Ohtori Akio posted:

And immediately there fell from his head as it had been hair: and he received AIDS forthwith, and arose, and was probated.

Ohtori Akio posted:

And immediately there fell from his head as it had been hair: and he received AIDS forthwith, and arose, and was probated.

Ohtori Akio posted:

And immediately there fell from his head as it had been hair: and he received AIDS forthwith, and arose, and was probated.

quote:

a discourse pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer.

Orbs posted:

practically torrential rains for days, and the garden exploded with life

Orbs posted:

Last time I did that,

Orbs posted:

to make the plants and animals near me grow well and healthy

Orbs posted:

this thread

Orbs posted:

For now, I pray at my altar (with various incenses, but a tulip one today), and pray when I go out to dig holes to put seeds in.

one of the Pauls posted:

Courage as an element of faith is the daring self-affirmation of one's own being in spite of the powers of "nonbeing" which are the heritage of everything finite. Where there is daring and courage there is the possibility of failsauce. And in every act of faith this possibility is present. The risk must be taken.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Colonel Cancer posted:

What about sorcerers tho

Ohtori Akio posted:

And immediately there fell from his head as it had been hair: and he received AIDS forthwith, and arose, and was probated.

nice obelisk idiot posted:

Thanks again LAB, I don't have too many takeaways from the article, but it was a very good overview of the topic.

I kind of get the impression that the conflict with the Cybele cult etc had an element of being a vanity of small differences thing, and that they were largely competing over the same demographics of people. And the former had been co-opted by the state to varying degrees and made less and universal, and that there was corruption in other ways, while Christianity was still new and energetic.

Like the article says, the gender stuff was a disreputable aspect of that religious current to much of Greco-Roman society. I feel like a lot of early Christians wanted to paint Jesus' association with 'unsavory' aspects of society, like women who performed sex work, as only a pity thing, rather than that they were particularly amenable to understanding what he was saying about the world. Such as a better understanding of things like harmful attachment to wealth, family, and identity.

https://henadology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/egypts-returning-goddesses-wtw-5.2.pdf posted:

We have direct evidence of controversy concerning these celebrations at times. We know, for example, that a representative of the cult of Tefnut and her consort Arensnuphis was subject to censure from an oracle of Khnum at Elephantine for licentious activities that were considered to have profaned the sanctuary of Osiris at Bigeh, where Tefnut also had a temple. “Offending the god (is) what you have done,” the oracle declares to one Petiireyhemesnefer, whose name incorporates that of iry-ḥms-nfr, Arensnuphis, the ‘good companion’ who accompanies the Goddess on her return. “You drank wine (at) night, while the goddesses [i.e., Isis and Nephthys] were in mourning-garb. You called out to your wife, saying, ‘Tefnut, there is no goddess like her,’ while the widow [Isis] was in (the) sacred grove.”21 The editor suggests (n. 19) that the issue here was breaking the silence required by the Osirian rite, but we may note also the elevation of Tefnut over other Goddesses, of which there is a parallel in the text concerning Mut as Wandering Goddess discussed below. Moreover, the devotee’s “calling out to his wife” in this fashion could be a euphemism for sexual activity in the name of the Goddess.

[...]

Further insight into the cult of the Wandering Goddess is provided by a fragmentary text dedicated to the cult of Mut.23 The text refers several times to the “Appeasing the Heart of Mut Ritual” and refers to “he who found the distant one,” who would “pacify her rages” (Jasnow & Smith 2010/11 p. 18, l. 10), as well as to a “day of seeking her” (ibid., p. 19, l. 17 & p. 40, n. 40), typical features of the Wandering Goddess cult. We read, moreover, that the orgiastic celebrations in her honor have apparently become controversial, so that the author of the text is concerned to defend them: a repeated refrain in the text is that “As for those who have called me [the author] evil, Mut will call them evil.”24 The text depicts Mut as the object of loving devotion who in turn communicates by direct theophany with her devotees and acts directly on their behalf. They think of her as their mother, and she is fiercely protective, the text comparing her to a panther and speaking of her “fiery blast.” The joyous celebrations mentioned in the text involve worshipers adorning themselves with special clothing, jewelry, cosmetics and perfumes and engaging in feasting (while certain dietary restrictions seem to be indicated at other times), drunkenness, music, dancing and sexual activity as a specific form of devotion to their Goddess: “Drink truly. Eat truly. Sing [...] Don clothing, anoint (yourself), adorn the eyes, and enjoy sexual bliss,” (p. 18, ll. 3-4). A degree of exclusivity in her worship, similar to that criticized with respect to Tefnut by the oracle from Elephantine, is suggested by the lines, “while (or since) I am entrusted [to] ⌜Mut⌝. [I will say to the] people(?): ‘I will ⌜not⌝ enter the house [of another god(?) except for Mut ...],” (ibid., p. 18, l. 12). In what we may see as a related feature, namely the cult’s broadly syncretic quality, Mut is presented at least once in this text in the elaborate conjunct form of “Mut-Sekhmet-Bastet- Wadjet-Smithis, the lady of Isheru” (ibid., p. 18, ll. 8-9), where the latter refers to the sacred lake in which the Goddess was ceremonially bathed and her wrath ‘cooled’, a rite often referred to by Egyptologists as the “navigation” of the Goddess. The common ritual of the Isheru thus binds together the syncretism of diverse Goddesses playing this common role.

[...]

