scribblings of unknowing

Herman Wirth and Questenburg

2011-10-12T22:01:00.002-06:00

In a quick synopsis from the following german text by Hermann Würth (1936), "the name of the village, Questenberg, seems to arise from this midsummer tradition of this pole and its "queste", that is, its wreath and the tassels. Würth talks about it as a symbol for an old midsummer festivity, which is a pagan festival, but he also talks of the tree as the 'year tree of the God' (?!) The oak-stem is about 8 to 10 meters high and had earlier been mentioned by Jacob Grimm in his German Mythology (1844). The ritual happened every year around Whitsun (late May). Würth describes the ritual as still having been practiced in 1924." Quoting from Jacob Grimm's "German Mythology" (Actually quoting the Stallybrass 1883 English translation re-titled "Teutonic Mythology" which is free from Google Books) "From later times and surviving folk-tales I can bring forward a few things. At the village of Questenberg. in the Harz, on the third day in Whitsuntide, the lads carry an oak up the castle-hill which overlooks the whole district, and, when they have set it upright, fasten to it a large garland of branches of trees plaited together, and as big as a cartwheel. They all shout 'the queste (i.e. garland) hangs,' and then they dance round the tree on the hill top; both tree and garland are renewed every year." 2008 photo (above) from German Wiki Similar Wiki in English. Other Maypoles on this blog. Jacob Grimm's four volume opus on CD, Grimm's Teutonic Mythology and Folklore,part of the ongoing english translation process of Northverg's Northern European Studies Project.

Why does the commentary of Jacob Grimm or, years later, that of Hermann Würth, inventor of the Nazi swastika, with regard to this tiny south Harz mountain village's maypole ritual have import now?

There appears a vast amount of forgotten, deeply DNA embedded source of human comfort - a calm and solace - in watching or taking part in ritualized "stems and tassels". Not in the actual sex act itself - too messy and frightening - but a comfort from a ersatz participation in one of the immeasureble multiplications of ritualized iterations of the act which have been curiously and clinically tidied and buoyed up over countless millennia. Why? This seems the obsession of this inquiry, apologies to Jung.

Examples: the Catholic Church uses "red wine" for the tassel and a white "wafer" for the stem. Same ritual. Same comforts against angst. And the Church cleverly get endless monies by providing the actual body and blood of their god to their customers - really! - and the symbols are not terribly different from the "stem and tassels" of Questenburg. Speaking of money. . . what else can explain paying multimillions of USD to two competing groups of men to go out into a large bowl filled with watchers and attempt to move a seed-like object through / over / under a hoop / gate / net. Please! Unfortunately, some of the "stem/tassel" games seem to involve the pain and death requirement by the "victor" on whatever passing lamb, goat, chicken or (see earlier posts ) Mexican, if handy.

Passage from Wirth regarding Questenburg (below) is from pages 429-431 of the first of the two volume opus, "Die Heilige Urschrift der Menschheit (rough trans: "Sacred Original Writings of Mankind"), published in Leipzig, 1936. Tis in Deutsche, tis not your eyes.

Bucranium and Christ

2011-09-05T09:25:00.002-06:00

Dear ARAS (aras.org),Subject: “Only Women Bleed”

I have visited your NYC office/library in the C.G.Jung Center several times. I wondered if you have personnel who might comment on the following idea?Gary Regester

Diagram, top left: From page 244, Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess, Harper, ©1991 -- “An even more esoteric symbol of the womb of regeneration is the bull’s head or skull (bucranium). The similarity of the bucranium with the shape of the woman’s uterus and fallopian tubes was noticed by the artist Dorothy Cameron while working with James Mellaart (in 1960-65) at Catal Huyuk (town in Anatolia [Turkey], c. 7000 BC) . A great deal of information on the symbolic role of the bull’s head is revealed by the wall paintings from Catal Huyuk. In many, the bucranium is shown in place of the uterus in the body of the Goddess. This is a plausible if esoteric explanation for the importance of this motif in the symbolism of Old Europe, Anatolia, and the Near East.”

Photo, top center: from Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. © 1994-2001 - “Bucranium - decorative motif representing an ox killed in religious sacrifice. The motif originated in a ceremony wherein an ox’s head was hung from the wooden beams supporting the temple roof (italics ed.-see next); this scene was later represented, in stone, on the frieze, or stone lintels, above the columns in Doric temples. The motif has been found on painted pottery in Iraq dating from 5000 BC. (Italics - Ed) It was later imported into Bronze Age Crete as part of the bull and double-ax cult, where the bull’s head was decorated with a garland of bay leaves. In Roman examples, the garland of bay leaves was omitted.”

Photo top right: from New Oxford Annotated Bible, NRSV, Oxford Press, © 1994 -John 19.16,34 “So they took Jesus: and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull (Greek: craniou topos), which in Hebrew (Aramaic) is called Golgotha. There they crucified him...one of the soldiers pierced (Jesus’s) side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out."

ARAS reply-Dear Gary RegesterThank you for your letter and evocative images! I am afraid we don’t have the time to do research of this kind, however intriguing it might be. I hope you can come in and do this yourself. These are just some things I remember from our files - there is a connection in Egyptian imagery between uterus and cow horns - not bull horns, as far as I know. There is a connection between Christ’s wound and a bleeding (or at least red-colored) vulva suggesting the womb from which the Church was born. We have several images like that.All best wishes, Ami Ronnberg, CuratorARAS (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) NYC, NY

From image provided by ARAS (left) from the Bible Moralisee(c. 1250): and the caption provided by ARAS (ARAS 5Ek.010) “The sleep of Adam is the death of Christ. The side of the first man constitutes the woman, as the wound in the side of Christ on the cross signifies the Church (Ecclesia), the wife of Christ, the blood and the water of baptism. The comparison between Adam’s sleep and the death of Christ on the cross, the creation of Eve from the rib taken from Adam’s side and the birth or creation of the Church (the Lord’s Bride) from the wound in Christ’s side while He was on the cross is an old typological comparison first made by the earliest Christian theologian: Tertullian, Augustine, Jerome and Avitus. (from 5Ek.573) In Christian iconography, the wound becomes the spiritual vulva-womb from which Christ is shown literally giving birth to His Church, thereby strengthening the concept of the androgynous mature of Christ, which was suppressed by the church authorities.”

Click on photo, left, to enlarge.

All Symbols are Phallus

2011-09-04T19:15:00.000-06:00

Originally posted one year ago today (and removed from the project about three weeks later), with this diatribe there slowly arrived the realization that Jung's archetypes are not all happy clever symbols that bubble up in fluffy dreams and churchy icons. Rather, from the same boiling cauldron arise a much larger dark host of death, destruction and mayhem. Even now, there is no return to were this path must lead.

From 5 August 2010-- In discussion yesterday with one of my house mates- topic: that the entire USA immigration issue ("give AriXona to China!") boils down to a white guy's artificial "line in the sand" aka "national border"; that all lines on the ground and the surveyors behind them are always white guy (not girl) issues and. . .and. . .lines are always phallic!; thus this is merely yet another pissing contest with endowment challenged gun and missile totting pickup truck owners. (Dont get me started on the psychic/phallic/coital implications of a 390 "horse power" "RAM" "King XL Cab" chariot. Nor let us remember the peoples who sit just outside of memory from whom the line choppers stole the precious sand/land from in the "first" place, and "the peoples", no doubt took it from others well beyond memory.)

Then, given the long long (XL) list of symbolic phallic poles/ lines/ rulers wrapped in much less well defined (the female "point"! ofcourse) not-so ersatz vulvic banners/ earth/ crowns - starting with the supremely holy local fabric&pole combo to which my children must pledge allegiance to "under God" in Unistasia; note that the long scroll of the Torah is wrapped around two of said pole thingies; Muslim minarets in Switzerland are completely different than Christian steeples, not!; capitalized corporate acronyms and initial letters with the balance of the Name waving out behind - you see where I am going? No? So then, not to mention paying largely male players millions of u$d or equivalent to move a seed-like object down a field/ court/ campo santo through a net/ gate/ hoop/ Goal! - against another rapier thrusting team of similar persuasion, praying the same victory prayer at the other end of the campo. Nor plugging away with a long metal Scottish stick to knock a small white sphere into a hole/cup that . . .yes, true. . .already has a flag/pole/stick in it. Best of all, we can distract the great multitude absolutely "all the time" by these inane Spectacles validated solely by our genetics and genitalia - genuflection indeed.

So, question my Jungian friend - may Carl rest well - are ALL symbols themselves phallic and the wrapper is the ineffable understanding tailing out behind for which we seek and fail? Or should I ask Emma? I am tired of "pussy footing" around while idiot Rome burns.
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Notes on photo above: 2009 David NcNew/Getty Images - A recently constructed section of the controversial US-Mexico border fence expansion project crosses previously pristine desert sands at sunrise on March 14, 2009 between Yuma, Arizona and Calexico, California. A top Homeland Security official told a House panel that the department could ultimately respond to escalating violence of warring Mexican drug cartels by deploying military personnel and equipment to the region. 6,290 people were killed in the violence in Mexico in 2008, according to Mexican officials, and more than 1,000 in the first eight weeks of this year. Hundreds of kidnappings in Phoenix during the same time period were blamed on the drug trade. The new barrier between the US and Mexico stands 15 feet tall and sits on top of the sand so it can lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the migrating desert dunes begin to bury it. The almost seven miles of floating fence cost about $6 million per mile to build. Zimbio March 14, 2009
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Dr. Fabio replies- Thanks for writing, sorry to take a minute getting back. Hope you are well.

All conditions can be interpreted for their phallic as well as yonic content. Once you are in the realm or symbols you are hitting into the ouroborus: the whole system: everything is everything.

So there is room for interpreting everything through the phallus. Though I would have to say that the mother supports the phallus, and that the phallus is a more recent phenomenon in the dreaming: the phallus is civilizing: it's primary role is to demarcate: even the ritual incision/circumcision: is intended to set the phallus off from the literal world of genitalia: it becomes a metaphor: this is what the father does: he turns basic instinctual drive into metaphor. The phallus in its essence moves away from incest...

So that's a start! Be well, and let's get together to speak soon

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Frater Holme replies- First, may I append your comment to my blog? Then, Googling "phallus demarcation" your genius synonym - I find among many others - this one, spot on to my question:

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~hwaa/hermes.html "It seems that Hermes is an ancient god of the countryside, whose name derived from the Greek word έρμα (herma) or ερμαίον (hermaion), meaning 'a heap of stones'. The function of these stone-heaps was to demarcate the land. Another form of territorial demarcation is phallic display, which is then symbolically replaced by erected stones or stakes. To this extent, stone-heap and apotropaic phallos have always gone together."

So, my question/problem - it is one thing that, per Jung, the archetypal symbols arise and re-arise in harmless dreams and semi-harmless religious iconography. But my concern is where the arising old DNA wrap into everyday symbol creates, maybe forces, human chaos, death, murder - where we, by revealing the "obvious" symbolic blackmail, just might reduce the suffering of the blind -

examples - OK, my diatribe on the USA's demarcation "Wall"; or, so much greater, the argument re: medieval Eucharist apparently sent 100,000s to their death at the "stake". Does shouting that those symbols are not the eternity saving blood/body of nonexisting Jesus Christ, but rather the ancient ancient menstrual envy (blood sacrifices on phallic heap of stones) and certain semen/wheat symbols - just might have made difference between life and death - fatwa where are you?

Or the differences between the Byzantium Blues' and Greens' and their chariot races in the U-shaped Hippodrome that end in the deaths of 30,000 in an afternoon - racing your pickup trucks/horses around the
"rose bowl" - I think no one pays attention to the obvious looming symbols - as a fish is to water - this are not dream, not holy icons - just normal everyday stuff - that kills and maims.

Even worst, that the knowledgable (seem to) control/distract the populace by encouraging such DNA level phallic/yoni Spectacle / controversy - lemmings at the ready. Sorry this comes off as a raving lunatic - for it is the moon that causes the problem. (Certainly you found this related raving:http://www.fraterholme.com/2009/04/cantos-cunnus-2005.html).

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Dr Fabio replies-

Here are some mad responses for you, taken in good cheer:

Phallus taken literally kills: incests.

The phallus grows in power through successful iterations of abstinence, deferral and metaphor.

But that metaphor either dies out, bone dry dessicate, or it becomes the wound is re-opened, the circumcision wounding-grounding-humbling.

The quality of the mark-- from the stone tumulus to the incision-- demarcates savage nature from: Kei-wa: literally "Shiva" -- which is understood as "civilization," "that which is held tender, dear,"-- that demarcation is at times vulnerable: though we defend it with the weight of the American military-industrial complex. The task remains the opening of the wound: becoming vulnerable again: it's the best we can do.

Dreams are dreams: neither harmless nor harmful: they are the pharmakon to life's banality much as they seem to produce it: what matters is the degree to which we can shape the nature of dreams: not merely that dreams exist: and that we do this "shaping" with conscience.

Thus: not only the dream-- but, "I spoke the dream, and saved my soul."

Maybe no one needs saving, but, my friend, I do believe these are endangered times. We have ideals of freedom, liberation, and liberation-lived-as-democracy; and because they are ideals they are constantly endangered. -here endth the dialogue with Dr. Fabio on 19 September 2010

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Easing into Christopher Hitchens. . .

2011-07-29T11:54:00.003-06:00

Real Time Maher May 13, 2011

2011-05-16T20:57:00.001-06:00

Jennifer Knust's "Unprotected Texts"

2011-03-10T22:32:00.008-07:00

Fellow traveller Jennifer Knust and her book, "Unprotected Texts" are featured in today's Terry Gross's Fresh Air on NPR. She "suggests that the Bible shouldn't be used as a guidebook for marriage or sexuality because passages related to sex — on topics related to monogamy, polygamy, sexual practices, homosexuality and gender roles — are more complex and nuanced than popular culture has led us to believe." We agree. The "literalists" should first read their own book before pronouncing a defense of "Christian marriage" for all their neighbors - see our 2006 post.

On celibacy- "There's a fantastic passage in Matthew where Jesus says to his disciples that some people should be eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. So the way this gets received by early Christians is that Jesus is recommending celibacy which would make sense, given that he says elsewhere that we shouldn't get married, that we should be focusing our attention on spreading the gospel. So the idea [of] 'be a eunich' for the kingdom of heaven makes sense. However, interestingly enough, some Christians took this literally and there were some cases of early Christians castrating themselves for the purpose of celibacy. So that's a pretty radical statement that the best kind of Christian is one who is celibate to the point of castration. We don't talk about that much in our own culture and that was a really important message and many, many Christians were celibate."

On polygamy- "In Genesis, for example, polygamy was considered normal and it's what men did. You may remember some of the patriarchs had multiple wives and slave wives. The 12 sons of Jacob are fathered by multiple wives and concubines. In a subsistence economy, where people are subsistence farmers, the more wives and children one has, the more prosperous one is. And that seems to be how Genesis approaches the issue. So Jacob is a very wealthy man. He has many wives and children."

On the Song of Solomon- "It's an erotic love poem that was written some time during the monarchy in Israel and it imitates some of the other Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry from the time. It's quite erotic in its content. The way it gets read today is usually as an erotic poem. So it's often read quite literally as a description of sexual desire and sexual consummation. Interestingly, it wasn't read that way by rabbis and by the early Christians. They read it instead as an allegory or metaphor of the relationship of the soul to God — or the synagogue to God. So then, the description, for example, of the woman longing after her love becomes a description of the soul longing after God. The description of the man seeking out his lover in gardens becomes God seeking out the church in gardens and longing to be with the church and in a partnership in the church." Complete article.

Hong Kong "Maypole"

2011-01-30T14:53:00.002-07:00

HS- Thank you for your help. I walked to Central this morning from my hotel in Waichai to the Hong Kong Book Center on Des Voeux Rd (apparently related to Swindon Books, Kowloon, which I know from earlier visits) and there purchased a book on bronze age Rock Carvings in Hong Kong by Wm. Meacham. His book mentioned this "Lover's Stone" located in Waichai, about midway on Bowens Road and, conveniently, above my hotel. I walked there by showing the picture in the book and asking people "where is this?" - five highway workers, two policeman and one jogger later, I found it.

The author says that this rock is a folk shrine popular with "women seeking a husband, childless couples and old women desirous of grand children". I think it is fairly obvious what this "Lover's Stone" reminds Grandmother about. I think many of the amazing Hong Kong office buildings in the background pretty much tell the same story. In any case, it was a perfect Hong Kong day for me. Thanks for the encouragement. -Gary

Sins of Omission

2010-12-27T00:04:00.001-07:00

from the Wiki Teacher-
"For I do not do the good I want ..." -Romans 7:19
"Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin." -James 4:17
"He who has the ability to act on an injustice, but who stands idly by, is just as guilty as he who holds the knife." -Dracano Sapien
"In the end we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends" -Martin Luther King

Garden of Buddhas, Montana

2010-12-27T00:02:00.001-07:00

Mike Albans for The New York Times
Gochen Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche, left, and Khenpo Namchak checking on the quality of the completed castings of Buddhas.

October 31, 2010 New York Times
On an Indian Reservation, a Garden of Buddhas
By JIM ROBBINS
ARLEE, Mont. — On a rural American Indian reservation here, amid grazing horses and cattle, a Buddhist lama from the other side of the world is nearing completion of a $1.6 million meditative garden that he hopes will draw spiritual pilgrims.

“There is something pure and powerful about this landscape,” said Gochen Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche, the 56-year-old Tibetan lama, as he walked down a gravel road on a sunny fall day. “The shape of the hills is like a lotus petal blossoming.”

Richard Gere has not been seen house shopping here — yet. But on the land of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, a 24-foot statue of Yum Chenmo, the Great Wisdom Mother, has risen in Mr. Sang-ngag’s farm field. Nearby, in his old sheep barn, amid rubber molds and plaster, some 650 statues of Buddha sit in neat rows, illuminated by shafts of light pouring in through broken boards.

It seemed the perfect setup for a clash of two cultures when Mr. Sang-ngag, a high-ranking Buddhist lama, came to this remote part of Montana a decade ago, liked the landscape feng shui and bought a 60-acre sheep ranch. At the foot of the towering, glacier-etched Mission Mountains — not unlike his native Tibet — he and a band of volunteers began building a Garden of 1,000 Buddhas to promote world peace.

The arrival of the exotic culture here in cowboy country, with multicolored prayer flags flapping in the breeze, made some from the Salish and Kootenai tribes uneasy, to say the least.

An unusual land ownership pattern was partly to blame. While most Indian reservations are majority-owned by the tribes, a 1904 law allowed nonmembers of the tribes to homestead land. And as a result, there are four to five times as many non-Indians on the reservation as there are Indians.

Mr. Sang-ngag called his place Ewam Sang-ngag Ling, or the Land of Secret Mantra, Wisdom and Compassion. It turns out that it was sacred to the tribes as well, a place where, oral traditions hold, a coyote vanquished a monster and drove out many bad spirits so the people could live here.

Julie Cajune, the executive director for American Indian Policy at Salish Kootenai College and other Indians began working to build bridges between the tribes and the Buddhists. They suggested that the Buddhists bring traditional gifts, prayer scarves and tobacco, to the tribal council, which they did.

“Many people move here without recognition they are a guest,” Ms. Cajune said. “None of the mainstream churches or the Amish have done that.”

Buddhists in Japan, Taiwan and China have sent money for Buddha statues. The Dalai Lama has agreed to come and consecrate the Garden of 1,000 Buddhas after the project it is finished, perhaps in 2012.

But the patchwork of Indian and non-Indian land holdings within the reservation remains contentious. Some tribal members are worried that groups drawn to the Buddhist garden will buy up nontribal land, driving prices further out of the reach of Indians, and ignore tribal rules and customs.

They point to the case of Amish families who have bought farmland within the reservation, said Ms. Cajune, who is Salish.

“It’s ironic, but many Indian people can’t afford to buy land on their own reservation,” she said. A typical acre for building a home here might cost $30,000 — an enormous amount in rural and tribal Montana.

But Ms. Cajune said there was also an uncanny kinship between the tribal and Buddhist cultures, based on understandings of sacred landscapes, and even notions of honor and respect.

The biggest driver of rapprochement here is a shared history of subjugation and displacement — for the Tibetans, at the hands of the Chinese (Mr. Sang-ngag spent nine years in a Chinese labor camp) and for the tribes, by the American government.

“There is a shared vision of cultures being under pressure and surviving,” Mr. Sang-ngag said through a translator.

The heart of the 60-acre development is the 10-acre Garden of 1,000 Buddhas. When tribal elders came and blessed it, the two groups found they both used juniper and sage as purifying incense for ceremonies, for example, as well as similar prayer cloths and ritual drumming.

After much outreach by the Buddhists, including asking permission from the tribe to have the Dalai Lama consecrate the ground, Ms. Cajune said, “I think local people are feeling more comfortable.”

The sheep are gone from the green hills here now. “They achieved Buddhahood,” joked Mr. Sang-ngag, as he walked through the garden, designed in the shape of the dharma wheel, which symbolizes the core teachings of Buddhism. The Great Wisdom Mother statue contains sacred vases and holy texts. Swords, guns and other symbols of war are buried underneath, to symbolize a triumph over violence.

In the Buddha barn, meanwhile, is a Norton motorcycle, which members here jokingly refer to as the sacred chopper. It will be raffled to raise money to finish the garden. About half the money has been raised.

Last week the Buddhists began planning with the tribal officials about managing pilgrimages to the site, a possible headache for the tribe. “Some people want to keep the reservation a good, quiet secret,” Ms. Cajune said.

But Mr. Sang-ngag says good karma, or spiritual energy, is ebbing from the earth, and the garden will help enhance it. “It’s designed to awaken the Buddha nature” of wisdom and compassion in anyone who gazes upon it, said Lama Tsomo, a student who lives nearby.

A potential cultural clash has become cultural reconciliation. “It’s two cultures honoring each other in peace,” Ms. Cajune said. “That’s a powerful story people need to hear.”

Lost in Translation

2010-10-04T22:02:00.010-06:00

I am not extraordinarily optimistic that any of 'dem fundamentalist types might stumble on this blog, but...could happen - if so, ye literalistic wordmongers, read on.

I am in the middle of reading Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus", an armchair guide to New Testament textual criticism and the problems of translation. But in the recent 'Lord's Day' New York Times (aka yesterday's) comes a lovely Op-Ed piece by a flesh and blood living Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Michael Cunningham ("The Hours" and "By Nightfall"). Read this wonderful exerpt and pretend St. Michael is a candid and honest author of one of the 'sacred' books of the New Covenant writing about its writing and hopeful translation. Italics are mine. Mr. Cunningham's entire Times piece is a delight. Illustration left: Ji Lee/NYTimes

"Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. "But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. "It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work. "The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation."

