Mad Monks and Maenads

Don't blame me for physical reality, I just work here

[madmonksandmaenads]

Blog Review: "You're like the looney tunes of gnostics." -@inneskeeper

[9musesandanoldmind]

Artemis rescues Iphigenia.

I’ve decided to finally follow my wish of making a series of mythical women with more of a Bronze Age aesthetic than classical greek. So here it is. =B

Check Medusa too.

[theoutcastrogue]

Bedridden grandma carried by hand on a litter beach chair, to attend the village feast and participate in the dance. Mylopotamos, Crete, 2026

[theoutcastrogue]

Okay, this is crazy. This woman is Karina Raeck, an 88-year-old German sculptor who in her youth appeared in a Pasolini film, modeled for Salvador Dali, and danced flamenco among other things. Then she went to a concert in Berlin and saw Psarantonis, a Cretan singer and lira-player. This made her go to Crete and seek the musician's village. She learnt about the place and its history, and ended up staying. She lived there for 20 years.

Psarantonis (now very old, but still kicking and performing) sure is a memorable figure

She wrote a book dedicated to the Cretan resistance against the Nazis, and constructed a monument called "Andartis" (means rebel, guerilla, or partisan), aka "The Partisan of Peace" or "Peace Guerilla". It's an angel with one wing that can only be seen properly form above (say, from a plane), located on the Nida Plateau. All the monument's stones had been scattered on this plateau by partisans in 1941, to prevent the German planes from landing. She made sure the expenses were paid by the German Ministry of Tourism, as an apology from the German people. (see also: the Battle of Crete.)

She is now a permanent resident of the village in the video, which is not far from the musician's village she originally sought all those years ago. She is much beloved in the entire area. Here she is in ~2015:

P.S. In the video, timestamp ~0:19, the woman in the green t-shirt turns to the guy on her right and says something excitedly. Now with context, I can tell what she says: "It's Karina!" (Η Καρίνα!)

[nn-ee-zz]

I have surprisingly been getting messages from people asking whether I'd do a post about my design notes for the deadly seven sins. Alright then, here goes;

Design Notes; The Seven Deadly Sins

Greed points at everything they want and grasps anything they can. Their true form is unseen. Their own hand partially blinds them. Different eyes puncture their crown, stolen from others. They float, detached from all. Their stick is sharpened at both ends

It is the first and oldest design, dating back to 2023

The stick sharpened at both ends is a reference to Lord of the Flies (in the book, one end of the stick goes into the earth while the other holds a severed head) I wanted it to symbolize violence

Sloth exists in a wrapped cloth that provides comfort but muffles all sensations. Sloth doesnt see, speak nor hear. The cloth overwhelms them. They are bound by a rope whose edge reaches inside their confinement, giving them the ability to free themselves if so desired.

I made an extra effort to put the rope within Sloth's control, to avoid associating inertion from mental illness to laziness

I wrapped my Blajah plushie with a bed sheet and used my robe's belt as rope to get a picture reference for the upper body. Despite eerie origins, my designs come into paper with a lot of silly methods.

Pride exists inside a golden, hollow statue. Their gaze is set upon a cracked book of pages set in stone. Their laurel crown is sharpened to the point of horns. Pride can be set free if they break the outer shell that binds them with the gavel they use to condemn others.

The pose and clothing is a reference to the painting The School of Athens, by Raphael.

Being mettalic, the book only reflects back themselves. Even if you interpret it as stone, it would still work since the pages remain static

I like to imagine the rotten legs dragging their heavy statue shell around. Ever since I was little I have a strange fear of statues moving

Gluttony is a stomach, living and consuming themselves within their confinment. They’re not represented by an underweight or overweight person; it had to be something everyone has. Their scale is purposefully unspecified; because everyones is different.

The design resembles the Horseman of Famine because gluttony and famine are connected; the excessive hoarding by some people causes famine to others. They're like two different plates on a scale

While the basic representation is just fat, I never considered drawing an underweight person to counter it and appear subversive. When talking to a friend recovering from an eating disorder they mentioned how cheap and uncomfortable it is when people use extreme thinness just for the sake of horror and I have to agree. I always avoid drawing real bodies for horror

Lust is the only one who tries to disguise itself with a human appearance, tho it has too many hands. One hand to beckon, one to threaten, and one to silence you. It kneels because not all of its victims are adults. It lives undercover and invites you in as well

Many asked about the fourth hand: it's the one you only notice afterwards and are left wondering what it means, whether it's an innocent gesture or not. How it made you feel.

It has 2 other variation designs. While what I made before is beautiful, it is not unsettling enough. It has the artstlye of an angel rather than something human and dangerous

I settled on the design after a passage in the book Second-Hand Time, by Svetlana Alexievitch. It was a passage about a teen abused by a military squad, killed when she got pregnant, and mocked over how underveloped her body was. Because of that my original idea was to have Lust wearing military boots, but that would restrict the concept too much. I thought that drawing would make that passage less haunting to me, but to no avail.

