Students of comparative theology have long been aware of resurrection motifs in religion before Christ. James Tabor points to an even more direct antecedent in Judaism, as a new scholarly paper offers textual evidence of the sufffering-messiah-resurrected-after-three-days motif in Judaism circulating shortly before Jesus' crucifixion.
Available here.
The first picture below is "DJ Lea Luna - Pretending To Be Holy & In Control of Some Unknown Something or Other . . . ." When I saw this on FFFFOUND it immediately looked familiar, and then it hit me--it's a front-view echo of the picture that Erich van Daniken claimed to depict an ancient Mayan astronaut.
The following Bell Labs movie--directed by Frank Capra!--was a reliable way for my elementary & middle school teachers to kill time. What I'd forgotten about this classic film since then was how religion dominates it early on--the biblical reference at the opening to offset the science & paganism, Mr. Sun as a bitterly nostalgic dethroned deity basking in the memory of past adulation, the use of Father Time's forward focus to skirt explaining creation before the film had a chance to establish its cultural cred. The overarching narrative frame is fantastic as well--the meta-play of fiction and fact, with the text escaping control of its authors, illustrates a point with which I've annoyed any number of graduate seminars: there's precious little in postmodernism that hadn't already appeared in cartoons.
Anyway kids, roll up your nap blanket and get your milk & cookies, 'cuz here he is . . . Our Mr. Sun!
Via Bogoff.com, found through Neatorama, which featured the following super-cool Masonic watch from the 1930s and made the spot-on joke I wish I'd thought of first.
Speaking of Tech_Space, this post noting the excavation of an undisturbed Egyptian tomb immediately got me thinking about things I always think about when reading about Egyptian tombs.
Partly lamenting the disturbance of the inhabitant's ka and hoping beyond hope that Osiris isn't real, because if he is we are so screwed.
Partly meditating on how Egyptian tombs functioned as mnemonic proto-hologram projectors (no kidding--if you've ever been in one that hasn't been stripped, you'll see what I mean).
And above all, recalling my favorite board game as a child, filled with sacred jewels, mysterious hieroglyphics, eerie spirits and vengeful gods: Voice of the Mummy!
Neurospectacle has a rundown on trepanation,
a procedure where a hole is drilled into the skull, exposing the dura mater and brain for either medical (relief of pressure) or mystical (supposed heightened consciousness) purposes. It is likely the oldest procedure in neurosurgery and has been practiced by many ancient peoples all over the world.
Featured links include an animated how-to video (!), an illustrated history of the practice and an account of its modern revival among the extreme-body-mod community.
Although I've long been accused of having a hole in my head, I can't vouch for the procedure's effectiveness.
The violent extermination of the Mandaeans in Iraq--a gnostic sect that traces its origins back to John the Baptist--has been getting some coverage in the mainstream press. Their situation is also difficult in Iran, where they are systematically being deprived of their livelihood:
One occupation long open to Mandaeans has been jewelry making. However, . . . the Iranian Jewelers’ Association, who exercises control over the issuance of official licenses, has decided in 2003 to issue new job licenses to Muslim jewelers only. Mandaean jewelers were not allowed to apply for new licenses, thus depriving young Mandaeans of one of the few occupations they were allowed to practice.
For everything you need to know about the feast of Thoth (unless you're an Egyptologist, I guess), click here.
Streams in the Desert in Pahrump (!) Nevada is a Christian book store that also sells jewelry. And, by the way, offers hyberbaric oxygen treatments and Christian colon cleansing. According to the shop's owners, colon hydrotherapy is an ancient judeochristian practice described in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And Streams in the Desert is not alone. Turns out the DSS Essenes have been appropriated by any number of modern-day practitioners who tout the spiritual benefits of inner cleansing. But if you actually read through the available collected texts of the Scrolls, you won't find the cited texts there.
What gives?
In a nutshell, it goes back to a guy named Edmund Bordeaux Szekely, who claims to have discovered a pristine collection of ancient Essene texts. In his Essene Science of Fasting, the group is depicted as advocating enemas as part of its spiritual discipline. After that, the deluge.
Fun bonus fact: Jim Bakker's Heritage USA included a shop selling a seaweed drink mix that purported to give your colon a heavenly cleansing. The proprietors gave me heaps of the stuff free as a loss leader when I interviewed PTL folks for a project in grad school. Thanks to their description of what this miracle seaweed would do to me for the first three or so days after chugging it down, I never touched the stuff.
Folks who grew up in the 1970s may remember the Mighty Isis. She was a school teacher who transformed into an Egyptian superheroine. Here's a video of the transformation, in which the BofG plays a supporting role:
Ancient Egyptian gods are tricky things. First there's the matter of the spelling--the transliterated hieroglyphic for the goddess depicted in this approximately three-thousand-year-old amulet is variably rendered in English as "Nwt", "Nuit," "Newit" or "Nut." Nut was the Egyptian sky goddess, who gave birth to the stars and the morning sun.
