Salutations turned 11 today!
NASA
Monterey Bay Aquarium

★

JBB: An Artblog!
Xuebing Du
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Cosmic Funnies
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
No title available
RMH
ojovivo
will byers stan first human second

izzy's playlists!

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Cosimo Galluzzi
🪼
KIROKAZE
Today's Document
Jules of Nature
styofa doing anything
seen from Belgium
seen from Netherlands

seen from Türkiye
seen from Honduras

seen from China
seen from France
seen from Argentina

seen from United States

seen from Japan
seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States
seen from Albania
seen from Finland

seen from Türkiye
seen from Brazil

seen from Brazil
@combatready-bropenny
Salutations turned 11 today!
Someone explore Bad Batch Actor AU with me in what kind of bloopers there would be and set shenanigans:
-Omega accidentally breaks the lever opening the brig, she tried to awkwardly put it back
-Tech keeps accidentally breaking the Marauder steering wheel off when he does the drifting turns
-many dance parties during scene setups
-Echo misses the scomp port and puts it through the prop wall instead, he tries to keep playing the scene as normal
-Crosshair keeps making Hunter laugh during serious scenes
-Hunter keeps ruining the finale scenes by hugging Crosshair instead of his actual lines
-Echo falling in the water was absolutely not planned but they kept it in cause it was funny
-Rex tripped like 5 times trying to film him walking into and out of fog
-Wrecker knocking his head on the pipe at Saleucami was unplanned and they kept it in, Rex was laughing on the sides telling the set designers that he was right about them placing pipes too low
-Wrecker stomping the elevator down was unplanned as it actually did get stuck
-Palpatine rose into the senate with a milkshake in hand for one take
-They play pranks on Rampart making him laugh in his scenes
-Omega and any of the Batch lounging on set during scene setup in sunglasses
-Cad Bane letting Omega wear his hat between takes
-Wrecker accidentally held Omega up too high during the pod rescue scene and hit her head on the set ceiling making everyone laugh
-Someone’s mask fell off in the middle of a scene during Ordo Moon filming, they immediately went into over exaggerated dying
(Any more are welcome 😂)
with this blade and this mead i will protect you all from tyranny and the motherfuckers that threaten your home and hearth
get this photo circulating again so that i can get some real marriage proposals
Did it work?
not yet we have to keep going
KEEP IT GOING!
More Team RWBY, I love the sketches, but the silhouettes look even cooler for me~
Crafting something spooky! ✨
DC Pride #1 - “Finding Batman” (2022)
written by Kevin Conroy art by J. Bone
oopsie~ o///o
Emeryne's crow friend, blueberry, flies to see her in the middle of winter. Thank goodness she's okay, it's so cold these days and- oops.
(also it's hard to tell but darcy/blueberry is carrying an acorn in her mouth that's stem is connected to another acorn, as a sweet gift of love)
“Can we speak in flowers. It’ll be easier for me to understand”-Nayyirah Waheed
I hope you’ve all been enjoying the start of this cool Spring. :)
May this season bring as much joy to you, as it does the cherry trees. 🌸
Model Credit (Img 05): Rae, and Photographer (Img 07) : Rachel Dooley :)
I don't mean this in any jokey or disrespectful way; is there any truth to the alchemy in say, the Full Metal Alchemist anime? The symbols or transmutation circles?
Actually the author of FMA did a ton of research into historical western alchemy. The whole law of equivalent exchange is a real alchemical concept from hermetica, and one that sir Issac Newton expounded into the law of thermodynamics.
The elrics dad, Van Hoenhiem, is based on a real alchemist named Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hoenhiem. At one point Pride even references the real alchemists name.
Basically everything about alchemy in FMA is taken from primary sources, down to the symbology of transmutation circles to the color scheme of Edwards design.
The way alchemy works in FMA doesn’t resemble the way real-life alchemy is or was supposed to work, however, FMA is still packed full of references to real-life alchemy. The most obvious one is Hohenheim’s name, but there are plenty more! (Ed and Al also share their names with real-life famous occultists, Edward Kelly and Alphonse Constant (Eliphas Levi), but this might be a coincidence.)
