Goddess End-Times

Or rather, different times.

A white buffalo calf has been born in Texas. The Lakota Sioux - and other tribes as well - believe that a white buffalo will usher in a return of the goddess, committed to peace and unity.

This site tells the story: "that the birth of a white buffalo calf would be a sign that it would be near the time when she would return again to purify the world. What she meant by that was that she would bring back harmony again and balance, spiritually."

Quite a different world than one in which a reporter, here, lauds a 19th century buffalo hunter as being "successful" for having shot 20,000 buffalo. The article also notes that people in some middle American town still have a festival honoring the guy. Extinction Ecstasy?

The image is White Buffalo Calf Woman, by Rogue Guirey Simpson

Mary and Ecumenism

My Childhood vision of Mother Mary MacKillop
galloping past the Alpha Convent bringing
more joeys to Central Western Queensland,
by Luke Roberts

Zenit is the conservative Catholic news service - it's "the world seen from Rome."

They've got an online interview with Mark Shea, identified as a former Protestant and now a leading Catholic apologist, who has written a three-volume defense of Mary. Some of his quotes:

Many of the [early Protestant] Reformers had a profound devotion to Mary and, in fact, accepted much of Catholic teaching about her. However, as Protestantism became more remote from Catholic teaching (and as, in English-speaking countries, Elizabeth I found it very convenient to supplant the cult of the Virgin with a political cult of the Virgin Queen), that connection failed and was eventually broken.

Along with that went the loss of a sense of the sacramental, of the senses of Scripture, and of an appreciation for the feminine in the life of the Church. Mary came to be seen almost exclusively as a sort of pagan goddess and an actual threat to genuine Christian devotion: a perception that would have been absolutely foreign to the mind of any Christian in the first 16 centuries of the Church....

One of the earliest slurs uttered against Jesus was that he was a bastard, the product of a liaison between Mary and a Roman soldier named Pantera (probably a corruption of "parthenos" which is Greek for "virgin").

Is the point of the slur to attack Mary? Of course not! The point is to attack Jesus as a mere common bastard and to deny that he is the Son of God or of any divine origin.

Likewise, when the heretic Nestorius demanded that Christians no longer hail Mary as "Theotokos" or "God bearer", his attack was directed not at Mary, but at the notion that the Man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity were a unity....

When it comes to Mary, the average Evangelical Protestant is in a position analogous to that of a teetotaler terrified that a sip of wine at communion will transform him into a raging drunken libertine.

Rather than be hyper-focused on the question of whether Catholics honor Mary "too much" and are just about to bow down to Astarte and Isis, the Evangelical would find much more spiritual benefit asking the question "How is it we Evangelicals honor her ‘just enough'?"

When honestly considered (especially against the backdrop of historic Christianity and the practice of the apostolic Church), what he will discover is that it is Evangelicalism that is peculiarly fearful of the woman whom Scripture declares all generations shall called blessed.

Aside from pulling her out of the closet to sing "Round yon virgin, mother and child" she is basically never spoken of among Evangelicals—except to say that Catholics are way overboard about her.

But the reality is that the most Marian Catholics (think John Paul II or Mother Teresa) also tend to be the most Christocentric ones. That's because all real Marian devotion refers us to Christ....

ZENIT: Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote in an essay about the apparitions at Fatima that Mary was the key to bringing Christ to the Islamic world. What do you think of this proposal?

Shea: I think he's on to something.

I have no idea how it will all play out, but I was struck by a conversation I once had with a man from Turkey who emailed me asking for more information about the Catholic Church. He was raised Muslim but was drawn to Christ.

Looking over the vast menu of Christianities available on the web he was very quick to pare it all down to the Catholic Church. Why? "Because you honor Mary as we are taught to do in Islam."

I think there's something mighty important going on in that, just as I have noticed that, among the various folks I have met who have become Catholic from a Jewish background, virtually all of them have had some sort of mystical encounter with Mary.

It's interesting to tease out meaning from this. It certainly doesn't include the idea that if Jesus had a mortal father he would be just a "mere common bastard." When Jesus' message was that we are all the children of god.

Shea's point is that the veneration of Mary is Christ-centric and conservative. As someone who wrote about the church for 15 years, with all kinds of access to both what you might call the corporate side of the church and its living communities, I'd agree. The most conservative Catholics of all are incredibly devoted to Mary.

But as for the dire lack of the feminine face of god in Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam, I'd second Shea's view: "there's something mighty important going on in that."

Protestants & the Feminine Face of God

Protestants may not define themselves by their "sullen neglect of Mary," as Time magazine put it a few years back, but their message surely lacks the feminine face of god. As Time put it, "[In Mary there is] a central Christian image of love . . . that Protestantism never officially repudiated but from which it has been estranged almost from the start."

Protestants deny it. Protestant speaker and preacher Mark Roberts writes, "I've included Mary in my own preaching at several points. For example, eleven years ago... "

Gee. I guess "underwhelmed" would cover that.

Travel to the Camargue

Thirza Vallois has a great article on the Camargue at France Today. Vallois is author of the three Around and About Paris guides. She's a consummate historian - those books on Paris are the only guidebooks necessary for the traveler who sees life in the context of history.

Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, "the cradle of Christianity in Western Europe" as Vallois puts it, is on the coast of the Camargue region. It's here that one version of the legend of the Magdalene has her coming to shore, with her "black servant Sara" who became patron saint of the European gypsies, and, "Eventually the village became a pilgrim destination for European gypsies, an ongoing tradition that draws thousands of gypsies from all over the Continent for the three-day event, May 24-26, along with huge crowds of spectators who turn up as much for the gypsy music and dancing as for the gypsies' fervent religious pilgrimage. After Mass on May 24, the statue of Sara is carried in procession all the way into the sea."


