There are always three Gods traditionally wherever you go. The Sky, Air and Earth gods. To understand the father Gid think of the difference between the air and the sky! This makes a great insight into the troublesome Trinity of Christianity. It was once explained to me that God was the Sun in Space, Jesus the sun as mankind sees it on Earth and the Holy spirit the light connecting the two. Well exactly right, and going back long before Christianity. Interesting fellow who told me that - a story there!
On the shores of the Mediterranean they venerated a female deity, and this seems to be the pattern in pre-historical times. Man didn't understand his role in fertility. Women held the keys to life and were celebrated for this. Neolithic figurines with greatly exaggerated female parts symbols of feminity, fertlity and creation. The "Source". For the farmers that evolved fertility became an essential feature of their labour in the fields. Work alone was not enough, mysterious fertility was the magic of nature. Hunter gatherers in northern climes had braved the winters and the loss of fertility and this was mythologised as the Earth Mother losing her lover and mourning for the winter, only to have him resurrected in spring.
Again here is another circle. In 1996 I had formed the opinion that female emancipation was the key to the future because women hold the key to life. They are earthly creatures bound to reality and nature through the experiences of childbirth that men can only wonder at from afar. They are involved in a stream of life in a way that men can never understand. This wholesomeness and connectedness with reality I saw as a key feature of their wisdom. I had a compilation of only female song-writers (and they form a interesting group by themselves in the ocean of men) brilliant names like Susan Vega, Cindi Lauper, Tori Amos to name a few. It was called Predominant Female (not only because it was predominantly female, but pre-Dominant also). Or so was the belief then. Then I met "my muse".
But man soon enough understood his role in childbirth. And women being so deeply involved in the stream of life knew that they needed a man to complete their fertlility. Man gained the bargaining tool and rose to "call the shots" (great song - is Phoenix really rising? - was it written by a man tho? Xenomania - the producers who also do Sugababes who I have to acknowledge are quite good tho they can't sing yet! -have got the right idea - it was obvious that this had all been over looked by the music industry when the Spice Girls started in 1996 - yes I thought I was prophetic then). So the cult of man-gods began and where the female Earth of fertility had ruled the Sky God her husband came to dominate and mete out and control the law of fertility.
This issue of fertility goes real deep. A gay friend of mine had to resolve this. Interesting that to understand the role of "sex" in a gay relationship he had to decide that he was infertile. Whatever society says this is a profound question - what is the meaning of fertility to a homosexual? This is the crucifix upon which homosexuality is hung by the church. Does sex have meaning outside of fertility and issues arrising from fertility? Open question.
You will have heard of the major Saxon gods before: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday names after Tiw (war but maybe evolved from sky Tiwaz, Zeus, Deus, Deva etc), Woden (dead), Thor(thunder - usually goes with sky God) and Frigg (fertility). There is another called Balder who has been much forgotten in England, the son of Frigg. His myth surrounds his death and resurrection, his death marking the beginning of the end of the world. Further North there was no resurrection. He is forgotten maybe because his myth got adopted by Jesus instead, and this myth originating with the fertility goddess of old. American "End Timers" really should read the mythologies of their founder nations to get a bigger picture! This has been a big failure of the American dream: to start history in 1776!
Now the book makes brief mention of the Hebrew God - Yahweh. Apparently he is different from all the other gods. Yahweh has no manifestion on Earth. The books says that the Indo-Aryans believed that these physical entities were the god. I'm not quite sure about this. When I experienced what I recon might have been the Earth Mother at Mere while she was the Earth, it was in another plane, over laid upon the physical earth. It was as if I was understanding the hills as her body induced by a strong sense of peace and a connection via what I think they call the heart chakra (these are just words for something not quite normal!). So yes you disrespect the physical earth and you disrespect the Earth mother that is true. Yahweh on the other hand is not immanent in nature at all. This seems to challenge what I have been saying about Laws. I seem to have linked Reality and Laws with Yahweh. Branston quotes 1 Kings 19:11-12 which I won't quote but says clearly that God is not in nature... 'I AM THAT I AM' says He. A variant one might think for the great Upanishad assertion 'tat tvam asi' which states "I am That". Buddha is similar "That is not I" (profound opposite of "I am That"). All better than Descartes "I think therefore I am". Yahweh makes no identity, relation, nothing: He just IS. I find this very hard to comprehend - the Ouroboros is stirring - Is Yahweh an Ouroboros? Extremely deep issues here that I am not even close to examining - far beyond the pagan stuff I set out to look at...
The worlds customs and people are not so different when you look beneath the surface. Compare May poles (which have vanished in my life time) with Totem poles. I like this one especially: The Orion's Belt in the constellation Orion has another name "the three kings". The line of stars points to Sirius the brightest star in the Northern Sky and on the winter solstice apparently (I need to check) the sun rises beneath this. So as the night evolves and the sky revolves on the longest night first you see the three kings. And, if you follow those
to a bright star in the East the sun - the new born Lord, the sun god, the Oak of light is crowned as king. Oak is the spring and summer form of the Horned God (pre Saxon now) who rivals with his darker brother the Holly for the attention of The Goddess. His is defeated at midsummer and retires so the celestial wheel to gain wisdom before being reborn (sound familiar ;-). Maybe the appeal of Catholocism in Meditteranean countries is the preservation of this myth with teh Virgin Mary? Here he is (I think) in the Chruch of St Mary and St Sexburga in Sheppey. Found this is my picture collection this week. Apparently it is one of the oldest places of worship in England, St Sexburga having being associated with a nunnery founded in AD664 [ref] less than 67 years after Augustine arrived. My bike was stolen from outside the church while I was talking to the people inside - worth the photo tho I think.The horned god also also known as "Cernunnos, the Green Man, Herne the Hunter, and Lord of the Wild Hunt, he is a god of fertility, growth, death, and rebirth" [ref]. Yet the Wild Hunt is usually led by women Berthas (very fearsome I think!) and also Artemis and Diana in Greece a nod to the once dominant Goddess. Herne gets resurrected in this much more modern myth from Berkshire.
