M'Dears' Place in History
Mother's Day Divine
By Kevin J Walker, Netitor of the Word NetPaper
May. 01, 2006
From soldiers crying out on the battlefield, to Mother's Day being far more popular than Father's Day, women have been venerated back to the misty dawn of Humankind. Once females were the objects of religious veneration. Then something changed to dethrone Mama from her lofty perch where big church bureaucracies were concerned. What happened is the subject of this latest "Reasons For Tha Seasons"...
STAR HUSTLER PRESENTS:
THE REASONS FOR THA SEASONS --
MAY DAY, AND MOTHER'S DAY:
WOMEN AS MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE;
DAN BROWN'S "DAVINCI CODE" INVIGORATES DEBATE
ON (A) WOMENS' PLACE IN RELIGION
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We have another of our periodic Reasons For The Seasons as we do double duty concerning the May 1ro Cross Quarter Day, and Mother's day. In historical facr, the entire month of May has been set aside for the veneration of females, particularly mothers.
M'Dear has been venerated throughout millennia, and she has been exhibited in legend, myth, and song, and we find this even in astronomy.
From soldiers on the battlefield to Mother's Day even after being cut back being far more popular than Father's Day, women have been venerated back to the misty dawn of Humankind. Once, females were the original objects of religious veneration. Then something changed to dethrone Mama from her lofty perch where big church bureaucracies were concerned. What happened is the subject of this latest "Reasons For Tha Seasons."
In the past in the NetPaper we have generated articles about Groundhog Days, and other Cross Quarter days such as Midsummer's and May 1ro; and the Cruci Fiction of the Easter/Ishtar Myths that were merged onto old Syrian and other regional Pagan holidays to rid early Christian church from their competition.
But the crafty heads of the heretical offshoot of Hebrew Judaism didn't stop there. They have been fighting a continuing battle against the natural inclination of Humanity to elevate Mother to Godhead. Biology, religion, myth, Astrology and Astronomy all played their part in this eternal drama. Read on:
The Ancients who were deciphering the language of Mother Nature (!) noticed that three times 3, or that second Prime Number cubed, or 3 times itself led to 9, which is the same number of months for a woman to bring forth a creation of her own.
“So, there you have it!” they reasoned.
“Doesn’t this show and prove that women are directly connected to the Divine One, He/She who created all?!”
BIG BOOTY ICONS IN ANTIQUITY
Indeed, the oldest representations of tribal peoples always depicted women as Divinities, such as prehistoric carvings in what is now France and Russia ( the big-booty "Venus" sculptures, thought to be hopeful fertility talismans); to the 68 or so Black Madonnas from Spain to Russia, all the way to the still evolving and competing Cult Of Mary.
The competing Cult of Virgin Mother Mary was dethroned by the eventually triumphant male hierarchies when the early Christian church was being set up. Once they were no longer in danger of extermination by the Romans, the Christian church turned their attention to the growing role of women in Christianity, and halted it with Extreme Prejudice.
This was ironic because it was the uncharacteristic allowance of women into the early church following the example of Yeshua/Jesus, the teacher and itinerant rabbi which accounted for adding to their numbers of adherents. Most religions didn't even allow women in more than inferior supportive roles, including its main competition at the time Mithraism from the followers of Mithridites.
The way many saw it, the Son was worthy of veneration to be sure, but then so was the Mother of the Son of God, or the human man who was most favoured by God as the one who Redeemed Humanity after Adam and Eves' transgression and the Fall, thereby proving that we were indeed Worthy and that the Creation Experiment should continue and not be scrapped.
BROWN'S DAVINCI CODE MAKES USE OF HISTORICAL FACTS
Sometimes, artifacts such as the too well-hidden Dead Sea and Egyptian Hag Namadi Scrolls pop up showing that under Gnosticism, a Greek word referring to Those in the Knowledge, women were much greater involved in the establishment of early Christianity.
This is the basis for Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code,” about the search for the Holy Grail, which is not a large cup for holding Last Supper wine, which doesn’t even appear in DaVinci’s strange painting by the way. It is God’s universal repository which is the Wo-Man, through which She creates Humanity, or the Earth-bound mortal versions of the Divine.
This is the basis for Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code,” about the search for the Holy Grail, which is not a large cup for holding Last Supper wine, which doesn’t even appear in DaVinci’s strange painting by the way. It is God’s universal repository which is the Wo-Man, through which She creates Humanity, or the Earth-bound mortal versions of the Divine.
BAREFOOT, PREGNANT, AND OUT OF POWER
The elevation of the Wo-Men to the godhead didn’t last long in modern human history --despite their bodies being possible star maps-- and for the last 2000 years there has been a concerted effort to beat the Wo-Men down and prevent them from ascending to their rightful place as Nature must have intended.
