Ed Hardy devil. Taken from Tattoo Artist Magazine blog.
And I saw with my body what I could never have seen with my mind or imagination during my career as a failed artist. Everywhere I travelled I saw how the pervasive shadow, the all-moving darkness, was using our world. Because this shadow, this darkness has nothing of its own, no way to exist except as an activating force or energy, whereas we have our bodies, we are only our bodies, whether they are organic bodies or non-organic bodies, human or non-human bodies, makes no difference—they are all simply bodies and nothing but bodies, with no component whatever of a mind or a self or a soul. Hence the shadow, the darkness uses our world for what it needs to thrive upon. It has nothing except its activating energy, while we are nothing except our bodies. This is why the shadow, the darkness causes things to be what they would not be and do what they would not do. Because without the shadow inside them, the all-moving blackness activating them, they would only be what they are—heaps of matter lacking any impulse, any urge to flourish, to succeed in this world. This state of affairs should be called what it is—an absolute nightmare.
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| — | Thomas Ligotti, “The Shadow, The Darkness” from Teatro Grottesco, 2006. |
Quoth Wikipedia:
The Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a man who has been hanged, often specified as being the left (Latin: sinister) hand, or else, if the man were hanged for murder, the hand that “did the deed.”
According to old European beliefs, a candle made of the fat from a malefactor who died on the gallows, virgin wax, and Lapland sesame oil - lighted and placed (as if in a candlestick) in the Hand of Glory, which comes from the same man as the fat in the candle - would have rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented. The candle could only be put out with milk. (In another version the hair of the dead man is used as a wick, also the candle is said to give light only to the holder.) The Hand of Glory also purportedly had the power to unlock any door it came across. The method of making a hand of glory is described in “Petit Albert”, and in the Compendium Maleficarum.
Struck by lightening and left with a Lichtenberg Figure. Lichtenberg figures are tree-like markings, found commonly on the trunk, arms or shoulders on lightening victims.
From First Utterance, 1971. Great music for when the leaves begin to change and the nights get cold.
The most popular explanation for the Loch Ness Monster is that it is a plesiosaurus, a marine dinosaur left over from the late Jurassic. The real answer, however, may be far more sinister. Infamous occultist Aleister Crowley lived on the South-Eastern shore of Loch Ness from 1899 to 1913, inhabiting the Boleskine House estate. It is known that during this time he was performing a range of drug-fuelled demonic sexual rituals with the aim of using dark magic to summon paranormal entities. It is soon after this time that most of the major sightings of Nessie started. Some theorists suggest that Nessie may in fact be a leftover remnant from these summoning rites, a sort of interdimensional reverberation of a dark spirit whom Crowley was unable to send back to the other side. This hypothesis may also explain why researchers have never been able to detect the entity via sonar or other scientific techniques.
What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city—the werewolf—is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city. That such a man is defined as a wolf-man and not simply as a wolf…is decisive here. The life of the bandit, like that of the sacred man, is not a piece of animal nature without any relation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.
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| — | Giorgio Agamben, from Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. |
