Weekly thingy and The Hierophant/The Mistress of the Copper Mountain
There’s still time, y’all! Go check out Alleyman’s Tarot, please.
Ok, next thing. I WAFFLED on this one, and then ended up going with my first impulse which I should really always trust more. The Hierophant is a weird card for me as a Jew, given that the version I’m most familiar with is hella pope-y. But also even when interpreted as more of a teacher/mentor, there just weren’t a lot of great options leaping to mind. I did consider Cinderella’s mother’s ghost’s tree (and if that means nothing to you, basically there was no fairy gomother originally – Cinderella goes and prays at the tree that has grown from her mother’s grave and all the fun ballgown and shoe action comes from her mom’s ghost) but that’s a purely benign and giving presence, and also very sort of abundant and fruitful and none of that feels right for a fairly forbidding card. So, back to my first plan – the Mistress of the Copper Mountain/The Malachite Maid/just a whole bunch of other names, really.
She turns up in a lot of Russian fairytales and legends, and she’s sometimes conflated with a whole ‘nother girl who’s trapped in a mountain, but this lady is in no way trapped. She’s on her throne with her lizard familiars, wearing her malachite gown and copper embellishments, and she looks young and beautiful but you should not fuck with her. As with several of my other ladies so far, sometimes she gives and sometimes she takes. She nurtures and mentors artisans and miners, but to serve her they have to be chaste and loyal and if they fuck up it does not end well. She occasionally helps a lost girl here and there, but her ends are often more for her own amusement than anything. She may also appear as a lizard in a crown and honestly I was torn, that’s such a weird fun note of random to throw in here, but I love the descriptions of her human form and you know I can’t resist drawing a heavily embellished sarafan.
Places to buy stuff!
- TEEPUBLIC: mostly t-shirts, a few other products. Watch for sales, when shirts drop from $20 to $14!
- REDBUBBLE: Just, I don’t know, a ton of different stuff. T-shirts are more expensive than Teepublic, but there are a lot more options.
- AMAZON: Home of the Geeky Gals Coloring Book! Daydreams and Whimsies! AND NOW, The Neurotic Owl Compendium!
- ETSY: paper dolls, a knitting bag pattern, and a bunch of vintage dolls of various sorts from my collection
Did I miss something? I think that’s everything.
What’s making me happy this week:
- Obsessively listening to ‘Husavik’ multiple times a day because while the Eurovision movie is a fun glittery mess that song is a fucking banger. Also I picked up ‘banger’ from NPR podcasts, where I’m pretty sure all the cool kids get their slang.
Neurotic Owl 