There are some people who take issue with Dan Brown's premise of "The DaVinci Code", that Yeshua and Maryam married and produced offspring, and the Catholic Church has been fighting a centuries-long battle to keep it secret. It is clear to anyone who has studied religious history that women in general, and both Marys in particular, once held a greater role in early Christianity than they do now.
At Marquette University, which is a Jesuit (not a Catholic) institution -- there's a distinction we won't get into now -- we were required to take two things: A foreign language, and theology, and lots of both. I chose Latin because I shrewdly noted that since it isn't a spoken language there was no hated audio lab requirement, but you still got a full four credits. No fool, me!
For Theology, rather than be indoctrinated into Catholicism any more than what I was getting by campus osmosis, I chose an eclectic multicultural blend of Hindu, Yoga, Buddhism, Islam and even tossed some Wiccan and Shamanism into the mix. This gave me a pretty good foundation for an overview of global religious practices, and also had the side effect of cementing my position as an Atheist! But I digress:
I saw the similarities in religions, noted how they were used by conquerors to control subject populations, such as Christianity for Enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere, and the eastern Arab invaders' Islam for Africans in their own land. I also saw how women were treated under different belief systems, and how Christianity went through evolutionary changes over two millennia.
My Latin allowed me to read parts of the pre-King James Bible when it was translated from the Greek. (Aramaic, the language of Yeshua and his Disciples of the Middle eastern people of the region was primarily a spoken dialect among the regular people. Much day to day commerce and business was transacted in the Latin of the Roman conquerors and Greek).
All around the Mediterranean, churches venerating the Virgin Mary started popping up in the early Christian church when it moved out of the Middle East, following the Roman Empire's holdings from England to Turkey when it turned from being persecuted and instead miraculously became the state religion!
The Roman capital was moved by Emperor Constantine to Constantinople in what became Turkey, its capital now called Istanbul under the Muslim invasion. Christianity re-transmitted itself into the soft underbelly of EurAsia that became Russia, and the Eastern Orthodox Church with a stronghold in Greece.
That faraway church considers itself the One True Church, unsullied by the numerous changes and illogical tinkering, omissions of Diets an conferences over centuries, and the later widespread corruption that caused the Protestant Reformation in Europe. The Eastern Orthodox Church has intriguing differences with its Western counterpart, and could be disturbing to those who adhere to the King James version.
[African American History note: If you look at the pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., -- named after the leader of the Protestant Reformation by the way -- you'll see a holy man with a squarish hat to King's left. That was a leader of the US Eastern Orthodox Church, who early on supported the Civil Rights struggle when mainstream and many Black preachers were telling King to be quiet and stop stirrin' things up so much, resulting in King's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" on their hypocrisy and timidity in the face of power. I told you the Eastern Orthodox Church was different!
[Also, look at who were the bodyguards of King at the mass gathering of the National Mall. Those were the white-garbed men of the FOI, or Fruit of Islam, the specially trained operatives of the Nation of Islam].
There are some people who take issue with Dan Brown's premise of "The DaVinci Code", that Yeshua and Maryam married and produced offspring, and the Catholic Church has been fighting a centuries-long battle to keep it secret. It is clear to anyone who has studied religious history that women in general, and both Marys in particular, once held a greater role in early Christianity than they do now.
At Marquette University, which is a Jesuit (not a Catholic) institution -- there's a distinction we won't get into now -- we were required to take two things: A foreign language, and theology, and lots of both. I chose Latin because I shrewdly noted that since it isn't a spoken language there was no hated audio lab requirement, but you still got a full four credits. No fool, me!
For Theology, rather than be indoctrinated into Catholicism any more than what I was getting by campus osmosis, I chose an eclectic multicultural blend of Hindu, Yoga, Buddhism, Islam and even tossed some Wiccan and Shamanism into the mix. This gave me a pretty good foundation for an overview of global religious practices, and also had the side effect of cementing my position as an Atheist! But I digress:
I saw the similarities in religions, noted how they were used by conquerors to control subject populations, such as Christianity for Enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere, and the eastern Arab invaders' Islam for Africans in their own land. I also saw how women were treated under different belief systems, and how Christianity went through evolutionary changes over two millennia.
My Latin allowed me to read parts of the pre-King James Bible when it was translated from the Greek. (Aramaic, the language of Yeshua and his Disciples of the Middle eastern people of the region was primarily a spoken dialect among the regular people. Much day to day commerce and business was transacted in the Latin of the Roman conquerors and Greek).