There is also another common variation: the image of the deity itself. In Nut's case, she could be a woman, a cow, or, as here, a sow--all conveying an image of fecundity. Or perhaps something more sinister:
It is not surprising that, as mother of the stars, she should have taken the form of a great sow, for the female pig’s habit of eating her own piglets must have been well known.
The first tropical storm of the season is moving toward the Florida coast. Pictured above, to mark the occasion: a hurricane pendant from Florida's Sanibel Island Goldsmith.
Storms have long loomed large in spiritual imagery. Even today, people link hurricanes to the wrath of God or Nature on our sins (whatever they may be). In fact, the appearance of God in the storm goes back as far as the Garden of Eden.
After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, they hear the voice of God l'ruach hayyom--in ancient Hebrew, "in the wind of the storm." The image in this passage is of God thundering out of a raging wind; no longer will Adam and Eve converse with their creator as of old, in the calm of an Eden at peace. (Wanna impress your friends with your knowledge of linguistic arcana? Tell them you, unlike the King James Bible translators, recognize that "yom" in context here is not "day," but an archaic cognate of the Akkadian umu, or "storm.")
The association of God with swirling storms points to an even deeper resonance between our perception of the divine and recurring patterns in nature. Benoit Mandelbrot, for example, has described how the topology of turbulence can be explained using fractal geometry, an analysis that has shaped how meteorologists predict the course of storms. We won't go into the math here--yet! For now, here's another look at our old fractal friend, the spiral, itself a common image in spiritual adornment. On the left, a spiral galaxy, and on the right, a hurricane--and for an accessible look at the underlying science, click the pic to visit [censored].
Above: arguably the world's smallest item of quality gold jewelry, a 16-atom configuration newly created by scientists but not yet available in stores. As this article from the New York Times notes, 20-atom configurations of gold take a pyramidal shape, an array echoed in the golden sands of Egypt.
Below: a small, but not quite that small, merkaba from cosmic jeweler Ka Gold (HT: Jennifer Emick).
DA VINCI CODE EXTRA: click the pic for Ka Gold's explanation of the mystical merkaba and you'll see a rather familiar figure, pictured here in a more family friendly version!
Left: A glass bead necklace from Maker Faire, by Jenine Bressner. Beads are among the oldest forms of human adornment, representing our earliest expressions of abstract symbolic communication.
Right: Neck rings worn by women of the Padaung. According to the Padaung creation myth, the rings are a reminder of the long-necked dragon mother from whose egg the Paudaung emerged.
To the left, a third-century BCE pendant featuring the Roman goddess Fortuna.
Here, your own personal destiny.
Halfway through the work week and getting a bit worn out? Many churches try to help by holding a midweek prayer meeting, which gives people a chance to connect, encourage and recharge.
While the midweek meeting particularly thrives within more conservative churches, that is not always the case. The picture above shows a rosary used in Wednesday meetings at San Francisco's Ebenezer Lutheran Church, a feminist community of faith. The gold figure on the end is a woman, but it is not Mary or a saint--this is a Goddess Rosary.
At herchurch.org, the Church provides an extensive explanation of the theology behind the Goddess Rosary, from female metaphors of the divine to reconstructionist Christian feminism. It also describes in depth the midweek rosary prayer meetings, where people recite this variation on the "Hail Mary":
Hail Goddess full of grace.
Blessed are you
and blessed are all the fruits
of your womb.
For you are the MOTHER of us all.
Hear us now
and in all our needs.
O blessed be, O blessed be. Amen
And blessed art thou, Jennifer Rose Emick of About.com's excellent Alt Religion site, for sending this link!
CONTROVERSY EXTRA: Although the Goddess Rosary has been around for a while, it has recently become a cause celebre among more traditional Christian sites in the blogosphere. Is the use of goddess imagery in Christian feminism "rank heresy"? If the problem is borrowing from "pagan" imagery, is mainstream Catholicism's devotion to Mary any more orthodox? And is laughing at people and calling them "kooky" the hallmark of Christian love?
I report. You decide.
The hottest thing going in Fort Lauderdale this month is no doubt spring break. But if you could pull yourself away from the surf and suds for a minute, you'd find there another attraction that at one time was a national phenomenom:
King Tut.
The treasures of the Pharoah Tutankhamun are touring again, and they'll be in Ft. Lauderdale until April 23rd, followed by stops in Chicago, Philadelphia and London. The first time this exhibit was in the U.S. it spurred a national craze--people flew in to Washington DC from around the country to stand in lines that went around the block.
Today it still draws crowds, but even so it's not exactly emptying the beach.
Perhaps that's a good thing. Now instead of ooohhing and ahhhing about all the gold, folks are engaging these relics on a deeper level, looking at them for what they say about ancient life and even modern faith.
New times bring new perspectives. For example, here's an article in today's Winston Salem Journal a rabbi notes the coincidence between the exhibit's current run and Passover this April. The author raises questions few discussed openly during Tut Tour I, such as whether we should celebrate goods built on slave labor.
By contrast, here's a classic video from the 1970s, offering a nuanced analysis of commercialization:
