilot who has casually stepped off the wind into these deserted streets".

It is no accident that the narrator's name is Blake. In a letter the poet William Blake declared "to the eyes of the Man of the Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself". Everything that Ballard's character sees is seen through the eyes of the imagination. It is left open whether anything like the transformed Shepperton he describes exists or is no more than Blake's delusion. He may even be dead and dreaming the place into existence. Impulsive, shifty and at times apparently psychopathic, Blake cannot be expected to give any remotely reliable account of himself. "Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography … yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw."

In the course of his life Ballard creatively deployed a remarkably wide range of different styles and genres, but nearly all of his novels and most of his short stories seem to me to explore a single theme. Whether the subject is an apocalyptic shift in the environment as in The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964), mental breakdown and transgressive sex in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973), urban collapse in Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975), the therapeutic functions of crime in Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) or the black comedy of Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard is showing how the personal identity we construct for ourselves is a makeshift, that comes apart when the stability of society can no longer be taken for granted. Empire of the Sun (1984) – the autobiographical novel Steven Spielberg brought to a wider audience – explores the same theme: it is in extreme situations where our habit-formed identities break down that we learn what it really means to be human. A drastic shift in the familiar scene may be the entry point to a world that is closer to our true nature. The paradox that is pursued throughout Ballard's work is that the surreal worlds created by the unrestrained human imagination may be more real than everyday human life. According to Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." The dishevelled pilot who appears at the start of The Unlimited Dream Company wants to escape the cavern completely. Blake's Shepperton is the world as it could be if the doors of perceptions were ripped from their hinges. The world Blake sees is shaped by unfettered human desire, a creation of the imagination in which the imperatives of society and morality count for nothing.

For Ballard himself these surreal landscapes may have had a healing function. His traumatic childhood left him with the conviction – fully corroborated by events in the 20th and 21st centuries – that order in society has no more substance or solidity than a rackety stage set. Together with the scenes of cruelty he witnessed after he left the camp in Lunghau, China, where he had been interned with his parents during the second world war, the spectacle of desolation in the empty city of Shanghai must have left deep scars.

Ballard spent 20 years forgetting what he had seen during his childhood, he said more than once, and another 20 remembering. His fiction was a product of this process, an inner alchemy that turned the dross of senseless suffering into something beautiful and life-affirming.

The Atrocity Exhibition. 1970. Hari Kunzu 

In 1966, New Worlds, a British science fiction magazine edited by the writer Michael Moorcock, published a "condensed novel" by JG Ballard titled "The Assassination Weapon". Moorcock was, he remembers, "delighted" to receive Ballard's copy. "It was exactly what I'd been looking for and I demanded more. He complained I was making his eyes bleed, turning them out. For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers." Later that same year New Worlds published "The Atrocity Exhibition", which would become the title story of Ballard's most notorious book.

In 1970 the American publisher Doubleday agreed to print an edition of Ballard's condensed novels under that title. Marc Haefele, a young Doubleday editor at the time, remembers that a few weeks before publication, the company president was touring a warehouse in Virginia when the book was drawn to his attention. On the spot, he gave the order to pulp the entire print run. A British edition went ahead, but it wasn't until 1972 that an American edition was published, under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA.

Whatever the guardians of public morality found so hard to stomach about The Atrocity Exhibition, it was surely more than dirty words and lèse-majesté. The novel presents fragments or avatars of a traumatised man, variously named Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot or Talbert, who is conducting some kind of spun-out scientific experiment, which also takes the form of a lecture or media spectacle. Traven is both a researcher and an experimental subject or patient in an institution where white-coated medical science has become contaminated by other things: pornography, celebrity, the imminence of violent disaster. He is observed by one Dr Nathan and has a highly fetishised sexual relationship with Karen Novotny or Catherine Austin or Coma, names for a blank, damaged woman who often seems to be constructed from fragments of female celebrities – Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe.

The Atrocity Exhibition visits terrible violence on these female celebrity bodies, in the form of plane and car crashes, nuclear fallout, disasters of all kinds. Ronald Reagan and the car-safety campaigner Ralph Nader get the same treatment. The book's obscenity, the reason it still has the potential to shock, is a function of its objectivity. It is clinical when, for decency's sake, it ought to feign emotion. It looks on our sacred treasures, our culture's real sacred treasures – the imaginary bodies of famous people – and responds with all the violence and lust and revulsion that the healthy well-adjusted citizen suppresses. Decency is what separates rational economic actors, dutifully maximising their personal benefit, from the racaille, from scum. It is the source of order. Ballard's fictional refusal of it was – and remains – a threat.

Each section of The Atrocity Exhibition is a flight over the same apocalyptic landscape, a landscape that is also the human body, observed with a clinician's eye as it undergoes trauma, as it is anatomised, penetrated, cut and crushed and humiliated, scorched and fucked. This body-landscape is also an image of itself, a mass-media projection made up of Hollywood movies and pornography and news footage of the Vietnam war. Living in the shadow of disaster, Travers is an exemplary modern subject. The only difference between him and the average suburbanite is that he doesn't disguise his abjection. He is a burnt-out case, a celebrity stalker, a kind of psychological crash‑test dummy with a detached professional interest in the brick wall that's about to make contact with his skull. He may, of course, also be insane.

The Atrocity Exhibition is a melancholy book, fixated on something terrible that it can't let go. Its landscape is both dead and accelerating, a windblown desert strewn with the wreckage of modernity that is at the same time a place of unbearable speed and intensity. In 1964 Ballard's wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to bring up their three children alone. In 2007, when he was already terminally ill, I interviewed him. "I was terribly wounded by my wife's death," he told me. "Leaving me with these very young children, I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman – and her children – and I was searching desperately for an explanation … To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early 60s. It wasn't just the Kennedy assassination … I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events."

The Crystal World. Robert MacFarlane

In his second novel JG Ballard drowned the Earth, in his third he burned it, and in his fourth he turned it to crystal. Between 1962 and 1966 he ruined the world three times – though he later made it clear that these works were not to be understood as "disaster stories", but as "transformation stories". "The geophysical changes that take place" in them, he said in 1975, "are all positive and good".

Ballard is not always to be trusted as his own best interpreter, nor do any of his extraordinary novels succumb to single readings, but it is true that one ends The Crystal World exhilarated by what has been witnessed. It is in two senses a dazzling work, which leaves the mind's eye scorched into strangeness. Deep in the central African jungle, time itself has begun to leak away, and the consequence of this temporal depletion is a super-saturation of space. Anything present within the "zone" of leakage begins to crystallise: to reiterate itself as pure structure. Orchids and ferns encase themselves in intricately outgrowing replicas. Water hardens into a white and glowing ice. Crocodiles acquire new skins of glassy silver scales.

Downstream of the zone, a man called Sanders arrives at a remote town called Port Matarre just before the equinox. He believes himself to be searching for his former lover, Suzanne, who is working at a leper clinic 50 miles further into the jungle. Self-analysing but also self-deluding, strongly driven but curiously aimless, Sanders is an early version of a character-type that recurs throughout Ballard's fiction. In Matarre an odd gaggle of other visitors gathers: Ventress, white-suited and hyperactive; Balthus, a black-frocked Jesuit priest; and Louise, a French journalist looking for a lost colleague and a scoop. All are drawn, for opaque reasons, deeper into the jungle and closer to the zone. What follows is a kind of "Baroquealypse Now", a river journey into the heart of lightness. All of the main characters eventually reach the ornate crystalline dream-forest of the "focal area", where gem-eyed pythons slither past, and the bodies of men lie embalmed in diamond armour.

It is the central paradox of catastrophe fiction that to destroy the world you must first summon it into being. The Crystal World is surely Ballard's most gorgeous calamity: apocalypse not as abolition but as transfiguration. The prose of the jungle scenes glitters with a dark and elaborate beauty, which feels far from the chrome-sleek sentences of Crash, published seven years later. This is a Byzantine Ballard, relishing the prismatic intricacies of the "jewelled twilight world" he has conjured. The crossing of the glacial river back to Mont Royal, the hunts through the radiant perils of the forest, the siege scene at Thorensen's mansion, the fate of Radek: to me these are among the most brilliant episodes of Ballard's fiction. They lustre on in the memory.

Kingdom Come (2006)

When I was a young writer in the 1980s, I read Ballard's luminous, erotic story collection The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.

When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under "Tales of Alien Abduction" or "Marsh Plants" and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry; Freud's avant-garde theories of the unconscious. I was just starting to write but Ballard made me feel less lonely. Perhaps more significantly we shared the dislocation of not being born in Britain. Home was the imagination. I too was attracted to the paintings of De Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives.

All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard's prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come: "The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …"

Kingdom Come is an exuberant, crazed, maverick, 21st-century restaging of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. We have our usual Ballardian narrator, a decent chap, former advertising executive Richard Pearson, who, while driving down the slow lane of the M25, is surprised to find the indicator ticking as if it has a mind of its own. Pearson obeys his car's invitation to turn down a slip road, which "I had somehow known was waiting for me." Ballard believed that our unconscious plans a number of assignments for us. The slip road leads to the small motorway town of Brookfields, near Heathrow. Pearson's father, a retired air pilot, has been killed by a deranged mental patient who opened fire, apparently at random, on the crowds shopping at the Metro-Centre, a massive mall in the middle of this town. Pearson suspects there is more to find out about his father's death and begins his investigations – with the oedipal help of the attractive female doctor who attended to his dying father, and who for some reason has sex with his son.

There are no space ships hovering above the Metro-Centre, with its "humid, microwave air", but the minds of the citizens who shop there have definitely been abducted by hyper-consumerism. Pearson starts to uncover the drives of the savage consumers of Middle England who lug home refrigerators, toasters, televisions, beat up Asian shopkeepers and lavish affection on the three giant teddy bears sitting in the atrium of the Metro-Centre.

Kingdom Come is a sort of fairytale in which "a more primitive world" is "biding its time". The blades of knives on display in the mall's hardware store menacingly form "a silver forest in the darkness". Ballard explores the nationalism that replaces politics, the mass spectacle of St George's flags waved at endless parades and sports matches. He often said that his literary aim was to find the hidden wiring in the fuse box of modernity. In the case of Kingdom Come, consumerism slips into "soft" fascism. As a former advertising man, Pearson knows that "all he is good at is warming the slippers of late capitalism" – and the future is "a cable TV programme going on forever", a barcode, CCTV camera and a parking space.

Cocaine Nights. James Lever 

"I could sum up the future in one word," JG Ballard said in 1994, during an interview collected in Extreme Metaphors, the indispensable anthology of Ballard's conversation, "and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring." The gated communities of the Costa del Sol that form the backdrop of Cocaine Nights are the most extreme visualisation in his whole body of work of what he elsewhere pictured as "the whole planet ... turning into a vast Switzerland". Here, in the "fortified enclaves" where "all space has been internalised", none of the holiday villas even look out to the sea, a hundred yards distant. "The residents of the Costa del Sol lived in an eventless world … a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present … Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm." They are "refugees from time … needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes … already the ghosts of themselves." One of the great and disorienting pleasures of reading Ballard – and especially disorienting in an essentially realistic book such as Cocaine Nights – is finding oneself at a loss to identify exactly where the surreal or fantastical begins, or if indeed it even has. Passages that read like wild satirical exaggeration solidify, on second glance, into clear-eyed reportage.

Ballard might have dreamed up these deserted pueblos, "their architecture dedicated to the abolition of time", using the De Chiricos and Hoppers his imagination was stocked with, but in fact he knew the resorts of the Costas well. By the time he wrote Cocaine Nights, he'd been making trips to the Mediterranean for more than 30 years, taking annual family holidays in Marbella, and then, when the children had grown up, on the French Riviera with his partner Claire Walsh. "I'm always much happier in the south – Spain, Greece – than I am anywhere else," he remarked, Englishly. These holidays helped generate several precursors to Cocaine Nights, beginning with the abandoned Costa Brava of "Low-Flying Aircraft" (1975) and the Hitchcockianly erotic "The 60 Minute Zoom" (1976) – two little masterpieces – and then a pair of more closely related stories, "Having a Wonderful Time" (1978) and "The Largest Theme Park in the World" (1989).