All around the Mediterranean, churches venerating the Virgin Mary started popping up in the early Christian church when it moved out of the Middle East, following the Roman Empire's holdings from England to Turkey when it turned from being persecuted and instead miraculously became the state religion!
The Roman capital was moved by Emperor Constantine to Constantinople in what became Turkey, its capital now called Istanbul under the Muslim invasion. Christianity re-transmitted itself into the soft underbelly of EurAsia that became Russia, and the Eastern Orthodox Church with a stronghold in Greece.
That faraway church considers itself the One True Church, unsullied by the numerous changes and illogical tinkering, omissions of Diets an conferences over centuries, and the later widespread corruption that caused the Protestant Reformation in Europe. The Eastern Orthodox Church has intriguing differences with its Western counterpart, and could be disturbing to those who adhere to the King James version.
[African American History note: If you look at the pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., -- named after the leader of the Protestant Reformation by the way -- you'll see a holy man with a squarish hat to King's left. That was a leader of the US Eastern Orthodox Church, who early on supported the Civil Rights struggle when mainstream and many Black preachers were telling King to be quiet and stop stirrin' things up so much, resulting in King's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" on their hypocrisy and timidity in the face of power. I told you the Eastern Orthodox Church was different!
[Also, look at who were the bodyguards of King at the mass gathering of the National Mall. Those were the white-garbed men of the FOI, or Fruit of Islam, the specially trained operatives of the Nation of Islam].
BURN THE WITCH! --WOMEN'S EARLY CHURCH SUPPRESSION
The misogynistic vehemence of the Catholic Church chased down, suppressed, sequestered and sometimes burned all those who looked to the growing Cult of Mary which threatened their growing power. The favourite tool was to denounce strong-willed "Uppity" females as "Witches," especially those who used readily available natural remedies to cure and care for people in their village.
In the British Isles since it was the prevailing Wiccan and Druid culture based on nature which even drew in their males, they were singled out particularly when Christianity grew in power there as witches, Warlocks, and sorcerers. For an engaging fictional look at the transition from Paganism to Christianity and its effect on the power of women Brittany, read the 1990s book "The Mists of Avalon."
During my abbreviated foray into Pre Medicine at Marquette University I learned this technique was employed to eject and then keep women out of the Healing Arts, and made men into the predominate practitioners of medicine even to this day. The AntiFems even declared war on Midwifery and female involvement in traditional healing arts and herbal medicine, such as Nature-loving, tree-hugging Wiccans and Druids from the British Isles, denouncing it as Witchcraft. Of course, the Salem Witch Trials are famous for showing how the Witch accusation and smackdown was used to keep women in their place.
It was a convenient means to pull uppity women down throughout Christendom, because did not the Bible itself declare that we “must not suffer a Witch to live?” This attitude plays a part in the entertaining movie "Silent Hill," a female-oriented horror movie about oppressing women which opens a town to unspeakable Evil.
Of course, without reading from the Hebrew's original spoken Aramaic dialect that itself was rewritten as ancient Greek before itself being rewritten down in Classical Latin, then to Medieval Vulgate Latin, then Old English, then Modern English, and now the "Good News" Bible with the Politically Correct gender changes, its hard to know what it really said or meant by "Witch," but we’re going too far afield. We continue:
The Male Doctor Cabal even got the Insurance industry to keep Midwifery practices out of favour for payment to make sure women must continue to look only to them as they essentially transformed the natural pregnancy process of women into a
nine month long illness,to be treated by Males in the expensive hospitals they themselves ran! Only a few pitiful Nurse Practitioners have survived the onslaught.
But there is more to the business of numbers and women's bodies, but for this we must look up, and out .
In the British Isles since it was the prevailing Wiccan and Druid culture based on nature which even drew in their males, they were singled out particularly when Christianity grew in power there as witches, Warlocks, and sorcerers. For an engaging fictional look at the transition from Paganism to Christianity and its effect on the power of women Brittany, read the 1990s book "The Mists of Avalon."
During my abbreviated foray into Pre Medicine at Marquette University I learned this technique was employed to eject and then keep women out of the Healing Arts, and made men into the predominate practitioners of medicine even to this day. The AntiFems even declared war on Midwifery and female involvement in traditional healing arts and herbal medicine, such as Nature-loving, tree-hugging Wiccans and Druids from the British Isles, denouncing it as Witchcraft. Of course, the Salem Witch Trials are famous for showing how the Witch accusation and smackdown was used to keep women in their place.
It was a convenient means to pull uppity women down throughout Christendom, because did not the Bible itself declare that we “must not suffer a Witch to live?” This attitude plays a part in the entertaining movie "Silent Hill," a female-oriented horror movie about oppressing women which opens a town to unspeakable Evil.
