katsintithu

Via Everlasting Blört, we enjoyed looking through this 1903 gallery of Hopi Kachina as rendered by an artist known as Kutcahanauu (White Bear) and published in a 1903 volume commissioned as part of an ethnographic study of tribal culture. The animistic spirit beings—revered and respected but not worshipped—have three distinct manifestations: the supernatural, the dance and the figurines (tihü), the likeness or personification of real world people, things and forces of nature and are understood to have relationships, unions and offspring. The figurines act as messengers between the natural and spirit worlds and have an instructive aspect for their caretakers. Much more to explore at the links above.

abbots bromley horn dance

Though cancelled this year due to the pandemic, customarily the eleventh century ritual folk dance—whose current iteration involves characters adorned with reindeer antlers, Maid Marian (Robin Hood’s love interest), a Village Idiot and a hobby horse is held on the day after Wakes Sunday, the first one falling after 4 September—traditionally an end of summer funfair introduced by Gregory the Great to transfer devotions from pagan idols to patron saints and preserved as a summer holiday through the Industrial Revolution as an homage to trade guilds. Academic research into the history of Staffordshire believe that the dance itself was a form of enchantment—sympathetic magic to ensure a good hunting season. The headdress used generation after generation has been radio-carbon dated back almost a millennium old where reindeer could last be found on the British Isles. An alternate kit of regular red deer antlers are used for when the troupe goes on tour. 

divinisation or pompatus of love

We enjoyed reading this short, collective hagiography that profiles several saints named Hyacinth, including one from Fara: “A martyr about whom nothing is known,” but we were more intrigued by the footnote for namesake flower (Giancinto, Jacinto, Hyakithos) and its mythological origins in a handsome Spartan prince and his fatal love-triangle.
Hyacinth was the lover of Apollo, but he had the attention and advances of a host of other suitors including the famous Thracian singer Thamyris, Zephyrus and Boreas—respectively the West and North Winds. Hyacinth preferred the company of Apollo and together in a chariot drawn by swans, they had adventures. While playing a round of frisbee (discus), Hyacinth was struck in the head and perished, the eponymous blossom rising up where his blood was spilled—a trope appropriated by Christianity as a symbol of renewal. Devastated Apollo blamed himself but there is strong suspicion that the winds conspired to punish the prince out of jealousy, and the god wanted himself to become mortal to join him after his healing powers failed him. The Spartan month that coincided with early summer when the flowers bloom was named in his honour and included three days of festivities. Hyacinth was eventually resurrected and joined the pantheon of the gods. This attainment of godhood is apotheosis and usually in Antiquity heroes were accorded local status alone, whereas in Imperial Rome, a deceased ruler was generally recognised by his success, decree of the senate and popular consent—though some ridiculed this practise as it also included the corrupt and inept—satirised by referring to the tradition with another Greek borrowing apocolocyntosis—that is, pumpkinification with accompanying lampoon that features Claudius and Caligula in the underworld.

the secret teachings of all ages

Having joined that Great Beyond on this day in 1990 (*1901) and perhaps finding out the accuracy of what he taught, Canadian-American mystic and prolific lecturer Manly Palmer Hall was best remembered for the eponymous ambitious and comprehensive survey and fusion of wisdom literature.
An encyclopaedic outline compiled and ultimately published in 1928—volumes sold per subscription prior to publication (which strikes one as exceedingly modern though such funding methods, cash-on-delivery, have a long past) and recruited top talent in all departments, including printers, the eminent illustrator J. Augustus Knapp and book designers once employed by the Vatican and great universities—as a concise and accessible digest of metaphysics that challenged one to examine symbols, convention and ritual though the lens not of a received religion but rather as a heuristic tool for probing universal truths. Travelling from his native Los Angeles to Europe and Asia, Hall acquired many rare books and manuscripts on esoterica as original sources and due to the success of his publication of The Secret Teachings of All Ages and some generous patrons (also not a new scheme) and in 1934 founded public trust called the Philosophical Research Society—still in operation, to further his studies, curate collections and host events and seminars on the occult and mythology.

