Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
I'm not a usual Waiting on Wednesday blogger, but since it's still early in 2013, I wanted to get down a list of books I'm looking forward to this year. Just yesterday I found out that Dan Brown is releasing a new novel in the Robert Langdon series, to be titled Inferno, on May 14. Yay!
My mom told me if I started The Da Vinci Code I wouldn't be able to put it down, and she was right. I still love that book, Angels and Demons, and (to some extent) The Lost Symbol, and I don't care if you like them or not.
I'm also utterly addicted to J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series - that's my mom's fault, too. I eagerly await Lover at Last, set to come out on March 27.
It will be bittersweet when this series ends, but I've got to read Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris. Amazon says the release date will be May 7th. I wonder if it's too early to put my name on the library waiting list? I never buy the hardcovers in this series - the first ones went straight to the genre paperbacks shelf, and I still contend it was kind of rude (and money-grubbing) of Harris' publisher to start putting them out in the much-more-expensive hardcover first.
...and my mom also got me hooked on Sookie Stackhouse. It was my introduction to paranormal romance, actually.
P.S. How fantastic are the Japanese covers for the Sookie Stackhouse series?!
P.P.S. Doesn't this one look like it might be about Bella Swan and Rosalie Hale?
I love vintage book covers. Now, some pins that are just cool. This is Jack Kerouac in 1944. Kinda sexy (even though he appears to be in some kind of trouble). Is anybody else looking forward to the On the Road movie with Kristen Stewart?
Anybody looking forward to Catching Fire?
This, I feel, is pretty cute. Lewis Carroll's birthday is coming up (January 27th), so I think a full Alice's Adventures in Wonderland post will be called for soon.
Look, I'm not saying that I don't like Rosanna Arquette. She's awesome in Pulp Fiction and the David Cronenberg Crash. She is, undoubtedly, a beautiful woman. But for me, when I think of the Hanukkah hotness that is the Arquette family, I can't help but fixate on sister Patricia.
Stigmata is a particularly bold choice, in which Arquette played a contemporary, female St. Francis of Assisi, receiving the wounds of Jesus on her body. This happens not because of Frankie's personal holiness - she doesn't even believe in God - but because she's been chosen as the messenger of a dead priest who discovered a suppressed gospel written by Jesus himself. The Church will do anything to keep the hidden gospel hidden, a plotline that anticipates The Da Vinci Code. The subplot is a romance between Frankie and Father Andrew Kiernan, a scientist/priest/investigator of alleged miracles, played by Gabriel Byrne.
If you watch American TV, you may have seen her recently on Law and Order: SVU as a prostitute assisting the SVU team in catching a spree killer who was one of her johns. Like P!nk and Jamie Lee Curtis, Arquette has taken her turn as a horror film vixen, appearing in the third Nightmare on Elm Street film, Dream Warriors.
For me, her most memorable turn as a literary character was her appearance in Holes as the outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow. When I worked in a school, one of the books we read out loud to the 7-12 year olds was Louis Sachar's novel. The Kissin' Kate parts were my favorites, especially her sad romance with Sam the Onion Man.
She has also appeared in the film adaptation of Eric Schlosser's muckraking nonfiction book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
If you remember Patricia Arquette as a regular from a TV drama, you probably remember her as Allison Dubois on Medium. The TV character was based on the real Allison Dubois, an alleged psychic medium who has written several books about her experiences, including We Are Their Heaven: Why the Dead Never Leave Us.
One day late - in the church, the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene is July 22nd. Part of the reason she was such a popular art subject seems to be that she served as an early pin-up girl, an excuse to depict a beautiful, sensual woman. This 16th-century image is by Titian.
Sticks by you through your crucifixion. Mary Magdalene is a ridadie chick.
The companion of Jesus of Nazareth is an extremely popular subject in classical European painting. This image is by Luca Signarelli (1450-1523) and was painting in or around 1504, making it about 30 years older than the Titian. P.S. I totally love her shoes.
The story of the jar is recorded in Luke 7: 36-38 in the Christian Bible:
"36 When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table.37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume.38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them." This image, by Domenico Piola (1627-1703), painted circa 1674, is called Magdalene in the Desert. It refers to a legend of Mary Magdalene in which she spent many years of her life after the resurrection of Jesus as a penitent, leading a semi-monastic life to make up for earlier sins. (Luke's account calls her a sinner, but never specifies what her sins might be. As we learned in the Epic Easter Post, Joan Borysenko identifies her with ancient Near Eastern temple priestesses, servants of the Great Goddess.)
