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BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary): Sightings & Apparitions

Apparently fed up with appearing in Mexican tortias, Mary has apparently headed down under for her next appearance.

From The Daily Telegraph, 31/01/03.

What do they see? ... Large crowds gathered at the southern end of Coogee Beach to catch a glimpse of the 'Virgin Mary apparition'


Now it's St Mary of Coogee
By MICHELLE CAZZULINO
31jan03
ONCE it was simply a leisurely trip to the beach; today it's a religious experience.

Between the wet swimming costumes and sand-filled towels, revellers at North Coogee also are clutching beachbags filled with cameras, rosary beads and Bibles.

During the day, they stand three- and four-deep gazing at what many believe is an apparition of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, a handful of sceptics also are on hand, seeking to explain away the figure as simply a combination of the white picket fence, the skyline and the afternoon sun, which illuminates the figure so that it is visible 100m away.

But their voices are drowned out by others intoning prayers, chanting rosaries and reading Bible passages.

Yesterday, Lenn Stezovski, a Macedonian Orthodox, was among those claiming to have seen the vision for himself. "I couldn't see her at first but as I got closer, she appeared," he said. "She had her hands outstretched and I prayed to her because I believe in it."

Similarly, Catholic teenagers Chad Areiji, 14, and his cousin Jimmy Boumoussa, 14, visiting the beach with Chad's 9-year-old sister Joelle, were instant converts.

"She's wearing a blue robe on the outside and a white robe on the inside," Chad said.


Coogee resident Janet Langden said she had visited the site several times over the last week.

"It was fantastic, just unbelievable," she said. "Some people see her, some don't. I just want to sit here and look at her."

But there was at least one doubting thomas among the believers.

"I haven't seen anything," said English tourist Angela Scott.

"I was standing here for ages before I realised what was going on. I thought someone had slipped off the rocks or something."


Pictures can be found here:
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5915053%5E13780,00.html
orhere: http://www.smh.com.au/ffxImage/urlpicture_id_1042911493112_2003/01/23/24spike.jpg
 
Those silly Catholics ought to read their Bibles and think about what it says. Time and again the Bible warns against worshipping graven images. Time and again the Catholics turn up and bow down to statues, icons, and stuff. A Christian should be worshipping God, not an image of Mary the Virgin. Anyway God will judge them - it's not for me to judge.

Bill Robinson
 
Never heard of BVM appearing in Oz before - she must have fancied a change of scenery . . .:)

I read somewhere the suggestion that Mary takes the place of the Mother Goddess (Isis etc) in other religions.
 
Big Bill Robins said:
Those silly Catholics ought to read their Bibles and think about what it says. Time and again the Bible warns against worshipping graven images. Time and again the Catholics turn up and bow down to statues, icons, and stuff. A Christian should be worshipping God, not an image of Mary the Virgin. Anyway God will judge them - it's not for me to judge.

Are you sure they are *worshipping* the images? I thought people just went to oogle at them ... And wouldn't a graven image be more like staring at porn, Sun page 3 etc etc??
 
Believers are flocking to a rundown street in New Jersey to see a tree stump they say has the form of the Virgin Mary and is a divine sign of hope for the impoverished neighborhood.

The piece of wood, whose shape believers say resembles a veiled Virgin Mary with a bowed head, was noticed by passers-by over the weekend on state-owned land alongside a street that residents say is a hangout for illegal drug users.

This seems to happen a lot-
Five years ago in nearby Jersey City, word of an image of the Virgin Mary on a freezer door drew people to a supermarket. That image, said to be a silhouette of a woman in a hooded garment, lasted four days.
 
Could it be Fatima in a bourkha???????

:)

Kath
 
BVM

There didn't seem to be a general thread on the Blessed Virigin Mary and Marian apparitions so here it is.

A big article:

Something About Mary

Beneath the surface of our highly rational society lies a vibrant spiritual devotion to Mary, the Mother of God.

By Anne A. Simpkinson

Last summer in the Boston suburb of Milton, Mass, thousands turned up at a local hospital to view an image of Mary in a window. An estimated 25,000 people, inevitably joined by morning talk show crews, jammed the hospital parking lot one weekend to catch a glimpse of Mary in flowing garments and with arms outstretched like a giant Catholic Mass card. The crowds became so overwhelming that hospital administrators covered the window with a tarp to dissuade the milling hordes from blocking access to the hospital. The tarp was eventually drawn back between the hours of 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. as a concession to the gawkers.

