Posted by araucaria
(here)
Posted by CD7
(here)
Well actually no, none of this sounds familiar.
OK, let me tell you what sounds familiar to me in all of this.
Queens greedily devouring boys to mark lunar cycles sounds exactly like Arizona Wilder’s description to David Icke of goings-on at Windsor Castle. Matriarchy not dead? The deity in those days was the Triple Moon Goddess (in her triple aspect: waxing, full, waning moon). I’ll come back to this. Notice in passing how the importance of the number 13 comes from the lunar year of 13 months (364 days).
The change from sacrificing boys to animals is documented in the Old Testament in the story of Abraham substituting a ram for Isaac on instructions from Yahweh. Yahweh often gets a bad press, but this sounds like progress. And Christianity, which also often gets a bad press, offers what sounds like further progress with Jesus offering himself symbolically in the form of bread and wine. To criticize this as a late form of cannibalism is to look backwards in time. The forward-looking view sees it as an improvement, although we now need to apply this same process of purification to the notion of sacrifice itself.
In Greece, the sacrifice would have been a bull, or maybe the difference is of time rather than place: different ages (Taurus followed by Aries: the mythical Jesus in the new age of Pisces would sacrifice fish). Rams and bulls were supplementary to requirements: a typical flock or herd would consist of females and their young; adult males being needed only in small numbers (even less when their contribution to the reproductive cycle was not understood). Nowadays we have herds of bullocks by castrating the males. Alternatively we have countries where bulls are allowed to live: until they reach the bullring, that is. Bullfighting at least shows respect for the animal’s physical integrity.
There has been talk on this thread about circumcision. This may have been originally a form of symbolic castration. Possibly the rise of the male was accompanied by an increase in testosterone levels, which have reached such unacceptable proportions today that we read posts here calling for a cull of the alpha males. Back then, the phallus was the only weapon men had to get a foothold on life, and the cult of the obelisk continues to provide evidence that the macho society is very much living in the past.
13, Apollo, Moon, obelisk: Apollo 13, the triangle on top of the Saturn V obelisk, marked the failed meeting of the sun god and the moon goddess. On the symbolic level, this is the true story of the moon adventure, and understandably many people see the ‘successful’ missions as being necessarily a hoax.
The top god in the new patriarchy was Zeus, Jupiter in Latin, also called Jove. You see the link to Jehovah/Yahweh). Zeus and his thunderbolts was possibly a Velikovskian age of Jupiter, but in any case not a sun god, presumably because the next biggest deity in the night sky after the moon goddess. The sun god of daylight was Phoebus Apollo.
The modern God, Deus, is likely a conflation of Zeus and Apollo. He has still not resolved his differences with the divine feminine, or, to put it another way, got over the trauma of earlier times. He has inherited from the male priesthood serving the queenship vicariously, while dressed in feminine robes. The pope is the
Vicar of Christ and I would suggest that his unreasonable refusal to accept women priests is only explicable if we see this role being played by
male priestesses.
I have mentioned elsewhere how the Reformation was over the role of women, the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary, against Puritanism and its outright rejection of the divine feminine. The Virgin Mary is itself a puritan version of the divine feminine, of which the Mary Magdalen angle would be the full-blown version. See below:
Posted by araucaria
(here)
There is a little more to the Mary Magdalen story than this smear campaign. It involves the identifying of her too with a mythical figure, namely what Robert Graves calls the Triple Goddess or the White Goddess, and which the poet Ted Hughes applies to a sizeable chunk of Shakespeare in
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. This is a lengthy explanation whose thesis is that Shakespeare was using the theatre as a ploy to expose his Catholic views at a time when Puritanism was persecuting Catholics. Simplifying outrageously, the eternal feminine (the Goddess of Complete Being), he says, was the major battleground at this time, espoused by Catholicism and rejected by Puritanism. She comprises at once the mother figure, the pure bride and the whore (representing her sexuality), which are not separable without leading to tragedy. Several plays explore different failures to reconcile these aspects of woman. For example, Othello, who loves his loving wife, kills the whore; or Hamlet, whose hesitation is because killing the whore also means killing his mother, while facing this dilemma collapses his relationship with his chaste bride Ophelia, whom he packs off to a nunnery; you get the picture.
From this perspective, misogynistic Pauline Christianity corresponds to Puritanism and counterintuitively Catholicism would be its heretical offshoot – the main difference being the acknowledged importance of women, with the emphasis on Mary the mother, Mary Magdalen the bride and sexual partner. It is somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church is criticized today for manifestly not doing enough for women. And back in the Elizabethan era, at a time when people were getting hanged, drawn and quartered for this major difference of opinion, Shakespeare was a whistle-blower and spiritual guide of the first order, using the fiction of the theatre to speak some unsavory truths.
This myth is often to be found in modern fiction as well. In French, Mary Magdalen is Marie Madeleine. Thus in Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time, she is a central mythical figure, not only for the famous madeleine cake and tea episode and its discreet connection with the narrator’s mother, but also the connection with his lover, alternating chasteness and promiscuity and stirring love and jealousy. This is also the theme of James Joyce’s
Ulysses, whose hero, Leopold Bloom, copes rather better with the sometimes unfaithful goddess figure he is married to. And the theme can be traced through
The Arabian Nights in which the wife is fighting for her life all the way back to
The Odyssey, in which the man is fighting for his wife.
So there was a whole lot going on long before Dan Brown came on the scene to popularize the story. We need to see the power of myth not simply as a way of spreading disinformation about real individuals but also as the universal relevance given to universal issues. Learning the truth about Mary Magdalen can help remove the smears to the individual; it can also help us deal with this endless issue of male violence due to (over)possessiveness, incomprehension and ultimately fear of the fair sex.
Re: Here and Now...What's Happening?
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She said we are in between.
'Birthdays are nature's way of telling us to eat more cake!' .
my mistake. 
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