#again apollo exists in my reality because i choose to believe he's real

[heliosoll]

can you believe in the law of assumption and religion? i keep seeing people say you can't but i don't understand.

Well... I want to preface all of this with this is just my opinion. I will be talking more matter of factly but that's just because this is what I believe. I'm not trying to force anyone to agree nor do I think people have to. Okay?

Personally, I think you can believe in a religion and the law. I honestly don't think those two things contradict. I 100% understand why people believe they do and why a lot of people feel uncomfortable believing in religion after getting into the law. However, and again this is just my opinion, I think a lot of those people are coming from a very westernized/Christianized viewing of religion.

There are so many religion and belief systems out there that preach humans getting on the same level as "gods". Things like reaching enlightenment or connecting to your higher soul are all beliefs that often go hand in hand with reaching a "godlike state of being". I mean, various times throughout history humans have even used this kind of belief to further their advancements in things like politics.

And while there are also many religions that place their Gods above humans and think of them as higher beings, the specific fear that comes with being a "human" against a powerful "God" is much more Christian in nature. Now listen I'm not shitting on Christianity; I grew up in a Christian family. But that means I know firsthand how Christians use the word of God to control others and place fear in people's hearts. The idea that we can never even hope to be as powerful or as enlightened as the Gods is a very Christian-centric viewing of religion.

While other beliefs preach being a good person to achieve a god status, Christianity preaches being a good person because God says so. While other religions hold the belief that humans can become Gods or even are Gods in their own right, Christianity hammers down the idea that we're lesser than God.

We are all made of energy. Every living thing is made of energy and that energy doesn't get destroyed when we're "gone". The way I see it, all these Gods and Goddesses and other such divine beings are also just made of energy. They aren't made from special energy that's better than us; they're made from the same energy we're made of. Our belief in these beings is what makes them so. They wouldn't exist if we didn't believe in them. And honestly? This is loa 101.

Our assumptions and beliefs manifest into our reality. To me, saying that these Gods aren't real or can't exist despite people truly and genuinely believing in them is more contradictory than anything else. Even outside sources like astrology, tarot, and witchcraft are still real if you assume them to be. Saying that they're just coincidences or just placebos not only contradicts the law but imo is very dismissive.

I personally choose to believe in the Greek Gods. I don't consider myself religious because of negative connotations to the word, but I do "follow" them. I personally work with Apollo mostly and even have an altar for him and Aphrodite. My belief in them is what makes them real in my reality. I assume they're real and therefore they must be. That's how the law works. I don't doubt their existence because I choose to believe in them.

But at the same time, I don't limit my own power just because I assume they exist. I work with my Gods, not against them. They don't see me as a threat nor do they think I'm being sinful or blasphemous for calling myself God. "God" is just a word. It's a word that has a specific meaning, but at the end of the day, it's just a word that allows people to understand how much power they truly have. When we think of gods, we think of truly powerful beings that can create and kill and love and hate and raise and condemn. And as pure sources of energy that simply chose to experience the universe in the 3D, we have that power too.

Believing in the Law and believing in religions is not contradictory to me. The issue that people face is when they follow religions that preach Gods being so much more powerful than us and humans being so, so weak and having to rely on them. That's when they start to give their power away to outside sources and downright refuse to acknowledge how much power they have. I genuinely think that any religious person can work alongside the law as long as they're also working alongside whoever they believe in. There's a very big difference between working with someone and working under them.

Believing in Gods is not what contradicts the law. Believing that they are more powerful than us is what contradicts the law. We are one and the same. We are made from the same energy that all these Gods are made of. We chose to experience life in the 3D and we can choose to fully live in the 4D or the 5D. We can mold and bend our realities because we're literally just choosing to be here. I'm made from the same energy that the Gods I believe in are made of. We exist in the same planes of reality. We have the same powers. I am just as much a God as they are and that doesn't contradict.

To me, saying that these Gods can't really exist because I'm a God would be like saying my neighbor Greg can't really exist because I also live here. However, if I started to say that my neighbor Greg was more powerful than me, despite us being made of the same energy and having the exact same powers, that would be against the law.

It mostly comes down to which religion you believe in because some work really well with the law while others don't. *Christianity doesn't work well with the law because the main belief is that the Christian God created the universe and that he's the most powerful being. That does contradict the law. Meanwhile, polytheistic hellenism (for example) works better because the Gods didn't create anything, they just represent things and the entire practice comes down to working with your Gods.

*Little disclaimer that I'm not saying Christianity isn't real or that you can't be Christian and believe in the law. I'm just stating that it's harder to work with that God on an equal level because of the belief that he's the most powerful.

[caliphascheherazade]

It’s like watching a forest fire. Big, violent, changing every minute and the sound not like anything else.

Every character in Agamemnon sets fire to language in a different way. Klytaimestra is a master of technologies, starting with the thousand-mile relay of beacons that brings news of the fall of Troy all the way from Asia to her in the first scene. She reenacts the relay in language that is so brilliant and so aggressive, she is like a conqueror naming parts of the world she now owns. She goes on to own everyone in the play—the chorus by argument and threat, Agamemnon by flattery and puns, Aigisthos by sexy cozening—with one exception. Kassandra she cannot conquer. Kassandra’s defense, which is perfect, is silence. When Klytaimestra demands to know whether this foreign girl speaks Greek, Kassandra does not answer—for 270 lines (in the original text). Klytaimestra exits.