Interestingly, the hospital didn't take a firm position in regard to the phenomenon itself. While explaining that the image was the product of chemicals mixing with condensation, the hospital's official statement added, "If there is a special message, it is believed by many that the purpose is to affirm the charitable mission of Milton Hospital to continue to serve the sick." This was more generous even than the Catholic archdiocese in Boston, which denied that the image had any supernatural origins.

Most Americans equate visions of the Blessed Virgin with sightings of the UFO variety, or with fairy tales rooted in myths from long ago and far away: the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico seen by a 16th century Aztec peasant, or the healing grotto in Lourdes, France where Mary is said to have appeared 18 times to a young girl, Bernadette Soubirous, in 1858. But Marian visions are at a historic high, and though some occur in exotic sounding places like Medjugorje in the former Yugoslavia, they happen more often and closer to home than we might think. Johann G. Roten, a priest of the Society of Mary and Director of the Marian Library at the University of Dayton, estimates that there are half a dozen reports of sightings every week. "Not all of them authentic," he quickly adds.

In the past 100 years, alone, Roten says, there have been between 380 and 400 apparitions that have attracted attention and scrutiny at regional, national or international levels, with the Roman Catholic Church looking into about 75 or 80 and recognizing a handful. At the regional level, you might have something like the Milton event, which attracts participants for a short period of time. Other sightings sustain a national buzz for years. In Conyers, Georgia, the Blessed Mother reportedly appeared to housewife and mother Nancy Fowler monthly from 1990 until 1993, and then annually until 1998. Then there are international phenomena, like that of Medjugorje, where a group of children first saw Mary in a light-gray robe standing on a cloud in 1981, and have been seeing and speaking with her daily ever since. The small Croatian-speaking village (now in Bosnia-Herzegovinia) still attracts millions of pilgrims from all over the world every year.

The trick, of course, is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Because the vast majority of Mary-sighters are Catholics, and because of the Church's official devotion to Mary, the Vatican is the ultimate arbiter of the veracity of the visions. The Church stresses that extreme care should be taken to discriminate between bona fide religious experiences and inauthentic claims. The Church's method has traditionally been fairly hands off. It prefers, says Roten, to "let the phenomenon take its course, observe it over a period time, give it leeway…to see how it plays out."

But it's possible to discern a change in the Church's attitude over the past two decades, one that might explain in part the recent rise in visitations, says Roten. Until the late 1970s, the church had a "very rational, scientifically oriented mentality," he says. But shortly afterward, a new head of the congregation of the faith was installed, under whom the church has softened its stance. Instead of seeing "endless progress and science as the ultimate answer," Roten says, the Vatican has adopted a greater openness to religious experience. In Medjugorge, Rome has reacted uncharacteristically, say observers, treating the events there with, in the words of one expert, "cautious support rather than distance."

Roten himself is squarely behind the authenticity of many of these sightings. "If indeed God is God, then He is omnipotent and has the possibility of manifesting Himself." Therefore, reasons Roten, "the possibility of apparitions should be accepted."

Some observers come to the same conclusion, but get there by different means. China Galland, an American who has written and taught about the feminine divine, travelled to Medjugorje in 1988 and was present at a session with three of the six visionaries who have grown up seeing Mary sometimes daily since first spotting her on a hillside as children twenty years ago. Galland photographed the visionaries, and later interviewed one of them.

Galland describes her experience with the visionaries as a "real gift," one that helped her understand that if, in fact, a "benevolent being came to visit a human being, it would come in a way that is familiar and consoling." In the East, she reasons, this being might take the form of Tara, a Bodhisattva figure in Buddhism. To young Croatian Catholics, the being may take the form of Mary. In her book, "Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna," Galland writes that she was "grateful to have been allowed into the presence of the Mother of God or God the Mother, as I think of her." "But," she adds, "we are always in this presence. Only rarely do we become aware of it."

Galland admits that she saw nothing in the choir loft where the apparitions supposedly take place, but she came away convinced that they had a bona fide spiritual experience. Citing the Biblical passage, "By their fruits you shall know them," she talks about the deep joy she felt after the session. "It was a love feast," she says of her session with the children and the town of Medjugorge itself. "It's a delight—this joy of the divine. Rarely do we get to experience it" she says. "Yet it was a very clear feeling I had there."

