These are masks of two demalions that personify Hildegard von Bingen’s concept of viriditas, which is one of Yost’s favorite themes. The first one is Ingottanyl from the Jack Loki adventure “Forgotten Dances of Survival and Kindness”, the second is Ethullosba from “A Wasteland of Linen”.
“Triple/Triad Goddesses” was what Yost had written in the Two Teddy Bears Journal under the heading “TIAV Masks”. An arrow indicates that this is a description of a mural in the Other Space Museum on Eleanorel Avenue in Los Angeles. Or more likely, the mural is in the museum’s coffee house*, since that is the setting of a story in which “5 characters meet at the Other Space Museum Coffee House”.
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I did not mention (in my last post) this other item that Terror Addams included in their package because it deserved a post of its own*. I am thrilled to reveal that the archive now owns a copy of the impossible-to-find first-ever Geranium Lake Properties coloring book!
To celebrate this announcement, I am posting four pages from the coloring book for you to download and color, including the design (above) for the masks Yost created for the cover of the Holy Fool album.
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A package arrived at the GLP archive last week. The archive was closed at the time. I imagine the sign on the front door said “Closed For Spring Cleaning” in a bold, cheerful typeface, something with serifs, like Cooper Black. (Is the presence of serifs somehow friendlier than their absence?) This sign will appear on the archive door regardless of the season; it has hung on the door during Valentine’s Day, Labor Day, both solstices, plus most of the major Jackalopian holidays.
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According to Ha Kim Ngoc, there should be at least sixteen Geranium Lake Properties comics marked in some manner with the abbreviation 5CB, but it is no surprise to me that projects pertaining to the Five Carthaginian Bodhisattvas cannot be easily found in the archive. After years of delving through its labyrinthine depths, the archive still manages to confound me, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.
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Yesterday morning, while browsing through files of unpublished images in the Geranium Lake Properties archive, I came across these two panels with their depictions of the moon and the sun. How perfect it would have been if I had posted them on Monday, for the eclipse!
The style of the above mask is called uk-wayyalyaryar, “the moon exploded”, or uk-weezeeggut, “moonburst”, in Inultarumek. Penciled on the back of the artwork are the letters T I A V, which is an abbreviation Yost used for “Travesty Is A Verb”, the working title for a story concept that Yost never developed (as far as we know). Beyond the title and a few unpublished comics marked with the abbreviation, there is not much written down about “Travesty Is A Verb” in the Yostian ephemera that now resides in the archive.
First off, I think this might help: Eyrillim is the plural, Eyrilmonghet is the singular. Eyrillim is the Inultaru name used for members of an egg-collecting (and egg-selling) guild.*
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Two posts in the same day! I have been saving these coloring pages for a rainy day activity, and right now I am waiting for the forecasted deluge to start. We have been promised thunderstorms! Thunder is a rare natural occurrence here. Sure, we get plenty of house-shaking rumbles from Mr. Musk shooting off his Space X fireworks every few weeks, but for some reason, we don’t get a lot of lightning in the local area. And contrary to what you might have learned about California, earthquakes happen far less often than thunderstorms.
As usual, feel free to download and color these masks in any manner your heart desires. This last coloring page is the mask used for the three versions of the Three Nights demalion, Kordeyn Guhtellop, but you do not have to be faithful to Yost’s color schemes.
We’ve had some funny moments on this blog in the past ten years. You may have missed them, my sense of humor can be subtle sometimes. Other times, not very.
I don’t get this last joke at all, but apparently this is hilarious to Martians (and a few of their Jackalopian friends).
Digging through the mazy warren that is the Geranium Lake Properties archive, I have unearthed several files dedicated to GLP comics that appeared in various zines, amateur fanworks and DIY media. Most of them were printed in black and white, and the two illustrations in this post were from a chapter in Words and Word Balloons, a thick (216 pages!) book-sized zine from ZC Pictorials*, edited by Jeff Braidwood.
*Which became Zoltan’s Continuous Publishing (ZCP) in 2002.
Today is the holiday we call Dpajormymy, and here in this unpublished Geranium Lakes Properties comic we have Kordeyn Guhtellop, the Three Nights demalion, wearing a Dpajor mask. Or is it Dpajor wearing a Kordeyn Guhtellop mask?
The answer to this wurncheolf* has to be that I don’t know; I don’t have a firm grip on the concept of the Three Nights. All I know for sure is that the Domain of Kordeyn Guhtellop consists of three holidays: Twelfth Night on January 5th, Dpajormymy on February 6th, and Yifteyzoumaymy on March 7th. Which brings us to this mask…
…of the demalion Yifteyzouma, dated for March 7th, and one has to ask, is this Kordeyn Guhtellop performing the role of Yifteyzouma, or vice versa? Also, why do the Moss Folk and some jackalopes call this March holiday Yiftoum Nahja, which translates as “the reptile house”? Which leads hapless people with wandering minds to the assumption that this holiday is about the Mayan god Itzamna (aka “god D”) because Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson, KBE, mistakenly interpreted the name Itzamna as “lizard house”.
