Billy and Diana - Philly Mascots

Something strange happened to me last week. I had been looking though some old research and I came across one of my favorite art objects in a photo.

There is the Augustus Saint Gaudens statue of the Roman goddess Diana that decorates the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I am of course aware of all the trials and triumphs of this statue as art and its ability to survive. It started out as a weathervane on the second of four Madison Square Gardens. The second Garden was actually right off Madison Square in Manhattan.

To make a long story short, this one time symbol and “goddess of Manhattan” got ditched when they tore the building down and it survived to become art in Philly. There is even an O. Henry short story, rather dated in language and understanding, The Lady Higher Up, in conversation between “Miss Diana” and “Aunt Liberty” in the New York harbor.

More boring details I will not talk about. But the strange thing is that when I looked at this statue, this work of art, and its setting in a treasure house of human culture, a museum I have many times visited, I slipped into the transcendent and felt spiritual and close to the Divine.

Art, and not pagan idol, touched something in me. The feminine road to the Divine was more pronounced in ancient, primitive, obsolete pagan cultures. Maybe that pathway should consider being reopened in the traffic jam of today’s uncertain global common culture.

I have to wonder how the world progresses that if some art might be a true pathway to the divine.

Speaking of superstition, there is the local Philly myth of the Curse of Billy Penn.

Curse of Billy Penn

The Curse of Billy Penn was an alleged curse used to explain the failure of major professional sports teams based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to win championships since the March 1987 construction of the One Liberty Place skyscraper, which exceeded the height of William Penn's statue atop Philadelphia City Hall.

The curse was supposedly overturned by placing a small statue of William Penn on the top of the tallest building in Philly, the Comcast center at 975 feet, in 2007 just in time for the World Series Title in 2008.

Superstition, myth, religion – many times wishful thinking and self fulfilling prophesy.

In any case, in an ancient sense and in honorable titles, Statues, Art, are mascots, honorary gods, in a vaguely pagan parameter, at Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, the Quaker City.

Pagan Transcendency into the Divine

Christianity is not a holistic religion in the ways that ancient religions were concerned with the whole and the parts of the whole and the interdependence of those parts.

By strictest definition, the word pagan means rural. In the context of ancient Rome with it hundreds of official and non-official gods and temples, pagan was a label for a country bumpkin religion with a country bumpkin god etc. As such Rome was the big time and so were its gods.

Along comes Christianity and every non-Christian religion gets a pagan label and then gets the heave ho off the side of the boat. Past wisdom, culture and insight got tossed as well. A respect for nature got a bad rap and label in the Christian stream of thought thing.

I have to laugh when I hear the apocryphal story of the mother of Jesus coming to live her last days in Ephesus and living with Mary Magdalene.

I do not think that that happened. Ephesus was home to the largest and grandest Greek style temple on earth, pictured above, and dedicated to a Greek earth goddess called Demeter. The temple was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Demeter can also be Gaia etc. The Roman version of the name Demeter is Diana.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the best you can do for a basic earth goddess in the male dominated monotheistic Christian religion. With a handful of sentences mentioning her in the NT, Mary is the stuff of myth and legend and not based on much sacred scripture.

I was doing some recent research or refreshing my memory from Freshman highschool English class whereby we had to memorize all the names of the Greek and Roman gods as a background to reading stories of ancient mythology.

What’s wrong with myth? Nothing. Before there was culture or churches and mosques, there was myth. Myth is the verbal and later written down sharing of culture around the small community nightly fire. Tribes are smaller than modern day countries. Myth is no longer small. Small myth sometimes now covers big modern countries and cultures but not too well. Something missing perhaps in old myths not properly retrofitted to today. As such, most myth is relegated to obscure storage and forgotten library shelves.

Myth or no myth, the western culture follows ancient Rome’s hatred of Nature to this day. Rome is long gone. Western civilization is not far behind using the British Petroleum’s behemoth haphazard failure to manage nature responsibly as a watershed mark in human history.

Do we finally take macro responsibility of the planet or do we, and all cultures globally, continue to ignore our environment? Our platform of life, on which we see life happening on many levels, must be shared with other living creatures in the oceans and on the lands. One species, if it goes extinct, sets the stage for other extinctions including our own species.

The ancient religious myth that God set us in change of Nature is a poorly written piece in that it leaves out the implied statement that we must take charge of nature responsibly.

