Tag: books

“An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not
necessarily
indicative of madness. It is quite maddening, granted, not only for
the loved ones of the eating disordered person but also for the person
herself. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly
contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A
gesture of strength
that divests you of all strength. A wish to prove that you need
nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and
becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find
an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save
the sorry identity of “sick.” It is a grotesque mockery of cultural
standards of beauty that winds up mocking no one more than you.
It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end
makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all
women. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, con-
tained—and in the end, of course, you find it’s doing quite the op-
posite. These contradictions begin to split a person in two. Body and
mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an
eating
disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion
that an eating disorder may fester and thrive.”

— Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

Johann Faust – Höllenzwang (17th c.). [x]
At the beginning of the 17th century, a book of black magic was
published, attributed to the mythical Faust and known by the title
Höllenzwang. The library in Weimar owned a manuscript of this text,
which Goethe was aware of. The document, which is difficult to date, is
written in cabalistic signs and, according to a German gloss, contains a
series of magic spells for exorcists.

The Rawlinson necromantic manuscript, 15th century

This collection of texts on magic and fortune-telling – popularly known as the Rawlinson necromantic manuscript
– is written in Latin and Middle English. It contains spells,
conjurations, invocations and ‘experimenta’ (true experiences) of
angels.

The two devices shown above are sigils, and pentagrams such as the
one on the left have long been accredited with esoteric powers. The
ancient Greeks saw in them a demonstration of mathematical perfection,
while medieval Christians saw in them an image of the five wounds of
Christ, while many now see it as an occult sign used by practitioners of
magic to invoke both heavenly and diabolic spirits.