It is probably no accident that Ed’s color scheme is black, white, and red. The three main stages of alchemy are names the nigredo, the albedo, and the rubedo. Nigredo, the black stage, is when the matter of the Stone “dies” and putrefies, representing spiritual death. Albedo, the white stage, is when the matter of the Stone is washed, boiled, and turns to vapor, which condenses back into water, and the cycle repeats. This represents spiritual ascension and unification with the divine. Finally, during the rubedo, this “volatile” matter becomes “fixed,” crystallizing into the Philosopher’s Stone. Ed also has gold hair and eyes, which is fairly self-explanatory. Gold is a metaphor for the state of spiritual perfection.
The “Flamel” symbol of a serpent nailed to a cross that’s on the back of Ed’s coat, painted on Al’s pauldron, and tattooed on Izumi’s chest is the “crucified serpent,” which actually does come from Nicolas Flamel. It represents the completion of the Great Work, the union of the fixed and volatile, the mercurial serpent physically nailed down to the cross with its four arms representing the Four Elements (with Quintessence in the center) and the reconciliation of polarities. It also demonstrates the death and mortification of the old body that is necessary for the Philosopher’s Stone to be reborn:
The wings at the top of FMA’s “Flamel” is probably meant to represent Mercury’s Caduceus, and maybe also the resurrection of the snake. The crown references the “King” that is a metaphor for the Philosopher’s Stone. The Flamel symbol also bears resemblance to the Staff of Asclepius, which represents medicine in the real world.
Another example is the “Green Lion” on the flag of Amestris that acts a symbol of the military and is referenced a few other times:
In real alchemy, the “Green Lion” is a symbol of antimony ore and represents the Philosopher’s Stone in its “imperfect” state, before it’s been purified. The Green Lion eats the Sun (representing perfection and Gold), causing a solar eclipse, representing the nigredo (death), the first stage of the Great Work. Amestris was created for almost exactly that reason, and it is far from “purified,” with corruption running deep into its core.
The image of the lion eating the sun appears in the show, when Ed and Ling are in Gluttony’s stomach:
There’s also the transmutation circle itself, which looks so realistic, I actually thought it was real when I first saw it online:
Here’s a real magic circle:
Real magic circles are from ceremonial magic, not alchemy, but the text around the outside of the Human Transmutation Circle does reference alchemy. The “peacock’s feathers,” the spotted panther and the green lion (as previously mentioned), the progression of black, gray, white, and red, all are metaphors for chemical reactions that are supposed to take place in an ideal alchemical procedure.
Some of the more complicated transmutation circles that appear throughout the show are also based on real designs from manuscripts. There’s this design on the wall of the Fifth Laboratory:
Here we see the Sun and Moon (more on that in a minute) and three symbols of Mercury, which represent their unification. This looked very realistic, so I did some searching and this is what I found:
It’s not exactly the same, but it’s clearly an image from an alchemical manuscript, and it’s very similar.
The designs on Ed and Al’s doors are real. The design on Ed’s door is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life as depicted by Robert Fludd in his seventeenth-century book Utriusque Cosmi:
The design on Al’s door comes from an alchemical manuscript called The Marrow of Alchemy by George Ripley (as in, the Ripley Scroll). It depicts the alchemical process:
I haven’t managed to find where the design on Mustang’s gate comes from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that one was real, too.
One more thing I want to draw attention to is this dialogue between child-Ed and child-Al in ”He Who Would Swallow God.”
Edward: “The Sun is male, representing masculinity.” Alphonse: “The Moon is female, representing femininity.” Edward: “When the Sun and the Moon overlap, then the two genders become one.” Alphonse: “In other words, the union represents a perfect being.”
The Sun and Moon are kind of a big deal in alchemy, and they are associated with maleness and femaleness respectively. Their role in real alchemy is as the metaphorical “parents” of the androgynous Philosopher’s Stone, the perfect being:
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
—The Emerald Tablet
