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Midjourney 6 prompt [a quote from John Stuart Mill

Midjourney 6 prompt [a quote from John Stuart Mill, from his 1874 essay "On Nature," in which Mill argues against the tendency to equate "natural" with "morally good"]:

"If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments necessary for that purpose; their strongest instincts impel them to it and many of them seem to have been constructed incapable of supporting themselves by any other food. If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided, with scarcely an exception, into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves. If we are not obliged to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon, it is because we need not suppose it to have been made by a Being of infinite power. - psychedelic color"

Used to illustrate my essay "A Planet of Parasites and the Problem With God" - musings on the existence of God, the problem of evil, the science of parasitic mind control, the simulation hypothesis, and the ethics of creating sentient digital minds... all from the mind of your friendly-neighborhood neurotic existentialist writer who somehow manages to find humor in it all.

Find the essay via the “Joyful Pessimism” link in the bio.

Midjourney 6 does lettering well now. These are th

Midjourney 6 does lettering well now. These are the lovely ladies of "Ishtar's Angels," the world's first end-of-life bordello, combining sex work, psychedelics, and assisted suicide. They are featured in my dystopian erotic novella "Ishtar's Angel."

Wanna ride with them? They'll treat you right... for your last-ever night! Go out with a *bang* at Ishtar's Angels!

Read the story via the “Joyful Pessimism” link in the bio.

The “Compendium Maleficarum” (“Compendium of

The “Compendium Maleficarum” (“Compendium of Witchcraft”) is a 1608 witch-hunting manual by Italian priest Francesco Maria Guazzo. The book contains many woodcarvings illustrating the alleged tales of witches’ crimes.

The woodcarving in the video illustrates the “osculum infame,” or “kiss of shame,” an imagined act of witches performing analingus on the Devil, submitting to him and sealing their pact. Those medieval priests were imaginative, kinky f*ckers!

The problem is, like most religious prudes, rather than simply enjoying their phantasmagoric masturbatory fantasies in the privacy of their own church cells and rectories, these priests projected their fantasies (in this case, fantasies of demonic butt-licking) onto others, namely, social outcasts whom they accused of the “crime” witchcraft, then tortured and burned alive.

The “Compendium Maleficarum” quotes an accusation read by a judge of the Holy Inquisition in Avignon, France in 1582, which condemned eighteen women and men to burning at the stake, convicted of witchcraft.

The accusation contains a lurid, prurient description of a Witches’ Sabbath ceremony leading up to a “kiss of shame,” resulting in an orgy with incubi and succubi (male and female demons who have sex with humans of the opposite sex.)

Today, on Halloween, in honor of all the women and men accused of witchcraft and tortured and burned by these perverted inquisitors, I release this spoken word piece: my reading of this lurid inquisitor’s accusation quoted in the “Compendium,” accompanied by the pianist Adey Bell.

“The Witches’ Sabbath”:
A Selection from Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum” (1608)
Read by Michael Ellsberg
Piano accompaniment by @adey_bell , playing “Rev. 22:20” by Puscifer.
Full video at https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8Bvq4b9/
#witch #witchcraft #witchesofinstagram #witches #pagan #pagansofinstagram

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Instagram post 18248006014200540

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Instagram post 18124907812308514

That Time I Taught My Platonic Female Friend to Do

That Time I Taught My Platonic Female Friend to Dom the $%^# Out of Me...

Recently, I rang my friend and book coaching client Celinne Da Costa to catch up. Half an hour into our conversation, she mentioned in an offhand comment that she was interested in exploring her dominant side in her sexuality.
I mentioned that I am a switch (meaning I go both ways in the Dom/Sub dynamic) and I since I know both sides, I enjoy and am good at supporting women in discovering their dominant side. It's fun for both of us. I also like the politics of it: women learning to dominate men subverts the patriarchy.

Celinne was supremely interested in this. We are completely platonic friends, and I supported her professionally in her process of writing her amazing memoir. So I assured that teaching/learning dominance can be done without anything involving sex, or even running erotic energy. Dominance is about progressively taking control in an encounter (with consent) and that can be completely platonic if that is what's called for, which was the case here.
Celinne is always up for adventure (that's what her whole memoir is about) so I suggested I give her a training session in BDSM-style dominance over video call, we record it, and if she's comfortable with it, she could release it to her audience on her podcast.

Celinne was a HELL YES to this. So we did it. For 2.5 hours straight.