Religious Knowledge Test by Pew Research

2010-09-29T22:05:00.003-06:00

Take the 15 question Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's Religious Knowledge Test , learn who in the US knows what about religion and check out the actual test here.

The Sphinx

2010-09-29T00:01:00.020-06:00

An early defender (c. 1850) of 'pop archetypes'- sorry, CG Jung but 'tis our project raison d'être-

"A favorite topic with me was the popular belief in omens - a belief which, at this one epoch of my life, I was almost seriously disposed to defend. On this subject we had long and animated discussions - [my relative] maintaining the utter groundlessness of faith in such matters, - I contending that a popular sentiment arising with absolute spontaneity- that is to say, without apparent traces of suggestion - had in itself the unmistakable elements of truth, and was entitled to as much respect as that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius." --Edgar Allan Poe "The Sphinx" 1850 - click on link for entire spidery piece.

At left: Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864, Gustave Moreau (French), Oil on canvas (21.134.1), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jeff Colson, "Shrine, 2008"

2010-09-24T21:33:00.006-06:00

Jeff Colson's "Shrine" fiberglass, steel, and acrylic 12 ft (H) x 62" (W) x 12" (D) Ace Gallery, Los Angeles from October 23 through December 2010. Is Jeff's "Shrine" the Zen form/nonform of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe? Ref: earlier Nuestra Señora post. From Jeff's gallery's press release-
"At the core of Colson􀀁s work is a witty sense of humor and an awareness that artistic inspiration can be found in many unlikely places. For example, a large sculpture that the artist refers to as a 'hot dog boat,' was in fact based on a vision of the Virgin Mary that he had while driving. The sculpture resembles that of a halo outline, yet does not reflect the artist􀀁s thoughts on religion, but rather it implies, according to Colson, 'a yearning quality that is earthbound and in reality will not fly.' Constructions of yearning, anticipation and the foreshadowing of impending demise dominate Colson􀀁s artworks making the viewer aware that although the pieces appear to be blank slates, they do in fact carry many potential messages."

Hmmm, "hot dog boat" - interesting turn of de lingua, not my words.

Christian Nation, Not!

2010-09-02T11:09:00.012-06:00

One of the most fallacious presuppositions of the not-so Christian "Christian Right" is that they want the United States to RETURN to the Christian principles on which it was founded. As our Fox News host Glen Beck said this past weekend, “Something that is beyond man is happening. . . America today begins to turn back to God.” Beck exhorted the crowd to "recognize your place to the creator. Realize that he is our king. He is the one who guides and directs our life and protects us." However, a moment of research (thanks to Google "founding fathers deist") into US history will show that this loaded statement is based on false assumptions. The men responsible for building the foundation of the United States had little use for Christianity, and many were strongly opposed to it. They were men of Europe's so-called Age of Enlightenment. Most were Deists, which is to say they thought the Cosmos had a Creator, but that s/he does not concern itself with the daily lives of humans, and does not directly communicate with humans, either by revelation or by sacred books. They spoke often of God but not the vengeful personal savior God(s) of the the Judeo-Christian Bible. In short, they were the same Humanists, the "holy right" now decry. They did not deny that there was a person called Jesus, and praised him for his benevolent teachings, but they flatly denied his divinity. When the "framers" wrote the US Constitution, they specified that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."(Article 6, section 3) This provision was radical in its day-- giving equal citizenship to believers and non-believers alike. They wanted to ensure that no single religion could make the claim of being the official national religion, such as their former ruler, the British Empire. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention religion, except in exclusionary terms. The words "Jesus Christ, Christianity, Bible, and God" are never mentioned in the Constitution-- not once. (Not to mention the First Amendment's no establishment clause, ratified in 1791.) Much of the paraphrase above from blogs "Founders Were Not Christians" which continues with a multitude of supporting quotations of the signers of the US Constitution and "The Christian Nation Myth".

Illustration above: Article 11, of the The Treaty of Tripoli reads "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." This Treaty written by Joel Barlow under the presidency of "founding father" George Washington, was then read aloud and unanimously approved by the Senate on June 10, 1797 under the presidency of "founding father" John Adams. The entire question is summed up by yet another "founding father" Thomas Jefferson who stated, as timely now as it was then, "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world, fools, and the other half, hypocrites" from Notes on the State of Virginia For more on John Barlow and Article 11, follow the link above (at bottom of page) to further links to yet more articles/links.

Bumps in the Night

2010-08-21T11:21:00.011-06:00

"If all of those saints were suggesting celibacy, whatever happened to when god told Adam and Eve to 'Be fruitful and multiply'. Did he not say that?"

FH- as for gods and multiplication - if we think that typical "sacred" writings are probably the narrow view of some (not all) scribes in the tribe - "fruitful and multiply" is always a big winner and appears in all collections of sacred writing in all cultures / religions - the bigger the tribe, the more women to cook and the more warriors to wipe out the competition.

Conversely, the hermits and ascetics were trying hard to avoid the rather difficult life of mixing with the normal folk, feed/clothe a family, with a wife and paying the "mortgage" - so, with clever slight of hand, they came up with sitting around atop poles (Simon Stylites) or hiding out mid-desert (St. Anthony) writing about "higher" thinking sans society - so celibacy, sainthood, harps and clouds.

Better path? carefully chose your best BS, not to bludgeon anyone with it overnight and review it in the morning. Probably beats sitting on a pillar for 35 years or scaring yourself silly with bumps in the desert night.

Stained glass

2010-05-27T10:55:00.000-06:00

Valenti Angelo, San Francisco Illustrator (b.1897- d.1982)

2010-05-25T08:40:00.003-06:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More valenti angelo

From Thomas a Kempis, "The Imitation of Christ" (Mt. Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, ca. 1947), by San Francisco illustrator, Valenti Angelo. His life in his own words. Best books: Valenti Angelo: Author, Illustrator, Printer and Con Amore: Valenti Angelo: A Bibliography, 1971-1982

Herman Wirth's Book of Wonders

2010-05-23T11:02:00.019-06:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More herman wirth

In our search for the origins of what is now the Greek letter "Phi" ϕ, we earlier discovered "Die Heilige Urschrift der Menschheit" (rough trans: "Sacred Original Writings of Mankind"), a two volume symbolist opus by Herman Wirth, published in 1936, Leipzig. The Dutch symbolist Wirth's research was sponsored by the Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler during this period (1935-1938). Wirth is rather infamous for "advocated the Swastika as 'species-specific sign of salvation'" in 1925. A very difficult set of volumes to find, WorldCat shows about four sets in USA libraries and four in Germany - here is a sampling of the first 15 of 400 illustrated pages of the second volume, "Bilderatlas". More to follow.

Ruth Cozen Snyder and "Maypoles"

2010-05-21T14:16:00.013-06:00

Thank you for a lovely and unexpected Mayday morning! And thank you for the instruction to find the living Sunset Blvd Maypole just down the street (photo below). Unbelievable! Follows some links for your granddaughter to show to her your 13,000 year old oeuvre:

13,000 year old Maypoles- click to enlarge photos - reindeer head on left, read commentary.
Egyptian Maypoles-
TODAY's most famous Maypole- (how be it upsidedown in this image) and its related historical "Phi" symbols - set one, set two (The "Phi" symbol also denotes the Golden Ratio of 1.61803398874989)
Chinese Maypoles-
Schuster's Maypoles-
Advanced Maypoles-
Cowboy Maypoles-
Islamic Maypoles-
Christian Maypoles-
My Maypoles-

Lilith - Adam's first wife

2010-03-12T15:05:00.014-07:00

So briefly, most recall the story of Adam and Eve, little knowing the true story of Adam's first wife, Lilith. Apparently, in a dispute over whom should be "on top", Lilith leapt into the air (with instant wings) and flew off to the Red Sea. God, making his usual rounds that evening learned the entire ugly story from His new creation and dispatched two angels to sweet talk Lilith into coming back to the Garden. Unable to dissuade her, our two clever ambassadors threatened to kill her first 100 children each day to which Lilith retorted that she would birth 1000 children every day. Our two angels return to the Almighty, related the situation and the Allknowing One, after a couple more attempts (three's a charm), sorts a more compliant Eve for Adam. Not being around for the Apple / Snake shakedown, Lilith is immortal and still with us today - though needing, with feet like those, some extra daily help with gathering semen to make those 1000 babies. She and her female offspring (ie the succubi) spend the nights causing and harvesting wet dreams 'round the world. Beats Santa Claus or maybe they. . . So, I got to be making this up? not! - Robert Graves and Raphael Patai 's excellent account and the wonderful and long lived Lilith website of Alan Humm - thank you again, Alan.

From the British Museum- "Queen of the Night" in old Babylon, 1800-1750 BC (southern Iraq)
This large plaque is made of baked straw-tempered clay, modelled in high relief. The figure of the curvaceous naked woman was originally painted red. She wears the horned headdress characteristic of a Mesopotamian deity and holds a rod and ring of justice, symbols of her divinity. Her long multi-coloured wings hang downwards, indicating that she is a goddess of the Underworld. Her legs end in the talons of a bird of prey, similar to those of the two owls that flank her. The background was originally painted black, suggesting that she was associated with the night. She stands on the backs of two lions, and a scale pattern indicates mountains. The figure could be an aspect of the goddess Ishtar, Mesopotamian goddess of sexual love and war, or Ishtar's sister and rival, the goddess Ereshkigal who ruled over the Underworld, or the demoness Lilitu, known in the Bible as Lilith. The plaque probably stood in a shrine. The same goddess appears on small, crude, mould-made plaques from Babylonia from about 1850 to 1750 BC. Thermoluminescence tests confirm that the 'Queen of the Night' relief was made between 1765 and 45 BC.

The relief may have come to England as early as 1924, and was brought to the British Museum in 1933 for scientific testing. It has been known since its publication in 1936 in the Illustrated London News as the Burney Relief, after its owner at that time. Until 2003 it has been in private hands. The Director and Trustees of the British Museum decided to make this spectacular terracotta plaque the principal acquisition for the British Museum's 250th anniversary.

Photo above: The plaque as it looks now compared to a reconstruction image created by Mark Timson of the British Museum's New Media Unit, with the guidance of Dominique Collon, curator in the Department of the Ancient Near East.

Best books: Siegmund Hurwitz "Lilith, the first Eve" and Raphael Patai "Hebrew Goddess".

Visible Vagina NYC thru March 20, 2010

2010-03-01T18:47:00.003-07:00

Rather rough group showing on an otherwise excellent subject. Split between (no pun) two galleries in NYC, The Visible Vagina from January 28 (Imbolc) to March 20 (equinox) 2010 at David Nolan 527 West 29th St (showing Gladys Nilsson's Stream 2009, left) and Francis Naumann 24 West 57th St, Ste 305 (includes Carol Cole's Back in the Womb, right). The Nolan Gallery's web is worth the visit, skip the Naumann site (what happened!?).

From the press release - "As the title of the exhibition suggests, the show is designed to make visible a portion of the female anatomy that is generally considered taboo―too private and intimate for public display. If shown at all, this part of a woman's body is usually presented in an abject fashion, generally within the context of pornography, intended, in almost all cases, for the exclusive pleasure of men. The goal of this exhibition is to remove these prurient connotations, implicit even in works of art, ever since the pudendum was prudishly covered by a fig leaf. This gesture of false modesty, it should be noted, was devised and enforced entirely by men (not only in the case of classical sculpture, but also in the Bible, in which, immediately after their disobedience in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve cover their genitalia with fig leaves). Indeed, until recently, men made virtually all depictions of the frontal nude female figure, but as this exhibition will demonstrate, that has changed dramatically in recent years."

Wiki Wonkas

2010-02-25T23:09:00.001-07:00

Enjoy!

František Kupka, Museo Picasso Málaga, 15 February - 25 April 2010

2010-02-03T17:50:00.012-07:00

NEW: Kupka moves from Museo Miro to Museo Picasso Málaga. The exhibition will show for the [second!] time in Spain a selection of around 80 paintings and drawings by the Czech artist, all from the Centre Georges Pompidou, and documents from the collection of Pierre Brullé, a leading expert on Kupka, who was considered the first painter to explore the concept of abstract act. The splendid collection of works from the Centre Georges Pompidou, mostly donated by the artist's widow in 1963, shows very clearly the development of Kupka's art from his early Symbolist paintings to his final years. František Kupka (1871-1957) began his artistic career at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he learned an academic style. Later on, in Vienna, he began to take an interest in Symbolism and allegorical art. After moving to Paris in 1896, Kupka worked as a press and advertising illustrator while at the same time making contact with the early avant-garde movements such as Fauvism and Cubism, though maintaining his independence and his own personal language. His interest in Futurist writings meant that around 1910 his work started to become increasingly abstract, with the idea of reflecting movement and studying the effects of colour and the relationship between music and painting. This led to the publication of the book La Création dans les arts plastiques in 1913. Despite his links to the "isms" of the period, Kupka always felt himself to be a lone experimenter. In 1931, together with Auguste Herbin, Jean Hélion and other artists he founded the Abstraction-Création group, which defended abstract art against the Surrealist movement led by André Breton.

The František Kupka exhibition at the Foundation seeks to highlight the artist's particular contributions, such as the combination of Austrian fin-de-siècle motifs with the early avant-garde exploration of form and the depiction of movement, which very soon led him to abstraction. This sensibility means that Kupka's work occupies a leading place in the history of modern European art. Major exhibitions of Kupka's art have been held in the main museums in France the United States and Japan, but he has never had a retrospective in Barcelona. It is in order to redress this unjustified omission that the Foundation is now presenting this show that will enable us to appreciate and understand the stylistic evolution and working methods of this key painter in the development of early abstract art.

Notes: Links to the entire Kupka collection of Centre Pompidou as photo above right, enter there, "kupka", into box at left. Early exhibition on the La Fundació Joan Miró site page . The second largest collection of František Kupka is located in his native country, the beautiful Museum Kampa, Prague, however images of his work on this site seem to be lacking.

". . .with bells on!"

2009-12-31T19:25:00.007-07:00

EROS - From Hesiod's Theogony to Late Antiquity This major archeological exhibition will focus on Eros, the archaic deity of reproduction, and on the historical progression of the concept ―from the first references made in Hesiod’s texts dating from the 6th century B.C. up until the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. The exhibition includes 270 artifacts from 45 archaeological museums and institutions from Greece, Cyprus, Italy and the Louvre in France. It is important to note that over 100 of the items on display will be available for public view for the first time. The exhibition provides insight into the archeology and history of more than 10 centuries in the ancient world, making it an exhibition of true historic, scientific, cultural and artistic value. Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens GR December 10th 2009 to April 6th, 2010.

The Codex Sinaiticus Project

2009-12-31T18:33:00.002-07:00

Online since July 2009. The Codex Sinaiticus Project is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript. [Find out more about the Codex Sinaiticus Project.]

I was asked by Océ UK to submit lighting designs for this project (alas, designs not accepted). Good to see the project reach fruition (but the lighting?!).

Enter Year X, Millennium 3

2009-12-27T10:23:00.002-07:00

In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
That was where the trouble started.
Before, there was chaos,
Which is what the wise man still seeks.
He divided light from darkness, dry land from sea,
But we got sea and darkness anyway.
Silly blundering old bugger,
Why couldn’t he have left well enough alone.
- Northrop Frye
Excerpts from Frye's annotated library.

Perspective

2009-12-27T00:14:00.002-07:00

Menstrual Envy 101

2009-12-23T15:44:00.002-07:00

I have argued earlier regarding the ankh-like cravat as "power symbol". And while we have not yet taken up this subject directly, recent news provided a splendid visual lecture on male menstrual envy - with the notable exception of Germany's Guido, what's up with yellow?

From NYTimes.com: "US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (C) speaks with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (L) and Britain's foreign secretary David Miliband (R), German Foreign Affairs minister Guido Westerwelle (Back-C) during a family photo during a NATO Foreign ministers meeting at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels. (photo: AFP/John Thys)"

псевдоним Юзефа Теодора Конрада Коженёвского

2009-12-01T22:37:00.002-07:00

"God is for men and religion is for women." - Joseph Conrad

Swiss Pissing Contests

2009-11-29T09:18:00.012-07:00

Surprising in CGJ's own country - photo left: typical Swiss alpine 'Christian' steeple. Photo right - captioned by Reuters (Italics mine): "Walter Wobmann, president of the committee 'Yes for a Ban on Minarets,' gave a thumbs-up in Egerkingen, Switzerland, on Sunday." Not entirely missed by SVP parliamentarian Oskar Freysinger, who is reported as saying, "The minaret is the power symbol of political Islam." Yes, and your thumb, er, steeple, sir?

November 29, 2009
Swiss Voters Projected to Back Minaret Ban
By REUTERS Filed at 9:09 a.m. ET

GENEVA (Reuters) - Swiss voters have approved a right-wing-backed proposal to ban construction of new minarets, initial projections showed on Sunday, a surprise result that could damage Switzerland's economic ties with Muslim states.
If confirmed, the result would be a huge embarrassment for the neutral Swiss government, which had warned that amending the constitution to ban construction of minarets could serve could "serve the interests of extremist circles."
"The initiative would appear to be accepted, there is a positive trend. It's a huge surprise," French-language Swiss television said, 30 minutes after polls closed at midday.
A majority of voters as well as cantons appeared to have approved the initiative, it said, citing exit polls carried out by the Berne-based Institute Gfs.
Both the Swiss government and parliament had rejected the initiative as violating the Swiss constitution, freedom of religion and the nation's cherished tradition of tolerance. The United Nations human rights watchdog had also voiced concerns.
A group of politicians from the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), the country's biggest party, and Federal Democratic Union gathered enough signatures to force the vote on the initiative which opposes the "Islamisation of Switzerland."
Its campaign poster showed the Swiss flag covered in missile-like minarets and the portrait of a woman covered with a black chador and veil associated with strict Islam.
"We just want to stop further Islamisation in Switzerland, I mean political Islam. People may practice their religion, that is no problem," Walter Wobmann, who is president of a committee of initiative backers, told Reuters on Sunday.
"We want to stop the further developments -- minarets, (the call to prayer), Sharia law," SVP parliamentarian said at a rally of supporters in the town of Egerkingen near Berne.
"The minarets is the power symbol of political Islam and Sharia law."
The Alpine country of nearly 7 million is home to more than 300,000 Muslims, mainly from Bosnia, Kosovo and Turkey.
Four mosques have minarets including those in Geneva and Zurich. The call to prayer is banned in the country.
An opinion poll carried out Nov 9-14 had showed a steady 53 percent opposed the initiative. Some 37 percent were in favor, against 34 percent a month earlier, with 10 percent undecided.
SVP parliamentarian Oskar Freysinger, a driving force in the campaign, says minarets bring the Muslim faith out into the public domain and reflect a demand for political power.
"If it's really just something decorative and secondary to them, why are they clinging so tightly to that symbol? It's a strong symbol for them, it's to show their territorial hold and I think for now, we'd rather not have that in our country," Freysinger told Reuters in Berne earlier this week.
In Geneva, home to U.N. humanitarian agencies, voters appeared overwhelmingly to have rejected the initiative by nearly 60 percent, according to Swiss television.
"I rejected the initiative, it's against Swiss law and against what I believe in. It's against the freedom of religion we have, so I voted against the initiative," one man in Geneva told Reuters Television as he left the polls.
Another Geneva voter, Antonio Spagnolo, said: "I'm shocked by this initiative, by this answer I've given you my position, I'm against this initiative because I think it's intolerance."
Tensions ran high ahead of the referendum as voters grappled with sensitive issues linked to immigration being aired across much of Western Europe.
Geneva's mosque was defaced with spray paint on Thursday, the latest incident after rocks had been thrown at the door.
"Islam in Switzerland and in the Western world brings various questions. But it doesn't call for aggression and that islamophobic propaganda," Youssef Ibram, imam of Geneva's mosque, told Reuters Television last week.
(With additional reporting by Catherine Bosley in Egerkingen and Anne Richardson in Geneva)

Margaret Magnus "Gods of the Word"

2009-11-23T08:30:00.008-07:00

Revolutionary idea, this book published in 1999 is presently out of print. With Margaret's permission I am slowly PDFing the entire 140 pages from my closest library copy borrowed from Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (who knew). Here, the first thirty pages (above), Margaret Magnus' website link and her description of "Gods of the Word"-

In 1993, as part of a computer project I was working on, I found myself reading an English dictionary and dividing all the words into prefixes, suffixes and roots. I had read studies in linguists which suggested that the initial consonants of a word had a set of meanings, and the remaining rhyming part also had a set of meanings. One 'sense' of 'str-' is linearity: string, strip, stripe, street, etc. And one sense of '-ap' is flat: cap, flap, lap, map, etc. If you put them together, you get a flat line: 'strap'. The idea fascinated me, and since I was marking all these words anyway, I decided to keep an eye out for these classes which have similar meaning and pronunciation both. It turns out that it is possible by means of a series of repeatable experiments to show that certain meanings hang out with certain phonemes and others do not. I have been working on a dictionary which outlines this data for English in much more detail rather formally and scientifically. But I also have many thoughts which I seem to express more openly and cheerfully when I voice them in a separate book. My purpose here is therefore not to prove anything, but to summarise my most important findings in plain English and to philosophise freely and naively on their significance.

Update March 2011: Margaret has self published through Amazon (link above) at a very nice price - enjoy the "preview" above.

Thank you, Leonard Shlain

2009-10-23T17:16:00.007-06:00

Dr. Leonard Shlain, surgeon/author of, among others, the book Alphabet Vs the Goddess, unfortunately passed away in May. For me, a left-handed, dyslexic, ex-divinity student cum image maker, Alphabet Vs the Goddess proved my most influential book in the last ten years - the title itself sent shivers up my spine when spied thirty yards away in Denver's Tattered Cover bookstore - even before I got to wading through its erudite contents. It's the sort of book where you immediately buy a half dozen to gift to your last five best friends - missionary to the saints. Dr. Shlain also proved a kind and patient correspondent during my continuing novitiate. I have just learned of his several recorded lectures, here is one - entitled "The Big O" - enjoy the next hour:

William Blake at Morgan NYC: "A New Heaven Is Begun"

2009-10-06T05:32:00.003-06:00

from the Morgan Library site- Visionary and nonconformist William Blake (1757–1827) is a singular figure in the history of Western art and literature: a poet, painter, and printmaker. Ambitiously creative, Blake had an abiding interest in theology and philosophy, which, during the age of revolution, inspired thoroughly original and personal investigations into the state of man and his soul. In his lifetime Blake was best known as an engraver; he was later recognized for his innovations across many other disciplines.

See Online Exhibition In the Morgan's first exhibition devoted to Blake in two decades, former director Charles Ryskamp and curators Anna Lou Ashby and Cara Denison have assembled many of Blake's most spectacular watercolors, prints, and illuminated books of poetry to dramatically underscore his genius and enduring influence. William Blake's World: "A New Heaven Is Begun"—the subtitle a quote from Blake referring to the significance of his date of birth—is on view from September 11, 2009, to January 3, 2010.

The show includes more than 100 works and among the many highlights are two major series of watercolors, rarely displayed in their entirety. The twenty-one watercolors for Blake's seminal illustrations for the Book of Job—considered one of his greatest works and revealing his personal engagement with biblical texts—were created about 1805–10. Also on view are twelve drawings illustrating John Milton's poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, executed about 1816–20. Both series were undertaken for Blake's principal patron, Thomas Butts. Also see University of North Carolina's Blake Archive

Stonehenge Depicts Female Genitalia (Reuters)

2009-10-04T17:57:00.008-06:00

TORONTO, Canada (Reuters) July 8 2003 -- Stonehenge is a massive female fertility symbol, according to Canadian researchers who think they have finally solved the mystery of the ancient monument in southern England. In the arrangement of the stones, the researchers say they have spotted the original design: female genitalia. The theory is laid out in a paper entitled "Stonehenge: a view from medicine" in an issue of Britain's Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. "To the builders of the henge, the most critical events in life were birth and death," Anthony Perks, a retired professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of British Columbia, wrote in the paper, published earlier this year. He noted there was no evidence of tombs built by the original builders. "Of birth, we could expect little evidence. However, evidence may be there but so large as to be overlooked." National Geographic image above by Joe McNally/Sygma

Nuovo segno d'infinito, M. Pestoletto, 2003

2009-09-30T09:33:00.006-06:00

Terzo Paradiso [Third Heaven]
Nel marzo del 2004 l'Università di Torino conferisce a Pistoletto la laurea honoris causa in Scienze Politiche. In tale occasione Pistoletto annuncia pubblicamente quella che costituisce la fase più recente del suo lavoro, denominata Terzo Paradiso , il cui simbolo è il Nuovo segno d'infinito da lui creato nel 2003. [In March 2004, the University of Turin Pistoletto conferred an honorary degree in Political Science. On that occasion Pistoletto announced publicly what is the most recent phase of his work, Third Heaven, whose symbol is the New infinity sign he created in 2003.]
Nel 2005 il Terzo Paradiso viene presentato quale evento nell'ambito dalla 51a Biennale di Venezia, come opera del soggetto artistico collettivo Cittadellarte, attraverso una mostra intitolata “L'isola interiore: l'arte della sopravvivenza”, curata da Achille Bonito Oliva, nel corso della quale sono organizzati - sull'isola di San Servolo, sul rimorchiatore Impetus e in altri luoghi della città - eventi, incontri e workshop con la partecipazione, tra gli altri, di Gilberto Gil in qualità sia di musicista che di Ministro della Cultura del Brasile. [In 2005, the Third Heaven is presented as an event in the 51st Venice Biennale, as a work of collective artistic subject Cittadellarte, through an exhibition entitled "The inner island: the art of survival", curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, in at which they are organized - the island of San Servolo, tug on the Impetus and elsewhere in the city - events, meetings and workshops with the participation, among others, of Gilberto Gil as both a musician and the Brazilian Minister of Culture.]
Relativamente al Terzo Paradiso e alla ricerca condotta in questi ultimi anni da Pistoletto sul piano dei simboli, si rimanda a due recenti colloqui tra Pistoletto e Massimo Melotti: Simbolo e arte , in Sul simbolo (Luca Sossella Editore, Roma 2004) e Il nuovo segno d'infinito, simbolo del Terzo Paradiso (Cittadellarte, Biella 2005). [With regard to the Third Heaven and the research conducted in recent years by Pistoletto in terms of symbols, refer to two recent talks between Pistoletto and Massimo Melotti: Symbol and art, the symbol (Sossella Luca Editore, Rome 2004) and the new sign infinity, a symbol of the Third Heaven (Cittadellarte, Biella 2005).]
"Ho tracciato sulla sabbia il nuovo segno d'infinito che sostituisce il simbolo tradizionale formato da una linea continua che si interseca descrivendo due anse. Il nuovo segno incrocia la linea due volte formando non più soltanto due ma tre cerchi. Quello centrale descrive un ventre gravido, prodotto dall'accoppiamento dei due cerchi che costituivano il vecchio simbolo. Questo ventre rappresenta la generazione del Terzo Paradiso. Cos'è il Terzo Paradiso? È l'accoppiamento fertile tra il primo e il secondo paradiso. Il primo è il Paradiso Terrestre, che precede il morso della mela. È il paradiso naturale dove tutto è regolato dall'intelligenza della natura. Il secondo è il Paradiso Artificiale, quello sviluppato dall'intelligenza umana attraverso un processo lentissimo che ha raggiunto nel corso degli ultimi due secoli una dimensione sempre più vasta ed esclusiva. Questo paradiso è fatto di bisogni artificiali, di comodità artificiali, di piaceri artificiali e di ogni altra forma di artificio. Si è formato un vero e proprio mondo artificiale che continua a crescere consumando e deteriorando in modo sempre più drastico il pianeta naturale. Il pericolo di una sempre più imminente tragica collisione fra queste due sfere è ormai annunciato in ogni modo. Ed è per evitare di proseguire verso questo catastrofico avvenimento che si deve concepire il progetto globale che chiamo Terzo Paradiso. (...) Il riferimento biblico non ha finalità religiose ma è assunto come messaggio per dare senso e forza al concetto di trasformazione sociale responsabile e motivare un grande ideale che unisce in un solo impegno l'arte, la scienza, l'economia, la spiritualità e la politica." ["I have drawn on the sand the new infinity sign replaces the traditional symbol formed by a continuous line that intersects describing two loops. The new sign crosses the line twice, forming not just two but three circles. What defines a central belly pregnant, product of two circles that made up the old symbol. This belly is the generation of the Third Heaven. What is the Third Heaven? fertile and coupling between the first and second heaven. The first is the Earthly Paradise, preceding the bite of the apple. It is a natural paradise where everything is regulated by the intelligence of nature. The second is the artificial paradise, the one developed by human intelligence through a very slow process which has achieved over the past two centuries size increasingly broad and exclusive. This paradise is made of artificial needs, comfort artificial artificial pleasures and any other form of artifice. It has formed a true artificial world that continues to grow, consuming and deteriorating ever more drastic the natural planet. The danger of an ever more imminent tragic collision between these two spheres has been announced in any way. And that is to continue to avoid this catastrophic event which must conceive of the global project called the third heaven. (... ) The biblical reference is not religious purposes but is taken as a message to give meaning and strength to the concept of responsible social transformation and motivate a great ideal that unites in a single engagement the art, science, economics, spirituality and politics.](M. Pistoletto, The Third Heaven, "Journal 8", Cittadellarte, Biella 2004, p. 5) Foto soto: J.E.S.

Jung's Red Book

2009-09-25T13:31:00.013-06:00

From the Philemon Foundation - "During WWI, Jung commenced an extended self-exploration that he called his “confrontation with the unconscious.” During this period, he developed his principal theories of the collective unconscious, the archetypes, psychological types and the process of individuation, and transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with the treatment of pathology into a means for reconnection with the soul and the recovery of meaning in life. At the heart of this endeavor was his legendary Red Book, a large, leather bound, illuminated volume that he created between 1914 and 1930, and which contained the nucleus of his later works. While Jung considered the Red Book, or Liber Novus (New Book) to be the central work in his oeuvre, it has remained unpublished till this day, and unavailable for study and unseen by the public at large. The work can be best described as a work of psychology in a literary and prophetic form. It is possibly the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. Its publication is a watershed that inaugurates a new era in the understanding of Jung’s life and work.

"The years … when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life.
"Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”
— C. G. Jung

New York Times article

Preview of the Red Book here (PDF)

Purchase from Amazon assists our blogging efforts.

PUBLICATION DATE OCTOBER 7, 2009
The Red Book: Liber Novus
C. G. Jung
Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani
Translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani
With a forward by Ulrich Hoerni
The folio size (11.57 inches by 15.35 inches) volume consists of 205 pages of text in Jung’s masterful calligraphic hand and, from his skilled brush, stunning paintings. Of them, 53 pages are full images, 71 pages contain both text and 81 images and pages are pure calligraphic text. Preview how the book was produced at: DigitalFusion LA Captures History for Carl Jung’s Red Book and the larger YouTube version.

Now a "holiday" book review from the New York Times (03 Dec 09) by KATHRYN HARRISON with an exceptionally succinct excerpt quoted below. Read entire review.

"In fact, reading “The Red Book” is like visiting a foreign place of worship. To understand Jung’s text — to meet and listen to the creatures of his unconscious — requires solitude, silence, concentrated effort. At the beginning of the book (which is divided into “Liber Primus,” “Liber Secundus” and “Scrutinies”), Jung rediscovers his soul, alienated while he “had served the spirit of the time.” With it, he embarks on a series of adventures and meets, among others, Elijah, Salome, a serpent and the Devil. The narrative proceeds like a blend of biblical prophecy and dialectic, in places unexpectedly funny, as when, in “The Castle in the Forest,” he encounters a woman from the kind of novels he had “spat on long ago.” “I am truly in Hell,” Jung remarks, “the worst awakening after death, to be resurrected in a lending library!” But the conventional heroine who fills Jung with disgust has something to teach him: what he considers “banal and hackneyed contains the wisdom” he seeks. The heroine trapped in a castle in a forest is an archetype — one that, in this instance, challenges his intellectual snobbery.

"“Individuation” is the word Jung used for the integration of conscious and unconscious required for a person to reach psychological wholeness, an evolved state of being he did not consider within the reach of every person. Rather than breaking with convention, the “insufficiently creative,” as Shamdasani calls them, should remain within the “collective conformity” of society, which encourages us to assume that all cosmologies, all myths and religions, lie without rather than within ourselves. But, as Jung argued, the collective unconscious, even deeper than the personal, is a realm into which we can travel to discover all we contain, making the beauty, terrors and wisdom of the unconscious available to consciousness."

Dawkins, Armstrong & the Wall Street Journal

2009-09-12T11:13:00.006-06:00

from The Wall Street Journal/LIFE & STYLE/SEPTEMBER 12, 2009
on the web with illustrations here.

We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question "Where does evolution leave God?" Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence-

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.

But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.

Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.

There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of strength.

Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?

Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth ("Existence is suffering"), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.

—Ms. Armstrong is the author of numerous books on theology and religious affairs. Her latest, "The Case for God,".

Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do-

Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.

Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most scientists' hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted around planetary islands throughout the universe—though sadly too thinly scattered to encounter one another. And if there is life elsewhere, it is something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turn out to be Darwinian life. The argument in favor of alien life's existing at all is weaker than the argument that—if it exists at all—it will be Darwinian life. But it is also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth, with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe.

What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws—it's happened often enough in the history of science). But although life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn't know about life we wouldn't believe it was possible—except, of course, that there'd then be nobody around to do the disbelieving!

The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst, can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves, whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply mysterious universe. But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a soaring Coast Redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea. Not once do any of these creatures disobey one jot or tittle of the laws of physics. Far from violating the laws of thermodynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged) they are relentlessly driven by them. Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on prey or spring to safety.

Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. And my bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may be found, anywhere in the universe.

What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe? What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods? Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.

—Mr. Dawkins is the author of "The Selfish Gene," "The Ancestor's Tale," "The God Delusion." His latest book is "The Greatest Show on Earth."

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Mammon Trumps Knowing

2009-07-03T07:11:00.003-06:00

As if the boys had not already "screwed" things up enough all by themselves. Where is Dan Brown when we need him?

NY Times | July 02, 2009
U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny By Laurie Goodstein
The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, leaving some fearful that they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.

Project Book Listing with Amazon/Abebooks Links

2009-06-06T10:59:00.049-06:00

Purchases made through these links support this blog and slog effort. Both Amazon and Abebooks offer new books, but Abebooks offers more extensive access to rare and used books - some listed here might be a bit arcane. Kindly suggest additions.

    Abbot, Elizabeth A History of Celibacy Da Capo Press (2001) ISBN:0306810417
    Angier, Natalie Woman: An Intimate Geography Anchor (2000) ISBN:0385498411
    Bettelheim, Bruno Symbolic Wounds, Puberty Rites and the Envious Male Collier Books (1962)
    Bishop, Clifford Sex and Spirituality: Ecstacy, Ritual and TabooDuncan Baird Publishers (2004) ISBN:1844830187
    Blackledge, Catherine The Story of V: Opening Pandora's BoxPhoenix Paper (2004) ISBN:0753817764
    Blank,Joani FemaliaDown There Press (1993) ISBN:0940208156
    Briffault, Robert “ The Mothers; A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions original 3 vols: 1927) Paper abridged edition: The Kessinger Publishing(2004) ISBN:076618692X; Hard: Howard Fertig(1993) ISBN:0865273987
    Brown, Norman Oliver Love's BodyUniversity of California Press; a reissue of 1966 edition (1990) ISBN:0520071069
    Camphausen, Rufus The Encyclopedia of Sacred Sexuality : From Aphrodisiacs to Yoni Worship and Zap-Lam YogaInner Traditions (1999) ISBN:0892817194
    Camphausen, Rufus The Yoni: Sacred Symbol of Female Creative PowerInner Traditions (1996) ISBN:0892815620
    Cattrall and Levinson Satisfaction: The Art of the Female OrgasmWarner Books (2002) ISBN:0446530719
    Chalker, Rebecca The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World At Your FingertipsSeven Stories Press; ASIN:0965172597
    Clare, Daniel Odier Desire: The Tantric Path to AwakeningInner Traditions (2001) ISBN:0892818581
    Corinne, Tee Cunt Coloring BookLast Gasp Press (1988) ISBN:0867193719
    Danielou, Alain The Phallus: Sacred Symbol of Male Creative PowerInner Traditions (1995) ISBN:0892815566
    Dijkstra, Bram Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle CultureOxford University Press (1988) ISBN:0195056523
    Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism (Vol 1) editor, Beverly Moon Shambhala 1997 ISBN:1570622507 An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism: The Body (Vol 2)editor, George Elder Shambhala 1996 ISBN:1570620962
    Fletcher, Alan The Art of Looking SidewaysPhaidon Press 2001 ISBN:0714834491
    Fontenrose, Joseph Python: A Study of the Delphic Myth and Its Origin University of California Press 1959 (Reprint 1980 ISBN:0520040910)
    Frazer, Sir James George “Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion” Kessinger Publishing Kessinger Publishing(reprint: 1927 edition, 732 pgs. 2003) ISBN:0766158128; abridged: The Touchstone Books(1996) ISBN:0684826305
    Friedman, David A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the PenisPenguin (2003) ISBN:0142002593
    Giedion, Siegfried, The Eternal Present (2 volumes) Volume I The Beginnings of Art; Volume II The Beginnings of Architecture Pantheon New York 1962
    Gimbutas, Marija The Language of the GoddessThames & Hudson (2001) ISBN:0500282498
    Gimbutas, Marija The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old EuropeHarperCollins Publishers 1994 ISBN:0062508040
    Graves, Robert The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic MythFarrar, Straus and Giroux; (1966) ISBN:0374504938
    Graves, Robert and Raphael Patai Hebrew Myths Paper: Anchor 1989 ISBN:0385263309 Out of print Hard: The Carcanet Press Ltd.2005 ISBN:185754661X
    Jaynes, Julian The Origin of Consciouness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral MindMariner Books 1990 ISBN:0395563526
    Mann, A. T. Sacred SexualityVega (2003) ISBN:1843335832
    Merritt, Natacha Digital DiariesTaschen (2000) ISBN: 382286398X
    Miles, Margaret R. Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness & Religious Meaning in the Christian WestVintage 1991 ISBN:0679734015
    Neret, Gilles PussycatsTaschen America (2003) ISBN:3822824607
    Neumann, Erich The Great MotherBollingen (1972) ISBN:0691017808
    Newman, Barbara From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (The Middle Ages Series)
University of Pennsylvania Press 1995 ISBN0812215451
    Patai, Raphel “Man and Temple” Ktav 1947
    Ridley, Matt The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human NaturePerennial (2003) ISBN: 0060556579
    Shlain, Leonard Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human EvolutionViking Press; (2003) ISBN:0670032336
    Shlain, Leonard The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and ImageArkana (1999) ISBN:0140196013
    Stevens, John The Cosmic Embrace: An Illustrated Guide to Sacred SexShambhala (1999) ASIN:1570621713
    Squiers, Jennifer Pearson Peek : Photographs from the Kinsey InstituteArena Editions 2000 ISBN1892041359
    Thompson, William The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of CultureMacmillan (1996) ISBN: 0312160623
    Twain, MarkLetters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings (Perennial Classics)especially Letter 8, originally published in 1963; Perennial (2004) ISBN:0060518650
    Vermaseren, Maarten Cybele and Attis Thames and Hudson, 1977 ISBN:0500250545
    Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and SecretsHarperSanFrancisco (1983) ISBN:006250925X
    Warner, Marina Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin MaryVintage (1976) ISBN:0394711556
    White, David Gordon Kiss of the YoginiUniversity Of Chicago Press (2003) ISBN:0226894835
    Wolkstein and Kramer Inanna, Queen of Heaven and EarthPerennial (1983) ISBN:0060908548

Cantos Cunnus 2005

2009-04-04T14:39:00.003-06:00

Open this publication - Free publishing - More goddess studies

Mami Wata

2009-04-03T22:32:00.003-06:00

New York Times "slide" show and article

Exhibition at the Fowler at UCLA

Bottle trees

2009-03-27T21:09:00.004-06:00

(Remember our Boots Atop Posts explaination??)

Jan Toorop's "De Drie Bruiden" 1893

2009-03-15T19:51:00.004-06:00

"In a letter to a friend, Toorop explained that he wanted to bring together the sentiments and ideas of ‘All-nature' in one grand form. The Brides are stylized expressions of the different mysteries in the shape of a human being. In this drawing Toorop, not for the first time, took up the old theme of Good versus Evil, in the form of asceticism versus lust, both in the figure of a woman. The young and naïve Bride, flanked by - in Toorop's words – 'the suffering of the soul which leads to the highest-purest, the mystical love” on the one hand – you can see this also in the bells at the topsides of the drawing, being held by the hands of Christ – and on the other side “the unquenchable thirst for deeply sensual and material longings', symbolized by the Bride who holds a cup which catches the blood that comes from a large urn. The urn is carried by the hands of women whose heads and bodies are being repressed by the Bride's other hand. They represent, in Toorop's meaning, 'the weak to eternal matter doomed world.'"

from a lecture by Francisca van Vloten, in the series related to the exhibition Masterpieces from European Artist Colonies 1830-1930 (Febr. 6 until May 22, 2005), Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Atlanta GA, on April 19, 2005

"It is so beautiful outside of color, color, color and sun … One gets intoxicated. The quiet is beyond words here. Your inner beauty keeps you so occupied, and outside the sun is contending with all the autumn colors …"

These words. . .were written by the Dutch artist Jan Toorop (1858-1928) in the autumn of 1908. They were meant for his friend and colleague Kees Spoor in Amsterdam and referred to the small seaside resort of Domburg on the former island of Walcheren, in the Dutch province of Zealand.

Kimosabe, Zen Master

2009-02-14T00:42:00.010-07:00

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are camping in the desert. They set up their
tent and are soon asleep. Some hours later, The Lone Ranger wakes his
faithful friend. "Tonto, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."

Tonto replies, "I see millions of stars, Kimosabe."

What does that tell you?" asks The Lone Ranger.

Tonto ponders for a minute. "Astronomically speaking, it tells me
there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets.
Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Theologically, it's
evidence that the great Spirit is all-powerful, and we are all small and insignificant. Chronologically, it appears to be approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, it seems we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What
does it tell you, Kimosabe?"

The Lone Ranger is silent for a moment, then says, "Tonto, you
dumb-ass. Someone has stolen our tent."

Marina Abramovic: Balkan Epic

2009-01-24T16:01:00.014-07:00

from Amazon.com listing- "Marina Abramovic is a pioneer in the use of performance as an art form. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. In her latest work, Balkan Erotic Epic, Abramovic creates new, surprising perspectives on archaic rituals that used erotic powers to influence fate and fortune. These powerful images talk to us about the disavowal of ancient practices, and about something buried deep in our consciousness."

The Balkan Epic- the interview, the book, the movie.

ADDENDUM: Abramovic at MOMA, NYC from March 14, 2010 (final days of Pisces - hmmm)

Balkan.Erotic.Epic.Marina.Abramovic
Uploaded by DocParano. - Independent web videos.

The Madonna Code

2007-07-21T14:44:00.003-06:00

Credits, left to right - Carlo Crivelli, The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, about 1489, National Gallery, London, followed by detail; El Padre Anónimo, Eterno Pintando a la Virgen de Guadalupe. Siglo XVIII; Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe housed on top of Tepeyac hill, north of Mexico City.

The caption which appears with Carlo Crivelli's detail (center left, above) in the book, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, by J.C. Cooper, Thames & Hudson, 1978 isbn 0500271259 states "In his Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, Crivelli encloses the Virgin and the Child in an almond-shaped mandorla formed by the two intersecting circles symbolic of each of the holy persons' all-perfection." Cooper continues under the entry 'Mandorla': "The vesica piscis or ichthus, the almond-shaped aureole, the 'mystical almond' which depicts divinity; holiness; the sacred; virginity; the vulva." Also refer to the earlier (1997), now found, parallel piece, The Viginal Mary by Anai Bendai.

From an inquiry to the writer, Rufus Camphausen, who also hosts Yoniversum, a vast site on yoni/vulva studies where the following letter and accompanying illustrations were first posted three years ago:

"Dear Professor Camphausen,

"In my research, I have noticed the affinity between the artists' rendering of the various apparitions of female saints and the vulva. Especially the Madonna herself, of which there have been over 3000 accepted appearances during the last 1500 years. With your encyclopaedic overview, has anyone posited such visual similarity? Certainly, there must be a DNA level remembrance at play in the artists' imagination. (I include the art historian's classic "face vase" visualization tool as an additional aid.)"

