Ιουστινός Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν
The five myths are:
Do we need to elaborate? I don’t think so, but if you want to read more:
Petersen , Irene Berg. “What Vikings really looked like“. ScienceNordic, July 29, 2012. Retrieved July 30, 2012.
Salve Lar Familiaris!
Salvete Di Penates!
I’m fascinated by the different ways people think about and create home altars.
“The first task for a new cultor Deorum is to establish a lararium. There is a process to it, in ritually cleansing the house and inviting your ancestors to visit your lararium. Usually it starts out simple. An image of the Lar familiaris or that of one’s Genius is flanked by two Lares offering food and drink. Oil lamps and candles, an incense holder, a bowl to receive libations or other offerings. Over the years the offerings can build. On the birthday of every family member, as one example, a pebble is added to the lararium and relics of various kinds may be stored there, as well as articles used in our rituals.” (Piscinus, 2013)
Updated to add links.
Interesting new book: The Last Pagans of Rome by Alan Cameron.
This online reviews says, “Cameron’s mission here is to topple once and for all the “myth” of a concerted resistance movement coordinated by a select group of late fourth-century pagan aristocrats to oppose Christianity’s infiltration of state and society. For more than four decades Cameron’s scholarship has been edging that romantic vision of the religious, literary, and social history of late fourth-century Rome to the brink of destruction. With the publication of this book the classic formulation of paganism’s fourth-century “revival” lies well beyond reconstitution.”
The 4th century pagan revival is so much a part of how we think about this period of Roman history, it’s a disappointment — although not a surprise — to find out that it has little foundation.
My dad believed and taught that America as a continent has its own guardian spirits. Christianity and other “foreign religions” could never take root here. Not permanently, anyway.
Those of us descended from the European diaspora are living in a time of transition. The ancestral gods we brought with us are native to Europe, not America. In fact, that’s why America has so many fanatic Christian Fundamentalists — they are fighting an inner battle against their natural environment.
Over time, we will adopt and adapt the local gods, but we are only a few generations into something that will be an extended evolution. In the meantime, those of us who were born here, in America, are truly “Native American”. We belong here, even though we haven’t yet learned how to be here comfortably.
We can learn how to be here in part by looking at the culture of the local tribes our ancestors displaced. One thing we should not do is appropriate their culture in any way that would pretend it is our own culture.
As I get older, I find myself more and more interested in that idea.
A cave that might have been the inspiration for Hades, the Greek underworld.
A cave that might have been the inspiration for Hades, the Greek underworld. It’s an interesting spin, but I have to think that it is just a nice hook to drum up some publicity for a site that’s important in its own right.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/story/2012-02-25/Alepotrypa-Cave-Hades/53237894/1//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js
An interesting comment by Tacitus, Agricola 21, quoted by Prudence Jones & Nigel Pennick in A History of Pagan Europe:
[Boudicca’s rebellion in 60 CE] nearly succeeded, but after it was put down and the punitive victor, Suetonius Paulinus, discreetly removed to another command, a series of new governors and their financial directors set about a systematic process of Romanization. As Tacitus observed with some acerbity, “Among the conquered it is called culture, when in fact it is part of their slavery.” Did it ever stop being part of our slavery, I wonder? Or have we successfully become Rome’s heirs rather than her slaves? Would contemporary Romans agree?
My first reaction is that as long as the Roman army occupied Britain, the Roman culture adopted by the native rulers was, as Tactus says, actually a badge of their slavery. When the occupying army withdrew, and native culture (or a blended culture) re-emerged, Roman culture was no longer a badge of slavery, but now merely a foreign influence similar, say, to the preeminence in Europe of French culture under Louis XIV. But, perhaps that is also a form of slavery. There are, I think, some obvious connections with the imperialism of the modern global monoculture, and the anger in the Muslim world about the loss of indigenous traditions.
We are all captives of our culture, and co-participate in its creation. So, we are all in some sense slaves of some culture, although perhaps we prefer that it not be a foreign culture. What’s interesting to me is how easily this topic relates back to Nietzsche’s discussion of slave mentality and the superman, where so much of our common culture is all about control of the individual, contrasted with the natural aristocrat who (supposedly) creates his own values.
