107 - iosis

wherever you look, beautiful reader, you will find alchemy, if you know what to look for.

someone warms the water, someone lights the candle, someone narrates the liturgy, the baby usually cries. athena was relatively composed about the whole affair. in this county, a baptism means two things, and the bath comes with a document. i told you two nights ago that a baptism is a purification ritual, a perfect symbol of albedo, and here it does the work on multiple levels. in lands as old as these, even the spirit is political.

albedo is the whitening, the body has gone black in its putrefaction and then it lifts. this is the part alchemists called ablutio, the washing, it was drawn often as dew falling on a corpse. think of it as first sign of hope. this is the spiritual part that the political falls back on with its own operation of separatio, separation. this is when the leftovers are taken apart and categorized in their own little labelled vessels. lebanon has eighteen of said vessels, fifteen of which run their own family courts, or sects. having undergone ablutio, nunu is categorized under the byzantine orthodox sect. nunu’s court decides who she can marry and where, who she’d have to leave the country to marry, what divorce would cost her, who gets her children if things go badly, what fraction of mine and my husband’s possessions she inherits. nunu is nine months old, has a jaw like a bulldozer, and now her first documented legal relationship with a god who has a special interest in her marital affairs. however, nunu is not a mono-legal person, nunu also has a documented relationship with a powerful colony, her canadian passport, so nunu can bypass these limitations like mommy did.

in greek, baptism is baptizein, meaning to dip, to plunge, to immerse. it’s a dyer’s word, as in to dip the cloth into the dye. the great dyers of the ancient mediterranean were right on this coast, in sidon and tyre, those places being bombed now in the south by yours truly. the greeks called them phoinix, phoenicians, meaning pureple or crimson, for the famous royal purple dye they produced, farming murex snails on the shores of sidon and tyre. it was the most expensive color in the world. violet was the theme of nunu’s dipping, on the coast where the color purple was discovered. this is a synchronicity i did not plan, beautiful reader, but am discovering with you as i write this.

another that comes to mind: greek alchemists divided the work by color into the four stages, but with their own names: melanosis, for blackening, leukosis for whitening, xanthosis for yellowing, and iosis for purpling. ios in ancient greek means violet. it also means rust, and venom. the final stage of the great work is named after a color that doubles as a poison. nunu is my iosis.

until tomorrow <3