One thing is for certain, jackalopes love a threefold holiday. They observe the anniversary of the Three-Day-Three-Way War on November 16th, 17th and 18th, and on November 29th (except for leap years) they celebrate Threethreethree Day. Sometime in March or April (I have not yet pinned this down) is the Three Georges Festival, although some people call it Two Georges and a Georgia.
*I found this word last week in the Paisley Notebook, where it is defined as a question (or a series of questions) that must be answered with “I don’t know.”
This is an image of Yost’s final version for the album cover* of The Empty Space, the second album from Chansons de Geste. Which was the side project of two members of Bury Me Standing, Teri Ainsworth and Ross Kerrinza. I intended to make three posts last year about the progress of this design but I was distracted by other projects. I still hope, with crossed fingers, to post the third part before another year passes.
The qualities of my distractions are unintentional, inconvenient, yet often they become necessary, bringing with them tangential insights. Distractions led me to the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, or “Emptiness”.
The title of today’s post comes from the complex philosophical concept of Pratītyasamutpāda, translated as “dependent arising”. I feel it is far too daunting a task for me to attempt even a cursory explanation of this Buddhist doctrine, so instead I will provide you with a link to a video from Pete Beard’s excellent YouTube channel. This video is about the psychedelic art of Rick Griffin and it does nothing to explain Pratītyasamutpāda, but while I was watching the Sunyata video from Let’s Talk Religion, the Rick Griffin video was previewed on the right of my screen, sitting in YouTube’s queue of suggested videos. I accept this as an example of dependent arising in action, and I accept that my ideology may be faulty.
*All of Yost’s designs for album covers appearing here in Vraicking were made for 33rpm (LP) vinyl records.
I have seen this Geranium Lake Properties comic identified many times as Mother Jackal in her guise as the Rescuer of Witches, so the first thing I want to say is, this mask is NOT THAT. This panel happened in the middle of “The Numerous and Numinous Satisfactions of a Belletrist”, an adventure where everybody in that tale (except Jack Loki and Alice Aroumbeyski) mistook Iffareesha* for Mother Jackal. Plus there is no divine vocation like “Rescuer of Witches” in the lore of the Inultaru. There are tales of Mother Jackal, Father Antelope and Iffareesha providing sanctuary to people accused of witchcraft during the Satanic panics that often plagued Christianity, but these people were not witches. Most of them were women persecuted because they were vulnerable females, and all of them were innocent of the apocalyptic conspiracies trumped-up by craven witch hunters and inquisitors.
I can see why people who have read these tales might reach for the pithy title “Rescuer of Witches” (rather than “Rescuer of People (Mostly Women) Falsely and Maliciously Accused of Witchcraft”) but that convenient term obscures this most important truth: there were no witches.
Well, except that there were witches (and still are), but no witch hunter or inquisitor ever encountered any of them. “Verum dominae magicae se liberant,” was what Iffareesha said on that issue. “The truth is that witches free themselves.” The Jackalopian goddess of magic affirmed that an actual practicing witch had all the talents needed to evade witch hunters, and the power to rescue herself. Most of Iffareesha’s followers were (and still are) wise women, scholars of the magic arts, all kinds of “cunning folk”, and demalions of the natural and occult worlds. In the stories about Iffareesha, she sometimes came to the aid of her devotees against a persecutor, but that persecutor was almost always a powerful magic user or a divine force, and was usually an enemy of Iffareesha. She did not concern herself with Christian authorities who inflicted bloody pogroms on their own congregations. There were no real witches in the infamous witch trials, there were just Christians murdering Christians.
“Non nostri chaos circulus,” said Iffareesha, using the majestic plural. “Not our circle of chaos.”
(Please avoid the common gaffe of using the erroneous “Non nostri chaos circulus, non nostri simiae.” I can’t find the source of this error, but Iffareesha never said “Not our circus, not our monkeys.”)
*She is Iffarresh-wut-Kyyatsee when she is performing her role as the demalion of the new moon and seed-planting.
I felt that I needed to wait until after sunset before I posted the Twelfth Night mask of Kordeyn Guhtellop, the Three Nights demalion. I also expected this would give me enough time to unravel the spurious folklore from the various beliefs entwined around the Three Nights holiday, but I underestimated the difficulties of that task. So we all will have to wait for the night of February 6th for that exposition. Hopefully, I will have the history of the Three Nights sorted out by then, and if not, I guess it can all be done on the third night, on March 7th.
Vraicking 