Noovorous @noovorous - Tumblr Blog

you have to pretend to be a wizard sometimes, for your health. the obvious method is d&d, but you can also open the dishwasher on cold mornings and raise your arms dramatically as you're enveloped in the steam, or you can find a really good stick to walk around in the woods with, or you can run a bizarrely dedicated rp blog on tumblr. but it's an important component of human well being to occasionally pretend to be a wizard.

#I could not agree more #life is too tedious to not be a wizard sometimes #let us seek new exquisite moods and states of stimulation

Having exhausted of thrills the moods of historical cultures and writhing with ennui I was forced to embrace the atmosphere of prehistories shrouded in unknown. Carnellian and golden beads of Varna Culture, extravagant Mould golden cape, snails farms kept in clay vessels and great earth mounds have captivated my imagination. Perhaps the dark of ages that covers them and absence of written history is in part what fueled decadent fascination with the orient as they called it? In lack of well available knowledge of far away lands it was easy to fill in the gaps with their own fancies. Today to be that kind of orientalist one has to be willfully ignorant. But the Bronze Age? The dark of ages upon it remains very real.

#decadence #bronze age #I guess?#romanticizing life

I am so jealous of ants. To be able to clean your loved ones by kissing them seems divine.

One could easily imagine the dining-rooms and those terrible repasts which Gilles deplored in his trial at Nantes. Gilles admitted with tears that he had ordered his diet so as to kindle the fury of his senses, and these reprobate menus can be easily reproduced. When he was at table with Eustache Blanchet, Prelati, Gilles de Sillé, all his trusted companions, in the great room, the plates and the ewers filled with water of medlar, rose, and melilote for washing the hands, were placed on credences. Gilles ate beef-, salmon-, and bream-pies; levert- and squab-tarts; roast heron, stork, crane, peacock, bustard, and swan; venison in verjuice; Nantes lampreys; salads of briony, hops, beard of judas, mallow; vehement dishes seasoned with marjoram and mace, coriander and sage, peony and rosemary, basil and hyssop, grain of paradise and ginger; perfumed, acidulous dishes, giving one a violent thirst; heavy pastries; tarts of elder-flower and rape; rice with milk of hazelnuts sprinkled with cinnamon; stuffy dishes necessitating copious drafts of beer and fermented mulberry juice, of dry wine, or wine aged to tannic bitterness, of heady hypocras charged with cinnamon, with almonds, and with musk, of raging liquors clouded with golden particles—mad drinks which spurred the guests in this womanless castle to frenzies of lechery and made them, at the end of the meal, writhe in monstrous dreams.

Should I perhaps attempt to recreate and follow the demoniac diet of Gilles de Rais as relayed in Là-Bas? The world is torturing me severely with a boredom most nauseating, boredom not of a lack of matters to occupy myself with but of lack of enjoyable, new stimulation of senses and thoughts.

I doubut however that any diet could sufficiently "kindle the fury of one's senses", it never ceases to equal parts amaze and disgust me how prudish christian/culturally christian thinkers somehow arrived at equating sensual experiences of eating and savouring with sin. Should gluttony be a sin then let me be a great sinner.

#disclaimer: some of these ingredients are poisonous #like I said Là-Bas more than makes up for lack of food focus in À rebours #joris karl huysmans #literature #decadent movement #gilles de rais #Là-Bas #gluttony

morphons

Newlyn, Cornwall. February 2023.

noovorous

Such a shame des Esseintes was not interested in food, at least not nearly to the same degree as he was with liquors and perfumes. I could just imagine the most weird and yet surprisingly tasty (or disastrous) combinations someone like him would invent. Musk and mastic and a dozen other ingredients about which average european of his times might have not even heard of would have been his staples. Morroccan mint tea but with lime? Riffs on recipies from De Re Coquinaria? So much to discover when you're a shut in decadent.

noovorous

After reading Là-Bas, the descriptions of food make up for their lack in À rebours. Especially the part detailing the diet of Gilles de Rais ordered so as to "kindle the fury of his senses".