Despite the multiple murders at its heart, Cocaine Nights is one of Ballard's most relaxed works, inaugurating what you might call his late period – that slight flattening of style and deceleration that mark his four last, and four longest, fictions. It is Ballard's beach read, designed to be picked up at an airport, consumed poolside and left, mottled with Ambre Solaire and disintegrating, its binding-glue long melted, on a shelf in the villa between the Dibdins and Rendells it is slyly constructed to resemble. For a novel about leisure – Ballard's only full-length work explicitly about this lifelong preoccupation – the subtly parodic chunky-thriller rhythms and unhurried mystery-story plotting are a perfect fit: it's a holiday book satirising the ritual of the holiday book.

This autobiography, Ballard's last work, retains the forensic poise of his fiction, the Ballardian restraint, through monstrosities of violence witnessed by a child; disconsolate urban debris; the drabness of a conservative country that does not know that its past is all it has (here England is a ghost story, while the US is science fiction); heartbreaking and abrupt personal tragedy. But Miracles of Life was written under the unique and poignant circumstances of a terminal illness. The book partakes of the elegiac long before, even, the wrenching and brief final chapter, which in that distinctive calm prose acknowledges pain, the death that is coming, the fears of that death, and the therapeutic nature of what we have just read. Overhanging this last book by the great diagnostician of modernity is his own diagnosis.

Startlingly plain reflections on the classic Ballardian tropes – birds, low-flying aircraft, pool after empty swimming pool – pepper the text. "I … felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged." "I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal." "The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world." In the therapeutic reflection not a single person could begrudge him, might Ballard be banalising his own work? Might the cost of this, for the reader, outweigh the benefit?

It does not. Stand down. The book reveals secrets. It answers questions. But by a strange dialectic of exegesis and opacity, it and they remain oblique. "I think now," Ballard says, almost owlishly, "that the drained pool represented the unknown." And with that he gently, politely, glosses everything and nothing. He fills the empty pool with emptiness.

This superposition of introspection and austere secrecy, of simplicity and opacity, is not new. Miracles of Life is Ballard's second autobiography, not his first. In 1984, he published a piece no more than three or four pages long in the magazine Ambit. It is calm and melancholy and hopeful, a life story of a seemingly very different kind. Sometimes it is called "The Autobiography of JGB", sometimes the adjective "Secret" is added to "Autobiography".

In the piece, B wakes to discover first that Shepperton is empty of all other people. Then that London is. Then the world. B wanders and wonders.

The animals are gone too, but – of course – for the birds. The first day, B is anxious, but when he wakes again, "he was relieved to find that Shepperton was still deserted". The relief remains. There is no more horror in the solitude. B explores. Stocks up on food. The seasons pass. He feeds the birds. Until at last, in the piece's final line, "the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work."

The story bears very little resemblance to the human trajectory in Miracles of Life, but the calm candid tone, the matter-of-fact surprise at the quotidian in Miracles of Life, is the same as B's sedate astonishment at the empty city. The city in the emptiness of which, at last, contentedly, B could begin his work.

This earlier shadow, this yearning and refracted autobiography, places Ballard at the heart of fiction of the unreal. It makes a kind of sense of all his writing, his strange, dense code full of secrets and revelations. "The Secret Autobiography" is a pre-echo of Miracles of Life. The empty apartment blocks and villages through which young Ballard walks in these pages are outliers of the empty city in which "JGB" begins his work.

The Kindness of Women (1991) Michael Faber 

Like many men scarred by war, JG Ballard spent much of his life determined not to talk about it. Had he died in his early 50s (not such an improbable fate, given his intake of alcohol and tobacco) only one short story, "The Dead Time", would have existed to pay direct witness to his wartime experience. He preferred to divert the memories into more fantastical conceptions: drowned worlds, concrete islands, terminal beaches, atrocity exhibitions.

It wasn't until the 1980s that he commanded his fiction to shine a documentary torch into his own life, to illuminate, and perhaps to exorcise his Shanghai ghosts. He confronted them first in Empire of the Sun, tackled them again from another angle in The Kindness of Women, and finally – just before he died – offered a conventionally "truthful" account in his autobiography, Miracles of Life. The Kindness of Women, marketed as a "sequel" to Empire of the Sun, steered back towards the provocative style of Ballard's earlier work, exploring the psychic fallout of horror and violence. The scene where young Jim watches four somnolent Japanese soldiers slowly murder a Chinese prisoner with telephone wire is a masterpiece of understatement and baleful resonance: even as Jim negotiates his own escape, we know that, on a deeper level, there is no escaping from such a sight.

Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard's life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. "To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme." Those last 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's novels.

If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's medical studies in postwar England tell us a lot about Ballard's values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: "You'll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia." It's an appropriate metaphor for Ballard's clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was "an old-fashioned storyteller at heart", he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism's emphasis on the inexplicable and SF's tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating.

It is in the area of physicality – especially sex – that Ballard's style jars most with the conventions of British +++fiction. It's hard to imagine another English author who could come up with a sentence like: "Her small, detergent-chafed hands, with their smell of lipstick, semen and rectal mucus, ran across my forehead." Frequent references to penises, labia, pelvises and prostates underscore Jim's contention that "Gray's Anatomy is a far greater novel than Ulysses." Ballard is unashamedly fascinated by the flesh – every pore, blemish and scar of it. The scenes in The Kindness of Women where Jim dissects the woman's carcass inspire some of Ballard's most tender, most respectful, most reverent writing.

For all his modernity, however, Ballard was formed by the fashions of a previous age; he could never quite shake the values instilled in him by Biggles and Boy's Own. His ambivalent fascination with soldiers, his disdain for the defeatism of the British in Singapore, and his lifelong love affair with fighter planes, set him apart from the long-haired peaceniks of later generations. His relationship with the times was atypical. Indifferent to music, immune to the charms of psychedelia and bemused by the idealism of hippies, he felt less enamoured of the 1960s than many of his fellow experimenters. He approved of the shake-up of the class system, and celebrated the rise of the literary counterculture that promoted his work, but in The Kindness of Women he chooses to present the 60s as an era driven to psychosis by a steady diet of drugs, assassinations, war trauma and TV. "The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade."

Ballard was not an emotionless man and he did not write emotionless fiction. The coolness that many critics have characterised as archetypically "Ballardian" is not as chilly as it seems. In The Kindness of Women, warm feelings – of pity, of passion, of parental love, of fond friendship – course richly beneath the surface of the skin but, like veins that retreat or collapse when a hypodermic needle seeks to penetrate them, they elude the forensic approach of Ballard's pen. The Kindness of Women is a curious hybrid, combining – not always successfully – the merciless thematic rigour of his earlier, more fantastical work and a new humanity that dispelled the deviant cyborg of myth. Many years before, when Crash was rejected by a publisher whose editorial assistant had branded him "beyond psychiatric help", Ballard took the comment as encouraging proof that he'd hit a nerve. By 1991, he no longer revelled in such opprobrium.

In truth, Ballard's basic decency was always there, even in his most outrageous tales. It is a measure of how obtuse the guardians of public morality continue to be, that Ballard was ever accused of being a nihilistic pervert or a champion of orgasmic car crashes. Like all satirists, he assumed that humans should behave compassionately and morally. Grieved by their failure to do so, he expressed his alarm – not with earnest handwringing, but by ushering us straight to a dystopian fait accompli. In short, he shanghaied us.

• Over the course of this year, Fourth Estate will reissue JG Ballard's complete works. The first titles are out this month, the next in June; the pieces above are edited versions of the new introductions.

The Guardian 

Real Histories l. The 'Enigma' Code for The World. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Nammu

Sumerian Creator Goddess. Nammu is the Mother of heaven, earth and the sea, spontaneously creating the Universe without the aid of a mate. She is the life-giving water that sustains humanity as well as the gods, and is attended by seven other goddesses who act as handmaidens. 

Nanu Buluku 

West African goddess of making. The Fon people worship Nana Buluku as the primordial Creator Goddess and grandmother of the gods. She is also seen as the first woman of the Yoruba religion, life breathed into clay by the Great Gods. She rules herbs, spellcraft, and magick, and is pictured carrying a basket full of bark and roots. Mandrake root is sacred to her.

Nanshe 

Dream Goddess of Babylonia. Nanshe is a water goddess of prophecy worshipped throughout Mesopotamia. She is referred to as the Interpreter of Dreams, and she blesses her priests with soothsaying abilities. Nanshe’s symbols include jars of water and fish. 

The Goddess Guide. Priestess Brandi Auset 

Goddess (Artwork) 

The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies. Jonathan Black 

The book is based on twenty years research and, crucially, the author has been helped to understand what is encoded in key texts by a high level initiate of more than one secret society, in one case initiated to the highest degree. Leonardo, Newton, Washington, Napoleon and an astonishing number of the great men and women who have made history are shown to have used the secret techniques to achieve altered states that have been nurtured and preserved by the societies. There, they believe, they access a higher intelligence and see the world as it really is. Great works of art, scientific discoveries and historic decisions are shown to have arisen out of these altered states - and with a remarkable unanimity of purpose. This history is crammed with more esoteric believe-it-or-nots than any book since Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, but it does also have a serious, philosophical undertow, which is the suggestion that with a slight shift in consciousness, the world and its history can be seen to be very different to what we have been brought up to believe.

Review

Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography...yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw. 

JG Ballard 

We writers are meaner and more competitive than athletes. Norman Mailer

The young Mailer's models were Faulkner and Hemingway, but, more than the example of their prose, there was the allure of their fame, and their commanding role in American life. 

In the forties writers were, as he puts it, "the marrow of a nation". He saw that to become a writer was to enter a competition. "We're meaner and more competitive than athletes", he explains. "No one understands that writers have "personalities quite as ugly as the ugliest athlete". 

Robert McCrum. Norman Mailer obituary. 2007

Real Histories ll. The 'Enigma' Code for The World. Amera Ziganii Rao

War God: Nights of The Witch by James Hancock 

"Five hundred years ago the old Mexican prophecy which announced the return of Quetzalcoatl came true. In an era dominated by human sacrifices and the decadence of a great culture, bearded men, white-faced, from beyond the sea, arrived to impose their law. In this fast-moving highly recommended novel, Graham Hancock masterfully reconstructs the biggest clash of civilizations ever, revealing aspects that only a genius author could unveil."

Javier Sierra, New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Supper and The Lost Angels 

Real Histories lll. The 'Enigma' Code for The World. Amera Ziganii Rao

Graham Hancock 

Graham Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer and journalist. Hancock specialises in unconventional theories involving ancient civilizations, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past. One of the main themes running through many of his books is a posited global connection with a "mother culture" from which he believes all ancient historical civilizations sprang.

Born in Edinburgh, Hancock's formative years were spent in India, where his father worked as a surgeon. Having returned to the UK, he graduated from Durham University in 1973, receiving a First Class Honours degree in sociology. As a journalist, Hancock worked for many British papers, such as The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian. He was co-editor of New Internationalist magazine from 1976–1979, and the East Africa correspondent of The Economist from 1981–1983.

Hancock sees himself as a journalist who asks questions based upon observation and as someone who provides a counterbalance to what he perceives as the "unquestioned" acceptance and support given to orthodox views by the education system, the media, and by society at large. Prior to 1990 his works dealt mainly with problems of economic and social development. Since 1990 his works have focused mainly on the possible connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.

His books include Lords of Poverty, The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis (released in the US as Message of the Sphinx), The Mars Mystery, Heaven's Mirror (with wife Santha Faiia), Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, and Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith (with co-author Robert Bauval). In 1996 he appeared in The Mysterious Origins of Man. 

He also wrote and presented the documentaries Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age (2002) and Quest for the Lost Civilisation (1998) shown on Channel 4. In Hancock's book Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith, co-authored with Robert Bauval, the two put forward "a version of the old Jewish-Masonic plot so beloved by ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists." They suggest a connection between the pillars of Solomon's Temple and the Twin Towers, and between the Star of David and The Pentagon. 

