These occasional papers will be rooted in my explorations of mythology, ancient and modern, and why I care about the damn stuff.
In the day time, I'm Enlightenment Girl; a lawyer with a kick ass job advising a public official on the law and carrying out his decisions. I love my job. Usually.
But not only does my job often not feed my soul, being this close to real power teeters on the edge of a soul destroying abyss. Rather than going back into therapy, I've started exploring meaning in the place that, right now, seems closest to my soul; in the archetypes of the collective unconscious, in our mythic history, and in science fiction. We'll see where this takes me. I can always go back into therapy.
Don't get me wrong, gentle reader. I have no faith in the ancient gods, and a dwindling hope that humanity will band together to build the good ship Enterprise and take us all into an ever closer Utopia. I am a stalwart atheist with nihilistic tendencies. The Nazguls have nearly taken my sentimentality for Avalon. Hope is not completely dead, and I use mythology, and especially the tarot, as a source of useful abstractions for things that my mundane vocabulary ill describes, and as a tool to dig for deeper insight.
These papers are idiosyncratic, poorly cited, rarely researched, and often are powered by energy churned up by events I'm forbidden by the ethical canons of my profession from discussing. They are musings on what ever happened to strike me when I had time to muse, not an attempt to do a deep reading of the works of Joss Whedon or the SciFi channel. I certainly can forgive a reader for believing otherwise. I rarely write this way about books, even the ones I love more than I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Maybe because I have thrown tarot regularly for 17 years, this part of my brain is most energetic when I have an empathetic reaction to some character. That empathetic reaction comes more easily when an actor speaks the author's words, than when they go directly from the author's fingers to my brain, though sometimes Neil Gaiman gets close.
I am loosing these pieces on the web in the narcissistic hope that some readers might find them useful for their own explorations of the arcana. Cogent feedback and good natured criticism welcome. I will sporadically check eratatosk at yahoo.
Welcome. May The Fates Smile Benignly Upon You All.