xx. prairial

Corresponding with the above date on the Republican Revolutionary calendar—the equivalent of today on the Gregorian—lawyer and statesman, Maximillen François Marie Isidore de Robespierre aghast at the idea of complete rejection of the role of god and religion, sought to achieve a happy medium between Roman Catholicism and the agnostic Cult of Reason, proclaimed in Year II (1794) of the Republic the Festival of the Supreme Being, Féte de l’Être suprême.
Meticulously planned and with holidays scheduled in advance every tenth day—the equivalent of fortnightly celebrations, many saw the courtly and bureaucratic nature of the event as a substitution and surrogate for the old ways that the movement had sought to overturn, especially the paternal nature of this civic, state religion that believed that reflection and threat of retribution were necessary for a democratic society. The Thermidorian Counter Revolt (so called for taking place not long afterwards on IX. Thermidor II—27 July 1794) was in response to this re-imposition and precipitated Robespierre’s downfall and his guillotining—the agenda of observances falling away immediately thereafter, with Napoleon restoring Catholicism by Year X.

anthroposophy and apogee

Acknowledging the esoteric dangers that have emerged from the pseudo-scientific disciplines that arose towards the end of the era of Enlightenment just on the cusp of Modernity that try to reconcile the onslaught on evidence that the Cosmos is far older and complex than we can account for with the Bible and founding mythologies, Geoff Manaugh introduces us to the writing of one Sampson Arnold Mackey by leaning heavily into the paradoxical nature of such ethnography and theosophy that it’s in the effort of nailing down a narrative that brings up the problematic nature of speculation and amateur pursuits.
Never going away just repackaged and given a different sheen, we look at impossible epochs and receding events that disappear from the archeological record dredged up from archetypal memories and leading down pathways—some branches potentially problematic, either in fiction, espousing dangerous ideology or adopting thinking that rejects any achievement outsized in the mind of the beholder technically or sensibly has to be the work of the supernatural and one is left to deal with various theories that state the Pyramids of the Ancient Egyptians and Nazca Lines were the work of aliens. Mackey’s The Mythological Astronomy in Three Parts published in 1827 is no different than modern day disaster movies that gainsay the slow creep of environmental degradation with something dramatic like the flipping of the Earth’s magnetic poles and makes a deep and earnest investigation into a pet theory relating to the procession of the zodiac—that we’ve moved on from the Age of Pisces to the Aquarian one, except that Mackey hoped for more cataclysmic and drastic transitions—plunging humankind from an time of general prosperity into an “Age of Horror” plunging the world into deep enduring winters and arid droughts. Life and culture are driven so far as we know by stability and not swings between extremes, however distance that time out of mind may be. The work presents calculations, and like trying to pinpoint the primordial flood that haunts and informs our collective memory is a way to privilege one original story over another and suggest in was the deluge that formed the Mediterranean, for example, or makes some similar loaded and elaborated assumption—which again seems to be the overreach of amateurism that breeds more fables—but still invites one to ponder if these larger, unfathomable cycles might not have some bearing on belief and behaviour and constitution and how disaster imprints and lingers and that instinctual awareness of a pendulum fuels dread and hope.

jure uxoris

Buried in the churchyard of the chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula (in Chains) of the Tower of London, another Royal Peculiar like Westminster Abbey, where she was imprisoned and executed unrepentant with no crime articulated against her, the feast of the martyrdom of the Blessed Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (*1473 – †1541) is celebrated today—advanced one day as Augustine of Canterbury already occupied the actual date with her estranged son Reginald the last Catholic to hold that office before the split of the Church of England—on the order of Henry VIII.
Niece of kings Edward IV and Richard III, Margaret was one of the few members of the House of the Plantagenet to survive the War of the Rose and though once reduced to poverty was able to restore herself and her immediate family, titled in her own right—the other being Anne Boleyn, Marquess of Pembroke, also executed under the orders of the same. Though having no designs on restoring the dynasty and presenting no real threat to the king’s legitimacy, Margaret was disposed of, ostensibly on the intimation of treason, for being a power and independent individual—not to mention a landed woman of means whose property could be repossessed.