#joris karl huysmans #à rebours #decadence #decadent movement #literature #Là-Bas #gilles de rais

The only knowledge of Là-Bas I had before I started to read the novel itself was introduction and commentary attached to a copy of À rebours I have read a long time ago. From there I knew that Là-Bas deals with satanism and little else.

Written and set at the tail-end of XIXth century, a period secular enough to have yielded earliest stirs of modern satanism, or at least so I believed. Would the philosophy behind satanic movement in the novel be atheistic with merely symbolic significance of satan, luciferian with the adversary being a noble bringer of light or medieval with necromancy of summoning devils while asking saints for protection? I had no idea.

Satanism that I found in the novel was that of middle ages and of early modern period. Satanism that those burned at stakes of witch hunts were accused of but none or almost none of them practiced, now in this more modern age of disappointment with God and his church blossomed into reality. Satanism of Là-Bas is one that stems from deep belief in God's existance and even deeper hatred for him, one that requires a priest so that holy hosts may be used in ritual profanation of Christs flesh and in casting curses, poisoning through supernatural means, feeding fish and mice on a diet of consecrated hosts and summoning incubi and succubi.

The protagonist (Drutal) is in the very begining rooted to the modern age (albeit lightly rooted for his lifestyle is almost eremitic) only to be removed from his day and age and put for the remainder of the novel into a bubble of middle ages and early modern period not as they were but as they are imagined. He witnesses both sides of the grand battle between forces of Creator and Adversary as he visits a bell ringer's humble abode in a church tower and a black mass conducted by a blaspheming poisoner priest.

Does the novel accurately depict satanism of its age I cannot say. Supposedly Huysmans attended a black mass himself. But truth is not important here as decadence cares little for such detail as reality. The mood of the novel is painted like a masterpiece of dutch masters of brush and canvas, its vocabulary and rythm being a soothing balm on the mind of someone like me- a person that keeps a yellow book always by my bed.

#literature #decadent movement #decadence #joris karl huysmans #huysmans #Là-Bas #the damned #down there #satanism

"After all," said Des Hermies, "Satanism aside—and yet Satanism also is a phase of religion—admit that, for two miscreants of our sort, we hold singularly pious conversations. I hope they will be counted in our favour up above." "No merit on our part," replied Durtal, "for what else is there to talk about? Conversations which do not treat of religion or art are so base and vain."

I could not agree with Drutal more on that subject, I find that the most enjoyable conversations I've ever had were on religion and art, sometimes visited by sciences (which are also arts).

Reading Là-Bas was a deeply enjoyable experience, one that felt like an excuisite hot meal on a cold day.

#Là-Bas #down there #the damned #joris karl huysmans #huysmans #literature #decadent movement #decadence

bungerc0re

inviting a girl over to cut symbols into you and she keeps agonizing over what to use. alchemical is too fake, catholic is boring, etc. eventually you propose a pentagram just to get something moving and she says that'd be "poser gnostic shit" and walks out

#goetic it is then

retroactivebakeries

it's important to nourish your ego with self-aggrandizing fantasies in which you you sit upon a throne of night-black obsidian and color-crazed agate, carved with cherubs and grotesques; in which you are robed in cloth-of-gold and nacreous adornments: in which your crown is a thing of poisoned crystal too terrible to look upon; in which you hold the power of life and death in your hands, looking down as you pass judgment on a blog about to be blocked.

#the king in yellow #hildred castaigne

bad-but-sad-boy

Okay imma try a thing

reblog if you think 18th/19th century men's clothing is cool.

evilwizard

sin is actually really cool and good for you

noovorous

"Even now, it is sickeningly easy for beings to get lost in false grand narratives, living out completely driven lives in pursuit of non-existent codes, ideals, climaxes and golden ages. In blindly thinking that their stories serve absolute ends, such creatures almost always end up harming themselves, if not those around them.