Galland notes how the crowds gathered around the visionaries, wanting to touch them, talk with them and have them offer prayers to the Virgin on their behalf. She saw how the visionaries patiently sat with pilgrims day after day, answering questions. "I was astonished to think they lived in that intensity every day of their lives, and don't believe it can be sustained unless something else is going on."

Galland, author and scholar in the area of divine female images, sees the apparitions on two levels. It could be, she says, an "intra-psychic phenomenon where people's beliefs might constellate something that they are longing for." Or, it could be a metaphysical event occurring "outside of ourselves rather than from our deep interior."

Seeing Mary sightings as a psychological phenomenon need not belittle them as spiritual events. Writing in "San Francisco Catholic," Fr. Ron Rolheiser calls Marian devotion "the mysticism of the poor." "In relating to her," he writes, "countless people, without the benefit of professional training in theology or liturgy, have wonderfully appropriated to themselves deep, essential truths about God's person, presence, compassion, and providence. They know and taste God's love through their relationship to Mary."

Galland, who describes herself as both a practicing Buddhist and a practicing Catholic, says there is much that we don't know about this world and about the nature of the mind. Conversations with Buddhist teachers, including the Dalai Lama, have convinced her that the power of devotion and a strong concentration of the mind can call forth a deity. Called the phenomenon of self-arising, the Buddhists believe that spiritual beings can be invoked when there is an appropriate convergence of time, place, and person.

Despite the numerous false claims and possibility for scams, Roten firmly sees value in apparitions. He says he personally "knows people 'graced' by apparitions" by which he means they are changed and transformed. "Some people have a change of heart triggered by their experience, not of a personal apparition but through participation in an event related to an apparition."

Whatever we choose to believe, Marian apparitions seem to touch a chord deep within human beings and express enduring truths, truths we're perhaps more in need of today than ever.



Anne A. Simpkinson, former Beliefnet spirituality producer, made a pilgrimage in 1992 to the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland where she encountered the palpable devotion of Polish Catholics and a change in her spiritual practice, from Buddhist meditation to Centering Prayer.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/138/story_13845_2.html
 
The daftest one ever was that fencepost in Australia. It was a freaking fencepost! You could walk up and touch it and say 'Hi, I'm touching a fencepost'.
But no, it was the Virgin Mary really. We're all just duff-brained sin monkey's if we cannot see that that piece of wood is infact an apparition of the Virgin Mary. :rolleyes:
 
McAvennie said:
The daftest one ever was that fencepost in Australia. It was a freaking fencepost! You could walk up and touch it and say 'Hi, I'm touching a fencepost'.
But no, it was the Virgin Mary really. We're all just duff-brained sin monkey's if we cannot see that that piece of wood is infact an apparition of the Virgin Mary. :rolleyes:
Many would argue that the miracle in sightings of the BVM is the spontaneous appearance of her image, not what it's actually made of.

Admittedly the fence-post in question was a bit dodgy (one had to view it from a particular angle to see the apparition), but the fact that it was actually a fence-post was not lost on the faithful.

Similarly the ones that are trapped condensation in the UV coating of a window. The appearance of the image is the sign, the poor application of adhesive sheets is how the sign manifests itself.

It's like the eggplants that spell Allah. No-one denies that it's just the way the seeds have formed inside the plant, but rather they see that the seeds took that particular form as miraculous.
 
You couldn't take me for a xtian even in a bad light, but I definitely had an image of Christ in a plaster stain in the hall of my old house! :eek:

Had face, beard etc- unmistakeable.
I uncovered it when decorating, showed it to a few peeps, noted that they all spontaneously spotted Him and repapered.
:)
 
It's a sign. A sign I tell you.

"Get your house damp-proofed" :D
 
escargot said:
You couldn't take me for a xtian even in a bad light, but I definitely had an image of Christ in a plaster stain in the hall of my old house! :eek:

Had face, beard etc- unmistakeable.
I uncovered it when decorating, showed it to a few peeps, noted that they all spontaneously spotted Him and repapered.
:)

You sure it wasn't that bloke from "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" Bill Bailey or someone??
 
Galland, who describes herself as both a practicing Buddhist and a practicing Catholic, says there is much that we don't know about this world and about the nature of the mind.

Um, can you be both, and apparently agnostic as well? :p

Without getting into a religious argument, why do the Catholic and Protestant churches view the BVM so differently?

