As a myth worthy of exploring, and perhaps even inhabiting, the Story of Actaeon contains a heady witches’ brew: a hunt, the glimpse of beauty of the immanent body of a Goddess-in-flesh; a metamorphosis.
Then, a reversal: Another hunt, and a glorious death – and another metamorphosis.
There are versions, improvements and shifting details, as there usually are in any story worth retelling. Easier to abandon truth and purity for a compelling performance.
Sometimes, going out means going in.
Going through the Old World has recapitulated so many parts of my own development. All the facts learned in the classical studies classroom are attached to memories of growing up on a far edge of the world.
Athens, the famed city of the philosophers, and so much history, lends itself to these sorts of wankish ruminations.
Alexandria is my favourite place in Egypt.
The sensuous curve of the long waterfront is a delightful walk; not even the starving, fornicating stray cats or the constant pestering horse-and-cart touts detract overly from this lovely seaside stroll.
The place does feel different from the more inland parts of Egypt, somehow – whether the gentle Mediterranean breezes, or the faint echoes of its legendary founding and subsequent cosmopolitanism seems unclear.
So: we’re looking for the palace of the Doge, to prepare for a trip the next day.
Venice is a disorienting braid of fascinating streets packed with fascinating distractions; when moving down lanes running between medieval buildings. This is a subtle city, and it’s easy to get lost.
We were sitting at a lovely restaurant, beside the harbour in Chania, in Crete. Mornings there were cool in the shadows, hot in the sun.
Initially, the Minoans built and used this same facility; then the Egyptians. The Venetians expanded and developed it further, as the tides of empire and the Mandate of Heaven shifted to the ones most worthy to bear it. Now, It has a a number of excellent restaurants and a marina with pleasure boats gently testing their moorings.
My lovely wife discovered a new talent while we were walking though Boston Common in Massachusetts on Christmas Eve: she could talk to squirrels.
This delighted her (and I) no end.
There's a memorial in the middle of town, to the 20 people killed by the good people of Salem, during the witch craze in the spring of 1692.
It's an affecting site – especially when you look slightly more into the story. Further details that have since emerged that the allegations, trials and murders showed once again, the motives were more upon the earth, rather than under it.
From one perspective, Christianity is basically an operative necromancy within a reskinned Egyptian pantheon and a monopolistic orientation.
The Medici Chapel in Florence reinforces this perspective: a magnificent structure to memorialise this most incredible bloodline.
The Hall of the Princes is magnificent, and well worth seeking out. It is personally challenging for the sheer audacity, of the balls of these guys. Truly, this is a place of the Glorious Dead.
The Accademia Gallery in Florence is a lot of things: the home of Michaelangelo's David and other sculptures, an exceptional collection of musical instruments, and exhibit rooms full of early renaissance paintings. It is magnificent.
Perhaps foremost of these – at least for me – it's a temple to the development of symbolic and representative realism.
This slammed into my awareness on actually seeing the things, with that rending force particular to occult insight: reality changed when Europeans learned to accurately represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane.
Catholicism permeates everything here in Porto, Portugal. In its native context – total, monumental, and all-encompassing – it seems a completely natural reflex, articulated through architecture as well as artistic output.
It offers the last word on everything, with the monopoly of cause.
An example of how this works – in Igreja dos Clérigos, or The Church of the Clergymen, there is a quote on the wall that explains how, given God creates all, including the faculty of artistic expression, the artist cannot help but express the glory of the divine.