Of course, without reading from the Hebrew's original spoken Aramaic dialect that itself was rewritten as ancient Greek before itself being rewritten down in Classical Latin, then to Medieval Vulgate Latin, then Old English, then Modern English, and now the "Good News" Bible with the Politically Correct gender changes, its hard to know what it really said or meant by "Witch," but we’re going too far afield. We continue:
The Male Doctor Cabal even got the Insurance industry to keep Midwifery practices out of favour for payment to make sure women must continue to look only to them as they essentially transformed the natural pregnancy process of women into a
nine month long illness,to be treated by Males in the expensive hospitals they themselves ran! Only a few pitiful Nurse Practitioners have survived the onslaught.
But there is more to the business of numbers and women's bodies, but for this we must look up, and out .
WOMEN’S BODIES, AND ASTRONOMY
Dick Gregory used to say in his sometimes esoteric speeches that there was no coincidence that there were “nine lights in the sky, and nine holes in a woman’s body.” While an interesting observation, this has no correlation whatsoever to anything. But the Numerologists can find meaning in the most ordinary things, whether true or not. After all, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Or vice-versa. Whatever.
Anyway, people did notice that there were some particular lights that moved about, and they were called “the Wanderers.” We now call them by a version of their Greek name “Planeta” -- the Greeks named lots of stuff, taking advantage of the leisure time allowed when you had lotsa slaves do all your work for you.
Now, the number Nine of planets is interesting, because there are some allowances that have to be made. Telescopes were in widespread use in the 1600s -- and don’t you believe that nonsense that Galileo of Fierenze, or "Florence," was “the first man” to point a 'scope at the heavens-- he was just the first who had a really good publicity operation, writing and distributing what he saw.
There are historical reports that school children in Holland in the 1300s would raid the garbage heaps behind the spectacle-makers shops for pieces of discarded lenses and look about with them, marveling that the pieces of curved glass “made the town church steeple appear closer, but upside down.” Do you think that people waited 300 years to put at least two of them together to make things right-side up, or took a peek at the sky at night? Puh-leese!
Even in the Kevin Costner movie “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves” it is shown that Arabs had optical knowledge by the time of the Crusades of the 1100 to 1300s. And we can’t even go into the mysteries of the south-central African Dogon Tribe, and their noted observations in the late 1800s of the star Sirius and its dark companion. But we continue:
The only planets that could usually be seen went out from Mercury to Saturn, which is the limit of naked-eye observation. Uranus may have been visible in unpolluted rural skies to the eyes of healthy people back in tha day, but its hard to try that nowadays in cities.
There are nine planets in popular use. We’re on Terra, so that one doesn’t count. Luna, erroneously called “our Moon” is part of the Terra/Luna double planetary system. So, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, but not counting Uranus (no scatological school boy jokes, please!).
But that’s only Seven Lights, so wassup? We now have to include the Moon, or as I prefer to call it by its non-Anglo Saxon and proper name of Luna. But that still leaves one. The other light in the sky, but not the nighttime sky, is of course Sol, or "the Sun."
I won’t detail the female orifices, for that you’re on your own. Besides, as a writer and science popularizer I couldn’t be expected to know about such things, since people think all we Academics and StarGazers do is read books and peer through either telescopes or microscopes. If they only knew! Believe it, we make ample use of that scientific knowledge, especially things we learned in Biology. But enough about that.
But much as the clues to female contributions in the formation of Christianity, there are some bread crumbs leading back to the hidden or covered up truth. Cassiopeia is still known as an African princess whose “W” or “M” shaped constellation is to the North.
They are called the Eternal Stars as her parent’s on the other side to the West/East in a slow, circular dance. Their stars do not set since they revolve around Polaris, the Polar Star that marks the North, and incidentally the tail star of the misshapen Little Dipper asterism. There’s a story about Cassiopeia's forced marriage to a king in another land, which must have been very affecting for people to still note it millennia later, and to survive the wholesale renaming and reordering of history to “His-Story.”
The Star Hustler says keep looking up – the price is free! --kjw
The Word NetPaper Science website is still under construction because it’ll have more stuff, like links to NASA, space astronomy pictures, and Space Science news sites. There will be an Astronomy calendar segment returning to The WORD NetPaper 511 as always for the Solstice and Equinox Seasons, and to keep you abreast of the approaching Lunar eclipsi and sunspot activity which may flare up this year with impacts on cell phone eception and other phenomena.
Anyway, people did notice that there were some particular lights that moved about, and they were called “the Wanderers.” We now call them by a version of their Greek name “Planeta” -- the Greeks named lots of stuff, taking advantage of the leisure time allowed when you had lotsa slaves do all your work for you.
Now, the number Nine of planets is interesting, because there are some allowances that have to be made. Telescopes were in widespread use in the 1600s -- and don’t you believe that nonsense that Galileo of Fierenze, or "Florence," was “the first man” to point a 'scope at the heavens-- he was just the first who had a really good publicity operation, writing and distributing what he saw.
There are historical reports that school children in Holland in the 1300s would raid the garbage heaps behind the spectacle-makers shops for pieces of discarded lenses and look about with them, marveling that the pieces of curved glass “made the town church steeple appear closer, but upside down.” Do you think that people waited 300 years to put at least two of them together to make things right-side up, or took a peek at the sky at night? Puh-leese!
Even in the Kevin Costner movie “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves” it is shown that Arabs had optical knowledge by the time of the Crusades of the 1100 to 1300s. And we can’t even go into the mysteries of the south-central African Dogon Tribe, and their noted observations in the late 1800s of the star Sirius and its dark companion. But we continue:
The only planets that could usually be seen went out from Mercury to Saturn, which is the limit of naked-eye observation. Uranus may have been visible in unpolluted rural skies to the eyes of healthy people back in tha day, but its hard to try that nowadays in cities.
There are nine planets in popular use. We’re on Terra, so that one doesn’t count. Luna, erroneously called “our Moon” is part of the Terra/Luna double planetary system. So, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, but not counting Uranus (no scatological school boy jokes, please!).
But that’s only Seven Lights, so wassup? We now have to include the Moon, or as I prefer to call it by its non-Anglo Saxon and proper name of Luna. But that still leaves one. The other light in the sky, but not the nighttime sky, is of course Sol, or "the Sun."
I won’t detail the female orifices, for that you’re on your own. Besides, as a writer and science popularizer I couldn’t be expected to know about such things, since people think all we Academics and StarGazers do is read books and peer through either telescopes or microscopes. If they only knew! Believe it, we make ample use of that scientific knowledge, especially things we learned in Biology. But enough about that.
But much as the clues to female contributions in the formation of Christianity, there are some bread crumbs leading back to the hidden or covered up truth. Cassiopeia is still known as an African princess whose “W” or “M” shaped constellation is to the North.
They are called the Eternal Stars as her parent’s on the other side to the West/East in a slow, circular dance. Their stars do not set since they revolve around Polaris, the Polar Star that marks the North, and incidentally the tail star of the misshapen Little Dipper asterism. There’s a story about Cassiopeia's forced marriage to a king in another land, which must have been very affecting for people to still note it millennia later, and to survive the wholesale renaming and reordering of history to “His-Story.”
The Star Hustler says keep looking up – the price is free! --kjw
The Word NetPaper Science website is still under construction because it’ll have more stuff, like links to NASA, space astronomy pictures, and Space Science news sites. There will be an Astronomy calendar segment returning to The WORD NetPaper 511 as always for the Solstice and Equinox Seasons, and to keep you abreast of the approaching Lunar eclipsi and sunspot activity which may flare up this year with impacts on cell phone eception and other phenomena.
NEXT: Where there Ancient African explorers to the Americas? Archeology, genetics, maritime currents and linguistics point to the strong possibility.
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-- Kevin J. Walker, Netitor,
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-- Kevin J. Walker, Netitor,
The Word NetPaper
Milwaukee, WI USA
FREELANCER BIOGRAPHY
Mr. Walker is a print journalist who often includes Science and Travel articles among his forays on political and societal observations. A past professor of Journalism at his Alma Mater of Marquette University, Walker has written extensively for several newspapers on urban issues, and is presently compiling his essays on the phenomenon of intractable trans-generational familial poverty into the book in progress "The Culture of Poverty," based on his observations on the effects of Welfare Reform in his hometown in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He often writes from an Undisclosed Location in the Hidden Valleys retreat inland from the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin, where he indulges in his first intellectual loves, amateur Astronomy and stargazing.
FREELANCER BIOGRAPHY
Mr. Walker is a print journalist who often includes Science and Travel articles among his forays on political and societal observations. A past professor of Journalism at his Alma Mater of Marquette University, Walker has written extensively for several newspapers on urban issues, and is presently compiling his essays on the phenomenon of intractable trans-generational familial poverty into the book in progress "The Culture of Poverty," based on his observations on the effects of Welfare Reform in his hometown in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He often writes from an Undisclosed Location in the Hidden Valleys retreat inland from the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin, where he indulges in his first intellectual loves, amateur Astronomy and stargazing.
--30--
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