Question by the reader : Laura

Bom dia!

Aproveitei o fim de semana prolongado e e fui arrumar meus livros no meio de tantos encontrei O Diario de um Mago, havia lido, mas ha muito tempo, então comecei a lÊ-lo novamente e foi uma leitura tão linda que não consegui mas parar, vi que poderia usar tambem os mesmos ensinamentos no meu cotidiano no dia a dia, mas fiquei curiosa quanto a um personagem, PETRUS, ele realmente existe, ou existiu?

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I read the first pages of Brida yesterday: I find so many common sensations with Brida (page 1 to 32 that i read )

I wrote a small book ” to love, it was thus that ” (I fetch a editor: it’s important to share it with all: for the love of all ) to tell my sensations of the energy of the love, my meeting with the Angels messengers, God , St John, and The message received on the road of Santiago de Compostela: ” that your road of life is always a road of love, wherever whom you are” (a magic road)

I am writing another book ” the sand of time “: I tell my life, my guardian angel, the feelings were lived on ” the angular stone ” between 2 worlds, visible and invisible,my road on the knowledge of the Sand of Time etc.

after, i must find a traductor : Because I think that my story does not belong to me = it is a testimony for the universal knowledge.

I think that so more people showed, we would have a more precise knowledge of all this (because it exists for a long time)

Each can be brought to experience it (not magician’s need etc.): I it puts arrived alone by the god’love by the faith in love. And each can live it (it is what I develop in my book ” the sand of time “).

because i love all, and i want to keep the hope of the futur , my faith in the Man , my faith in his capacity to love.

Sido

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I loved the book Brida,particularly since it was based in Ireland,where we have a long tradition with paganism and Witches.Christianity took our pagan ‘Bridget’ and called her ‘Saint Bridget’.At least it was a woman being honoured .There was a Witch called ‘Biddy Early’ who lived in Co.Clare ( Ireland) .She was a herbalist and healer.Biddy walked fron her home in Co.Clare to Coole Park,to collect plants and herbs.There is a plaque by the poet Yeats with a mention of Biddy in Coole park( where Yeats stayed in the big house and wrote poetry).The names ‘Brida , Breda , Biddy ,Bridie ,Breidge etc derives from ‘Bridget’.
I was christined Bridget after my ( natural)grandmother Bridget.

A thread of fear and misogney still exists in relation to Witches ,in Ireland where some people are concerned.I remember working with a group in Co . Clare a few years ago,the morning after Co.Clare had lost an all Ireland hurling match ..they were blaming ‘Biddy Early’ albeit in a jovial way-that the ‘curse of Biddy had made them lose the match.Biddy had never cursed anyone,she had healed and cured people.Christy Moore ,one of our ballad writers sings the famous song ‘Burning Times’. Here are the lyrics…

Burning Times

In the cool of the evening, they used to gather,
‘neath the stars in the meadow circling an old oak tree.
At the times appointed by the seasons of the earth and
the phases of the moon.
In the center, often stood a woman, equal with the others
respected for her word.
One of the many they call the witches, the healers and
the teachers of the wisdom of the Earth.
And the people grew in the knowledge she gave them,
herbs to heal their bodies, smells to make their spirits whole.
Hear them chanting healing incantations, calling for the wise ones
celebrating in dance and song.
Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna

There were those who came to power, through domination.
They were bonded in their worship of a dead man on a cross.
They sought control of the common people by demanding allegiance
to the church of Rome.
And the Pope he commenced the inquisition, as war against the women
whose powers they feared.
In this holocaust, in this age of evil, nine million European
women they died.
And a tale is told of those who by the hundreds, holding hands together
chose their deaths in the sea.
While chanting the praises of the Mother Goddess, their refusal of betrayal
women were dying to be free.
Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna

Now the Earth is a witch, and we still burn her. Stripping her down
with mining and the poison from our wars.
Still to us the Earth is a healer, a teacher and a mother.
The weaver of a web of light that keeps us all alive.
She gives us the vision to see through the chaos,
she gives us the courage, it is our will to survive!
Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna

Here’s the link to the song on youtube… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RntnpYTfpSc
Paulos’ book ‘Brida’ also reflects the positive aspects of Witchcraft
in Ireland
On the darker side is a book ‘The Burning of Bridget Cleary’ By Angela Bourke ( A TRUE STORY )-brillantly reserched and narrated.In 1895 Bridget Cleary was murdered by her husband as he suspected she was a witch.

Thanks Laura for your question to Paulo about ‘Brida’ !!!

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Life imitating art…and art imitating life! Oh, to be inspired

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I loved that book, read it last week only…I was little intrigued by those rituals ,some parts even seemed funny.I mean the impression of Brida at the final ritual, that seemed a normal party ,with dance,wine,fun and laughter.I already mentioned that a bit I would have liked that Brida had stayed with the Magus. Is a silly childish thing, but I feel that way.
All in all, Brida is a strong character and I loved her. Interesting the idea of the transmigration of the souls.Is that of Indian origins?

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When I was a child growing up, I knew a man – a friend of the family, actually – who was a Highway Patrolman. I never knew him well, because I was just a child, but somehow he left a very deep impression upon me. He has been dead for years now, so I never, as an adult, knew him. However, somehow, this man became a central figure in my writing, a character by the name of Carl Warden. Carl Warden, of course, is not that Highway Patrolman – he is so very different from him in so many ways, and yet, he was undeniably born from my childhood memories of this man. I will share with you all, just a little of the flavor of Carl Warden:

Carl Warden Sketch 1

Carl Warden sat at the cedar-plank picnic table under the shade of the big chinaberry tree in his back yard and scraped, with one huge pink fingernail, at the green mold growing on the boards. The color of it, the texture—swamplike, reminiscent of things growing under water—made him feel cool inside, at home in his own body, which otherwise, at other times, felt unnatural and cumbersome. A warm morning breeze blew through the honeysuckle scurrying up the rusty cyclone fence, and filled the air with its sugarwater. Carl sniffed the air. The small perfectly round nostrils of his flat, almost non-existent nose widened and contracted, widened and contracted. Stink, he thought, only that it was not really a thought—more of a biological reaction, a shrinking away, of his whole body from the source of the sweet scent.