Hancock's most recent non-fiction book, Supernatural: Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, was published in the UK in October 2005 and in the US in 2006. In it, Hancock examines paleolithic cave art in the light of David Lewis-Williams' neuropsychological model, exploring its relation to the development of the fully modern human mind.

His first novel, Entangled: The Eater of Souls, the first in a fantasy series, was published in the UK in April 2010 and in the US in October 2010. The novel makes use of Hancock's prior research interests and as he has noted, "What was there to lose, I asked myself, when my critics already described my factual books as fiction?" 

Although his books have sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated into twenty-seven languages, his methods and conclusions have found little support among academics, his work being labelled "pseudoarchaeology". 

Orion Correlation Theory 

One of the many recurring themes in several of Hancock's works has been an exposition on the "Orion correlation theory" (or OCT), first put forward by Belgian writer Robert Bauval and then further expounded in collaborative works with Hancock, as well as in their separate publications.

BBC Two's Horizon TV series broadcast a programme, Atlantis Reborn, on 4 November 1999 that challenged the ideas presented by Hancock. It detailed one of Hancock's claims that the arrangement of an ancient temple complex was designed to mirror astronomical features and attempted to demonstrate that the same thing could be done with perhaps equal justification using famous landmarks in New York. It also alleged that Hancock had selectively moved or ignored the locations of some of the temples to fit his own theories.

Hancock claimed he was misrepresented by the programme, and he and Robert Bauval made complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Commission against the way Horizon had portrayed them and their work. Eight points were raised by Hancock, two by Bauval (one of which duplicated a complaint of Hancock's). This included the complaint that:

The programme had created the impression that he [Hancock] was an intellectual fraudster who had put forward half baked theories and ideas in bad faith, and that he was incompetent to defend his own arguments. Adjudication: [The Commission] finds no unfairness to Mr Hancock in these matters.

The BSC dismissed all but one of the complaints. Overall, the BSC concluded that "the programme makers acted in good faith in their examination of the theories of Mr Hancock and Mr Bauval". The complaint which was upheld was that;

The programme unfairly omitted one of their arguments in rebuttal of a speaker who criticised the theory of a significant correlation between the Giza pyramids and the belt stars of the constellation Orion (the "correlation theory") which the Commission did find to be unfair. That speaker was the astronomer Edwin Krupp. Krupp argued that Bauval had fudged the maps of Orion and the Pyramids by placing them upside down in terms of stellar directionality in order to make the theory work.

The BBC was not obligated to do more than broadcast an apology for the single point of unfairness but made a decision to modify the Orion sequence to demonstrate that the overall argument of the film remained intact. In Atlantis Reborn Again shown on 14 December 2000, Hancock and Bauval provided slightly lengthier rebuttals to Krupp and argued that the ancient Egyptians had made the Pyramids correlate in the most obvious and intuitive manner with the three stars of Orion's Belt, that Orion could only be seen at the highest point in the sky by the Egyptians looking in a southward direction and a work of symbolic and religious art. 

Wikipedia 

Goddess Life V (Artwork) 

Weed and Alcohol. Amera Ziganii Rao 

So, on another and much wider and much closer to home vista, all at the same time, what the hell is alcohol all about? 

I just had a drink for the first time in years and years – Jack Daniels, it used to be my flavour - and after what I have been learning, through the esoteric research to match my own, the knowledge to catch up clearly, with The Natural Born Mystic life I have been fortunate enough to lead, NATURALLY, that drugs like weed through to peyote through to so many others are hallucinatory and consciousness shifting drugs that  were not only useful to the real ancients like us, but essential, what the hell is alcohol about? 

The first thing that struck me is that it is an incredibly WEAK drug!! 

It also does nothing whatsoever, other than IRRITATE me and make me want to go to sleep. It makes you go numb, it gives you a headache and it alters nothing in the mind or senses or states of existence, WHATSOEVER. I suppose it kills feeling. Whatever that means. 

And then, the second thing that struck me is that it is REALLY expensive. 

So, the whole western world at least, is induced into a state of apparent stupor, with everything in the world promoting the most useless, non enhancing, dummifying, stupifying, non thinking, non feeling, non happy making drug in drink and charging the world for it. 

What a clever people they are, these Draconians that run the world.

Alcohol is promoted because it silences and DEPRESSES people. I feel depressed after having a couple of drinks. 

Not in all the years, on and off that I have been FORTUNATE enough, to smoke weed, have I ever felt depressed, numb, stupified, SEXLESS and tired. 

Weed is a drug that fires up the senses, fires up the happy section of the brain, gives one the will to live and takes one into the Universal Mind. The Universal Mind is GOD. Love, Higher Love, Creative Love, Sex Love, Love Love and Humanity Love. All at the same time, FROM ONE SPLIFF, OR EVEN HALF OF ONE. 

Additionally, and anyone who has an arthritic type pain like mine to such intense levels will testify, it soothes pain. Let alone many other healing properties it has probably instilled in me and anyone else who champions it. Emotionally it has given me the will to live in this sterile world and given me the COURAGE to go down into the dark nights of alchemy, to turn the lead into gold. Weed is The Great Mother’s gift to us. Honour it. 

Weed soothes the body and mind and heart, to extraordinary levels. In fact, Herb, or Weed, or ‘Pot’ or Marijuana soothes everything. It also is a very sexual, sensual, creative, humanity evoking and senses enlivening experience that takes one into true happiness and leaves you with it for weeks and months afterwards. 

Like anything – well, I am no longer sure about anything about alcohol – but let’s just say that any recreational anything has to be done in moderation and in allocated times, to avoid the non lucid ACTION of life, for sure. 

But to ‘recreate’ with an impotency creating numbness is beyond me. Don’t men traditionally lose the will to have sex with drink? What on earth would anyone want to do that for then? Unless of course, they are trying to stop themselves wanting sex. I suppose that that is one way to self medicate yearning and frustration for sure! Just kill it dead. Have a drink! No wonder the whole world is in ego. And no wonder the whole world is in pain. The agenda is to stop any feeling or thought and get numb and that does reflect normal society’s attitude to everything for sure. How incredibly sad. What a waste of time. 

I used to think it was just me. I gave up alcohol years ago, because I found I could drink a whole bottle of Jack Daniels and it did nothing for me. Herb was much faster, nicer and smoother and very sexy, very sensual and very spiritual. AND INCREDIBLY ACTIVE. And it gave me peace as it always does and always will, if I ever need to access it outside of meditation and creativity and love. Rasta is not stupid, just like all surviving spiritual cultures of the world, rare as they may be. But it’s not me. It’s a weak and useless drug that costs so much money and is EVERYWHERE. 

It takes you nowhere, it certainly does not enliven any senses of mine, it certainly never makes me feel better whenever I check it out to see what all the fuss is about, and now, as I look at it initially and superficially, it’s no wonder people beat people up and whatever. It makes you really IRRITATED!! And it makes you really tired and edgy and horrible. 

Good Lord, Good Lady, what a strange world of imprisonment. I am so fortunate to have lived the life I have lived. And I look at the argument and increasing possibility of legalisation and I am not sure it will be a good thing. Why would we want to regulate the plant of The Universe. The Draconians poison anything they get their hands on, from Hollywood to the high street. Why would we want them to go anywhere near the greatest and most HEALING substance on earth?

What a load of rubbish. Complete waste of time. Have you ever heard of anyone beating someone up because they were on weed? Weed takes you into your soul. Which is precisely why psychosis – of course, that’s talked about all the time – can come from any consciousness shifting drug, of course. It’s not the drug that is to blame. It is the lack of esoteric and spiritual and emotional education to handle it that causes that sickness to go along with all the others on earth. The non Temple society from hell. 

Alcohol, from what I can see, takes you bang down into the ground. As base chakra as can be. And it sits in you like a lead ball. Horrible. And sooooo weak! I’ve had a good life. Long may weed continue to dominate the underground of this world. It’s the only place to be. Clearly. Publicly though, I wanted to start defending and exploring the madness of this world’s attitude to it. Smoke weed! You’ll feel a fuck of a lot better. The New World is calling. It’s called Sensi. 

Thank you. And have a good, drugs filled weekend. Either, terrestially or celestially (meditation). Leave the numbness shit alone. Think, feel and have sex. You'll feel much better:) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014  

Hierophant (Hieroglyphics) 

A person, especially a priest, who interprets sacred mysteries or esoteric principles.

Wikipedia 

...Werewolves being Priest Apprentices. 

Goddesses/Disirs/Hierophants being High Priestesses. 

Smoke! Enter The Universal Mind. You have the gift too. Inner power comes from The Universal Mind and The Inner (Universal) Heart. Smoke! Open up to who you are. And forget the rest. 

You'll feel a fuck of a lot better. 

No wonder the whole world is so cruel. It's all drinking the most useless substance on earth. Alcohol. Or of course, drinking or smoking nothing at all. And being 'religious' instead. No wonder. Open your mind. It so deserves it. Open your heart. There is a good life to be lived on this earth. The real 'HIGH' life. Universal love. The Universe, on earth. She gave us the gift of a real life. Use it. You are, truly, MORALLY allowed. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Miracle Growth. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

There is a big difference between respect with knowledge and the terror of judgmentalism and ignorance. 

We've cleared it all. Now the question is perfectionism. Do we long distance judge or do we make that journey together. 

I am no longer a slave and am ready to be a true mother. You have respect and know you are finally allowed to be a son. 

Let me be your Sacred Whore Monarch Lolita. Let me look after you the way SHE looks after me. 

Let us look after you the way you have always wanted. Let us let you be the father son you were born to be. 

You and I can hold each other now. You can bring me all the greatness of your world now. I am no longer afraid and my respect now, again matches yours. 

I know who I am. Let me help you know the same about yourself. 

Let me Sourcerer my favourite apprentice. Let you take care of me. 

Let's grow the rest together. 

Let's umbrella the world. It needs it so. As we are finally allowed and able to need each other. 

The timing I hand over to you. My job is intention. My job is to give you redemption. 

Take it with all the love in the world. It is given. Your ascension will come. WITH me. 

Don't be afraid anymore. I have enough courage for both of us. The unconditional love is now Divine. The rest is negotiation, argument and growth. 

Either we do it from the austere 'safety' of our respective cells. Or we fly together. 

I choose risk and joy. What about you? 

Exactly. It came from you. 

'Souls almighty. Don't you know, we are willing'. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ♡♡ 2014

The Times 

My Case for Legalising Prostitution. Caitlin Moran 

‘I can’t see why women being sex workers is such a big thing. Caring for the dying is far more intimate’

I get why women having sex is a problem – I really do. Back in, say, 1400 – before contraceptives, prophylactics and antibiotics – women who had sex were, basically, a potential danger. If they whooped it up around the village, they could pass on incurable diseases that would make hands, or penises, fall off. And as for themselves, sex could equal pregnancy – with all its chances of maternal injury or death.

You can see why, as scared human beings in a pre-medical era, we came up with those brutal emergency social categorisations of “virgin” “mother” and “whore”. The main three “types” of women – all solely predicated on their sexual activity. We made “sex ladies” and “not-sex ladies” – good virgins who were kept safe from diseases in order to later become disease-free mothers, and then the bad women, who were for having sex with.

If I’m being honest, had I been the ruler of a country in medieval times where syphilis and gonorrhoea were rampant, and I had no antibiotics or condoms, there’s every chance that even I – a massively bad-ass strident feminist – would have come up with the same arrangement. I, too, would have overseen a system where sex work is seen as one of the most awful things a woman can do.

However. It’s 2014. And the big question you have to ask yourself about the stigma around sex work in the 21st century is: would we invent this system now? Forget everything that has gone before. If – in some mad, sci-fi world – sex had only been invented yesterday, in an era where women are legally equal to men, with contraceptives and condoms, where married couples are encouraged to do it at least twice a week, and there’s dating, Tindr and Girls – would we outlaw sex work? If there was a man who wanted to have sex with a woman, and a woman said, for the first time, “Okey-dokey – I’ll do that, with a condom, for £100,” would we prosecute him? Would we say she could only do this business transaction with him if she stood on the outskirts of town at 2am, picking up customers blind?