Speaking of retiring to gain wisdom another feature of this is the being hung on a tree. The Northmen believed a great ash tree supporting the universe called Yggradsil. Odin (Woden) gained his mystical knowledge from being hung to die on this tree! Over the millennia the separated tribes carrying these stories have turned up a real soup of mythologies, but the basic threads can still be seen all the way through to this day. You can see where Science got its legs from. As peoples met and had such wildly different stories to tell the dissatisfaction with the myths musthave grown and people began to look for myths that all people everywhere could share. Sometimes this is done through force (politics, education), sometimes it just happens through social bonding, but sometimes it is done peacefully through wisdom and enquiry (I hope). If there is a Truth surely this must be the one we are interested in... not random regionalised myth, not unexamined normative myths, not dogmatic,, oppressive must have "Beliefs" (note the sub list comma, does it work?), but something we can hold in our hands look at with confidence and show other people - the scientific Truth but one about things that interest namely our lives not disinterested "matter"-s.
So returning to woman and man the myths go back a long time. The foundations of our own understanding of these issues goes back a long time. But at root something I have become aware of myself. Women are the driving force of biological Life. They are the force to procreate, they are the force to marriage, to buy houses, to start faimilies, to 'nest' as I described the behaviour in the partners of my friends. And to do this they need a man. A man completes a woman's desires. A man on the other hand is more independent, once even completely outside the cycle of life. For him woman surrounds and absorbs him, is the mysterious world of nourishing fertility that he wishes to be come enveloped in. This is certainly how I felt in 1996 and I'm in accord with Branston. Women are the stronger then their energies going into the stream of life, while men have while only a supporting role, an essential role. Being freer they have used this as blackmail over the centuries to dominate. Tables are turning now as women are discovering once again how to be free from men in all aspect even child-birth.
But and like everything I am saying at the moment there is another side to this. Yahweh is not bound to nature. Buddha does not say that the natural world is where it is at. Like Plato these people are scornful of nature as an imperfect and decaying place. Mankind's true nature is transcendent of nature. Thus Men raise to ascendency precisely because they are not tied into the muddy impure world of natural being. Women are weakened in their transcendence because of the ties. [nice but useless pun there with weekend]. This is why in the Indian religions women have such a low status. I have had complete faith in Buddha ever since reading the Dhammapada so what did he really say about women and what has come into the texts since?
I faced this problem in 2003 walking to John o'Groats. Realising afterwards that I sought Nature not as a natural being but as an spiritual being. The natural beings will destroy the planet ironically, over populating and getting rich upon it. While the transcendent species enjoy nature as a place to Be, not as a source of life. So the human is not animal when they take a walk in the woods, but instead spiritual. While the woods may have been grown for timber to make things and create wealth to bring up a family - which is humans as natural. Mixing in yesterdays musings on the subject participation with nature is thus two levelled. One immanent immersion in nature through Living (work, sex, families etc; Subsisting) and the other immanent immersion in nature through Being (experiencing, watching, walking; Existing). I've tried to do both and failed. I wanted sex to be a state of Being of experiencing nature, but of course it teeters on the brink of subsisting because women so think differently it seems and sex does mean children...
So the decision can't be made which is better the Earth Mother or the Sky Father, woman or man. They are not equal, but they are not unequal either: they are different and are involved in a very complex ancient mythology that resurrects even today in the very questions I am posing to my self: what is Life and how to Live?
A sub-conclusion here though. The question for you Mr G is this. Do you want to Live or do you want to Be: or are you not really doing both? Yet paganism and Monotheistic religions and Buddhism do not mix: they are at different levels. Do paganism and you can live but you will forget to be. Do Monotheism and you will Be but you may forget to live, as ascetic you will be challenged not to live. Buddha solved this with the "middle path": live no more than you need - take what you need only - do not indulge the wants, and do not starve the body.
p.s. you'll notice my mother has kindly hosted me for the week so lots of time to get on with examining these things on line. I notice that subsistence is an important ground to existence. It is hard in the garage because of fear of the establishment. This means that the state here is employing terrorism because I am afraid of them despite having done nothing wrong! I should write on the "Enclosure Acts" soon which I'm sure hold the key to the fascist state we have in UK. People of Briton vote for a government, but this presuposes that we are part of a political system. I was confirmed into the CoE which I hold to be a higher authority than the government and accept Gods judgement (I've no choice see previous posts), yet I have never agreed to be part of the political state and I'm sure anyone reading this hasn't either? Yet the state seems to assume we are part of it and that we are governed by it's decisions... how did this fascism come about? Unbelievably important issue... what if the government really is illegitimate! and I can't see how it is not. That would be a case to end all cases... a real ragnarok and the Ouroboros to end everything!
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