Respectfully,
Frater Gray Hölme

"Dear Brother Hölme-

"The Madonna images next to your black and white renderings and the Yonis are simply great ... the association does not surprise me - although I've not seen it visualized in that much detail. Personally, I've only made the connection between the vesica pisces shaped "halo" around some 'Mother of God' images and the Yoni. To my knowledge, it has never been visually 'spelled out' quite so convincingly as in the images you have sent ... just lovely! Your drawings make it much more clear than Dan Brown's theory in the Da Vinci Code that the Madonna represents a continuation of the millennia old worship of the Great Goddess - now hidden below layers of obscuration. I would like your permission to use them in our yoniversum pages. However, in order to avoid an Bible Belt equivalent to the Fatwa against you, do think about a nom de plume for yourself as the discoverer of this esoteric wisdom. Frater Matrix perhaps? Once it's ready, I will send the relevant URL to the Vatican."

Regards, R.C. Camphausen

NOTE: The above correspondence led to the accompanying gallery of revealing images which can be accessed by the daring from the menu below comparing illustrations from prayer cards with photographs of vulvas. The limited choices of photographs are from the book Femalia by Joani Blank. The selected photographs are used here with permission of Joani Blank and the photographers, Tee Corinne and Michael A. Rosen, who - naturally - retain their Copyright ©. The center drawings are by Frater Gray Hölme.

Drawing One
Drawing Two
Drawing Three
Drawing Four
Drawing Five
Drawing Six
Drawing Seven
Drawing Eight

Kerouac's Knees - the 1951 Scroll

2007-07-11T18:25:00.001-06:00

"My mother once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. This is true all over the world in the jungles of Mexico, in the back streets of Shanghai, in New York cocktail bars, husbands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babes of their ever darkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home and get on their knees and ask for forgiveness and the women bless them peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the apocalypse."

from "On the Road: The Original Scroll" by Jack Kerouac - the 'legendary' first draft written in 1951 - to be published by Viking NYC on August 16, 2007 - isbn 067006355X - only 56 years too late, but better than Mark Twain's daughter's 60 year suppression of "Letters from Earth" - see earlier blog here. 09/11/22 edit: Or Carl Jung and his family's 90+ year delay of the publication of his "Red Book"-see future blog here.

Crown of Thorns [Vagina Dentata]

2007-06-17T19:06:00.001-06:00

Don't be afraid - these are only artist's renderings - click to enlarge.
Left: Rolf Geissler
Center: Gretchen Schermerhorn
Right: Temple Terkildsen
More actual dentata photos at the Goddess Cafe.

DO BE very very AFRAID!! - this working version.

From Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 1983-

"Toothed vagina," the classic symbol of men's fear of sex, expressing the unconscious belief that a woman may eat or castrate her partner during intercourse. Freud said, "Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of female genitals." But he had the reason wrong. The real reason for this "terrifying shock" is a mouth-symbolism, now recognized universally in myth and fantasy: "It is well-known in psychiatry that both males and females fantasize as a mouth the female's entranceway to the vagina."

The more patriarchal the society, the more fear seems to be aroused by the fantasy. Men of Malekula, having overthrown their matriarchate, were haunted by a yonic spirit called "that which draws us to It so that It may devour us." The Yanomamo said one of the first beings on earth was a woman whose vagina became a toothed mouth and bit off her consort's penis. Chinese patriarchs said women's genitals were not only gateways to immortality but also "executioners of men." Moslem aphorisms said: "Three things are insatiable: the desert, the grave, and a woman's vulva." Polynesians said the savior-god Maui tried to find eternal life by crawling into the mouth (or vagina) of his mother Hina, in effect trying to return to the womb of the Creatress; but she bit him in two and killed him.

Stories of the devouring Mother are ubiquitous in myths, representing the death-fear which the male psyche often transformed into a sex-fear. Ancient writings describe the male sexual function not as "taking" or "posessing" the female, but rather "being taken" or "putting forth." Ejaculation was viewed as a loss of a man's vital force, which was "eaten" by a woman. The Greek sema ir "semen: meant both "seed" and "food." Sexual "consummation" was the same as "consuming" (the male). Many savages still have the same imagery. The Yanomamo word for pregnant also means satiated or full-fed; and "to eat" is the same as "to copulate."

Distinction between mouths and female genitals was blurred by the Greek idea of the laminae -- lustful she-demons, born of the Libyan snake-goddess Lamia. Their name meant either "lecherous vaginas" or "gluttonous gullets." Lamia was a Greek name for the divine female serpent called Kundalini in India, Uraeus or Per-Uatchet in Egypt, and Lamashtu in Babylon. Her Babylonian consort was Pazuzu, he of the serpent penis. Lamia's legend, with its notion that males are born to be eaten, led to Pliny's report on the sexual lives of snakes which was widely believed throughout Europe even up to the 20th century: a male snake fertilizes the female snake by putting his head into her mouth and allowing himself to be eaten.

Sioux Indians told a tale similar to that of the Lamia. A beautiful seductive woman accepted the love of a young warrior and united with him inside a cloud. When the cloud lifted, the woman stood alone. The man was a heap of bones being gnawed by snakes at her feet.

Mouth and vulva were equated in many Egyptian myths. Ma-Nu, the western gate whereby the sun god daily re-entered his Mother, was sometimes a "cleft" (yoni) and sometimes a "mouth." Priestesses of Bast, representing the Goddess, drew up their skirts to display their genitals during religious processions. To the Greeks, such a display was frightening. Bellerophon fled in terror from Lycian women advancing on him with genitals exposed, and even the sea god Poseidon retreated, for fear they might swallow him.

According to Philostratus, magical women "by arousing sexual desire seek to devour whom they wish." To the patriarchal Persians and Moslems this seemed a distinct possibility. Viewing women's mouths as either obscene, dangerous, or overly seductive, they insisted on veiling them. Yet men's mouths, which look no different, were not viewed as threatening.

"Mouth" comes from the same root as "mother" -- Anglo-Saxon muth, also related to the Egyptian Goddess Mut. Vulvas have labiae, "lips," and many men have believed that behind the lips lie teeth. Christian authorities of the Middle Ages taught that certain witches, with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow fangs in their vaginas. They likened women's genitals to the "yawning" mouth of hell, though this was hardly original; the underworld gate had always been the yoni of Mother Hel. It has always "yawned" -- from Middle English yonen, another derivatave of "yoni." A German vulgarity meaning "cunt," Fotze in parts of Bavaria meant simply "mouth."

To Christian ascetics, Hell-mouth and the vagina drew upon the same ancient symbolism. Both were equated with the womb-symbol of the whale that swallowed Jonah; according to this "prophecy" the Hell-mouth swallowed Christ (as Hina swallowed her son Maui) and kept him for three days. Visionary trips to hell often read like "a description of the experience of being born, but in reverse, as if the child was being drawn into the womb and destroyed there, instead of being formed and given life." St. Teresa of Avila said her vision of a visit to hell was "an oppression, a suffocation, and an affliction so agonizing, and accompanied by such a hopeless and distressing misery that no words I could find would adequately describe it. To say that it was as if my soul were being continuously torn fro my body is as nothing."

The archetypal image of "devouring" female genitals seems undeniably alive even in the modern world. "Males in our culture are so afraid of direct contact with female genitalia, and are even afraid of referring to these genitalia themselves; they largely displace their feelings to the accessory sex organs -- the hips, legs, breasts, buttocks, etc. -- and they give these accessory sex organs an exaggerated interest and desirability." Even here, the male scholar inexplicably "displaces" the words sex organ onto structures that have nothing to do with sexual functioning.

Looking into, touching, entering the female orifice seems fraught with hidden fears, signified by the confusion of sex with death in overwhelming numbers of male minds and myths. Psychiatrists says sex is perceived by the male unconscious as dying: "Every orgasm is a little death: the death of the 'little man,' the penis." Here indeed is the root of ascetic religions that equated the denial of death with the denial of sex.

Moslems attributed all kinds of dread powers to a vulva. It could "bite off" a man's eye-beam, resulting in blindness for any man who looked into its cavity. A sultan of Damascus was said to have lost his sight in this manner. Christian legend claimed he went to Sardinia to be cured of his blindness by a miraculous idol of the Virgin Mary -- who, being eternally virgin, had her door-mouth permanently closed by a veil-hymen.

Apparently Freud was wrong in assuming that men's fear of female genitals was based on the idea that the female had been castrated. The fear was much less empathetic, and more personal: a fear of being devoured, of experiencing the birth trauma in reverse. A Catholic scholar's curious description of the Hell-mouh as a womb inadvertently reveals this idea: "When we think of man entering hell we think of him as establishing contact with the most intrinsic, unified, ultimate and deepest level of the reality of the world."

citation: Barbara G. Walker, "The Woman's Encyclopeadia of Myths and Secrets", HarperCollins, 1983, isbn 006250925X

First, the Dome, then the Minarets

2007-06-13T07:55:00.001-06:00

photo credit: Chris Hondros/Getty Images, left, and Hameed Rasheed/AP

From today's New York Times-

June 13, 2007
Minarets on Shiite Shrine in Iraq Destroyed in Attack
By GRAHAM BOWLEY

One of Iraq’s most sacred Shiite shrines, the Imam al-Askari mosque in Samarra, was attacked and severely damaged again today, just over a year after the previous attack on the site unleashed a tide of national sectarian bloodletting.
Angry demonstrations erupted in Samarra following the attack, which destroyed the mosque’s two minarets. Security forces fired in the air, and the Iraqi government announced a curfew in Baghdad starting at 3 p.m. today.
Shiite leaders called for calm. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, condemned the bombing, but appealed to Iraqis to show restraint.
It was unclear who carried out the attack in the predominantly Sunni town about 60 miles north of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces secured the area around the mosque and were investigating the cause of the explosion, the American military said. Iraqi police reported hearing two nearly simultaneous explosions coming from inside the mosque compound at around 9 a.m. today.
The official Iraqia television station reported that local officials said that two mortar rounds were fired at the two minarets.
The shrine was badly damaged in the February 2006 attack by Sunni insurgents, but the destruction of the remaining two minarets is expected to have powerful symbolic importance to Iraqis.
Radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for peaceful demonstrations and a three-day mourning period to mark the shrine’s destruction.
Senior American military commanders in Iraq have said recently that they feared just such an attack on a Shiite shrine to refocus Sunni attention on the country’s struggle between Shiites and Sunnis.
But they expected that if such an attack did occur, it would most likely come at one of Iraq’s three other most-sacred Shiite sites, not the al-Askari shrine, which was already badly damaged.
Since the attack in 2006, the shrine had been under the protection of local — predominantly Sunni — guards. But American military and Iraqi security officials had recently become concerned that the local unit had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda forces in Iraq.
A move by the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad over the last few days to bring in a new guard unit — predominantly Shiite — may have been linked to the attack today.
Speaking on Al Jazeera television, Abdul Sattar Abdul Jabbar, a prominent Sunni cleric, said the new guards had arrived at the shrine shouting sectarian slogans that may have provoked local Sunnis, in a sign that the attack was already being depicted as sectarian.
Gunfire was reported around the mosque last night, which may have been linked to the change of guards.
Attacks on Shiite holy sites have increased in the last two months and tensions in Samarra have also risen recently.
The attack in 2006 ravaged the mosque’s dome, which had been the defining feature of the shrine.
Before that attack, more than a million Shiites streamed into the mosque each year, visiting the graves of the 10th and 11th Imams. They also came to honor Muhammad al-Mahdi, who became the 12th Imam when he was only 5 years old, in A.D. 872.
Shiites believe that it was at the shrine that the Mahdi was put into a state of divine hiddenness by God to protect his life. Shiites believe that the Mahdi will return at the end of days, at a time of chaos and destruction, to deliver perfect justice.

John F. Burns and Damien Cave contributed reporting from Baghdad. Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from elsewhere in Iraq.

SIDESHOW Here

Crown of Thorns [Rings of Stones]

2007-06-04T11:00:00.001-06:00

Rings of Stones continue our "Crown of Thorns" motif of vulvic circles of phallic points- [photo credits follow]

From Aubrey Burl's Preface, 1979- "In the years when Egypt was young, long before the pyramids, at time when the earliest forms of writing and numbering were being developed in the Near East and when pathless forests and swamps obscured most of Western Europe, at this time a group of people in the British Isles, somewhere, built a stone circle. Its very simplicity hinders our understanding of it. Upright stones as tall as a man around a space a person could stroll across in half a minute, a few bits of human bone, patches of charcoal, these are all that remain of a place that people struggled to build many years ago." -page 46, "It can be seen that the sacred circle, whether of earth or of stones [or of wooden posts - see next], had a long tradition behind it in prehistoric Britain, linked to cults in which human bones were used in rites so powerful that there had to be a barrier between them and the ordinary world of the living." -page 49 "At many megalithic rings. . .the circles had been found to stand on sites of earlier settings of posts, At the Sanctuary in Witshire four consecutive timber rings may have been put up and rotted before the concentric circles of stones were raised around 2300BC. Elsewhere in England other wooden rings have been discovered, at Woodhenge, at Arminghall and at Bleasdale. Others lie undiscovered, their postholes invisible beneath the grass." Citation: Aubrey Burl, Rings of Stone, Lincoln Publishers, 1979 isbn 0899190006 RINGS OF STONE

Which leads us to speculate, that in addition to the extremely necessary "rings of stones" by Tiffany for a mere $13,000usd, above right, popular culture still requires circles of vertical posts as a barrier between the dead and the living - new(er) and old(er) below.

Photos: left/top - Calanais, Isle of Lewis, Scotland by Chameleon; left/bottom - Swinside, Cumbria, England by Richard Mudhar; middle/top - Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, England by Nick White and drawing by English Heritage. Right above - "Celebration" diamond rings by Tiffany NYC. Second photo: cemeteries in Riverside, Californa and Silver Plume, Colorado by author.

Crown of Thorns Koan

2007-06-03T22:57:00.000-06:00

Borders and Boundaries

2007-05-13T12:11:00.000-06:00

From this morning's "The Fences That Could Set Global Neighbors Off" by Daniel Schorr on National Public Radio and from Louis Untermeyer, ed. (1885–1977). "Modern American Poetry", 1919.

64. Mending Wall by Robert Frost. 1875–1963

SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: 5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. 15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 25
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 30
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him, 35
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me, 40
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Front of One's Nose

2007-05-04T19:50:00.000-06:00

"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
--George Orwell

May Pole Diary

2007-05-01T22:05:00.000-06:00

Build your own Maypole. Why not? What ancient memories might be elicited upon viewing? And how would a May Pole in the flag waving western United States survive? First attempt, left above, at flying a neutral (non patriotic) tricolor - magenta, cyan, yellow - pole about 300 ft above the village ended in less than 24 hours with a group of 6 men (now known) dissembling the fabrics but politely laying the pole on top of the rock outcrop. Next attempt was to time the next pole construction with a more public local Irish festival (second above), then remove the Irish tricolor to the mountain; its deconstruction occurred about one month later by unknown ax wielding person(s) who removed the fabrics completely and placed the pole nearby on the ground. Pole was "re-clothed" with autumnal hops blossoms and re-erected (fourth, fifth above). De-construction of this version occurred about six weeks later after first snows and a six foot section (2M) was removed from the middle of the pole by a saw wielding (they are learning!) yet unknown person(s). The pole remains were removed for the winter into the village and then redressed in "legal" Christmas wreaths and re-positioned for Mayday / Beltain in photos below - after its first week, it remains, but a pre-emptive immolation is scheduled for proper Beltain fire on the evening of May fifth (Cinco de Mayo) - (Update: before weather permitted its immolation, person(s) unknown removed this fourth iteration on evening of May 20th) - photo of installation next.

From Wikipedia - Beltane

Beltane has a complex etymology and a resultant variety of different spellings.

The word Beltane derives directly from the Old Irish Beltain, which later evolved into the Modern Irish Bealtaine. In Scottish Gaelic it is spelled Bealltainn.[9] Both are from Old Irish Beltene ('bright fire') from belo-te(p)niâ. Beltane was formerly spelled 'Bealtuinn' in Scottish Gaelic; in Manx it is spelt 'Boaltinn' or 'Boaldyn'.

In Modern Irish, Oíche Bealtaine is May Eve, and Lá Bealtaine is May Day. Mí na Bealtaine, or simply Bealtaine is the name of the month of May.

In the word belo-te(p)niâ) the element belo- is cognate with the English word bale (as in 'bale-fire'), the Anglo-Saxon bael, and also the Lithuanian baltas, meaning 'white' or 'shining' and from which the Baltic Sea takes its name.

In Gaelic the terminal vowel -o (from Belo) was dropped, as shown by numerous other transformations from early or Proto-Celtic to Early Irish, thus the Gaulish deity names Belenos ('bright one') and Belisama.

From the same Proto-Celtic roots we get a wide range of other words: the verb beothaich, from Early Celtic belo-thaich ('to kindle, light, revive, or re-animate'); baos, from baelos ('shining'); beòlach ('ashes with hot embers') from beò/belo + luathach, ('shiny-ashes' or 'live-ashes'). Similarly boil/boile ('fiery madness'), through Irish buile and Early Irish baile/boillsg ('gleam'), and bolg-s-cio-, related to Latin fulgeo ('shine'), and English 'effulgent'.

All photos can be enlarged by a click. Note older posts' link - as each newer post builds on these before it, take a look from the beginning. Thank you and please comment.

Happy New Year - Miaos' Flower Pole

2007-02-22T11:26:00.000-07:00

From chinaculture.org- Flower Mountain Festival takes place during the two weeks following New Year's Day each lunar calendar year to pray for happiness of the Miaos and bless with safety and prosperity. During the festival, the Miaos get dressed up and go to the large lawn near the village. They play the Lion Lantern Dance, swing, blow bamboo leaves and play the bamboo flute. People erect in the mountain a "flower pole" dyed in red and blue in 12 segments to pray to the god for giving birth to children. Young men and girls riot in dancing and singing and seek their lovers. The entertainment lasts three days, and the Miao villages are filled with animated dance and songs.

On the very day, the erection of the Flower Pole is to precede the activity of the Flower Mountain Festival. The Flower Pole is the icon of the Flower Mountain. It is also the performance tool in the festival. It is made of straight and decorticated fir in several zhang (1 zhang = 3.3 m) high. Afterwards, people plant it in the middle of the Flower Mountain to form the center of the entertainment -- Lusheng ground. The Lusheng players play the Lusheng and dance under the Flower Pole with the contests of climbing pole when playing Lusheng, and climbing pole when playing Lion Dance. There are also programs such as the antiphonal singing, bullfight, horserace, bird match and various martial arts performances, which make the Miaos immersed in great happiness.

The festival not only provides all villagers with the festal gathering, but also the unmarried young people with the chance to seek their lovers. In the mountains south of Yunnan Province, the homemade telephones are installed to enable young men and girls, without knowing each other, communicate with each other or sing through homemade call before date. There is another interesting way of selecting lovers: the young men wander in the crowd. As he found his favorite girl, he will stealthily draw near to her. When he stands at her side, the young man will open the umbrella to cover the girl and sing to observe her reaction. At this moment, the girl keeps silent and skews at the young man. If she finds the young man unsatisfied, she will still keep quiet or refuse by singing. If she likes the man, the girl will look at the young man and sing a sweet song tenderly. As they feel satisfied with each other, the girl will offer her ring to the young man as the keep sack. When the Flower Mountain Festival ends, the spoony girl will follow her lover.

In the Flower Mountain, the most favorable young men are those fellows who climb the Flower Pole while heading down and taking up the Lusheng and pig head. He has to climb up and down keeping playing Lusheng, which can match with the acrobatics. The crowned young man is not only regarded as the hero, but also the icon among the girls. It is said if the young man courts some girl, she will surely fall in love with him.

NPR.org's Flower Mountain piece by Louisa Lim or listen to the story. Credit on photo above, also Louisa Lim.

Sam Harris, Messiah!

2007-02-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

Beyond Belief
Therareoften Blog
IdeaCity Online
Richard Dawkins

On a Sun's day morning, dear Teacher-

2007-02-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

When you get a chance, I am curious about the narrative of the dream that caused your recent contact. Also, any thoughts on my attempts at unlearning by means of this modern bile smearing bloggering - the "fool" in the "where angels fear to tread" - as Jesus Himself warned - "pray only in your closet" (Matthew 6.6) and stay off the street corners and infohighways.

I will ponder to dying day the proper direction and misdirection allowed to teachers by his/her conscience. I read today in his biography that even Julius Wellhausen had pedagogical misgivings- "Wellhausen received a professorship at Greifswald, [but] resigned in 1882 because he believed that his teachings were having a dire effect on theological students destined for the ministry, and because he had become a figure of controversy over his published views on the Old Testament."

By the late 1960s, not only had Wellhausen's now well developed "Documentary Hypothesis" (P-E-J-D sources) called into question the fundamentalists' understanding of authorship of Hebrew scripture, but Wellhausen's approaches to "biblical history" (1878) had also set off the largely failed attempts at "proving" Hebrew scripture through "biblical archaeology" - showing that any actual reality afforded Scripture before 1000bce was fanciful ethnocentric myth, at best, equal to Homer's stories - no Abram, no Issac, no Moses, no falling Walls of Jericho, no David, no Solomon, no Israel, not even a camel - and of all this, from my religious teachers, not one word.

Add to this, the wider body of huge mythological works produced between 1900 and 1960s- such as Fraser's 12 volume "Golden Bough"(1906-15); Briffault's 1800 page "Mother's"(1927); Graves'"White Goddess"(1948); and the early efforts of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade. Again not one word. Perhaps to the odd high school bible student off to conduct a storefront evangelical series - a headsup might have been in order - a "look out for the truck!" or similar.

As a seven year old child, my father would pay me $10 to read small condensed volumes of a children's encyclopedia. His admonition was to "Skip over the mythologies, because they might cause one not to believe in Bible stories." Being an obedient child and seeing the shorter path to the $10s, I skipped the mythologies.

Now, as my own wandering muse, I am beginning to puzzle over the dynamics of "forbidden knowledge" and its dangers- "when to hold them...when to walk away". Silent knowledge surrounds us, as do severe reprisals for speaking. As a present example of the unspeakable, the last thing any of us in the United States are allowed to even ponder, during the Bushes' αρμαγεδδων, is the earlier question, "What Jewish homeland?" (above).

(And the mundane - even to suggest that wrapping evergreen roping around a bridge railing is an ancient vulvic/phallic exercise - this too is forbidden knowing - and never, ever suggest that a baseball cap, a pickup truck and the SuperBowl are the same compensatory symbols - be prepared for a bloody nose.)