I am not talking Neo-Paganism here. I am talking about resuscitating those portions of ancient culture that saw, felt and acted in response to the key points of nature that cause mankind to survive and prosper.

Gaia as the earth goddess is not really an ancient concept. Gaia as resurrected myth is an accumulation of many ancient earth goddesses. And what are earth goddesses? They are symbols of the sacred feminine.

The west and its hatred of nature is mixed with hatred of women in the mean desert monotheistic religions. Nature is buried along side with the feminine. The Roman military calendar replaced the lunar calendar. Conflicts were settled in blood along with the destruction of ancient pagan belief systems, based many times on nature. A world religion like Hinduism is based on many previous cultures and many previous cultures’ beliefs, gods and goddesses. Inclusive is one way to do religion.

Christianity, if it wants to survive must look differently at the world and be part of nature, God’s nature or be prepared to quickly, at this point in time, fade out permanently of historic view.

Part of a culture war in recent years in the west, or more accurately America, is between the dying western culture and against Secularism or Neo-Paganism. Neo-Paganism also goes by the name of Pantheism, whereby you believe in many gods instead of the mean singular desert gods of Judeo Christian Islamic monotheistic myth.   The many gods or idols that some secularists or neo-pagans would seem to worship are science, technology, cars, fast food, fashion, and greed and or success.  Any means to succeed including warfare are okay so long as you win at any cost.  Any cost these days means at the expense of humanity and the fragile nature of our planet.

Of course, the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims do not all agree that they are talking about the same god. As such and to such people, I label their beliefs myth. There seems to be many gods even amongst the so-called monotheists.

Transcendence into the energy of the universe is possible on any level, at any time and in any culture.

Transcendence into the concept of God is a way pagans used to channel into the Spiritual. The universe did not live, breath and evolve for a billion years waiting for the one true religion (there are so many) to finally arrive on this planet.

The ancients, the pagans, the pre-Christians did a thriving business in many belief systems. Those forced from the scene belief systems were many times balanced in being male and female. Transcendence into the energy of God was possible within some of those belief systems. Human or animal sacrifice though crowded out the clarity of any hoped for vision of God as we think of Him today.

Western civilization is in a way an extension of a single male god myth – now gone sterile over time. Western Civilization on the religious level is an extension of a long, out of date myth created by Constantine. The forced male only paternalistic religion thing does not work anymore in a total member, total cultural global society. That the culture attached to that lone god myth has perhaps travelled as far as that culture and myth can travel.

Time to think outside the sterlile (at present) western Christian box.

Any ideas I have at the moment are to restore at the very least the regular value of the feminine if not the sacred feminine back into western culture and its institutions in order to save it at this critical time in history.

Time to re-examine some of the ancient pagan ways of reaching out to the spiritual and the Divine that are in true balance with Nature and Nature’s God / Goddess.

Thomas Olmsted - High Priest of Phoenix

After St. Joseph's: Are Women Still Safe in Catholic Hospitals?

Even the Catholic Church, whose official doctrine demands that women be sacrificed in order to preserve fetal life, has for many years made no attempt to impose such a draconian policy upon its vast network of hospitals in the United States. Until last week. In a radical move that is likely to inflame the abortion debate even further and, more disturbingly, to endanger the lives of millions of expectant mothers, Thomas J. Olmsted, the Catholic bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, has condemned and excommunicated a highly regarded nun who approved an abortion necessary to save a pregnant woman's life.


The Irish nun at the center of the case is Sister Margaret McBride, an administrator at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. McBride was part of a hospital ethics committee that approved the termination of an eleven-week-old fetus after the mother developed a case of pulmonary hypertension that threatened to kill her if she continued with her pregnancy.

Although the specific details of the case have not been revealed for reasons of patient privacy, Catholic Healthcare West, which operates the hospital, has described the woman's death, in the absence of termination, as all but certain. In response, Mr. Olmstead declared that the nun was "automatically excommunicated" and warned that: "While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."

Of course life is sacred but sometimes the life of one already here must be considered first in a dangerous life threatening situation. 

I do not understand this ongoing and continued hatred of the Roman Catholic church towards women and womens' medical needs.

Bishop Olmsted is a major Creep (the only "C" word that I can use here in good taste) as far I am concerned in this matter. 

Sister Margaret McBride is a Saint!

God forgive Tom Olmsted's total lack of humanity towards half the human race!