Did You Know…The Ningyo. How to Become an Immortal, Part One

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mermaid, ningyo

The ningyo are Japanese mermaids, but they’re different from the pretty, western versions many of us are used to. They’re often described as monkey-mouthed, half-human-half-fish creatures. And these poor things are famous for being eaten.

For good reason, their flesh is both tasty and leads to astonishingly long life.

Now, Japan has some pretty weird shit in their waters, and the ningyo are no different. Catching them are believed to bring on storms and bad luck, so they’re often thrown back. And washing up on shore warns of oncoming war or disaster.

But of course, if one’s lucky enough to sample mermaid meat and get a taste of the ningyo, they’ll be rewarded with immortality. Seems like a storm or catastrophe is a small price to pay.

Several fictional stories utilize this myth in their story-lines, like Rumiko Takahashi’s Mermaid Forest or the Mermaid Saga, an anime/manga series that centers on Yuta who ate mermaid meat and lived for more than five-hundred years and searched for a cure to the more common side effects of this treat: death or becoming a damned creature known as a Lost Soul.

And its origins come from Yao Bikuni, a myth that depicts a young woman eating some after getting drunk at a party, and she stayed sixteen for over eight-hundred years before she became a nun and died in a cave.

Want to read more? Check out this link.

Did You Know…About Phea and James?

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Altantean, Broken World, Chronos, murder, Primordial God, reincarnation, shifters, tragic, underworld, vampires

I know, this isn’t my normal DYK post, but I’ve been in a sharing mood.

I’m a fan of context and connections and deeper meanings, so this is from the author’s mouth…urm, fingers? You know what I mean.

Two of the oldest characters featured in my Broken World series, Phea and James have pasts locked together with violence, manipulation, and the struggle for power.

If you’ve read “Maiden of the Underworld,” you know about Phea’s beginning. But if you haven’t, let me give you a recap: Phea is the daughter of Chronos, the Primordial god of time and an Atlantean woman. She’s set against the twin gods of the Atlantean pantheon: Markandeya, the god of the underworld; and Jydios, the god of war. Without too many spoilers, she dies, becomes the first vampire, finds some romance, and makes some heart-breaking sacrifices. Hers is a tragic story.

There’s much more I haven’t written about her past yet, like how she started the war between vampires and shifters because she was jealous of her son’s wife and family. Or how she’s the grandmother of all shifters. Unfortunately for the lot, blood ties don’t seem to curb her cruelty. She’s merciless.

How does James fit into this? Well, mini-spoiler: James is the reincarnated Jydios—the war god that tricked and murdered Phea to steal her power by using her love for him against her. Does that give her some more sympathy? Kinda, yeah. Does it undo the six-thousand-year-old torture she lays down on James? No, not really. It’s complicated.

Jydios tortured and killed any demi-god who had the balls to visit his real godly temple. That’s more than two dozen sacrificed to feed his well of power. James knows this, the knowledge beaten into him by Phea, and he understands that he suffers for the dharma branded on his soul.

The two of them have been allies and adversaries at once. She was given a child that abandoned her, so Phea made James abandon his wife and child, taking their second from them before his birth. She claimed and refuses to release him, although she invites others to her bed to test his faith and force him to fight for her. He fights to survive and does her bidding because he has no other choice.

He really doesn’t. Because Phea’s powers were bestowed on her from the higher pantheons, she can control him just enough to disable his uprising, but he doesn’t make it easy on her.

Especially now, he’s played his trump card, and they both have limited time to put their warring plans in motion to see who really controls their kingdom.

So there it is, some Broken World history. Want to read their story? Got some unanswered questions? Let me know!

In the meantime, I’ve got four full novels and three short stories in the world. Take a look and catch up in time for the upcoming stories featuring Ria’s father, Aderyn Tanguy, and Boden’s trip home to see his family for the first time in better part of a millennia.

Did You Know…About Ria’s Meditation Techniques?

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blood phoenix, chakras, enlightenment, flames, focus, Meditation, PTSD, techniques, vitarka mudra, yoga

From early on in the Blood Phoenix stories, we watch Ria use meditation to deal with her newly acquired vampirism. She uses her chakras and focus to keep from killing her victims and controlling her visionary powers in Rebirth. In Claimed, she learns to stack them to tap into her powers and defend herself. With practice, she uses them to heal her mind and deal with her PTSD in Imprinted.