Listen to today's NPR "Children of Abraham"
Further link to "what did the biblical writers know and when did they know it?" which in fairness to the "1960s" comment above, speaks of an ongoing controversy at present.
Image credit: Wm. Blake's Woman Clothed in the Sun

"One Man's Ceiling, Another Man's Floor"

2007-02-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

Photo caption reads: The swastika is a sacred symbol for Hindus, who are protesting its proposed ban in the EU. Here Hindus in India celebrate Diwali by lighting lamps in the shape of a swastika. Photo credit: Reuters

SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 17, 2007, 12:38 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,460259,00.html
CROSSED SWORDS - Hindus Against Proposed EU Swastika Ban

European Hindus are opposing German calls for an EU-wide ban on swastikas, arguing that the Nazis hijacked the Hindu symbol which actually stands for peace.

Germany's plans to push for a Europe-wide ban on swastikas may seem reasonable enough to those who prefer not to see far-right extremists sporting Nazi symbols in public. Unless of course, you are a Hindu, for whom the Nazi era is just an unpleasant blip in the millennia-old symbol's history.

European Hindu groups have come together to oppose a German proposal to introduce a ban on Nazi symbols -- including the swastika -- within the European Union, arguing that the Nazis hijacked the Hindu symbol.

"The swastika has been around for 5,000 years as a symbol of peace. This is exactly the opposite of how it was used by Hitler," Ramesh Kallidai of the Hindu Forum of Britain told Reuters. The swastika is commonly used as a blessing in Hindu rituals such as weddings.

"It is almost like saying that the Ku Klux Klan used burning crosses to terrorize black men, so therefore let us ban the cross," he added. "How does that sound to you?"

Hindus from the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy want to form a pressure group in the European Parliament in May to oppose the ban. They plan to visit European Commission leaders and members of the European Parliament to put pressure on them to resist the German move.

Germany, which took over the six-month rotating presidency of the EU at the beginning of this year, wants to launch an initiative to make Holocaust denial and the display of Nazi symbols a crime across the whole EU. The swastika and other Nazi symbols are already banned in Germany.

"In Germany the fight against racism and xenophobia is both an historic duty and a current political concern," Germany's Justice Ministry said in a statement earlier this month.

Kallidai said Germany's initiative was probably well-meaning but said that Hindus had not been consulted.

"Every time we see a swastika symbol in a Jewish cemetery, that of course must be condemned. But when the symbol is used in a Hindu wedding, people should learn to respect that," he told Reuters.

"In Sanskrit it means May Goodness Prevail," he said. "Just because Hitler misused the symbol, abused it and used it to propagate a reign of terror and racism and discrimination, it does not mean that its peaceful use should be banned."

Even within Germany, the swastika ban can be problematic. There was an outcry last year when the owner of an anti-fascist mail order company in Stuttgart was fined for selling anti-Nazi merchandise featuring swastikas with a line through it.

dgs/reuters © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2007

Kissing the Shroud

2007-02-02T16:18:00.000-07:00

Photo by Max Becherer, appearing in the New York Times Travel Section, part of an article entitled "The Mysteries of Kabul" published January 21, 2007. This particular image is not part of the excellent NYT's "slide show" of Becherer's Kabul photographs.

Caption for the photo above reads "Shiite Muslims kissing a sacred shroud before prayer." For those following these "scribblings", this single image of the adoration of a wrapped pole is worth more than any 1000 word comment (- we are only the messenger!).

"Imbloc" aka "Groundhog Day", February 2

2007-02-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

Already half the way from solstice (December 21) to spring equinox (March 21), we reach the "quarter" holiday of "Imbloc" known only to those who do not accept the accepted "Groundhog Day". Why not?? perhaps a clue from the White Goddess site- but compare with Wikipaedia's Groundhog Day-

"Imbloc (Candlemass, Imblog, Imbole) - February 2nd Pronounced: EE-Molc

"This holiday is also known as Candlemas, or Brigid's (pronounced BREED) Day. One of the 4 Celtic "Fire Festivals. Commemorates the changing of the Goddess from the Crone to the Maiden. Celebrates the first signs of Spring. Also called "Imbolc" (the old Celtic name). This is the seasonal change where the first signs of spring and the return of the sun are noted, i.e. the first sprouting of leaves, the sprouting of the Crocus flowers etc. In other words, it is the festival commemorating the successful passing of winter and the beginning of the agricultural year. This Festival also marks the transition point of the threefold Goddess energies from those of Crone to Maiden.

"It is the day that we celebrate the passing of Winter and make way for Spring. It is the day we honour the rebirth of the Sun and we may visualize the baby sun nursing from the Goddess's breast. It is also a day of celebrating the Celtic Goddess Brigid. Brigid is the Goddess of Poetry, Healing, Smithcraft, and Midwifery. If you can make it with your hands, Brigid rules it. She is a triple Goddess, so we honour her in all her aspects. This is a time for communing with her, and tending the lighting of her sacred flame. At this time of year, we will light multiple candles, white for Brigid, for the god usually yellow or red, to remind us of the passing of winter and the entrance into spring, the time of the Sun. This is a good time for initiations, be they into covens or self-initiations.

"Imbolc (February 2) marks the recovery of the Goddess after giving birth to the God. The lengthening periods of light awaken Her. The God is a young, lusty boy, but His power is felt in the longer days. The warmth fertilizes the Earth (the Goddess), and causes seeds to germinate and sprout. And so the earliest beginnings of Spring occur.

"This is a Sabbat of purification after the shut-in life of Winter, through the renewing power of the Sun. It is also a festival of light and of fertility, once marked in Europe with huge blazes, torches and fire in every form. Fire here represents our own illumination and inspiration as much as light and warmth. Imbolc is also known as Feast of Torches, Oimelc, Lupercalia, Feast of Pan, Snowdrop Festival, Feast of the Waxing Light, Brighid's Day, and probably by many other names. Some female Witches follow the old Scandinavian custom of wearing crowns of lit candles, but many more carry tapers during their invocations.

"It is traditional upon Imbolc, at sunset or just after ritual, to light every lamp in the house - if only for a few moments. Or, light candles in each room in honour of the Sun’s rebirth. Alternately, light a kerosene lamp with a red chimney and place this in a prominent part of the home or in a window.

"If snow lies on the ground outside, walk in it for a moment, recalling the warmth of summer. With your projective hand, trace an image of the Sun on the snow.

"Foods appropriate to eat on this day include those from the dairy, since Imbolc marks the festival of calving. Sour cream dishes are fine. Spicy and full-bodied foods in honor of the Sun are equally attuned. Curries and all dishes made with peppers, onions, leeks, shallots, garlic or chives are appropriate. Spiced wines and dishes containing raisins - all foods symbolic of the Sun - are also traditional."

Further Imbloc / Candlemas links:
Wiccan Web Weavers
Candlemas, from a Roman Catholic view
The Light Returns

Local Pagans, Church Goin' Folk

2007-01-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

No one questions a wreathed vertical lamp post or wrapped VERTICAL STOP sign, or a wreath on a picket fence (Ménage à many) and wishful thinking, but wrapping a (horizontal) bridge with evergreen and ribbons? I had never seen this before. Perhaps a hint: In an article about a Neolithic village near Stonehenge in today's New York Times--

"In a teleconference conducted by the National Geographic Society, Dr. Parker Pearson said a circle of ditches and earthen banks at Durrington Walls enclosed concentric rings of huge timber posts — “basically a wooden version of Stonehenge,” he said.

"The excavations exposed not only the timber circle but also a roadway paved with stone leading to the Avon River, about 500 feet away, which was similar to a river road from Stonehenge. The evidence, Dr. Parker Pearson said, “shows us these two monuments were complementary” and that “Stonehenge was just one-half of a larger complex.”

"They said the road was paved with flint and led straight from the Durrington enclosure to the (River) Avon. A similar road at Stonehenge, discovered in the 18th century, is aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise, the archaeologists noted, while the one at Durrington lines up with the midsummer solstice sunset. Similarly, the Durrington timber circle was aligned with midwinter solstice sunrise, while a giant stone monument at Stonehenge frames the midwinter solstice sunset.

"Venturing into the bumpy field of Stonehenge interpretation, Dr. Parker Pearson suggested that the durable stones of the better-known site were a memorial and final resting place for the dead, and the wood architecture at Durrington Walls symbolized the transience of life. People from all over the region, he said, probably came there to celebrate life and deposit the dead in the river for transport to the afterlife."

Hmmm? a paved flint road leading from a circle of stones to a river? seems like our "post with vessel". Does it equals a bridge from the stone circle to the river of the Afterlife/HereAfter? Do wrapped bridges over a river equal a wrapped (vulvic) Phallus (Bridge) over a rebirthing (vulvic) River? I can only tell you that this Land's mundane folk will (unconsciously) always be streaming wrappings about phalli to their last breath - OK, perhaps too large a cognitive leap - here's a related but even greater reach, good luck! - does no one discern our (USAs) famous "star-spangled banner" with its streaming "broad stripes and bright stars"?--

thank you, Francis Scott Key-
"Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

"Sacred vessels" ATOP Posts, Page 14

2007-01-07T13:40:00.000-07:00

In my hurry to change subjects to the "crown of thorns" motif, my transitional wreath/tires atop post page reminded me that I had skipped an important wreath/post category above - the flowery captial atop the column (meaning that we will probably skip the newer Antebellum phallic columns that line the vulvic entrance porches of the Southern United States, but may not skip the more esoteric Boaz and Jachin of Solomon's Temple)-

from our trusty Encyclopædia Britannica - "CAPTIAL, in architecture, the crowning member of a column or other columnar form, providing a structural support for the horizontal member (entablature) or arch above.

"Two kinds of simple stone capital have been found in the stepped-pyramid complex at Saqqārah (c. 2890–c. 2686 BC). One, a saddlelike shape, suggests bent reeds or leaves; the other, an upturned bell, derives from the papyrus plant. Later Egyptian architecture used capitals derived from such plant forms as the palm and lotus,

"Three widely used forms of the capital were created by the Greeks. The Doric capital consists of a square abacus surmounting a round form with an egg-shaped profile called the echinus, below which are several narrow, ridgelike moldings linking the capital with the column. The Ionic capital—probably related to the volute capitals of western Asia—has a tripartite design consisting of a pair of horizontally connected volutes inserted between the abacus and echinus - its echinus is carved with an egg-and-dart motif. The Corinthian capital is basically an abacus supported on an inverted bell surrounded by rows of stylized acanthus leaves.

"Design of capitals in medieval Europe usually stemmed from Roman sources. Cubiform, or cushion, capitals, square on top and rounded at the bottom, served as transitional forms between the angular springing of the arches and the round columns supporting them. Grotesque animals, birds, and other figurative motifs characterize capitals of the Romanesque period. At the beginning of the Gothic period, exotic features tended to disappear in favour of simple stylized foliage, crockets, and geometric moldings, particularly in France and England." from "capital." Encyclopædia Britannica 2006

Notes on motifs used on captials atop columns above - generally, feminine; all - of regeneration and immortality:
reeds - Wilkinson, 1992 - the "emblematic" reeds or "sekhet" is "a symbol of 'that which is produced by the fields'. . .the sekhet is thus sometimes personified as a goddess bearing offerings" such as "ducks, goslings, eggs" and other "'food and provisions' for the god."
papyrus - Posener, 1962 - "the papyrus became the vigorous symbol of the world in gestation;"
palm - Chevalier, 1969 - "palms. . are regarded univerally as symbols of. . . regeneration and immortality". - Walker, 1983 - "the palm branch signified the virility of the god, Osiris, in union with his mother-sister-wife, Isis. . . or Tammuz, united with his mother-bride, Ishtar". Wilkinson, 1992 - "the palm branch was the symbol of the Egyptian god, Heh, the personification of eternity."
lotus - Walker, 1983 - "Before creation, the Hindus said, all the world was golden lotus, 'Matripadma', the Mother Lotus, womb of nature. In Egypt, the great goddess was called the lotus from whom the sun was born at his first rising." Chevalier, 1969 - "the lotus is pre-eminently the archetypal sexual organ or vulva, a pledge of the continuity of birth and rebirth." Wilkinson, 1992 - "as a symbol of rebirth, the lotus was closely associated with the imagery of the [Egyptian] funerary cults."
eggs and darts - Walker, 1983 "its original meaning was an endless line or circle of men (darts) and women (eggs). . .the ancient sexual connotations are even more clearly portrayed in the Egyptian versions which alternated downward-pointing phallic symbols with narrow oval slits each topped by a diamond-shaped 'clitoris'."
inverted bell - we have discussed the vulvic bell in earlier blog.
acanthus leaves - Chevalier, 1969 - "the acanthus motif was used extensively in funerary architecture to designate the trumphant conquest of the trial of life and death, symbolised by the thorns on the leaf of the plant. As with thorns in general, the acanthus is the symbol of . . .virginity - and that too implies another sort of triumph."

References above:
Jean Chevalier et al, Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, 1969 London isbn 0140512543
Barbara Walker, Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, 1988, Harper Collins San Francisco isbn 0062509233
Richard Wilkinson, Reading Egyptian Art, 1992, Thames & Hudson London isbn 0500277516

Storied Monkey Riding Subconscious Tiger

2007-01-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

I am more and more puzzled about how deeply we unquestioningly act out the drama within the archetypal, especially, per this blog, within the coital archetypal, while on the face of it, the act of sex, as only one example, in judeo- christian- islamic Abramic Yahweh- Jesus- Allah culture of the present patriarchal, always warring paradigm, is "sehr forbotten". But it is the sex, not a killing war, that is forbidden. Yet no one seems to have a problem hanging the symbolic vulvic wreath on the phallic door; nor a cowboy boot, tire or bottle atop a fence post - but strangely, this is done for no conscious reason whatsoever, just somehow makes "them" feel better. Perhaps, it's the "them" that's the rub. Here's a hint for the New Year from the NY Times - click to the full article:

from Dennis Overbye Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t New York Times, January 2, 2007

"Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."

Missing Index for Walker's "Myths"

2007-01-04T19:58:00.000-07:00

As a pilgrim intent on peeling back the layers of obfuscation (look it up!), one begins to discover Graves' "White Goddess", Briffault's "Mothers", Camphausen's "Yoni" and Barbara Walker's 1120 page opus, "Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" isbn006250925X oft quoted in this blog. Yes, OK sometimes Barbara is "over the top", I know her motivation too, too well - but she, unlike many other writers' over heavy agendas, does in fact well cite her source material - extensively, and page by page - her book's genius. All the more strange then that her 1120 page book fails to offer any index whatsoever. Shame! shame! on the cheap editors of HarperCollins. No index until now- a free PDFd 40+ page index to Walker's amazing work by two amazing altruists, Cheryl Brooks and Beedy Parker -

In Beedy Parker's own words: "A comprehensive (40 page, 6400 entries) index to The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barabara G Walker, is available, by e-mail or as print copy (at cost of copying and postage), from Beedy Parker at beedyparker@gwi.net , (207) 236-8732, or 68 Washington St., Camden, ME, 04843. We view this as an ongoing project, subject to correction if errors are found or more entries should be made.

"The index was produced by Cheryl Brooks, a professional indexer, in 2003, at the instigation of B. Parker who was frustrated by not being able to retrieve many of the fascinating references in the Encyclopedia which do not have their own alphabetic entries. Barbara Walker herself, who was contacted, said that the publisher did not feel that an enormous index, added to an already large book (1124 pages) would make sense. So we undertook to do it ourselves and are now making it available to others.

"Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (HarperCollins, 1983) is an extremely valuable reference, based on the author's wide reading in folklore and mythology. It documents, entry by entry, the fate and historic distortion of matriarchal religion by triumphant patriarchy in the last few thousand years. Reading it, slowly and methodically over the course of several years, was a revelation to me and put into place many of the seemingly senseless customs and rationalizations of creeds and beliefs of our major religions and our folkloric traditions. A recurring theme is the metamorphosis of feminine deities into masculine form, especially within the Christian and Judaic traditions.

"I understand that the WEMS, as we have come to call it, is not entirely respected in all academic circles. Barbara herself sees this as largely patriarchal backlash. It is also based on scholarly doubts about some of her sources (a marvelous bibliography of some 385 books), within the context of a battle for academic high ground in the shifting world of history of religion since the arrival of Women's Studies. Barbara Walker has the advantage and disadvantage of not being an academic, free to read as she pleases and judge for herself, as does the reader, but not held to scholarly proof and peer approval. She also has written on more esoteric subjects, tarot, sacred stones, women's rituals, and is a gifted and well known designer of graphic knitting patterns, all rather suspect to serious students. Her book The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (HarperCollins, 1988) provides an iconic adjunct to the WEMS, and it would appear that her work in researching women's religious history stems from her fascination with pattern and symbol, which are often keys to a hidden and repressed past, seemingly innocent.

"The book was welcomed with accolades in the 80's and has been on course reading lists and many bibliographies. The essays at particular entries are excellent, well written and often stand by themselves as thoughtful critiques of cryptic subjects. I hope that an index will make it even more useful as a reference to information which is not readily available to people, particularly women, who wonder how we got to where we are.

"My purpose in making the index available is actually as an environmentalist, because I see, as does Barbara Walker, our treatment of women, socially and within the great religions, as part and parcel of our destructive treatment of the "environment", as "Other", and disposable, by the dominant mind set. Feminine and Nature are often seen as similar and even the same, now and in the past, whether worshipped or abused. I do not think we can survive our abusive views and behavior. Shaking this domineering foundation at its historic and prehistoric roots could help bring us round to the respect, care and love of the natural world we are a part of, to true awe. I see this reference as a revolutionary resource."

from Beedy Parker, 02 January 2007

Again, the link to Barbara Walker's WEMS Index.

Deiseal vs Widdershins

2006-12-30T23:02:00.000-07:00

Deiseal - circumambulation with the object at your male right hand (aka "clockwise" and "deosil") as e-ample - http://www.deiseal.net/

Widdershins - circumambulation with the object (God forbid!) at your female left hand (aka "counter-clockwise") as e-ample - http://www.widdershins.org/

Eucharistic Musings for Christmas Day

2006-12-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

From the 25th Chapter of the Gospel of Saint Matthew in plain King James' English - so that the "Current Occupant" (cf: Garrison Keillor) and his prosperity "Christians" ("our riches are proof of our goodness, your poverty is proof of your evil") can read between their bites of goose and ham on today's ancient "holy day" - let those with ears, hear:

"[31] When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:[32] And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:[33] And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

"[34] Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:[35] For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:[36] Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

"[37] Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?[38] When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?[39] Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?[40] And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

"[41] Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:[42] For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:[43] I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

"[44] Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?[45] Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

"[46] And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal."

Sorry, GWB - but some light Christmas reading for your new Year might be useful.

Solstice Greenman

2006-12-21T15:43:00.002-07:00

If studying maypoles, one should build and site maypoles. If studying the greenman, it follows that one should become a greenman. Happy Solstice! Greenmen everywhere - and Greenwomen as well.

"Boldness has genius...and magic in it."

2006-12-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

Oft credited in its entirety to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - the good Frater's favorite quote. Thank you, William Hutchinson Murray (b:18 March 1913 - d:19 March 1996)

"This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth - the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans - that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!'"

-W. H. Murray in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951.
- quoted "couplets" from J. W. von Goethe in Faust, 214-30 based on John Anster's "very free translation".

Wreathed Pine Trees in Rome - 204 BC to 420 AD

2006-12-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

Tis the Season for the daring who are able to leap into the second layer of mythic onion in a single bound - an earlier "Christmas tree" - notice any interesting parallels? - the decorated pine tree with celibate celebrants (sorry!) in "woman's clothing" waiting to be "saved by the Blood" on Vatican's (pre-Christian) Hill?? Hmmm!? OK, it's not a "Christmas" tree, it's an "Easter" tree - no rabbit; yes bull.

From Sir James George Frazer's (1854–1941), The Golden Bough published in 1922 - Chapter 34 The Myth and Ritual of Attis cf: the newer and more scholarly "Cybele and Attis" by Maarten J. Vermaseren, London: Thames & Hudson, 1977, isbn 0500250545

"ANOTHER of those gods whose supposed death and resurrection struck such deep roots into the faith and ritual of Western Asia is Attis. He was to Phrygia what Adonis was to Syria. Like Adonis, he appears to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and resurrection were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring. The legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike that the ancients themselves sometimes identified them. Attis was said to have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, a great Asiatic goddess of fertility, who had her chief home in Phrygia. Some held that Attis was her son. His birth, like that of many other heroes, is said to have been miraculous. His mother, Nana, was a virgin, who conceived by putting a ripe almond or a pomegranate in her bosom. Indeed in the Phrygian cosmogony an almond figured as the father of all things, perhaps because its delicate lilac blossom is one of the first heralds of the spring, appearing on the bare boughs before the leaves have opened. Such tales of virgin mothers are relics of an age of childish ignorance when men had not yet recognized the intercourse of the sexes as the true cause of offspring. Two different accounts of the death of Attis were current. According to the one he was killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other he unmanned himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. The latter is said to have been the local story told by the people of Pessinus, a great seat of the worship of Cybele, and the whole legend of which the story forms a part is stamped with a character of rudeness and savagery that speaks strongly for its antiquity. Both tales might claim the support of custom, or rather both were probably invented to explain certain customs observed by the worshippers. The story of the self-mutilation of Attis is clearly an attempt to account for the self-mutilation of his priests, who regularly castrated themselves on entering the service of the goddess. The story of his death by the boar may have been told to explain why his worshippers, especially the people of Pessinus, abstained from eating swine. In like manner the worshippers of Adonis abstained from pork, because a boar had killed their god. After his death Attis is said to have been changed into a pine-tree.

"The worship of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods was adopted by the Romans in 204 B.C. towards the close of their long struggle with Hannibal. For their drooping spirits had been opportunely cheered by a prophecy, alleged to be drawn from that convenient farrago of nonsense, the Sibylline Books, that the foreign invader would be driven from Italy if the great Oriental goddess were brought to Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her sacred city Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone which embodied the mighty divinity was entrusted to them and conveyed to Rome, where it was received with great respect and installed in the temple of Victory on the Palatine Hill. It was the middle of April when the goddess arrived, and she went to work at once. For the harvest that year was such as had not been seen for many a long day, and in the very next year Hannibal and his veterans embarked for Africa. As he looked his last on the coast of Italy, fading behind him in the distance, he could not foresee that Europe, which had repelled the arms, would yet yield to the gods, of the Orient. The vanguard of the conquerors had already encamped in the heart of Italy before the rearguard of the beaten army fell sullenly back from its shores.