Jane.
 
The Catholic church view Mary as a saint and that she is close enough to god to give her the power of answering prayer.

I was brought up as a protestant (Lutheran) and Mary is just seen as the woman who bore Jesus. Yes, she was special because she was a virgin and apart from being meek and pious and godly she was no different to anyone else.

The Lutherans (and most protestant churches) view the trinity and the only holy thing. God, the son and the spirit, all the rest are mortals and don't even come near.
 
mejane said:
Um, can you be both, and apparently agnostic as well? :p

Without getting into a religious argument, why do the Catholic and Protestant churches view the BVM so differently?

Jane.

As to the first, I've found to a number of westerners that what attracts them to it (among other things) is its malleability. Of being a Ju-Bu (Jewish Buddhist) or whatever not a contradiction.

Tyger Lily gives a good nutshell answer to the second. From the Protestant side, at least, it ties in with Luther's concept of "the priesthood of all believers". A person doesn't need anybody (besides Jesus) to intercede to God on their behalf. eg, in the Roman Church, it's believed that when a man is ordained something actually changes him that gives him special, um, qualities. In the Lutheran Church, pastor is merely an office.

It's funny, but as unlikely as I am to ever become RC, it's precisely the mystical aspects (such as Marian apparitions) that fascinate me the most about it. And as the original article alludes to, the BVM rarely identifies herself as such. But rather the people viewing it put it into the cultural context they're a part of , namely Catholicism. In another time/place it would be something else. Similar to the theories that the UFO's of today are the witches of yesteryear and the fairyfolk of earlier than that. Which I find, if not a compelling explanation, fairly intriguing.
 
LobeliaOverhill said:
I've seen a statue of the BVM moving

The idea of that scares the hell outta me! It's that bit outta the film where one of those things is there and suddenly the eyes just open, Exorcist 3 maybe?
Anyone who knows Darlington will know that if you turn down one of the streets intersecting Duke Street heading towards Blockbuster Video there is a church set back off the road through an archway. They have a statue of Mary with arms oustretched that is very visible even in the pitch dark. First time I walked past that place and caught sight of her out the corner of my eye I nearly had a heart attack!
 
McAvennie said:
The idea of that scares the hell outta me! It's that bit outta the film where one of those things is there and suddenly the eyes just open, Exorcist 3 maybe?

Nah it were nowt like that .. I've mentioned it elsewhere on the MB yonks ago - it's a statue at a grotto near Kinsale that's been seen moving a lot, there was a crowd of us out for a drive and we stopped for a look, there was a loud speaker relaying prayers and I could see the statue's mouth moving (as tho' she was praying too) out of the group of us 3 admitted to seeing the same thing ...
 
Tyger - I /always/ see these faces as che guevara..... :)


mejane: "Without getting into a religious argument, why do the Catholic and Protestant churches view the BVM so differently?"

from my point of view it's the other way around. Lopaka is right and eloquent - and for me it's one of the defining differences.


Even if I could get over transubstantiation, papal infalibiilty ex cathedra and so on I can't do the BVM shift.

Kath
 
stonedoggy said:
Even if I could get over transubstantiation, papal infalibiilty ex cathedra and so on I can't do the BVM shift.

Kath

This I find interesting, because I think the BVM fills a huge gap in the Judeo-Christian religion, and was probably necessary for all those conversions. She supplies the mother goddess.

Bear in mind here that I'm an agnostic, standing outside all of this and looking at it all as phenomonology and behavior and so on. If any version of Judeo-Christian religion is the ultimate truth about the universe, I'm going to hell, anyway, and if my Reverend Mom can't save me it's a lead pipe cinch nobody here can, so if I say something off the wall and offensive to Catholics, it's only to be expected and y'all can afford to forgive me before rather than after the flamewar. Thank you.

Anyway, to proceed. Think about the Trinity. If you were filling in blanks, Father, Son, and _______ , what would you put in that last slot if you weren't accustomed to singing the Doxology?Mother, of course. And though the idea of the universal prehistoric matriarchy is, um, unproven, it is true that mother figures are important in religions worldwide, as is only to be expected. Consider all the feminine imagery that occurs in pre-Christian European art, and the religious associations of all or most of that art - Pomona, Demeter, Freya, Sheela-na-gig, the female trinities of maiden/mother/crone-Fates-etc. Obviously the idea of the Divine Lady was powerful in the psychology of the converted tribes, and if the priests and kings wanted the conversion to be lasting, they had to supply female imagery to match it. Hence, the BVM, the Magdalene, Sophia, and a host of feminine saints, many of them apparently ripped off from pagan goddesses.