In the otherwise sexy old 21st century, it seems so many of our prejudices about sex work run on attitudes we haven’t updated since 1400. I can’t see why women wanting to be sex workers is such a big thing. There are far more intimate, legal business exchanges going on every day. Can we really say putting our elderly and dying in the care of others is less intimate than someone having sex with someone for 20 minutes? Or leaving our children at nurseries, in the protection of others?

It is perfectly societally acceptable – indeed, desirable – for a woman to walk into a beautician’s and have her anus waxed by someone she’s never met before. During that exchange, you’re supposed to keep up a flow of polite chitchat about the weather – a far weirder idea, to me, than having sex with someone who wants to keep the conversation to a more honest and basic “Yes, yes, more.”

We pay therapists to listen to our most intimate secrets, women to host our surrogate pregnancies, men to donate sperm to make our future children. Is having consensual sex for cash really in a radically different physical and emotional dimension to all these legitimate human exchanges? Only if you believe that all sex should be done purely and solely from deep and loving motivations. And quick conversation with all your married/dating friends should remind you that most people in this country have transgressed that unsaid rule on a fairly regular basis, yet continue not to be socially shunned.

One of the biggest sticking points in the sex work debate is, understandably, the issue of sex trafficking. The last estimate suggested 2,600 women working as prostitutes in the UK had been trafficked for sex work.

But trafficking isn’t inherent to prostitution. That’s an abhorrent and illegal practice of the current sex work industry – not sex work itself. By the same chalk, parts of the fashion industry are reliant on trafficking and slave work. But no one would suggest we criminalise the fashion industry – we lobby for human rights instead. What’s one of the main things that keeps the sex trafficking industry in rude health, with each woman earning an estimated £48,000 per annum for their kidnapper? Trafficked women knowing they cannot approach the police, because their work is criminalised.

Make sex work legal – create a world where women can run their own secure and regulated brothels, pay tax on that respectable, middle-class £48k a year, and be seen to be doing a job no more socially unacceptable than the person who is, even now, putting a clean nightshirt on your grandmother – and it would be very difficult to continue keeping these women hidden and imprisoned.

I really don’t think we would criminalise sex work if it had been invented yesterday. And so today, we must look at it again, as 21st-century people – and not scared, sex-fearing medieval peasants. 

caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk 

The Times 

Michael Lewis. The Scourge of Wall Street 

Will Pavia 

An explosive new book reveals how, in the blink of an eye, money is skimmed off stock-market trades every day, making a powerful minority even richer. Now the FBI is investigating. Will Pavia meets its author, Michael Lewis

“I’ll tell you a weird story,” says Michael Lewis, the writer whose weird stories have occasionally upended industries. In late March, Lewis was on an airport bus in Arizona, speaking on his mobile phone to his publisher about his upcoming book, Flash Boys. “There was a guy with what appeared to be his wife and kids at the front,” he says. “And he comes and sits right next to me. And he says, ‘I’m really sorry to seem to be stalking you, but I’m leading an investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office into high-frequency trading, and we’re very interested in your book.’”

This was a book that had not yet been published. No review copies had been sent out; the contents had been kept a closely guarded secret. Yet there was already a great deal of speculation about what it might contain. The other group, besides law enforcement personnel, who were particularly interested in it, were high-frequency traders, the new panjandrums of Wall Street, who wield computer code and high-speed cable networks that nip in and out of the markets millions of times a day, buying and selling shares in a fraction of the blink of an eye. When Lewis had almost finished the manuscript, he began getting some frantic messages from members of that caste, demanding that he talk to them.

“Big-time people,” he says. “These people – who had refused to be interviewed by me – were now e-mailing me and basically suggesting that I had an obligation to interview them. I said, ‘Why didn’t you let me know eight months ago when I asked?’ I think their first response was: ‘We just won’t tell him anything and then he won’t know.’”

Lewis, 53, says he was perplexed by their reluctance to talk about what they did for a living. “Why is the stock market a secret?” he says. “That’s the thing that I wanted to know. All this secrecy, how much money they’re making, where the trades are – that this stuff is secretive is nuts.”

We’re in a restaurant in the Four Seasons hotel in Washington DC. Lewis is dressed like a college professor on holiday: navy sweater, light blue cords and trainers with luminous laces. He is tanned, if not weathered, and his auburn hair now contains the occasional lonely strand of white. He hails from New Orleans, and as he speaks you sometimes catch the longer vowel sounds, the grace notes of a drawl. His expression is one part owl, two parts hawk.

Flash Boys, his juggernaut of a book, has been out for five days now, and somehow, an account about a highly technical and marginally understood trading practice has become the talk of America.

Lewis was once a trader himself, at Salomon Brothers, before abandoning that world on what seemed a flimsy pretext: someone had offered him a modest publishing contract. The resulting book, Liar’s Poker, came to be the set text on Eighties Wall Street excess, and other wildly successful works of non-fiction followed, studies of Silicon Valley (The New Big Thing) or the housing bubble (The Big Short), which read like thrillers and made him a mulitmillionaire. Even so, he claims to have been stunned by the sound and fury that has greeted his latest true story.

“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” says Lewis. Moneyball, his book about a baseball coach – which became a film starring Brad Pitt – caused a huge stir, and is credited with changing the way a lot of teams now recruit their players. “But that was in the world of baseball,” he says. “I mean, the US Department of Justice wasn’t announcing an investigation of baseball scouts.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder has just appeared before a senate committee and announced that his department is now looking at high-frequency trading and “investigating this practice to determine whether it violates insider trading laws”. Earlier in the week, both the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission declared that they, too, were now probing the so-called Flash Boys and their high-frequency trading practices.

These are men (and they do seem to be mostly men) who make their fortunes in milliseconds. Here’s how it works: when an ordinary trader, let’s call him Ted, enters a bid for shares on a computer in New York City, that bid order takes fractions of a second to reach the computers of the various stock exchanges housed in warehouses in northern New Jersey. The order might take a couple of thousandths of a second to reach the nearest exchange, BATS Global Markets, and a few more milliseconds to reach the others.

High-frequency traders’ computers are so fast they can detect Ted’s bid as it hits the first market, and streak ahead of it to the other exchanges. Before you can say “Jack Robinson”, before you have even begun to pronounce the J, the high-frequency guys have snapped up the shares Ted was trying to buy and sold them on at a marginally higher price. By zipping in and making himself the middle man between buyer and seller, the high-frequency trader skims a couple of pennies here and there, on millions of trades a day, and makes millions out of those milliseconds.

Lewis became interested in these traders when he was covering the story of Russian computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov, who had been arrested by the FBI shortly after leaving his job at Goldman Sachs. Aleynikov was accused of walking away with a computer code he had been working on. Prosecutors said the code could be used to “manipulate the markets in unfair ways”. Lewis found it strange that no one questioned why Goldman Sachs had such a code. He also noted that the Russian was described as a high-frequency trading programmer, yet no one seemed to know what that was. It seemed to Lewis that there was a cadre of people who were making a lot of money and who had very little interest in telling anybody how they were doing it.

In late 2012, when Lewis was still circling his subject, looking for a way in, he spoke to a mild-mannered Canadian named Bradley Katsuyama. “He had read Moneyball and Liar’s Poker,” says Lewis. “Katsuyama said, ‘I’ll teach you about this.’ After I’d talked to him for about an hour, I said, ‘Say what? It works like what?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

Katsuyama was particularly well placed to explain things – he had spent the previous five years investigating high-frequency trading himself. In the summer of 2007, Katsuyama began noticing that shares he was bidding on tended to vanish from his computer screen the moment he pushed a button to execute them.

He wasn’t particularly technically minded, but he made it his job to investigate on behalf of his bank, the Royal Bank of Canada. He got in touch with Irishman Ronan Ryan, who had been laying fibre optic cables for high-frequency trading firms.

Signals travel down a fibre optic cable at about two-thirds the speed of light; you lose millionths of a second over longer distances, and if the wire turns a lot of corners. High-frequency traders duly spend huge amounts of money on wiring, and pay fees to place their servers inside the stock exchanges themselves, as near as possible to the processor that handles the trades. Ryan’s company alone had charged firms $80 million between 2005 and 2008 to wire up computers inside exchanges. Lewis describes one company that was “digging trenches in places that would give Tony Soprano pause” and another extraordinary operation, carried out in great secrecy, to lay as straight a cable as possible between New Jersey and the futures exchange in Chicago by tunnelling beneath the mountains of Pennsylvania. All to avoid the circuitous routes of existing networks and thus save fractions of seconds.

Katsuyama recruited a team of brilliant programmers and problem-solvers, a medley of Wall Street misfits. He interviewed others, too, waving the prospect of a job in front of them in order to pump them for information about what was going on on their firms’ trading floor. Lewis writes in Flash Boys that “the thread running through all these people, even the ones he didn’t hire, was their fear and distrust of the system”. Katsuyama, Ryan and the rest gradually realised what they were up against – most of the big banks were involved in high-frequency trading in some way, and this went all the way to the top.

Katsuyama quit his job and took most of his team with him. They launched a new market, IEX, which was designed to thwart high-frequency traders by introducing a delay of 350 microseconds on every trade, a feat that required 38 miles of cable in a container the size of a shoe box.

As Lewis chronicles this journey – a Canadian and his band of brothers, taking on Wall Street – you begin to understand why those high-frequency traders were worried. High-frequency trading is legal and above board, as far as we know, and it has been going on for years, but set out in plain English it looks more than a little odd. The ultra-fast line to Chicago was available only to the highest bidders, who wanted to keep it as exclusive as possible. One prospective customer, offered access for a fee of £20 million, asked: “Can you double the price?”

We read of steak dinners in Omaha where high-frequency firms bought the customer “order flow” of online broker TD Ameritrade. (This is the mechanism whereby discount brokerages sell most of their clients’ orders to wholesale companies, which then trade them outside traditional stock exchanges.) “The payment for the order flow is as off the record as possible,” Chris Nagy, a former employee of the broker, told Lewis. The high-frequency guys were said to be particularly interested in seeing the share bids made by small-time investors with slower internet connections and computer processors. “Yours and mine,” Nagy told him. “Our quotes are late to the market, a full second behind.”

We read of banks striking similar deals with high-frequency traders to give them privileged access to private exchanges, their so-called “dark pools”. The high-frequency traders also pay some of the exchanges to receive advance notice of bids coming in.

Underlying this speedy new world are shades of a Hollywood-style dystopia, of ruling the world, of computer malfunctions that send the markets reeling. A cadre of Russian programmers build the computer systems, often not knowing what they are working on, or how valuable it will prove. Aleynikov was convicted because almost no one – not the prosecutors and certainly not the jury – had any real sense of what he had done. His conviction was overturned, but while in jail, he remained cheery, because it didn’t feel terribly different from the gloomy cubicle where he had laboured, writing his codes.

We hear of trading algorithms with names such as Ambush and Nighthawk. Credit Suisse markets one called Guerrilla, with the aid of a flip-down chart that bears a picture of Che Guevara scowling, as if someone has told him how his image is being used.

I tell Lewis that he makes Wall Street seem like a fantasy realm. The dark pools sound like somewhere Gollum would bathe and the Flash Boys, the new masters of the millisecond universe, are like a secretive group of alchemists, turning base metals into gold. It sounds like Game of Thrones or Middle Earth, only with less progressive attitudes towards women. Had Lewis declared that Merrill Lynch had begun breeding dragons, I’m not sure I would have been terribly surprised.

“This is what it is,” says Lewis. “I didn’t think about it until after I wrote the book, but it is Lord of the Rings and Brad Katsuyama is Frodo. And he’s triggered a war, and he’s got a special power: his ability to explain things to other people.”

This may not entirely defuse the arguments of critics who feel Lewis over-dramatises his subjects, picking out heroes and villains and generally making a great and very readable fuss about nothing.

