CHRIST THE Copy-CAT

The powerful double-punch behind female deity is birth and sustenance. The Great Mother Goddess not only births us from her own body which is the Earth, the womb (see the "We Are Nothing But Dirt" post below), She is the source -- the only source -- of our peas, potatoes and Pete’s Pale Ale.

Actually, She is our peas, potatoes and Pete’s Pale Ale. She’s all that stands between us and sheer starvation, i.e., withering away again to dust/earth. The Earth-our-womb-‘n-food is female simply because it’s only women who possess the magic to birth and feed other humans through their own miracle-bodies. The poor male body can do neither. Put very simply,

Woman = Birth & Food = Mother Goddess
Man = [BLANK] = Bogus Daddy God

What’s so pathetic about the first Daddy gods of the Bronze Age is that they actually thought they could con us into thinking they – just like Mother – could birth ‘n feed us from their own flesh.

They wanted this so bad they could taste it.

And they tried so hard, poor dears. Giving birth through stolen ribs, pensis, sweaty armpits, slits in heads and bellies and by sitting on eggs. Now aren’t these little tricks just totally cute, creative and clever? Didn’t they totally convince you they were The Great Mother Goddess?

Those are some of their little ways of “giving birth.” As for feeding us through their bodies, well, poor dears, the best could do is something they christened “communion”: getting us to bake little wafers out of wheat, (which of course comes directly from the Great Mother’s body [earth/dirt]). Then -- and this is so cute – the little dickens tried to con us into believing the wafers are actually their bodies and not the Mother’s.

What breaks your heart is, they actually thought we’d fall for this stuff!!!!
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thnx to glane for the foto

LUKE SKYWALKER Where R U?

We need a new hero to step forward, one unafraid to guide us through the “dark night of our soul” and back into the light of Gaia. Luke Skywalker, where are you? Luke, we need you. Help us tear ourselves away from "the dying gods”; help us find the old lost paths back to the world of Gaia:

“…The new mythology does not create conquering heroes but rather seekers after the … Gaian world…. Those who refuse the call will hang on desperately to the *dying gods and … will continue to endanger the world …. Those who answer the call will … participate in a breaking away – as heroes have always done….

"[T]he ecological hero will have to endure a *dark night of the soul, a perilous journey among the *demons that haunt us as a species. As it has always been for heroes, this adventure is a *quest for something lost. The universe that science shows us is an elegantly integrated … universe… in which the … exclusionary religions … [and] national entities … become the outdated carriers of racism, pollution, corporate greed, war, and disease.

"The crucial salvation now is communal salvation; without it our species will die…. It will be the role of the new hero … to lead the way to the formation of belief systems … that will … be in accordance with the miracle of the ecological universe….”

From David Lemming’s The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 286-87. Starred words indicate separate entries in The Companion.
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Thnx to zeafonso for the foto

Look DOWN AT YOUR HANDS

Look down at your hands. Skin, nails, hair, bone. Where’d that stuff come from? Peas, Porterhouse steak, Bic Mac 'n fries, Pete's Pale Ale – whatever. And where’d that stuff come from? Seeds, water, dirt. Earth.

You are nothing but dirt. You were born out of dirt, of “Mother” earth. You are Mother Earth. Can you look me in the eye and say you’re anything but dirt?

How do you stay alive? More peas, potatoes & Pale Ale. To stick around, you have no choice but to slurp up more of Mother Earth. Not only did She bear you, She feeds you. All that stands between you and thin air is – Mother Dirt.

But why is “dirt” a word for “Earth”? When’d that happen? When the War-Gods bounced into town with their twisted ‘minds’ and told us we have “dominion” “over” Earth? BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Like saying we rule rocks, rain or the air!
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Thnx to rovaro for the foto

FEMALE Monotheism, ANYONE?

Goddess forbid I should leave you with the impression that all archaeologists pooh-pooh the Goddess. Here’s a pretty impressive dude who claims the Goddess was "a supreme being" all across the Near and Middle East from at least 10,000 BC all the way up to the time Yahweh reared his War-God head. This highly respected archaeologist even serves up the term “female monotheism”:

“Throughout the total duration of the Neolithic across the whole of the Near and Middle East, a unique ‘ideology’ is found … organized around two key symbols: one [is] female. Can she perhaps be derived from the first female statuettes known in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe and spread as far as Siberia? … She was not a ‘fertility symbol’ but a genuine mythical personality, conceived as a supreme being and universal mother, in other words a goddess who crowned a religious system which one could describe as ‘female monotheism’ in the sense that all the rest remained subordinated to her. The other [symbol], incarnate in the form of the Bull, is male…. At Catalhoyuk he appears subordinated to the Goddess by filial relationship, but he nevertheless ranks as the second supreme figure…” (Cauvin 2002: 32).

“Thus there is the celebrated statuette of Catalhoyuk, the Goddess, obese, giving birth, seated on panthers that serve as her throne; at Hacilar, the same person, equally seated on a panther, holds in her arms sometimes an infant, sometimes a young feline. Thus … are the ideas of fertility, of maternity, of royalty and of being the mistress of wild animals. Here are all the traits of the Mother Goddess who dominates the [Near and Middle Eastern] pantheon right up to the time of the male-dominated monotheism of Israel” (Cauvin 2002: 29-31; there’s a picture page in between this quote).

The book these quotations come from is Cauvin’s The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, 2002, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. "Jacques Cauvin is Directeur de Recherches emerite of the CNRS [the French National Scientific Research Council]. He is the founder of a CNRS-funded multidisciplinary research team that has worked at the Institut de Prehistoire Orientale at Jalès for more than twenty years on the beginnings of sedentary village life and the origins of farming in the Near East.”

FEMALE FIGURINE Festishes

Today I tried to digest an article* on the pre-Bronze-Age Goddess figurines on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Beginning with a nice bang, the author tsk-tsks over the fact that textbooks still call female figurines “eroticism.”

After that, though, she kept smacking me in the eye with fly-speck stuff like this: “[female] figures may have [been] … teaching aids for transmitting … knowledge about pregnancy and birth, [and they may also have been] … fetishes….”

Try as I might, I can’t see a simple-society woman explaining birth-giving by molding statuary. Take Nisa, the !Kung woman interviewed back in the eighties by Marjorie Shostak.** Can you see Nisa taking three hours to make a statue when she can draw the same gosh-darn thing in the sand in three seconds flat? Or better, act it all out (in the time it takes to say “It’s a girl!”)? (If you’ve read Nisa, you know what I mean, here.)

And the “clutching the fetishes” line just raises the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. Anthropologists used “fetish” in days of yore -- and only about the religions of others. Never caught ‘em using ‘fetish’ about christian crosses! My stars! Same with communion bread and wine, their god’s blood and guts – er, blood and body.

“Fetish” has a nasty ring, a ‘dirty’-sex-thing ring. Like “foot fetish,” or “the ‘witch doctor’ [sic] cured me with a shrunken-head fetish.” In the vocabulary of the modern scholar, “fetish” should get zilch shelf-space.

Here’s the rule and don’t forget it: When archaeologists dig up a male figurine, it’s a god or a man. Period. End of story.

But female figurines – ooh la la! Different story! There’s a new explanation every hour (Gotta be something we can call them other than ‘goddess'…). So we get “child’s toy, sex toy, child’s creation, teaching tool, trading token, obscenity, masturbation tool, fetish, self-portrait – the list goes on and on (“No, no, please ma! [Whimper, whimper]…. I beg!! Don’t let them be Goddesses! I too, too scared!!!”)

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*Diane Bolger, “Figurines, Fertility; and the Emergence of Complex Society in Prehistoric Cyprus,” Current Anthropology Volume 37, Number 2, April 1996.
** Nisa: Kung Woman, 1982.
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Thnx to morellomat for the foto

THOSE WHO Control THE PAST

After reading this, hadda go out and buy a big bag of junk food to drown my blues: "Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right Is Reimagining U.S. History," in Harpers Magazine, Dec., 2006.
A few snips from this long and frightening article:

Liberals like to point out that many of the Founders were not ... Christian but ... deists or downright unbelievers. Fundamentalists respond by trotting out the Founders’ most pious words, of which there are many (Franklin proposing prayer at the Constitutional Convention; Washington thanking God for His direct hand in revolutionary victories; etc., etc.).