Another important category of potential full-time worshipers, so to speak, of the Wandering Goddess, and which raise fascinating issues in their own right, are the “corporation of women-men” (ẖ s-ḥm.t-ḥwṱ.w), or “androgynes” mentioned three times in the demotic text known as the Myth of the Sun’s Eye. Mark Depauw translates these passages as follows: “Their corporations of women-men, their faces are sad; their beautiful women are in the street without laughing,” (11.5) in reference to Egypt’s sadness at the Goddess’s absence; “Have you not let the corporations of women-men shake their hair for the one who is in Tꜣ-ww [an unknown location]? Have you not let the corporations of women-men shake their hair for the one who is in the city of the sistrum [Hu/Diospolis Parva]?” (22.23, 22.26), referring to the festivities at her return.29 Depauw places these ambiguous passages in a rich context of “transgressions of gender boundaries in ancient Egypt, from androgyny to virilization of women and effeminisation of men” (p. 59).

Orbs posted:

Not a banishment ritual, but this thread did remind me of a big spell I started yesterday. It's a garden-blessing ritual, to make the plants and animals near me grow well and healthy. I chewed the salvia divinorum quid (one of my rare but potent spell aids) in the red bowl last night. That was a lovely experience, but the main event will be when the quid fully "dries" in a few days, when I can burn and sacrifice it. Last time I did that, I got practically torrential rains for days, and the garden exploded with life. Somewhat literally, as the vessel I did the burning in shattered in the process, scattering the ashes to the wind.

For now, I pray at my altar (with various incenses, but a tulip one today), and pray when I go out to dig holes to put seeds in.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

I liked your post! Revelation of myth through spirits/natural phenomena while in a ritually induced receptive state fits a lot of definitions of religion magic


I liked the pigeon who guest starred also. Along with being Earth Day / Passover / the full moon yesterday it was my one year anniversary of having found my pigeon. My magic was expressed through the celebration of one whole year of loving Pigeon

He still doesn't "get" taking pictures together like my bird Amadeus does, he is poorly inclined toward staying still on my shoulder and will lose interest and begone Away at a moment's notice; but this does not discourage me from making attempts at pigeon selfie times because even the failures, with randomly-placed, perspective-mocking Pigeon, tend to be able to make me smile

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Jacobean Witchcraft and Feminine Power posted:

James I of Scotland, himself an avid believer in the connection between witchcraft and female power, claims in his Daemonologie that women are the weaker sex "so it is easier to be intrapped in these grosse snares of the Deuill, as was ouer well proued to be true, by the Serpents deceiuing of Eua at the beginning, which makes him the homelier with that sexe sensine" (43-44). This connection between Eve, the Serpent, and witchcraft is picked up by Stuart Clark who explains that some "even called Eve the first witch, an association that, more than any other, makes intelligible the gender link that they relied on" (113).

The mixture of politics and the demonic is clear in James's writings, which connect witchcraft to an inversion of the prevailing power structures as nothing "has been more familiar than this concept of witchcraft as an anti-religion" (Clark 86).

quote:

For demonic inversion was inseparable, in the first instance, from notions of archetypal rebellion and pseudo-monarchy. The devil's original presumption prefigured every subsequent act of resistance; he was Belial, 'which means', wrote the authors of Malleus maleficarum, 'Without Yoke or Master.'(86)

In the inverted world, "itself turned upside down", the king's subjects replace "for religion superstition, for true worshippe detestable idolatrie: and to be shorte, for God Sathan, for Christ Antichrist" James 1, Workes, 307; Goodman, 9-10). This exchange of the holy for the unholy occurs in both witchcraft and Judaism, as James explains that "the 'aping' of religious service in modern witchcraft was the same in form as the 'counterfeiting' of God among the gentiles of the Old Testament" (Clark 98).

In his Daemonologie James links the climb of the magus into celestial knowledge with the Fall of Man, inverting the rise into divine wisdom so that it becomes piety turned upside down; he also connects it with the Fall and Eve, linking women and witchcraft, creating a swarm of associations that binds Adam and Eve with the Magus and the Witch and with the inversion of obedience to the divine ruler (11, 43-4). Witchcraft and magic then become disobedience to the earthly authority of James as king. James ruled by Divine Right, and claimed to be chasing witches "not because I am James Stuard and can comaunde so many thousands of men, but because God hath made me a King and judge to judge righteouse judgement' (Calendar 524). He clearly connected his witch-hunts with his powers as king, and since the church "repeatedly badgered the secular power to take action" against these deviant magicians and witches, seeing black arts as "disease of the body politic comparable to [...] adultery," James had no difficulty relating his divine absolutism to witchcraft and disobedience. James's comparison between witchcraft and adultery demonstrates the connection between sexuality and the disruption of the hierarchy, and witchcraft became a central concern of James's rule. He believed this chaotic rebellion to be satanic forces intent on disrupting his benign, god-sanctioned reign (Croft 26), and to be connected in a biblical precedent as treason: "For rebellion is as the sinne of witchcraft," a passage that explicitly illustrates the connections between power-inversion and witchcraft (I Sam.15:23 in Daemonologie). As early as 1605, James was proclaiming that God had given him divinatory powers that allowed him to discover the Gunpowder Plot (Clark 623), and during his accession he said "if the king was 'Jacobum Dei, James by the Grace of God' (621); then God was 'Deum Jacobi, the gratious God of King James'" (Rawlinson 36).