"We may conjecture, though we are not told, that the Mother of the Gods brought with her the worship of her youthful lover or son to her new home in the West. Certainly the Romans were familiar with the Galli, the emasculated priests of Attis, before the close of the Republic. These unsexed beings, in their Oriental costume, with little images suspended on their breasts, appear to have been a familiar sight in the streets of Rome, which they traversed in procession, carrying the image of the goddess and chanting their hymns to the music of cymbals and tambourines, flutes and horns, while the people, impressed by the fantastic show and moved by the wild strains, flung alms to them in abundance, and buried the image and its bearers under showers of roses. A further step was taken by the Emperor Claudius when he incorporated the Phrygian worship of the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of Attis, in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival of Cybele and Attis is best known to us in the form in which it was celebrated at Rome; but as we are informed that the Roman ceremonies were also Phrygian, we may assume that they differed hardly, if at all, from their Asiatic original. The order of the festival seems to have been as follows.

"On the twenty-second day of March, a pine-tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree was entrusted to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed like a corpse with woollen bands and decked with wreaths of violets, for violets were said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as roses and anemones from the blood of Adonis; and the effigy of a young man, doubtless Attis himself, was tied to the middle of the stem. On the second day of the festival, the twenty-third of March, the chief ceremony seems to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third day, the twenty-fourth of March, was known as the Day of Blood: the Archigallus or highpriest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering. Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood. The ghastly rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and may have been intended to strengthen him for the resurrection. The Australian aborigines cut themselves in like manner over the graves of their friends for the purpose, perhaps, of enabling them to be born again. Further, we may conjecture, though we are not expressly told, that it was on the same Day of Blood and for the same purpose that the novices sacrificed their virility. Wrought up to the highest pitch of religious excitement they dashed the severed portions of themselves against the image of the cruel goddess. These broken instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently wrapt up and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to Cybele, where, like the offering of blood, they may have been deemed instrumental in recalling Attis to life and hastening the general resurrection of nature, which was then bursting into leaf and blossom in the vernal sunshine. Some confirmation of this conjecture is furnished by the savage story that the mother of Attis conceived by putting in her bosom a pomegranate sprung from the severed genitals of a man-monster named Agdestis, a sort of double of Attis.

"If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom, we can readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine deities required to receive from their male ministers, who personated the divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions: they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy before they could transmit it to the world. Goddesses thus ministered to by eunuch priests were the great Artemis of Ephesus and the great Syrian Astarte of Hierapolis, whose sanctuary, frequented by swarms of pilgrims and enriched by the offerings of Assyria and Babylonia, of Arabia and Phoenicia, was perhaps in the days of its glory the most popular in the East. Now the unsexed priests of this Syrian goddess resembled those of Cybele so closely that some people took them to be the same. And the mode in which they dedicated themselves to the religious life was similar. The greatest festival of the year at Hierapolis fell at the beginning of spring, when multitudes thronged to the sanctuary from Syria and the regions round about. While the flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life. When the tumult of emotion had subsided, and the man had come to himself again, the irrevocable sacrifice must often have been followed by passionate sorrow and lifelong regret. This revulsion of natural human feeling after the frenzies of a fanatical religion is powerfully depicted by Catullus in a celebrated poem.

"The parallel of these Syrian devotees confirms the view that in the similar worship of Cybele the sacrifice of virility took place on the Day of Blood at the vernal rites of the goddess, when the violets, supposed to spring from the red drops of her wounded lover, were in bloom among the pines. Indeed the story that Attis unmanned himself under a pine-tree was clearly devised to explain why his priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree at his festival. At all events, we can hardly doubt that the Day of Blood witnessed the mourning for Attis over an effigy of him which was afterwards buried. The image thus laid in the sepulchre was probably the same which had hung upon the tree. Throughout the period of mourning the worshippers fasted from bread, nominally because Cybele had done so in her grief for the death of Attis, but really perhaps for the same reason which induced the women of Harran to abstain from eating anything ground in a mill while they wept for Tammuz. To partake of bread or flour at such a season might have been deemed a wanton profanation of the bruised and broken body of the god. Or the fast may possibly have been a preparation for a sacramental meal.

"But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was turned to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow, the twenty-fifth day of March, which was reckoned the vernal equinox, the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the celebration took the form of a carnival. It was the Festival of Joy (Hilaria). A universal licence prevailed. Every man might say and do what he pleased. People went about the streets in disguise. No dignity was too high or too sacred for the humblest citizen to assume with impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band of conspirators thought to take advantage of the masquerade by dressing in the uniform of the Imperial Guard, and so, mingling with the crowd of merrymakers, to get within stabbing distance of the emperor. But the plot miscarried. Even the stern Alexander Severus used to relax so far on the joyous day as to admit a pheasant to his frugal board. The next day, the twenty-sixth of March, was given to repose, which must have been much needed after the varied excitements and fatigues of the preceding days. Finally, the Roman festival closed on the twenty-seventh of March with a procession to the brook Almo. The silver image of the goddess, with its face of jagged black stone, sat in a waggon drawn by oxen. Preceded by the nobles walking barefoot, it moved slowly, to the loud music of pipes and tambourines, out by the Porta Capena, and so down to the banks of the Almo, which flows into the Tiber just below the walls of Rome. There the high-priest, robed in purple, washed the waggon, the image, and the other sacred objects in the water of the stream. On returning from their bath, the wain and the oxen were strewn with fresh spring flowers. All was mirth and gaiety. No one thought of the blood that had flowed so lately. Even the eunuch priests forgot their wounds.

"Such, then, appears to have been the annual solemnisation of the death and resurrection of Attis in spring. But besides these public rites, his worship is known to have comprised certain secret or mystic ceremonies, which probably aimed at bringing the worshipper, and especially the novice, into closer communication with his god. Our information as to the nature of these mysteries and the date of their celebration is unfortunately very scanty, but they seem to have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood. In the sacrament the novice became a partaker of the mysteries by eating out of a drum and drinking out of a cymbal, two instruments of music which figured prominently in the thrilling orchestra of Attis. The fast which accompanied the mourning for the dead god may perhaps have been designed to prepare the body of the communicant for the reception of the blessed sacrament by purging it of all that could defile by contact the sacred elements. In the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a wooden grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood poured in torrents through the apertures, and was received with devout eagerness by the worshipper on every part of his person and garments, till he emerged from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows as one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the blood of the bull. For some time afterwards the fiction of a new birth was kept up by dieting him on milk like a new-born babe. The regeneration of the worshipper took place at the same time as the regeneration of his god, namely at the vernal equinox. At Rome the new birth and the remission of sins by the shedding of bull’s blood appear to have been carried out above all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian goddess on the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the great basilica of St. Peter’s now stands; for many inscriptions relating to the rites were found when the church was being enlarged in 1608 or 1609. From the Vatican as a centre this barbarous system of superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that provincial sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican. From the same source we learn that the testicles as well as the blood of the bull played an important part in the ceremonies. Probably they were regarded as a powerful charm to promote fertility and hasten the new birth."

Crown of Thorns, Page Two

2006-12-09T21:35:00.000-07:00

Crown of thorns in Arvada, Colorado. (We are only the messenger.)

Crown of Thorns, Page One

2006-12-09T19:51:00.000-07:00

Barbara Walker, 1983, page 962 - "Svayamvara was the ceremony of bridegroom-choosing by the queens of pre-Vedic (2700 -1500 BC) India where the queen embodied the Virgin Kali who chose Shiva, the Condemned One, as her consort, casting over his head a wreath of flowers representing her yoni enveloping his lingam. [The wreath was her own genital symbol; the god's "head" was his. (pg.311)] In the role of sacred king he would die in his mating, like a penis, and his bridal wreath would become the funeral wreath laid on his grave." Barbara Walker, "Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets", Harper Collins, 1983

Boots/posts to Crowns/thorns

2006-12-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

So, our farmer hangs rubber tires on metal posts - why? - does it feel like the "right" thing to do? Commercial offerings of "wreath stands" - the "right thing to sell"? Christmas Wreath on a municipal lamp post on a bridge - the "right city thing". Colorful wreath hung on a stake over a California grave - staves off sadness?!

I am told that the mental exercise of bringing "water to a fish" or "ice to an Eskimo" (or spirituality to a Christian) is a logical impossibility - ie, becasue no one can step outside of ourselves to make that examination. But when we insist on a dogma - whose ancient origins we have never thought to question - such dogma by which its believing causes, no REQUIRES, the present and future death and destruction of fellow humans - then, at least, we in the fringe, can attempt to discuss "water with the fishes".

Tis the season for transition - our second motif - "crown of thorns" - "rings of stones" - "vagina dentata" - vulvas made up with phalli - see next posts.

To KNOW or Not to Know

2006-12-06T13:16:00.001-07:00

From a friend: "To quote my son, 'I'm a militant agnostic': 'I don't know and YOU DON'T KNOW EITHER!!'" So, to KNOW or not to Know, is this the Question?

Last night's reading- art historian Carl Schuster's amazing "Patterns That Connect", isbn 0810963264, page 190-3, "Legitimation: Return to the Male Womb"-

"The word for 'knee' is used in kinship terminology thoughout many languages, including all or most Indo-European languages. . .for ideas like 'degree of kinship' or 'generation'. . .and can be traced back to the homonymy of two Indo-European roots: the nominal root *g'en for the 'knee' and the verbal root *g'en-, which seems to mean 'beget'."

"The homonymy of these roots leads to such correspondences as that between the Latin 'genu' for 'knee' and 'genus' for 'decent'. [The Greek writer] Euripideas refers to knees as 'generative members' and the knee was commonly refered to as the seat of paternity."

This last quote of Schuster's is as close in this essay as he gets to suggesting that the 'knee', 'thigh' and 'foot' are phallic euphemisms. - see my earlier blog:

(Though Schuster does later quote Hebrews 7.10 "He was yet in the loins of his FATHER when Melchisedek met him" and also mentions that "the Hebrew word for 'blessing' derives from the Hebrew word for 'knee', as in Jeremiah 1.5".)

But Schuster does continues to a very interesting observation: "The Indo-European verbal root *g'en-, meaning 'to beget' (Latin 'gigno') is used to designate exclusively the parental role of the father, not that of the mother. This has been explained in terms of what appears to be a THIRD homonymous root of *g'en-, meaning 'to know' (Latin 'gnosco')."

So - could it be argued 'linguisically' that the desire 'to know' is also 'rooted' at the 'knee' (puns always intended) in a phallic compensation desire/construct similar to (k)needing to run out to purchase a Corvette or pickup truck or dose of Viagra?? That is, deciding 'to know' will make me feel more like a 'REAL' man - a real fundamental MAN! And conversely, an "agnostic" (even if this is a one word oxymoron)- are the "no knowing" and "weak-kneed" (anti-penis) sissy men loose on the deck - "militant agnostics"? not "hardly"!

Did we mention "genuflect"? - "to bend the 'knee' in worship of the Divine" - Ouch!! Unless ofcourse, the Divine might be Feminine, then 'bend' the 'knee' might mean. . .

"May the Lord add His 'Blessing' (His 'Knee') to the reading of His Word."

"Sacred vessels" ATOP Posts, Page 13

2006-11-19T11:24:00.005-07:00

Related cartoon from the future (March 2007) by Mark Stivers.

Sacred, profane or mundane? The good Frater Holme's raison d’être is to demonstrate that "sacred" symbols percolate into [and out of] mundane and profane everyday objects.

So yet another visual simile for your consideration - India's ancient sacred "Post/Vessel" Yonilingam with androgynous serpent, left, and on the right, a Supermarket version? For an explaination of this coital iconograph of Shiva's phallus and Pavarti's vulva, see Yonilingam with other reference images here and a recently discovered commercial iteration in the middle bars of our visual harmonic- to demonstrate that, indeed, popular culture continually extrudes the mythic!

Other visual affinities within this project: The Bucranium (Sacred Ox Head) and the Crucifix below, and the even more frightening Madonna Code.

"Sacred vessels" ATOP Posts, Page 12

2006-11-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

From Carl Schuster, 1996 - left to right: "Y-posts" from Hawaiian Islands; Mangarena; New Guinea; New Hebrides; Borneo; and Sumatra.

My thanks to Ami Ronnberg, Curator of the New York C.G. Jung Center's Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) who two weeks ago introduced me to Carl Schuster's twelve volume, 3500 page, 7000 illustration, Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art produced by Edmund Carpenter and generously "deposited. . .in 600 academic libraries" including the collections at ARAS. Fortunately for poor students, I have been able to find in Denver's Public (read: Plebeian) Library, Carpenter's abbreviated version of Schuster's huge efforts Patterns That Connect, 1996, Abrams, isbn 0810963264. Though Carl Schuster accepted research grants from Jung's Bollingen Foundation, Schuster's prolific "literary executor" (and defender?), Edmund Carpenter, considers Carl Jung as a lightweight "popularizer" (ibid. pg 8) responsible for "past foolishness" and spouting "jungian nonsense" (see bio by Carpenter and bio by Chicago's Field Museum.) But again, thank you, Ami!

While this novice observer sees the "Y-post" (illustration above) as a coital construct with vulvic "V" atop phallic post - the same as our prosaic wine glass - Carl Schuster equates the Y-post as (ibid. pg 14)- "the image of a tree with the branching of the human race. This correspondence between Tree & Genealogy lies beneath a wide range of cultures, in fact, Culture. Ultimately it rests on the analogy of plant propagation and the notion of human birth from budding."

"By its branching, the Tree symbolizes the Tribe, and thereby especially its ancestors to whom sacrifice must be brought. To me, the forked post is the symbolic reduction of the Tree (its use in connection with sacrifice, though important, merely extends its basic meaning as Tree)."

"This association of Tree & Genealogy dates from a least Upper Paleolithic times. What began, I assume, as a 'natural' metaphor, became- quickly, perhaps - an elaborate symbolic system that included limb-sharing ancestors, two-headed, joint-marked figures; and much more. There is nothing 'natural' about these systems: they are inventions, transmitted by word & practice." from Schuster / Carpenter's Patterns That Connect, 1996, Abrams, isbn 0810963264.

In his defense of Schuster, Carpenter points out that (paraphasing) "nothing about Carl Schuster's work evoked greater skepticism than his approach" which "excluded no relevant category of traditional culture," nor "data from diverse cultures, periods and continents". While their book, Patterns That Connect, does extend the Y-post motif to patterns on clothing, to "rebirth" gaming boards and ancient labyrinths, nowhere does Schuster's vast collections include obviously related (and I suppose, even less defensible) "everyday" Y-post motifs such as the Maypole, crucifix, wineglass or our cowboy boots atop posts. Perhaps the larger 3500 page version "deposited in academic libraries" includes the populist mundane - we will see on our next visit to academialand.

Who is Asher'ah? Part Three: The Weavings

2006-11-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

From Book of 2 Kings 23.7, NRSV, 3rd Ed., 2001 "[King Josiah] broke down the houses of the temple prostitues that were in the House of the Lord, where the women did weaving for Asherah." From the Jewish Publication Society's TANAKH, 1999, a transliteration of the Hebrew masoretic text "where the women wove coverings [Hb. batim] for Asherah." Raphael Patai, 1990, page 299 comments "The Septuagint [the early Hebrew Scripture translation to Greek, 300-100BC] [uses the Greek word]'stolas', that is, 'garments' for batim which may be based on an original badim, ie, 'linens'. The expression badim '(a person) clothed in linens' appears as a standing epithet for a mystical figure in Ezekiel 9 and Daniel 12." -from The Hebrew Goddess, isbn 0814322719

Recall that the general Deuteronomist's usage of an "Asherah" is a "sacred wooden post or pole", not the Goddess. Then the reference to women weaving linens within the precincts of Solomon's Temple for the sacred pole. Sounds a bit like Betsy Ross to me. So, is today's cover illustration of the American edition of "Newsweek", the weekly news magazine, a modern iteration of an ancient ritual? - the symbolic fabric wrapped around the symbolic pole - the ersatz female wrapped around the ersatz male - the image is too perfect. Keep it in mind for future blogs here. Please re-read the two earlier blogs - "Who is Asher'ah?" Part One in June 06 and Part Two in July 06. Newsweek cover illustration credit: photographer,Craig Cutler, 2006.

American voters, please do so tomorrow - for the world's sake.

"Sacred vessels" ATOP Posts, Page 11

2006-10-22T22:11:00.000-06:00

From Leonard Shlain, 1999- "The starched shirt collar with a tie hanging down between its two pointed tabs-an abstract representation of male genitalia-has long been a symbol of patriarchal dominance."

OK, a business mans' necktie as phallus - a fairly "straight forward" idea. I agree initially with Dr. Shlain, author of "Art and Physics", isbn 0688123058, and more importantly, "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess - Word vs Image", isbn: 0140196013, quote above from page 426.

However, take a second look at the dangling phallus from between the two pointed tabs - what we CANNOT see hidden behind the white starched shirt collar is the yonic "loop" around the neck - if we could see the loop, then the necktie closely resembles our coital (or androgynous) "ankh", our "vessel atop a post". Or taken as a whole - "starched shirt collar WITH a tie" - our modern version of the priestly "alb and stole" - we definitely have our "ankh". Then, if we were to add Norman O. Brown's comments from Love's Body,1966, that the "head is phallus", then our neck-tie wearing corporate raiders above began to resemble three side-by-side ancient "phi" "power-on" symbols. (Don't yet "see" this - review earlier "posts" with boots.)

What then does the woman's purse signify? Sidewalk sex workers seem always (USA) accessorized with stilettos heels (vessel w/post) and purse (signifying?) - sacred to mundane - why?

Am looking for the photo credit of the corporate raiders pictured above from the New York Times - one moment please.

"Sacred vessels" ATOP Posts, Page Ten

2006-10-14T19:59:00.000-06:00

Female reindeer head [c. 12,000 bce], first from left above: from S. Giedion -"Rites associated with the [interment of the] skull [Ed: 30,000 to 10,000 bce - Mousterian to Magdalenian periods]. . .need to be distinguished from rites involving sacred poles or posts, sometime, but not always, surmounted by an animal's head. Such post were made of wood or of stone and became, in some sense, centers of power.

"From the bird on a pole in the cavern of Lascaux, which is being clutched at by a bird-headed man, the tradition of the bird-crowned staff or pole extends until the time of the Lombards in sixth-century Italy and until quite recently anong some primitive peoples [Ed: and well beyond! - to the scepters of modern royalty - ie, doves - and USA/other flag poles - ie, eagles, double eagles].

"An example [drawing, left above] from the northern Magdalenian period (around 8000 bce) was discovered by Alfred Rust in a pond (now meadowland) from the end of the last glaciation at Ahrensburg-Stellmoor, not far from Hamburg. He found there an undisturbed wooden post (2.12 m) still topped with the skull of an aged female reindeer (Ur-Schweiz (Basel), XII, 1948, pp. 68-71).

"Survivals of the cult of the sacred pole persisited until recent years among the Ainus in northern Japan, where the shaman continued to play an important role. Posts with animal skulls, called inao, sometimes clustered almost like a hedge, crossroads--in short, in all places associated with divine beings" (Murdock, 1952, pp. 187-88). Murdock considered that 'that inao are neither gods nor offerings.'

"The final development of the sacred post appears in Egypt, in the obelisk, whose peak was thought to be the resting place of the sun-god Ra. [Ed: ie, golden orb; as, tops of most American flag poles]

"The cult of the sacred post makes it even clearer that both the cult of the skull AND the ritualistic animal intermints [in caves] were closely related to the procreation of the [human] species."

citation above: page 291, S. Giedion, The Beginnings of Art, Bollingen Series, Pantheon, 1962.

Sheep head on post [c. 2002 ce], second from left:
From: Dimitri Subject: [scribblings of unknowing]
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:07:35 -0600

Dear Sir,

As an individual who has traveled far and wide, what does it say to you that such Boots Atop Posts seem to be prevalent in the US of A only? In the country where I live, we have beer cans atop posts, Cola bottles on posts, and sheep skulls atop posts? Is there - in your opinion - a difference in the symbology of the whole concept - depending on using a boot or a skull - or does it all signify the same?

Greetings, Dimitri [source of photo, second from left above]

the good Frater answers...

All signifies the same, but as to sheep skulls vs Cola bottles? have you photos of sheep's heads? Compare Freud's Boots with Gimbutas' Skulls - was denken du?

Bulls' Heads on Post [c. 1995 ce], India, third from left above: from Vidya Dehejia, DEVI - "A sacrificial pole erected for a buffalo sacrifice in a Maliah Kondh village. After the sacrifice the Maliah Kondh place the buffalo head on top of the pole like a trophy. India, state of Orissa, Phulbani district, Balliguda area, spring 1995." Note: "like a trophy"; compare with earlier "trophy" posts.

citation above: Vidya Dehejia, DEVI The Great Goddess, Smithsonian Institution, Prestel Verlag, Munich 1999

"heads on pikes", right above - Cartoon or poster of the French Revolution [c. 1789–1799 ce]: "Aristocratic Heads on Pikes"

Cowboot boots, sheep heads, tires, Coke bottles and other "skulls" placed atop posts; national flags, golden orbs and Christs'/Adonis' hung on poles and trees - all the same symbol? What is being symbolized?

Be afraid! ?? Notes from Antarctica

2006-10-10T23:14:00.000-06:00

"Christianity, a second-class superstition"?

2006-10-08T09:01:00.002-06:00

Quoting from today's New York Times, 08 October, 2006-

"Society 'treats Christianity like a second-class superstition,' Tom DeLay, then a Republican representative from Texas, told the crowd. 'Seen from that perspective, of course there is a war on religion.'" -from the first of a four part series in the Times entitled "IN GOD'S NAME - Favors for the Faithful" which examines "how American religious organizations benefit from an increasingly accommodating government."

"Second-class superstition"? (Hmmm?, a "first-class superstition" would be?) Mr. DeLay, you honor your Christians by several "classes" up from reality. Mr. DeLay should take five minutes out of his busy schedule, find a history book and learn about Adonis, Attis, Osiris - their virgin births and deaths on/as trees and nearly 32 other "super hero" stories that came BEFORE DeLay's annointed Christ mythos. But aside from his concerns about a "second-class superstition"-

by reading and living his own Book, Mr. DeLay could improve the situation of Christian believers and the "war" against them. Without mentioning the obvious for Mr. DeLay - "thou shalt not steal" or "thou shalt not bear false witness" - here is my esoteric choice of six passages from the Christians' Bible which Christians should probably take a second look or, truth told, a first look.