Sarah, by other accounts, is Mary Magdalene's daughter by Jesus.

The Templars make their way into the Camargue as well:

Paul Ricard (1909-1997) was another of the Camargue's pioneering visionaries. In 1939, by which time his future empire of "real Marseille pastis" was well under way, he bought a sprawling estate with a farmhouse, a former medieval domain of the Knights Templar-a Templar cross still stands on the site today. Called Méjanès (meaning halfway), it was situated midway between the two branches of the Rhône. There he intended to grow the licorice, fennel and mint that go into the iconic drink of Provence, but the war, and the Vichy government's ban on spirits the following year, forced him into alternative planning. Since he couldn't sell alcohol, he would use Méjanès to breed cattle for both milk and meat. But one way or another, the land was a salty wasteland and would need an irrigation system. The Knights Templar had been faced with the same challenge.

Ricard was also among the early pioneers of the Camargue rice industry, which now supplies 25 to 30 percent of the home market. He may have picked up on Henri IV's idea to introduce the staple to the Camargue-in Henri's case, they say it was to complement his favorite dish, poule au pot, although Ricard intended it principally as a means to desalinate the soil. The French associate Ricard's name with the famous anise-flavored pastis he created in 1932, mostly unaware that, if Parmentier taught their ancestors to eat potatoes, Paul Ricard was instrumental in teaching them to eat rice.

Exploring the Camargue by horseback, as Vallois says, is easy to do, safe, and unforgettable.

The young woman who guided us not only explained the local fauna and flora, but also talked about the differences between the French that she spoke and the French they taught in school - which she'd never understood too well. Her French was well flavored with the Provençal dialect.

The Trinity with Mary

Humanity's experience of the sacred keeps bringing back the feminine sacred - and Church dogma just as endlessly has insisted differently. There seems to have been a particularly strong yearning in recent years for the "face of the goddess," but it seems likely that this same yearning has been just as powerful in past centuries. They called it heresy. Paganism. Idol-worship. (The image of the Virgin Mary is from the Mariavite Sodality, a Texas Catholic group that "includes Marian paths of Gnosis.")

Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire, says,

The Christians of the seventh century had insensibly relapsed into a semblance of paganism: their public and private vows were addressed to the relics and images that disgraced the temples of the East: the throne of the Almighty was darkened by the clouds of martyrs, and saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration; and the Collyridian heretics, who flourished in the fruitful soil of Arabia, invested the Virgin Mary with the name and honours of a goddess. [More on this seventh century "heresy" is at The Chariot.]

That evidently led to the The Qur'an's teaching "And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, 'Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah'?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, though I know not what in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden." (Qur'an 5:116)

Which has in turn led to Christians reacting in horror at the thought that anyone would think that they worship more than one god - and in particular include a feminine god as part of the trinity. After all, the early Christian fathers spent centuries arguing, killing and excommunicating one another over how to explain Christianity as monotheistic - despite the trinity of the father, son, and holy spirit - all of whom were always relentlessly masculine, of course.

And yet even today a Presbyterian website reports, "Muslims and Jews have presumed, as have some Christians, that Christians worship three separate gods. An African Muslim once said that the main difference between his religion and Christianity was that he had several wives and one God, while Christians had one wife and several gods. Muhammad thought Christians believed in three different deities, one of them the goddess Mary, who was impregnated by intercourse with the father God."

There is one essence of God," say the Presbyterians (and the Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, etc.). "The emphasis is on oneness, not three-ness.The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God -- but they are one God."

Gotcha.

The Mormans don't buy it.

To Mormons, the Godhead consists of three separate and distinct beings:
* God the Father
* Jesus Christ
* The Holy Ghost

That takes them completely out of the supposedly monotheistic Christian tradition, which hammered out back in the first few centuries after Christ how it was that there could could be 1) the Father, 2) the Son, and 3) the Holy Spirit, and yet the three were one. The Mormans, saying that they're going by the Bible alone, think that's bunk.

In fact, the entire discussion of the trinity from both the Mormon and the Presbyterian links are primary exhibits on how analyzing faith turns it into dogma and strips it of its transcendent power.

One thing that all varieties of Christian dogma have in common, though, is that god is male, whether he's one or three.

For their part Muslims insist that any god more than one male god is too many.

That eliminates, however, the "ah moment" many women - including myself - feel upon testing out these words: Our mother, who art all around me, hallowed be thy name.

There's a rush of rightness there even for an agnostic such as I.

Inexplicable religion

The Guardian has a Simon Blackburn review of Karen Armstrong's new book, In Defense of God. The book's thesis is that religion at its essence uses "devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music."

Armstrong evidently posits that the worst perversion that can happen to religion is intellectualizing it: "This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail."

So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the "apophatic" tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words...

The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression.

Blackburn disagrees, saying that silence is no more than the lowest common denominator, the mind idling - and that, "As David Hume put it, in human nature there is 'some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent.' So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance."

Silence is of course often the mind at idle, especially when it comes to intellectual endeavors. But isn't that Armstrong's point? That religion, despite Aquinas' labors, is in no way suited for intellectualism?

Prehistoric Cave Artists Were Women

National Geographic reports that scientists have measured the myriad handprints (including the one shown, from the Pech Merle cave in southern France) that are part of prehistoric cave art and come to the conclusion that they are the hands of women.

Bien sûr...