“It’s ready!” called a voice from behind the bent screen-door to the kitchen of Carl Warden’s ancestral home.

For the rest of this beautiful morning Carl sat beneath the chinaberry tree, eating crawfish directly from the murky steaming water of the big black cast-iron pot his sister, Ellen, sat before him on the long wooden table. Pinch the tail, bite the belly, suck the head. The tiny marble-like eyeballs, he liked best of all, the way they popped, juicy little balloons of saltiness and fishflesh in his mouth. Pinch, bite, suck. Pinch, bite, suck…and so on. As he did this, Carl Warden’s neck swelled and turned from grayish to pinkish to bright crimson red. As his fat neck swelled, the rolls puffed and expanded, creating the effect of gills on each side of his head, beneath his flat, pinned-back ears.

It was an allergic reaction, one that had plagued him since infancy, since, as a squirming pup in the crib, his mother, a full-blooded Cajun, had dripped the thick crawdad juice into his wide-open mouth. No doctor could explain this. It simply did not accord with medical science – this was the general consensus. If what Carl Warden experienced was in fact an allergy, then he should as well be experiencing the accompanying symptoms of dizziness, choking or even asphyxiation, from the swelling of his tongue and contraction of his wind-pipe. None of this happened to Carl Warden as he sucked the flesh of the crawfish his sister sat before him every Sunday morning of his life. Fishflesh, especially of the crustacean variety was pleasure to Carl Warden, of the highest variety. As he ate, he felt the lust of it fill every fiber of his being, pump full every muscle, every vein and artery with life and love-of-being.

* * *

There was something about Carl Warden that made Sheriff Platt uneasy, though he had been his chief deputy now for over twenty years. It was something undeniable, almost a physical repulsion that Platt felt in the presence of Carl, and yet, try as he might, he could never quite put his finger on it. Long hours he spent, in fact, pondering this very puzzle, leaned back in his swivel-chair, with his shiny patent-leather boots propped up on the big plastic desk-blotter that protected his antique cherry desk.

It was something about water. It was definitely that. But what? What exactly did water have to do with it, with anything for that matter?

“So, what’cha got planned this weekend?” said Sheriff Platt, gazing across the room at Carl, who had been shuffling through the file cabinet in the corner of Platt’s office, searching for an arrest file on the Hupper County boy who had escaped jail down in Larson last week.

“Usual,” said Carl, not looking up. He had his back turned to Platt.
Something reptilian, no, amphibian, almost prehistoric about Carl’s narrow sloping shoulders, thought Platt, then, catching himself, “That doesn’t make sense.”

“What don’t?” said Carl.

Platt just then realized that he had spoken his thought aloud. Attempting to recover, in his usually aggressive manner when embarrassed, he blurted out, “When the hell you gonna stop looking for that gold and write them donkeys off as dead and gone, Carl? They ain’t no fuckin gold up that river! Ain’t nothing but catfish and mudpuppies and watersnakes in there.” What Platt was referring to was Carl Warden’s well-known “pastime,” to put it politely, though everyone in town by now, knew it to be and openly referred to it as Carl Warden’s obsession—his unending and passionate search for the seven donkey-loads of gold supposed to have been lost in the Trinity River, somewhere between the old Hulls Ferry crossing and Flatboat swimming hole, where now Anse Foster ran his boatlaunch and fishin supply store. Every weekend for almost ten years now, Carl Warden had spent wading in those murky gray waters and squirming his way through the dense underbrush that lined the riverbank on both sides. He had a metal detector bought with his Christmas bonus a few years back, and that went with him too, along with the small hand-spade he used to dig in the high mud banks where he suspected the gold must be hidden. So far, in all these years of searching, he had found nothing other than a few Civil War era coins and one broken-faced ladies solid-silver handmirror. This, however, did nothing to daunt Carl Warden’s enthusiasm for the quest nor did it dash, even slightly, his certainty that one day, one day very soon, he was going to find those seven donkey-loads of gold.

There was something about the persistence of this quest in itself that irritated Sheriff Platt to an extreme. He wanted to make Carl stop this ridiculousness—to stop it immediately. And yet he never did. Platt, in fact, never insisted, as he would like to have done. There was something about it though, about the fact that it went on at all, the fact that Carl never wavered in his determination and exuberance, his certitude—something about this that did not sit well with Platt. He could not explain it and yet he felt it to be—sensed it with the same sixth-sense that he used to sniff out outlaws in this county—he sensed it to be somehow criminal. It was something that could not be trusted, that was not wholly benign, something that would have consequences. “Consequences” were, in Platt’s mind, a thing to be controlled, to be circumvented.

—————————————————–
It is amazing, I think, how figures from real life can seep into fiction, be reborn there, and take on a being, a new life, all their own. As I say, there is very little of Carl Warden that is true to the person of that Highway Patrolman I once knew, but as I know in my own mind, and do not seek to hide in any way, the one was undeniably born from the other.

I don’t know if I could ever write someone else’s “story” in the sense of adopting a plot from real life, but almost all of my characters are rooted in some way in very real people that I have known or at least met somewhere along the way. I do not attempt to replicate these real-life figures – the are merely seeds: when I plant them in my writing, they grow, and as they grow, they become something larger than life itself, something wholly other than the real people who impressed me and from whose memory they were spawned.

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