SNIP

… William J. Federer's … America’s God and Country — a collection of apparently theocentric [quotations] distilled from the Founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates” — has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984, “control the future.”

SNIP

Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians ... to pray [where] the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation.” [It was on the basis of these] three words [that] the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state....”

“‘Those who control the present,’” Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.

PUTTING 'V i c t o r y' OUT OF ITS MISERY

The word “victory” needs to be struck straight away from American dictionaries. According to the highest authority in the land, His Highness, G. Dubya Bushy, no such word exists. Or at least one might suspect as such, considering Bushy’s refusal to define the word the thousand or so times he’s been asked.

How can a word hold its head up without a definition? A word minus its meaning just takes up space in our dictionaries. It knows it's not carrying its fair share. And it makes American dictionaries look bad. You have 50,000 words all nicely defined, and then a string of letters (‘v i c t o r y’) marches out -- with nothing behind it?

How embarrassing for ‘victory’! It just sits there shivering in humiliation and shame, poor thing, a pitiful outcast in a land of 50,000 other words, all handsomely described, defined, and definitively delineated. Let’s pitch poor ‘v i c t o r y’ and put it out of its misery.
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Thnx to wazari for the foto

GODDESS WORSHIPPERS Whistling IN THE DARK?

Great debate going on over at WashingtonPost.com, on the Goddess! (Thanks to Medusa Coils for the heads-up on this.) Here's the 2c-worth I threw into the pot:

Wendy,

“Goddess feminists are whistling in the dark when they argue … that everyone used to worship goddesses (some people did, but many did not)….”

Just a tad curious how you know who worshipped what in the past. As an archaeologist I can tell you *we* aren’t certain. One thing we do know, though: thousands of female figurines (but almost no males) have been unearthed in Europe and the Middle East circa 10,000 – 3000 BC. Many are other-worldly – i.e. not dolls, playthings, or porn stuff. A 6000 BC figurine, for example, shows a mammoth nude flanked by two lions, seated on a throne and giving birth. Figurines are often found in temples, on shrines, or mixed among religious paraphernalia.

Another thing we know about 10,000 – 3000 BC: there was no war to speak of. Go get *How War Began,* 2004, by Keith Otterbein, professor of anthropology at SUNY, Buffalo, a director of the well-known Human Relations Area Files, and author of numerous articles on warfare.

Read it.

Here’s the mistake you and most others make about goddesses. They split into two groups. Those after 3000 BC (the date differs by area) are wimpy war-god makeovers. Many before 3000 BC appear to be Great Mother Goddesses.

In a nutshell: After 3000 BC: War gods. Wimpy make-over goddesses. Constant war. Before 3000 BC: Great Goddesses. No war gods. No war.

Go get *The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture,* 2002, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, by archaeologist Jacques Cauvin. Read it.

I'm sure you'll agree we’d all be better off if we stuck with the war gods, the wimpy goddesses, and our constant warfare. Hee, hee.

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Thnx to the U. of TX for the pic

RICHARD DAWKINS: WHO'S THE Baddest OF THEM ALL?

"Richard Dawkins’s nice way of deploring both Islam and Christianity is well meant, but it is folly. Not all religions are equally dangerous...." MORE>>>>

(Remember Richie Dawkins? He's the dude who said Jehovah was “the most unpleasant character in all fiction: ... a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. See more reviews of his The God Delusion on Amazon.com]
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Thnx to mavvamp for the foto

PANTHEONS & pAmATRIARCHY

HERE'S an interesting pantheon site -- with references cited and recent changes noted. Includes pantheons I don’t see every day: Teutonic, Slavic & Eurasian and Haudenosauncee, for example.

The only thing I don't like is this statement in the Haudenosaunee section: "[R]ecall that the Haudenosaunee are matrilineal in matters of inheritence and descent - but note also the difference between matrilineal and matriarchal, which the Haudenosaunee weren't."

