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BPAL Madness!

doomsday_disco

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Everything posted by doomsday_disco

  1. doomsday_disco

    The Donkey's Tail

    Each purchase of Gloomily, Gloomily comes with a 1/32 oz imp of the Donkey’s Tail. The Donkey’s Tail is not available for sale on its own, and make sure you keep it safe as you never know where it might end up. “That Accounts for a Good Deal,” said Eeyore gloomily. “It Explains Everything. No Wonder.” Doubles as a bell-pull: a beribboned strip of French lavender, bourbon vanilla, silver thistle, grey musk, pink silk, and well-loved grey cotton.
  2. doomsday_disco

    The Phenomena of Witchcraft

    The Rev. Joseph Glanvil, chaplain in ordinary to Charles II., was a writer of great erudition and ability. In his “Sadducismus Triumphatus,” written to show that the phenomena of witchcraft were genuine occurrences, he gives an account of Mr. Mompesson’s haunted house at Tedworth, where it was observed that, on beating or calling for any tune, it would be exactly answered by drumming. When asked by some one to give three knocks, if it were a certain spirit, it gave three knocks and no more. Other questions were put, and answered by knocks exactly. Glanvil himself says, that, being told it would imitate noises, he scratched, on the sheet of the bed, five, then seven, then ten times ; and it returned exactly the number of scratches each time. Melanethon relates that at Oppenheim, in Germany, in 1620, the same experiment of rapping, and having the raps exactly answered by the spirit which haunted a house, was successfully tried ; and he tells us that Luther was visited by a spirit who announced his coming by “a rapping at his door.” In the famous Wesley case, the haunting of the house of John Wesley’s father, the Parsonage at Epworth, Lincolnshire, in 1716, for a period of two months, the supposed spirit used to imitate Mr. Wesley’s knock at the gate. It responded to the Amen at prayers. Emily, one of the daughters, knocked ; and it answered her. Mr. Wesley knocked a stick on the joists of the kitchen ; and it knocked again, in number of strokes and in loudness exactly replying. When Mrs. Wesley stamped, it knocked in reply. It is not surprising that John Wesley was a Spiritualist. “With my last breath,” he writes, “will I bear my testimony against giving up to infidels one great proof of the invisible world ; I mean that of witchcraft, confirmed by the testimony of all ages.” Planchette, or The Despair of Science : being a full account of modern spiritualism, its phenomena, and the various theories regarding it : with a survey of French Spiritism, Epes Sargent Green balsam, bay leaf, fossilized amber, blackened vetiver, and clove bud cloaked in oud.
  3. doomsday_disco

    The Fall of Anarchy

    Shattered amber tears, smoked saffron, burnt sugar, myrrh, brown leather, peru balsam, vetiver, and ash. Joseph Mallord William Turner
  4. doomsday_disco

    Honey, Raspberry Jam, and Buttercream

    Honey, Raspberry Jam, and Buttercream.
  5. doomsday_disco

    Halloween Hagelslag

    Who wants to go Dutch with us on a warm slice of buttered pumpkin bread covered in chocolate candy sprinkles?
  6. doomsday_disco

    Cosmic Criquet

    In the shadows of a neon hive-city, insectoid forms glide between thick curtains of bright green vines and crackling circuit boards. Blooming under sheets of acid rain and electric moons, this scent opens with the dark crackle of leather: slick, sunless, and alive with static. A surge of petrichor follows, like rainfall striking alien soil, soaking into a garden grown from strange seeds and synthetic spores. Peculiar blooms unfurl, humming with iridescent electricity. Moss clings to chrome roots, cybernetic orchids burst from humid soil.
  7. doomsday_disco

    The Lovers’ Serpent

    Winding through the Tree of Knowledge, the serpent offers transformative awareness, wisdom, and the awakened potential that elevates the soul or brings its downfall. Far be it from me to pass up an opportunity to revisit my beloved Snake Oil (especially with a Biblical twist) so I’ve crafted a Serpent in the Garden take on the original formula, suffused with fig, pomegranate, apple, green sandalwood, olibanum, blackcurrant, and iridescent serpent scale accord.
  8. doomsday_disco