That this psychological need for the mother figure, and its fulfillment in the BVM, is not limited to Europeans is demonstrated by the history of the Church in the New World. Saints are all very well, but it's the Virgin of Guadalupe (who appeared to the shepherd on a hill sacred to a Mexican goddess) who gets tattooed on people's backs. The first New World converts, according to legend, were Pueblo Indians who were evangelized by a bilocating nun.

Some years ago, an exhibit came to town called Splendors of Mexico, which had gathered together Mexican art treasures from all over the world. One of the exhibits consisted of the foundation capitals of pillars from a Mexican cathedral. The cathedral had been built on and of the ruins of an Aztec temple. The Aztec workmen doing the building had carefully taken the stones depicting the earth mother goddess and placed them, image safely face down and touching the earth, where they would support the entire Lady Chapel.

I don't believe in any of it; but I "get" this at a primordial level; and I think it's what the BVM is all about.
 
"Father, Son, and _______ , what would you put in that last slot if you weren't accustomed to singing the Doxology?Mother, of course. "




This is a bit like Don't Call Me Shirley.... but no, I wouldn't.

father and son are linked in various ways but mother doesn't give you the third leg. It gives you two things the same (parent) and a different one.


Do you read much Gimbutas?


Kath
 
stonedoggy said:
Do you read much Gimbutas?


Kath

Never heard of him.

If my reasoning is correct, people who need the BVM would complete the set with Mother, making a basic family unit. Since you don't need the BVM, logically, you don't finish the set that way. As usual, the pattern is set by the percipient, not by some definitive exterior logic or reality, or even the person posing the problem; and that's the difficulty with intelligence testing in a nutshell.

How do you finish the set, by the way? I'm sitting here looking at it, and, disposing of Mother and Holy Ghost, getting nothing. Daughter, by your stated logic, just repeats Son. Cousin? Uncle? Dog?
 
"Never heard of him. "

Maria Gimbutas is female... try googling her. She is a promoter of the Mother Goddess/BVM paradigm.

I'm having difficulties picking out the data from the conclusions in your argument. I just don't find the statements following "Of Course" and "Obviously" and "As Is Only To Be Expected" to be that - Sorry! :)

"Obviously the idea of the Divine Lady was powerful in the psychology of the converted tribes, and if the priests and kings wanted the conversion to be lasting, they had to supply female imagery to match it. Hence, the BVM, the Magdalene, Sophia, and a host of feminine saints, many of them apparently ripped off from pagan goddesses."

What date are we talking about here? It's C12 and C13 that see this develop into what we might recognise today in the RC communion. Think Bernard of Clairvaux?

Integration and identification might be useful concepts? If there is such a think as an eternal verity it would, I think, be likely to wear different clothes according to the differing situation. See Jung. Ripped off does rather suggest that there was no genuine faith feeling or attempt to unite local tradition with what was coming along next. You don't have to postulate someone "ripping off" other people to get the observable result.

"the BVM fills a huge gap in the Judeo-Christian religion, and was probably necessary for all those conversions."

All what conversions? there /wasn't/ a Marian cult in the first centuries in the way we experience it now. I'm not sure how the protestant or pre-marian conversions happened in the light of this. it's only relevant I think to those which were faith-based I think, and I would dispute its role there.

I'm afraid I can't pick out the key point of the last paragraph. Mea Culpa! :D Humans reuse building materials. Beyond the simply practical there are lost of ideas about why something might be done a particular way. But I can't pick out which might appeal to you?

Kath

PS have you deliberately assigned a gender to the spirit? or removed one? it's very easy to build an edifice on a simple cultural difference which hasn't been explored fully. Or on a misunderstanding. I am aware of a chap who was a long way into writing a book on The Black Sun as it appears in alchemical illustrations. Unfortunately much of his thesis was invalidated when found out that many "black suns" are the result of tarnished silver paints and inks.
 
And now you know why I don't write non-fiction, and why I'm interested in the way people arrange the world in patterns around them and then mistake those patterns for objective reality which everyone could see if they looked.