What the author doesn't tell you is that the Haudenosaunee (aka the Iroquois) were not patriarchal, either.

I think we need another new word, this time for what I think used to be quite common worldwide: neither patriarchy nor matriarchy but a blend of both. Should we call it "PaMatriarchy" -- "Women and men having equal power"?

Say it like this: "pah - mah' - tree - ar -- kee."

Or should it be MaPatriarchy?
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Thnx to ispap for the foto

Blowing OFF PAGANISM – & BOUNCING BACK AGAIN

Terri in Joburg, South Africa, has this to say about falling away from her faith. I love the parts about pre-rational thinking versus trans-rational thinking, and magical thinking becoming magical being:

I went through my own Dark Night not so long ago, after many years as a Pagan. I just dropped it all and became a metaphysical naturalist and a strong atheist.

Because I was hurting, nothing that was nonmaterial existed. What we could see was all there was. Belief was stupid.

Well, you who’ve been there know what I’m talking about -- and it may be most Pagans who’ve been on their path for any length of time.

But eventually I began to realise that what I was blowing off as primitive, pre-rational thinking was in fact post or trans rational thinking. The two are frequently confused, especially by those who’ve never experienced the transrational. From the outside they may look similar, but a little enquiry uncovers the fact that they are vastly different.

‘Magical thinking’ becomes magical being, and a whole new understanding of the integral nature of the entire universe becomes accessible.

Go HERE to get to Terri's blog, "Aquila ka Hecate."
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Thnx to kaler for the foto

“WOMAN” Turned INTO “MAN”!

D'jou know the word for “woman” used to be “man”?

Naw!!! I kid you not! “Man” comes from the old Norse word meaning “moon” and “wisdom.” Of course we women *do* have “moon wisdom” -- we bleed at the moon cycles -- something I’m told men have always admired (Penis envy?! Pshaw! Women are in tune with the moon and bleed without dying. Now that’s Big!)

So what was Old Norse for “dude”? It was “wer.” You know, as in Wer-wolf (i.e. wolf-man)? And ‘wer’ came from Sanskrit, ‘vir.’ As in ‘virile’?

Who perped this stuff on us, anyway? It’s making me fume. Musta been Flies Guys dudes who sat on women and pumped the air out of ‘em. These crude dudes took every one of our words for people-with-vaginas and junked them. Then they made up new words all coming from words for people-with-penises:

Man --> Wo-Man
He --> S-He
Male --> Fe-Male
Man --> Hu-Man
Dude --> Dude-Ette
(To read more about these stinky dudes, type “Flies Guys” in the search-engine box below).

This is just not right.

Even the war-rotten, woman-raking ancient Romans let women keep their own names:

Roman (Latin) Words for Vagina-person, Penis-Person:

Male: Mas, masculus, masculinus
Female: Femina

He: Hic, is, ille
She: Ea, illa, haec

Man: Vir
Woman: Mulier

Human: Humanus

Person: Homo

Him: Eum,hunc,illum
Her: Ejus, illius, hujus

So. Dudettes and Dudes:

MY NEW WORDS FOR ALL OF US:

Male: Mas (plural maris)
Female: Femina (plural feminae) “Was that mouse a mas or a femina?”

Man: Vir (plural viri) (as in “Veer off to the left”).
Woman: Mulier (plural mulieris) “That vir proposed marriage to that mulier today.”

Him: Hunc (as in “what a hunk!”) “I married hunc today.”
Her: Ejus (as in “aegis”: guidance, support, protection and tutelage). “The bride got rice in ejus eyes.”

Person: Homhet (as in trying to please heteros and homos both). “That homhet has toast crumbs on hunc tie, and the other homhet has egg on ejus blouse collar.”

He: Hic (as in “hiccup”)
She: Haec (as in “take a hike!”). “Mom bought baby clothes for the twins: blue for hic and pink for haec.”

Mankind: Peoplekind. “When did peoplekind begin to walk upright?”

People: People
Human: Human (I guess we can stick with a couple of the old guys).

NOTE: Still haven’t come ta names for Dude and Dudette; all ideas welcome.
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Mucho thnx to keeweeboy for the foto.

