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Drivers yakking or texting may see new limits

White House considers restrictions on mobile devices while driving



updated 2:42 p.m. PT, Tues., Sept . 29, 2009



WASHINGTON - With more drivers yakking on their cellphones or texting from behind the wheel, the Obama administration is taking its first hard look at U.S. highway hazards with an eye toward potential new restrictions on using mobile devices while driving.



Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is kicking off a two-day summit on Wednesday involving researchers, automakers, safety advocates and lawmakers to find ways of preventing distracted driving from leading to widespread deaths and injuries.



LaHood said he plans to make recommendations Thursday on ways federal and state governments, as well as safety groups can address the distractions, pointing to previous approaches for drunken driving and seat belts.



Ultimately, LaHood said, he wants the summit to set "the stage for finding ways to eliminate texting while driving."



"You see people texting and driving and using cell phones and driving everywhere you go, even in places where it's outlawed like Washington, D.C. We feel a very strong obligation to point to incidents where people have been killed or where serious injury has occurred," LaHood said.



Some seek nationwide ban



Eighteen states and the U.S. capital have passed laws making texting while driving illegal and seven states and the district have banned driving while talking on a handheld cell phone, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Many safety groups have urged a nationwide ban on texting and on using handheld mobile devices while behind the wheel.



"People who wouldn't get drunk and drive somehow think it's OK to text and drive — which is just as dangerous," said Kristin Backstrom, a senior manager with the American Automobile Association's Foundation for Traffic Safety and one of the forum's speakers.



In July, the Virginia Tech University Transportation Institute found that when drivers of heavy trucks texted, their collision risk was 23 times greater. Dialing a cell phone and using or reaching for an electronic device increased risk of collision about six times in cars and trucks.



The Virginia Tech researchers found the risks of texting generally applied to all drivers, not just truckers. A separate report by Car and Driver magazine found that texting and driving is more dangerous than drunken driving.



Congress is watching



Congress is watching closely. Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat who will address the summit, and other Democrats introduced legislation in July that would require states to ban texting or e-mailing while operating a moving vehicle or lose 25 percent of their annual federal highway funding. The Obama administration has not taken a position on the bill.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33078038/ns/us_news-life/?GT1=43001#storyContinued





Drivers yakking or texting may see new limits

White House considers restrictions on mobile devices while driving



updated 2:42 p.m. PT, Tues., Sept . 29, 2009



WASHINGTON - With more drivers yakking on their cellphones or texting from behind the wheel, the Obama administration is taking its first hard look at U.S. highway hazards with an eye toward potential new restrictions on using mobile devices while driving.



Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is kicking off a two-day summit on Wednesday involving researchers, automakers, safety advocates and lawmakers to find ways of preventing distracted driving from leading to widespread deaths and injuries.



LaHood said he plans to make recommendations Thursday on ways federal and state governments, as well as safety groups can address the distractions, pointing to previous approaches for drunken driving and seat belts.



Ultimately, LaHood said, he wants the summit to set "the stage for finding ways to eliminate texting while driving."



"You see people texting and driving and using cell phones and driving everywhere you go, even in places where it's outlawed like Washington, D.C. We feel a very strong obligation to point to incidents where people have been killed or where serious injury has occurred," LaHood said.



Some seek nationwide ban



Eighteen states and the U.S. capital have passed laws making texting while driving illegal and seven states and the district have banned driving while talking on a handheld cell phone, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Many safety groups have urged a nationwide ban on texting and on using handheld mobile devices while behind the wheel.



"People who wouldn't get drunk and drive somehow think it's OK to text and drive — which is just as dangerous," said Kristin Backstrom, a senior manager with the American Automobile Association's Foundation for Traffic Safety and one of the forum's speakers.



In July, the Virginia Tech University Transportation Institute found that when drivers of heavy trucks texted, their collision risk was 23 times greater. Dialing a cell phone and using or reaching for an electronic device increased risk of collision about six times in cars and trucks.



The Virginia Tech researchers found the risks of texting generally applied to all drivers, not just truckers. A separate report by Car and Driver magazine found that texting and driving is more dangerous than drunken driving.



Congress is watching



Congress is watching closely. Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat who will address the summit, and other Democrats introduced legislation in July that would require states to ban texting or e-mailing while operating a moving vehicle or lose 25 percent of their annual federal highway funding. The Obama administration has not taken a position on the bill.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33078038/ns/us_news-life/?GT1=43001#storyContinued

I am giving some sources on LAMIA because I see some think this is a generic word meaning "Vampire" and it does not mean that. I see men making IDs out of this and I laugh. A Lamia is female period and never male. There is one source that alludes to possibly being intersexed (hermaphrodite) but it's sort of fringe and not in agreement with most sources. Don't use this name guys...I am afraid I don't want to keep spitting out grass from rolling around laughing on the ground so hard. Besides do you want people to think you are stupid. The Lamiae were thought of as stupid, lol.





LAMIA was a child-devouring Daimon. She was a daughter of the god Poseidon, and the mother of the sea-monsters Skylla and Akheilos. Her name and family suggest she was originally imagined as a large, aggressive shark.



In one story, Lamia was a Libyan queen loved by the god Zeus. When his jealous wife Hera learned of their affair she stole away her children. Lamia went mad with grief, and tore out her own eyes. Zeus then transformed her into a monster allowing her to exact her revenge by hunting and devouring the children of others.



Lamia often appears as a bogey-monster, a night-haunting demon which preyed on children. She was sometimes pluralised into ghostly, man-devouring demon Lamiai.



The Greek word lamia means dangerous lone-shark. Such sharks were also referred to as ketea (sea-monsters). As such it is likely that she was identified with the monstrous sea-goddess Keto. Both Lamia (Lone-Shark) and Keto (Sea-Monster) were said to have spawned the monster Skylla (the Rending One). Another child of Lamia was the boy Akheilos (the Lipless One) who was transformed into a shark by the goddess Aphrodite.



LA′MIA (Lamia). 1. A daughter of Poseidon, became by Zeus the mother of the Sibyl Herophile. (Paus. x. 12. § 1; Plut. de Pyth. Orac. 9.) 2. A female phantom, by which children were frightened. According to tradition, she was originally a Libyan queen, of great beauty, and a daughter of Belus. She was beloved by Zeus, and Hera in her jealousy robbed her of her children. Lamia, from revenge and despair, robbed others of their children, and murdered them; and the savage cruelty in which she now indulged rendered her ugly, and her face became fearfully distorted. Zeus gave her the power of taking her eyes out of her head, and putting them in again. (Diod. xx. 41; Suidas, s. v. ; Plut. de Curios. 2; Schol. ad Aristoph. Pac. 757; Strab. i. p. 19.) Some ancients called her the mother of Scylla. (Eustath. ad Hom. p. 1714; Arist. de Mor. vii. 5.) In later times Lamiae were conceived as handsome ghostly women, who by voluptuous artifices attracted young men, in order to enjoy their fresh, youthful, and pure flesh and blood. They were thus in ancient times what the vampires are in modern legends. (Philostr. Vit. Apollon. iv. 25; Horat. de Art. Poet. 340; Isidor. Orig. viii. 11; Apulei. Met. i. p. 57.)



Source: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.



http://www.theoi.com/Ther/Lamia.html



LAMIA A monstrous shark-shaped sea Daemon. She was a devourer of men.



http://www.theoi.com/greek-mythology/sea-gods.html



The ancient Greeks believed that the Lamia was a vampire who stole little children to drink their blood.



Her name comes from the gullet (Greek: Laimos), since she devoured human children.



Lamia gradually evolved into a kind of succubus. Later authors described the Lamiai as haunting ghosts (phasma) which also employed illusion in the seduction of young men. They were companions of Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft and haunting ghosts, who came forth with her from the depths of the underworld. Many lurid details were conjured up by later writers, assembled in the Suda, expanded upon in Renaissance poetry and collected in Bulfinch and in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Lamia was envious of other mothers and ate their children. She was usually female, but Aristophanes suggests a hermaphroditic phallus, perhaps simply for monstrosity's sake. Leinweber notes, "By the time of Apuleius, not only were Lamia characteristics liberally mixed into popular notions of sorcery, but at some level the very names were interchangeable." Nicolas K. Kiessling compared the lamia with the medieval succubus and Grendel in Beowulf.



One interpretation posits that the Lamia may have been a seductress, as in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, where the philosopher Apollonius reveals to the young bridegroom, Menippus, that his hastily-married wife is really a lamia, planning to devour him. Some harlots were named "Lamia". The connection between Demetrius Poliorcetes and the courtesan Lamia was notorious. In the painting by Herbert James Draper (1909, illustration above), the Lamia who moodily watches the serpent on her forearm appears to represent a hetaira. Though the lower body of Draper's Lamia is human, he alludes to her serpentine history by draping a shed snake skin about her waist.



Modern folk traditions



In the modern Greek folk tradition, the Lamia has survived and retained many of her traditional attributes. John Cuthbert Lawson remarks that "....the chief characteristics of the Lamiae, apart from their thirst for blood, are their uncleanliness, their gluttony, and their stupidity". The contemporary Greek proverb, "της Λάμιας τα σαρώματα" ("the Lamia's sweeping"), epitomises slovenliness; and the common expression, "τό παιδί τό 'πνιξε η Λάμια" ("the child has been strangled by the Lamia"), explains the sudden death of young children (ibid). As in Bulgarian folklore and Basque legends, the Lamia in Greece is often associated with caves and damp places



In modern Greek folk tales, Lamia is an ogress similar to Baba-Yaga. She lives in a remote house or tower, eats human flesh, has magical abilities, keeps magical objects, or knows information crucial to the hero of the tale's quest. The hero must avoid her, trick her, or gain her favour in order to obtain one of those. In some tales, the lamia has a daughter who is also a magician and helps the hero, eventually falling in love with him.



Bell, Women of Classical Mythology (sourced from Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.25; Horace Ars Poetica 340; Apuleias Golden Ass 1.57) :



"LAMIAE, obviously related to the persona of Lamia, the fearful child-snatcher, were handsome, ghostly women who by various sensuous means lured young men to their beds. There they enjoyed the fresh, youthful energy of their victims, then drank their blood and ate their flesh. They were in ancient times the equivalent of vampires in modern legends."



LA'MIA (Lamia). In later times Lamiae were conceived as handsome ghostly women, who by voluptuous artifices attracted young men, in order to enjoy their fresh, youthful, and pure flesh and blood. They were thus in ancient times what the vampires are in modern legends. [p. 714] (Philostr. Vit. Apollon. iv. 25; Horat. de Art. Poet. 340; Isidor. Orig. viii. 11; Apulei. Met. i. p. 57; comp. Spanheim, ad Callim. Hymn. in Dian. 67.)



http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Lamia

The Truth About Lying

We are a culture of liars. Maybe we'd all benefit from brushing up on our skills.



http://www.newsweek.com/id/213575



By Jessica Bennett | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Aug 26, 2009



Ricky Gervais's new film, The Invention of Lying, is about a world where lying doesn't exist, which means that everybody tells the truth, and everybody believes everything everybody else says. "I've always hated you," a man tells a work colleague. "He seems nice, if a bit fat," a woman says about her date. It's all truth, all the time, at whatever the cost. Until one day, when Mark, a down-on-his-luck loser played by Gervais, discovers a thing called "lying" and what it can get him. Within days, Mark is rich, famous, and courting the girl of his dreams. And because nobody knows what "lying" is, he goes on, happily living what has become a complete and utter farce.



It's meant to be funny, but it's also a more serious commentary on us all. As Americans, we like to think we value the truth. Time and time again, public-opinion polls show that honesty is among the top five characteristics we want in a leader, friend, or lover; the world is full of woeful stories about the tragic consequences of betrayal. At the same time, deception is all around us. We are lied to by government officials and public figures to a disturbing degree; many of our social relationships are based on little white lies we tell each other. We deceive our children, only to be deceived by them in return. And the average person, says psychologist Robert Feldman, the author of a new book on lying, tells at least three lies in the first 10 minutes of a conversation. "There's always been a lot of lying," says Feldman, whose new book, The Liar in Your Life, came out this month. "But I do think we're seeing a kind of cultural shift where we're lying more, it's easier to lie, and in some ways it's almost more acceptable."



As Paul Ekman, one of Feldman's longtime lying colleagues and the inspiration behind the Fox TV series "Lie To Me," defines it, a liar is a person who "intends to mislead," "deliberately," without being asked to do so by the target of the lie. Which doesn't mean that all lies are equally toxic: some are simply habitual—"My pleasure!"—while others might be altruistic. But each, Feldman argues, is harmful, because of the standard it creates. And the more lies we tell, even if they're little white lies, the more deceptive we and society become.



