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March 4 - June 28, 2020
Why tenfold?
Are we accepting the slow pace of change as a rule and making a deduction based on that rule, or am I about to learn why the eschatological practices of the early Zoroastrians mirrored those of their own predecessors.
That’s an interesting twist.
A harridan or bad tempered overbearing woman.
Presumably cold poison.
In Norse religion it is the bridge guarded by Hajmdal (I think).
Why do we persistently imagine the existence of a prior world destroyed by catastrophe? Does it help us explain why our current life is imperfect? Does it provide a warning of what can happen if we behave badly? Does it reflect our anxiety of failing and seeing the whole world we have built collapse?
Do we even know that Canaanites were foreigners? I am not certain anyone has actually disproven the theory that the Israelites emerged from among the Canaanites.
An interpreter of scripture.
Guilty of ...? I think presuming to believe he knows what God should do.
Odd how so many of the heroes of the Old Testament seem villainous by modern standards. In any modern telling, the zealot who refuses to allow the equality of the Canaanites and their religious beliefs is a pretty unambiguous bad guy.
Which seems like a very ancient way to conceptualized your god.
Pffff; everyone knows that no self-respecting deity can bring rain without first lighting an altar by divine will. Obviously divine will lights the altar and THE ALTAR brings the rain, duh!
Only one gets a seat at the table for Passover, and it’s not even the one who caused Passover!
These are prophets connected with either the political or religious establishments of their respective locales.
I am not certain what Eliade is getting at by contrasting profession and vocation. I guess the latter carries connotations of a calling or genuine passion, which may or may not be part of a profession.
Which makes the prophets sound rather problematic. These are the ones claiming that all compromise is apostasy, and that their word, conveyed directly from God, is the only possible truth. “I do not represent this faction or that faction, I represent the Truth” has a certain resonance with many a despotic regime of future eras.
It is unfortunate how little survives from the period following the division of Israel. I cannot help but wonder if the texts that we have, the very zealous accounts of the prophets and their gleeful predictions on Israel’s demise provide a snapshot of something very like a failed state. Is this a society where all traditional means of conflict resolution have broken down leading to civil discord and even collapse.
Much of the documents that form our understanding of religious morality seem kind of like the most extreme proclamations of a society in mid collapse preserved in amber and wrenched from their original context. It is as though the angriest proclamations of France ca. 1793, just as the nation descended into bloody anarchy, were preserved as the founding documents of a religious movement. Or as though one of Trotsky’s bromides from 1917, torn from its original context as part of the collapse of the old Russian Empire has become the cornerstone of a religious movement.
Well, that sounds like a happy family life.
Mixing intolerance with misogyny, lovely.
A tree, apparently it was once used to make turpentine.
This seems like a very different religious tradition than the richly ritualistic religion described in Exodus. It is also markedly different than the non-credal religious vision that became preeminent in post-diaspora Judaism.
The point at which one segment of a society celebrates foreign invasion as a means to overcome and destroy their domestics opponents seems to be well past the point where things have gone totally off the rails. It makes one think that late Davidic Israel had, essentially, collapsed into internal strife by the time of the Assyrian invasion.
It seems like one of the primary purposes of religion up to this time was to provide rituals for expiation. The process, in the latter days of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah seems to be dying, or at least the protagonists of the Tannakh are challenging the practice’s legitimacy. It makes me again wonder if our three monotheistic faiths are ultimately shaped by the death throes of a small nation experiencing a fairly mundane breakdown of civil society.
I don’t think they were, at least not until the 20th century.
Says the prophet eager to see the real inhabitants of the real world die screaming in search of a vision of a “more perfect” world, a world whose perfection is presumably reflected in a population who behaves exactly how the prophet wants.
It gave the millennialist prophets the Armageddon they had hoped for. The subsequent utopia was harder to find.
Much to the detriment of us, there ancestors. We are going to forever hear their hyperbolic insults used as a justification for the destruction of Israel and the rise of Christianity; and in the most painful moments, even as an excuse for anti-semitism.
I increasingly see ritual as the only valid contribution provided by religion to society. Rituals can provide the framework for expiation, reconciliation, and purification. It is through rituals that a community can actual build a constructive response to disagreement and potential strife. Substituting personal experience and moral rectitude for ritual at the center of religious experience turns an institution that could help society move forward peacefully into one that pits the adherents of differing belief against one another in mortal combat. The greatest feet of Judaism, having descended through the strife of the late Davidic era was to abandon a path based on belief, experience and moral rectitude, and to embrace a non-credal system organized around common rituals and ceremonies.
At this point salvation is still national, not individual.
And possibly to an internal conflict that was not being resolved by traditional means?
This is a fairly old theory.
The myth about a late-arrived god need not necessarily be a late-arrived myth.
They imply a Paradise? Why?
We’re assuming it mirrors an actual religious practice? Maybe a safe assumption given the era.
Everyone loves a good occult ritual. To many, secrecy conceals truth.
That’s one hell of a ritual right there.
We’re assuming the existence of some cosmic force that is titillated by living naked in nature?
I have no idea. A delirium associated with insomnia.
Eating of raw foods
Dream interpretations.
Only the gods could experience true immortality.
Which they presume to be central to the purpose of a mystery cult.
Later encompassed by the image of Jesus in his manger.
I have by now gathered that Eliade sees ecstatic, or at least transcendent experiences as inherently eschatological. I think I get the gist of the belief. A transcendent experience implies a different place or different state of being, and this alternate state of being can persist after physical death. I do not think, however, that Eliade ever proposed or even explained this connection. It seems like it is a preposition he assumes to be obvious. Some of his readers are me and my thick skull didn’t absorb this for a few hundred pages. I would have appreciated an explanation.
Interpretations implying that it explained a descent into the underworld (via death) and a subsequent return? It’s almost like this tale literally states what the myth of Orpheus implies by analogy.
Talk about euhumerization.
