lb_lee | Entries tagged with religion

I really want to tell you about these two books but my brain is sludge. But here! I will try! Here are two magic-y books that seem interesting for multi stuff, if you are so inclined! One is new. The other is not.

The new one is Misha Magdalene's Outside the Charmed Circle: Exploring Gender & Sexuality in Magical Practice. It talks some about noncorporeal personhood, but most interesting is "Chapter 8: Between the Mundane and the Divine: On Negotiating Consent with Gods." There's sections on saying no to gods and dealing with gods who don't take no for an answer. It seems neat and maybe relevant to folks with that kind of thing? Folks with divine headmates?

The older one (from 1981) is Diane Mariechild's Mother Wit: A Feminist Guide to Psychic Development. I got it very dubiously, and got served a large slab of humble pie, which I wasn't graceful about. This one is very much an exercise book, try-what-works and dump-what-doesn't, and a lot of those exercises are stuff for relaxing, tuning into your psychological landscape, and working with headspace stuff. Some of the exercises are fun. It's very second wave goddess-y feminism, if that's a thing you like/dislike.

We will keep Mother Wit because it's the first resource we've found on headspace healing which is an ongoing problem we've had in here, and a lot of the exercises have worked better than we expected to. Outside the Charmed Circle will be liberated probably to who-is-page for a talk thing.

Current Mood: drained

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Summary: “By placing it into the hands of physicians, spirit sex is relegated to the status of a disease that must be cured. […] by regarding sex with spirits as a psychological disorder of the mind, it can be dismissed as a mere fantasy or illusion, probably induced by some childhood trauma, that has no value to or significance in the so-called real world. The view is that once a person who is under the ‘illusion’ that he or she is having sex with a spirit has been successfully counseled, the aberrant notion will simply fade away like a forgotten dream.” (Tyson, 25)
Series: Essay (sorta)
Word Count: 3000ish
Notes: Rough transcription and expansion of a talk I gave for the Pleasure Pie Sex Salon in November 2023; it was the blow-out winner of the writing poll! Mentions of psychiatric abuse, exorcism, rape, violence, harassment, negative side effects of tantric training, and suicide. Despite all that, this is a happy essay.

Hello! We are Rogan and Mac of LB Lee. We are multi (multiple personalities by popular parlance), we’ve been together since 2007, and we’ve been making comics about it since 2008!

Pretty quickly in, we realized that people had no idea how we have sex, and there was no way for them to learn, asides from asking us rude, intrusive questions. There were no books, no pamphlets, no guides—even the Internet barely mentioned such things, except as “this happens” and “what a freak show!” So we started making works like Alter Boys In Love (2010-2017) and Multi, Orgasmic (2022). But this is a live talk, not a comic, so let’s get into the nuts and bolts: what, exactly, do you do with a noncorporeal partner?

( This is a text-only medium so you just have to imagine us waggling our eyebrows. )

Mac: while reading a book about a sex educator who married a spirit in the 1890s, I came across the wildest thing: apparently one of the damn reasons people were so against touching clits (including this woman) was because IT MADE YOU GAY. (Or, as they called it at the time, "homogenic." Genic multis take note.)

( Read more, more, MORE... )

Current Mood: silly

Rogan: hey friends, for those of you who've been poisoned by plural political backbiting, I have found the perfect palate-cleanser: Go read stuff about other forms of bodysharing, bodyborrowing, and manyselvedness that have NOTHING TO DO with the subcultures that poisoned you.

( Ask me how! )

Reading The Altar of My Soul: the Living Traditions of Santería, by Marta Moreno Vega, found this bit on spirit mediumship. Vega first found herself exploring Santería after the spirit of her deceased mother took hold of a medium during a ceremony and spoke to her. This comes afterward:

( Read more... )

Had an excellent first day of sales and will be there again Sunday! Come check us out!

We also blew shameless money there, because there was so much irresistably cool stuff. The haul:

( booooooks )

Man, I have missed doing anarchist events. Watered my heartflowers good!

Current Mood: sleepy

During the pandemic, we discovered the Chuangqi Trilogy by Lydia Kwa: Oracle Bone, the Walking Boy (which we read first), and (just now we discovered) the third book is in preorder, A Dream Wants Waking. (We have just now ordered it. QUEER ROBOT GHOST FUTURE YESPLZ.)

