The Harpies

Aeneas, the epic Trojan paladin, was submitted to frightful new ordeals while navigating with his people towards the marvelous lands of the ancient Hesperia.

Ancient traditions, lost within the night of the centuries, tell us that, while they were upon the open sea, the dreadful forces of Neptune arose a terrible tempest, which (thanks to God) did not sink their ship. However, it did cause Palinurus, who was the most skillful of the pilots, lose his bearings in mid-ocean, after passing through three long days of darkness and three starless nights.

Horrifying were the moments when the Trojans approached the shores of the terrifying Strophades Islands, which are in the great Ionian sea, and which are inhabited by the Dantesque harpies. They are disgusting witches with the heads and necks of girls who were beautiful maidens in the past, but have now been transformed into horrible furies who pollute everything they touch with their foul contagion. It was a monstrous, abominable harpy army that in afore time was commanded by the execrable Celaeno. They were provided with hooked claws for hands, and their faces were pale with a hunger that could never be satisfied.

The glorious hero with his people arrived to this land and entered the harbor without thinking of abject witches or of horrifying Witches’ Sabbaths. Hungry as they were, these strong descendants of Dardanus did not hesitate to sacrifice the beautiful and reluctant cows they found happily eating unguarded on the grass of this no man’s land.

But suddenly, when they were feasting on this rich fare, the Harpies were upon them, screeching as ravens and swooping down from their mounts with a fearful clangor of their wings, grabbing and tearing the food to pieces and polluting everything with their filthy mouths. This was a horrifying spectacle; all of the meat was infected, the odor polluted the air, and the banquet became filthy, repulsive, and sickening.

The Trojans, escaping from these sinister ladies who were transformed into horrifying fowls, once again sheltered themselves in mysterious caves far back from the sunny beach. But to the disgrace of these illustrious warriors, when they were ready to eat after sacrificing new cattle, the noisy flock of damned witches came once again and polluted the food.

Therefore, filled with great anger, these men armed themselves with their bows and javelins in order to exterminate this fearsome tribe of abominable harpies. But the harpies had a filthy skin that felt no violence from the bronze, and their backs were as invulnerable as steel.

Terrible was the spell that Celaeno burst out of her breast while flying round about the glorious heads of the courageous Trojans, screeching:

Is it war you offer us now, sons of Laomedon, for the slaughter of our bullocks and the felling of our oxen? Is it your plan to make war against the innocent Harpies and drive us from the kingdom of our ancestors? Listen to what I have to say and fix it in your minds. These words were spoken by the Almighty Father of the Gods to Phoebus Apollo, and Phoebus Apollo spoke them to me, and now I, the greatest of the furies, speak them to you. You are calling upon the winds and trying to sail to Italy. To Italy you will go and you will be allowed to enter its harbors, but you will not be given a city, and you will not be allowed to build walls around it before a deadly famine has come upon you, and the guilt of our blood drives you to gnaw round the edges of your tables, to put them between your teeth and eat them.

Surprised and consternated, the Trojans beseeched the Holy Gods to turn away this threat from them. They then abandoned that gloomy land and sailed into the sea again.

Factually, to sacrifice the sacred cow is equivalent to invoking cruel harpies of pernicious presages.

It becomes opportune to refer here to the symbolic cow of five legs, which is the terrific guardian of the Jinn lands.

H. P. Blavatsky actually saw a cow with five legs in India, which had a “fifth leg” growing out of her hump. It scratched its head with the extra hoof and killed flies with it, etc. That animal was guided by a young man who was a member of the Sadhu sect.

If we read the three syllables of the word CABALA in the inverted way, then we read LA-BA-CA. In Spanish, LA VACA means “the cow,” which is the living symbol of the eternal Mother Space.

The eternal feminine element of Nature, the Magna-Mater (from which the “M” and the Aquarian hieroglyphic emanates), is always mentioned in all theologies of the north, south, west, and east of the world.

She is the universal womb of the great abyss, the primitive Venus, the great Virgin Mother, who emerges from the waves of the sea with her son, Cupid / Eros. She is the final variant; in short, she is Gaia, Gaea or the Earth in her superior aspect, the Hindustani Prakriti.

Let us remember Telemachus descending into the world of shadows in order to inquire about the fate of Ulysses, his father. The young man walked under the light of the moon while invoking Prakriti, the powerful deity who is Selene in heaven, as well as the chaste Diana on the earth, and the formidable Hekate within the subterranean worlds.

The two subsequent unfoldments of Hekate / Proserpine, which are the fourth and fifth aspects of Prakriti, are negative. They constitute the shadow of the eternal Mother Space, which are lost reflections within the mirror of Nature.

Black and white Jinns exist. Harpies follow the tenebrous path. Dante found them tormenting the devolving submerged souls within the Infernal Worlds.

Harpies are black Jinns; they utilize the two negative inferior aspects of Prakriti. They submerge themselves within the fourth dimension with these two aspects, in order to fly through the air.

The physical body can take any given figure while inside the unknown dimension, and beautiful maidens can transform themselves into horrifying fowls, as the example of those birds that Aeneas found in the tenebrous Strophades Islands.

Charon, the infernal God, whose eternal age is always melancholic and abominable, conduces the harpies who have passed through the doors of death to the other shore of the evil river. There, among its muddy currents of black water with frightful and filthy borders the specters of the dead wander. It is the fatal river where the boat of Charon navigates, conducing the lost ones into the sombre, dismal, and obscure regions of the submerged mineral kingdom.

Horrible is the end that awaits the harpies of the execrable Celaeno, which is to frightfully devolve within the sub-world until petrifying and reducing themselves into cosmic dust. The condemnation of those who perform evil is just; their mouths are as open sepulchres. They never knew the path of peace.