We are a culture of liars, to put it bluntly, with deceit so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we hardly even notice we're engaging in it. Spam e-mail, deceptive advertising, the everyday pleasantries we don't really mean—"It's so great to meet you!" "I love that dress"—have, as Feldman puts it, become "an omnipresent white noise we've learned to tune out." And Feldman also argues that cheating is more common today than ever. The Josephson Institute, a nonprofit focused on youth ethics, concluded in a 2008 survey of nearly 30,000 high school students that "cheating in school continues to be rampant, and it's getting worse." In that survey, 64 percent of students said they'd cheated on a test during the past year, up from 60 percent in 2006. Another recent survey, by Junior Achievement, revealed that more than a third of teens believe lying, cheating, or plagiarizing can be necessary to succeed, while a brand-new study, commissioned by the publishers of Feldman's book, shows that 18- to 34-year-olds—those of us fully reared in this lying culture—deceive more frequently than the general population.



Teaching us to lie is not the purpose of Feldman's book. His subtitle, in fact, is "the way to truthful relationships." But if his book teaches us anything, it's that we should sharpen our skills—and use them with abandon.



Liars get what they want. They avoid punishment, and they win others' affection. Liars make themselves sound smart and savvy, they attain power over those of us who believe them, and they often use their lies to rise up in the professional world. Many liars have fun doing it. And many more take pride in getting away with it.



As Feldman notes, there is an evolutionary basis for deception: in the wild, animals use deception to "play dead" when threatened. But in the modern world, the motives of our lying are more selfish. Research has linked socially successful people to those who are good liars. Students who succeed academically get picked for the best colleges, despite the fact that, as one recent Duke University study found, as many as 90 percent of high-schoolers admit to cheating. Even lying adolescents are more popular among their peers.



And all it takes is a quick flip of the remote to see how our public figures fare when they get caught in a lie: Clinton keeps his wife and goes on to become a national hero. Fabricating author James Frey gets a million-dollar book deal. Eliot Spitzer's wife stands by his side, while "Appalachian hiker" Mark Sanford still gets to keep his post. If everyone else is being rewarded for lying, don't we need to lie, too, just to keep up?



But what's funny is that even as we admit to being liars, study after study shows that most of believe we can tell when others are lying to us. And while lying may be easy, spotting a liar is far from it. A nervous sweat or shifty eyes can certainly mean a person's uncomfortable, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're lying. Gaze aversion, meanwhile, has more to do with shyness than actual deception. Even polygraph machines are unreliable. And according to one study, by researcher Bella DePaulo, we're only able to differentiate a lie from truth only 47 percent of the time, less than if we guessed randomly. "Basically everything we've heard about catching a liar is wrong," says Feldman, who heads the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.



Ekman, meanwhile, has spent decades studying micro-facial expressions of liars: the split-second eyebrow arch that shows surprise when a spouse asks who was on the phone; the furrowed nose that gives away a hint of disgust when a person says "I love you." He's trained everyone from the Secret Service to the TSA, and believes that with close study, it's possible to identify those tiny emoticons. The hard part, of course, is proving them. "A lot of times, it's easier to believe," says Feldman. "It takes a lot of cognitive effort to think about whether someone is lying to us."



Which means that more often than not, we're like the poor dumb souls of The Invention of Lying, hanging on a liar's every word, no matter how untruthful they may be.

Looks like the profile playlist site is down. Think they lost a server or something. The playlists will not come up on any of my profiles. I cannot access the site by the URL so that is my conclusion. Maybe it will come back up later...leaves a gaping hole on my profile but I guess that's ok for now. Not going to rush into anything by removing it unless it goes on for a long time. I'm sure they are trying to fix the problem.

I find it interesting that more won't step up to the bar about the Simon Necronomicon. It is a fact that Peter Lavenda is a very SMART man and is trying to cover up what they did by writing another book. He is a good researcher and he really went all out to discredit Harms and Gonce. The thing is I did my research as well and I found no evidence of the Monks he spoke about but I did find out about stolen books at the time period and area he speaks about but there is no mention of anything like a Necronomicon.



He should give it up but I think it is too much of a money making scheme for that now. It was inferred the second book was written because money was needed. He is very good at weaving a conspiracy theory. I find it interesting since all the other authored versions had their makers come out and state after pressured a bit that they had created a hoax. Just because this man won't tell, why do people still believe it's for real, especially when H. P. Lovecraft has stated so himself? Even his tales that were later picked up by an author friend took on a new face and ended up very different than Lovecraft's vision. I don't remember his name now because it was three years ago I wrote the article. Heh, I drove Gonce crazy until he wouldn't talk to me anymore, lol. He is into other things but he is considered very knowledgeable on Mesopotamian magick despite the picture that is being painted. The only way to add smoke and mirrors is to discredit the authors of the book, debunking their expertise and knowledge not to mention the research.



Cabal didn't come out in the open and specifically say anything until his wife died but he finally did and why would anyone believe Lavenda who is an eccentric who doesn't have the stature of Alan Cabal? One has to look at the facts. People want this book to be real because they love the whole mythos. I don't even care really, it is a book like many books and all of them written by someone and the nature of them sketchy, even the Goetia. Shrugs but I wouldn't get too caught up with it because sometimes things like that can have their own way of coming back and biting you in the ass.



My article is somewhere in my Azuredark journal. I would like to revise it but I have to limit my typing due to my tendonitis at the moment.



I'm going to track down what they are up to now. Their debating is still up on the Ancient Magick message board, even after three years. LOL



This is Harms website:



http://danharms.wordpress.com/



This is the Necronomicon Files website. I don't know how up to date it is anymore or if they are really wanting to go any further into the debate after they did all their research and people still persist to think this one version is real after H.P said it was a figment of his imagination and all the work they did and even Alan Cabal who was actually there exposed what happened. I will never ever understand people. This dang version has gotten almost a religious reverance and following with people who get involved with the mythos by generation. It is amazing. I think I will start a religion...any ideas??? LOLOLOL.



http://www.necfiles.org/

I have come to the conclusion that no matter what one does here or how hard one works on their profile...it just isn't enough for some people. I spent hours and I had a special font made for here. A heading made. Everytime a new influx of people come I get all these people with chips flying all around. Geesh it can be really disheartning there are people like that and some of them are really nice too.



It does at times make me want to just give up. I have tried different styles, colors and you name it and there are always those who come along when you think you fixed it good enough and they just have to give these awful ratings and why? Because they think a graphic is used a lot or they don't like a color or they think the music isn't underground enough or it's not their style and its not a point or two it might be five or six. These profiles are about the people who make them and one can clearly tell when someone has spent a lot of time working on them. I have more than one profile and feel that this one has been picked on more than enough, lol...watch out I have it booby trapped now, lol...



I have fibromyalgia so by tomorrow I will have forgotten ... (not really but it sounds good)

This is every Mom's worst nightmare. Four of my grandkids live here. Two of them are twin boys who are around 2 1/2. Today while they were playing in their room, the more adventurous of the two pulled down his diaper out the side of his shorts and took out the poop and wiped it along with his brother all over the whole room. They are delayed about a year so they don't really exactly talk yet. He wouldn't have told us. I got the job of showering them and Mom is steam cleaning etc. the room, lol.



I did this when I was about the same age. I was being watched by my Father who just didn't change me quick enough so I painted the walls, the crib and me. I remember him coming out of the bathroom with one leg in his pants and yelling when he saw what I did. Not at me it was just one of those gasps you do when you see what it is...POOP everywhere, lol. That's what we have today. I said to my daughter who wasn't comforted that they really had my genes, LOL.



I have them watching the Rocky and Bulwinkle movie in my room while she cleans. What a world :)

Just trivia as usual. I have seen the debates over what word to use for those who are blood drinkers and are not fetishers. They don't seem to like the use of sanguine and cite it means happy, etc. This is not the first line of definition for that word.



Main Entry: 1san·guine

Pronunciation: ˈsaŋ-gwən

Function: adjective

Etymology: Middle English sanguin, from Anglo-French, from Latin sanguineus, from sanguin-, sanguis

Date: 14th century



1 : bloodred



2 a : consisting of or relating to blood b : bloodthirsty, sanguinary c of the complexion : ruddy



3 : having blood as the predominating bodily humor; also : having the bodily conformation and temperament held characteristic of such predominance and marked by sturdiness, high color, and cheerfulness



4 : confident, optimistic





There are other definitions of course but not primary. Use sanuinary if you want but here you can see it is the context because it can mean a ruddy complexion if used in a certain way. Use either term because it appears both are correct. The community needs to quit splitting hairs over

trivial matters. I prefer the term pranic to psi and I use it in the proper sense of the definition of the word. Others use it to mean something else. Ask if you aren't sure how someone means it and quit telling people something is wrong. Most of the ideas professed are modern anyway. Who becomes an authority? Just like the word Vampirologist, there is no actual academic title of this manner. The media coined it merely by associating it to someone who wrote a book on vampires, generally more encyclopedic in nature but not always...it is a non academic title.

The rumors about Aleister Crowley having anything to do with the writing of the Simon Necronomicon are totally unfounded but some from the OTO in NYC were involved. Peter Lavenda is actually Simon and he wrote or had a friend write another book under that name. He was the original Simon but even Alan Cabal posed as Simon in one book signing when it first was published. He goes into that in this article I am posting. Now I will post a little about who Alan is first.



Alan Cabal (born December 1, 1953) is an American journalist and occultist who has written for ''New York Press'', ''High Times'' magazine, ''CounterPunch'', and other publications. In the Nineties, he performed in the band White Courtesy Telephone. His tenure at the ''New York Press'' began in the 1990s and concluded in 2005 when he resigned in response to Matt Taibbi's controversial satire titled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope". Known for tackling highly-controversial subjects, he has contributed to the upstart political magazine ''CounterPunch''. Cabal was described by Christopher Knowles as a luminary of the occult scene in New York City.



About three years ago Daniel Harms and his associate John Wisdom Gonce III, who wrote a book together telling all about the Necronomicon were debating with Simon on a message board. I wrote an article about the hoax with their permission using some of their materials and the GraveYard Press which I am a co-founder, published a couple of their articles outside of their book.



Some people refuse to believe what their book says but I did the research. All you have to do in regard to H.P. is read his letters to friends commenting on why people keep asking him about the Necronomicon. He says he made it up and it came from a dream he had. The problem is he put it in bibliographies and asked his friends to mention it in their stories. He was just sort of like that but it wasn't a real grimoire. It didn't exist.





The Doom that Came to Chelsea

By Alan Cabal



http://www.nypress.com/article-7663-the-doom-that-ca

me-to-chelsea.html



My ex-wife died back in March, after a long and heroic bout with cancer. She walked out on me in 1997, but we remained on good enough terms that I hosted her first and only visit to Vegas in October of 2001. Las Vegas was a refuge from the maudlin hysteria of the time. She was dazzled by it. I got to spend a week with her last year, just before I drove to California. I didn’t think I’d be coming back, and we both knew that this would probably be our last time together.



She had just enough strength to walk down the driveway to the mailbox, so we spent the week just hanging out, smoking pot and watching television, going over old times. The pot counteracted the nausea from the chemo and kept her appetite up. I brought her a stuffed toy camel from the Hard Rock Cafe in Bahrain and a keffiya from Beirut, and offered pep talks about spontaneous remissions and her old Lotto habit.



"The odds on Lotto are pretty bad," I said, "but you played it twice a week. Your chances of beating this are much better."



I managed to hold back the tears until I got back to my apartment in Manhattan. I had a tricky moment in the airport bar, but then again, I always do in those places.



I first laid eyes on Bonnie at a bar called the Bells of Hell on 13th St. just west of 6th Ave. where the Cafe Loup now resides. The Bells of Hell was a hardcore Irish joint with a bar in the front and a good-sized performance space in the back. The location and name made the place a natural watering hole for the customer base of Herman Slater’s Magickal Childe, up in Chelsea at 35 W. 19th St. The Magickal Childe was ground zero for the occult explosion in New York City in the 1970s.



Herman Slater and his lover Ed Buczynski had a little occult emporium on Henry St. in Brooklyn, just off Atlantic Ave., back in the early 1970s. They mainly sold herbs, candles and oils, but they also carried a modest selection of books. The Warlock Shop was just a hole in the wall, but despite its humble appearance, it was a true cash cow. In 1976, the duo pulled up stakes and moved the operation to Chelsea.