Here’s Part 1. We dive into inquiry about what Domme persona she wanted to explore. True to her nature, Celinne dashed my expectations by coming up with a whole new distinction within BDSM archetypes I had never considered before, even though I'd been in this world for 10 years and she was completely new.
I was blown away that Celinne was willing to try learning a new skill--especially one so vulnerable--for her audience, diving right in. That's my friend Celinne for you!

Listen to Part 1 via the link in my bio. (Part 2, coming soon, is where it gets completely crazy, and Celinne's inner dominatrix came out and she dommed the shit out of me in real time like a pro right out of the gate.)

PS - thank you @selena_soo for connecting me to @celinnedacosta many moons ago. You sparked a wonderful friendship!

Diamanda Galás, vocalist and pianist gave a solo

Diamanda Galás, vocalist and pianist gave a solo concert in town my sophomore year in college. I was drawn to the concert from her picture on the poster: jet-black hair with dangerous eyes. One of the review snippets called this live performance of her new work Schrei X “the most harrowing experience in a lifetime of concert-going.”

At the show, a sole piano and microphone set the stage. The lights dimmed. The room was pitch black except for a small light on the music stand. A tall, slim figure in a long black dress walked out. Applause. She stood in front of the microphone, silent for at least a minute. Then, from the speakers emanated the most spine-shattering, unrelenting shriek I had ever heard. About fifteen people stood up and exited the auditorium upon hearing this single note.

Amidst cries and shrieks, Galás belched out guttural sentences and spoke demonic verses in a low raspy voice. More shrieks and cries and echoes. Then, fragmentary shouts of violent dialogues, perhaps self-dialogues in her mind: “Cunt! Cunt“ Then she dove into what sounded like passages from the biblical liturgy in Latin, mumbling in the tone of Catholic priests.

I read during the intermission that Galás had been institutionalized at one point. Her brother, a gay man, had died of AIDS at the height of the crisis in 1984, and in 1989 she had been arrested in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in an early ACT-UP “die-in” protesting the Catholic Church’s stance against AIDS education.

Not long after that action, she had somehow finagled permission to perform and record her protest work Plague Mass live inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York—a performance the Catholic Church immediately denounced as blasphemy.

The music was dark, but I found her cacophony beautiful. Not as in “the opposite of ugly;” the music was extremely ugly. Beautiful in that it was perfect—perfectly dark.

***
From "Joyful Pessimism: A Memoir of Sex, Mental Illness, and Philosophy," out later this year from El León Literary Arts. Chapter 2: "The Horny Ecofeminist."

Read more by subscribing to my Substack. (Link in the bio.)

"The Horny Ecofeminist" (photo: the author, age 17

"The Horny Ecofeminist" (photo: the author, age 17, 1994)

In the fall of my freshman year at college, in 1995, Playboy magazine sent a glimmering tour bus to our New England liberal arts campus to promote its recently-published “Women of the Ivy League” issue.

The only time in my life that I have been possessed by an all-encompassing, rigid, demagogic ideology coincided with Playboy’s visit to my school. My ideology did not think kindly of Playboy.

For reasons related to militant teenage ethical veganism, and from the influence of a beloved English teacher, since my junior year of high school, I had been a hard-core adherent of ecofeminism. This theory, which emerged from the radical environmental and radical feminist movements in the seventies, held that male violence towards women and human violence towards animals and the environment stem from the same source: how men within patriarchy objectify everything around them for their use.

Thus, when Hugh Hefner sent his slimy recruiting minions to my school-town turf, ready to exploit our unsuspecting, innocent young women, I needed to defend our campus from the predations of the nation’s pornographer-in-chief...

I sat at my dorm room desk and composed a letter to the Brown Daily Herald decrying Playboy and pornography.

I clicked “send” on the letter.

But then, later that afternoon…

As was my custom most afternoons, I locked the door, and fished in my dresser for a key. I double-checked my roommate’s class schedule, taped to the wall. Then I kneeled by my bed, pulled my suitcase out from under, and unlocked it.

From within this locked treasure chest, I removed a stack of magazines: well-worn Playboy and Penthouse magazines I’d been collecting since I was thirteen, when I used to shoplift them from the local grocery store by sticking them in newspapers and then buying the newspaper without paying for the hidden porno mag....

***
From "Joyful Pessimism: A Memoir of Sex, Mental Illness, and Philosophy," Chapter 2: "The Horny Ecofeminist."

Read more by subscribing to my substack, where I'm releasing the book chapter by chapter. (Link in the bio.)

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