Marriage? SAY WHA’??? WHAT’S THAT?

Now here’s something to shoot you bolt upright in your comfy living room recliner: the ancient Goddess people might not have known the institution of marriage.

Vicki Noble* thinks that when the upstart War-God guys came to conquer the Goddess people (around 4000 BC depending on where in the world you’re at), they crafted a delicious way to get the pesky female Goddess leaders out of their hair: they zapped them into domesticated animal-women:

“The Bronze and Iron Age female populations were co-opted and overcome through what is often pleasantly described as ‘intermarriage,’ but was in fact abduction, rape, and imprisonment of the highest-ranking women [i.e. forced sex with, and enslavement to one dude not of their choosing]. Eventually, all women might be similarly colonized in the … practice in which women … are … raped and … impregnated by the men of a … conquering group as part of the accepted ethos of war.”

“…[D]uring the often brutal transition to patriarchy which took several thousand years to accomplish, the entire assemblage of the shaman priestess was transferred, virtually intact, onto the newly instituted office of the bride.” [Ever wonder where your wedding veil came from? How ‘bout the ring? A dude’s gotta have some way to mark his property, right?]

“I know this … is upsetting…. I feel strongly, however that this addiction we have to … marriage – and the torture so many of us endure within its protective and isolating walls [men and women alike] – is precisely why we must force ourselves to squarely face the truth….” (190-91)

Now all this might seem fairly far-fetched -- except for the fact that we now know not everyone in the world has marriage. The recently-discovered Mosuo of China/Tibet say a “vow of fidelity is shameful … -- it is considered a negotiation, an exchange….”

*Vicki Noble, 2005, “From Priestess to Bride: Marriage as a Colonizing Process in Patriarchal Conquest,” in The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, 2005, Cristina Biaggi, ed., Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas and Trends.
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Thnx to Stock.xchng & ravasolix for the foto

PITCHING the fundies INTO PRISON

This new book calls for for pitching fundies into prison for "preaching hate" against gays, lesbians, abortionists, et al.! It's called American Fascists, and it's by Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the New York Times Chris Hedges. Some snippets from a review in the Los Angeles Times:

"[T]he United States today faces an internal threat analogous to that posed by the Nazis in Weimar Germany.

snip

"Under Christian dominion, Hedges writes, "Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished.... and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship." The Christian right could come to power, he suggests, if we had "another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster."

Snip

"Hedges concludes that the Christian right "should no longer be tolerated," because it 'would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible.... Any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law,' and therefore we should treat 'incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.' Thus he rejects the 1st Amendment protections for freedom of speech and religion, and court rulings that permit prosecution for speech only if there is an imminent threat to particular individuals.

Snip

"Hedges advocates passage of federal hate-crimes legislation prohibiting intolerance.... Many countries do prohibit "hate speech." Holocaust denial, for example, is a crime in Germany, Austria and several other European countries.

From American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, 2007, Chris Hedges, Free Press: 256 pp.

Chris Hedges is “…the son of a Presbyterian minister and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. He's also a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the New York Times who has reported from more than 50 countries over the last 20 years.”

Read the entire review of the book in the Los Angeles Times.

w AND THE HOLY INQUISITION

Bushlet is right up there with the greats, isn’t he? Last people to openly torture people were the Christian popes of the Holy Inquisition. Johann Meyer was a physician who criticized the Church for torturing women. He said you couldn’t believe them when they said they were witches, ‘cause they were tortured until they said they were witches. Now what would His Holiness Bushlet have done to Meyer? Punished him, of course -- for daring to criticize divinity. Which is exactly what the Holy Christian popes did to Meyer…. (from Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia 1983 p. 386)

FRANCE ON Bended KNEE BEFORE War GODS

Bird’s-eye view of how the little sweetie War Gods have conquered the world, piece by piece, bit by bit:

French academic Robert Redeker has been sentenced to death on an Islamicist website. To help potential assassins the site gives his address and a photo of his home….