Oracle Bone and the Walking Boy both take place in Tang Dynasty, China--specifically, the capital city of Chang'an. Kwa (who's both a poet and a psychologist by trade) has a gift for delineating the complexity of human relationships, both good and bad, in this beautiful quiet way. She makes this ancient time in a faraway land feel so real and alive; we totally recommend these books if you're interested in queer, character-relationship-focused magical realism of the Chinese variety.

This post is NOT about any of that though. Instead, it's about the OTHER book we found THANKS to her books.

( Learning about a transgender group in India who marry and are possessed by a goddess. )

EDIT: more quotes:

( Read more... )

Mori: FINALLY! It's DONE! Madgic #3 is available as an ebook for $4 or a paper zine for $8! (I plan to get a print run this coming Tuesday.)
( Cover, blurb, and specs behind the cut! )

Current Mood: SO TIRED

Mori: Okay, I disappeared down a rabbit hole the past few days, so now I'm going to tell y'all about this radical queer anarchist group I learned about and the zine that got me here. It gets long, guys! (Content warnings for death, suicide, religion, anarchism, jail, and violence talk. Also mention of anti-Chinese racism and lynching from the 1800s.)

( Circulate through whatever worlds will have us. Jailbreak the rest. )

I'm very dopey from painkillers, so I'm rambly!

One of our friends sent us a gift of books to keep us entertained during our recovery, and one of them is The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, by Nancy Eiesland, made in 1994. It was recommended by a blind minister friend of ours, who we met doing Arisia disability panels together back before the pestilence, and now we have a copy! I'm only about 50 pages in, but it feels like a breath of fresh air and is definitely giving us food for thought for Madgic #3: God, Forsaken. The focus of the Disabled God is on physical disabilities in a Christian context, but a lot is still applicable!

"The bodies we inhabit and the lives those bodies carry on need not be perfect to have value." (15)

( Snippets and quotes and my thoughts about them! )

56 pages, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, black and white! Available on paper for $8, or as an ebook for $4!
( Image behind cut )Everyone knows that crazy people have symptoms, not spirituality. So, what happens when you can't ignore it anymore and have to make up religion as you go? Join LB Lee on their stagger-dance through sanity and spirituality: * Dealing with madness and mortality with more of the same! *Otherordinary entities that won't leave you alone! * Murdering the god in your head for mental health purposes! *Many, many illustrations of skeletons!

NOTE for paper buyers: due to a print error, one page of this zine had to be manually corrected. The zine is still perfectly readable and fine, but folks who buy from the imperfect initial print run will get their book signed and adorned with a sticker of their choice as compensation. (Sticker options include: emoticons, travel, winter stuff, or Kink Pride stickers.) If you want a sticker, please make sure to say so, either in the comments here or in the Etsy order notes section!)

While doing research for Madgic: Psycho Pomp, I ran across this very short mention of spirit marriage with Santa Muerte. I figure I might as well copy it out here, since it's only one paragraph in a roughly 40 page paper.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: working

Mori: Well, it took me a while, but I finished Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. It didn't take me this long because I was bored by it; on the contrary, I took like twenty pages of notes, way more than the other stuff I've been reading lately. I still don't have the guts to take on Jung's The Red Book yet (the last time I tried to read Jung, it was a SLOG), so on to Leslie Desmangles's Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti! And Desmangles, quoting Deren, sums up a big part of why it took us so long to figure out we're also a religious-based system:
( We thought our beliefs created reality, and then we smashed facefirst into a glass door. )

Current Music: "Revenge of the Undead" - Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band

Most of them, I don't think would be interesting to other people, but here are some lines I thought beautiful:

From "Introduction: Imagine Heaven," by Donald Cosentino:

"In Vodou, we consider a human being like a starship. You are a starship and your energy is the captain. You can put yourself in a state where another energy can take control within you. When you see smoke in the sky, what do you say? You know there was a plane. The plane is gone, you don't see it anymore. It's the same thing when a person is possessed by a lwa. The lwa doesn't stay six or seven hours within the person. It's like a hit... plaaak, it makes a plaak, and then it goes. It leaves the person with an open mind." (Pg. 27, and while my notes attribute this quote to someone named "Lavoisier," no first name given, a couple other sources online with the same citation attribute it to "Ronald Derenoncourt, Haitian musician and TV personality popularly known as 'Aboudja'" so maybe I just fell asleep at the wheel?)

( Vogeuing, religious kintsugi, and loa marriage behind the cut. )

Mori: Happy Halloween! We spent it in the spookiest place of all: THE LIBRARY!