Recent events in a certain community call to mind one of my favorite passages from Thaddeus Golas’ The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment:
“Every person who allows others to treat him as a spiritual leader has the responsibility to ask himself: Out of all the perceptions available to me in the universe, why am I emphasizing the ignorance of my brothers? What am I doing in a role where this is real? What kind of standards am I conceiving, in which so many people are seen to be suffering, while I am the enlightened one? My experience is that everyone believes he or she is capable of leadership, but very few do it well.”
I’ve been very interested the past few weeks in Myths & Nationhood, Geoffrey Hosking and George Schopflin, eds. (Routledge, 1997). It seems to me that investigating the role of national myths in fostering identity applies equally as well to reconstructionist religions, particularly those with a folkish element. I was particularly struck today by Anthony Smith’s “The ‘Golden Age’ and National Renewal.” His thesis is that:
“The return to a golden age is an important and probably an essential, component of nationalism. Its role is to re-establish roots and continuity, as well as authenticity and dignity, among a population that is being formed into a nation, and thereby to act as a guide and model for national destiny. . . . By serving as a model and guide to that destiny, ethnic antiquity, and especially the golden age, becomes a source of continual inspiration, establishing the authenticity and continuity of the community’s culture and conferring dignity on nations-to-be and well-established nations alike.” Smith finds five functions of a golden age myth: to satisfy a quest for authenticity, to locate and re-root the community in its own historic and fertile space, to establish a sense of continuity between the generations, to remind members of the community of their past greatness and hence their inner worth, and finally to point toward a common destiny.
He also finds three tests for practical usability. First, the myth must be authentic on many levels. It cannot be merely an invented tradtion or a patchwork. It should be reasonably well-documented, and capable of being connected and made relevant to the people concerned. Secondly, it must have the potential for inspiration, meaning that it has a mythic quality that can strike a chord in the heart (as well as being applicable to all citizens of the nation). And, thirdly, it must be capable of reinterpretation in the light of changing social and political needs.
Here is a brief excerpt:
“These concepts serve a number of functions for both individuals and communities in a nationalist epoch. The first is to satisfy the quest for authenticity. For nationalists themselves, this has become a lietmotif of their struggle. They seek to ‘realize themselves’ in and through the nation-to-be, believing that the nation has always been there, concealed under the debris of the ages, waiting to be ‘reborn’ through the discovery of the ‘authentic self’. The interesting thing is that many people, who are not part of the nationalist elite or movement, have engaged in their own quests for ‘authentic identity’ and have come to embrace the need for authenticity in their own lives and as a part of the wider community that needs to be purified of external accretions.” Sounds like the Reconstructionist community to me.
In a little section called “Spiritual Overinsurance,” Jonathan Kirsch (God Against the Gods) writes:
“Thus, for example, a pagan might be a devotee of the stately old gods of Rome and Greece whom Homer calls ‘the Olympians’ — Apollo and Zeus, Aphrodite and Athena — and at the very same time, a worshipper of the Syrian goddess known as the Great Mother, the Persian god called Mithra or the newfangled cult that conjoined the Egyptian goddess Isis and a freshly minted god called Serapis, a conflation of two older Eygptian deities. One famous pagan called Praetextatus, a contemporary of both Constantine and Julian, is described on his epitaph as a proud collector of pagan priesthoods and initiations of all kinds: ‘high priest of Vesta, high priest of the sun, a priest of Hercules, an initiate of the mysteries of Dionysos and Eleusis, priest and temple guardian in the mystery of Cybele, and Father in the mystery of Mithras.’ It says as much about paganism, as about Praetextatus that he used to joke with the pople that ‘he might be tempted to become a Christian by the prospect of being Bishop of Rome.’
“So welcoming was polytheism that even the holiest figures of monotheism were recruited into Greco-Roman paganism. One emperor . . . adorned his private chapel with ‘statues of Abraham, of Orpheus, of Apollonius, and of Christ,’ writes Edward Gibbon of Alexander Severus (208-235) . . . .
“Even Yahweh, regarded by strict monotheists who wrote the bible as the one and only god, was made over into the deity called Iao and given a place among the many gods and goddesses of paganism. . . . [T]hey wanted to make sure that they did not forfeit the blessing of the right god by making sure to worship all gods — a practice that historian Robin Lane Fox describes as “spiritual over-insurance. . . .
“’Whilst all nations and kingdoms honor their respective god, the Romans respect the gods of all the others, just as their power and authority have reached the compass of the whole world,’ boasts the pagan orator Caecillus. ‘They search out everywhere these foreign gods, and adopt them for their own; nay, they even erected altars to unknown gods.”