At the Magickal Childe, there was enough space to dramatically increase the merchandise offered, and since Herman had the cash and the connections, the new store became, in effect, the one-stop-shop for any and all conjuring needs. In addition to herbs, oils, candles, books, robes, swords and other accoutrements of the Art, one could find human skulls, dried bats, mummified cat’s paws and a wide variety of unusual jewelry, a large portion of which was created by Bonnie, my ex-wife-to-be. A room in the back of the store served as a temple and classroom for the various strains of wicca that began to gravitate to the place.



That temple also served as the launching pad for the explosive growth of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in the city in the late 70s and early 80s.



Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he’d grown weary of explaining to customers that H.P. Lovecraft’s fabled forbidden tome was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more. He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a "genuine" Necronomicon could be huge–with the right packaging. In 1977, the book made its debut in the window of Herman’s little shop of horrors in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad, unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem.



Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus trilogy, and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping through counterculture circuits. Grady McMurtry was attempting to jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in California and had just succeeded in having Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck published. Punks and proto-goth/industrial types searched out obscure Satanic treatises and rare tracts from the seemingly defunct Process Church of the Final Judgement. Unrepentant hippies and uber-feminists found common ground in the gentle, woodsy eco-cult of the wicca, available in enough variant "traditions" to suit any palate with an appetite for sweets.



None of the wiccan "traditions" were any older than the electric light bulb, and the OTO had its origins in a very dubious Masonic lineage of no greater antiquity than aniline dyes, but that didn’t stop any of us from having a good time. The Necronomicon was not merely the icing on the cake: It was the hideous formless mass that squatted gibbering and piping where the bride and groom should be.



This was the 1970s, and the whole scene was awash in drugs and crazy sex. Herman had an appetite for rough trade and kept a steady stream of dope-crazed street hustlers flowing down from the Haymarket Saloon up on 8th Ave. above Port Authority. He’d keep them around until they ripped him off, then give them the boot and move on to the next one. He liked them big and stupid, a total contrast with Eddie’s graceful and intelligent demeanor.



The differing wicca groups were squabbling over the supposed validity of lineage, and there were no fewer than four established OTO groups internationally, each claiming exclusive dominion over the brand and trademarks. As a lifelong student of what Crowley termed "magick" (the "k" inserted to distinguish the practice from prestidigitation), I have never been a big fan of what I call the "booga-booga" school of magick. I tend to see the practice more as a form of radical self-help and advanced covert sales technique than any kind of actual traffic with disembodied critters and goblins. That said, between the copious amounts of hallucinogens ingested and the spells and counterspells hurled around, there were times when the vibes around the store congealed and quivered like a great Waldorf Salad.



Into this bubbling swamp of spiritual fecundity stepped Peter Levenda, aka "Simon." Charming, soft-spoken and aloof, well-versed in all aspects of occult theory and practice, he eased his way to the center of the scene. The Necronomicon was a team effort. Herman provided the sponsorship, while the design and layout were the work of Jim Wasserman of the OTO, a raving cokehead from Jersey named Larry Barnes whose daddy had the production facilities and a fellow who called himself Khem Set Rising (who also designed the sigils). The text itself was Levenda’s creation, a synthesis of Sumerian and later Babylonian myths and texts peppered with names of entities from H.P. Lovecraft’s notorious and enormously popular Cthulhu stories. Levenda seems to have drawn heavily on the works of Samuel Noah Kramer for the Sumerian, and almost certainly spent a great deal of time at the University of Pennsylvania library researching the thing. Structurally, the text was modeled on the wiccan Book of Shadows and the Goetia, a grimoire of doubtful authenticity itself dating from the late Middle Ages.



"Simon" was also Levenda’s creation. He cultivated an elusive, secretive persona, giving him a fantastic and blatantly implausible line of bullshit to cover the book’s origins. He had no telephone. He always wore business suits, in stark contrast to the flamboyant Renaissance fair, proto-goth costuming that dominated the scene. He never got high in public.



In short, he knew the signifiers and emblems of authority, and played them to the hilt. He hinted broadly of dealings with intelligence agencies and secret societies operating at global levels of social influence. He began teaching classes in the back room, and showed a genuine knack for clarifying and elucidating such baroque encrypted arcana as John Dee’s Enochian magick system in such a way as to make it understandable even to a novice. He also lacked the guts to let a woman know when he was through with her, or so Bonnie said. She was positioned to know at the time, despite her failing marriage to Chris Claremont, the comic book author who put the X-Men on the map. Chris was her third husband. I was her fourth, and last.



As Simon, Levenda threw parties with various forms of live entertainment and staged rituals presented by the various groups that swarmed around the shop. He had no political enemies on the scene, owing to his adamantine and resolute refusal to affiliate with any one group. There has always been a very heavy crossover factor between the Renaissance fair/Society for Creative Anachronisms crowd, the science-fiction fan circuit and the occult/wicca scenes. Simon had friends throughout all of these arenas, and they all showed up to support this effort at unity.



The house band for these affairs was Turner and Kirwan of Wexford, whose sound was primarily influenced by Irish traditional folk music, Pink Floyd and the esoteric "Canterbury School" of so-called "progressive" rock inspired by the band the Soft Machine, which school included Mike Oldfield; Hatfield and the North; McDonald; Giles, Giles and Fripp. Connor Freff Cochran (known then simply as "Freff") was nearly always in attendance, juggling and entertaining, ornamental and always a hit with the women.



Copernicus–second only perhaps to G.G. Allin on the obnoxious meter–had his performance debut at one of these events, and occasionally even Norman Mailer would pop in, with his assistant Judith McNally in tow. Judith and Simon were rumored to be an item, and it was also rumored that she had done the bulk of the work on Mailer’s big hit, The Executioner’s Song. She’s listed in the acknowledgements of the Necronomicon.



Certain theories have it that even a bogus (or, to be kind, synthetic) grimoire will work if it is internally consistent, but that means following the rules to the letter. Simon’s Necronomicon contains a manual of self-initiation in the form of a series of "gates" that are to be "walked." Following the instructions given in the book, walking these gates should take just shy of a year. One certain Martin Mensch–an adepti who had received the book in manuscript form for examination, as had Bonnie due to her status as a Gardnerian wiccan high priestess of some repute–decided to accelerate the process, and ran the gates in a matter of weeks. Shortly after completing the final gate, he stepped out of a cab at 10th St. and 1st Ave. and got capped in the head in one of those random acts of mindless violence that were coming into vogue at that time.



Simon decided to start a group of his own, one that would span the different traditions and merge the gentle current of the wicca with the rigorous scholarship of the Golden Dawn/OTO trend under the umbrella of the Necronomicon. Heavily inspired by the Illuminatus books and Timothy Leary’s exopsychology theory of the eight-circuit brain, he launched Stargroup-1 at these parties.



As the 80s dawned and the Reagan era began, the Berkeley-based Caliphate OTO swelled to become the dominant force among the Crowley crowd, and the internal politics of that group morphed into a drug-soaked, sex-crazed caricature of I, Claudius. The wicca continued their ongoing disputes regarding the validity or lack thereof of the various "traditions," and Stargroup-1 issued the New York Tarot, a genuinely cute endeavor to replace the traditional tarot card images with photographs of New York City and certain members of the group. People were having mad sex of every conceivable variety in every imaginable combination. Turner and Kirwan of Wexford streamlined their sound and turned into a new-wave effort called the Major Thinkers.



Simon was finding Larry Barnes increasingly difficult to tolerate, an understandable position given the man’s outrageous level of cocaine consumption. Simon refused to attend a book signing, so Wasserman recruited me to impersonate him and forge his signature on a run of hardcover reprints. Barnes kept laying out rails of blow until I simply had to refuse any more; I thought I was going to have a stroke. His skin had that bluish tinge one usually associates with corpses; he couldn’t shut up and made no sense at all. He was completely obsessed with numerology, a classic symptom of incipient paranoia. Shortly thereafter, Larry snitched out his suppliers and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program, never to be seen again. In 1980, Avon released the paperback version of the Necronomicon, which remains in print and has been selling very steadily ever since.



For me, the scene peaked at a reception thrown by a prominent tax attorney from DC at the Plaza Hotel honoring Grady McMurtry, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and Simon. There was a screening of Anger’s film, Lucifer Rising, a splendid buffet, rivers of free booze and a full range of sense-deranging substances. It was the last time that particular crowd got together on friendly terms.



Not all of us took Simon’s hints of dabblings in intelligence work all that seriously, but apparently the Feds did. An agent infiltrated the OTO with the apparent intent of getting close to Simon, who was doing a great deal of consulting for the local lodge and seemed to be flirting with affiliation. As the noose tightened, Simon became more and more critical of the OTO, finally denouncing it as "fascist" and vanishing, some said to Singapore. Other reports placed him in Hong Kong or Shanghai. The truth is, no one knew.



Bonnie and I headed out to San Francisco, where we were married by a Justice of the Peace on October 6, 1983. Grady McMurtry led the Caliphate OTO through a series of court battles aimed at establishing it as the one true OTO and died of congestive heart failure on the day the judge granted his victory. Stargroup-1 quietly disintegrated, and the wicca made peace with one another as fundamentalist Christians took control of the White House. The Major Thinkers broke up. Pierce Turner went solo, and Larry Kirwan formed Black 47.



Herman Slater sailed his little pirate ship through it all, indomitable and ornery, the very fairy godmother of the entire scene. Every now and then the issue of unpaid sales taxes would pop up and he’d threaten to sell the shop, but he never did. The books, such as they were, consisted mainly of scraps of paper stuffed into shopping bags. There was no earthly way anyone but Herman could make any sense of it. The cranky old fucker fired me no fewer than three times in the course of my tenure there, but Bonnie’s jewelry sold, and he eventually bought the line from her. She never had much business sense, not that I consider that a flaw. She was an artist, first and foremost, and a damned fine one at that.



In 1989, Ed Buczynski died of complications from AIDS. On July 9, 1992, Herman followed him into the Western Lands. He left the shop to a handful of employees who had managed to avoid pissing him off. Unfortunately, he also left an incredible tax debt. The shop limped along for a few years, deteriorating gradually and finally closing its doors for good in 1999. The space remains vacant as of this writing.



During the last ten years of her life, my wife embraced Tibetan Buddhism, specifically the variant known as Dzogchen. In our last conversation, she mentioned that my picture was sitting next to the Dalai Lama in her makeshift shrine in the hospice where she was spending her final days.



"I am honored by the gesture," I told her, "but I’m not so sure I belong there. It might give His Holiness weird dreams."



She left me her Necronomicon, number 141 of the first edition of 666 hardcover copies, inscribed by Simon: "To Greymalkin, As per the missing page of the Nec… ‘Blessed Is, Blessed Was, Blessed Will Be…’"



She was a wonderful woman. It was a very colorful scene, a very colorful time. We were all naive and completely insane, but we had a good time together. It was, in a word, magick.

I mention watching this farther down. Here is essentially what it is about.



The Man from Earth is a 2007 science fiction film written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman. The film stars David Lee Smith as John Oldman, the protagonist of the story. The screenplay for this movie was conceived by Jerome Bixby in the early 1960s and was completed on his death bed in April 1998, making it his final piece of work. The movie gained recognition in part for being widely distributed through Internet peer-to-peer networks and its producer publicly thanked users of these networks for this.



The film tells a story of John Oldman, a man claiming to be a Cro-Magnon ,i.e., Magdalenian caveman, who still survives after 14,000 years. The entire film is shot in a small house and its porch, relying solely on the conversation of the characters to keep the plot moving: the film is an intellectual discourse between the alleged 14,000-year-old Cro-Magnon and his professor and teacher friends at his farewell party.



www.wikipedia.org/The Man From Earth

Japan scientists create 3-D images you can touch

By Chris Meyers



http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE58F1KP20090916



TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Imagine a light switch or a book that appears only when you need it -- Japanese scientists are one step closer to making the stuff of sci-fi films into reality after creating a hologram that can also be felt.



"Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you'd try to touch it, your hand would go right through," Hiroyuki Shinoda, professor at Tokyo university and one of the developers of the technology, told Reuters.



"But now we have a technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms."



Holograms -- three-dimensional images -- are commonly found on credit cards, DVDs and CDs to prevent forgery, and larger scale holograms have been used in entertainment.



By using ultrasonic waves, the scientists have developed software that creates pressure when a user's hand "touches" a hologram that is projected.



In order to track a user's hand, the researchers use control sticks from Nintendo's popular Wii gaming system that are mounted above the hologram display area.



