I haven't been writing here in the last month because I am exploring New Orleans, a bohemia that does not reside in cyberspace, rather in the intimate nooks and dirty corners of public squares, cafes, caberets, neighborhood bars, street corners and block parties.

Within the last year, I have felt a deep infinity for Artemis and Hekate. But Lilith hisses like a dragon wind through my life this past week and I suspect  She will right through Aries - if not longer.

On Saturday, I participated in an indie film and in preparation for the part, I invoke the energy of Lilith and Mary Magdalene (one and same to me) to portray the symbolic Great Harlot of Babylon in The Book of Revelations.

I had been told that Lilith was a demon, and so this invocation of her guidance would seem to be fraught with danger. (I've invoked Kuan Yin with miraculuous results before.) Yet I  was starting to sense that the power of Lilith had been subsumed into the false Madonna-whore dichotomy so prevalent today. And that Lilith was simply pure primal power.

Adam's first mate, she would not be subservient to his single-sided demands, so invoking the secret sound of God, she escaped through the wind and lives to this day in the ruins of cities legend says.

"In Greece Lilith is the goddess of the black moon (Artemis is the goddess of the full moon and Hecate is goddess of the crescent moon). In Greece she was also revered as a fertility goddess, helping to conceive children and grow crops. " - The Demonification and Sexuality of Lilith

So the other day, I tell the sculptors from the collective sipping coffee at Flora's, that I'm going by the British pronunciation of my name, or Eve-lyn (stress on Eve) in order to get in touch with the primordial feminine.

Herbie replies: "Well then, that's not Eve. You're Lilith."

Ah, yes, so right. It's New Orleans that's integrating the primal sediment and earthly voodoo of Lilith within my soul.  Thank you!

"Lilith has returned out of the collective consciousness. What is going on now, especially in the male psyche, is the reconcilation with Lilith. The first reponse of Man is to be terrified of her, for he sees her as She, the raw, savage, bitch-goddess, the destroyer of men, the embodiment of entropy. In the old Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, the great male god, Marduk, tore the Great Mother Goddess, Tiamat, apart to build the great masculine citadel of Babylon. But now as the Goddess draws back the dismembered pieces of her body to regain her ancient life, she is pulling Babylon to pieces. And so men fear the chaos of the feminine and seek always to assert order and control. In the return of Lilith, men fear the end of civilization and the death of all their great cities and industries. The Goddess has come back to take away all their toys of civilization away and dance gleefully in the ruins.

But these terrors of the masculine imagination are very much projections. We need in the wisdom of The Tibetan Book of the Dead to remember that this terrifying Goddess is really only the malevolent aspect of a beneficient diety; but to remember that, we have to follow the rest of the advice of the book to "recall our Buddha-nature," the consciousness that is greater than any personal ego.

...If we let go, then we can see that she returns as midwife to our own rebirth. Everything we think so imprtant, all the monuments of business civilization and technology, must come tumbling down, for they are external pagan idols which prevent us from seeing the even greater divinity locked up inside ourselves. As Lilith dances in the ruins, there is also a joy of remembering what other nature lay waiting inside her when Adam brushed past it to cast her to the ground and mount  her in the roar of a lion." - William Irwin Thompson,  Darkness and Scattered Light

"You may already be an Anarchist.

It's true. If your idea of healthy human relations is a dinner with friends, where everyone enjoys everyone else's company, responsibilities are divided up voluntarily and informally, and no one gives orders or sells anything, then you are an anarchist, plain and simple. The only question that remains is how you can arrange for more of your interactions to resemble this model." - from fighting for our lives: an anarchist primer

Oh, this reminds me the intentions of the slow food movement (conviviality),  and Salons, and art colonies, and how gathering around the dinner table is community.

And it hits me: Oh, my, I am an anarchist.

I suppose I did not need to hang out with underground artists and gutterpunk gypsies in New Orleans to discover this.

Though I am not exactly a warrior revolutionary in the same sense. And sometimes those anarchists aren't radical enough.

"The bravest warrior with the sharpest sword is the one who can cut away all that impedes her/him from unconditional love." - Juliet Carter

Not for the faint of heart, nor those afraid of the dark.

image The Kiss of the Enchantress, Isobel Lilian Gloag