The Elder Sign

[old book]

Lameth Warp:--

Your story is very good. I found a few insignificant typographical errors, spelling errors, one or two verbs in the wrong tense. Not sure about the nocturnal ejaculation, I would have skipped that I guess. Sort of a cosmic entity based on fear of psychological mother-smothering? Shekinah? I liked it.

[LambethWarp]

Lameth Warp:--

Your story is very good. I found a few insignificant typographical errors, spelling errors, one or two verbs in the wrong tense. Not sure about the nocturnal ejaculation, I would have skipped that I guess. Sort of a cosmic entity based on fear of psychological mother-smothering? Shekinah? I liked it.

Thanks. Yeah, I haven't really proofed that one too thoroughly yet. I'm not familiar with this shekinah thing, I'll look it up. I was going more for the succubus angle - you know, Lilith, the Jinniya (female Djinn), Aisha Qadisha - see http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004336.html - all sorts of female demons crop up in Middle Easter mythology, apparently. I just thought it added a nicely fucked-up sex-magic slant to it, given the earlier references to Crowley. Cheers for reading though!

[old book]

Man, I think it's better than you realize. Shekinah is the idea of the void through which the light knows itself, "she was my glory and delight, from the first day," and has more connotations such as the glory of God, etc. It's basically the feminine counterpart of the Judaeo-Christian God.

The typos were rather simple: "unlit" turned into "until" in one instance, and the transitive and intransitive forms of lie/lay got bungled in one spot. There was also a passage where the subordinate clause wasn't set off sufficiently and the subject of that clause took over the action of the main subject, that sort of thing. A few commas here and there would fix that.

Jung and Freud talk about how the smothering influence of the mother on the individual, and Jung says this is what individuation strives against, and if it fails the psyche is trapped within the maze of the mother's influence and the self fails to mature. You've got this cosmic Gate-vagina closing in on the poor restorator and subsuming him. I sort of wondered at the several phrases where Demontfort served as Dee's teacher because you didn't build up his authority for that, and Dee certainly did have some authority with QE1. It might have been interesting to explore the smell of the divine feminine void some more, but would easily descend into fishiness.

Well done!