“I get accused of that, of course,” he says. “But the people who live this story would say it feels very dramatic: staring-at-the-ceiling-at-night dramatic, mind-spinning dramatic. I have to order the material; it is true that I have to make the drama clear, [but] I don’t feel that the emotions in the book are even an inch away from the real ones experienced.”

Things didn’t get any less dramatic once Lewis had finished his book. Katsuyama read it a few days before it was published. “I don’t think he was surprised by his role in the book, but he was surprised his wife was interested,” says Lewis. “He’s got what appears to be a pretty narrow technical story. But he thinks, ‘Oh my god – my wife is liking this story. A lot of people might want to read the story.’” 

On the day of publication, Lewis was at home in Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife Tabitha Soren and their three children. He writes in a cabin, made of redwood, that stands in their garden. It all sounds rather idyllic. “Where we live does look a bit like the Shire,” he says, in keeping with his Lord of the Rings theme. On Monday afternoon he left the Shire for Mordor, or at least for New York, where his Canadian Frodo was already at the centre of a storm. “His world blew up,” says Lewis.

Katsuyama had never been on television; he made his debut on the prime-time CBS show 60 Minutes. Then he appeared live on business news channel CNBC. The network has a circular, open-plan studio slap bang in the middle of the New York Stock Exchange. There, Katsuyama squared off William O’Brien, president of BATS Global Markets. In the book, the exchange is portrayed as a creation of the high-frequency traders and a critical element of their hegemony; this was Frodo versus a lord of Mordor.

O’Brien accused Lewis of writing Katsuyama a 300-page press release. He appeared enraged at the Canadian’s suggestion that the American markets were rigged. Katsuyama managed to keep his cool and just about hung on to his smile, but it must have been a terrifying experience.

“He wasn’t terrified,” says Lewis. “He was angry. He was worried he was going to hit the guy.” Lewis said he thought the quarrel was interesting, “but I didn’t think it was nearly as interesting as Wall Street found it”, he says. “Trading floors on Wall Street stopped. A thousand guys stopped and watched. I heard a great story from a guy at one of the big Wall Street firms. They were watching it, and his colleague goes, ‘So the angry guy [O’Brien]. Do we have an investment in his exchange?’ My source says, ‘Yeah, we do.’ Then his colleague says, ‘So the little guy [Katsuyama], we don’t have an investment in his exchange?’ He replies, ‘No we don’t.’ So the colleague says, ‘We’re f***ed.’”

Lewis laughs heartily as he retells this story. “And I had tears in my eyes when Brad stepped down,” he says. “All these guys on the exchange gave him a standing ovation and this big guy came and lifted him up.”

Lewis met Katsuyama for tea the following afternoon in Midtown Manhattan. By now the book was becoming hard to avoid. “I sat there at the table, and I hear Flash Boys,” says Lewis, gesturing to one side. “I hear: ‘Have you read this new Michael Lewis book?’ I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’”

Surely he wasn’t complaining? “It’s very good for the book, but it’s not healthy for me, or for Brad or for any of us. It’s not normal.”

Lewis called Billie Beane, the baseball team manager who was at the centre of the controversy that followed the publication of Moneyball. “He was laughing,” says Lewis. “He was saying, ‘It’s Moneyball all over again.’ Someone does something disruptive like this to an industry [and] it realigns everybody…Every actor in the industry is forced to respond and the responses are all over the map. The person at the centre of the story ends up taking the bulk of the grief.”

Lewis will spend a few weeks promoting the book and then, “I get to go home to Berkeley and hide, like someone who starts a fight and then runs away. It’s not a heroic role,” he says. “Brad Katsuyama gets to spend the next decade of his life in this war.”

Lewis has found himself offering advice to Katsuyama and the other people in his book. He frequently refers to them as “characters”, as if he were a novelist rather than a non-fiction writer. “It will settle down after people have read it,” he says. “It will take longer than it did with Moneyball, but all the angst and unpleasantness my main characters are experiencing will turn into a gentle glow and they’ll feel good again.”

The other unlikely hero in the story is Goldman Sachs, the bank widely known as a vampire squid and the sort of thing you can easily place in a Tolkien story. In a climactic scene, Goldman Sachs is transformed from squid to white knight, riding to the rescue of Katsuyama’s fledgling market. Lewis puts this down to two men newly installed at the top of the bank’s stock market operations. “They truly believed that the market at the heart of the world’s largest economy has grown too complex and was likely to experience some catastrophic failure,” he writes.

Lewis admits hesitating slightly at the thought of praising the bank. “I thought, ‘If I end up helping to resuscitate Goldman’s reputation, how will I feel about that?’” he says. “I think the guys at Goldman who did this are good guys. I think they really want to do the right thing. If they aren’t rewarded for doing this – it’s going to cost them some money – then why will Goldman ever behave well? That incentive structure needs to return to Wall Street, right?” You may not get your Christmas bonus, guys, but glory awaits in a Michael Lewis book.

The main criticism levelled at Lewis is that, far from being bad for markets, high-frequency trading helps to make them more efficient and better at serving small investors. Critics say Lewis has sided with hedge funds against the little guy. “I don’t know where this argument comes from, but it seems to me so obviously wrong,” says Lewis. “Big hedge funds, weirdly, are on the same side of the market, the losing side, as even individual investors. But even if you leave to one side the guy in his underpants trading on E-Trade, the mass of middle-class savings are in big institutions.”

Lewis points to his account of the online broker selling its “order flow”. “Nobody wants it on paper; they want it to be handshake deals,” he says. “Nagy himself said their ‘order flow’ was the most valuable because their customers were the stupidest.”

Lewis says the high-frequency traders benefit from volatility. “It creates instability in the market, and it’s offensive. It’s like rich people stealing from middle-class people.”

Will there be any prosecutions? Lewis is not sure. “If they know that there’s this group of very smart people who have spent the past five years digging up information about how the markets work from the inside and they have managed to persuade Goldman Sachs that they’re right, that saves the investigators a lot of work,” he says. “So if there was any influence on the process it was that. Just finding out that Brad Katsuyama existed.”

So when will the movie happen? I think the question might be a little premature, but it seems not. “The most responsible person I’ve dealt with in the past week is my Hollywood agent,” says Lewis. “He’s had 30 producers trying to buy it. And he said, ‘You can’t come back to me to make an offer until you’ve read the book and have some concrete idea of what you’re going to do.’”

Lewis says he can already imagine the opening scene – the workmen laying a cable to Chicago. Then you have the medley of misfits who take on Wall Street. “The Dirty Dozen, Ocean’s Eleven, whatever it is,” he says.

In the acknowledgements section of his book, the names of Katsuyama and every other employee of his new exchange are listed like the heroes of a revolution, “so people can look back and know them”.

Lewis says he genuinely thinks the formation of their previously little known exchange could prove the starting point of a change in the relationship “between Wall Street and the rest of our society. It’s about reducing the role of Wall Street in finance, in our culture,” he says.

Lewis says Ryan appeared on the front page of The Irish Times. Lewis describes him in the book as “having the look of a man who has survived one potato famine and is expecting another”.

“He’s a hero there now,” says Lewis. “He’s the Irish guy who went and kicked some ass in New York.”

Lewis says Katsuyama is now a national-hero figure in Canada, too. “The ambassador wants to come and see him,” says Lewis. “This guy seems like a normal Canadian, nice guy, but he’s about to change the world. And look what’s happened, right?”

Will Pavia 

© Michael Lewis 2014. Flash Boys (£20, Allen Lane) is out now. It is available from the Times Bookshop for £16, free p&p, on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk 

Read an exclusive extract from Michael Lewis’s book in The Times on Monday 

The Times 

Rachel Zoe: how to dress in Hollywood 

Chris Ayres on the rise and rise of the superstylist

In the war that rages between stars and the paparazzi on the streets of LA, Rachel Zoe – pronounced “Zoh” – is the queen of the arms dealers.

For tabloid photographers, she can turn a mundane encounter with an up-and-coming actress into a front-page fashion scoop. For that same actress, she can spin those “just out of bed” pictures into a £150,000 endorsement deal. And for the designer who pays for that deal, she can drum up so much business, all the sweatshops in China couldn’t keep up.

In theory, Zoe is a “stylist”. In reality, she has become one of Hollywood’s most powerful brokers of taste and fame, with a staff of more than 30, an online newsletter read by close to 1 million people a day, her own clothing and accessories lines and a roster of clients (the “Zoe-bots”, as rivals have derided them) that includes Jennifer Lawrence, Jennifer Garner (aka Mrs Affleck) and Kate Hudson.

Indeed, Zoe, along with her relentlessly competitive rivals – among them the former Women’s Wear Daily editor Elizabeth Stewart and the British ex-Burberry publicist Penny Lovell – now wields more influence than many LA studio executives.

When Zoe agrees to meet me at her Melrose Avenue office – encircled by the West Hollywood outlets of Alexander McQueen, Helmut Lang and Marc Jacobs – it’s ostensibly to discuss her latest book, Living in Style. But it soon becomes clear that 42-year-old Zoe – who is the mother of two little boys, Skyler, 3, and newborn Kaius – is also keen to counter some of the less flattering stories that have circulated of late about her trade.

These aren’t just the usual complaints about Zoe’s “mommyrexia” and her infamous black coffee and grapefruit diet. In Vanity Fair, for example, there has been talk of “dress trafficking” and exorbitant £4,000-a-day fees; of murky deals with designers and fashion blacklists for undesirable celebrities; of stylists butchering gowns to satisfy their own egos on Oscars night. That’s not the half of it, either. To some, Zoe and her ilk are responsible for the all-pervasive, inch-deep culture that saw Jennifer Lawrence’s new hairdo – a pixie cut! – being deemed worthy of a breaking-news alert on CNN.

Unsurprisingly, these are opinions with which Zoe takes issue.

“I know this might sound very LA and ridiculous to an English person, but I believe in karma, and that you can succeed in this business without being shady or a back-stabber,” she explains, after ushering me into her minimalist office. “Yes, there are stylists who don’t have one client – or one client who they’d want to have – because of how they’ve treated people in the past, or lied or stolen or manipulated. But you’re either that person or you’re not. And ultimately, if you are, you’ll get discovered.”

In true fashion dominatrix style, Zoe commands our meeting from behind a transparent blob of a desk, tapping her heel on the black hardwood floor as she makes her points. Her outfit on this midweek morning is ironed black trousers, fitted black jacket and the kind of oversized cocktail ring that she popularised as part of her “boho-chic” look – most famously deployed via her bubble-era cipher/socialite client Nicole Richie.

Her face, meanwhile, is half obscured by a surfer-girl mane of blonde. She reminds me of a cross between Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada and Janice, the hippy Muppet.

It would be foolish, of course, to dismiss Zoe as just another LA airhead. She might play the ditz, but there’s no doubt that the woman sitting in front of me is one of the celebrity industry’s most brilliant tactical minds. What’s more, when Zoe isn’t on the red carpet, she leads the life of an abstemious, hyper-competitive CEO. “I barely drink,” she tells me. “I’ve never done drugs. I go to sleep at between 9pm and 10pm. And I’ve been with the same man for 23 years.” (This being Rodger Berman, her Beatles-haired husband and a former Wall Street banker. He takes care of the operational side of the business.)

To fully grasp Zoe’s shrewdness, it is first important to know that what she does for a living didn’t exist until about 15 years ago. Before then, sloppily dressed celebrities, usually eating junk food, were prize game for the paparazzi who circled Beverly Hills and West Hollywood in tinted-window SUVs. (“No one looks good eating,” a photographer once confided to me.) Glitzy awards ceremonies, meanwhile, were held only two or three times a year, and the twirl up the red carpet was treated by many as a kind of fancy-dress parade. Hence Cher’s spiky black alien headgear of 1986. Or Kim Basinger’s comic-strip-villain-meets-blancmange dress of four years later, which endures to this day on fashion-disaster lists.

