Book Report of Sorts

I've been at an extremely low point lately, to the point where I can't even write about it with any depth. I need to, I should, but I just fucking can't.

So I read, and embroider, and play WoW, but it's patch/maintenance day for Azeroth.

Aside from nomming some tasty zombie short stories (The Living Dead, edited by John Joseph Adams), I've picked up The Temple of Twelve: Novice of Colors by Esmerelda Little Flame. I've read one person's personal pathworking through it, a few reviews and other random stuff on the 'Net about it. It seems to be good for helping folks open up to their artistic side, and since my embroidery is technically 'creative', I figured, eh, why not. There is a lot of color symbolism in the Tarot itself, and since I'm already pathworking with that, I had kind of hoped that TToT would add some vibrance.

I get irritated sometimes when people on the Pagan forums or in chats & what-not regarding magic(k)al work tell someone "oh, colors mean whatever you want them to mean" or "colors mean different things to different people". Yes, personally, colors can be pleasing or displeasing to various people, or remind people of different things that have happened during the course of their lives... but magic(k)ally speaking, colors mean what they mean, and have always meant. It's one thing if you want to use, say, a pale blue candle to represent yourself and a flaming orange candle to represent the object of your desire. That's personal symbolism. But, generally, the planetary daemon of Venus is not going to look kindly on your blue and orange candles, just because they make you personally think of loooooovve.

Why can't you take the New Age road with colors? Why can't they just mean whatever the fuck you want them to mean, thousands of years of symbolism be damned?

Because they vibrate at various frequencies and do different things for different reasons. Lenses and refractors and prisms produce singular colored rays or rainbows, with the colors in a specific order, for a reason, not because it's some random thing created by dysenteric unicorns. I don't feel assed to go into the scientific reasons why yellow is yellow and blue is blue (this is my blog, I don't need references, dammit) but there are definite reasons - and because our brain is a science-type thing as well, different parts of our brains respond to different colors the same way as anyone else's brain responds to those same colors (try to eat rare meat under a blue light f'instance... go ahead. I'm waiting - and then try it under natural to slightly reddish light).

( cut due to spoilage )

I'm going to seriously try to finish the book, especially since during my rant I realized that yes, at some level, even though I'm not a visual artist (or any type of artist) colors are important to me. They do speak to the inner witch, even though I don't do magic(k) any more. I've got synaesthesia to some degree, and I do love my colorin' books. I keep telling people that embroidery is 'coloring with thread'... so, there you have it.

It's only mid-March & we're already in the 80s. With the a/c already on. Fuuuuuuuuuuu....