Medieval literature contains copious reference to a custom on New Year's Day, in obedience to which men disguised in deerskins or as old women took part in riotous dances and processions. Though the performers were Christians, the rite was clearly borrowed from heathendom.... It was called cervulos facere, and incurred the bitterest hostility from official quarters in the Early Church. From the fourth to the eleventh century bishops and saints in Gaul, Germany, Spain, and Italy denounced it in monotonous unison from cathedral and pulpit ; it was even definitively banned by the Council of Auxerre at the end of the sixth century, though without effect. In England its observation was less general, or else ecclesiastical tutelage was more indulgent, for the fulminations are much scarcer. Yet it existed, and was proscribed anew under the Christian kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons by the Liber Poenitentialis of Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury from 669-670 and a celebrated disciplinarian. The book, which may be in part later than Theodore, yet exercised a great influence from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, prescribed three years' penance for the sin:-
" Si quis in Calendis Januariis in cervulo aut vetula vadit, id est, in ferarum habitus se tommutant et vestiuntur pellibus pecudum et assurnit capita bestiarum ; qui vero taliter in ferinas species se transformat, III annos poeniteat, quia hoc demoniacum est." Lib. Poen, Thorpe, xxvii, 25.
The original significance of the custom it is hardly the purpose of the present note to examine. De Gubernatis (Zoology and Mythology, p. 88) explains the old woman, the second form of disguise, as representing a sort of winter-witch. It is worth observing that St. Augustine also mentions a third disguise, viz., as a goat :-
"indui ferino habitu et capreac aut cervo similem fieri," (Op. Migne, vol. v, col. 2003, ad Cal. Jan.).
"The Running of the Deer"
Richard D. Barnett
Folklore, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Dec. 31, 1929), pp. 393-394.
Actually the Flood was caused by Ishtar when she was suffering from PMT. See Tablet 11 of The Epic of Gilgamesh. I am also mystified as to why anyone would worship a being who is described as sending plagues and floods on innocent people. Anyway, it’s all a metaphor…So the Lord said, “I will destroy Man whom I have created from the face of the Earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry I have made them.” - Genesis 6:7
So, God gets pissed at Man and decides not only to kill every single person on the planet (even the newborn babies who are, one would think, blameless), but he also decides to off all the animals. Well, except fish, I would guess. They were probably quite pleased!
Anyhow, flood happens. God has a grand ole time going along undoing everything he did. Is it just me, or does he strike you as a frustrated gamer, always reloading Sims from a save point, after having done horrible things to his Sims?
The Bible was written by writers, and I’ve long felt that much of what those writers wanted to say has been lost, crushed, twisted, and sometimes outright perverted by later so-called “Bible based” traditions. All religious sentiments aside, as a fellow writer I feel it is my calling and my sacred duty to read through the text, not for comfort or for inspiration or for edification, but simply to hear what it is they were trying to say.David says:
This is not a story they taught me at Temple Sinai's Hebrew School in 1980: The founding fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel lie, breach a contract, encourage pagans to convert to Judaism only in order to incapacitate them for slaughter, murder some innocents and enslave others, pillage and profiteer, and then justify it all with an appeal to their sister's defiled honor.Bill says:
I am not against the Bible. I am just against the idea that this book – or any other book, including the Koran or the Book of Mormon or whatever – is a special revelation from God. It is probably the most irrational, dangerous and divisive idea that currently infects the human psyche. And, as Art Lester said to me last month, ‘The book-believers are the ones who will destroy the world.’ Sadly, Art might just be right. And it is our duty to challenge the book-believers, by fostering a new kind of religious consciousness with the contrary message that knowledge and wisdom are the result of human thought, human experience, reflection, reason, scientific endeavour. They do not drop down from heaven fully formed, nor are they are not the preserve of one nation or one religion or one period in history. And they are certainly not to be found in one book. To suggest that they are is to turn works of literature into loaded guns.Bill is the author of The Gospel and the Zodiac, which puts forward the idea that the Jesus mythos was originally an initiatory mystery based on the symbolism of the Zodiac. Neat idea.