This image is of Blanche d'Antigny portraying the Penitent Magdalene. The photographer, Paul-Jacques-Aime Buadry, lived 1828-1886. This image is in the public domain.
She has been portrayed by Lady Gaga...
...and by the Italian-born actress Monica Bellucci**. (I remember her best as Persephone from the Matrix movies - although, like the Rosario Dawson character in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, she's not a very powerful Persephone.)
Here she is in a contemporary image from Pinterest, still holding her jar.
This one is beautiful. It's unclear whether her white gown is supposed to represent her purity (in her penitent state, presumably) or her status as Jesus' bride. Both, perhaps? The doves are also ambiguously Christian or Goddess religion, symbols of both the Holy Spirit and Venus.
Here she is in the Eastern Orthodox icon style. In her hand, she holds a red egg. This comes from a folk legend about eggs turning from white to red when Jesus rose from the dead on the original Easter Sunday.
One of the most fascinating images you can find on Pinterest by searching "Magdalena" is the comic book The Magdalena. The series depicts a line of women, all descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene (and their fabled daughter Sarah, as mentioned in The Da Vinci Code), who inherit the Spear of Destiny (the spear that pierced the side of their ancestor Jesus on the cross) and fight to defend the Catholic Church.
The French version of the word Magdalene is Madeleine, which may remind you of the French breakfast treat. I ate them when I went to Spain.
So, in a way, you could honor Mary Magdalene by eating madeleines, reading Marcel Proust and getting your Remembrance of Things Past on. Just be sure to pronounce "Proust" to rhyme with "roost," or you may be mocked in song - see "Bitches in Bookshops."
** Sometimes, Bellucci remains in the Gucci name, but if the movie version of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were one of those couples who dressed alike, it might look something like this:
Happy Easter! It's also Pesach (Passover); tonight will be the second seder night.
Some may think that because my blog is called Pagan Spirits, I must not celebrate Easter or believe in Jesus, but this is not the case. I was raised Catholic, you know. Now when I want to go to church, I go to Episcopalian services, because I kind of fell in love with the Church of England's American sister. Just 'cause I'm a witch doesn't mean I don't love Jesus.
No, really, you can do that - ask Joan Borysenko. She wrote a fabulous, amazing book called A Woman's Journey to God.
On pages 218-226 of this book, Borysenko writes the passage that gave me a new appreciation of Yeshua bar Yahosef (Jesus, son of Joseph, in Hebrew) as the mythological archetype of the Annually Dying and Returning Vegetation God, like Tammuz, Osiris or Dionysus. Based on the work of Margaret Starbird, the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (the same book on which The Da Vinci Code is partially based) and her own imagination, Borysenko created "Jesus and Mary: Partners in the Hieros Gamos."
Heiros gamos, as readers of The Da Vinci Code know, is Greek for "sacred marriage," a sexual rite in which the woman represents the Goddess and the man represents a male God. Borysenko envisions Mary of Magdala (Magdala being Hebrew for "watchtower") as a zonah, a word that means both prophetess and "prostitute." Not "prostitute" literally in the sense that they took money, but they had sex with the various worshipers who came to the temple. In modern Hebrew usage, "zonah" also means Jewish woman who has sex with non-Jewish men.
Mary Magdalene was a priestess of the Mother Goddess. In Borysenko's telling, Jesus comes to the temple of the Goddess, called Esther. Esther is a form of the goddess-name Asherah, or Ishtar. When the young priestess Mary reached a mature age, she and Jesus made the sacred marriage. It's a beautiful story.
Jesus is the archetypal solstice-born male god who becomes the consort of the Goddess, delights her with lovemaking, dies and goes to the Underworld and then is reborn to start the whole process anew.
In The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker links Esther/Asherah/Ishtar with other Near Eastern goddesses, including Egyptian Isis (called Star of the Sea, a title also applied to Mary the mother of Jesus - Key West has a Catholic church called Mary Star of the Sea), Indian Kali and Astarte. Astarte was called Queen of Heaven, where she kept the souls of the dead in the form of the stars. She is recalled in the Bible in Jeremiah 44:19:
"And," said the women, "when we were burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and were pouring out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands that we made for her sacrificial cakes in her image and poured out drink offerings to her?"