vittore e corona

Feasted on this day in parts of northern Italy, Austria and Bavaria, Saint Corona (or sometimes going by her Greek equivalent, Stephanie, στέφᾰνος—both denoting one who is crowned) is forever twain with Victor of Damascus, an early Christian martyr serving as a soldier in the province of Syria.
Before being ultimately beheaded for refusing to renounce his faith in 170 A.D. during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the imprisoned Victor was brought provisions and encouraged to preserve despite the bodily tortures he was made to endure by a woman called Corona, identified according to different sources as either the sister of one his fellow enlisted men or Victor’s wife. The authorities decided to apprehend her as well—and according to her hagiography, and as depicted rather bizarrely on this turn of the century fruit sticker—the crest of the greengrocers’ guild of Vienna, was put to a rather gruesome death for comforting the imprisoned by being bound to opposing palms trunks and being torn asunder once released. Rather than being invoked in times of plague, Corona is the patron of gambling and the lottery and called upon for circumstances involving money or treasure.

lemuralia

Celebrated discontinuously on today, the eleventh and the thirteenth, the Roman performed annual rites into order to exercise malevolent spirits of the dead that had taken up residence in their house during the previous year whom might be lured away with offerings of beans.
The Vestal priestesses whose chief patronage was for hearth and home, cultivating a sacred fire that symbolically burned for all and was never to be extinguished, baked all the mola salsa used throughout the year, salted flour cakes that were much like communion wafers and were burnt offerings themselves as well as given to sacrificial animals—for the whole city and for Lemuralia made a special batch made with the first ears of grain of the season to help appease the restive dead. According to contemporary scholarship by Ovid, the observance was derived from an older ritual called Remuria instituted by the founder of Rome himself to atone for the death of his brother, Remus.
Incantations included the head of the household (paterfamilias) rising at midnight and pattering around the chambers barefooted and tossing black beans over his or her shoulder, favomancy—see above, and repeating Haec ego mitto—his redimo meque meosque fabis (These I dispatch; with these beans I redeem me and mine) with the rest of the family and domestics banging pots and pans. Though All Saints and All Souls Day for Western Christianity has been advanced toward the end of October and beginning of November (Halloween right now? Yes please), for the Eastern Catholic and Oriental Orthodox church, they are celebrated on the Friday following Easter as perhaps a syncretism of this Roman custom. Because of the vacating of noxious ghosts, the month was considered an inauspicious time to wed, and hence the proverb: Mense Maio malae nubunt—Bad girls get married in May.

the magicks of megas-tu

Following the previous episode and originally pitched for TOS, the October 1973 adventure finds the crew of the Enterprise on an alien world in a parallel dimension where magic is common practise instead of science and are placed on trial for humanity’s complicity in the Salem Witch Trials, subpoenaed to appear by a devil-like being called Lucien with near omnipotent powers. The officers of the court are not pleased that Lucien let the humans know about their planet and letting them dabble in spell-casting and are resolved to condemning both him and the crew for their transgressions.
Captain Kirk is able to successfully make his counter-argument, pleaing that mankind has advanced far since the seventeenth century and urges the judge show clemency—crucially, for Lucien too.  Convinced by this act of sympathy, the Enterprise is dismissed and allowed to return to their dimension. In the end, it is revealed that Lucien is synonymous with and the embodiment of the Abrahamic concept of Lucifer, this moment of dénouement being somewhat of a compromise since the creators wanted to feature an encounter with God as they had later wanted to do with the franchise’s first big screen adaptation—a pitch-script that itself never materialised in the form they had wanted.

