When Most People Lose All Sense Of Impulse Control, They Down Five Beers Or Go Buy Chocolate Or Something.

When most people lose all sense of impulse control, they down five beers or go buy chocolate or something. I, for some reason, rip out my heart and slap it onto my phone screen until it becomes pixelated words.

Mnemosyne

Eris sits on the floor, throwing knives at a blue printout of the letter t. Hekate paces the floor out of range, a pack of black dogs following her steps. She is fiddling angrily with a set of keys in her left hand, the tattoo of a snake writhing in pain around her right.

As the thunk of another blade hits the target, Eris jolts up from her seat. Her gaze is wild with fury, and her memory perfect. Hekate glances at her, metallic eyes glittering like so many of the daggers in the wall. They are in agreement.

Like blood and quicksilver, the Lady of Riots and the Mistress of the Crossroads glide through the halls of the Underworld. A hoard of hounds and shades follow them, the battle-cries of forgotten revolutions cutting through the silence. The heavy air is thick with it, rousing the dead from their slumbering walk. The victims of tyrants shake with remembrance. This is what they died for, this and so much more.

They reach the gates, a black wall encompassing the whole of the murky realm, alive and awake and shuddering. Hekate shoves the keys like a borrowed gift into the lock, the wall parting before the amassed spirits like an ocean of ink.

The glint of starlight is just beyond, and the pound of hungry feet echoes through cities and under streetlamps.

It echoes in graffiti and burning trash-cans.

It echoes in the brazen screams of the young, and in the weary cries of the old.

And somewhere, in it all, He is there. The fleet-footed, the messenger, the one who brings the martyrs home. He is there, screaming with them. He is their words and he is their solace. He is the thief and the wanderer. He is their implement when they have none. He is as familiar with the streets of their city as they are.

Through the night, the city shatters, and when the sun rises it is in infinite fragments. The young are staring at a Sun that has risen before them too many times to count. They are staring at a Sun that has burned for them forever, and while in the Winter air it is cold and distant, still it is trying to keep them alive while they fight to live. The young who feel old stare on and the Old who are infinitely young remember.  And they will not let you forget. December 17th: 497 BC – The first Saturnalia festival was celebrated in ancient Rome. 1777 – American Revolution: France formally recognizes the United States. 1819 - Simón Bolívar declares the independence of Gran Colombia in Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela). 1862 – American Civil War: General Ulysses S. Grant issues General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. 1918 – Darwin Rebellion: Up to 1,000 demonstrators march on Government House in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. 1927 – Indian revolutionary Rajendra Lahiri is hanged in Gonda jail, Uttar Pradesh, India, two days before the scheduled date. 1944 – The U.S. Army announced the end of its policy of holding Japanese-Americans in internment camps, allowing “evacuees” to return home. 1951 – The American Civil Rights Congress delivers “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations. 1989 – Romanian Revolution: Protests continue in Timișoara, Romania, with rioters breaking into the Romanian Communist Party’s District Committee building and attempting to set it on fire. 1989 – Fernando Collor de Mello defeats Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the second round of the Brazilian presidential election, becoming the first democratically elected President in almost 30 years. 2003 – International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers is founded by Dr. Annie Sprinkle and the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA, an American sex worker rights organization. 2014 – The United States and Cuba re-establish diplomatic relations after severing them in 1960. 2018 –Tumblr implements a new policy targetting freedom of expression among the oppressed while allowing the oppressive class to run rampant.

Choking

Choking I hear her-

-blue veins and bruises and chapped lips and coffee teeth-

-and look for the person in this paper maché prop.

There is just enough love in blood ties and dandelion memories

For the solemnity to sink past the alien greyscale

As I color in the numbers of this silent moving picture.

She comes from an alien world,

The dusty brittle grass where my family was forged

Oil and grain and cattle.

It was not an empire of silks,

No palenquin or servants or gilt dogcarts,

But an empire scraped out of the gritty landscape,

Flogged out of it like meal from the mouth of a sacred dog.

And who knew it would become the river of stars we see each night,

Taken for granted but for those strange-minded poets

Or those highly educated astronomers

Who "don't know dogshit"?

And she-

Immortal, stern, cold, proud, pious,

Pressed flower preserved in a snapshot of time

Brittle prarie grass twisted into mooring rope-

She was the closest thing to a Disney princess

Or those wild and foreign noblewomen from yellowed buckram hardbacks

Embossed in faded gold

That I could safely say I knew.