This past September, Robert Redeker, a French high-school philosophy teacher at Saint-Orens-de-Gameville (a small city near Toulouse) and the author of several scholarly books, published an op-ed article in the newspaper Le Figaro. The piece …was titled “What Should the Free World Do in the Face of Islamist Intimidation?” It was a fierce critique of what Redeker called Islam’s attempt “to place its leaden cloak over the world.”

snip

Denunciations of Redeker’s “insult of the prophet” spread across the Internet…. Redeker … soon received a large number of threats by letter and e-mail. On an Islamist website, he was sentenced to death in a posting that, in order to facilitate a potential assassin’s task, also provided his address and a photograph of his home.... On [police] advice, Redeker, his wife, and three children fled their home and took shelter in a secret location. Since then, they have moved from city to city, at their own expense, under police protection.

snip

[T]he vast majority of responses (by the French), even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher.

snip

To be sure, Redeker’s language had not been gentle. But since when has that been a requirement of intellectual discourse in France?

How did France reach this point? The first and most immediate explanation is that the country is about to enter an important electoral season, with races for the presidency and legislature scheduled for May of this year. As many as five million Muslims reside on French territory….

MORE >>>>
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thnx to adamci for the foto

DON'T Believe ANYTHING YOU READ ON THE INTERNET

I’ve been mulling over pignut’s comment (Dec. 19) about rumors that Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer.

My dear readers, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. As a matter of fact, don’t believe anything you read on the Internet – until you check it out. Not even what you read on this blog.

But how to check stuff? Who’ll give you the ‘truth’? I think this is a crisis: more and more of us feel we can’t trust information.

Ironically, for all its blemishes, one of our more accurate info sources might be the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Not the front part of Wiki articles, but the behind-the-scenes parts -- where everyone’s feuding, fighting and fisticuffing over what should and shouldn’t be popped into an article.

By the time you get them in your hands most encyclopedias are yesterday’s news. And at most their articles are penned by one or two people. A Wiki article on the other hand can have dozens of authors and is often updated weekly.

Also, the most knowledgeable among us – our university profs -- whether they realize it or not, often hand you their personal viewpoint on an issue. With Wiki articles, tho, you get three, four, maybe ten people slugging it out, all with different viewpoints. You can even read these juicy slugfests. Just go to the top of any Wiki article, click on the “discussion” tab, and you’ll get a virtual feast of feisty feuding. With this much fun on the Internet who needs TV?

A word of warning, though: don’t trust a Wiki article that’s not backed up by a bibliography of published stuff. Published writers may not always be totally objective, but they try hard to be. Why? ‘Cause if they’re not, no one will publish their stuff any more.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Do you sometimes feel you can't trust the information you get in books, on TV, radio, newspapers? Have you ever used Wiki?
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Thnx to bjearwicke for the fine foto

ROBIN HOOD THE Goddess GUY

As Morgaine notes on December 29, Robin Hood was a witch – or wizard (take your pick of terms):

“Robin Hood, Wizard of the Greenwood, was a real person or persons leading Sherwood Forest covens in the early 14th century, with a wife or paramour taking the role of the Goddess Maerin, or Marian, or Mari-Anna, the Saxon wudu-maer, literally the Mary or the Mother of the Grove. Great sacramental feasts in honor of Robin and his lady were remembered in popular rhymes nearly three centuries later….” Barbara Walker, Woman’s Encyclopedia, who sources Lewis Spence, The History and Origins of Druidism. New York: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1971, p. 109

snip

Robin “was supposed to right the wrongs inflicted on the peasants by the church. He stole the treasures of the rich clergy and nobles and bestowed them on the poor. By force of arms he maintained a [Pagan] preserve in the wildwood, a sanctuary for heretics [sic] and others persecuted by the church….”

snip

“… Robin defended unspoiled land against the encroachment of towns. In country districts, each village set aside a plot of raw woodland, which was not to be disturbed, because it belonged to the Goodfellow, or the Good Man. Elders of the Scottish church in 1594 exerted their utmost influence to abolish this Goodfellow’s Croft….” Barbara Walker, Woman’s Encyclopedia, who sources W. Carew Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles (2 vols.). New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1965, p. 283.
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Thnx to the Robin Hood Picture Gallery for the pic of N.C. Wyeth's Robin Hood and his Merry Men