Apropå SD:s eftervalsdebatt om nyckelharpor och annat...
Monday, October 26, 2026
My ishta-devatas?
My ishta-devatas according to Copilot (Krishna in his Gopala aspect), ChatGPT (Tripura Sundari) and Gemini (Lakshmi). According to their respective analyses of my Vedic chart, that is!
A bit unexpected from a purely "spiritual" viewpoint, but there you go...
Sunday, October 25, 2026
Feeding the enemy to the Goddess
"Feeding the Enemy to the Goddess: War Magic in Shaiva Tantric Texts" by Olga Serbaeva is an article originally published in the journal "Religions". It´s rather "in-house" and deals with some medieval Tantric texts on war magic. We are very far removed from the amorous pastimes of Krishna and Radha, or the dharmic law-and-order of Vishnu. This is a world of human sacrifice and black magic. The deity worshipped is often Kali, sometimes Kubjika or "Mahalakshmi" (really Durga), or the terrible Matrikas (Mothers) as a collective.
Even apart from the human sacrifice, the rituals are clearly transgressive in nature. They involve offerings of the magician´s own blood, alcohol or unspecified "juices", which are perhaps sexual substances. The Goddess should be visualized as "howling like a jackal", the jackal being associated with the charnel ground. Human "omentum" (fat?) should also be offered. How has it been obtained? One particularly complex ritual feature an entire mandala made of corpses. If these rituals are conducted *before* the war, where do the human remains come from? In other cases, the enemy army is the sacrifice. There is also a ritual conducted in the middle of a battle field, after the battle is over.
The Tantric texts promise various supernatural results from the hideous rituals which will benefit the kings fighting the war. The power of illusion is central: the magician can conjur imaginary armies to scare the enemy, or take the form of the terrible god Bhairava. The author suspects, however, that the *real* purpose of this war magic wasn´t to aid the kings (that was more of an side effect used to "sell" the rituals to powerful patrons), but to make it possible for the Tantrika to obtain human body parts in a "legal" way. Thus, the rituals serve the religious or spiritual purpose of bringing the practitioner closer to the Goddess...
I´m not sure if that´s very reassuring, though.
Human nature
Why does the far right always say "the left (or the liberals) don´t understand human nature"? By far right standards, "the left" or "the liberals" have been in power for generations. So clearly they *do* understand human nature...
Capturing cryptozoology
The skeptical YouTube channel "Truth is scarier than fiction" reviews the recent documentary "Capturing Bigfoot", which makes a strong case for the famous Patterson-Gimlin film (PGF) being a hoax. Which is awkward for cryptozoologists and other true believers in the hairy beast, since the PGF has always been the best piece of evidence for Bigfoot´s existence.
Of course, none of this will move the needle, since peopel were seeing Bigfoot (a.k.a. Sasquatch) before the PGF even existed. Indeed, it was these observations that inspired the PGF in the first place. So people will probably continue seeing (and smelling) the elusive creature despite the documentary and its scandalous revelations.
Besides, many of these people (the humans involved in Bigfooting) thrive on controversy anyway, so this is just more grist for the mill...
Climate science in crisis
This is probably true. Guess what climate change denialists are going to do now...
Amerik(w)a
I suppose this means that Amerika is "transitioning" to Amerikwa. I originally assumed the headline was a joke, but of course it wasn´t...
Trans neo-Nazi teen accused of Hindu temple mass shooting plot will get hormone treatments in jail
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