The technology has so far been tested with relatively simple objects, although the researchers have more practical plans, including virtual switches at hospitals, for example, and other places where contamination by touch is an issue.



Shinoda also said the technology could be used to replace other physical objects, making it economical and environmentally friendly.

I guess I have to clarify something. I am not fond of horror movies in general that are of the slasher type but there are a few I have liked. I consider all of these movies to be fantasy. If the movie is no more than chopping up people more or less with very little plot I will usually pass. I am just scared of people who take some of these things seriously and try to emulate it like be like a Twilight Vampire or the Vampire Lestat or any number of vampire characters and act it out.



I never heard of things like that when I was a kid back in the day where we walked 10 miles to school through sleet and snow, lol.



My favorite to watch is more in the area of Sci fi and fantasy but even some of those have areas that can get pretty gorey such as Starship Troopers which was not a favorite movie of mine!

Most movies have some aspect of this unless you watch comedies and romance movies which I do sometimes. Action adventure like Indiana Jones is fine but they have blood and guts as well in some of those, lol...it's suppose to be fiction and fantasy. Now when you step over the edge and can't distinguish the difference by being a fanatical fan...that is sick in my opinion.



There were violent movies since they created movies and tv. Kids and others were not acting like they are so much now back then. There have always been murderers and hopefully one day that will change but the brain is an organ like any other and sometimes it doesn't work correctly. All I have to say about that one.



I watched a movie called The Man From Earth which I thought had an interesting storyline. I really loved it and plan on buying it. I wanted to buy Mind Walk which is another where people are conversing on a controversial topic but it only comes in VHS which surprised me. I think I might have recorded it but I can't remember. Yes, I like to watch movies. I watched the pilot movie for SG-1 and I don't remember having seen it when the series came out. I didn't start watching it right away. I didn't like it when they re-arranged main characters and added Ben Browder even though he is very good looking and I don't care for Claudia Black at all so I kinda stopped watching the show and now it's over except re-runs. I am curious to see what SG Universe will be like.

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

by Declan McCullagh



http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html?tag=mncol



Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.



They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.



The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.



"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."



Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.



A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.



When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.



The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.



Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.



The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.



Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)



"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."



Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.



The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."



Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:



The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response.



Declan McCullagh:

Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for an on-the-record answer to these four questions that I asked her colleague on Wednesday. I'll let you know if and when I get a response.





I'm sorry but I think the governments should stay out of the internet...my opinion. I think the response was just hype and I don't believe them for one minute.

September 2009 Global Vampire Community Discussion

Hosted By Voices of the Vampire Community (VVC)



Any interested are welcome to attend a Global Vampire Community Discussion on Sunday, September 20, 2009. Two different sessions will be hosted to best accommodate everyone's schedule (the discussion will reset at the beginning of each session). The first at 4:00 PM Eastern US/EST (8:00 PM GMT) and the second at 9:00 PM Eastern US/EST (1:00 AM GMT - September 21, 2009). If you need assistance with time conversions refer to: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc The discussion will be held in the IRC channel #vampirevoices on Dalnet.



Topics For Discussion:



a. Your Personal Health: What is your opinion on the correlation of various medical maladies common to some sanguinarian and/or psychic vampires? What steps do you take to ensure optimum physical and mental health?



b. Variety Of Feeding Methods: Are some of your specific feeding methods (sanguinarian and/or psychic) more effective than others? If so, which are more effective and which are less or ineffective?



c. Open Vampire Community Discussion: Any topic you'd like to bring up for discussion is welcome.



If you have the ability to install or use an IRC client (a program used to connect to an IRC server) to access the discussion, please do so. If you don't have an irc client already installed on your machine, two popular clients are mIRC (http://www.mirc.com/) and xchat (http://www.xchat.org/ or http://www.silverex.org/news/).



If you do not have the ability to access IRC another way, you can access the discussion by going to http://tiny.cc/vampirevoices and entering your desired Username, then clicking "Connect". Please be aware that Dalnet limits the number of people who can connect via the browser-based chat, so if you have another option for connecting, we strongly encourage you to not use the browser-based system.



For anyone who has an IRC Client, use irc.dal.net or another dalnet server (http://www.dal.net/servers/) and join #vampirevoices



Please help spread the word to all those you know in the vampire community. The channel (#vampirevoices) is always open so feel free to drop by anytime you wish. We hope to see everyone there!



- Voices of the Vampire Community (VVC)

http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/vvc.html



_____



Global Vampire Community Discussion Transcripts:



Global Vampire Community Discussion - July 10, 2009 - http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/images/VVCGlobalVampireCommunityDiscussion07.10.09.pdf

Global Vampire Community Discussion - August 2, 2009 - http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/images/VVCGlobalVampireCommunityDiscussion08.02.09.pdf



VVC Public Meeting Transcripts:



April 27, 2008 - http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/images/VVCPublicMeeting04.27.08.pdf

August 9, 2008 - http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/images/VVCPublicMeeting08.09.08.pdf

December 6, 2008 - http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/images/VVCPublicMeeting12.06.08.pdf

April 25, 2009 - http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/images/VVCPublicMeeting04.25.09.pdf

August 30, 2009 - http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/images/VVCPublicMeeting08.30.09.pdf

I just don't understand people these days and especially kids. As a mature adult I shouldn't have to feel wary about speaking to someone under 18 but I am and try not to especially here because the topics are controversial. I was reading a bunch of things about impressionsable people who emulate the fictional vampire. I almost started to cry because what does this do for the real community...the finger points that everyone in it are loony and possibly murderers in numerous ways, if not molesters. I am thoroughly sick of it. Here is why.





Vampires in Hampton Roads



Katie Collett



HAMPTON ROADS, Va. - They're Blockbuster hits and number one best sellers. We're talking about movies and books about vampires and even Satan worshipping. Casting crews make the lead character look handsome and appealing, but local sheriff officials say they discovered a connection with those movies and recent crime in the area. So, they contacted 10 On Your Side to alert parents of the problem. A 10 On Your Side investigation confirmed investigators' fears of this disturbing growing trend.



It might be hard to believe or even uncomfortable or scary to hear, but through our investigation we heard experts say vampires are real and they're living right here in Hampton Roads. Even more shocking is how easily your child can get sucked into their culture without you knowing it.



Twilight is a popular book, transformed into a popular movie, but it's not just a story anymore. For some, it's become reality.



"This I would have never thought would have come into my life, because I didn't know anything about it," says Lisa.



Lisa is a Virginia Beach mother who wants her identity hidden, but her family's story told.



"This girl was a vampire and she truly believed that she was a vampire," says Lisa.



That girl was a friend of Lisa's then 14-year-old daughter, but how did her little girl get involved with a self-proclaimed vampire? The answer sat right in their living room and Lisa's husband picked up on the problem.



"He would walk through the living room and notice she was on the computer and things would be minimized very quickly," says Lisa. "He kept telling me, 'She's doing something she shouldn't be doing,' and I kept saying, 'No she's not. She's fine. She's fine.'"



So to be on the safe side, Lisa installed a program in her family's computer that allowed her to check her daughter's IM and MySpace history. What she found was disturbing.



"There's things in there where she says that Satan, I am filled with Satan and he may as well consume me, of darkness or something and that was my daughter talking. So, it was very eye opening."



This mother's next step was searching her 14-year-old's room.



"There were pictures of, what I would call angels, that looked like they were dead or falling over a rock or whatever," says Lisa.



At her wits-end, Lisa contacted Don Rimer, a former Virginia Beach Police Officer who is an expert in Ritual and Occult Crimes.



"With the advent of Twilight and TrueBlood, we're seeing people, not just children, not just teenagers, but people are starting to take on that kind of a lifestyle," says Rimer. "Very reminiscent of what people did when Ann Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire . Now people are playing games. New games are coming out. There's new merchandising that is associated with this and as long as they play their games and conduct their behavior lawfully, no one has a problem with that, but we're having crimes associated with it."



This expert tells 10 On Your Side the proof lies in recent vampire cases across the country.



"This past Halloween, in Hagerstown, a father was killed at the request of his 16 year-old daughter because he was trying to intervene in her new Twilight, vampire behavior. She had taken that on as a lifestyle with a number of friends. They were living that life. She sent one of her new associates to kill him. He's dead and that's what frightens everyone," said Rimer.



You don't have to leave Hampton Roads to find proof of violent vampires. There's a group of self proclaimed vampires in jail right now, including Terisa Davidson of Hampton, and Dianna Breznik, Thomas Rogers, and Aaron Meader of Newport News. All but Meader are serving time for attempting to kill a man known as their head vampire in York County.



"The female which was involved in this, the eldest, she's 42 years old, wanted to be the leader. The male leader, she and the others decided to eliminate him. So he was taken to a remote area and he was stabbed, they injected him with a substance, and they hit him with a car. They beat him and then finally they soaked him in a flammable liquid and set him on fire and left him out in this remote area thinking he would die, but he crawled for hours until...he was able to be rescued and he survived," says Rimer.



Rimer is quick to point out, not all self-proclaimed vampires are violent to people outside their culture.



"Like in any society, we have good and evil. There are people involved in that that have no intention of committing crimes and then those who do."



Even so, Rimer doesn't think your children are ready for any form of the vampire world.



"There are people in that culture (who) believe they have the right to take human blood by whatever means necessary. Then others are just playing a game. It's just a game. It's a movie, it's a book and we just want to look that way. We're just going to go to a club, but there's all kinds and children getting involved in that don't know the difference."



So what are warning signs of your child dabbling in vampirism or the occult?



http://www.wavy.com/dpp/news/local_wavy_hamptonroads_vampiresandoccult_20090312











I found a whole long list of other cases, one in which a man sacrificed his friend to Akasha no less. Anne Rice's character and drank his blood. Are people NUTS. Movies are movies and nothing more. Why do these kids get like this? They can blame it on the net but before the net they could blame it on something read in a magazine or in some book in the library. The blame cannot be on the books and movies. Something is very wrong when our children cannot tell the difference between a fictional character and reality. It's fine to like these movies but to act them out is just beyond belief. Because of some of these things happening in Virginia, some of the real community from what someone said got identified. They had nothing to do with any of this and were more or less in the shadows but someone meddled and it got published. One cannot go openly and state they are anything because they can lose jobs or children and in some cases it can be because of a religious belief that is considered occult and not just vampirism. It is amazing how many think all vampires drink blood when most do not. This all makes me very upset and angry.

I see they are advertising Grace. I didn't care much for this movie. That is all I will say about it other than I thought it a tad obscene.



I have watched a lot of the newer movies but I generally don't watch animated movies unless it is a combination or sometimes Disney. I just don't like them, so I didn't watch the 9.



I was actually watching one of my older movies rather than online recently. I am one of a few I think that liked "Mona Lisa Smile". I think most of the research they did was how people behaved on the East coast rather than the whole of the US. I was 5/6 when the school year at the girls college was portrayed. I remember back then. Kids were much more sophisticated and mature. Like they said about the older girls...20 year olds wanted to be 40. It is the opposite now. I was very well schooled in not talking to strangers or taking anything from one or going near them or anyone who identified being there sent by my parents. I would have run. Only had to do that once. Thought a car was following me and I ran down the alley and through the back gate to my house. Kids 5 and 6 routinely walked to school even if it was a few blocks, in groups or alone. I walked mostly by myself every day a number of blocks. Parents only drove their kids for the most part, on rainy days. I wore dresses every single day. Pants were not allowed for girls. They didn't ask the Mom's to put shorts under the dresses like they did when my daughters went to school. They mostly wore pants then.



I find it really weird how society has gotten fixated by sexual harrassment and it has gotten an unhealthy over-pouring into elementary school. Boys use to think it funny to flip up girls dresses. They would run by and do that for fun but it wasn't thought of as harrassment. It was just a stupid game boys played and thought funny. They had no idea about sexual harrassment or anything else. It was not allowed and they would get scolded and it didn't happen a lot but kids pulled pranks. The difference is kids didn't cuss at young ages and they had manners, saying please and thank you. You didn't hear of many hurting other kids and none went on shooting rampages. We all knew how to read and write and had no homework in elementary school. Kids were smarter. We didn't try to educated those who spoke other languages at the expense of all the other children. They all learned English quite well. I don't know I think attitudes changed so much in those that grew up and now they have gone into over protecting children. Children are children and should not be tried as adults.



You didn't hear of teenage suicides, drug use and things like that. We had lockers and they didn't have weapons or drugs in them but lockers were only in 7th grade up. We didn't put 6th grade in with the middle kids. I feel they are too young. It was k-6, 7-9 and 10-12 and I think it should go back to that with less homework and teachers actually getting the kids to learn in the classes. Manners need to be expected and stricter dress codes. The kids have to respect something. They need places to go to. The town I live in just closed the last popular place for teens. Teen boys need to learn to get along so places for them to go stay open.



