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.

British Petroleum's War on Nature

There is a lot of talk about how to revive a seemingly dead Christianity in this seemingly dying planet’s stage of history.

I am thinking that the dying part of the dying planet has to do with the removal of the sacred from nature and Christianity helped manage with that disconnect centuries ago. If nature had a mythical god associated with it, the god, its shrine and the worship of some sacred aspect of creation got destroyed or discounted into nothing within the fanaticism of the new, world is about to end – repent – join now or regret it later in hell – Christian religion.

The rape of the Gulf of Mexico continues under knuckleheads more suited to be failed CEO type bishops running the RC church into the ground. BP and the RCC answer to nobody, not even God it would seem these days.

So much for venting the frustration of watching corporations destroy America and the Western Culture all for the sake of a quarterly profit, or yearly bonus by “short-term bottom-line thinkers” (knuckles dragging).

Rome was not built in a year nor was it destroyed in a year to put a matrix on the idea. The idea perhaps fits the concept of the decline of a culture, our present culture, where the old myths centered around the old Roman state religion of Christianity do not meet the needs of modern culture such as now and with  ideas such as environmentalism.

End Time paranoia helps a religion get started out of fear. If you do not want to survive with me, please jump out of the lifeboat – the boat is getting rather crowded. It is the twenty-first century. The end of your world did not happen in the first century or the fourth, or the tenth of the twentieth centuries. Something missing in that success formula I think.

Mixing science perhaps with ancient myth, the idea that the Earth represented by a goddess named Gaia came into existence to give some metaphoric momentum to a new idea, or more accurately an old idea, about how man is or should be in balance with nature.

The man responsible with mixing ancient myth with modern science is James Lovelock. James Lovelock defined Gaia as:

a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet….

James Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist, environmentalist and futurologist who lives in Devon, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment.---(Wikipedia)

Green thinking in terms of new innovative ways to fuel our economy without nineteenth century petroleum robber baron technology are what is needed right now.

New ways of thinking is also perhaps a means to interject a balance into thought. This to reintroduce the idea of a feminine side, to balance wasted centuries of old male only perception in looking at a stark, male only, universe.

Jesus and the Womb of God

This is where I get creative and inspired and perhaps even mystical.

Creative is a dirty word in American business. I learned that the hard way. It shows signs of intelligence which is verboten in our present American fascist state of things left undone, half-assed in the political and religious forums now abandoned to MBAs, PhDs, lawyers and hedge fund managers.

I am inpired by my recent postings on the forgotten female half of our civilisation. I use the British/European spelling. There is no civilization left in the American myth. But that is another story. (sorry for the negative aside)

If you look at anything, you can look at it twice and in a totally different light. I like to use the Earp Brothers and the fight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 in Tombstone Arizona as an example of an urban legend being cast into stone. It, the bottom line, was that the Earp brothers were out to make money and blow town. The truth is that they acquired a lot of deeds for land, property and mines.

They wanted to leave but there were bigger crooks than they running the town. Somebody redrew the town map and every lot in town was in dispute and had to be resurveyed. Of course the surveying fee was outrageous and enough to make most people sell out at a discount and leave town. Or you could sue in court.

So while the Earp brothers got entangled in Republican urban politics they crossed paths with the cowboys and rural democratic politics. The demographics have reversed over a century later. While the Earps didn’t mind eating stolen Mexican beef bought off the Cowboys, the Cowboys wanted a little more respect from the Earps while in town. And so it went.

The rest is history or is it? The Urban legend of the good city dweller against the evil cattle rustlers was set in stone by Hollywood. The good guys were the urban crooks and the bad, bad cowboys just drifted away into history.

In dealing with the concept of women in the church or a religious setting, one has to wonder where and how the urban legend of Jesus got set in Stone. At one point Jesus was real and just like the Earp brothers in Tombstone.

Everybody has a story, a direction and a purpose in life. Getting back to Jesus. As I read and read account after account, opinion after opinion, urban legend after urban legend I have strangely come back to some sort of mystical concept of Jesus.

(Here comes the mystical?)

That if the oldest gospel is dated around 70 C.E., then the oral history is being told and few if any living witnesses to Jesus were still around. In a world with a life expectancy of 35 years for the average human beings then and up until the beginning of the twentieth century, then the first and oldest account of Jesus is a third person account of an urban legend.

