Gnostic Wolfe

Jerry Friedman · 06 Nov 2002, 19:59 · from urth-v0211.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Gnostic Wolfe
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 11:59:28 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0211-2043 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0211/2043.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

--- James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net> wrote:
...

>          What you tend to find in all "pagan" religions is something
> like this:
>=20
> a. Nature gods of streams, woods, etc. Little local gods. Totem tribal
> spirits.
> b. Often these are linked with ancestors, who have become spirits
> somehow.=20
> Household gods. Lares and Penates. Totem poles and masks.
> c. Sky gods, associated with government. The big gods. And medium gods=20
> associated with particular cities. Vesta in Rome.
> d. Some kind of "god behind the gods" with whom we have no contact.

I think "all 'pagan' religions" is an exaggeration.  Probably
mostly civilized cultures have "big gods" associated with government.

> (Though=20
> there are those who question how much the "great spirit" really exists
> for=20
> "pagan" people.)

I've talked with one Native American woman who was very strongly
against the ideas of one God and one Truth, but I don't know whether
that opposition was part of her tribe's traditions or more a
response to the damage done to them by monotheists.

>          In any culture, it becomes a matter of emphasis. Small tribes
> go=20
> mostly with local gods and ancestors.

I agree, but I might say "only" rather than "mostly".

> Large citified or imperial cultures=20
> move more into sky/government gods -- their horizon has been enlarged.

And subjugation, whether of foreigners or their own peasants, becomes
more important to them.
...

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net