    David and Jonathan

    In the First Book of Samuel it is written: “And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,” (1 Samuel 18:1) and in that binding the axis of a kingdom trembles. Robe, armor, sword, and girdle are given freely, a voluntary unmaking of inheritance in favor of devotion. This is love as sacred oath, not fever but fidelity, a bond forged in the shadow of Saul’s rising wrath and the uncertainty of exile. When David laments, “thy love to me was wonderful beyond the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26) grief becomes testimony and loyalty becomes scripture. Jonathan’s renunciation is ego relinquished so that another may ascend, sulfur tempered by mercy, ambition dissolved into covenantal gold. Here the Lovers stand not in garden innocence but beneath the weight of throne and spear, choosing allegiance over advantage, devotion over dynasty. Love does not seize power but surrenders it, and in that surrender is transfigured into something that outlives both battle and crown. Shepherd’s wool and wild honey, cedarwood and olive leaf, sun-warmed leather, plumes of frankincense rising from a quiet altar, and a thread of red pomegranate seed crushed between steady hands.
  9. doomsday_disco

    Beatrice and Dante

    Courtly love that becomes cosmology, a spiritual ascent, a ladder to heaven. In The Divine Comedy, Beatrice is not simply muse or lover, but a guide. She is radiant Sophia, living wisdom, the luminous intelligence that draws the soul upward through ever-widening spheres of divine light. Beatrice’s eyes are mirrors that reflect the radiance of Heaven itself, “with eyes of light more bright than any star.” Her gaze does not return to the pilgrim but lifts him upward, directing his sight beyond her to the splendor of the Eternal. “Then to the eyes of beauty my eyes turned,” Dante says, and the beauty he sees there is “far more beautiful than the vast universe beneath his feet.” The beloved is not held but beheld, and in that gaze the soul is altered. Though she is one of the Lovers, she also rises above them, not to inflame desire but to purify it. Through her presence, longing is refined from appetite into ascent. The earthly self, heavy with burdens, is gradually transmuted. L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. In these Lovers exists adoration that moves the sun and stars. Longing clarifies, burns, and rises, and the anima lifts the earthly self toward its red perfection, where desire is no longer hunger but illumination. Love that is hope, love that is divine, love that reflects the radiance of the highest heavens. White rose and scarlet iris, beeswax smoke and frankincense tears, vellum and sacred myrrh, and a thread of red saffron steeped in luminous amber.
  10. doomsday_disco

    Achilles and Patroclus

    In the song attributed to Homer, their devotion turns the tide of war. Patroclus is the hidden heart of the warrior, the tender pulse beneath iron and oath. When he falls, the world blackens, grief becomes wildfire, and pride is burned away in the furnace of loss and sorrow. This is love as ordeal and the beloved as mirror of the soul. Nigredo in the shadow of the pyre, calcination in the roar of battle. From mourning rises terrible clarity, bright and merciless as a drawn blade. Love does not soften fate; it forges it. Bronze-bright armor warmed by the sun, salt-wind off the Aegean, crushed amarantos beneath restless feet, and the metallic sting of blood on sand.
  11. doomsday_disco

    Eve and Adam

    In the book of Book of Genesis, the first pair stand in untested unity, formed of earth and breath, innocence and possibility. “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:18), and from that declaration arises polarity as gift rather than fracture, difference as the condition of communion. Bone of bone and flesh of flesh, they are not rivals but reflections, two aspects of one living mystery: the soul and the spirit of humankind. Yet the drama of the Lovers is not stasis but choice. When the fruit is taken and shared, consciousness deepens and the seamlessness of Eden gives way to the currents of history. “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:23). Through Eve’s invitation and Adam’s consent, spirit and soul descend into the rivers of Time, entering the full measure of embodied existence with its labor and ecstasy, its birth pangs and graves. Mortality becomes their teacher, and the dust from which Adam was shaped becomes the destiny to which he must return, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Esoterically, she may be seen as the animating impulse, the quickening spirit that urges experience, while he embodies the ensouled humanity that must walk the path she opens. Their so-called fall is also initiation, the necessary passage from unconscious unity into lived duality, where joy and sorrow are known rather than merely imagined. The Lovers here are not simply the bliss of Eden but the courage to enter time together, to face consequence side by side, and to seek, through exile and return, the restoration of a higher garden not of innocence but of awakened wholeness. In the first dawn of consciousness, before history clothed itself in shame, stand Adam and Eve as archetypes of a polarity not yet divided against itself. She is the descending brilliance, arching her consciousness towards the world itself, the soul drawn upward toward gnosis. He turns toward her, embodied will answering its own reflection. Above them burns the stark, pure radiance of unity and within them sleeps the yet-unforged Stone. The serpent coils at the axis of the Tree. It is the mercurial spirit, subtle and ascending, the luminous volatility of both knowledge and growth that refuses stasis. Through its whisper the fruit becomes the tincture that awakens innocence into awareness. Sulfur awakens in desire, Mercury stirs in receptivity, salt forms in the tears of exile. The expulsion is the separation required for conjunction, solve preceding coagula. What was unconsciously whole must become consciously divided so it may one day reunite in wisdom. In these Lovers, unity dissolves into duality, and in that darkening begins the opus. This is not the loss of Eden; it is the ignition of the Great Work. Skin musk, fig sap, pomegranate, apple skin, and the smoke and warmth of humankind’s newly-kindled fire.
  12. doomsday_disco