Zoe was still a teenager during that Moonstruck and Michael Keaton-as-Batman era, living in Millburn, New Jersey, about as far as it is possible to get from Hollywood in the continental US. Not that Rachel Zoe Rosenzweig (as she was then known) was in any way style-deprived. Her father, Ron, had made millions from computer chips – his company, Anadigics, is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange – and he spent his free time travelling the world and collecting art with Zoe’s mother, Leslie. Many of the pieces hang in their Hamptons beach house, which has been featured in property magazines.

“My parents are cool jet-setters,” says Zoe. “I grew up around Mark Tansey paintings and Eames furniture – a very visual environment.”

Zoe cultivated an early Vogue habit, but she had no idea how to make fashion a career. So she read psychology and sociology at George Washington University, where she met Rodger. Then she moved to Manhattan to take a lowly assistant’s job at teen magazine YM, since closed. She was 22. Three years later, she went freelance, renting herself out to the publicists she’d befriended at record labels.

“It was a crazy, crazy time,” she recalls of her constant flying back and forth to Miami, where she worked on promotions for Jessica Simpson and Enrique Iglesias. “The music industry was so different, so lucrative. It was insane, the money they had.”

By the time Napster and iTunes put an end to the fun, Zoe had settled down with Berman (they married in 1998) and was getting bored at work. “It became somewhat formulaic to turn around the images of these pop stars,” she says. “And despite how much money I was making, I wasn’t actually enjoying it. I had this epiphany that I’m a fashion girl, that I want to make women look glamorous, so I had to change things up.”

Next stop: LA.

It was 2002 when Zoe got her first Hollywood client: Jennifer Garner, the up-and-coming star of a new TV show, Alias. Which means to say that instead of music labels paying Zoe’s fees, she was now retained by the publicity department of ABC, the TV network. And when Zoe put Garner in a cream halterneck Narciso Rodriquez for the following year’s Emmys, it changed both of their careers. Zoe pulled off another triumph with a vintage, tangerine-coloured Valentino that Garner wore to the 2004 Oscars. “When Jen put it on, I told her, ‘I don’t know if people are going to understand this,’ ” Zoe recalls. “I thought it was a gamble. But it was the most talked-about dress of the year.”

Zoe quickly became the most sought-after stylist in Hollywood. Instead of playing it safe, however, her next client was a long shot: Nicole Richie, daughter of Lionel. (Zoe claims ignorance as to how she was paid, but hints that the singer wrote the cheques.) Richie had no talent to speak of, but she was young and attractive and had a rising profile in the tabloid press due to her partying with another socialite, Paris Hilton.

Zoe set about taking that profile, strapping rockets to it and blasting it into near-Earth orbit. When the paparazzi took shots of Richie, for example, Zoe made sure that it wasn’t of her client looking drab in undignified poses. Instead, Richie would be walking to or from some LA hotspot wearing a meticulously low-key ensemble and clutching a killer accessory. Richie’s publicists would then encourage the photographer who took the pictures to offer them as a fashion story, not a gossip titbit. And the tabloids lapped it up. 

Especially when they realised how much their advertisers liked this new angle. Headlines such as “Actress X Looks Hideous While Inhaling A Cheeseburger” quickly gave way to “How To Look Casually Cute Like Actress X As She Grabs Quick Lunch With Friends”.

The effect on high-street sales – in particular accessories – was profound. For a year or two, every new photograph of Richie or Hilton seemed to create an “It bag” – the Fendi spy bag, say, or the Givenchy Nightingale – with department stores across the Western hemisphere instantly selling out.

“Fashion makes the star makes the fashion,” went the mantra of Zoe, who, by 2006, had become a celebrity in her own right due to her power to create stars and sell products out of what seemed like thin air. (She published her first book a year later: Style A to Zoe. A reality show, The Rachel Zoe Project, followed in 2008.)

As Zoe’s clients demonstrated their ability to sell tabloids, the more the tabloids wanted them. And the more the tabloids wanted them, so did everyone else. One of the early opportunities Zoe spotted was for red-carpet events, which, like paparazzi shots, could be used aggressively as a tool to advertise whatever it was her clients wanted to endorse. Such cheap programming made the TV networks happy, too. As a result, the so-called Oscars “pre-show” was tripled in length to an hour and a half and given a running, football-style commentary. It’s a trend that has showed no sign of slowing down since. There are now a staggering 19 live awards broadcasts in America a year, each with their own red carpets and after-show parties. According to well-circulated rumours, some fashion brands actually pay celebrities to attend events.

When I ask Zoe if she ever feels a tug of guilt for encouraging this feeding frenzy – what with the paparazzi regularly putting lives at risk in car chases, and her ex-client Lindsay Lohan melting down to the point where she ended up doing community service at the LA County morgue – she offers a blameless shrug. 

“What came first: the chicken or the egg?” she says. “I don’t totally know. But my theory wasn’t, ‘Let’s give the paparazzi a reason to chase celebrities.’ It was more like, if you’re already being chased, and if they’re going to get you anyway, why be in pyjamas when you can be in a cute pair of Louboutin ballet flats and an oversized sweater with a pair of cut-offs?” 

Capitalising on the tabloids’ privacy invasion in this way can actually reduce pressure on actresses, she adds, because the income from endorsement deals gives them the freedom to appear in low-budget films, or take time off when they have a baby.

And while Zoe won’t say it, having your face already on billboards in fashion ads makes you a far safer bet when up for big roles.

A backlash has been long coming, however. A handful of celebrities, such as Diane Kruger, refuse to have any dealings with dress-wrangling middlewomen. And far from praising the likes of Zoe, some studio publicists have ranted about being presented with outlandish invoices for their services. “It’s such a racket,” fumed one to The New York Times. Indeed, there’s now said to be an industry cap of £1,000 a day for styling – lower than hair and make-up budgets. It’s certainly a long way from the £60,000 reportedly once demanded by a famous actress to fly her stylist and team via private jet to a film festival overseas. 

But Zoe is eager to set a few things straight. She is adamant, for example, that she would never accept payment from a fashion house to “suggest” a certain accessory or clothing item to her clients. “That’s essentially stealing,” she says. “You’re manipulating someone to do something so that you can make money off it. The best way is for the stylist to get paid as a stylist. Openly and honestly.”

Zoe adds that even when her clients sign endorsement deals with brands, she doesn’t take a percentage. Instead, she’s paid for her services directly – and transparently – by the fashion house in question. As for complaints by publicists about stylists’ fees, she rolls her eyes and says, “They need to switch places with us for a day and see how that works out.”

The way Zoe tells it, even the Oscars night dress-selection process is relatively straightforward, albeit not without its moments of hysteria. Yes, she admits, some big fashion names refuse to supply samples to stars they consider unworthy – the “do not shoot” list, as it’s known – but as soon as a garment can be bought in shops, “they can’t control that any more”. In contrast, a few designers have exclusive deals. Typically, this means a star will be supplied with four or five gowns of the same label for a big event, and must go with one of them. (Jewellery is a separate issue, with a single earring placement reportedly worth £50,000.) The vast majority of female nominees at any awards show, however, will be free to pick from a deluge of samples or sketches that will be presented to them months beforehand. Instructions for adjustments will then be sent back to the ateliers in Paris, and the final product will arrive via FedEx a day or so in advance.

“They know the game,” says Zoe, when I ask if designers’ egos ever get wounded by such a process. “They know when they are sending that dress that it is going to be one of several options. It either immediately doesn’t work and is sent back, or it goes to someone else, or it gets narrowed down again, most often to two dresses, and the best dress wins.”

As a general rule, all gowns – even worn ones – are returned. If the actress gets her gong, however, it’s considered bad form to ask for it back. That’s usually the least of Zoe’s concerns, however.

“The worst part of my job is always having to tell a designer that they’ve just spent all this time and money building a custom dress, and my client’s not wearing it,” she sighs. “But I’m honest and I never string people along. Nothing is confirmed until my client is in the car. I’m superstitious like that.”

The Zoe who confides all this seems a good deal more humble than the one who can be found quoted in news items from five or ten years ago. Back then, she would tell reporters things such as, “Anna Wintour is one of my heroes, but they say that I’m more influential. As great as it is, Vogue won’t change a designer’s business.”

Being a mother, perhaps, has brought the stylist down to earth. Or closer to it, anyhow. Even an icy feud with Nicole Richie has finally thawed. “You take any friendship or working relationship and there’s break-ups and shake-ups, right? We’re both mums now, we share mutual friends, and we’re very close.”

Motherhood has also forced Zoe to simplify her fashion rules, a point she makes in her new book. “I maintain more of a uniform,” she concedes. “I have ten pairs of black tuxedo pants in different fabrics, ten pairs of my favourite jeans in different washes, a million different tops that I wear that are my go-to basics, and I change my jacket and shoes every day. Oh, and I wear half the amount of jewellery that I used to, because it’s so sharp and spiky.” Even Zoe’s beloved Range Rover is getting ditched for a more practical Mercedes. “I’m having really bad anxiety about it,” she says, in an admission that isn’t likely to win much sympathy beyond her West Hollywood headquarters. “I’m in full denial.”

If Zoe is skimping on her own lifestyle, however, she appears to be making no such economies when it comes to her son Skyler’s wardrobe. She has confessed to buying him £150 Gucci booties that he’ll grow out of in a few months, telling one LA style writer, “I know it’s excessive, it’s disgusting, and I’m embarrassed.” To make up for such indulgences, she buys him only wooden toys, and refuses to throw lavish children’s parties.

Fortunately, she also has the grounding force of Berman, her husband and business partner. “We are best friends and we are pretty much each other’s everything,” she tells me. Just as well, she adds, because “this is a hard business” and it’s only going to get harder as she expands into an eponymous brand of clothing, a move that has resulted in ridicule and/or failure for countless others before, most recently Kayne West.

As of now, her line is available in high-end American department stores (£105 for skinny stretch jeans; £90 for a silk tank), but it hasn’t yet taken off in Britain. Her autumn collection, presented at the LA outpost of Soho House in March, is a tomboyish take on the girls of Sixties Paris.

“People are, like, ‘Why did it take you so long?’ ” she says of her decision to brave the critics and the whims of retail. “It’s the same reason I waited for so long to have children. I knew it would be hard. I knew it would be time-consuming. And I knew that I would love it. But I wanted to give it 100 per cent.”

Chris Ayres 

Living in Style: Inspiration and Advice for Everyday Glamour by Rachel Zoe (Sphere, £18.99) is out now 

The Times

What I’ve learnt: Sheryl Sandberg 

‘In 2011 Forbes ranked me the fifth most powerful woman in the world. I felt embarrassed and exposed’ 

Businesswoman Sheryl Sandberg, 44, is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, about her professional experiences. She was previously employed by the U.S. Treasury and Google and this year became a billionaire. Divorced by the age of 25, she remarried in 2004 and lives in northern California with her second husband, David Goldberg, and their two children.

We can’t get more equality in our work places until we get more equality in our homes. Right now women have two jobs and men have one.

Sharing your emotions can build deeper relationships. I once burst into tears in front of Mark [Zuckerberg]: I was horrified. I’d heard somebody at Facebook had said something false and cruel behind my back and it hurt me deeply. I’d not even been at the company for a year and, like most people, I thought that crying at work was a very bad idea. He asked, “Do you want a hug?” I did. It was a breakthrough moment for us.

All of us, at some level, want to be liked. But I think we also want to make a difference.

Finding the right partner is huge. If you want to marry a man you have to decide what kind of relationship you’re looking for before you settle down. Your career depends on it. If women want the same kind of opportunities at work as men, they have to find a man who wants to be equal at home.

Our memories of early childhood are “memories” that are told to us. My parents told me about being 1 or 2 and in a park eating an orange, and it dripping all over my face. They have a photograph of it, too. That can’t be my earliest memory, and yet it is.

It’s way better to be smart than it is to be popular. Keep studying; if they call you a geek, it’s going to help you in life. I went to a big state high school in Miami and I was a smart girl and it was not cool to be a smart girl. I was pretty convinced that no one wanted to date me. I was never going to be the most popular girl in my class: I think that was probably good for me.

If you’re going to say that the world has to be different, not everyone is going to agree with you. But the only way we create change is by having those conversations and having them loudly.