"Esther" is the Hebrew word for "star," and Walker contends the Biblical Esther celebrated at Purim is a version of Ishtar; Mordecai is Ishtar's consort Marduk. In this version of the myth, rather than Marduk/Mordecai being personally sacrified, a proxy is accepted in his place - Haman.
The virgin form of the mother goddess is Mari, and it is no coincidence that the mother of Jesus and the bride of Jesus have the same name. In the ancient Near Eastern legend, the Goddess is both mother and lover, the young God both son and lover in a never-ending yearly cycle of sacrifice and rebirth. It's an extended metaphor for the yearly cycle of the seasons and the crops, so try not to be too freaked out by the incestuous implications. The son is the grain-seed that has to be buried in the earth (his mother) and "die" so he can sprout/be reborn and we can eat.
For an alternate literary version of the son-lover's sacrifice, see "The Sacrifice" in The Virago Book of Erotic Myths and Legends by Shahrukh Husain.
I said in a previous Easter post that the name of Ostara, a Germanic goddess said to be the origin of the name "Easter," may not be historically accurate. This is still true, although I will point out that Walker traces "Ostara" to "Astarte."
In a movie by A Douchebag Who Shall Not Be Named During Passover, this is Jesus.
http://pinterest.com/pin/46936021088155415/
This gorgeous Italian-American is Jim Caviezel, and he's who I'm imagining when I'm envisioning the sacred marriage of Jesus and Mary. (We won't get into the whole issue of why Hollywood likes Jews to be played by Italians; that's a rant for another day.) Your image of Jesus may vary.
It could be Christian Bale in Mary, Mother of Jesus. But it could be.
"Crucified" - cover by German Goth-rock band Atargatis - appropriately, named for the Syrian mother-goddess, the mother/lover of Mithras according to Husain
"Judas" - Lady Gaga as an Italian-American Mary Magdalene - wouldn't she go great with Jim Caviezel as Jesus?
This just-for-fun post was provoked by the author Elizabeth Black and her Man Candy Tuesday post this week. (Elizabeth and I both wrote stories in Torquere Press's Vamps anthology.) In celebration of her May-December erotic romance Don't Call Me Baby, Elizabeth posted photos of some of the hotties who inspire her work.
I had a ton of fun writing "5 Jewish Dudes I'd Most Like to See Lewd," so I now present the older dudes I'd most like to see lewd. Harrison Ford made my Jewish dudes list, and the day I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two I blogged about my crushes on Alan Rickman and Colin Firth. These are the other three.
I was really good and used public domain photos from Wikimedia Commons, with proper attribution - but they weren't the best photos. So I replaced them. Sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit.
1. Jean Reno. Two words: The Professional. P.S. He speaks French and starred in the film adaptation of one of my favorite books, The Da Vinci Code.
The French song I'd like to insert here is "Judas Mon Ceour" off Belly's Sweet Ride, album, but since no one seems to have uploaded it to YouTube, this is my "French" alternative. Ooh la la indeed, Harry Potter's long-lost sister Grace. Jean Reno, voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?
2. Chow Yun Fat. I do not care about your stereotypical remarks about Chinese dudes and baby carrots, Austin Ruth. Chow Yun Fat is hot.
3. Gabriel Byrne. It's not just the Irishness, or the fact that his lips have touched Ellen Barkin. It's not just the fact that he played history's hottest poet, Lord Byron, in the off-the-wall Ken Russell film Gothic. There's something about his piercing stare, his beautiful blue eyes...even when he's playing the devil, you've gotta root for him.
Some people say Stigmata is a bad movie. I say, "How could it be? Gabriel Byrne is a horny priest who makes out with Patricia Arquette. She's the hottest of all the Arquettes." Plus, I love the idea of a female, 21st-century Francis of Assisi.
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. The series depicts a line of women, all descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene (and their fabled daughter Sarah, as mentioned in The Da Vinci Code), who inherit the Spear of Destiny (the spear that pierced the side of their ancestor Jesus on the cross) and fight to defend the Catholic Church.