Let me throw in a little Islamic perspective which says that Jesus did not die on the cross nor was resurrected. That Jesus was assumed into heaven like the legendary prophet Elijah and you have what I mix with the beginning of the Gospel of John.

The beginning of the gospel of John calls Jesus Logos or the word or the reason God comes down to the perception of man.

The gospel of John is much more fluid and poetic in parts than the first three gospels. John is also the start of the Urban legend of the Jews as bad guys and the Jesus posse as the goodie two shoes of that O.K. Corral scenario.

Anyway, I look at the third party account of Mark and realize that if Mark is not a living eyewitness then he is describing Jesus and the perception and assumption of Mark is that Jesus is a man. No. I am not saying that Jesus is a woman. But if a person is writing history later, it is possible that you do not know 100% about who or what your history subject is about.

So if you take the Gnostic concept or poetic license of the Beginning of John 1:1-5 -

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

- You can look at Jesus from a different angle, like looking at a work of true art in a museum. I see some perfections and flaws of the artist so to speak.

That in real time, with a real Jesus preaching a real gospel, Jesus was neither male nor female. Jesus the logos, the word, the reason was standing right in front of you not unlike a space alien and you see, hear and perceive what you want to see, hear and perceive. Or what you are capable of perceiving in matters possibly divine.

If you are a male, you see a male. If you are female, you see a female. Jesus and his grouping of followers were both male and female. In God there is no male or female. In Jesus there is no male or no female as well?

It was not until after he dies or disappears from the scene that petty human traits arise. Suddenly is it not possible that Mary Magdalene was an apostle. Suddenly the gospels or Paul’s obsessions and petty male hang-ups become the things put into stone, into words on paper, a translation. The true and original urban legend fades into obscurity.

The miracle of God’s presence among us in the form of a future man, a humanist man, a divine male/female presence in our midst gets lost in translation.

I do not want to get into the logistics or the semantics of the Trinity which is really a stone age version, interpretation not suited to today’s modern scientific urban global person to deal with in a credible pattern or sense.

Without going much too deeply into this theory of mine which is already probably a half a dozen heresies rolled into one, I look at something rather symbolic of things, of teachings and urban myths and man and his engineering.

I look at the Hagia Sophia, or Santa Sophia, the primary center of Christianity for a thousand years. While this building, this church and the Eastern Rome flourished for a thousand years, they probably were herding domestic animals into the decrepit old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the winter time for shelter throughout the dark western ages while this magnificent building was the one true Church to the civilized worlds in the east. Here too Islam had one of its grandest buildings for close to five hundred years.

Hagia Sophia is related to the word logos or word or reason or touching the purpose of man in response to God and his prophets to the human race. Hagia Sophia is holy or sacred wisdom. The eastern Roman empire would have seemed to have been more attuned into a feminine sense of wisdom, or understanding, and coming from God. This as opposed to the western male view coming to us to the modern day.

The western church is scared shitless of the feminine and the womb - it is where we all came from - figuratively and literally.

When I look at the image above, (click for a larger image), I see wisdom written in stone, in concrete, in mosaics and the “Allah is Great” Quran plagues. I see mankind reaching out to the universe before science or man had a clue or sense about what the universe truly is.

Click on the image above of the Hagia Sophia. It was the center of Christian faith, the premier center for a thousand years. It was a major center of Islam, its grandest mosque, for close to five hundred years. It is the most sacred spot on planet earth to all faiths of the one God concept.

Sacred wisdom, sacred knowledge, the word, the reason, the logos – no matter how you translate it – here is the spot where heaven touched earth directly for fifteen hundred years.

Look at the enlarged image. What do you see? Is it a museum? Is it a basilica, a church? Is it a mosque?

Look deeper. What humankind has left here for all generations to see is the myth of God, the myth of the Prophets like Jesus among others. I would see a cave if I were a caveman.

I see a womb, perhaps the womb of God. I see great mystery. And then I am transported back to reality and it is just a building.

The perception of man toward - God, Jesus, Science, Art are all in their own way part of a formula, a plan, a logos, a reason, a whisper from above and a meaning for all things.

The purpose of life is a mystery. To an artist, life is poetry.