There is no reason why Kassandra should speak Greek. She is a Trojan princess who has never been away from home before. In fact, she will turn out to command all registers of this alien tongue—analytical, metaphoric, historical, prophetic, punning, riddling, plain as glass. But Apollo has cursed Kassandra. Her mind is foreign in a much deeper way. Although she sees everything past, present and future, and sees it truly, no one ever believes what she says. Kassandra is a self-consuming truth. Aiskhylos sets her in the middle of his play as a difference you cannot grasp, a glass that does not give back the image placed before it.

As a translator, I have spent years trying to grasp Kassandrain words. Long before I had any interest in the rest of Agamemnon, I found myself working and reworking the single scene in which she appears with her language that breaks open. I got some fine sentences out of it and thought to publish them, but this seemed vain. I dreamed of her weirdly mixed with the winters of my childhood and imagined a play where someone like Björk would sing wild translingual songs while sailing down a snowy river of ancient Asia Minor. But other people have tried such things and anyway the play already exists. It is Agamemnon

Eventually I accepted that what is ungraspable about Kassandra has to stay that way. Aiskhylos has distilled into her in extreme form his own method of work, his own way of using his mind, his way of using the theater as a mind. The effect is well (if inadvertently) described by the painter Francis Bacon, who (talking about his own method of painting) says:

It seems to come straight out of what we choose to call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it …

Francis Bacon makes his paintings, as Kassandra makes her prophecies, by removing a boundary in himself. He wants to access something more raw and real than the images articulated by his conscious mind. Interestingly, he finds reading Aiskhylos especially conducive to this end:

Reading translations of Aeschylus … opens up the valves of sensation for me.

Perhaps this is because Aiskhylos knows how to get these valves open too. Not just in the Kassandra scene but everywhere in Agamemnon there is a leakage of the metaphorical into the literal and the literal into the metaphorical. Images echo, overlap and interlock. Words are coined by pressing old words together into new compounds—“dayvisible” (54), “dreamvisible” (308), “manminded” (9), “thricegorged” (1116), “godaccomplished” (1127). Metaphors come, go and reappear as fact; for example, the figurative “dragnet of allenveloping doom” that the Greeks threw over Troy (267) materializes as the very real “dragnet—evil wealth of cloth” in which Klytaimestra snares Agamemnon to kill him (1138–39). Real objects are so packed with meanings both literal and metaphoric that they explode into symbol, like the red carpet or cloth over which Agamemnon walks as he enters his house (608–49).1

Francis Bacon says that his own images “work first upon sensation then slowly leak back into the fact,”2 and he speaks of a need to “return fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.”3 He means a violence deeper than subject matter:

When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war. It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself … the violence of suggestions within the image which can only be conveyed through paint … We nearly always live through screens—a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.4

This violence is intrinsic to Aiskhylos’ style. He uses language the way Bacon uses paint, especially in the Kassandra scene where he stages the working of her prophetic mind—the veils, the screens, the violence, the clearing away. She is a microcosm of his method.Francis Bacon thinks of himself as a realist painter, although he admits this requires him “to reinvent realism.”5 Aiskhylos is a realist too. They both have an instinct “to trap the living fact alive” in all its messy, sensational, symbolic overabundance. Let’s return to the red carpet that Aiskhylos unrolls as if in slow motion in the famous carpet scene (608–49) that carries Agamemnon into his house and his death. This amazing red object can be interpreted as blood, wealth, guilt, vengeance, impiety, female wile, male hybris, sexual seepage, bad taste, inexhaustible anger and an action invented by Klytaimestra to break Agamemnon’s will. As a woven thing, it reminds us that women are the ones who weave and that weaving is an analogy for deceptiveness. Klytaimestra will use cloth again when she snares Agamemnon to kill him. As a red or purple-red object, the cloth is bloodlike but also vastly expensive and ruined by trampling. Agamemnon fears that this action will look insolent or impious or both—he feels all eyes upon him. As a cause of dispute between husband and wife, the red cloth unfolds her power to master him in argument and outwit him in battle. For this is a battle, and when he enters the house, he has lost it. Notice he enters in silence while she comes behind. Then she pauses and turns at the doorway to deliver one of the most stunning speeches of the play (“There is the sea and who shall drain it dry?” 650ff.). It is a truism of ancient stagecraft that the one who controls the doorway controls the tragedy, according to Oliver Taplin.6 In Agamemnon this is unmistakably Klytaimestra. The carpet scene is like a big red arrow Aiskhylos has painted on the play to underscore the fact.

Violence in Agamemnon emanates spectacularly from one particular word: justice. Notice how often this word recurs and how many different angles it has. Almost everyone in the play claims to know what justice is and to have it on their side—Zeus, Klytaimestra, Agamemnon, Aigisthos and (according to Kassandra) Apollo. The many meanings of the word justice have shaped the history of the house of Atreus into a gigantic double bind. No one can stop the vicious cycle of vengeance that carries on from crime to crime in its name. The bloodyfacedFuries are its embodiment. I don’t think Aiskhylos wants to clarify the concept of justice in any final way, although lots of readers have seen this as the intention of his Oresteia overall. So far as Agamemnon goes, no definition is offered. The play shows that the word makes different sense to different people and how blinding or destructive it can be to believe your “justice” is the true one. This is not a problem with which we are unfamiliar nowadays. As Kassandra says, “I know that smell” (886, 983).

— Anne Carson, Introduction to An Oresteia