1) for the door knockers, the helpers of the Almighty - Romans 1.19-20: "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world, His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made. So they (we, the ungodly) are without excuse." Again, for emphasis- Who shows we, the godless, about God? not our fellow worm bait - but it was, for your short moment, so reassuring to be the happy little helper of the great Eternal One.

2) for the Lord's Day folk and Blue Laws - again, Romans - 14.5: "Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds." Oh, and, by the way, no judging of each others' judgements - entire chapter, Romans 14 - takes all the fun out it.

3) two creation stories- the one you know Genesis 1.1-2.3 and one you do not know, Genesis 2.4-24. Compare. OK, you know the mysogynic rib part, but compare the rest - days of week, etc. - dont forget the Lilith story.

4) two (three) sets of "Ten" Commandments- the one you know, Exodus 20.2-17, with condensed version, Deut.5.6-21 and then the second set you do not know, after Moses broke up the first set, Exodus 34.1-27. Compare all three. Note on Ex. 34: firstborn humans are to be "redeemed" just the same as the first "womb openers" from sheep and cows - "Father, where is my brother?" Some scholars refer to this second writing as the "Ritual Decalogue. Wiki discussion here.

5) from an earlier post on the "Ten" or however many Commandments that the right winging USA so-called "christians" want posted in every courthouse and government building (who exactly are the Taliban?!) - The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 31.31ff, cf: Heb. 8.6-13) stated that "the days will come that (the Lord) will make a NEW COVENANT, not according to the covenant...made with their Fathers...out of Egypt [that would the be TEN stone ones], but a covenant (He) will...write in their hearts." Well, this has not happened yet - in 2900 years.

This echoed by the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 3.6,2 NRSV) that "God has made us competent to be ministers of a NEW COVENANT - written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tables of stone, but on tablets of human hearts - for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." Still, no action yet - 1960 years later - folks are still "stone" bound.

6) my great favorite - "God with Breasts" - El Shaddai - I promised some esoterica - “By the Almighty [El Shaddai] who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts [shadayim] and of the womb [racham] ” -Genesis. 49:25, see also Genesis 28:3; 35:11.

(re-edit 08/10)

"Sacred vessels" BENEATH/ATOP Posts, Page 9

2006-10-07T20:46:00.000-06:00

From Joseph Winthuis, 1928- pg. 12 "To the primitive, all straight lines signify the membrum virile - the phallus; whatever is circular or sickle-shaped is the membrum muliebre- the vagina. However unlikely this statement may appear, it is our only way of gaining insight into primitive thought."

This aint pretty - it's becoming an ancient/modern möbius strip of 0's and 1's - this rabbit hole will stay "under construction" - please come back for continuing details of the "boot atop post" icons above and in the previous post.

credit above: Joseph Winthuis, "Das Zweigeschlechterwesen bei den Zentralaustraliern und anderen Volkern" Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1928 - " a fieldwork in Central Australia; an attempt to prove that the theory of the dual sex being is the main spring of life & expression of physical relationship between male & female; sex relationship & its significance expressed in art; objects (sacred & secular); sagas, cults, songs and ceremonies."

(How polite! - how nice the language of our Australian and German cousins. But in light of the Colorado "cowboy boot on the upright G-d d-mn f-cking fence posts" - no quaint "primitive thought" BS need apply! These f-cking so-called "primitive" symbols extrude today - everywhere - 1011101010101011100!! - did we also mention the popularity of the Base "10" system?)

Regarding the petroglyphs "i", "j", "k" and "l" above - following from their intermediate source (page 234), in S. Giedion's Eternal Present, the Beginnings of Art, 1962, page 230 : "It is astonishing that the innumerable ideograms of eastern Spanish art - those last notes of prehistory from the iron and bronze ages - are still deprived of any precise interpretation, as are also those similar northern symbols, related to them in type and time, from [Clonfinlough,] Ireland [previous post] and the high western Alps. But the expression of male and female qualities has been definitely brought out in a number of different figurations. What, for instance, is the meaning of the strongly definely circular form crossed by a vertical line which comes so close to the form of the Greek letter phi? Is it really only an abstract human figure? Can it not just as well be an androgynous symbol (read: "coitial" here, ye boots/posts folks]? Other signs point to the possibility of this as the highest fertility symbol: generator of life, with life endowed." citation: S. Giedion, Eternal Present, Pantheon Books, Random House, NYC, 1962

Whatever you do, pay no attention to anything like the 1/0 symbol named the "exclaimation" "point", i.e., "!" [we are only the messenger] or its new bigger brother- the so-called, wait-for-it, "Power On" symbol!!! - where to draw the "line" or, is it, inscribe the "oval"? - as you recall, this blog is an attempt to examine symbol where it leads - sacred archetypal (deep 30,000 year old ancient) to the mundane "everyday" (as in even "today's" edit - 10/10 - oh my!).

"Sacred vessels" BENEATH/ATOP Posts, Page 8

2006-09-16T18:07:00.001-06:00

This post has proven to be a bottomless rabbit hole -turning our post/boot over one last time - your patience please. In our last post, from Wikipaedia- "The Globus Cruciger (Latin) is an orb (globus) topped with a cross (cruciger), a Christian symbol of authority used throughout the Middle Ages on coins, iconography and royal regalia. It symbolises Christ's (the cross) dominion over the world (the orb), literally held in the dominion of an earthly ruler (or sometimes celestial being such as an angel)." And from the Encyclopædia Britannica, 2006, entry "orb"- "Christians adapted the [Roman orb] by setting a cross above the ball to signify the world dominated by Christianity. Rulers were often depicted with the orb, but the first to hold it in hand at his coronation was the Holy Roman emperor Henry II in 1014; thereafter the “imperial apple” became an important emblem of the royal power invested in the monarch." Italic emphasis mine.

Once again, "history is written by the victors" and powerful ancient archetypal symbols are brazenly stolen (No. VIII: "Thou shalt not steal". Yea, right!) pirated for profit and manipulation by the present ruling religions. The Globus Cruciger no more "belong" to "Christians" than does the famous bleeding man hung on a tree - that post "soon coming". As an example of such unthinking "divine" attribution of "Christian" symbols, did you hear the one about the Christian honeymoon couple who checks into the motel happily assuming that no other humans have ever before "used" "their" sanctified Christian Bed. Perhaps the Christian toilet? We digress!

Quickly, the ages of the "Christian" "Globus Crucigers" above top, followed by depth references below - A: Cyprus, a young 500 BC (Before Christ); B: Egypt, 2500 BC; C: Spain, 3000 BC; D, E: Italy, 3000-2500 BC; F: Ireland, 3000-2500 BC.

A: From Symbols.com "This is our planet's ideogram, the sign for the earth, or the planet called Tellus. It has been found on a Cyprian coin from around 500 B.C. It is similar to the so-called orb, used by rulers during the Middle Ages to symbolize their control over a part of the earth's surface." From the Encyclopædia Britannica, 2006, "Tellus, also called TERRA MATER, ancient Roman earth goddess. Probably of great antiquity, she was concerned with the productivity of the earth and was later identified with the mother-goddess Cybele. Her temple on the Esquiline Hill dated from about 268 BC. Though she had no special priest, she was honoured in the Fordicidia and Sementivae festivals, both of which centred on fertility and good crops."

B: Three "nefer" - see previous post - drawing of the three "nefers" from the neck of a "nefer" shaped vase, tomb of Kha, Deir el-Medina, 18th Dynasty (1550-1307 bce), page 78, "Reading Egyptian Art" by Richard Wilkinson, 1992, Thames & Hudson, isbn 0500277516

C: From Symbols.com, entry "41b:22" - "A sign engraved in a rock face in Galicia in northern Spain about 3000 B.C." More on this petroglyph and "J", "K", "L" (next post) of the so-called Spanish Art Groups, II and III, in the books: "Prehistory", M.C. Burkitt, 1925, Cambridge Press; "Rock Paintings of Southern Andalusia" by M.C. Burkitt and H. Breuil, 1929, Oxford Press; "Eternal Present" by S. Giedion, 1962, Pantheon Books.

D: "An ideogram engraved in neolithic times in a rock wall in Val Camonica near Brescia in Italy." from Symbol.com. The Valley Camonica has unnumbered tens of thousands of petroglyphs from 5000 bce down to medieval times - see rupestre.net

E: "This ideogram was found carved into a rock wall in Galicia in northern Spain. It was engraved about 5,000 years ago." from Symbol.com - see notes following "C".

F: Clonfinlough, Ireland: Neolithic rock engravings. Drawing after Burkitt from page 234,"Eternal Present" by S. Giedion, 1962, Pantheon Books. This glyph seems to be tied to a large number of mythic ideas from the runic "split year god" to the Christogram of Constantine. It features in the works of Hermann Felix Wirth ""Die Heilige Urschrift der Menschheit" by Herman Wirth, 1936, Leipzig. The Nazi SS leader Himmler sponsored Wirth at this point of his studies (1935-38). Locals recall that Abbe Breuil deciphered (c. 1929) the image and concluded that it represented a fight to a finish between the Old Irish and the Milesians in pre-Christian times, 1300BC. The cross-men were charging at the loop-men who in return were retreating from the attack.

"Sacred vessels" BENEATH Posts, Page 7

2006-08-26T23:01:00.000-06:00

Now we enclose the bell/stupa shape to "move" on to the onion-domed Eastern Rite churches, the Roman/Medieval spear/scepter and orb, and the handy all-in-one Globus Cruciger (our upside down "boot atop post") of Queen and Christ.

from left to right, top: 24-domed Intercession Church on the Vytegra River, built 1708 and burnt to the ground in 1963. Colour photograph by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, 1911; Antoniniano of Marcus Aurelius Carinus (Roman Emperor, 283 – July, 285 ad) holding pilum and globe; Albrecht Dürer, "Emperor Charlemagne", 1511/1513, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, Germany; Unknown, "The Coronation of Elizabeth I", 1558, National Portrait Gallery, London, a copy attrib. to Nicholas Hilliard of the lost original

left to right, bottom: Queen Elizabeth II holds the Globus Cruciger, the "Sovereign's Orb", for her coronation portrait in 1953 © Cecil Beaton / Camera Press; Andrea Previtali , "Salvator Mundi", 1480 - 1528, National Gallery, London; Pedro Berruguete, "Salvator Mundi", 1501, Palencia; Anonymous, "The Virgin Hodigitria", 1677, Museum of Architecture, Kiev

Barbara Walker, 1983, page 188: "The cross [is]..a male symbol of the phallic Tree of Life. .often appeared in conjunction with the female-genital circle or oval, to signify the sacred marriage. The male cross and female orb composed the Egyptian 'Nefer' amulet of blessedness, a charm of sexual harmony [c. 2400 bce]; page 534: It is still customary for rulers to hold the "phallic" scepter in the right [male] hand [and] the "yonic" orb in the [female] left hand. This usage descends from the king's [/Queen's] symbolic display of the 'hieros gamos' [sacred marriage] between himself [/herself?] and the Goddess. The original meaning was that the ruler united male and female principles; but the meaning was lost, and only the symbols remain."

citation: Barbara G. Walker, "The Woman's Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets", HarperCollins, 1983, isbn 006250925X

from Wikipaedia- "The Globus Cruciger (Latin) is an orb (globus) topped with a cross (cruciger), a Christian symbol of authority used throughout the Middle Ages on coins, iconography and royal regalia. It symbolises Christ's (the cross) dominion over the world (the orb), literally held in the dominion of an earthly ruler (or sometimes celestial being such as an angel)."

Dear Sister - Mark Twain's Thoughts

2006-08-25T18:06:00.000-06:00

Dear Sister,

Mark Twain holds that one woman requires 35 to fifty men to assist her satisfaction - here is that exerpt - his daughter - may she obtain her reward! - refused to allow publication of "Letters from Earth" until fifty years after Twain's death - here the last half of Letter Eight - Samuel speaks:

"It is as I have said: every statute in the Bible and in the law-books is an attempt to defeat a law of God -- in other words an unalterable and indestructible law of nature. These people's God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible's statutes. He breaks every one of the himself, adultery and all.

"The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life.

"The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in man's construction is this: During your entire life you shall be under inflexible limits and restrictions, sexually.

"During twenty-three days in every month (in absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also she wants that candle -- yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.

"But man is only briefly competent; and only then in the moderate measure applicable to the word in his sex's case. He is competent from the age of sixteen or seventeen thence-forward for thirty-five years. After fifty his performance is of poor quality, the intervals between are wide, and its satisfactions of no great value to either party; whereas his great-grandmother is as good as new. There is nothing the matter with her plant. Her candlestick is as firm as ever, whereas his candle is increasingly softened and weakened by the weather of age, as the years go by, until at last it can no longer stand, and is mournfully laid to rest in the hope of a blessed resurrection which is never to come.

"By the woman's make, her plant has to be out of service three days in the month, and during a part of her pregnancy. These are times of discomfort, often of suffering. For fair and just compensation she has the high privilege of unlimited adultery all the other days of her life.

"That is the law of God, as revealed in her make. What becomes of this high privilege? Does she live in free enjoyment of it? No. Nowhere in the whole world. She is robbed of it everywhere. Who does this? Man. Man's statutes -- if the Bible is the Word of God.

"Now there you have a sample of man's "reasoning powers," as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can't overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her.[**] He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man.

"So he concretes that singular conclusion into law, for good and all.

"And he does it without consulting the woman, although she has a thousand times more at stake in the matter than he has. His procreative competency is limited to an average of a hundred exercises per year for fifty years, hers is good for three thousand a year for that whole time -- and as many years longer as she may live. Thus his life interest in the matter is five thousand refreshments, while hers is a hundred and fifty thousand; yet instead of fairly and honorably leaving the making of the law to the person who has an overwhelming interest at stake in it, this immeasurable hog, who has nothing at stake in it worth considering, makes it himself!

"You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.

"Now if you or any other really intelligent person were arranging the fairness and justices between man and woman, you would give the man one-fiftieth interest in one woman, and the woman a harem. Now wouldn't you? Necessarily. I give you my word, this creature with the decrepit candle has arranged it exactly the other way. Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it. He even wantonly added a sharp pang to that pathetic misery; for he kept within those women's sight, always, stalwart watchmen whose splendid masculine forms made the poor lassies' mouths water but who hadn't anything to solace a candlestick with, these gentry being eunuchs. A eunuch is a person whose candle has been put out. By art.[**]

"From time to time, as I go along, I will take up a Biblical statute and show you that it always violates a law of God, and then is imported into the lawbooks of the nations, where it continues its violations. But those things will keep; there is no hurry."

END of Letter Eight- Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, isbn: 0060518650

[I had told my sister that my panic and obsession was - even if we get 125 years here - that we cannot live long enough to set aside the religious baggage acquired by the age of ten. To which she replied, "Eight".]

Your unfaithful brother, Grayholme

Does God need Housing? Beth-El

2006-07-30T20:13:00.000-06:00

above, l-r: crystal quartz, natural Asherim, verdant springs, grantite pillars - at our 3800 meter elevation in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, it is too easy to question why other human beings continue to believe that God needs affordable Housing - more Temples, Churches, Qubbas - (more male womb/room envies??). But for the curious, Beth-El (House of "God") of Jacob/Israel fame, may not be exactly what you thought--

from Genesis 28, v.18 "So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19 He called that place Beth-El: 22 And this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God's house." Note to Gen 28.18 in the New Oxford Annotated RSV, 3rd Ed. 2001; states "Ancient Israelite local sanctuaries featured sacred pillars, perhaps signifying male powers of fertility (see v. 22; 31.13, 45-54; 35.14, 20)." [Ed: "perhaps"?!]

Who is "El"? From Encyclopædia Britannica, 2001- El (Semitic: "God"), the chief deity of the West Semites. In the ancient texts from Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) in Syria, El (El the Bull) was described as the titular head of the pantheon, husband of Asherah, and father of all the other gods (except for Baal). Although a venerable deity, he was not active in the myths, which primarily concerned his daughters and sons. He was usually visually portrayed as an old man with a long beard and, often, two wings. He was the equivalent of the Hurrian god Kumarbi and the Greek god Cronus. Writers of the [Hebrew Scriptures] used the word El both as a general term for "deity" and as a synonym for Yahweh.
© 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Answering Dimitris - Why Phallos, no Vulva?

2006-07-27T16:13:00.000-06:00

Dear Dimitris-

Last July, you asked me, "How come you've suddenly shifted from vulva to phallus?" And two weeks ago, you asked "I can't help but note that you've taken a much greater interest lately (as far as I get to see things) in the Linga and his various manifestations in and from around the world ... whereas I've met you - originally - you were much more a "yoni man". Or was I deceived into thinking so by my own One-Pointed Attention? Seriously. There seems to be shift there. I'd like to know if my perception is right or wrong - or gray."

Dimitris, let me suggest four answers. This serves as a useful cathartic exercise and your recent question comes at an expected moment - I have reached the classic 55 year old point of the householder who can now answer such questions "without care". One point of correction, I have indeed moved, but only from Yoni to Yoni w/Penis and THEIR manifestations - I have yet not moved quite so far as the "Linga and His various manifestations" - nor do I expect to - see Answer 3 below.

ANSWER 1] SPECTACLE! In response to your invitation to write an "short" essay regarding veneration of the Vulva for Demetra's book, one must immediately ask "why does anyone need explaination to venerate the Yoni/vulva which is everyone's arrival terminal?" then, restated "what blocks/blinds everyone from seeing the obvious?" And when we slowly scratch our way back through time to humankind's first images - why, indeed, it was the Vulva (see S. Giedion's Eternal Present, Vol 1, pg 173ff as an example).

[Now to answer your questions, it is useful to be living in the United States at the time of George W. Bush - same question "what prohibits everyone from seeing the obvious?"]

Why?? SPIN vs SILENCE The yX male (in his confused attempts against the obvious yoni double X chroma superiority) SPINS huge spectacle and false promise- sufficent to satisfy his fears some of the time, maybe most of the time. Women in general quietly dismiss men's spectacle out of hand, but say nothing very loudly (not always from any fear, as women have all the actual power and wisdom, but) because the one thing that having actual power and wisdom does (non-attachment) is begat SILENCE, or if not silence, at least not Spectacle. This, as example, is why it is impossible to write an essay on Yoni veneration without revealing one's maleness and male limits - only a man would use words to create a devotional to a bleeding baby hole.

Next, Woman may very likely also be silent regarding the male spectacle because women reasonably lack any first hand knowledge or appreciation of the two principal entangled fears and envies of the yX male from whence "arise" the motivation for his Spectacle and attempts at compensation-

a) envy of woman's blood magic (moon, menses, making babies)- hence male motifs, myth and mentality requiring blood "sacrifice" including war - a part of a male immortality construct. No woman I have met can believe Menses are a point of male envy, but history and the present male blood letting prove otherwise.

b) phallic magic or lack thereof (aka re-erection, resurrection, "who is controlling whom" and/or, more precisely, "is this erection, my very last erection?") A woman, might have a headache, but she is still physically always able to engage in sex and more importantly, to continue her arousal and have repeated orgasms. Men can neither quickly re-engage nor readily have multiple orgasms. (On this point, see Mark Twain's Letters from Earth, Letter 8.)

The "blood envy" construct, I have begun to understand and have been attempting for some time to discuss in my essay, however the latter - "limited phallic magic", I am only now "wrestling" with (55 years old!) - which would no doubt gave "rise" to your observation of my appearance of phallic fixation.

ANSWER 2] THE TEACHER Remember the ancient saying?? "When the student is ready, the Teacher will appear."?? Perhaps true. The discovery that the first icon was the Vulva and that every present day religion, if you but scratch off about 3000 years of history, was controlled by women, not by men - was, for me - shattering. Yes, a "yoni man"! But at the moment, I am coming, Teacher, upon the motif named "phallos wrapped". Certainly my wanderings since my fortunate trip to Patmos have turned up keyhole after keyhole, motif after motif - each which has expanded into a universe after universe of both knowledge and has revealed earlier misinformation. Perhaps this "rabbit holes" of a Path is itself the expected Teacher? (You have certainly been the Bodhisattva to me - calling from the far shore.) But I carry heavy right-wing fundamentalist baggage, acquired before the age of ten (my sister says "before eight years old") which I cannot exhaust in the remainder of this natural life. You, Dimitris, I think, do not have such baggage - that is, your lightness is your advantage. As I identify each item of baggage, I must ask "what is it?", "where did it come aboard?", "where did/does it fit in the mix?, why should I mend it or toss it?" - BEFORE I can move on. This is an exercise of the FISH attempting to unlearn/describe WATER. A short list of the larger pieces of misguided fundamentalist baggage would be:

One Way - Univocation (ie, My Way or the Highway)
Servants of God (ie, the Almighty needs Your help)
Chosen People (ie, you are the OTHER, so I now I can kill you)
Holy Writ "People of the Book" (ie, Holy Words save you for all Eternity, words are NOT proscibed "images" Ex. 20.4ff)
No history, nor human culture (ie, we be leav'ng fo' heaven any day now!)
Linear time and progressive knowing (ie, Christians know more about God than Jews, Protestants more than Catholics, and I know more than you)
God gives Money to the Holy Ones (ie, the poor are sinners)
AND MORE - stay tune in this space - but said much better than I - Chris Floyd's recent article.

ANSWER 3] ÉGALITÉ! The very very few women who have be kind enough to wade into my tirade - "Cantos Cunnus" - have commented that woman give men/phallos much more credit than do I. And that a truely oppressive Matriachy/Yoni could never exist (except among the leather ladies of your homeland), because if men were to relax their Patriarchy / Phallos, things would only come up to EQUAL - ie, women are not so stupid as to create the opposite of a Patriarchy. This is an opinion expressed by the authors in a number of books by women as well as Leonard Schlain' several tomes. This being the case, one could only move from Yoni to Yoni Around Phallos as a move towards balance - "Penis only" would be a step too far.

ANSWER 4] NO LOCAL YONI You may be correct that I have edged towards the Phallos even if wrapped in virtual vulva - but this past year or more your Yoni acolyte has not had the stablising influence of a willing point of devotion. Again, when the Teacher appears and when She disappears - this too is the Path.

Amen, Amen!

Who is Asher'ah? Part Two: The Object

2006-07-27T15:22:00.000-06:00

Fanciful woodcut above shows Hebrews worshipping the Sun, Moon and stars atop four aniconic Asherim. This blog will sooner or later get to a more probable iteration.