We now have pages of notes from Cosentino's 1996 tome, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, and thanks to the book-scanner, a PDF of the chapter "My Double Mystic Marriages to Two Goddesses of Love: an Interview," by Georges Rene and Marilyn Houlberg. Seeing as the book had a small run, is out-of-print, and goes for beaucoup bucks secondhand on Amazon, I don't feel bad about sharing that PDF around, so if you want a copy, let me know.

Current Mood: tired

Rogan: Okay, so, I finished Megan Rose's Spirit Marriage.

It took me weeks, not because it was bad, but because I kept having to put it down and think and feel about it every few pages. It gave me so much food for thought, and simultaneously gave me clarity not just on my own marriage, but also what I've been flaccidly calling my "unwanted religious experience," which dragged me pretty hard for a year and a half or so, and which I found extremely difficult to understand or talk about. Thanks to this book, I feel like I'm finally getting words for it. (It also helps that while I knew there were other people who experienced this, Spirit Marriage was the first time I could find people TALKING about it. And there are sources that I can comb through to learn more!)

I highly recommend it for any plural with in-system relationships, inner mythos, or religion, ESPECIALLY if you think it DOESN'T apply to you.

Mori: now I'm digging through the citations. Other things on the reading list:

Carl Jung's Red Book. (The oversized folio version, thank you very much.)
Deren's Divine Horsemen: Living Gods of Haiti.
Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. (This one is a BEAR, one of those never-digitized, limited-print run 500 page monsters that are at least $40 for a used paperback on Amazon, but the library has it in closed-stacks, in-library use only, and everyone says it's amazing, so TIME FOR A LIBRARY ADVENTURE.)
Craig Chalquist's Storied Lives: Discovering and Deepening Your Personal Myth. (This one seems to be unavailable anywhere unless I buy it, so I might just have to suck it up and hope Chalquist... y'know, doesn't suck as a writer.)
Popul Vuh.
Davidsen's "The Religious Affordance of Fiction." (And the other installments in the fiction-based religion issue of Religion.)
Tyson's Sexual Alchemy. (Not sure it'll do anything for us, but whatever, it's about boning spirits, seems like it could be relevant.)
Carroll's Liber Kaos, Liber Null, and Psychonaut

Done/Almost Done:

Ida Craddock's "Heavenly Bridgerooms"
Jason Miller's Consorting with Spirits
Hine's Condensed Chaos

Current Mood: wibble

The paper book is $8.00 on Etsy, and the PDF is on itch.io for $4.00. It was the big hit at MICE this weekend, outselling everything else! (And to think, Mori was worried nobody would be interested...)

When you’re severely mentally ill, religion or magic may seem like nothing but worsening symptoms, but what happens when therapy, medication, and doubt doesn’t make it go away? Herein, Mori of LB Lee talks magic and multiplicity, sanity and spirituality:
• Autonomancy, semiotics, and dance to communicate with the subconscious mind (depicted as a cartoony whale)
• Exorcism, coercive belief modification, and how belief is less about thoughts or feelings than behavior
• Sanity-boosting, inner community building, and body rooting
52 pages, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, black and white.

A textured dark gray handprint, with a white circumscribed triangle and square on the palm. The outside of the circle makes a ring of symbols. Text reads Madgic: a sanity and sorcery zine by Mori of LB Lee. The title is written in spikey text, with a heart worked into the D, a spiral for the G, and an x dotting the I.

A textured dark gray handprint, with a white circumscribed triangle and square on the palm. The outside of the circle makes a ring of symbols. Text reads Madgic: a sanity and sorcery zine by Mori of LB Lee. The title is written in spikey text, with a heart worked into the D, a spiral for the G, and an x dotting the I.

I'm trying out yet another new ebook-accessibility thing which, if it works, will make future zine-making a lot simpler. Up till now, I've had to make screenreadable versions manually, deleting every image and replacing it with text and saving it as a different file. However, LibreOffice has recently updated with accessibility tools that, hypothetically, allow straight embedding of alt-text into images in the PDF, meaning that if it works, I could just make the one file for everything. I hope it does. Unfortunately, it seems to crash LibreOffice a whole heck of a lot.

Current Mood: drained

Still plugging away at Megan Rose's Spirit Marriage, which is leading me to learn more about spirit possession and its overlap with plural/more-than-one stuff. This part is from an interview with Voodoo Queen Bloody Mary in New Orleans:

( Read more... )
This other one's from "Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of “Cannibal Monsters” in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910" by Nathan D. Carlson, in Ethnohistory 56:3 (Summer 2009):

( Read more... )
The citations given for that passage are:

Robert Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships (Regina, SK, 2002), pg. 76–102, 153–56.