Envy is a slowly burning and constricted heart. It covers its identity with a mirror; the more it seeks to resemble the reflection of others the less it will resemble itself. But even the reflection is broken, inaccurate, and unsatisfactory.

Many have said the concept looks like a chrysalis or a flower bud, unable to flourish. I like when people interpret my drawings, they often find beautiful meanings that escaped me

I pondered whether to paint the mirror in front of them black, to symbolize phone screens, but decided against it because it would blend into the background

Least popular design but one where people have told me ''I cant stop thinking about it'' the most, which made me cherish it a lot

Wrath is not a beast acting ravenous, but a human thing slowly crawling towards you. All of their actions are justified by the halo they claim to be righteous. The closer they get, the more they shed their humane appearance

It was a challenge to make wrath differ from someone being rightfully angry. It applies to all designs; how to portray dangerous excess to very common and not entirely wrong emotions.

Wrath has no legs. Nothing to stand on

''Little by little, it turned into that wild fury in which the eyes camouflage with a black veil, the fists contract with a tremedous force and your very teeth find the enemy'' Roughly translated quote by Nikolai Gumilev that I kept in mind while designing it. Amazing writer

That is all I can remember at the moment. Hopefully it saciates everyone's curiosity and not ruin the magic and mystery. Thank you very much for your interest. I will see you soon, when it's time for the Seven Heavenly Virtues

[zoazoaa]

If you are attracted to a girl it's important to show her sinister artifacts and relics

[inkjie]

soliloquy by an immortal cave painter.

pencil, ink, and ochre on paper

[cuppydogshane]

all the rights that come with marriage you should be able to have without marriage btw. you should be able to designate a person who can visit you in the hospital regardless of your relationship to that person.

[autogynophelia]

Whenever you say something, you are really saying two things:

The thing you're saying.

That that thing is worth saying.

That is, speech/writing has a cost to it, in the form of energy and time expended doing it, in the energy and time taken by others to listen to/read it, and the thing you are communicating is implied to be sufficiently valuable to worth that trade-off.

E.g. if you meet a woman and she says, "Hi, I'm Becky, I was born on a Thursday," it would be an odd experience because even if 1 applies, 2 clearly doesn't (unless you are running some kind of day-of-birth study or something ig). There is a hidden meaning of, "you should be aware of the weekday of my birth because it is important," that seems to make no sense.

And yet people will often defend something they have said on the basis of it being strictly true, which is unsatisfactory because it only justifies half of what was communicated by the act of saying it.

If Becky comes along to a queer event and says "Hi, I'm Becky, I'm AFAB," you have to understand that that is not just a neutral statement of fact, it also communicates something like this: "I am aware that if I looked and sounded the same but my sex assignment was different I would be treated differently. I am informing you of my sex assignment right now so that you treat me appropriately hereafter."

And that is just straight-up transmisogyny, both in displaying uncritical acceptance of how prevalent transmisogyny is in queer groups, and in demanding exemption from it. It sounds absurd on the face of it that a cis woman describing herself using entirely true statements can be doing transmisogyny, even in the absence of any transfeminine person or any mention of transfeminity at all. But it's true all the same.

And if you try telling Becky she shouldn't say that, she and most of the other people at the event will tell you "but it's true!", "she can describe herself how she likes!", "don't police how other people talk about themselves!", and so on. And people will look at you like you've lost your mind if you start claiming that Becky is abusing you by introducing herself in a manner that doesn't reference you at all.

[deadgenerations]

our age of bronze is collapsing, the age of iron struggles to be born... now is the time of sea peoples

[uptownthots]

“it isnt something you have to read critically” well 😭

[uptownthots]

this technically is true but I think this also perfectly encapsulates why I am inherently distrustful of like. “”cozy”” “turn your brain off” fiction lmfao. like okay WHO gets to turn their brain off and who has to suffer through bigoted caricatures of themselves while everyone else is having cozy silly no brain time 😐

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

"art should comfort the comfortable! what do you mean 'the disturbed?' ...i don't know.. that's scary"

[scissorsaint]

In another life I would have loved to poison the abusive husbands of the women in my village

[tarotfey]

Two small sigils, the first is From burnout, recover, and the second is You must sleep. Rest.

[dee-the-red-witch]

I for one love that the burnout recovery is IMMEDIATELY reminiscent of a bowl of comforting soup.

[ninaemsaopaulo]

As sereias de Monika Marchewka, artista polonesa.

[madmonksandmaenads]

The history of the occult is very amusing because it combines the petty drama of theatre kids with the esoteric self-importance of academia.

[fallingtowers]

teens are reportedly "serpentmaxxing" by crawling on their bellies and eating dust all the days of their lives

[joyous-bunnies]

hi! yay-bunnies here. i got banned unfortunately. can u spread my bunnyspores?

[madmonksandmaenads]

Christian girls say they're waiting for "The One", yet they deny the apophatic unity of The One with Trinitarian doctrine. This is why they are left waiting.