To those like the misguided; look at the story of Man, and come to your senses! It is not the destination, but the trip that matters. What you do today influences tomorrow, not the other way around. Love Today, and seize All Tomorrows!"

All Tomorrows by Nemo Ramjet

#i love this book #such a hopeful message to end it with #all tomorrows #nemo ramjet #C.M. Kosemen

gofgrl

i want to be the kind of person where you just look at me and you think “yeah, they drink absinthe.”

#I am that kind of person #and I do fancy a green fairy #those amongst people I meet who know what absinthe is say to me “yeah of course you do”#which are signs I'm doing a great job

melismasthmatic

my hottest take is that a lot of people who think they believe in evolution don’t actually believe in evolution. bc what they actually believe is the misunderstanding of evolution that eugenics is based on

noovorous

I tend to avoid serious topics but whatever.

If there is one thing in the world I'd say I have an above average understanding of it's evolution, knowing how it works shaped my worldview through my entire childhood and later and helped me avoid various nasty ideologies that use their view of what evolution is to further their agenda. So here you got a set of simple reminders:

-Evolution doesn't have a goal, no ultimate lifeform, no reaching perfection- it is a mechanism of adapting to the environmental conditions driven by random genetic mutations, recombinations and survival till the age when the progeny can function

-There are no forms more evolved or less evolved than others- some oversimplify that let's say mammals are more evolved than amphibians due to the fact that traits we use to classify an organism as amphibian are older and mammalian ancestors were at the time of amphibian's emergence undifferentiated from them. "But what about this or that superior trait?"- there are no superior traits, only those that allow one to survive and reproduce and those that hinder it. All the basal ("primitive") lineages kept on evolving alongside younger traits. All the "living fossils" kept on changing and adapting to the changing environment.

-Humans went through a genetic bottleneck relatively recently and thus have very little genetic diversity when compared to other species, we are all very closely related to one another

-Not everything is genetic- I can't believe there are people to whom it must be explained but especially amongst those organisms that can learn (like humans) upbringing conditions and environment shape a lot of behaviour and even phenotype (traits). The foundational notion of epigenetics is that there are genes that only become active in certain conditions.

Last thing I'd like to mention is the absolutely disgusting notion that european superiority in world's history is genetic. I sadly ran into such a statement in the wild cloaked in the guise of "darwinism".

Why did europeans specifically conquer most of the world and not some other group?- that question must be answered to explain why "genetic european superiority" is bullshit.

Europeans had only two areas in which they were in any way "superior"- warfare and seafaring. And that superiority came from experience- why did they had such an experience? Because Europe is build like a military training area- it is a lush land in the temperate climate zone divided by multitude of natural barriers (bays, mountains) and it's own training swimming pool (the mediterranean) plus a shitton ov navigable rivers, all of which helped to develop a multitude of permament states in constant war with each other. Throughout Asia there were many catastrophic military conflicts but they usually were intertwined with periods of relative stability- europeans were at war constantly. Hobbes claims that the natural state of a human being is being at war with everyone, all the time- only an european could claim so and only an european would be right about it.

I said there were only two areas of european "superiority", I'm tempted to add a third one- inequality. Patriarchal christian culture meant that select few families could accumulate vast fortunes which came in handy financing East India Companies and their equivalents. More women-friendly inheritance laws in the muslim world as well as very low taxes in China, all those were a hinderance to empire building when in competition with europeans.

So what about that "genetic superiority"? Geographic features of mediterranean and europe are just that- geographic features- any "race" that would settle this region of the world would be in conditions to develop better in terms of warfare and seafaring. Inequality is cultural factor- again not genetic and many variants of inequality develop amongst all settled societies.

Whoever would spend their civlisational childhood in europe would develop prime traits for world conquest, there is nothing genetic about it.

Long story short- europeans conquered the world because europe is a great place to learn warfare, seafaring, also because they had worse gender inequality than muslim world and much more exploitative taxes than pretty much anyone.

#might delete later