Sunday, October 11, 2015

Tools of the Trade

I'll have the long-in-gestation mummified heart up tomorrow.  In the meantime, here are the ritual tools that are part of the set- a harrowing blade (antler and gar tooth), binding amulet (carved agate), and some additional iron nails.  You can right click and "Open Link in New Tab" to see the full sized picture.


Update:  Well, this is awkward.  I was planning on linking to the Ebay auction for the heart at the end of the "making of" post today (Monday).  Apparently, it looks realistic enough that the auction was pulled for "trafficking in human body parts" despite the rather lengthy description pointing out it was a prop.  Hopefully this will be resolved quickly.

5 comments:

  1. And what is a 'harrowing blade?'

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  2. @ gndn

    A blade for harrowing, of course. Heh.

    http://www.thefreedictionary.com/harrowing

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  3. @ Props :

    Take it as a compliment to your realism, and be glad the compliment did not come along with an arrest warrant.

    (Be glad also that we live in the age of DNA testing, so that in utter extremity it could be *proven* the heart was not human, and thus not a murder victim's....)

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  4. Leave it to Propy to find a word with an Old Norse root (herfi), which makes its way into Old English (hergian) about 1000 CE, and finally into the more modern form, harrow. Aelfric of Eynsham uses the word hergian to mean to despoil, ravage or harry. Harry, a military term also “to make predatory raids or incursions’’. So yeah, Harrowing Blade works pretty well as a ritual instrument as a less for an agricultural instrument. There are religious associations to the word harrow such as the Harrowing of Hell & etc.

    You must have done quite a job with that heart to get it kicked off of eBay. Funny you just vero’d a bunch of stuff yourself. I wonder if they red flagged you as a trouble maker or somebody you vero’d previously decided to play a bit of mischief. No opinion too low about eBay staff or some of the (so called) dealers there.

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  5. Thismight prove more helpful in explaining the provenance of the term. The dictionary link has only references to the emotional sense of the word.

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