Here’s a little background information and the techniques she uses.

Meditation with chakras allows one to strengthen the connection between body and mind, to build on each chakra, and to tune intent and energy to create ultimate focus.

The six physical chakras stack like a pyramid:

The base is dense, heavy, and difficult to change as it represents strength and stability, opposite in nature from the tip, the sixth chakra is easily changeable, light, and airy. The seventh chakra, at the crown of the skull, is our connection from the body to consciousness.

Stacking chakras through meditation, as Ria does, means visualizing and stimulating each chakra from the root through the navel, chest, throat, and forehead to the crown. As each grows balanced, one gains a better feel for the world around them, relating to it physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Ria often imagines the process as wrapping a suit of armor around herself, and the regular activation lends to her advanced healing and controlling the excess of energy feeding her wild abilities, essentially caging in the feral chaos she holds onto—more to come on this later.

The other techniques Ria uses in the books are not as elaborate, so a brief overview will do.

Flames—this was the first technique I used when I learned about meditation in college. This takes on a variety of starting points, staring into a real flame, creating an imaginary flame in the mind, and building a shrine either physically or mentally, that allows a person to add means of reaching into our consciousness.

Focus/Re-Focus—this is one I learned of through my husband. When clearing one’s mind, we must allow the noise in our heads to have their say before they can give us any peace. This is what he does, calling up his worries, filing them if important, and swatting them away if he lacks control to change them. Similar techniques relate to the effort it takes to shoo away that random, chattering noise in the mind (at least in my mind). For Ria, this means dealing with her survival’s guilt after killing another renegade vampire.

The vitarka mudra—this hand gesture is commonly seen in Buddha statues as the sign of enlightenment. The term vitarka in Sanskrit means reasoning, consideration or deliberation, and mudra means closure, mark, or seal. Together, vitarka mudra is the gesture of debate. In yogic practices, the mudra aids in controlling the flow of energy and unblocks chakras.  Ria uses a variation of the mudra by touching both the index and middle fingers to the thumb, symbolizing compassion. When she uses it, she’s honing her powers in attempts to keep others from harm.

Got questions about these techniques? Leave them in the comments below.

Want to know more about Ria? Check out the Blood Phoenix novels here.

Did You Know…About Imprinting?

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blood phoenix: imprinted, book trailer, Freud, Honan and Delsa, Laurell K. Hamilton, mormon, necromancer, paranormal romance, Stephenie Meyer, vampires

Imprints seem to span further than the notable reference to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. First, they imply a biological connection between the sex of a parent and the gene passed down, which results in learning and development.  If you want to know more of the science, check this out, but I’m no expert. I merely gleam some reference to Ria and her past, especially her connections with her mother.

Second, we have the psychological imprint. The two types of psychological imprints refer to bonding with one’s parents or parent-like figures. The sexual imprinting suggests the stage of our development commented on by Freud, that we favor our opposite-sex parent and often create a template for future partners based off of them. Whereas, bonding imprints take place in new born creatures that bond to the types of animals they’re surrounded by at birth, thus they pattern their behaviors in a similar fashion.

I once again find connections between Ria and Boden’s relationship and what the term imprint implies. When her powers were budding, Boden used his influential magick on her—beginning their imprint. A few hours later, he drank his blood, deepening their connection, and shit got crazy from there.

Third, the newly famous theories from the paranormal romance world focuses on shifters, or werewolves, and their strong bonds with humans. Stephenie Meyer’s books popularized this involuntary lifetime attachment with her werewolves. Their imprints mean the werewolves protect and please their mates for the remainder of their lives. But she wasn’t the first to use this type of connection. Laurell K. Hamilton used this in her Anita Blake series between both the shifter characters and the main human female, and a link between this woman, a necromancer, and newly risen vampires. Sherrilyn Kenyon also creates a bond between her shifter characters in her Dark Hunter and Were Hunter series, where shifters mate for life, literally marking them for their mate and their mate only. The men cannot cheat, and the women cannot reproduce without their mate. Their bond is ultimate and complete.  Even further back, the story of Honan and Delsa created this type of bond as the characters transverse the before, the life, and the afterlife together, fated to find each other again and again. In fact, this is theorized to be Meyer’s inspiration as a Mormon story. This guy writes about it more in depth. Interesting stuff.