joseph the worker

Venerated as the patron and protector of labourers and the institution of the Church and intercessor for a happy death as he died surrounded by friends and family, Jesus and Mary included, Joseph is celebrated four times during the year: 19 March—the Feast of Saint Joseph (Josefstag, not to be confused with the Feast of the Ascension, which is also celebrated as Fathers’ Day in some countries) for his role as husband and guardian, the third Wednesday after Easter—the Solemnity of Saint Joseph for his role as spouse and patronage of the Catholic Church, this Memorial as role as a Worker (since 1955 as a reflection of and solidarity with the broader movement for social justice and labour reform that had been observed on the first of May since 1890)—a carpenter, and the first Sunday after Christmas for coming to terms with his situation. His extended patronage includes the pontificate of Pope Francis, Sicily, Austria, Belgium, the Americas, the Philippines and Vietnam as well as being the champion of explorers, pilgrims, immigrants, real estate agents and engineers.

speak of the devil

Founded on the principle of religious scepticism and gravitating towards the devil in the sense of adversary and ideological foil to theism, the Church of Satan was constituted in the Black House of California Street, San Francisco on this day, Walpurgisnacht, by musician, actor and occultist Anton Szandor LaVey (*1930 – †1997) in 1966.
Explicitly not espousing a belief in the Christian characterisation of the Great Dissembler or in fact any other deity for that matter, the orientation’s high priest saw the value in and reduplicated the organisation and the hierarchy, though as a counterpoint to the control and validation that the Abrahamic faiths demanded and by extension the share of evangelical prosperity that they tout. The Church also recognised the intrinsic value and co-opted some symbolism and ritualistic elements as cathartic and therapeutic—so called lesser magic with the possibility of greater, supernatural magic that was outside the limits of human comprehension yet only ahead of scientific understanding. Learn more about the Church’s history and tenants at the link to their website above.

le livre des esprits

With the 1857 publication on this day of Allan Kardec’s (nom de plume of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, *1804 – †1869) seminal, gospel work The Spirits Book, the Spiritist movement (not to be confused with a parallel interest called spiritualism, which concerned itself with the ability and inclination of the dead to communicate to the living) is considered arrived and complete with this final codification that attempts to address the hard, existential questions.
The main tenants of the governing philosophy hold that all corporeal living beings are manifestations of essential and discrete immortal souls which need to become incarnate at increasingly higher states to attain intellectual and moral perfection. The major schism between the former and the later was Spiritism’s belief in the reincarnation, transmigration of the soul into other physical containers and dead relatives being unavailable for consultation through a medium and thus never took hold in the United States and United Kingdom (though those objections seemed to have lapsed in the meantime) as it did in other parts of Europe, South America and Asia. Another aspect that established religions took grave exception to was Spirtism’s theist nature—evolution-affirming in its acknowledgement that a supreme and ambivalent god set things in motion but then stepped away.  After Kardec’s death, his wife and co-founder Amélie Boudet became the movement’s leading authority. There are upwards of twenty-million adherents world-wide, with the majority in Brazil and Vietnam.

saint et grand vendredi

As Paris and the world approaches the one-year anniversary of the conflagration that engulfed Notre Dame last year, there will be a small, closed service (only seven clerics and worshippers in attendance) and meditation broadcasted in remembrance and solidarity for those suffering because of the spread of the corona virus, also responsible for the small and non-existent audiences at this and other communities around the world. This day marking the crucifixion of Jesus, the brief mass inside the cathedral will also focus on its most celebrated relic, the Crown of Thorns, which was gifted by Baldwin II, Emperor of Constantinople (called the Broke) to King Louis IX of France in 1248, and was saved by the city’s Fire Brigade last April.