I walked alone downtown when I was only 8 and never was bothered. Probably even younger than that. I was with others or a parent or my grandmother from time to time. We had no gangs but one I think and it was more like a club really. Now we have something like 16 gangs in town, most of them hispanic. I was never afraid to be out at night in the past but wouldn't venture out now and I live in a fairly small town. It's sad that society has actually regressed.

Calculate Your Carbon Footprint. I did this for our large family living here and we came under the national average for the US...wahoo. We could do better though.



If you want to see what yours is go:



HERE

It's funny, Horror movies are a hard one to judge, especially if they are remakes. Take Spielbergs (scifi/horror) remake of War of the Worlds. I literally hated it, but after I watched it a few times I stopped comparing and I rather liked it on its own merits. I am sort of torn about Halloween II. Many didn't like it from what I have read in the reviews. I didn't like some updating and that was the use of f--k so much. It wasn't necessary to the movie. The originals didn't have that and did wonderfully. Then the guys wife, lol...It wasn't the worst I have seen, watch The Crypt, lol.



Here is what a few had to say:



I didnt care for this halloween overhaul at all!! I have nothing against Rob Zombie, because the remake was great, but this sucked big time IMO. If you are a true halloween fan you will watch it , but alot of you will be disappointed. 4.5/10





I watched this movie in theaters, and I must say I was highly disappointed. regardless of whether this is a remake or a retelling, the movie was awful. The first of these retellings was excellent. It added new depth to characters that were lacking in portrayal and took new turns into unexplored territories of the franchise. This newest installment did nothing of the sort. Firstly, the numerous continuity flaws

[SPOILER]

I felt the original gave the appearance that the film was set in the 70s and then perhaps the 80s, however in this they have cell phones, make references to fergie, there are new cars, etc etc. Also, they give no explanation as to how Michael miraculously survives multiple .357 (a gun designed to destroy tissue and organs) gunshot wounds.



Also, it's indicated that Michael was only grazed by the round Laurie fired into his face at point blank range. However, there is quite a lot of arterial spray for a simple graze. Not to mention, even though Michael is supposed to be this behemoth monster, the pain would be so immeasurable that he would not have made it ten feet. Then of course, there was the portrayal of Michael. After his mother died he never speaks in the slightest. He takes several extremely damaging blows and doesn't so much as whimper. I would have no problem with this but for the most part when he kills he grunts like a caveman, something he did not do in the first. I understand that I am referencing the first installment of the retelling quite a bit, but I feel that if you're going to make a sequel that follows nearly directly after the first, then you should at least stick to your character designs and plot concepts. Now, for the final nail in this crapshack coffin. Sherri Moon Zombie appears quite a bit in the movie as a ghost. I don't really consider this a spoiler, so I didn't mark it as such. The real reason she is in the movie, is because she loves attention and I don't think Rob zombie could deal with the fact of making a movie that didn't involve his wife in some way. Her ghostly appearances would have been freaky and weird, if she wasn't in every other scene, looking ridiculous and rattling off her dialog in the poorest manner.



[SPOILER]

Also, why is the child version of Michael a ghost with his mother. Last I checked he wasn't dead, he just grew up. I would accept that when Michael put on the mask it represented a fracture in his psyche, but the boy version of Michael is wearing a mask as well. So if Zombie was trying to achieve that point, he simply made it redundant.



I only give this movie a 2/5 because the gore was quite good. But if you're looking for something more than that, or perhaps you hope that this movie will broaden the characters more-so than the first, I suggest you look elsewhere. Reluctantly 2/5. (Also, fun fact, a third is already slated and is going to be in 3D. The best part? Rob Zombie isn't directing it.)





To be fair:





wow! this movie was great!! what is with the bad reveiws?? this movie was really diffrent from the first rob zombie halloween but w/e.



it seems this was more rob zombie- disturbing, realistic, brutal. not the michael myers by john carpenter but rob zombies michael myers, and to me, robs is littl more F'ed up.





i haven't seen bad reviews like this in awhile! not on a very good movie anyway. it seems some people just don't like Robs story telling.look at friday the 13th. they smashed the first 3 into one movie and explained some stuff and thats it. atleast Mr. Zombie is trying to show you things through a different point of view, the killers! this movie is great and after the BLOB re-whatever he does i hope he continues with the halloween franchise. his abillity to tell a story is gripping and wonderful. stop hating on the man. believe me he doesn't do these movies for the money. he has enough of that.



My opinion:



No matter how you change a story they are all adaptations of something, especially when remade and they will not be letter for letter the same as the original. Why make them if they are like that? They will have the overall flavor of the original. It was ok as slasher movies go and yes he changed certain things...so what. If you like the slasher stuff he did a good job.

Goodwill Returns Trashed Treasure Worth $500,000

Reporting Kimberley Chapin

CBS



A recent, generous donation from a hotel included the usual: furniture, mirrors, lamps, paintings and other decorative pieces. While going through those, workers stumbled across a life-size, bronze statue of a ballerina weighing in at 2 ½ tons!



Intrigued by the expensive-looking, signed statue, the management at Goodwill in Miami did some research and identified the original artist and the fact that a only ten such ballerinas were produced decades ago. When they were created, collectors paid half a million dollars for each piece.



However, not many bargain hunters head to Goodwill searching for $500,000 statues. Savvy art dealers recommended Goodwill sell the statue in the worldwide art market. They could bring in a fortune, all for the nonprofit organization.



But rather than reel in the big bucks, the management at Goodwill decided to return the ballerina.



"Once we learned of the value and history of the ballerina and that the ballerina came from a large corporation that has gone through several ownership changes over the years, we suspected that the owner did not have a clue of the value of the statue," Dennis Pastrana, President and CEO of Goodwill, said. Goodwill then advised a representative of the owner who was pleasantly surprised that Goodwill contacted them.



"We have a reputation for integrity and honesty. And while we could have kept the statue, in good conscience we knew that it would have been wrong and unethical to attempt to sell such a valuable piece of art without notifying the donor first."



The donor, who has requested to remain anonymous, had already been generous. "Their other donations have translated into a value of about $68,000 to Goodwill," said Pastrana.



Goodwill Industries is a national nonprofit social services organization for training and employing people with disabilities. In 2008, the institution provided training and employment services to over 4,800 people with disabilities and special needs in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

From the Los Angeles Examiner, dated September 9, 2009



Today MTV UK posted a specualtion that Evan Rachel Wood and Alexander Skarsgard of the hit HBO vampire series True Blood are "reportedly dating". This account comes based on a mention by Perez Hilton that the stars, who play the Vampire Queen Sophie-Ann and now legendarily sexy Eric Northman, have been spotted together in Louisiana on/near the area where Skarsgard is filming the remake of Straw Dogs. Supposedly, Evan, who has only been in one episode of True Blood, thus far, but will make another appearance in Sunday's Season Finale, flew out to Louisiana specifically to be with Alexander. However, again, this is currently only speculation.



Prior to this new romantic development, Evan was involved with the gender-envelope-pushing goth rocker Marilyn Manson. I think it's safe to say, that if this rumor is true, her tastes have definitely improved. Wood and Skarsgard would make quite the beautiful couple wouldn't they? Let's keep our fingers crossed that they confirm their budding relationship to the media.



And, speaking of the Season Finale of True Blood, here is a bit of video to tide you over till Sunday!

This is one perspective just from language base mostly. I am not going to say I believe everything this person says. All I am saying is one cannot say anything is unequivocal when so many don't agree and many are well educated like this man. It is interesting anyway to hear what he has to say and why.





The Nephilim: Their Origins and Evolution

By Petros Koutoupis



Since the very beginning of biblical study the נפלים (nephilîm) have been the topic of great controversy. Who are they and what do they represent? Are they biblical giants? What does the term literally translate to, and why does the brief mention of them in the Book of Genesis show resemblance to other mythologies? Many scholars, both independent and accredited, have dedicated much of their lives to answer the questions listed above. It wasn't until the discovery and translation of the Book of 1Enoch [1] that we were finally given a better understanding of these nephilîm; but is it a proper understanding? I was intrigued by these nephilîm and wanted to know more.



Independent researchers have inappropriately linked them with ancient astronauts, an elder culture that long predated our own, and even to the builders of the pyramids. As I will explain below, these theories hold no grounds and the nephilîm had a specific role which eventually corrupted over time. This detailed analysis will incorporate the theology during the proposed time of writing for the verses, grammatical study in Hebrew and Aramaic word forms, and even external influences that would have played a role in the region; but before I delve into these topics I would like to inform the reader that I am an advocate of the Documentary Hypothesis which proposes that the biblical scriptures which we have come to know as the Pentateuch were written and edited by more than one scribe over time, disproving any notion of Mosaic authorship. I cover a lot of this evidence against a Mosaic authorship, more detailed information on the Documentary Hypothesis, and the topics of the nephilîm in my book, An Adopted Legacy: Neo-Assyrian Origin to Hebrew Lore. I would also like to recommend the following books on the Documentary Hypothesis:



Friedman, Richard E. The Bible with Sources Revealed. 1st ed. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

Friedman, Richard E. Who Wrote the Bible?. 2nd ed. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Campbell, Antony F., and Mark A. O'brien. Sources of the Pentateuch. Minneapolis: Fortress P, 1993.



An Identification to the Race in Question

The easiest way to start this topic is by briefly explaining what the nephilîm are not and reveal the evidence as this research progresses. Note that I am not attacking these authors but merely pointing out their misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The nephilîm are not, as Zecharia Sitchin proclaims, (1) those who came down from above, (2) those who were cast down, and (3) people of the fiery rockets. The Hebrew verb for 'to go' or 'to come down, descend' is ירד (yārad) [2] which shows no relation to the term in question. He then goes on to identify the nephilîm with the Sumerian deities, claiming that the Sumerians knew of their existence and that they came from a planet called Nibiru.



A quote taken from Andrew Collin's book, From the Ashes of Angels, shows that some confuse the the nephilîm with the sons of God and use the term interchangeably to signify one and the same race:



This implies that nephilim, a word meaning the 'fallen ones', or 'those who have fallen', was the original name given by the Israelites to the fallen angels. Strange confirmation of this suggestion comes from rereading Genesis 6. Verse 2 speaks of the Sons of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, while in contrast verse 4 states firmly that: 'The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men.'

It would seem that most of these authors attempt to link the root word for the nephilîm with the Hebrew word of נפל (nāphal). Nāphal means 'to fall' or 'to fall in battle, by the sword', 'to be killed', 'to be fallen' and also 'to fall unto/upon'; all of these definitions display characteristics not held by the nephilîm or, as I make the argument in my book, the sons of God.

We first read of the nephilîm in Genesis 6:4. This is one of two verses to mention the nephilîm three times throughout the entire Pentateuch. These three occurrences have been credited to the Yahwist (J), a scribe from the Southern Kingdom of Judah to whom a good part of the Pentateuch has been attributed. In my research, I have personally dated J from the middle of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to just before its decline; starting just after the fall of Samaria and Exile of the Israelites at the hands of Sargon II [3] . Genesis 6:4 reads [4] :



The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.



1. The phrase Book of Enoch refers to 1Enoch, which is wholly extant only in the Ethiopic language. There are also 2 other books called Enoch, 2Enoch (surviving only in Old Slavonic, c. 1st century CE) and 3Enoch (surviving in Hebrew, c. 5th-6th century CE.) The numbering of these texts has been applied by scholars to distinguish the texts from one another. [back to text]

2. I first noticed this in an untitled paper from Michael S. Heiser found at http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/. [back to text]

3. Reference my book An Adopted Legacy; I cover these details within. A lot more evidence and analysis will be given in the second installment of the series to confirm all the findings in the first. [back to text]

4. JPS translation. [back to text]



The biggest clues to the identification of the nephilîm will come from Numbers 13:33 [5] :

And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.



Taking an interpretation of the nephilîm as the 'people of the fiery rockets' again holds no credibility when examining the term itself and the surrounding grammar of Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. Historically, the Hebrew word was left untranslated by the Revisers, the name of one of the Canaanite tribes. The Revisers have, in fact, translated the Hebrew גברים (gibbōrîm), in Genesis 6:4, as 'mighty men'; which will be a key point in the coming conclusions. When the Old Testament was first translated to the Greek language, the word for nephilîm read γίγαντες (gigantes), the Greek word for giants. This is confirmed in Numbers 13:33 [6] with the description of the Israelites when compared to the race of giants.