    Eighteenth Lash

    Vanillekipferl plunked in a pile of pine needles.
  13. doomsday_disco

    Kite and Two Crows

    Rain-soaked leaves, lightning-struck wood, gleaming black myrrh, smoked cedar, hinoki, and black tea. Yosa Buson
  14. doomsday_disco

    His Crown and His Shroud

    “O father, see yonder! see yonder!” he says; “My boy, upon what doest thou fearfully gaze?” — “O, ’tis the Erl-King with his crown and his shroud.” “No, my son, it is but a dark wreath of the cloud.” A dread shape forms in the mist: chilled white musk, rain-soaked earth, and a gleam of blackened steel.
  15. doomsday_disco

    Night-Scented Orchid

    A tribute to Epidendrum nutans, the nocturnal seductress of the forest canopy. Sweet, indolic jasmine curls around a breath of citrus and moonlit air, a perfume that blooms when the world sleeps.
  16. doomsday_disco

    Lavender Rosemary Seed Bread

    An aromatic crusty loaf covered in pre-bake slashes to create a floral pattern on top, flecked with flax, sesame, pumpkin seeds.
  17. doomsday_disco

    Choco-Bordello

    A Lupercalia Box of Chocolates scent that was supposed to go live this year but we were short on components. A chocolate truffle filled with wild plum, amaretto, burgundy wine, and black currant.
  18. doomsday_disco

    If Bears Were Bees, If Bees Were Bears

    Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws and began to think. First of all he said to himself: “That buzzing-noise means something. You don’t get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee.” Then he thought another long time, and said: “And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.” And then he got up, and said: “And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” So he began to climb the tree. He climbed and he climbed and he climbed, and as he climbed he sang a little song to himself. It went like this: Isn’t it funny How a bear likes honey? Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder why he does? Then he climbed a little further … and a little further … and then just a little further. By that time he had thought of another song. It’s a very funny thought that, if Bears were Bees, They’d build their nests at the bottom of trees. And that being so (if the Bees were Bears), We shouldn’t have to climb up all these stairs. He was getting rather tired by this time, so that is why he sang a Complaining Song. He was nearly there now, and if he just stood on that branch … Crack! “Oh, help!” said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet on the branch below him. The bees were still buzzing as suspiciously as ever. A golden gourmand for a philosopher. Wild clover honey buzzing with mead fizz, a gust of woodsmoke, and a dusting of ambered pollen.
  19. Alas, poor Marsh! Dribbles of masticated vanilla pods soaked in ethanol and caked with mud.
  20. Raspberry punch with elderberry liqueur, lemon juice, a splash of gin, and a smattering of Victoria sponge crumbs.
  21. doomsday_disco

    La Dame Aux Pamplemousses

    Billowing bulbous blobs of grapefruit marshmallows.
  22. The crime of Lady Violet at Gilravage Hall in Neglected Murderesses. Black Darjeeling brewed to the edge of acridity, its dark tannins laced with the faint metallic sigh of tarnished silver. Bruised and rain-damp wisteria petals clinging to a loosened knot of fraying violet ribbon. The lingering ghost of charred wood from a dormant hearth drifting beneath a sweep of velvet the color of fading bruises, tangled with the ragged threads of silk-stitched roses.
  23. doomsday_disco

    La Sylphe de Forêt Noire

    From Edward Gorey’s Scènes de Ballet. A glimmer of white tulle in a thicket of ink-black pines, graceful as a half-spied pirouette between a silhouette of clawed branches. The hush of forest moss under satin slippers, a wisp of candle smoke, the flick of a wrist as pale as lilies beckoning through thick myrrh shadows.
  24. doomsday_disco

    Grumblotch’s Salts

    These are not soluble in lemonade, as clarified in The Awdrey-Gore Legacy. They are, however, most likely toxic. Pale crystals poured from a chipped glass jar, emitting a brittle whiff of bitter almond and cinnabar, swirling, undissolved, into sugar-clotted lemonade.
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