Fourth, paranormal investigators theorize that because we are made of energy and leave almost undetectable traces everywhere we go, we thusly leave an energy stamp, like a fingerprint, in places we spend a great deal of time or energy.

This is the final nail, so to speak, is their transfer of powers—when both the imprint and her newly acquired glamour explode in a coffee shop. It takes an elemental to sort it out, but traces are left. Too much of their energy swapped.

Ultimately, I called it an imprint for a lack of a better word. Boden and Ria formed this bond without my intent and not really with theirs either. Unless you take Boden’s cackling as any sort of sign.

In book three of Ria’s story, Blood Phoenix: Imprinted, we explore their bond more deeply, but the name refers not only—just majoritively—to Ria and Boden. It also refers to her past selves, and thus, her connections to her parents, her soul, James, and Gene.

 

Want a free look into the Broken World and access to more super secret book stuff? Download “Maiden of the Underworld” here.

 

BONUS CONTENT: The Official Blood Phoenix: Imprinted book trailer is live. ❤

Did You Know…About Atlantis (Part Two)

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Ancient Mysteries, anthology, atlantean, atlantis, avebury, Broken World, carnac, Crete, did you know, Egypt, fantasy, folklore, geology, K.T. Frost, Lost City, Minoan, myth, paranormal, plato, Spyridon Marinatos, stonehenge, Thera, tsunami, volcanic explosion, writing

So if we believe Plato’s notes on Atlantis, the continent should lie somewhere off the coast-lines of the Atlantic Ocean. However, several hypotheses have tried to connect Eastern Atlantic structures as megalithic buildings, such as chambered tombs or stone monuments. These megalithic builders were characteristic of prehistoric Europe, and the claims of matching buildings in the Atlantic Americas do not uphold under close inspection. Essentially, “there are no America equivalents of the chambered tombs of the stone rings at Stonehenge, Avebury, and Carnac” (James and Thorpe).

The various geologic claims of Atlantis as a lost continent, in short, are unfounded. The continental drift, in which the world’s one landmass fractured apart—now known as the tectonic plate theory, does not allow room for the Atlantean continent. Recent theories suggest Altantis may have relocated to Antartica, but no evidence exists to support this other than a literal reading of Plato.

Although Plato’s depiction of the lost city was debunked, K.T. Frost, a young Belfast University scholar, suggested that Atlanteans echo the once-flourishing Minoan civilization in Crete: “Egyptian tomb paintings depicting visitors in Minoan-style costume showed that the Egyptians were aware of this civilization, while its sudden disappearance about 1400 B.C., Frost suggested might have given them the impression that ‘the whole kingdom had sunk in the sea’” (James and Thrope). The only drawback was the lack of a big enough catastrophe.

Greek archeologist Spyridon Marinatos theorized that the crater left by the explosion of Thera, a Bronze Age volcanic explosion turned tsunami, left a crater and gave rise to the tale of Altantis’ destruction. His 1967 excavation uncovered streets, houses, and beautiful pottery. This discovery prompted several books in 1969 that argued Thera as the real Atlantis. However, many of the comparisons between the Minoan and Atlantean civilizations were too weak, the explosion of Knossos a decade and a half earlier, and the lack of communication breakdown between Egypt and the Aegean world was not significant to indicate a “sinking” of an island.

My source:

James, Peter and Nick Thorpe. Ancient Mysteries. Ballantine Books: New York, 1999. Print.

Want to know more?

Andrew Collins on Atlantis as Crete or Thera

The UnMuseum on Atlantis

The Shadowlands, Atlantis the Lost Continent

Want to read about my version of Atlantis?

Read “Maiden of the Underworld” in my DISTORTED anthology.

 

Did You Know About…The Icelandic Christmas Trolls and Their Yule Cat?

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Beast, Bjúgnakrækir, candy, canonized, children, christmas, christmas eve, creatures, criminals, Death, devouring, did you know, eat children, folklore, giantess, Gryla, homicidal, horror, hunger, Hurðaskellir, iceland, icelandic, Kertasníkir, life, misbehave, mythology, myths, ogress, pranksters, santa claus, stories, thieves, thirteen, traditions, trolls, yule, yule cat, Yule Lads

An Icelandic monster, the Yule Cat is a giant, ferocious cat that lurks in the snowy countryside around the Christmas season and eats people who did not receive new clothes to swear before Christmas Eve.