Through the “chemical wedding” of the Sun and Moon (sulfur and mercury), the Philosopher’s Stone is produced. I actually didn’t consider that a solar eclipse might be a symbol of the chemical wedding, until Ed and Al explicitly pointed it out in that episode. That’s not what an eclipse traditionally represents in alchemy (that’s the Green Lion swallowing the sun, the nigredo and dark night of the soul that follows the first chemical wedding), but I still think it makes sense.
(An image of the Chemical Wedding itself actually appears on the door to the exam room in the 2003 anime.)
Alchemy in FMA mostly doesn’t resemble real alchemy beyond those references. Real alchemy isn’t equivalent exchange — changing something into something else of equal value — but rather, metamorphosing something into a more improved version of itself. Theoretically, this would be turning “lead” into “gold,” the most base form of metal into the most perfect form of metal (as was believed). But real alchemy isn’t about chemicals, and it never really was. Real alchemy is a spiritual process, meant to transmute the soul from its “base” human state into a “perfect” spiritual state. The way to do this is to separate out the “subtle” from the “gross,” i.e. the higher spiritual self from the mundane and earthly human self, and then joining them back together so that the spiritual self purifies the mundane self. This is summarized by the Latin phrase “solve et coagula,” to dissolve and to congeal, or alternately, to separate and to bring together. FMA parallels this with its two parts of alchemy being deconstruction (solve) and reconstruction (coagula). Therefore, the character whose goals and motivations come the closest to those of real alchemists is… believe it or not… Father.
What Father wants, or at least what he says he wants, is knowledge. He wants all the knowledge in the universe. That’s what most occultists want, actually. Most occultists want to either merge with or become alike to God, although they all have different theories and methods of doing that. In FMA, the Philosopher’s Stone is an alchemical catalyst powered by human souls, but in real life, the Philosopher’s Stone is (long story short) a metaphor for the perfect being that Father wants to become. The real Philosopher’s Stone is a being that is a perfect balance of male and female, sun and moon, dark and light, human and divine. It is therefore whole and complete. As I understand it, a person who has become the Philosopher’s Stone can, theoretically, have the power and knowledge of a god whilst still being able to live on earth as a human.
By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. So was the world created.
—The Emerald Tablet
Father’s “perfect” form is a perverse version of this ideal.
(This form gives me some very confusing emotions.)
“As above, so below” is the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence, the closest thing to a real Law of Equivalent Exchange — it is the idea that the Macrocosm (God, the Universe, Truth) reflects the microcosm (humanity), and that by affecting one, you affect the other. The goal of the alchemist is to become the Philosopher’s Stone, the place where Human and Divine meet and become one thing.
I can’t believe it took me until now to see “As above, so below” represented here. Even the episode’s title makes that obvious! But despite that blatant symbolism, there is no healthy convergence of divine and human here. Many occultists believe in something called “ego death,” which I used to think meant losing one’s individuality, which sounded a lot like being trapped in a homunculus with a torrent of other screaming souls. Only now, after watching this show, do I understand what “ego death” really means. This scene is pure ego on Father’s part:
HEAR ME GOD! I DEMAND YOU ANSWER THE CRY OF MY SOUL! COME TO ME! JOIN ME! YES, I WILL NO LONGER BE BOUND TO YOU OR YOUR CONSEQUENCES! I’LL FORCE YOU DOWN TO THIS EARTH AND INTO MY BOWELS! YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BE ABSORBED!
—”Eye of Heaven, Gateway of Earth.”