It is extremely important for the reader to understand that in Hebrew grammar the singular nāphal cannot form the plural nephilîm. If we were to follow grammatical rules within the language we would end up with the plural nōphelîm. Clearly this is not the same as nephilîm, and we can now see that it is impossible for nāphal to be the root word used. A detailed analysis of the characteristics held by the nephilîm will further prove this in the section below. One other area of concern is that nōphelîm is not in the plural passive form but instead a plural active indicating that these beings are 'falling' and have not 'fallen'. Now what have the nephilîm fallen from? The answer is nowhere. If a link were to be established for someone(s) falling from God's grace it would have to go to the sons of God as is apparent in the Post-Exilic and not in the Pre-Exilic literature. The biggest clue to the identification of the word's root can be found in Numbers 13:33. In the Masoretic Texts (MT), the word nephilîm is used twice in this verse, but oddly enough is spelled differently. Many have wondered what this could mean. In the first occurrence we find:



נפילים

NFYLYM



The spelling comes with the matres lectiones throwing in an extra י (yod) to give us a proper pronunciation of the word nef-ee-leem. This is the only instance of this spelling found throughout the entire Old Testament. The second spelling holds (which is consistent with Genesis 6:4):



נפלים

NFLYM



This is without the extra yod. It is extremely important to understand how these matres lectiones (or mother of words) work and Hebrew orthographical analysis to see the evolution of these matres lectiones. The purpose of the matres lectiones was to preserve the proper pronunciation of words in the consonant only Hebrew language. Specific characters are used to act as vowels. For example, a yod, depending on the structure and form of the word can be used to indicate an 'ey' or 'ee' sound. In this case we see the 'ee' forming the second syllable's vowel. Orthographical analysis of the evolution of these matres lectiones show that the Israelite script, which evolved from the Phoenician, did not originally use their characters as vowel markers. We do not see this until the 9th century BCE [7] in the surrounding regions. Literary evidence seems to indicate that the role of the matres lectionis originated from regions to the south of Phoenicia and Israel, more specifically Moab and Judah. Our earliest examples of it come from the Meša` Stela. Scholars studying Hebrew orthography in the Old Testament have noted attempts by many scribes, when copying texts over time, rewriting older words with newer spelling forms so that they may be able to preserve pronunciations for future readings. There have been cases where we have seen that scribes would overlook words to rewrite and it would seem that the verses containing the nephilîm were no exception. This is why we see a modified spelling in Number 13:33. Oddly enough all three occurrences of the nephilîm in the Samaritan Pentateuch preserve only the latter form of spelling. This may hint at a revision of the spelling taking place during the Post-Exilic period and after the Samaritan adoption of the Pentateuch; believed to have taken place ca. 400 BCE.



5. JPS translation. [back to text]

6. See above. [back to text]

7. It is highly recommended to read the extensive research on Hebrew Orthography under the direction of Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman in their book Early Hebrew Orthography: A Study of Epigraphic Evidence. [back to text]



This quickly brings to mind a point to which Michael S. Heiser made in his argument with a Sitchinite named Erik Parker [8] . Heiser made a reference to the Aramaic written Book of Job found at Qumrân, part of the Dead Sea Scrolls collection. The constellation of Orion is written as נפילא (nephîlā'). This is the feminine form of the Aramaic masculine נפיל (nāphîl). Coincidently enough nephîl literally translates to 'giant' and its Aramaic plural form registers נפילין (nephîlîn). To make this a Hebrew word, we must take the ending character ן (nun) and alter it to a ם (mem). We then end up with נפילים. It would come as no surprise if early orthography would reveal that even in the Aramaic, there is a possibility that nephîlîn may have not always had the yod in its second syllable, which would have looked like this: נפלין. This evidence helps to make sense of it all. We can see how the Greek Septuagint (LXX) labeled these nephilîm as giants and why they were constantly described as giants in Numbers 13:33 and their Post-Exilic references. Numbers 13:33 is a lot clearer with this understanding because we can now see how a race of giants (nephilîm ) gave birth to another race of giants (Anakim) followed by the birth of a third race of giants (nephîlîm), who towered over the Israelites. Now the question is, was this originally an Aramaic word? If so, at what point in history did the Hebrew language adopt this loan word? I cover a possible answer to this at the conclusion of this paper.



The Roles and Evolution of the Nephilim



It is extremely important to start looking at some of the grammatical clues followed by characteristics of the nephilîm detailed in these 2 verses. Even though the evidence clearly suggests that the word signifies 'giants', I still feel that there is something most scholars miss when it comes to the nephilîm . To review, the nephilîm were a product of the sons of God and the daughters of men. Breaking the last part of this verse (Genesis 6:4) down even further, and studying the grammar, we find that it literally translates to the following:



הגברים אשׁר םעולם אנשׁי השׁם



…the mighty ones who from old, men [of] name.



These nephilîm are clearly spoken of with great honor. Could this be a Biblical Age of Heroes identical to that Hesiod spoke of in his The Works and Days [9] ?



...Zeus, son of Kronos, created yet another fourth generation on the fertile earth, and these were better and nobler, the wonderful generation of hero-men, who are also called half-gods, the generation before our own on this vast earth. But of these too, evil war and the terrible carnage took some; some by the seven-gated Thebes in the land of Kadmos as they fought together over the flocks of Oidipous; other war had taken in ships over the great gulf of the sea, where they also fought for the sake of lovely-haired Helen. There, for these, the end of death was misted about them. But on others, Zeus, son of Kronos, settled a living and a country of their own, apart from human kind, at the end of the world. And there they have their dwelling place and hearts free of sorrow in the islands of the blessed by the deep-swirling stream of the ocean, prospering heroes, on whom in every year three times over the fruitful grain land bestows its sweet yield.



Much like the hero-men, who were also called half-gods, the nephilîm were also a product of semi-divinity; the sons of God and the daughters of men. When analyzing this piece of scripture even further, the Epic of Gilgameš, quickly runs through my head. I will be explaining and discussing this epic later on in this paper. While these clues are not concrete enough to form a final conclusion, we must now look at all the other evidence.



The post-exilic literature has revealed to us a different perspective of the nephilîm , one unlike the writings of Genesis 6:4. It is in the later literature that we see a dark side to the nephilîm ; one of blood-thirst and sin. It is also in the Post-Exilic writings that we find the sons of God (a.k.a. the Watchers) and the nephilîm leading mankind to their corruption and destruction.



8. Michael S. Heiser is a scholar of Ancient Hebrew and Semitic Languages. http://www.michaelsheiser.com/ [back to text]

9. Lattimore, Richmond, trans. Hesiod: The Works and Days/Theogony/The Shield of Herakles. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1959. 37. [back to text]



The Ethiopic version of Enoch was discovered in the land of Ethiopia by the freemason James Bruce, in 1773 CE. This book is believed to have been compiled around the 2nd to 1st century BCE, and was written in the Ethiopic language of Ge'ez. 1Enoch details the fall of the Watchers who in turn also give birth to the nephilîm . The fallen angels then went to Enoch to intercede on their behalf with God. The remainder of the book describes Enoch's visit to heaven in the form of a vision, and his revelations. Here we have an excerpt concerning both the sons of God and the nephilîm :



6:1 And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters.

6:2 And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.'

[skipping chunk of irrelevant text]

7:1 And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.

7:2 And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells:

7:3 Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them,

7:4 the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.

7:5 And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood.

7:6 Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.



This is obviously not the famous and mighty nephilîm that we read about in the Book of Genesis. As it is clearly seen, blame for mankind has quickly been taken off man and placed towards the children of heaven [10] . This is a topic that I will be getting to in more detail by the conclusion of this paper.



The Book of Giants [11] holds more detailed accounts on the interactions between both Enoch and the nephilîm . We still start off with the wicked angels bringing forth knowledge and havoc to mankind; performing unnatural acts. As time progresses, the offspring of these angels, the nephilîm , were suddenly troubled by a series of dreams and visions. Enoch's main role was as an interpreter of these dreams. I would like to mention the existence of a Gilgameš as being one of the giants.



I dwelled on this problem for a long time. Why were the nephilîm regarded as beings of such high stature and prestige in one source, while demonized in others? It took a while before I heard about and picked up the Book of Jasher. Readers and scholars of the Bible have often been intrigued by other books mentioned within the scriptures. The Book of Jasher is one of them; mentioned in both Joshua 10:13 and 2Samuel 1:17. Many scholars place this compilation as early as the 5th to 4th century BCE; just after the Babylonian Exile and before the Persian influence that swept the nation. In the very beginning of the second chapter, we read:



1 And it was in the hundred and thirtieth year of the life of Adam upon the earth, that he again knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bare a son in his likeness and in his image, and she called his name Seth, saying, Because God has appointed me another seed in the place of Abel , for Cain has slain him.



2 And Seth lived one hundred and five years, and he begat a son; and Seth called the name of his son Enosh, saying, Because in that time the sons of men began to multiply, and to afflict their souls and hearts by transgressing and rebelling against God.



When you read on, there is no mention of the sons of God coming unto the daughters of men and bearing giant children who also brought corruption to the known world. It was mankind who corrupted themselves [12] , a parallel to the Genesis account. Moving on to chapter 3, the author begins to speak of Enoch and how Enoch reigned over all of mankind. We learn of his life and how he was taught the instructions of the Lord [13] ; but there is still no mention of the sons of God and the nephilîm . This brings me back to the Yahwistic (J) account of the sons of God and the nephilîm in Genesis. Rereading chapter 6 verses 1-8, we can clearly see that there is no real connection between the sons of God, the nephilîm , and the corruption of mankind leading to the Flood of Noah.

6:1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

6:2 that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives, whomsoever they chose.

6:3 And YHWH said: 'My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for that he also is flesh; therefore shall his days be a hundred and twenty years.'

6:4 The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

6:5 And YHWH saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

6:6 And it repented YHWH that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.

6:7 And YHWH said: 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and creeping thing, and fowl of the air; for it repenteth Me that I have made them.'

6:8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of YHWH.

Focusing in on Genesis 6:4 and 6:5, there is no connection and we can safely assume that the story trails away from the sons of God and the nephilîm into another direction: mankind's corruption. The author of the Book of Jasher may have known this and, seeing no real point in mentioning the heavenly beings and their offspring, decided to omit it. The Book of Jasher also helps to answer another anomaly. If the nephilîm were part of the cause of the corruption, then why are they still present in Numbers 13:33? Genesis 6:4 does state that the Nephilim were in the earth in those days and also after that. After what; the Flood? Going with the belief that the sons of God and the nephilîm stood apart from the corruption of man would help make the verses in Genesis and Numbers easier to comprehend. Following the Priestly (P) and Yahwistic text regarding the repopulation of man [14] from the seeds of Ham, Shem and Yapheth, we also discover that there is no text to account for the Anakim and the nephilîm spoken of in Numbers 13:33; an event which took place after the Flood. How were these giants brought back to the land? The answer is that they were never wiped out.



10. Read below. [back to text]

11. 4Q203, 1Q23, 2Q26, 4Q530-532 and 6Q8 [back to text]

12. Read below. [back to text]

13. A variation of this is covered in 1Enoch. [back to text]

14. Gen. 10-11. [back to text]



We must now start to shift our focus away from biblical sources and onto Mesopotamian and Levantine mythology. It is in the Standard Babylonian Version (SBV) of the Epic of Gilgameš that we find important and coincidental similarities with the primeval history of the Book of Genesis [15] . In the middle of the first column and at the very beginning of the second of the first tablet, we discover Gilgameš's background:



Wild calf of Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh, is perfect in strength,

Suckling of the sublime wild cow, the wild cow Ninsun

Towering Gilgamesh is uncannily perfect…

…Two-thirds of him was divine, and one-third of him was human…



With knowledge of the Sumerian King List, we find out that Lugalbanda was once a king of Uruk. Many older Sumerian poems exist pertaining to Lugalbanda. He was a mortal who had joined with the deity Ninsun to produce Gilgameš. At first glance, one may wonder why the strange division of divinity and mortality. This may be due to the fact that Lugalbanda may have started off human, but was deified in the years to come. Reasons or events for this transformation are unknown. Other than his partial divinity, a lot of emphasis is placed on Gilgameš's (and the later Enkidu who was created by the gods) height throughout the rest of the narrative [16] .

[…] stately in feature,

[…] in body, lofty […]

His foot was a triple cubit, his leg six times twelve,

His stride was six times twelve cubits,

His thumb was […] cubits.