Farmers used the Yule Cat as a threat to scare their workers into finishing their wool-work before Christmas. Those who processed the autumn wool were rewarded with new clothes, and those who did not take part received nothing, thus falling prey to the gruesome cat. Other versions focus the Yule Cat’s victimization of children who do not work hard enough.

The Yule Cat is connected to the giantess Grýla and her sons, the Yule Lads. The three create an awful grouping. The Grýla is a mythical troll or ogress who is as ugly as she is ravenous. Stories of her are meant to frighten children who misbehave year round as she can detect them. During Christmas, she comes from the mountains, from her caves, to hunt for children as they’re her favorite snack. And she was always hungry.

Folklore says she’s been married three times, and her third husband lives in their cave in the Dimmuborgir lave fields, with the Yule Cat and their sons.

The Yule Lads are the modern versions of Santa Claus. Unknown in number, they place rewards or punishments into childrens’ shoes set on window sills during the last thirteen nights before Christmas Eve. Many versions of the Yule Lads exist in Icelandic lore, ranging from mere pranksters to homicidal mosters who eat children, like their mother.

Their original portrayal showed them as mischievous, or criminal, pranksters who stole from and harassed the population—mostly rule farmers—and are now canonized as the thirteen Yule Lads. Some include: Hurðaskellir, or Door-slammer, who likes to slam doors, especially at night; Bjúgnakrækir, or Suasage-Swiper, who hides in the rafters to snatch sausages as they smoked; and Kertasníkir, or Candle-Stealer, who follows children to steal their candies.

Want to learn more about these Icelandic Christmas Creatures? Check out these links: this one, and this one, ooo a video, don’t forget this one, and another video.

Did You Know…About Atlantis? (Part One)

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alisha costanzo, anthology, anthony s. buoni, atlantis, atlas, Broken World, crystals, Death, distorted, fantasy, folklore, gods, horror, Legend, magick, mermaids, myth, mythology, plato, Poseidon, power, war, writing

Once the home to an advanced, ancient civilization, the lost continent of Atlantis has become an iconic myth that has inspired philosophers, like Plato, and writers, such as Jules Verne. Often, we imagine Atlantis as crumbling columned ruins in the thick of seaweed and moss or a pristine sunken city, still inhabited by a mysteriously intelligent and hardy race. Yet, no matter the depiction, the majority of the world reveres the lost city as a reality.

Hundreds of books have reconstructed the image of Atlantis drawing from mythology, archaeology, and geology and conclude that the Atlantean civilization was completely destroyed by a colossal catastrophe about 12,000 years ago, perhaps via a natural cataclysm, such as an asteroid impact or the Earth’s crust opening to swallow them. But perhaps they destroyed themselves through their mad experiments. Either way they are theorized as an advanced civilization, likely more advanced than our own society, through their use of crystals, which could be the force that wiped them out.

According to Plato, the Athenians led a successful resistance of the Europeans against the Atlantean forces, which were ruled by group of kings descended from Poseidon. The chief king descended from Atlas, Poseidon’s eldest son. The people were viewed as godlike for their pure hearts, but due to their divine blood, they faded into corruption and greed—much like the advanced civilizations of the twenty-first century. After the Atlanteans were defeated, the gods decided to punish them for their pride. Plato writes, “There were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single day and night…the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depth of the sea.” When the earth swallowed up the island, it also took with it the people and the campaigning army.

To learn more about Plato’s Atlantis, click here or here.

For a more in depth look at the theory of Atlantis (specifically as a lost continent in the Java Sea between India and Australia), click here.

To learn more about my rendition of the Atlantean myth, click here.

Did You Know…About the Gypsies?

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burned at the stake, fate, Fortune Tellers, gypsies, Hindu, karma, nonhuman, past lives, persecuted, satan, Tarot, thieves, travel, Veda, Vedavica

Traditionally considered companions to creatures of the night, such as werewolves, gypsies gained notoriety since they migrated through Europe in the dawn of the second millennia. They are often seen as thieves, fortune tellers, and cheats, or condemned to death as witches and descendants of Satan. Gypsies were killed without legal penalty in the sixteenth century, as they had no legal rights.