This isn’t a genuine attempt to understand God, this is just an inferiority-superiority complex. Father doesn’t care to understand anything about God. All he cares about is himself, and acquiring power for himself. Power is all he’s after, to assuage his inferiority complex. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting power (e.g. Mustang), but godlike power to command the universe is a byproduct of having properly completed the alchemical process and become the Philosopher’s Stone. It is not the end in and of itself. “Ego” isn’t having a sense of self, it’s the inability to understand the spiritual. It’s viewing everything in a mundane lens, having all your motivations be ultimately small and petty, no matter how grand the spectacle. It’s wanting power or glory or whatnot just to make yourself feel better, but not having the self-awareness to actually admit that. The first stage of the alchemical process is nigredo, death — watching your old self die away so that it can be reborn as a better version of itself. Father never understands this, and The Truth says as much.
The Truth is a personification of the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism:
Who am I? One name you might have for me is The World. Or you might call me The Universe. Or perhaps “God.” Or perhaps “The Truth.” I am All, and I am One. So of course, this also means that I am you.
That’s basically it right there. God is All. All is God.
The reason why the Homunculus never grew beyond his days in the flask is because, despite wanting to acquire knowledge, he never actually learned anything. Trying to drag God down to Earth is sheer hubris, not because Earth is too far beneath it, but for the opposite reason — it can come down to Earth whenever it likes. It is everywhere and everything. And the Homunculus never did any of the introspective work needed to find God within himself. He tried to separate out (solve) his perceived “flaws” (the Seven Deadly Sins, i.e. the other homunculi) but did not reintegrate them back into himself (coagula), thus only completing half the alchemical process. He is neither human, nor divine, he only steals Hohenheim’s human shape and Truth’s divine power. He never broadened his thinking or improved himself mentally/spiritually, and thus can’t become alike to God. He never became more than what he is, the dwarf in the flask, and thus his Gate is blank.
Edward, by contrast, loses almost everything in attempting human transmutation (nigredo), and then accepts his own humanity at the gate of Truth (albedo), losing the ability to perform alchemy but becoming a better version of himself (rubedo) — thus, completing the alchemical process. In the end, he’s free, which is all Father wanted to be. He acknowledges that you don’t have to use alchemy or whatnot to become more than you are, because who you are is enough.
Thus, Edward becomes the best version of himself, which is what real alchemists aspired to be. He’s completed the Great Work, and therefore has no need for alchemy anymore. “That is the correct answer, alchemist!”
Okay there is a whole ton of stuff here that I didn’t read because the most important thing is that holy shit “Theophrastus Bombastus van Hoenheim” is a fucking kick ass name
It’s a pretty kick ass name, but you probably know him under a different one: Paracelsus
Yes, that Paracelsus.
@lrosenerds @ophiliad
Penny, her friends, then there‘s Ruby-
Keep reading
Penny, her friends, then there‘s Ruby-
Keep reading
nn__ee__zz on Instagram
Part 3 of ‘Castle of Dreams’ Ball!AU~!
Beginning // previous // next
My husband, Peter Parker, was an ordinary person. He always said it could’ve been anyone behind the mask. He was just the kid who happened to get bit. He didn’t ask for his powers, but he chose to be Spider-Man. My favorite thing about Peter is that he made us each feel powerful. We all have powers of one kind or another. But in our own way, we are all Spider-Man. And we’re all counting on you.
It starts with Stabby and ends with us making friends with AI's who will start a mutiny and cause "accidents" for us.
You can’t deserve a person’s love. You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking like that. They either love you, or they don’t. That doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough for them to love you, because love isn’t something you earn by being good enough. It isn’t something that can be quantified or doled out. Don’t blame yourself for not being loved how you need to, just teach yourself how to look for love where love lives.
This isn’t just about romantic love, or even skewed towards romantic love, although it does apply there too. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to accept is that my mother simply wasn’t someone who was capable of loving me, and there is no version of me that I could have ever been that would have earned that love. But with acceptance came healing. I was able to love myself more instead of resenting myself for not being more than any one person could be.
Are you listening? Even love for yourself isn’t earned. It is a kindness you give yourself.