I’m still a long way from feeling confident. In 2011 Forbes ranked me the fifth most powerful woman in the world. I felt embarrassed and exposed.

It took me ten years to realise that “the good ones” are not always taken. By the age of 25, I was divorced. It felt like a massive personal and public failure. For many years, until I married [my second husband] David Goldberg, I felt that no matter what I accomplished professionally, I was branded with the scarlet letter “D”.

After a while I learnt to accept that my children were going to play differently, and that’s OK. As a mother I would have loved my son and daughter to play with dolls and toy trucks equally. But that didn’t happen: she would kiss her toys, he would smash his up.

Always look at the data. The data’s super-clear that at any income level all children do better if their fathers are active at home, too: they’re happier, better adjusted, do better in school and professionally. That’s very compelling.

Lots of women, but hardly any men, have been told they’re too aggressive at work. I have – “bossy”, “shrill”, “emotional”. The same quality in a man would be called “having high standards”.

Women need to learn how to be comfortable with leadership, with ambition, with power. A world with more females leading it would be more productive, more peaceful, happier.

Lean In: For Graduates by Sheryl Sandberg is published by WH Allen (£16.99) 

And of course, just to keep our own personal (UNIVERSE) miracle in perspective......

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. 

Humbert Humbert. Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov 

Natural Born Mystic™. The Female Holocaust

So, basically I am a suffragette. My Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela and every other heroic journey years. Mine is to have been a suffragette. A suffragette to Wife Beaters and Daughter Beaters. Misogyny is too polite. You are all Wife Beaters. And I am a suffragette. Well, someone's got to do it and someone's got to do the research. This story has to be told in full and for that, the suffragette work has to come first. 

Glad I got that straight again. As for ego, it goes through layer by layer; one step forwards, ten backwards and that kind of thing. 

It was the same with mine. Destiny is as yet unknown. The process most definitely is. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The revolutionist is a psychologically remorseless human being; he (she) cannot be stopped because his (her) goal is all out revolution. Vladimir Lenin 

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great. ~ Mark Twain 

"I'm not a businessman. I'm a business, man." Jay-Z 

Do you love the idea of the Revolution manifesting itself in your life, in your actions, in your political visions? Quoted by Radical Or Slave? 

I cannot get enough of Pharrell! This is perhaps one of the best OprahPrime interviews. Smart. V. Thoughtful. Humble. Self-aware. Quoted by Rogo 

1 in 4 women deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan said they experienced sexual assault. Washington Post 

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men (women), but from doing something worthwhile. ~ Wilfred T Grenfell 

My brother (sister), when thou hast a virtue, and it is thine own virtue, thou hast it in common with no one. Friedrich Nietzsche 

The revolutionary girl sees wealth in the way that people exchange ideas not in the way that they hoard them. Mary Wollstonecraft 

Science is about finding ways to liberate the minds and spirits of humanity. Albert Einstein 

"Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money." -W.J. Cameron 

Few things in life are as unattractive as an arrogant person in a position of leadership. Tim Fargo 

There is little difference between gang wars and capitalist wars, they both are based on the competition over capital. Mahatma Gandhi 

Only the dead have seen the end of war. - George Santayana 

Revolutionary rap injects braveness and boldness in the political outlook of the listener. Tupac Shakur 

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together. Thomas Carlyle 

Third world citizens must start seeing themselves as revolutionaries instead of mere victims. Che Guevara 

I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun. - Thomas Edison

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. - Winston Churchill 

You are goodness, mercy, compassion and understanding. You are peace, joy, and light. Choose to know yourself as these things always. Neale Donald Walsch 

Without your feelings, you would not know where you are in life. Nor would you know what areas you need to work on. Iyanla Vanzant 

Psychology must not serve the global fascist business class through mass media machinations. Sigmund Freud 

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

Paris Review. Mathew Weiner (Madmen) 

Matthew Weiner, The Art of Screenwriting No. 4

Interviewed by Semi Chellas

INTERVIEWER

I’m struck by the irony that Don Draper has become an icon of the 1960s Establishment when the character himself feels like such an outsider.

WEINER

Everyone loves the Horatio Alger version of life. What they don’t realize is that these transformations begin in shame, because poverty feels shameful. It shouldn’t, but everyone who’s experienced it confirms this. Sometimes people say, I didn’t know we were poor—Don Draper knows he’s poor, very much in the model of Iacocca or Walton, who came out of the Great Depression, out of really humble beginnings. Or like Conrad Hilton, on the show. These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.

The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know they were in the presence of a Jew. I was a ghost. Certain male artists like to show that they’re feminists as a way to get girls. That’s always seemed pimpy to me. I sympathize with feminism the same way I identify with gay people and with people of color, because I know what it’s like to look over the side of the fence and then to climb over the fence and to feel like you don’t belong, or be reminded at the worst moment that you don’t belong.

Take Rachel Menken, the department-store heiress in the first season of Mad Men. She’s part of what I call the nose-job generation. She’s assimilated. She probably doesn’t observe the Sabbath or any of these other things that her parents did. That generation had a hard time because they were trying desperately to be buttoned-down and preppy and—this is my parent’s generation—white as could be. They were embarrassed by their parents. This is the story of America, this assimilation. Because guess what, this guy Don has the same problems. He’s hiding his identity, too. That’s why Rachel Menken understands Don, because they’re both trying desperately to be white American males.

Of all of them, Peggy is my favorite. I identify with her struggle. She is so earnest and self-righteous and talented and smart, but dumb about personal things. She thinks she’s living the life of “we.” But she’s not. And every time she turns a corner, someone says, “You’re not part of ‘we.’” “But you all said ‘we’ the other day.” “Yes, we meant, ‘we white men.’”

Paris Review 

The revolutionist loves the people more anything else; he (she) loves the struggle to liberate humanity from the enemy class. Vladimir Lenin 

Sexist people, you know the people who build alliances based on sexist hatred. People You Don't Need 

Consumptive people, they're too socially obedient to bring anything of creative value to your life. People You Don't Need 

The capitalist society is built on the destruction of its members' free will. George Orwell 

The capitalist society uses legal and 'illegal' drugs to lock up people inside of their own weakness. George Orwell 

The capitalists are gangsters who make trillions from the slave labor of humanity. Al Capone 

Bankers: people who pretend to move money from one place to another, charging fees for every imaginary movement. Capitalism Dictionary 

Xenophobic people, you know the fools who blame immigrants for their own personal failures. People You Don't Need 

Racist people, you know the sick fucks who use racism to strengthen their social bonds. People You Don't Need 

Emotionally needy people, they want everyone to understand them yet they're not willing to understand anyone. People You Don't Need 

Naomi Ozaniec. Daughter of the Goddess: the Sacred Priestess

…… We find ourselves at the close of two thousand years of patriarchy, confronting enormous problems of global proportions. The ecological and environmental crises that loom large seem to speak for the failure of a way of life proffered by a male deity. Under the aegis of a Father God, the Earth has been robbed, pillaged and raped, not as simple acts of godlessness but because the Father God offers creation for his children to use as they will. The Father God offers supremacy to his sons. It is their manifest destiny to master the Earth and to conquer. The Earth has been conquered but the victory is manifestly hollow. 

There is no doubt that many women feel the Goddess is reappearing. Women are again working with images of the Divine Feminine to discover themselves. Wherever and whenever the Goddess manifests, women will turn towards Her in service as priestesses. 

The eventual demise of the priestess coincided with a profound change in sacred belief. The whole edifice of the ancient world was dismantled as God replaced Goddess and the sons of the father supplanted the daughters of the mother. The Nymph of the Grove, in The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves, reacts to the spread of the Father God with alarm and disbelief: “Who may a Father God be? How can any tribe worship a father. What are fathers for but the occasional instruments that a woman uses for her pleasure and for the sake of becoming a mother?” 

The Goddess was dethroned, the priestess was removed from sacred office. Womanhood fell from grace to disgrace…..  

Daughter of the Goddess: The Sacred Priestess. Naomi Ozaniec 

I have always been interested in the human quest for meaning and justification. I have always found the comparative search for the absolute, deeply fascinating. Each civilisation, indeed each society, offers its own truth as being the only truth. The broad historical sweep of this work has enabled me to become immersed in some of the many explanations of the human-divine relationship. I am still fascinated, perhaps even more so by the belief structures which uphold civilisations. 

This book has not been an easy one to write. I set out with many questions. I have not found all the answers. Documentary evidence for civilisations long dead is incomplete and more often non-existent. Artefacts and archaeological sites reveal the bare bones of a people. The moving spirit of a civilisation is far harder to touch and describe, it is as elusive as perfume upon the air. Yet it is this invisible essence which breathes life into actions and most especially ritualised actions. 

I am interested in the role assigned to women by differing societies generally, but I am particularly interested in the differing functions assigned to women who played a sacred role for others. I deplore the lack of women in sacred office in the world today. 

My own interest is more than academic or historical. I have witnessed meditation, conscious mediumship at close quarters. It is powerful, it can be awe-inspiring. I have mixed with women who currently fulfil the role of priestess with great devotion. The priestess is alive and well at the end of the twentieth century. 

I have enjoyed the detective work imposed by the task of researching this book. It is still incomplete. There are still many unanswered questions. I have become deeply interested in the matter of polarity which has reappeared unbidden through various civilisations. It seems that the sexes are still at war one against the other. 

I am interested in the past and the present but most of all I am interested in the future. How will the undeniable re-emergence of the Goddess tradition develop? Will it flower into a movement which has something genuine to offer humanity in the twenty-first century, or will it wither on the vine, starved by its own narrow interests. 

I have been immersed in this study both by day and by night. My dream life has reflected my work, throwing up goddesses and bee maidens alike. A dream of Isis released me from a deep, agonising paralysis of spirit which afflicted me midway through my work. I had fallen into gloom and was convinced that the fruits of my labours would only meet rejection by women so attuned to another note. 

I feel that I have merely scratched the surface of the issues which I found to be pertinent. Hopefully others will follow. There is much still to be discovered. 

Introduction 

In the history of religions priests and priestesses represent high sacral personages. Their specific character consists of being invested by a community as supernatural authorized mediators to the transcendental world for the performance of the public cult rituals. 

J Maringer. Priests and Priestesses in Prehistoric Europe 

The contemporary perspective of society makes it difficult for us as a group to recognise and respect the role of the priestess as a sacred ministrant and mediator of divine presence. The Church of England is being riven asunder by the question of women’s ordination. Imagine the reverberations if these women were demanding recognition as priestesses of Christ. The fact that these women seek to be priests rather than priestesses is a measure of male dominance within Christianity. 

The priest is an all too familiar figure. We understand his functions as personal counsellor, theologian and as the official representative of sacred power at religious ceremony only too clearly. 

The priestess is an unfamiliar figure to society at large, a leftover from the ancient world, dragged up from the depths like the rediscovered coelacanth. Such is the power of androcentricity, the male-centered society. However, the priestess was not always an unfamiliar figure. 

Priestesses were prominent in the vanished civilisations of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Crete, Greece and Rome. Priestesses in shamanic guise were important throughout oriental history. They were significant in Celtic lands and in Old Europe. The priestess was a familiar and accepted figure in the ancient world. The priestess of Demeter enjoyed such high prestige that she was accorded a special place at the Olympic games. She sat upon a raised dais and was treated as a semi-divine person. Plutarch dedicated his study, De Iside et Osiride, and a second book, Brave Deeds of a Woman, to the priestess Clea. Sacred women played a definite and particular role in many varied societies. 

We cannot doubt the existence of these women, but we should not make careless assumptions about their functions. We have to permit these past civilisations to speak for themselves as far as is possible. Imposing twentieth-century values and assumptions on cultures long dead is dangerous and facile. It is only too easy to superimpose current feminist values onto the past. Superficially at least, there would seem to be a harmonious resonance between the intentions of modern women’s spirituality and the practices of the ancient female priesthoods. Yet if we are not to be simply glib in our comparison, we must be prepared to look beneath the surface presented by the past. We need to ask many questions. Who were the women who became priestesses? What function did they fulfil? By what authority did they hold office? What was the nature of their work? What kind of daily lives did these women lead? It is possible that we will not find the answers which have simply been lost in the intervening morass of history. 

