Best Witches!

Witch, kamiste, Deviantart

Hey, Best Witches, ghouls and ‘goyles! Hope your weekend was as spooktacular as mine!

Here’s the Sunshine Superman, Donovan, accompanied by a rather nice bit of witchy goth.

It must be the Season of the Witch. Must be.

The Eagles. Uh, yeah… Eagles… man… also accompanied by a rather nice bit of witchy goth. Who knew?

Raven hair. Ruby lips. Sparks fly from her fingertips… Ooh. Witchy. Way.

The incomparable Sarah Vaughan with That Old Black Magic that she weaves so well…

By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.

~ Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I

❤💀❤

Best Witches!

Lord, what Fools these mortals be!

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

~ Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 3, scene 2

The mischievous fairy Puck brings his king Oberon to view a spectacle—what he calls a “fond [foolish] pageant.” Four Athenian lovers, lost in the fairies’ forest, have lately been acting very strangely, and Puck is partly responsible. Where Oberon had hoped to reconcile, with the aid of a love potion, the bickering lovers, Puck applied the potion to the eyelids of the wrong man. Before, Helena had pursued Demetrius, who had pursued Hermia, who was in love with Lysander. Now, because of Puck’s mistake, Lysander pursues Helena, and in the meanwhile Oberon has fixed it so that Demetrius pursues Helena too—the result he originally intended.

All this faery meddling doesn’t prevent Puck from blaming the lovers’ behavior on their own foolishness. As far as he’s concerned, their actions amount merely to a performance put on for the faeries’ enjoyment, while the lovers themselves treat the whole affair with deadly seriousness. Shakespeare’s judgment seems to be that love is a form of madness that prompts the lover to act in very foolish ways, indeed. As Duke Theseus says, lovers, like madmen and poets, are fantasists, “of imagination all compact [composed]” (Act 5, scene 1, 8). Though their fantasies are irrational, however, they are also acts of creation that produce “More than cool reason ever comprehends” (line 6). Theseus doesn’t wholly approve of the frantic delusions of lovers and poets, but the poet Shakespeare is implicitly more tolerant.

Implicitly.

The Dizzy Fool:

A Brief History of the Fool

What a Fool Believes

Here Come The Jesters

Rock and Roll Fantasy

The Fool

A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Hamlet Act 3 scene 1

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. – Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy Orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

~ Bill Shakespeare