His cheeks had a beard like […]

The locks of his hair grew thick as a grainfield.

He was perfection in height,

Ideally handsome […]

This emphasis on height was also extremely significant in the many other translations of the story; such as the Hittite version in which Gilgameš is described as being eleven yards in height and his breast was nine spans in breadth. Normal humans in the epic(s) were never mentioned as being the same height as these demigods. In fact, the everyday citizens of Uruk were constantly astonished at the heights of both Gilgameš and Enkidu. The demigods found in the ancient Mesopotamian world display undeniably similar traits to the nephilîm . They are heroic and spoken of with high prestige, as is present within this epic; a lot of attention is directed towards their height; and these semi-divine beings existed before and after the Flood. In the next section, I will be providing evidence of how the deities themselves may also have been of high stature by referencing Ugaritic mythology, which will eventually lead us to believe that the sons of God including God himself may have been viewed as giants at one point in history.

References to deities of the Ugaritic [17] pantheon point to gigantism. Most of these references are directed towards one specific deity, Ba‛al Haddad. Judging by the Ugaritic sources, Ba‛al Haddad was the principal deity established as the main cult of worship at Ugarit. In the story entitled Ba‛al and Mot [18] we see such an example. From the very beginning of the story, a grudge between Ba‛al and Mot is present. Ba‛al Haddad was a mighty storm and fertility deity, and Mot is the god of death, pestilence and plague who ruled the Underworld. Constant references are made to Mot causing the heavens to wilt and collapse and with his deathly powers scorching the crops and the fruit of the trees; features exactly opposite of Ba‛al Haddad, who as mentioned earlier symbolized fertility. Mot ends up thinking he killed Ba‛al [19] , and Ba‛al disappears. Athtar, another deity, attempts to take the storm god's place on the throne at mount Zephon. Athtar seats himself on Ba‛al's throne, but finds that he is not tall enough to occupy it.

He (Athtar) [20] sat on the seat of the mightiest Ba‛al,

(But) his feet did not reach the foot-stool,

his head did not reach its top.



15. i.e. the nephilîm and the Flood of Noah and parts of the Eden narrative. [back to text]

16. These gigantic features can also be seen in tablet IV, on the path to Humbaba in the Cedar Forest; tablet VI, the battle with the Bull of Heaven; and tablet X, the ferry ride to Ut-napishtim. [back to text]

17. Ugarit, modern day Ras Shamra. [back to text]

18. CTA 4 [back to text]

19. Mot swallows Ba'al. Although many translations of this story imply that Ba'al used a substitute, disguised in his clothing, and hid in the shades of Mot's realm, the underworld. When Anat searches for him later on, she searches for her brother's shade. [back to text]

20. Author's note. [back to text]





In all his statues and stone carvings, Ba‛al Haddad was constantly depicted as a giant holding a smiting position; while everything else surrounding him was shorter in height. Even in front of the leader of the Ugaritic pantheon El, the mighty Ba‛al Haddad towered over him. In a similar fashion, we have the same traits presented in other ancient artifacts around the world. To list a few, we have the Narmer Palette and the Victory Stela of Naram-Sin, in which both kings are deified to such a degree where we see Narmer [21] towering over his servants and enemies holding a smiting position, and in Naram-Sin's stela, not only is Naram-Sin [22] superior in height compared to the rest of the individuals depicted on the stela, but he has also been known to deify himself by writing his name with the proto-Akkadian sign of il, standing for god; as is seen in his victory stela. Even in simple cylinder seal impressions we see the same motifs, where the gods are taller in stature than mankind. In the figure, the gods are represented with the horned cap while the humans are bearing most of the workload and are smaller in height.



Figure 1 - Impression of cylinder seal showing the building of a structure with both man and gods depicted in the scene, ca. 2246-2160 BCE. BLMJ Seal 377



With a deeper investigation of the main Pentateuchal literature to the post-Exilic writings followed by the mythology of the surrounding regions, we now know how originally the children of the sons of God were spoken of as heroes and mighty warriors, as opposed to the demonized giants we find later on. These same heroes were given features of gigantism, which symbolized strength or warrior/ ruler type status and semi- to full divinity. It is now important to understand how this change took place.



Conlusions



At what point in history did the Judahite Hebrew scribe adopt the Aramaic term nāphîl? The answer is, during the Neo-Assyrian Period, under the Neo-Assyrian Empire. While Akkadian was still in use under the Neo-Assyrian regime for political purposes, the language of the people was an Aramaic one. It is possible that after the fall of Samaria, the conquest of most of Judah at the hands of Neo-Assyria, and Hezekiah's surrender to Sennacherib resulting in him merely serving as a vassal to the Assyrian king created an opportunity for this Aramaic tongue which had been spreading as the official language of the empire to reach to Israelite/ Judahite territories. The Aramaic language, extremely similar to the many other variations of Semitic languages, was easily adopted, and extended from Mesopotamia to as far west as Egypt until the Hellenistic Period.



The fact that these nephilîm were still on the earth many generations after the Flood of Noah seems to prove that they played no part in the corruption of mankind. These themes would have been adopted at a later date, more specifically the Post-Exilic period. The Book of Jasher confirms this. Literary evidence clearly points the evolution of the sons of God [23] and the nephilîm to the time of the Persian Empire. In Zoroastrianism we have the similar ahuras and daêvas. Ahura is the Avestan word for God/gods and angels while daêvas was later corrupted to mean demons or anything having to do with evil. The original meaning for daêva comes from the root div, which means 'to shine'; leading daêvas to translate originally as 'the shining one(s)'. Oddly enough, what has taken a negative tone in Indo-Iranian culture is just the opposite in the neighboring Indian culture, which was a term used regularly to denote any deity. Scholars believe that the reason for such a word play may come from the opposing beliefs of the two cultures. While one side promoted monotheism, the other polytheistic side went against everything the first stood for. Anything or anyone not recognizing the supreme Ahura Mazda as the one and only good deity must be evil, and that is probably why a general and most commonly used term for God/ gods in one culture meant something evil in the other. That may be a reason as to why we find Hindu deities such as Indra labeled as a daêva. It was the worship of the daêvas that brought suffering and distress to mankind, creating the classical situation for a prophet to arise and offer salvation through consolation and hope for the people; this role was taken by Zarathushtra. During the post-Exilic period, when Zoroastrianism was at its highest influence, it is extremely possible that the Jews of the time adopted such themes. Starting to take a more dualistic approach in their own religion [24] , it can easily be seen that anything going against the supreme YHWH was evil, including those very sons of God that came onto the daughters of men, bringing forth their "evil" offspring, the nephilîm . Coincidently enough, the angels spoken of in the post-Exilic literature are described as pure and bright as Heaven; they are said to be formed of fire, and encompassed by light [25] . Could the scribe have seen this and taken the once heroic warrior demi-gods and demonized them? Mankind couldn't have been at fault, the scribes would have thought; evil forces must have been introduced to influence humans to commit evil things. The reader must also understand that before the Post-Exilic period and the introduction of Zoroastrianism into the Levant, Hebrew lore never incorporated any evil entity. You had the corruption and introduction of Sātān and his role to God, Belial, and Mastema; all evil spirits opposing the great YHWH, a role never assigned beforehand.



Now the question is, aside from the famed mighty warriors looked upon to such a high degree, as seen in Genesis 6:4, were there any surrounding and now lost mythological stories concerning these nephilîm ? Were they instead divine kings who ruled mankind at its earliest stages of civilization, as is seen in the Sumerian King List, the Epic of Gilgameš and in more historical stories?



If you have any comments or questions regarding this article please direct them to comments@petroskoutoupis.com. Or just visit www.petroskoutoupis.com.



21. Narmer (c. 3100 BCE) is a Pre-Dynastic king of Egypt, where under his leadership the unification of both Upper and Lower Egypt took place. His capital was found at Hierakonpolis (Nekhen) and the artifact was found in the 'Main Deposit' of the same site. [back to text]

22. Naram-Sin (c. 2250 BCE) was a king and the grandson of Sargon of Agade, king and creator of the Akkadian Dynasty and empire. Expansions of the empire were made under his reign, and he was given the title of King of the 4 Quarters/Corners, which meant 'king of the (known) world.' [back to text]

23. In An Adopted Legacy I also cover a detailed analysis on the role of the sons of God. [back to text]

24. The Jewish religion was starting to adopt more of a dualistic theme; paralleling that of the Zoroastrians. Now, if there was good, then there always was evil. Zoroastrianism was the first to introduce an evil entity always opposing the good; the supreme deity was the Ahura Mazda, while the opposing force was the Angra Mainyu, which literally translated to 'evil spirit'. [back to text]

25. cf. Ps. 104:4 [back to text]



http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/KoutoupisP1.php?p=1

Even though most think of the topics brought up as being non religious in the forum, they are and they are biased to one viewpoint. It is mostly the hyped viewpoint in many cases. (IMO) I won't name a specific one because many divide up what is who. Not only are these writings religious in nature but to some degree historical. Most of what is written in certain time periods are of this type and cannot be separated so to say I don't want to talk religion is sort of hypocritical. You keep bringing it up!



Most of the topics, not all are of a religious nature. When you bring up Nephilim, angels, demons, darkness which almost always is a value judgment of religion you cannot talk on the topic. Darkness could be debated upon if people would leave out their religious examples. Many are posting things that are old fashioned, outmouded ideas. Many are making the statements addressed to the "he" idea. One cannot talk on any of these topics if verses are going to be quoted and even apocrapha or pseudapocrapha used as examples from one basic religious group. It is a matter of opinion what is what and in some cases belief. I am getting tired of having to respond to questions and then have people, or the originator give examples from religious writings and almost always it is from Judeo/Christianity.



Then the gender biases come up, like all angels were "he" etc. Yes most know it to be that way but if anyone did any study at all they would find out that some of it was changed from a female representation to a neutral one and then a "he". A patriarchal society does not recognize "shes" in any form of spiritual matter and would not use that and it is known to have changed. (Not everything of course) It does say he in translated writings, in fact it is all male for the most part and all the females are relegated to the background but there are scholars that explain all of this if one takes the time to find out. When I say it doesn't say that I am referring way back and trying to get people to get away from assuming because you see "he" or sons of it doesn't mean the translation is correct. I have just come to the conclusion that angels cannot be exactly classified by gender and one has to look deeper at the overall picture. It clearly makes the male gender look pretty silly if this were to be the case. The churches voted at Nicea that angels were spiritual beings and not physical which is refuted in the writings so how can anyone then go the step farther and figure they were all "he" because they wrote that down too. It's a lot of stuff and it is complex and it is something that could cause quarrels and I don't like being dragged into it. I could stop posting but I want to learn and talk so that wouldn't be too fair.



There are other beliefs connected to the writings. There are those that worship angels or an angel. There are some that believe John the Baptist was the Messiah and worship him. All I am saying is there is no one answer to anything because as soon as you think you have it figured out, someone finds something and our technology concerning analyzing things and dating them gets better and better.



Look what was done to Astarte. She was turned into the male demon Asteroth. All of this to discredit this particular goddess because she was female and they had a different belief system. Then you have those differentiating Christianity from the Catholic faith. They are both Christian. It should be Protestant and Catholic not the other way around.



Example: (From Wikipedia-topic Astarte)



Astarte described by Sanchuniathon



In the description of the Phoenician pantheon ascribed to Sanchuniathon Astarte appears as a daughter of Sky and Earth and sister of the God El. After El overthrows and banishes his father Sky, as some kind of trick Sky sends to El his "virgin daughter" Astarte along with her sisters Asherah and the goddess who will later be called Ba`alat Gebal, "the Lady of Byblos". It seems that this trick does not work as all three become wives of their brother El. Astarte bears to El children who appear under Greek names as seven daughters called the Titanides or Artemides and two sons named Pothos "Longing" and Eros "Desire".



Later we see, with El's consent, Astarte and Hadad reigning over the land together. Astarte, puts the head of a bull on her own head to symbolize Her sovereignty. Wandering through the world Astarte takes up a star that has fallen from the sky (meteorite) and consecrates it at Tyre.



Astarte in Judea



The Masoretic pointing in the Hebrew Tanach (bible) indicate the pronunciation as ʻAštōreṯ instead of the expected ʻAštereṯ, probably because the two last syllables have here been pointed with the vowels belonging to bōšeṯ "abomination" to indicate that word should be substituted when reading. The plural form is pointed ʻAštārōṯ.



For what seems to be the use of the Hebrew plural form ʻAštārōṯ as the name of a demon, see also Astaroth.



