I ended up going to Gotham over this past weekend. My brother Kronos decided a couple weeks ago that we were going 😂 He does that sometimes and I thought well alright fine, I’ll get my yearly appearance in.
We attended two events. The Gotham Social and a special event I can’t go into too many details about just yet but I’ll have a better post about that in a couple weeks.
Some of you may not know what a Halo is, so let’s discuss that!
A “Halo” is the name of a vampyre hotspot. Halos are generally cities but sometimes they cover wider territories. Originally, Halos were areas consecrated by Father Sebastiaan… and by consecrated, I mean he made 100 pairs of fangs in that city and would call it a Halo. However, despite the business origins of the practice, the creation and consecration of Halos would take on its own life and ritualistic traditions within the Vampyre Community. Eventually, Halos would become egregores molded by a High Priest/ess within an area out of the collective vampyric energy current.
Originally, Halos were only those who were consecrated under the Sabretooth banner. Today, not all Halos are consecrated by Father Sebastiaan. He calls his Halos “Prime Halos” – I assume the rest are “secondary” in his eyes, but we’ll call them independant. I had consecrated the Baltimore Maryland area the “Mobtown Halo” in 2017. 🥰 (ngl, I think the prime halo concept came about because I consecrated my Halo outside of the Sabretooth regime. The concept of the Prime Halo came shortly after the first time we talked about my local halo in 2018ish? I know I’m not the only one to consecrate my own Halo, but it was an interesting timeline)
What is the Gotham Halo?
The Gotham Halo is New York City’s Vampyric Community. It was the first Halo as it was the home base for the original fang shop. The Gotham Halo is the birthplace of a lot of Vampyre Community tradition as we know it today.
Because of this history, Gotham’s Vampyre Community has deep roots, confusing bloodlines, weird webs of connection and drama all over the place. Yet it also has a well established nightside community presence. There has always been several regularly dedicated events for nightside throughout the VC’s history in Gotham.
This History is part of several projects I’m digging into.
Which is what I will be sharing snippets of with you over the next several months. I do not foresee any travel plans in my life for the next several months. Therefore, its about to be writing and research marathon time.
I am hopefully going to be getting with Lord Shaolin of Gotham to get to work on articulating Gotham History in general and then I was offered the opportunity to help go through some of Father Vincent’s archives to digitize some of it and get what should be publicly acknowledged out there on the Coven’s website. (Much excite, pray for me that this is something that pans out🤞)
Here’s me at the Producers Club & Theater close to Times Square. This is where Saturday’s event “The Gotham Social” was. That was a time 😂
The Gotham Social is always debaucherous. There’s “Gogo dancers” that are essentially strippers without the pole. Everyone getting hammered and acting a fool. It’s just pure shenanigans. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong. But mid 30s me likes a different vibe most of the time nowadays. I still go and watch and feed, ya know… I still vamp around. But I like a more chill environment that I can understand people’s conversations in nowadays.
Aside from getting to mingle with the VC in Gotham, I also got to explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art which Id never been to.
above picture by the met – the rest below taken my be.
It was incredible. You can spend a full day open to close there and still probably not see it all. I want to take Tim there so badly. My main mission going was to see the Ancient Egyptian exhibits and hooo-lee shit did they far exceed my expectations.
They have a temple, which is surrounded by a moat of water, and also full of people. I took the picture above. It’s called the Temple of Dendur. The Met’s website says:
Completed by 10 B.C., the Roman emperor Augustus — who had succeeded Cleopatra VII, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt — commissioned this temple to honor the great goddess Isis. Worshipped here as well were two brothers, sons of a local Nubian ruler; the esteem in which the brothers were regarded in this region, about fifty miles south of modern Aswan, may explain why Augustus chose Dendur as a place to erect a temple. During The International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, the 2,000 year old temple was dismantled to protect it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser following the completion of the Aswan High Dam. The government of Egypt presented the Temple of Dendur as a gift to the people of the United States in recognition of the American contribution to this historic campaign.
The absolute chills I got throughout this room and tbh the whole exhibit. The energy radiating through the room and off of the artifacts was awesome and it was an even bigger reminder that this kind of energy is my absolute favorite. I’m not a club kid anymore. I’m a history seeking adult now. I was feeling that the night before on Saturday but my trip to the museum solidified it. I was skipping around like a kid through some parts of the exhibits just from the joy of it. We need things in our lives that make us feel that way and those experiences are what I crave.