Citation compiled from Encyclopædia Britannica-

The word Asherah (Ashera, Asherim [plural]) in the [Hebrew Scripture] was used not only in reference to the goddess herself but also to indicate a wooden cult object associated with her worship. Prior to the conquest of Canaan (Palestine) by the Israelites in the 12th-11th century BC, the high places (Hebrew BAMAH, OR BAMA, Israelite or Canaanite open-air shrine usually erected on an elevated site) served as shrines of the Canaanite fertility deities, the Baals (Lords) and the Asherot (Semitic goddesses). In addition to an altar, matztzevot (stone pillars representing the presence of the divine) and asherim (upright wooden poles symbolizing the female deities) often were erected on the high places, which sometimes were located under a tree or grove of trees.

Because the Israelites had associated the divine presence with elevated places (e.g., Mount Sinai), they used Canaanite high places to worship their own God, Yahweh. Canaanite agricultural fertility rites and practices were adopted by the previously nomadic Israelites, often in a syncretic fashion with Yahweh replacing Baal. A strong reaction to the adoption of such rites led to protests by Israelite judges and prophets from the 12th to the late 7th century BC, when the Deuteronomic Reform of 621 bce led to the extirpation of the many local high places which included stone pillars, wooden Asherim and altars as sites of worship.
© 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

from Edward Carpenter, 1914: As to the Asherah, or sometimes plural Asherim, translated "grove,"--for which the women wove hangings--the most generally accepted opinion is that it was a wooden post or tree stripped of its branches and planted in the ground beside an altar, whether of Jehovah or other gods. Several biblical passages, like Jeremiah ii. 27, suggest that it was an emblem of Baal or of the male organ, and others (e.g., Judges ii. 13, and iii. 7) connect it with Ashtoreth, the female partner of Baal; while the weaving of hangings or garments for the "grove" suggests the combination of female with male in one effigy. At any rate we may conclude pretty safely that the thing or things had a strongly sexual signification.

Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk by Edward Carpenter, pg 34 [1914] LONDON GEORGE ALLEN & Co. LTD

And BEST article in the internet on Asher'ah and Her connections is Asphodel Long's "Asherah, the Tree of Life and the Menorah : Continuity of a Goddess symbol in Judaism?" presented in 1996 at the College of St. Mark & St. John, Plymouth, UK [w/ excellent bibliography!) I would only add to Ms. Long's connections the Priestly redactor's concerns re: Aaron's blooming Rod and other "power" staffs which populate the Hebrew Scripture.

Two excellent books on this question are:
Patai, Raphael The Hebrew Goddess. Wayne Univ. Press Detroit 1990 isbn: 0814322719
Hadley, J. M. The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah- Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess. Cambridge Univ. Press 1997 isbn: 0521662354

"Sacred Vessels" BENEATH Posts, Page Six

2006-06-29T20:21:00.000-06:00

Above, l-r: Buddhist hand-bell; Schoolmarm's Bell c. 1930; bottle of Courvoisier; Capital Building, Denver, Colorado; Bodnath Stupa, Kathmandu

Now we turn our rancher's boot atop the fence post on its head, tip the wine glass upside down-

From Robert Beer, 1999 “The ritual hand-bell or vajra ghanta (Tib. rdo rje drilbu) ... [incorporate] the two main ritual [Buddhist] implements that symbolise the perfections of method or skilful means (vajra), and wisdom or emptiness (ghanta). As a sexual symbol, the hollow 'lotus' of the bell represents emptiness as the vagina, and the prongs of the vajra - symbolising the four nadi which emanate from the 'jewel-wheel chakra' at the tip of the male sexual organ- represent form or appearance. When paired [ed: separated], the vajra is held in the right hand, and the bell in the left, representing the inseparable union of method and wisdom. Their union is the coincidence of great bliss and compassion as pure emptiness and form.”

citation: Robert Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, Shambhala (1999) ISBN: 157062416X, page 243

Symbolism for the stupa

"Sacred Vessels" ATOP Posts, Page Five

2006-06-18T22:21:00.000-06:00

From Linda O'Keeffe, 1996 "In 16th-century Venice, shoes called chopines (right above) placed women's feet on platforms that frequently rose to unprecedented heights of 30 inches or more. Venetian husbands reputedly introduced the heavy wooden chopines to prevent their wives from straying.

"Manchu women (left above, late 19th century) with unbound feet wore shoes on pedestals to imitate the mincing "Lotus foot" step admired by Chinese men. The stilt-like bases were made from sewn layers of starched cotton."

Citations: Words and photos from "Shoes - A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers & More" by Linda O'Keeffe, Workman Publishing, New York 1996

"Sacred Vessels" ATOP Posts, Page Four

2006-06-18T21:32:00.000-06:00

Above: "Roger Federer became the third player in the Open era to capture four successive Wimbledon tennis championships" -NYTimes.com, July 11, photo: Gerry Penny/European Pressphoto Agency

Below: Geoff Ogilvy kisses his "Loving Cup" trophy, US Open, June 18th, photo: Barton Silverman/NY Times

From Silver Gallery- "Loving Cup Trophy acquired its name from the English. In hopes of enhancing the chances of good crops or health, it was customary to sip spiced beverages from a bowl passed from person to person. Each would kiss the vessel which came to be known as the Loving Cup."

(In case, you thought I was making this stuff up.)

Evening Koans

2006-06-16T22:07:00.000-06:00

The flowered tree is not well hidden.
That shorn, stands between.

Avoid their noisy markings.
Our Paraclete, quiet Chaos.

Speak! O! Sphinx!

2006-06-14T21:16:00.000-06:00

It would be well if the males' compensations - for their lack of connection with Nature; for any obvious continuation beyond death (as women have through birth giving); and for fear of life itself - would simply stop with his invented symbols, written language, wars and religions - BUT he does not stop there - instead he immediately HIDES, whatever his latest invented compensation, inside a somewhat literal inversion of the “Pandora’s Box” mythos.

That is, the male hides that latest paradigm – enclosing all his evil inside the Box - and then he EXCLUDES Pandora and her sisters from seeing what new inventions are inside His SPECIAL box. If we apply the logic - "if smoke, then fire" – that is, if the evidence is first observed that there is now a blatant exclusion of women from the latest male construct, then we may conclude that there is a new paradigm defining one of man’s latest false compensations against death and his fear of living.

As possible examples-
If no female teachers; then education and alphanumeric systems are a false male compensation.
If no female priests; then religions, abstract belief systems are. . . .
If no female doctors; then study of medicine and life sciences are. . .
If no female vote; then government, borders, land boundaries are. .
If no female lawyers; then law systems, corporations, last wills and testaments
If no female soldiers; then wars and implements of war,
If no female inquisitors; then sin, guilt, evil, Devils
If no female competitors; then team sports, races, race cars
If no actresses (kabuki, Shakespeare, Greek); then theater, politics
If no female brotherhoods; then secret societies, fraternities
If no female name givers (nominclators); then naming names, patronyms (male surnames), sacred divine names (“in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost”); honorifics, titles, magic incantations– (cf: Egypt: Hekau below.)

In all, one aweful Tool Box of futile and failed wonders.

Interestingly, one learns with little study that most or all of these constructs mentioned above are not even male inventions, but rather direct robberies from Pandora- as example, from RC Camphausen: “incantations or magic words = the Egyptian “hekau” (from Hekat - Egyptian toad-headed goddess of birth) comes from the Thracian Goddess Hecate (“older than Zeus and Osiris”) who is the archetypal high goddess of magic (her name means “Extending Her Will from Afar”). In this sense then, perhaps “Words of Power” (hekau/magic) do not necessarily/always have to be male-made.”

More "Sacred Vessels" high ATOP Posts

2006-06-13T17:50:00.000-06:00

There appear to be four coital motifs which meander in and out of popular and sacred culture - this oversimplification is somewhat new ground, so we are inventing language/names which will no doubt change as we blog along-

a] "trophy" - more or less equal parts male and female "attributes" which we see above, ie "shoe-in-post"; "Holy Grail"; "bell/ghanta",;

b] "holly wreath" - the vulvic circle made up of phallic parts, ie "crown of thorns"; "ring of keys"

c] "flowered rod" - the phallic wrapped with various female "attributes", probably our anathemic "asher'ah" object.

d] "axis mundi" - more a virtual "pole" around which dynamically turns the "feminine" aspect, ie female earth turning on its male axis or the ziggurat or "Tower of Babel" winding up vertically to the heavens

This post begins the first category- "trophy", then follow through the other three motifs.

From ARAS Online: "The ankh or crux ansata - the sign of life - has the form of a looped knotted cross. As a syllable, this hieroglyph is the root of no less than twenty four words. Of these, Brugsch (cited by Giedion) lists fourteen which retain the original sense of the root: to have existence, to renew existence, to will into existence. Other meanings include those of 'eye' and 'ear' which divert in meaning to that of opening. Winthius (cited by Giedion) observes that the picture of an opening or an eye is recognized by some ethnologists as a picture of the vulva."

"Giedion believes that the Egyptian sign of life may be related to the prehistoric fertility symbols of vulva and phallus, the upper part corresponding to the Aurignacian symbol for the vulva, combined with an abstraction of the phallus, yielding in combination a symbol of androgyny, of the eternal renewal of procreation, of the magic power inherent in the union of male and female."

"In early Christian times, the ankh was modified by Egyptian Christians into the Coptic cross."

credit: ARAS Online [online archive] Record No. 2Ac.008, New York: The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism; available from www.aras.org; accessed 15 June 2006.

Citations mentioned by ARAS:
The Eternal Present: The Beginnings Of Art.
S.Giedion, Pantheon Books. Bollingen Series XXXX\V 6.1, 1962. pp.120,231,233.

The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture
Giedion, S. Pantheon Books, 1964., pp.89-93.

More about the related popular images of Christmas stocking /candy cane and wine glass - or do you already see where we are headed??

Who is Asher'ah? Part One: The Goddess

2006-06-13T17:07:00.000-06:00

Photos above: left, Asher'ah, detail from an ivory box from Minat al-Bayda' near Ras Shamra, Syria, c. 1300bce; in the Louvre, Paris; right, Astarte, with Lotus blossum, Canaan, 3000-2000bce; Israel Museum(IDAM), Jerusalem - see John Singer Sargent's wonderful Astarte in Boston Library.

Against who did the Yahwist prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures rail (Judges 6.25-32; 1 Kings 16.32,33, Ezekiel 8.1-18)? And what was her wooden aniconic image which they repeatedly "broke, cut, hewed, burned and uprooted" (2 Kings 23; 2 Chron 31.1,34.4,7)? First, the goddess - Part Two: The Object.

Drawing from the several citations in the hopefully "neutral" Encyclopædia Britannica , here is what we can easily learn of Asherah (aka- Astarte of Phoenicia, Ishtar of Akkadia, Inanna of Sumeria, Aphrodite of Cyprus, Hathor/Isis of Eygpt, cf: Tara of present day Tibet ). (Why say "neutral"? - a] remember that history, as well as religions and law were written by yesterday's victors and that b] today's fundamentalist believers "of the Book[s]" still avoid any competitive mythos - then, it is best, if possible, to find neutral playing fields.)

From the EB: Asher'ah (or Ashtoreth) was an ancient West Semitic goddess and consort of the supreme god, El (cf: Beth-El). Her full name was probably "She Who Walks in the Sea," but she was also called "Holiness," and, occasionally, Elath, "the Goddess." According to the texts discovered at Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1929, by a French archaeological mission under the direction of Claude F.A. Schaeffer, Asher'ah was the mother of 70 gods by her consort, El. She is also called simply Qudshu, "Holiness." Asherah is associated with the sea and with serpents. As mother goddess she was widely worshiped throughout Syria and Palestine, although she was frequently paired with Baal, who often took the place of El in practical cult; as Baal's consort, Asherah was usually given the name Baalat.

Many Ugaritic texts reveal an older Canaanite mythology. A tablet names the Ugaritic pantheon with Babylonian equivalents; El, Asherah of the Sea, and Baal were the main deities. These texts not only constitute a literature of high standing and great originality but also have an important bearing on Old Testament studies. It is now evident that the patriarchal stories in the Old Testament were not merely transmitted orally but were based on written documents of Canaanite origin, the discovery of which at Ugarit has led to a new appraisal of the Old Testament.

According to the Hebrew Bible, Asherah and Astarte were both worshiped in Israel during the first half of the 1st millennium bce, and Hebrew inscriptions attest to a pairing of Yahweh and Asherah. Up to the time of King Josiah's reform (621 BC) there was a women's cult of Asherah (under qedeshim auspices [consecrated for fertility practices], according to 2 Kings 23:7) in the Jerusalem [ed: aka Solomon's] Temple. The qedsha was one of a class of sacred prostitutes found throughout the ancient Middle East, especially in the worship of the fertility goddess Astarte (Ashtoreth). These prostitutes, who often played an important part in official temple worship, could be either male or female. Although Israelite prophets and reformers repeatedly denounced sacred prostitution, the early Israelites seem to have adopted the local Canaanite rites, which they apparently practiced publicly until the reform of King Josiah about 622 BC.

Asherah's Hebrew devotees considered her the chief wife of Yahweh, even as she was the wife of El, head of the Canaanite pantheon, for in the Bible El is identified with Yahweh. But Josiah eliminated the cult of Asherah, and official Judaism has since then left no place for other gods, which meant the elimination of every goddess. Popular religion, to be sure, persisted in the female fertility principle until the destruction of the Temple in 586 BC. In Judaean excavations Astarte figurines were found in private homes down to that time. Further purification of the Hebrew religion, which was intensified by the catastrophe of 586, put an end to the practice of pagan fertility rites, including the use of goddess figurines. Without goddesses there could be no sexual activity in the pantheon, and thus Judaism has developed without a divine mother figure.

Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Bush's "Marriage Amendment"

2006-06-09T13:41:00.000-06:00

Mr. Bush, the good Christian leader of the free world is at it again this week, to get out the vote this fall among his Christian "core". For the second time, he uses the word "marriage" with the word "gay" - as such oxymorons brings out the lexic folks en masse. For us, dyslexics, "civil union" are the right words. Both sides should put down the word "marriage", especially Christians who rarely read their Book and have no idea of what their founding "fathers" wrote about "marriage"-

First, Christianity was to have been a high speed, short term, SINGLE generational (Matt. 24.15-21, 34) escape strategy from the tainted planet Earth for the “chosen” people - no marriage assembly required - we would be "as the angels" (Matt. 22.30). The shackles of family and earthly concerns were to be thrown down (Matt. 10.34-37, 1 John 1.15-17). St. Paul suggested celibacy (1 Cor. 7.1-7). Jesus recommended much, much worse (Matthew 19.11,12)- "Not all men can receive this precept, but. . .there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs, for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it." Ouch! John the Revelator allowed that the 144,000 saints who surround Christ “the Lamb” on the heavenly Mount Sion “were not defiled with women” (Revelation 14.4). Defiled by women?

"Christian marriage" is the oyxmoron.

Why are the boots on fence posts? Answer:

2006-06-04T23:06:00.001-06:00

We are considering symbols winding in and out of the sacred and mundane. What motivates the rancher to place boots on fence posts? Do you see any similarity between the boots atop the posts and two images that follow? - the shoe-WITH-a-post stileto and the yonilingam - Shiva's "post" and Pavarti's "shoe"?

Perhaps some background is helpful - Freud suggests that the shoe is the symbol of the female genital ("Symbolism in Dreams", in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Tr. and Ed. James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London 1963, vol.XV, p.158 ). And that the foot is a penis substitute (Freud, "Symbolism in Dreams", in op.cit., pp.155-6). So, does the rancher, consciously or unconsciously, create a coital symbol - vagina atop penis - down miles of country lanes?

But to my growing right-wing Protestant "family", physicians that went on to become psychiatrists were Anathema, little better than the Devil Incarnate. Very well, let's turn to 3000 year old Holy Writ - where the feet, legs and thighs are also used as equivalent phallic "euphemisms" to avoid mentioning the extra frightening name of the male reproductive organ itself (just as the Hebrews avoided the name of their monodeity) - as example - after Moses received his divine commission at the Burning Bush to go before the Pharaoh seeking the release the Hebrews, the same all-knowing "Lord" tries to kill Moses because he turns out to be uncircumcised (Ex. 4.24ff). But his quick thinking wife, Zipporah, cuts off the foreskin of her son and touches Mose's "feet" with the bloody foreskin, saying "Truly you are a bridgroom of blood by circumcision to me!" So the Lord spares Moses. Commentary says (NRSV 3rd ed), "'Feet', a euphemism for the genitals (see Isa 7.20)". (Never heard this story, I'll bet.)

OK, Isa 7.20 reads "On that day the Lord will shave. . .the head and the hair of the feet, and will take off the beard as well" refering to shaming of prisoners. Shave the "hair of the feet"? Or Jacob (Israel) tells Joseph to make an oath by putting "your hand under my thigh and promise to deal loyally and truly with me" (Gen 47.29). Similar "euphemisms" are used in Greek myths of birth-giving male Gods, such as Kumarbi begats the the West Wind from his "thigh" or Zeus who gives birth to Dionysus from his "thigh" / penis.

The words, "testament" and "testify" come from the same root meaning as "testicle" - that is, one made an oath by placing your hand over something more precious than your mother's grave! From the knee (penis??) or "genu" comes "genuflect" - to bend the knee in worship. YHWH's covenant with Abraham, father of the Hebrews and Arabs, needed something more than a flexible penis, it required an oath signed with the blood of circumcision (Gen. 17.9-14) - 99 year old Abraham, his 13 year old son, Ishmael and all his male slaves were so "covenanted" on the same day. (Menstrual envy is here suspected by some scholars.)

So, if foot = penis, then boot = vagina. And fence post?

Still not convinced? Freud and Holy Writ not enough? On the back cover of Barbara Walker's book "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" isbn 006250925x, she asks "Why was Cinderella's glass slipper so important to the Prince?" Her answer, pg 168- "Beautified with her new riches, Cinderella won the Prince . . . Their union was symbolized by fitting her foot into a shoe, a common sexual allegory." Need more? From Robert Graves, "Greek Myths: 1" paper isbn 0140010262, pg 94 "Demeter's ecstatic initiates [celebrating the Eleusinian ('advent') Mysteries - 1500bce to 396ad] symbolically consummated Demeter's love afair with Zeus in an inner recess of the shrine by working a phallic object up and down a woman's top-boot;" this being "the temple of she who rages in a lurking place." Yet more? Charles Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Harper 1987, isbn 0060960930, pgs 26,27 "Today old shoes are tied to newlyweds' car and no one asks why. Originally, shoes were only one of many objects tossed at a bride to wish her a bounty of children. In fact, shoes were prefered over the equally traditional rice and wheat because from ancient times the foot was a powerfully phallic symbol [Ed: Panati fails to state the obvious converse - that the shoe was therefore a powerful vulvic symbol]. In several cultures, particularly among the Eskimos, a woman experiencing difficulty in conceiving was instructed to carry a piece of an old shoe with her at all times."

Does a fence post within a boot then equals "hard core xxx" farmer symbolism? Makes certain fetishes easier to understand. More comments to come on other "sacred vessels" high atop (or beneath) poles in this obsession to discover the proletariat's "Asher'ah".

...for the letter kills, but the spirit giveth life.

2006-05-31T21:13:00.000-06:00

To: letters@nytimes.com

To the Editor,

Re "Moses' Top Ten
By SARAH VOWELL
Published: July 16, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/16/opinion/16vowell.html

Aside the greater question of keeping Caesars and Gods in separate corners, Christians intent to affix "Ten Commandments" in American government venues (or anywhere else) should reread its second command which proscribes "graven images" (Exodus 20.4). Twenty ton granite monuments featuring the Ten Commandments would certainly qualify as "graven images" as well as "lithographs" (stone writings) hung on walls - in homes or in court houses. (The point was that any image is forbidden which substitutes attention, to any degree, from the invisible Divinity! - do we need to draw you a picture? or will WORDS suffice? [trick question])

The prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 31.31ff, cf: Heb. 8.6-13) stated that "the days will come that (the Lord) will make a NEW COVENANT, not according to the covenant...made with their Fathers...out of Egypt, but a covenant (He) will...write in their hearts." Well, this has not happened yet - in 2900 years.

This echoed by the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 3.6,2 NRSV)that "God has made us competent to be ministers of a NEW COVENANT - written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tables of stone, but on tablets of human hearts - for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." Still, not happening yet - 1960 years later.

As water is to fish, WORDS (yes, words!) themselves are the very invisible "graven idols" of bigots. (One does well to read ones own Book!)

Why does the rancher put boots on fence posts?

2006-05-28T18:47:00.000-06:00

The good Frater Holme's raison d’être is to physically demonstrate (theorem) that "sacred" symbols so perculate into [and out of] mundane and profane everyday objects; that such phenomena / relationships refute both Protestantism' literalism [univocation, i.e., "my way or the highway"] AND Catholic scholasticism; "both which are exterminators of symbolism" [Brown, Love's Body, 1966, pg 199]; meaning that there is no escape from the overwhelming superiority of symbolism mediating within the human psyche - "put down your weapons [words, idols and other third party meditations] and step away from your [expensive] vehicle!" "For the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." 2 Cor 3.6

Patmos, the Island of the Apocalypse

2006-05-28T10:29:00.000-06:00

This unlearning project begins with a visit with my friend, Babis Alexandrou, to the island of Patmos in 1995 during the celebration of the 1900th anniversary of the writing of the Book of the Apocalypse, commonly called "Revelation" by St. John the Divine. John was said to have been exiled by the emperor Domitian (81-96 ce) on a deserted desert island of Patmos. However, Patmos was hardly a deserted island. In 95 ce, the island was a maritime trading point between Asia Minor and Europe with at least 4000 inhabitants and one of the largest temples to the asian goddess Artemis (Diana) - complete with officiating hierodulic priestesses - located outside of the cult center of Artemis, the seaport city of Ephesus, only some 55 miles away - see Acts 19.24-35. This temple was about 20 minutes walk from the grotto where John and his disiple, Prochorus, are said to have been writing their Revelations. In 1088ce, the temple was destroyed by the Orthodox monk, Hosios Christodoulous of Latra. On its ruins, Christodoulous built the present fortress- monastery (above bottom - more Patmos photos).

This changes everything. John the Divine could have said, "Prochorus, I'm exhausted by dictating this dream. You tidy up some of the syntax. I met a priestess in the bar last night - see you in a couple of days." Time to re-read the Book of Revelation - especially the references to women - especially, to the Artemis-related woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, about to give birth, fighting a dragon - who features in the twelfth chapter - as her story is the inversion of the pre-existing Greek myth of the twins, Apollo (sun) and his sister, Artemis (moon) killing the she-dragon, Python, because the dragon attacked their mother, Leto, while they were invitro. Strange Christian window into "pagan" feminine mythos. Something, no protestant preacher ever preached at me.