tigernach mac coirpri

Criminally anglicised as Tierney, today marks the feast day of Tigernach (†549), patron saint of the town of Clones in County Monaghan, part of the border region of Ulster. Born of an unsanctioned and scandalised affair between one of the princesses (Der Fraích) of Farley (Fermag) and a mercenary warrior called Coirpre allied to her father the king, Tigernach was fostered by Saint Brigid of Kildare, whom gave him his name—meaning “princely”—and saw to that the child received a good education. Brought up in a parochial environment, Tigernach was dispatched to Rome to retrieve some relics to found a church and monastery and was eventually, the relationship with his grandfather the king reconciled, offered the rank of bishop in his home territory. As that would mean the ejection of the incumbent in Clones, Tigernach choose instead to retreat to life on a hillside as a hermit, cultivating the grace and wherewithal to perform the accounts of miracles attributed to him including raising from the dead the archbishop of neighbouring Armagh.

skirting the issue

Fast Company has a brief but circumspect survey of how fashion has informed and enforced social distancing through the ages with hoop skirts and hijabs and masquerades and mukena as interventions to communicability. What other dress do you think keeps diseases and unwanted suitors at bay? I wonder what sorts of accessories might come out of this latest push for separation.

graffito blasfemo

Believed to be among the earliest surviving depictions of Jesus was rediscovered in 1857 through excavation work on the Palatine Hill of Rome at a site that was the palace of Caligula prior to becoming a finishing school and it during this phase of the structure’s history some pupil presumably etched the graffiti into the wall plaster depicting a young man prostrating to a donkey-headed figure on a crucifix with the caption, apparently meant to mock a fellow student, ΑΛΕ ξΑΜΕΝΟϹ ϹΕΒΕΤΕ ϑΕΟΝ “Alexamos worships [his] god.” The standard method of execution until abolished by Constantine in the fourth century, Roman society found it incredulous that Christian would follow a figure so basely undone, conflated with the belief by contemporary Romans (around the second century) believed that Christians and other religious minorities practised onolatry—that is, donkey worship. In the next chamber, there is a seeming retort with no accompanying image but the inscription in Latin and by a different hand—presumably the victim of this ridicule: ΑΛΕξΑΜΕΝΟϹ FIDELIS—that is, Alexamenos is faithful.

mantra-rock dance

Organised by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness as a fund-raising event for a local temple and as a promotional event for the movement’s founder and chief evangelist, Bhaktivedānta Swāmi, the titular concert and service was hosted on this day in 1967 in San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom (a familiar venue). The evening included performances by Moby Grape, Big Brother and theHolding Company with Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead with speakers Owsley "Bear" Stanley, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg, leading the audience in the Maha Mantra chant.

missioners

In a rather revolting display of presumption and trouncing the principal of separation of church and state, the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion that’s receiving deserved condemnation, the Episcopal bishop suffragan of the US Armed Forces accepted a Bible donated from the Museum of the Bible (I think this opportunity for self-promotion and the prayvaganza for Trump were the big take-aways for this ceremony) to sanctify as the official one for the newly constituted Space Force at the altar of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.  Notwithstanding that the oath of office for any military branch is not sworn on any religious text, to privilege one narrative or worldview above another is completely antithetical to good order, discipline and cohesion. “Almighty God, who set the planets in their courses and the stars in space,” the chaplain beseeched, “look with favour, we pray you, upon the commander-in-chief, the forty-fifth president of this great nation, who looked to the heavens and dared to dream of a safer future for all mankind.”

suspended judgment

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we find ourselves affronted with those awful low-points of anti-scholasticism that makes one bid good riddance to the past decade, which in many ways has all the hallmarks of regression and should have by all rights set our species on the trajectory to the cutting-room floor—and perhaps still will.  Take solace while perusing this hall of shame that you don’t rank among them—the climate change deniers, the flat-earthers, the anti-vaxxers, the incels and their ilk and hopes that one never does. Condemnation of what’s wrong and misguided is of course justified but can also serve to cement one’s beliefs, grounded or baseless.