Normally, I enjoy Jonathan Kirsch, but God Against the Gods is really just a popular history of the transition from paganism to Christianity in the Roman empire. I read it in an evening, and didn’t see anything that I didn’t already know, or that any reasonably well-informed lay person wouldn’t already know. I’d recommend it primarily to people who already know that the triumph of Christianity was largely the result of politics, but who are bit fuzzy on the details.
The passage quoted above caught my eye for a very personal reason. I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by pagans and neopagans both who talk about “working with more than one pantheon.” I didn’t mind at first, but after a year of hearing it everywhere, it’s like a kind of water torture.
Who thought up this silliness, anyway? It sounds like Llewellyn Press nonsense to me. First, I don’t like the implicit idea that being a pagan involves working with a pantheon. It sounds like something from wicca and magic circles. I don’t work with my gods; I fulfill my duty by according them appropriate honor. Secondly, I’m not particularly fond of the implicit assumption that the gods can be neatly divided into discrete cultural packages. I guess some people suppose that gods are a consumer package like any other commodity — you do a bit of comparison shopping, then choose the style you want (but be careful that they go with the 9-piece living room suite from Sears, and make sure you can afford the payments).
The older I get, the more I go back to the core set of beliefs I already had when I was 14, and the more I’m prepared to ignore all the fluff I’ve learned to tolerate since then. I think of myself as a polytheist. I have my own set of preferred personal and family gods, who happen to be Norse. But I don’t deny the existence of the others. In fact, I think a good case can be made that the Christian god and the Greek and Roman gods are the appropriate civic and cultural gods of America. If I occasionally offer a pinch of cornmeal to Tonantzin as Queen of the Americas, or a pinch of incense to Hermes as a patron of lawyers (and thieves), I don’t see that I’ve given offense to my family gods, and I certainly don’t think of myself as “working with more than one pantheon.”
In fine, it seems to me that all the hand-wringing on this subject is really only possible among people who aren’t polytheists in the traditional sense of the word, people who have some kind of new-agey “all the gods are one” philosophy. If you accept, as I do, the proposition that each of the gods is a distinct being, it’s only a short step to “spiritual over-insurance.”
Royal Roman ruins go back to age of myth
Newfound palace dates back to city’s legendary origin
ROME – Legend has it that Rome was founded in 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of Mars, the god of war, who were suckled as infants by a she-wolf in the woods. Now, archaeologists believe they have found evidence that at least the time frame for that tale may be true: Traces of a royal palace discovered in the Roman Forum have been dated to roughly the period of the eternal city’s legendary foundation.
https://www.msn.com/
By coincidence, tomorrow is the Quirinalia, a Roman festival honoring Quirinus, a Sabine god who came to be identified with Romulus.
I saved this piece for myself but now I don’t remember where I found it, or if indeed the text here is quoted from Richard Reese.
by Richard Reese
The story of progress – that each generation is better than the one before it is about 200 years old. These 200 years have been the most tumultuous and destructive years in the history of the planet. In fact, the history of civilization is not a story of progress, but a story of continuous decline.
The Christian tradition begins in the Garden of Eden of the hunters and gatherers. The Fall symbolizes the dawn of civilization. Yahweh, a Semitic storm god, could see that farming was destroying Creation. For much of the Old Testament, he urges his Chosen People to destroy the hideous cities of the defilers of the Earth. But the farmers beat the nomads, and the Christian prophets tell us that we are now sitting in the shadows of an onrushing Armageddon.
In the Norse myths, it’s the same cycle. The human gods conquer the powerful forces of nature, rule for a while, then are destroyed by the revenge of nature at the battle of Ragnarok. The ancient Greeks saw human decline as a series of historic ages. Hesiod writes of the Golden Age: “They lived like gods, free from worry and fatigue; old age did not afflict them; they rejoiced in continual festivity.” This was followed by the Silver Age, a matriarchal era of agriculture, when men obeyed their mothers. This was followed by the Bronze Age, a patriarchal era of war : “Their pitiless hearts were as hard as steel; their might was untamable, their arms invincible.” This was followed by the Iron Age, a time “when men respect neither their vows, nor justice, nor virtue.”
Oct. 20, 2019: I find online a composition with the same title and apparently written by the same author, but the content is very different.