 

Thousands of gypsies were burned at the stake during the Middle Ages in punishment for forging the nails that bound Jesus Christ to the cross. During Nazi’s rule over Germany, 400,000 gypsies were killed in death camps and deemed as “nonhuman.”

Most scholars agree that gypsies hail from Hindu roots. Gypsies commonly believe in past lives, karma, and the triune goddess of fate. Vedavica, fortune tellers literally read the Veda and consider tarot cards as their own interpretation of sacred Hindu writings.

Gypsies are sentences to never retain their own national territory, political organization, church, or alphabet, because their culture was flooded by the sea; thus, they travel without rest.

Stieger, Brad. The Werewolf Book: the Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1999.

Want to know more? Check out these links:

Five Urban Legends About Gypsies

More information about gypsies and vampires

Modern Day Gypsies

Did You Know…About the Significance of Blood?

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Barnabas Collins, blood, blood transfusion, Dark Shadows, disease, Dracula, Jan Jenings, life, lore, myth, mythical race, significance, vampires, vampyr, Van Helsing

Nothing better defines a vampire than their need for blood. The significance of blood became apparent early for humans as they connected blood to life via childbirth and menstrual flow, spilling blood and the loss of consciousness, breath, and life of hunted animals.

Blood, therefore, is identified with life, although philosophers produced many speculative reasons as to why such a connection existed: “People assigned various sacred and magical qualities to blood and used it n a variety of rituals. People drank it, rubbed it on their bodies, and manipulated it in ceremonies.” Ultimately, people believed that drinking the blood of a victim gave one additional strength.

 

Much of the vampiric lore pertaining to blood developed prior to modern medicine. Yet, Dracula was written just as modern medicine emerged, and thus, mixes traditional blood lore with new medical knowledge. For example, as Lucy’s fiancé lay dying, Van Helsing ordered a blood transfusion, a new medical invention at the time, as a remedy to vampire attack. This transfusion began a new wave of vampire myth.

 

As blood itself grew demystified, the supernatural attributes of consuming it did as well, thus transforming the vampires into diseased creatures, caused by theological or moral flaw and that some physical disorder in the blood, which could be passed by the vampire’s bite. The act of drinking blood also became “a direct defiance of the biblical demand.” These adaptations gave cause to seemingly endless possibilities for vampires as a mythical race, proving why the myth has maintained so many devotees to this day.

For example, Dark Shadows, a late 1960s television series, introduced vampirism as a disease and sent one of the main characters, Maggie Evans, to assist her newly met vampire friend, Barnabas Collins, with a cure for his disease.

In 1981, Jan Jennings’ Vampyr introduced a research scientist and his relationship with a vampiress. Due to his love, he traced the disease to China and found it to be a contagious infection brought to America by early Dutch colonists, but he was unable to cure her.

Scientific discoveries of the essential function of blood within the human body have given it more mystification and promoted its return to holiness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Want to know more? Check out this link and this link!

Sources:

Melton, J. Gordon. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Canton, Michigan: Visible Ink Press, 1999.

Did You Know…About the Jackal People?

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Anubis, coyotes, Egypt, folklore, foxes, jackal, jackal people, legends, literary device, magic, magick, metaphysical, myths, shape-shifters, sorcery, were-creatures

Jackals had been closely associated with the underworld and ancient Egyptian god of souls of the dead, Anubis, and the animal symbolized destruction for Hebrews, represented cowardice for a good share of Asia, and Africans often viewed jackals as wise tricksters. However, Indian folklore stated that hearing a jackal’s howl from over one’s left shoulder was considered a bad omen.

Those who become were-jackals wore a stripe made by a witch doctor to hide across the forehead or waist that gave them the ability to shape-shift, generally at night for secret travel.

Jackal shifters are not uncommon, although they are metaphysically similar to coyotes. Old World jackals have the same magical qualities as the coyote.

Jackals, like foxes or coyotes, are depicted as clever sorcerers in myths and legends. Mentioned in the Bible, the jackal is often used as a literary device to exemplify desolation, isolation and abandonment, and the ruins of former cities and areas abandoned by humans.

Want to know more, check out this link.

Sources:

Steiger, Brad. The Werewolf Book: the Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1999. Print.

Jackal Wiki