But "there's nothing magical about fathers," says Susan Golombok, professor of family research and director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, and co-author of Growing Up in a Lesbian Family. "Fathers who are very involved with their children are good for children. But fathers who are not very involved - they aren't as important, and can even have a negative effect. It's a very simplistic notion to think that fathers are important just because they're male."In (neo-, meso- and paleo-) Pagan societies, there are and were many models of bringing up children (and many models of gender). Some tribal societies don't bother to keep track of who is the father of which child; some are patrilineal, some are matrilineal. In India, they have a saying that "It takes a whole village to bring up a child." We should be much more worried about the loss of the extended family, and the tribal community in which a child can get advice and help from any member of the community, not just its parents. The 'nuclear family' model seemingly advocated by the Conservative party is claustrophobic and probably dangerous to children on the grounds that abusive practices can happen within the four walls of the home without anyone else finding out (especially if the family is outwardly respectable). Other traditional societies have extended families to share childcare. Even if a child did need a role model of the same gender (which Professor Golombok's research seems to show is unnecessary), you could aways have a gay couple and a lesbian couple sharing the parenting.Don't boys need male role models? "The thing is that fathers make absolutely no difference to their children's development of masculinity or femininity," she says. "Studies that have looked at single-parent families have not found that boys are less masculine or girls less feminine. In fact, it seems that parents make very little difference to the masculinity or femininity of their sons and daughters. The peer group is more important, and the stereotypes that are around them in their day-to-day life. Even in families where parents try hard to influence their children's gender developent, where they try to stop their sons being very masculine, for example, and try to make them more gender-neutral, actually find that whatever they do makes no difference whatsoever. Fathers are important more in terms of emotional wellbeing, not in terms of role models."
As for the lesbian issue, says Golombok, "There's now been more than 30 years of research in Europe and the US, that has found very consistently that children raised in a lesbian household are no different from children in heterosexual families, both in terms of their psychological adjustment, and also in terms of their gender development, and in terms of their relationships with other children.
In his lecture, the Archbishop sought carefully to explore the limits of a unitary and secular legal system in the presence of an increasingly plural (including religiously plural) society and to see how such a unitary system might be able to accommodate religious claims. Behind this is the underlying principle that Christians cannot claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds (for instance in situations where Christian doctors might not be compelled to perform abortions), if they are not willing to consider how a unitary system can accommodate other religious consciences.I still disagree with what he said - in my opinion, the law should be single, unified and not make special exemptions for anyone (whether they be Christian homophobes seeking to discriminate against LGBT people, or Pagans who want to rebury ancient human remains, or the implementation of sharia for Muslims - most of whom have very sensibly asked, which sharia law are you going to implement? and in fact the Archbishop acknowledged the multiple forms of sharia) . It is OK to allow people to do stuff which doesn't hurt anyone else (e.g. there are special arrangements in place for Muslims to have mortgages without borrowing money at interest, which is usury and forbidden in Islam), and if Christian doctors don't want to do abortions they can refer women to clinics, and there are compromise options available in the ancient human remains situation. But discrimination in the provision of goods and services to LGBT people is just bang out of order.
Rethinking religion in an open societyI would recommend reading this, regardless of whether you are an atheist or a person with a religion or a spiritual path.
Though the role of religion in society has come back onto the agenda with a vengeance in recent years, the political, spiritual and intellectual resources at our disposal for handling the issues involved seem perilously thin on all sides in public life. This paper aims to reconstruct some key terms in the debate and to offer a positive case for a 'disestablished' form for religion within a plural social and political order. In particular it suggests that the alternative to hegemonic religion or attempts to exclude religion from public life lies in the rediscovery of an alternative form of politics rooted in practical 'goods' and 'virtues' derived from different communities and traditions, accompanied by the development of a 'civil state' framework.
So we must laugh and drink from the deep blue cup of the sky,Buddhist community of Lam Rim contribution – Mike Austin – he read from the Capala Sutra, which reminds Buddhists how to stay awake.
Join the jubilant song of the great stars sweeping by,
Laugh, and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured
In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord.
While I think that modern Pagans and polytheists should strive towards solidarity (when feasible) with those who practice pre-Christian faiths and rituals, our support should never be confused with the notion that we have a "right" to "borrow" (and take out of cultural context) their spiritual practices for our own benefit. Empathy for the Indian struggle does not confer the right to appropriate Native traditions and practices. Praying like an Indian doesn't help the Indian preserve their culture and integrity, it only serves our vanity and dilutes authentic practice.There's an excellent article about Responsible Eclecticism and Cultural Appropriation which outlines the difference - basically if you take someone else's ritual and plonk it down in your spiritual context with no thought about what you are doing, that is cultural appropriation. If in addition to that, the group you have borrowed from is in danger of having its culture and land-rights stomped all over by mainstream culture, and you do nothing to help them in their struggle, that is the pits. And most of the plastic shamans have done nothing to assist in the indigenous struggle for self-determination, they've just ripped off their rituals and made a great deal of money out of them.
by yksin