Her husbands dead,

Her children dead,

Her grandchildren and that one odd great-granddaughter

[Shittalk was our mother tongue, nothing but breeze to shoot behind everyone else's back, I knew the game]

Bending over her

And her sweet green legacy.

All grown past grassroots

Who've earned the right to say

"Just park there, fuck 'em. We are doctors."

With small clans of their own on the rise.

Choking

Choking

She wants to die

And her throat moves with sharp purpose

Like the carefully crafted whirligigs out past Witchita

And despite myself I cannot help

But pray soundlessly through my teeth

That they might not catch me invoking such terrible things

Beneath a graven image of the bleeding cross.

Namtar is almost to the doorway,

Stepping past the orderlies and beneath the muted TV-

Or perhaps Azrael comes for Christians?-

Either way, I pray,

And her arm whips out imperiously

To shoo us all from her presence

As she croaks an answer to our questions.

I think I understand a bit better

The old stories of old Natives

Walking into the brush to die.

I saw a bit of that in her, that ferocity,

That cold pride.

I love her

As one loves nostalgia

And blood that never truly left stains on my childhood.

She was more than I'll ever know, and during the writing of this

Went quietly into that good night,

And probably snapped at her reaper for waiting so long.

Beautiful, clever, and tough as nails.

May she have cool water and fine company

Wherever her soul comes to roost.

I loved her

And I choke in the quiet way

Of a person strange to mourning

Who cannot quite

Cry.

العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • català • Čeština • dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • italiano • magyar • Nederlands • norsk • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • svenska • Wikang Filipino • 中文

AO3 has reached 25,000 fandoms! To celebrate, we’ve put together info about fandom tags and how all tags work: https://goo.gl/W4wPxH

NANSHE

NOTES ::

www.ancientneareast.net/mesopotamian-religion/nanshe

Nanshe, Nanse

Born as a Healing God

One of several siblings born to save their father Enki from a curse placed on him by Ninhursag

Goddess of social justice, prophesy, fertility and fishing.

Https://www.themystica.com/nanshe/

Interpretor of dreams

Babylonian Goddess who gave her priests the ability to interpret (oneiromancy) and prophesy from the dreams of others.  (men specifically?)

priets acquired ability after undergoing an initiation ceremony of descent into her ‘pit’ (symbolic experience of life and death.)

Goddess of water and fertility (symbol was a vessel of water w/ a fish in it, signifying gravid womb)

https://www.mesopotamiangods.com/nanshe-quotes-from-texts/

Nanshe / Nanse / Nazi = Enki & Ninhursag’s daughter, via Uttu >>> spouse to Nindara, goddes of fish and fowl of the sea, goddess of justice

Nanshe has two symbols, 1) fish representing original row as a water and fishing goddess,  2) The pelican represents her roles as protector and caregiver.

Guerentor of Boundaries – lady of the storerooms

Nanshe Hymn describes her as having a role seeing that Weights and measures are correct

>>>  Has the Nanshe Hymn, or her mythos, still reading it, it’s a long read  <<<

https://www.ancient.eu/Nanshe/

Nanshe/Nanse/Nazi  is sumerian goddess of social justice and divination, whose popularity reached beyond southern Mesopotamia toward all points throughout the region in 3rd Millenium BCE.

Watched over orphans, widows, oversaw fairness, fresh water, birds and fish, fertility and favored prophets (bestowing dream interpretation.)

Role grew because she was 'Lady of the Storerooms’, connected to commerce- made sure the weights and measurements were correct.

Daughter of Enki (god of wisdom and fresh water), Ninhursag the mother Goddess.  Some myths she is sister to Nisaba (goddess of writing) and the hero God Ninurta, in other myths sister to Inanna and Ereshkigal.  Consort is Haia, god of storerooms // early husband is Nindara, Hendursag’s older brother local god of Lagash. Vizier is Hendursag- (judging peoples deeds and transgressions).

Depicted on cylinder seal as woman dancing above water flanked by two winged Anuna (gods of earth) with winged solar disk above her.  (solar disk is the Assyrian symbol of Utu-Shamash).  Persian golf (and all the creatures who dwelt there) her responisbility given by Enki.

Depicted by fish (connecting her to water) and the pelican ( symbolized devotion to humanity.  [in legend sacrifices itself for young]).

Nanshe portrayed as kind, compassionate, welcoming, and wise.

Perhaps best known from the Gudea Cylinders :: two terra cotta cylinders of text : The Building of Ningirsu’s Temple. Dated c. 2125 BCE.