This sphinx friend called the Sphinx of Hatshepsut was protecting the outside of the temple. It is believed this sphinx was created somewhere around 1479-1458 B.C.
The Met’s website says:
This colossal sphinx portrays the female pharaoh Hatshepsut with the body of a lion and a human head wearing a nemes–headcloth and false beard. The sculptor has carefully observed the powerful muscles of the lion as contrasted to the handsome, idealized face of the pharaoh. It was one of at least six granite sphinxes that stood in Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri.
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt, first as regent for and then as senior co-ruler with her nephew/step-son Thutmose III. Most of her statues depict Hatshepsut as an ideal king, a young man in the prime of life, but others depict her as a woman
You can see on the right hand edge of the above photo, they projected images on the side of the temple of what the hieroglyphic art would’ve looked like when it was freshly finished.
Above you can see a straight forward view of the temple on the other side of its moat, two Pharoahs sit regally in front of a large doorway directly behind where I stood to take the photo. It’s a grand entrance to such a magnificent space.
To the left of the Pharoahs stands four large statues of Sekhmet. This is where I started to get a little choked up 😅
I have had a relationship with Sekhmet for a long time. It was sort of a natural progression from my teenage obsession with Bast since I’ve always been a crazy cat lady from youth. Sekhmet stood tall all over this egyptian exhibit. There were these four here plus more statues like this in other parts of the Egyptian exhibit.
Like this one…. that I selfied with like a nerd.
Adjacent to the temple room there were other rooms filled with artifacts, art, statues, temple walls, papyri, mummy wrapping linen, and just so freaking much. I was blown away.
The pictures in this room were hard to get because it was dark. We weren’t sure if the darkness was on purpose or if they hadn’t installed lighting in there yet… but there was 6-8 sarcophagi in the center of this room so we were wondering if the lack of light was on purpose to preserve them.
The lapis and turquoise work was stunning nonetheless.
This Mummy Mask was so striking. It’s a plaster mask from a Greco-Roman period in Egyptian History. The colors were so vibrant, the detail so in tact. I was mesmerized by it.
The Met’s website says:
Plaster masks seem to have been particularly popular in Middle Egypt. They develop of course from Egyptian traditions, but appearances could be strongly individualized and Roman fashions of hairstyle, dress and jewelry were followed to varying degrees. This mask is very similar to a group from Meir and almost certainly came from that site. The woman is represented as if lying flat upon her bier. She wears a long Egyptian-style wig made of plant fibers, a deep-red tunic with black clavi (stripes), and jewelry that includes a lunula (crescent pendant), and snake bracelets. At the lower edge of her tunic are two holes, which were used for attaching the mask to the mummy.
The back of her head is then represented as resting on a decorated support. Over the top of her head is a gilded wreath encircling a scarab beetle that represents the sun appearing at dawn, a metaphor for rebirth. The interstices and surrounding area are filled with a complex patterned ground, with the sides filled by a register of tyet knots and djed pillars, symbols of Isis and Osiris. A main register runs around the edge of the mask which centers on the god Osiris, the source of regenerative power, who is flanked by Isis and Nephthys. To the right of Osiris and the two goddesses are Horus, Amun, Thoth, and Re. To the left are Anubis, Tefnut, Hathor, and Seshat. These gods serve as witnesses to the deceased’s resurrection.
Above is the back of the mask.
There was an incredible amount of things to see and dig into… and that’s just Ancient Egypt. I haven’t even gotten into the exhibits of other cultures we saw! But I’ll come back another time with a longer post specifically about the Met and revisit some of these things <3
But before I sign off, i’ll end this with a silly tidbit from after the museum. Once we were done visiting the Met, we head back to the hotel and we get in the room to see Housekeeping has set my lil stuffed crow witch friend up on my pillow… My crow buddy comes traveling with me. I always mean to take it out to make silly video clips with but I never have room in my bag so he holds down the fort while we’re out. I thought him being set up on the pillow was cute. 😂
I tried to use this trip as an opportunity to take video footage for video content because I am *notoriously* horrible at remembering to do that. Well, I took the video clips this time. Now I have to go through them all to see if any of it is actually usable and what I can create out of it 😅 Video coming up soon and I’ll share that with you guys first before I put it anywhere else. 🥰
Thanks for reading another chapter of the Captain’s Adventure Log.
xx
Madame Corvidae
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