Astarte, or ʻAštōreṯ in Hebrew, was the principal goddess of the Phoenicians, representing the productive power of nature. She was a lunar goddess and was adopted by the Egyptians as a daughter of Ra or Ptah.



In Jewish mythology, She is referred to as Ashtoreth, supposedly interpreted as a female demon of lust in Hebrew monotheism. The name Asherah may also be confused with Ashtoreth, but is probably a different goddess." (There is debate on what the Asherah are but I have also included the other mythology here)



I personally can't go to the forum without seeing the same things asked, over and over and over and I have only been here a little over two years. Read the archives first before asking these questions and quit using Judeo/Christian quotes as proof of anything...geesh. Just because they write something doesn't mean it wasn't changed or is right. This is offensive. Believe of course whatever faith you wish but the questions clearly drag someone in to have to say no this scholar says this since they found this or that or that isn't what it really says. No one wants to hear something they have been told all their lives isn't correct even if that may be the right answer. So I am tired of feeling set up to be sort of the adversary to some to be able to even post on the dang forum.



Also if you take examples from fringe writers like Sitchin and others you cannot expect to be anything but challenged. If you are interested in a lot of these writings, what I am posting next may be of interest to you. Try reading the Hiram Key. It's reviews are mixed but it is interesting.



All of what I mentioned is considered mythology because that is what it is. We, in modern times have chosen to believe which of all these writings we think is factual but it still becomes a matter of belief because history is written within all of these types of writings so finding out this person actually lived or that person does not verify its accuracy. Therefore I don't want to have to wade through all of this unless it is understood if I do I am not refuting religion but mythology.



If you are interested in reading more about some of these things the book I posted after this might be helpful.



Note: There are many beliefs within the actual community on how vampires came to be if you even believe anything beyond the revenant or fictionalized version. Look up Star Seeds and there are others. I am going to write an article on Indigo and Crystals because now everyone is talking like this always existed and they are this or that. Someone made this up folks. It didn't even exist in the 70s and I don't think in the 80s either but will check it out. I have before but forgotten. I chalked it off to a money making scheme, like the book "The Secret". If I remember right it started because of a book a couple wrote and then people went off on it and how it got into the more occult community I have no idea because when I first heard of it, it was sort of a spiritual way to explain certain behaviors in children such as ADHD and Autism, lol.

Biblical Origins: An Adopted Legacy

By Petros Koutoupis



http://astore.amazon.com/petroskoutouc-20/detail/1602641854



Product Description



Explore the world to which the Bible has been written in. Following the Documentary Hypothesis, each author provides clues to the origins of their writings. These clues reveal hidden propoganda and agendas during the time-frame to which the author had set these writings to scrolls. Biblical Origins is the first book in a future series, dedicated to solving the long lasting mystery: Who wrote the Bible? It is when this is identified that the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible will truly come to life, finally providing us with the answers to all else relating to it. There has been much confusion when attempting to date the Pentateuch, especially when considering the Documentary/Source Hypothesis. To what time-frame does each source/ author belong and under what influence do these writings come into existence? These questions have been plaguing both scholars and non-scholars since the very beginning of biblical studies. Designated towards scholarly research, Biblical Origins: An Adopted Legacy offers new insights to the author referred to as the Yahwist (J) and his role for giving us one of the most influential narratives read to this day. The origins of the Bible and its authorship are now revealed, with the author's influence based on the current conditions of the time and backed by Judaean political agendas. The Yahwist is not only identified to a specific period in Judiac history but as a result from additional research and analysis, clues are obtained confirming the identity of the Yahwist from another author in the Documentary Hypo-thesis, referred to as the Elohist (E). In addition to all the research revealed there is also an attempt in solving some of the Bible's oldest mysteries. The origins for the stories of Eden, the Flood, Babel, etc. are also carefully dissected and explained from the scribes' point of view. As a bonus the author provides, in an appendix chapter, his critical analysis of Genesis 14 and an identity to the author who wrote it.



Customer Reviews



A well written scholarly work on the Documentary Hypothesis. As Mr. Koutoupis points out in the book, Biblical study and research is a very new field of study and new discoveries are being made all the time. Only by studying this new material can one be up to date on Biblical history.



Biblical Origins begins with an introduction and history to the Documentary Hypothesis and points out that some passages were clearly written by someone other than Moses. An example given is from the end of Deuteronomy which records the death of Moses. Obviously someone other than Moses wrote this.



Mr. Koutoupis Investigates the textual evidence of the Henotheistic nature of the Hebrews' religion. One example provided is Psalm 82:1, "God (Elohim) standeth in the congregation of God (El), in the midst of the gods (elohim) he judgeth."



This book examines various texts and manuscripts including the Hebrew text of the Bible, the Book of Jasher, Ugaritic texts and other ancient Near Eastern documents to provide an overview of various events and people of Genesis including; the creation and fall of man, the Nephilim, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. The book also divides these accounts according to their relationship with the different authors.



Petros also goes into great detail about the origins and history of the Tetragramaton (yhvh) and its various related forms including yh and yhw as well as a possible connection to yam.



After reading this book, this reader is left with a greater appreciation for the origins of the events and persons in the Book of Genesis and highly recommends it to anyone interested in scholarly research on this subject. I will warn you, this book will challenge many of your long held beliefs. But as truth seekers we must be willing to broaden our knowledge and understanding if we want to find that truth.



*Note: This man is a scholar of writings of this type and he has his own website. You can find it if you type his name into your browser or you should be able to. He is a linguistic expert as far as these types of writings go and has worked with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There is a lot of talk in certain circles in here about the Vampyre Community or whether they believe in vampires. Generally this belief goes into the fictional area which seems most cannot separate in their minds especially the Dracula type of vampire which is totally fictional. It is beyond me as to why so many people are attracted to these fictional types of vampires. Folkloric vampires are mindless revenants almost resembling zombies in E. Europe. I don't see the fascination and why one cannot ferret out that it is just superstition. Many stories mixed together to create something and it varies in areas of the world. Many don't think of faeries drinking blood or draining others of energy but there are tales and of course ultimately because of English speaking people they get called vampires, lol.



The community is much more diverse than what you see in movies or read in books. It has others within its ranks depending on the group. Many include otherkin in their organizations. Some consider Vampyres as otherkin and yet others do not but they are "other" . This word has not been around for that long as other words that are now coined so freely.



There are area factions too. It depends in modern times what area of the world you live in and even in the US possibly city and/or state on the views and what they think about state of being and who is on first one might say. Many are followers of the modern cultish groups. I frown on it personally but as they say, you can't fight city hall. Some are impressed by those who write books and what is funny others known for writing in the paranormal are accepted at face value that what they are writing is correct. You have the camp with vampyrics trying to explain things most of whom don't fully agree unless they are followers and the other camp who are not trying to explain something they don't really understand even though many of them hang out with them. It is very comical quite frankly. This site wants only vamire things but unfortunately this community is entwined with others and many things they are involved with include the "other" side of things. If you are not a vampyric and you know you are not, don't seek out the modern community to answer questions because most don't like looky lous and you cannot be made into anything other than a friend or donor if accepted.



I am having a hell of a time using the computer due to my arms but trying and I am probably going back to my Council because it is going to hell in a handbasket very quickly. Online groups don't do that well in my opinion but if you have members from various countries it is difficult to function offline. Houses form all the time and some, even some accepted in the community are led by people who only want attention and are nothing more than people wanting to be in the limelight and many who have been around a long time know this and idly sit by and do NOTHING about it. They are interested in their events, goth night clubs and being acknowledged as some mucky muck who is so cool because they wear eerie makeup and dress in long black dresses or some male garb you could never wear to work. All of that amounts to fad and nothing more and I sort of bowed out because I had had enough of it. I do not wish to discuss the same old things over and over and I cannot understand why others wish to do this or even trace the vampire line if it is possible because no two people come up with the same ideas and they all say they are CORRECT. It is a bunch of crap I tried to wade out of but guess now I will put on my high boots and get back in but people won't like it because I say it like I see it!!!

I decided to write in here until the pain starts, lol. Still watching movies. Saw Gamer and like one other movie, I hated it. Love Gerard Butler but just didn't like this futuristic fiasco. I didn't like 300 either but probably the only person on the planet who didn't I guess. I didn't like the story and I didn't like his part in it. I didn't think he fit the part well and only got it due to popularity. It bored me for the most part. I like movies based on mythology but this one I just didn't like much.



I sometimes like movies no one else likes. I finished FINALLY watching White Noise 2 which is about NDEs and some far fetched religious silliness. It was a good movie though and I liked it. I just wish they would do something without bringing in a one world view from a religion. I started watching The Crypt but it was cheesy so I turned it off. The acting was ok and all but it was just like watching something you knew would be predictable. I saw The Cell 2 and I liked it a lot. Watched The Mist and it was a little out there in its premise but ok as well for a scifi/horror movie. I hadn't seen it when it came out. So watching new ones and those a couple of years old I haven't seen. I have to say most horror movies are pretty mindless. I love it when I can find ones that aren't merely scare, chase, kill and maim through the whole thing. I won't watch things like the Hills Have Eyes or the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (even though based on events). They just are made to scare people who like the adrenaline rush. I won't watch certain movies for the sex scenes...does nothing for me really. I would rather see a really meaty storyline than watch two people going at it or others chopping up people. It's mindless to me and snooze time, lol, although I did like The Shortcut. There was a pretty good story I thought.

I have watched so many in the last few days. As I said in the other post I loved Harry Potter but I think my favorite was Star Trek. That movie was so good. I am not fond of the actor they had play Spock but he was ok.



I also loved the new Transformers movie. I saw GI Joe, the newest Terminator, All the remakes of things Like Land Before Time, Land of the Lost (stupid I might add), I think its called. I have to re-watch Watchmen because there is so much detail and it is so dang long. I have to say I was like many both male and female that there was no reason to have the one character naked most of the time with his manhood waving in the breeze. LOL



I love Disney so I watched Race to Witch Mountain which was ok. I saw Adam Sandler's new movie (from his movie company) that is his first try at horror...not too bad. It's called The Shortcut. I had it figured out but realized by the ending I wasn't paying close attention because the signs of a twist were there, lol. I hated District 9. A really trippy one is A Perfect Getaway. I watched the Time Traveler's Wife, some of Across the Hall, Final Destination 4, Humanity's End. Another one I really liked was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This is all that I have been doing and resting my arms. I saw others prior on another site which were mostly tv things like Warehouse 13 episodes and episodes from a series based on 30 Days of Night. The sequel will be coming out soon. Can't even remember them all. I didn't do this on one day. Over I think something like four days. I won't be hanging out here much until my arms get better. I am going to check out a whole bunch more...as you can tell I love watching movies :)

I never generally get bored so have been surprised that I am now bored as hell here. I cannot keep doing the same things over and over each day. I don't see the incentive to do so really. I can't talk to all the friends I have because there are too many of them now. If I could send mass messages it would be helpful but somehow I am going to manage to get through them and send something soon.



I have taken a short break and now it will be longer because I have for want of a better description, tendonitis all the way up my right arm into my neck and starting in my left arm from my neck down. I just cannot type all the time right now. It's around my collar bone as wll on the left and is probably a combination of fibromyalgia actually and other things but I have done too much repetitive motion here. There is too much to do and now we have mentorships which is like being in a secondary coven. It is just too much for me. I stayed out of one here since I have two other profiles. Not sure if I am going to stay in the others or not. I am thinking I am going to eliminate all those extra one percent things so I am not dependent on them.



What I have been doing is watching movies online. I have seen so many now. I loved the new Harry Potter movie and I see nothing wrong with the ending but I knew somewhat about it since some in the family read the books so it was no surprise. The endings usually have the main characters coming together to talk before they leave at the end of each term. The headmaster from what I know would have suffered an excruciating death had not Snape stepped in. He was cursed. It had to happen and others will die and you probably won't like it but this type of story is violent and has been from the beginning. I really can't see why it is supposed to be childrens stories...seems to me more like adult stories with child characters that grow up...period. I like fantasy and I personally don't care about the age of the characters if the story is entertaining. Got to go back and finish Inkheart, lol...I fell asleep. I will watch anything with Brendan Frasier. Supposedly from another series of kid books. It is pure fantasy but entertaining all the same.

All I have to say about this movie is Wow. It was labeled horror but it really isn't. It is more like a psychological thriller. The little girl who plays Esther, the "Orphan" in my opinion should get an academy award for her performance and if you haven't seen this movie, hahahaha...you are going to be surprised. It looks like it is just another bad seed type of movie, but heh, it is way more than that.