R. H. Cockburn, ed., “Like Words of Fire: The Lore of the Woodland Cree from the Journals of P. G. Downes,” The Beaver 315 (1984): 41

Cockburn is the specific source for the "augmented personality" bit, so I'd have to dig in further.

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that my own religious ignorance has hindered learning my own history, and that there's no way I can learn about multi/plural/more-than-one/WHATEVER history and ways of being without going and learning about spirit possession, religion, and other ways of life. I feel like a fool for not realizing this sooner, but at least now I've got some leads and an idea what search terms to use. (It's horrible to be so pig-ignorant you don't even know the WORDS to use to SHIFT said ignorance.)

Current Mood: working

Quick life update because we have a deadline and need to stay quiet:

Mori has a rough draft of Madgic: a sanity and sorcery zine printed. Her goal is to have it out for MICE in two weeks, so she's on a five spot illos per day regimen to get it done (plus writing edits). It's not as bad as it sounds; many of the illos are small and simple. This will be her first solo title; wish her luck!
We found a book that just came out this year: Spirit Marriage: Intimate Relationships with Otherworldly Beings, by Megan Rose. I have gotten hooked on it; it takes a liberation spirituality stance of spirit marriage as giving power and freedom to the oppressed, by a woman in a spirit marriage herself. Part 1 covers spirit marriage in historical tradition and myth around the world, Part 2 interviews ten present-day practitioners about their spirit marriages today, and Part 3 covers guides for having a spirit marriage. Only thirty pages in, will see how it goes. Also, Rose separates her footnotes from her citations, which is a mercy.
We will be having minor surgery soon to make sure we don't have cancer. We highly likely do not, but there was a disaster medical case a while back involving this, so we need minor surgery before major surgery.
As is traditional, we went to Honk and we brought sinistmer with us to draw the performers. She took a photo of a dancer dressed as a skeleton who was part of the Chilean band. A lot of fun. May post sketches, but will have to wait.

Current Mood: busy

Atheists in Foxholes
Series: Essay
Summary: Religion and its affects on our multiplicity.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll, and chock full of content warnings, including just about any you can imagine associated with religion: religiously-inspired abuse, body horror, deific parasitism, mental illness, Hell, death, asphyxia, rape, and suicide. I’m not happy with this one, but I’ve been trying to tell this story for two years now, with no success, and all-done beats all-perfect. EDIT: formatting cleaned up.

“We’re gods,” he reminded her. “I don’t have to be fair.” --Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater, pg. 199.

“The worst possible relationships between humans and some mystically potent being or beings […] that I can imagine, would be […] parasitism. […] Those who think of themselves as ‘enlightened’ may in fact have been infected and, in some hideously intimate way, used.” --Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God, pg. 231-232.

“It is not external entities who are watching us and haunting us; we haunt ourselves.” --Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, pg. 46.

In 2019, I started seeing a shrouded skeleton lady in my headspace, who insisted she was not a headmate but an independently existing cosmic death entity, wearing a culturally appropriate guise for my psychological convenience. The only explanation I had was that my brain was breaking in a new way, so I bunkered down in hopes of waiting out the storm and ignoring this interloper until she went away.

It didn’t work. Instead, I had to start dealing with religion and its effects on our inner workings.

( Alternate title for this essay: The Gods Must Be Assholes. )

Current Mood: distressed

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Scribbles and Bits

Entries tagged with religion

Motherwit and Outside the Charmed Circle

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Does Touching A Clit Make You Gay, Fellas?

A Cure For Plural Pissfight Poisoning

The Altar of My Soul, by Marta Moreno Vega

Boston Anarchist Book Fair CONTINUES!

Jogappa: Gender Identity and the Politics of Exclusion, by Aneka

Madgic #3 is UP FOR SALE!

Bash Back, the Mary Nardini Gang, and "Be Gay Do Crime"

The Disabled God, by Eiesland

Madgic #2: Psycho Pomp is FOR SALE!

Santa Muerte and Spirit Marriage, 2009

Oops, we're also a religious system

Notes from Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (Cosentino, ed.)

My Double Mystic Marriages to Two Goddesses of Love: an Interview

Spirit Marriage

Madgic Is Up For Sale!

Two quotations on possession

Madgic, Spirit Marriage, not cancer, and Honk

Essay: Atheists in Foxholes

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