#eileen gregory

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Eileen Gregory - Summoning The Familiar - The Pegasus Foundation - 1983 (cover adapted by Patricia Mora and Maribeth Lipscomb from 'Mask' by Naomi Savage)

[pink-lemonade-rose]

"I am personally enamored of the idea that Clio governs the efforts of the scholar, the scribe. How else than by the presence of a Muse to describe the kind of excitement one feels when following arcane threads of association and connection, finding oneself among dusty books in the stacks of the library where the cat sleeps, reading about things one would never in one's life have imagined yourself reading. Research, when it possesses one, is very like a possession. [...] Many are the possessions by which one is taken in life, but this dazed, fixed alertness in pursuing a thread of investigation is remarkable among them - this sense that one has entered into the intricately filamented region of the brain itself, to the very place of the synapses, the mysterious electrical connectors where the sparks fly. What is thrilling is not that one is amassing information useful in relation to some end one wants to argue; what is thrilling is finding out the way things are, how things are related in ways no one has seen [....]"

Eileen Gregory, “Clio, Muse of History: ‘Things as They Are’“

[pink-lemonade-rose]

In religious terms Artemis is by no means the simplest of the Olympians, but rather confusing and contradictory. As an image of aspects of human experience she is bewildering. Yes, I mean, really, *bewildering*. Because suddenly that word seems generously given as a clue - so allow me to muse on it. To bewilder: to cause to lose one's bearings, to perplex or confuse through want of a plain path. To wilder:  to lead astray, to wander, to revert to the wild. Wild: living in a state of nature, not tame or domesticated or cultivated; flourishing without the aid of man; savage; impatient of, or not subjected to, restraint; eager with desire, erratic. Wilderness: from Anglo-Saxon, meaning literally, wild-deer-ness: a tract uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings - a pathless waste. One notes that wildness and wilderness are defined in negatives, in relation to civilization; that to be wildered or bewildered is measured in terms of the path, the known demarcation. To be pathless, without a clear path, or to be led astray or wander from the path is to be lost, to be in a barren waste. In all her varying aspects Artemis lies in this territory of the wild, as opposed to the civilized - or rather, one might say, she is manifest at the outer edges of the civilized and the rationally knowable.

Eileen Gregory, “Artemis” (in The Olympians, edited by Joanne H. Stroud)