1492

i find myself here, in the second life alhambra, having seen with my own eyes the beauty of the real thing, yet at the time of my visit little knowing its deeper significance. i hope i may be forgiven for it.



i think i realize now the events of 1492 and this place have a deeper dimension that i never really understood fully before. i knew columbus met with the catholic kings in the alhambra before he left on his voyage....in the same room where boabdil surrendered his kingdom. and also in this same palace in the same year was issued the infamous alhambra decree expelling the jews.

this catastrophe remembered, (among others) on tisha b'av. it is early, yet. still too early for tisha b'av this year. the saddest day of the year that i never celebrate...but its the reason i have chosen this place to roam, dressed as an old testament angel of affliction......for the laments and exile and destruction for the moslems and jews. and also the destruction and conquest and visited on the indigenous people in the americas. because i guess the energies that were expended to retake this fortress, never dissipated, perhaps just redirected into different parts of the world...

and so i visit the replica of a place that i have come to regard as the womb of our world. i like to think that all of us, the children of the new world, are the products of the scenes that took place in this magnificent jewel of a palace composed and created in equal measures of beauty and filth, violence and piety, and dreams of paradise....

al-zahra wears:

corvinus hair black by gauze
kaballah skin by nikita friede
cernwn horns by siyu suen
corded neck corset by RU
skull pendant by grim bros
u-sha fantasie outfit & boots by husky gfx

in al-Andalus Alhambra
listening to "todos los bienes del mundo"
a villancico by juan del encina

i am a very, very, very bad jew.

it's passover, and it occured to me to dress juana up like the angel of destruction, and roam an ancient egyptian themed sim.

i am not normally so bloodthirsty but found a really cool new skin called "kaballah" on xstreet by Nikita Fride.

it has various kabbalistic symbols, but my fave is the huge hamsa on the back. i wear hamsas in real life, pretty much keep them everywhere, and found it funny that the second life logo is a modified hamsa.

i was making an outfit to go with this splendid new skin when the hilarity of this idea struck me, and i just had to do it.

in lieu of a seder, the ritual meal where all the foodstuffs have a meaning, i purposely included a few things to serve as a kind of visual/clothing seder. so i suppose this is my utterly vain, profane, and probably semi-sacriligious passover observance this year.

• the bands are symbols of slavery
• amusingly enough the belt of the skirt has an anhk on it, a reminder that we must mourn the egyptians, because they were suffering too.
  
• the bones and skulls on my shoes reference both the bones of the slaves that were crushed to make mortar for the pyramids, and also the scorched lamb bone of the seder plate.
• the horns are for the common misconception/mistranslation that jews have horns.
• the bracers and torc are from the "abbadon" set. "abbadon" supposedly means destruction in hebrew.
  

michal the second life angel of destruction wears:

skin: Kaballah by Nikita Friede
horns: i don't remember, by Siyu Suen (illusions)
hair: fluff by jet doll
bracers, earrings, torc: abbadon set by tekeli'li
armbands: from amaya set by gauze
belt, silks, legbands: naughty isis set by nightshade designs
shoes: Dia de los Muertos platforms by grim bros
top and bottom: murder ballerina set by snatch