The term ‘priestess’ has now appeared in contemporary feminist vocabulary, indeed the priestess has reappeared in person. It is simply assumed that current usage is identical with past meaning. The shamanic priestess, medium and mediator are not identical in psychic function. The initiator into women’s blood mysteries and the initiator into the transcendent mysteries are not identical either in function or intention. Yet both ministrants might be called priestesses. We will have to be prepared to look further than simple labelling if we are to understand what these women meant within their own time. 

The feminist movement has done much to reclaim the history of women. This is a powerful corrective to written history which has been little concerned with the contribution and value of women. It is undeniable that the male historical perspective is at best incomplete and at worst distorted. Women themselves feel that it is time that the balance was redressed. The process is ongoing and open ended. Feminist theologians and writers have revealed the uncompromising androcentric thrust of cultural development. 

Feminists have done much to uncover both the overt and covert ways in which women’s freedoms have been restricted in the past. Their work has also significantly contributed to a revival of interest in the Goddess-based religions of the past. The worship of The Great Mother presents a powerful antidote to the male-dominated religions of this present Great Age in which so many women feel excluded, and even reviled. It has also contributed significantly to a renewed interest in the role of the priestess. 

The image of female deity is compelling for we are born from the mother. It is not difficult to envisage the prime creative principle in female form. Historically, the creator was worshipped as The Great Mother long before the notion of the Father God existed. We are in a position to look back through history and observe the results and consequences of these two contrasting belief systems. We find ourselves at the close of two thousand years of patriarchy, confronting enormous problems of global proportions. The ecological and environmental crises that loom large seem to speak for the failure of a way of life proffered by a male deity. Under the aegis of a Father God, the Earth has been robbed, pillaged and raped, not as simple acts of godlessness but because the Father God offers creation for his children to use as they will. The Father God offers supremacy to his sons. It is their manifest destiny to master the Earth and to conquer. The Earth has been conquered but the victory is manifestly hollow. 

There is no doubt that many women feel the Goddess is reappearing. Women are again working with images of the Divine Feminine to discover themselves. Wherever and whenever the Goddess manifests, women will turn towards Her in service as priestesses. 

The eventual demise of the priestess coincided with a profound change in sacred belief. The whole edifice of the ancient world was dismantled as God replaced Goddess and the sons of the father supplanted the daughters of the mother. The Nymph of the Grove, in The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves, reacts to the spread of the Father God with alarm and disbelief: “Who may a Father God be? How can any tribe worship a father. What are fathers for but the occasional instruments that a woman uses for her pleasure and for the sake of becoming a mother?” 

The Goddess was dethroned, the priestess was removed from sacred office. Womanhood fell from grace to disgrace. 

As we set out to look into the history of our race to search for the priestesses of the past, we are brought face to face with the difficulty of the task. In truth we need to examine the spiritual and cultural history of every civilisation in order to seek out the threads which bind woman and Goddess together, watching as it is torn away to prise woman and Goddess apart. 

The attempt to examine the historical role of the priestess is not an easy one. Nonetheless the search has value. In finding the past we might just come to understand the present a little more clearly. 

Introduction. Naomi Ozaniec 

Archetypal Irritation. You. Amera Ziganii Rao 

…..and to transpose it into the micro, to make it a part of our psychological and sociological and human development, it brings in the idea of the two archetypes again. It is not enough to ‘tolerate’ or ‘accept’ female vocation. It’s hers. Not yours. The Werewolf/Pig Species/Mars archetype (and indeed, equivalent of the Venus archetype) is always the same, male or female. Such crap producers, such crap bosses, such crap everything, and yet, EVERYTHING has to be about them. Not even our work can be ours, not even when we have taken full responsibility for everything in our own lives. Still, there has to be ownership. You are damn right. My ownership, the ownership of the person in question, for their own vocation. 

The repetition of the archetypal irritations is too much. Right from birth to now, I have experienced the same thing. And it comes down to that ‘collective unconscious’. The rape and pillage of the ‘male god’. Total belief that we want your world, your leadership and your fucking god. Men are for sex. Full stop. Until they recognise that, until the Mars archetype recognises that, there is no partnership. Which is why ‘sisters’ truly have to do it for themselves. And make the men (or women) watch, like everyone else. 

Not even when you accept the cruelty, neglect, selfishness and absolute, conditional love, is it enough. No. They have to own something about you. Anyone who knows me will tell you that if you try to own anything about my work, you will die a painful death. And still, your archetype, and you persist. You are on such a losing streak. And it all comes down to that falsehood of historical shift. And if we go to ‘La Familia’, again, it is all down to that shift, when sisters are made to shut up and worship the brothers, the little king versions of Daddy O. Fuck that. Your time is over. I offer you partnership. You offer me dictatorship now, as you did then. You have so far to go, I am not watching you anymore. I have work to do. MY work. ME, ME, ME, ME, MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE!!!!! 

Unbelievable. And unbelievably unattractive. And I know you have been told this before. I know your whole archetype and the Venus equivalents have been told this so many times before. You don’t care. You truly still think it is your world. Not inside my head, love. Er, that is me. Your idea of love is so fucked up, it actually makes me laugh now. Hahahahaha. Not. 

We don’t want your world. We don’t want your ‘Svengali’ attitudes anymore. We want friendship. Same thing, again and again and again. No friendship, no respect and yet, this relentless, emptily arrogant, useless, presumptive, unfounded, without qualification, total will to own, without any of giving that is actually required. Required, begged for and totally denied. You are still, seven years on, absolutely nothing to give, other than patriarchal property owning shit. 

And everything has to be spelled out to you, just as with all your kind, Mars or Venus. Grow up, I think is the usual comment. I’ll be polite and just leave it at that. Fuck off, is what I want to say. Ooops, did I say it? Fuck OFF. And come back if and when you have anything else to say. 

Archetype is so easy to read now, it is boring. Ego is so easy to read now that it is boring. Face your truths and watch. Watch me. You have not even begun to evolve. You give nothing, you get nothing. That is cause and effect. 

You get to sit in the ‘gods’. You’ll like that. The worst seats in the house. And all you deserve. 

And I will dance on your patriarchal grave. Thor as Whor. Right on. 

I AM BUILDING MY WORLD. You can watch. Oh yes, that’s all you can do. Well, this time, WATCH. And learn. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Archetypal Irritation. Amera Ziganii Rao 

And yes, I have accepted that I can only attract CONTROLLING NARCISSISTS. I am not looking to attract anyone ever again. Whatever the few women on earth have found, I have never found. I can only attract controlling narcissists and I accept that. 

And I run, run, run, run, and run. Because I am bored. When I am bored, I am dangerous. And I am very bored of you. And indeed, the whole template of what I can attract. It's done. 

I am not looking to attract anyone anymore. I can only attract controlling narcissists. And I accept it. I'm gone. 

32 years research and experience is done. Now, it's sharing this such generic story with anyone else who needs it. How to get rid of Controlling Narcissists. How to get rid of the male god. 

Do have a good Easter. With YOUR male god. And please, be Controlling Narcissists. But only with each other. We don't want you. We never wanted that. We wanted love. I get it. The Holy Grail for us is unattainable. You and your kind are all Controlling Narcissists. Be who you are. I am most certainly going to be nothing, other than who I am. Bloody brilliant and bloody gorgeous. 

And single. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

These women who became the inspirational founders of popular cults, each experienced suffering and deprivation in early life, loneliness and even cruelty in close relationships, the untimely death of children and rejection by the social group as a whole. It is this alchemical process which gives birth to shamanic qualities, powers and inspiration. 

The true shaman only comes to birth, after much personal suffering and misery. The cost is high. 

Naomi Ozaniec. Daughter of the Goddess: Sacred Priestess 

Love Amendment. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Yeah well. Maybe not single. Never with you. But you know what I mean. Sort it out. I'm worth it and so are you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

And God Created Woman ll Pt lll (ll). A Self Portrait 

AMERA ZIGANII RAO: A PROFILE  

FEMINIST AND HUMAN RIGHTS, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER. WRITER. MENTALIST AND ARTIST

AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Macho Intellectual Consciousness Passion of the Visceral Soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Consciousness. The politics of the 21st century. The Lost Knowledge. Forget trying to change the world. Change yourself. It changes your own world that changes THE world. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011 

Sexuality, non religious 'Wizard' and 'Witch' spirituality (the Gnostic intelligence of esoteric and consciousness exploration, ie wisdom and love) and human rights are the least fashionable things and the most uncomfortable things on the planet. And the things human beings have been damning and condemning for 8000 years. And the things that most people are absolutely fascinated by. What a shame. How bourgeois. How ordinary. How ego. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™

The Super Sacred Brother Lover™

The Return To The Source. Ascension.

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. When we were giants. All of us. When you did more than rape me.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Neo Feminist™, Post Tribe Social Reformer™ and Sacred Sexualist™. Human Rights Healer. Metaphysical Philosopher, Writer, Spiritual Intelligence Teacher, Hierophant (Interpreter of The Universe) and Mentalist Self Actualiser.

I can help you grow power, from nothing.

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™.

Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™

The Company.

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.

Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living.

I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live.

We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived.

But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years.

The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world.

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life.

The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love.

They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth.

The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants.

They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you.

I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done.

Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift.

You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

To trust your soul is to have courage. The courage to ‘get out of the way’. It takes a commitment to courage, a changing of the very matter of one’s access to courage, one’s relationship with courage and becoming the total renegade of an individual you have to, to become soul. It is that rare. ‘Getting out of the way’ takes a commitment to love and loving and being of love, no matter what. And frankly, that means redefining what love is, EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. Finding out what love really is and getting rid of the bullshit we think it is. Love. Soul. Power. It takes courage to be soul. Courage, courage and courage. The rest is easy. Soul is soul. Finally it is an absolute relief to get out of the way. The life of soul may be hair raising, treacherous and mind numbingly arduous. But it is a life of no regrets. Courage. The key to soul. Just give it a go. Wear that hat, say what’s on your mind, dream your dreams again, dream your dreams at all and just smile through the hate. Including one’s doubt. Courage. ‘Kill’ when you have to, especially yourself, and smile the rest of the time and cry when you need to. Always cry. Earth is a battlefield and crying is the way to win. Soul is a way of life. The natural way. Courage is ‘all’ it takes. We learnt the rules, only so we could break them. The rest is the art of life. Creation. Creating oneself again and again and again. Soul. The only way of life worth anything. Otherwise, we are just waiting to die. We don’t need to. We can live. It’s called soul. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013 

Self esteem. True, authentic, self knowing, self esteem. The one that includes the sex, the primal, the primitive, the animal, the real. The one that includes humanity and a state of unconditional love. Non needing, non greedy, non controlling, non afraid, non negative and non inhumane and non angry. Self esteem. What ego really is, in its true essence. The physical vehicle of self esteem. The physical vehicle of action, reaction, mastery, ‘misstery’, love and war, tenderness and sexuality. Humanity and human. The beautiful, crafted, styled, educated, aware, sincere, active, visceral, sexual, super sexual, heart led, sensitive, humane, courageous and ethical, hopeful ego. The instinct. The intuition. The magic. The primal. The whole. The whole Soul. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

I can feel your sexuality. I love it. My beautiful, filthy, dominating, obsessed, possessed, hedonistic, nihilistic, Sacred beast of a man. Because those of us who are the most sexual, what do we think, in the truth context of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and The Sacred Whore High Priestess (Priest) Society™, that means? We are the most spiritual. The most sexual are in fact the most spiritual. Spirituality being the communing between Mortal and The High Priestess (Priest) to reach ecstasy. Orgasm. Bliss. The most active, dirty minded, passionate, non reproductive, hedonistic, glorious, worthwhile, point of life, meditation or prayer or communing on Earth. THE way to reach God, The Mother, The Universe™. THE way to happiness. Humanity. Joy. Hope. Love. Sex. Sex. Our sex. Sex.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Love takes courage. Love takes being ready. Love takes love. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012