I find that I am convinced that it's been demonstrated that the Christianizing of Europe was characterized by formal mass conversions in the wake of (political or genuine) conversions by heads of state, and by the Christianization of pagan symbolism, so that gods were adopted as saints (Brigit springs to mind) or demons (the horned god as the source of horned devil imagery) etc.; but as for my sources, they have all rotted down into the compost heap I call my brain. Certainly this is a common theme in works I've read, but how certain am I that this is being treated as established even by those works, as opposed to seeming so intuitively right to me that it *ought* to be established? And (silently counting up the number of works I've read that are outright flaky, or which, while sound on one subject, either directly contradict or interpret in ways that seem to me ridiculous evidence that I am familiar with from other, more direct sources), how good are these sources even if they were intended to be read as I read them and I could track them down?

And the answer is, I don't do primary medieval Christian research, so all my sources are secondary; and the mere fact that the need-for-a-mother-goddess storyline seems to me so intuitively obvious makes it suspect. If there is contraindicatory data, by all means, lay it on me.

On the subject of the capitals, best results would be obtained by us standing next to them and viewing them at the same time, interpretive data in hand. "I saw them and you didn't" is true as far as it goes, but since instinctive response is not evidence, it doesn't go very far - especially in the absence of any reference materials to ensure against my confabulating details. I can't even remember the name of the goddess in question, which is embarrassing and annoying. The Aztecs were, however, converted by force, and the builders of the church were slaves. The exhibit displayed the capitals lying on their sides, so that you could see the care with which the Aztec stonemasons had preserved the original form of the native carving and how the original shape of the base stone dictated the shape of the European structure placed on top of it. The Spanish were fond of mutilating and smashing the heathen idols they encountered in Mexico, but these escaped such harsh treatment, though it would have been simple to deface them before re-using the stone. The circumstances of the church's construction, the orientation of the carvings, and their state of preservation in comparison to other re-used stone in the same church, are all indicative of a reverent and a defiant purpose by those who placed them.

But I wish I had bought an interpretive book (I was cashiering for the exhibit at minimum wage and had no spare cash, so I didn't - I have since learned that such economy isn't worth the money it saves), because then I would be absolutely certain that I wasn't making any of it up; and it's my job to make things up, so I can't promise you I didn't.

Anyway, you never finished the set. Does it just look to you to be so artificial as to be irrelevant?

Also - I am interested in understanding how the feminine divine, which seems to me so much a part of the pattern of normal human religious feeling, can seem so inobvious and unintuitive to you. I may or may not ever understand, but you don't learn by not trying. It does not follow, however, that you are interested in seeing the reverse pattern, and if not it could get annoying to have someone constantly turning trying out different lights and saying: "Look! Right there! No, there! How can you not see that?" So if you don't care if you never grasp this facet (or just would prefer to be instructed by someone who knows the devotion first-hand), please for your own sake say so up front before we reach that point.
 
Originally posted by Peni
And now you know why I don't write non-fiction, and why I'm interested in the way people arrange the world in patterns around them and then mistake those patterns for objective reality which everyone could see if they looked. "

I think that's what this place is for isn't it? amongst other things.

"I find that I am convinced that it's been demonstrated that the Christianizing of Europe was characterized by formal mass conversions in the wake of (political or genuine)"

Can't find anywhere that's doubted on this thread - I pointed out that your BVM introduced as cunning plan by cynical overlords methods wouldn't work becuase of the relative dates :)

"conversions by heads of state, and by the Christianization of pagan symbolism, so that gods were adopted as saints (Brigit springs to mind) or demons (the horned god as the source of horned devil imagery) etc.;"

Still not sure why this would be a problem... I doubt it can be said conclusively about any one site but is there any real debate about this now?

"If there is contraindicatory data, by all means, lay it on me."

How about a comparison of Hutton 1999 The Triumph of the Moon with Jones and Pennick 1995 A History of Pagan Europe? Then you could make up your own mind. All the contradictory data you could wish for!

"On the subject of the capitals..(snip) The circumstances of the church's construction, the orientation of the carvings, and their state of preservation in comparison to other re-used stone in the same church, are all indicative of a reverent and a defiant purpose by those who placed them."

what about other suggestions? off the top of my head... a) bet taken on by workers they don't have the bottle to do it. b) People burning their boats and humiliating one god before another. c) Perception of a continuous thread rather like using a yeast mix from cake to cake. I'm sure there are others. Reverant towards what and defiant towards what? I'm still not clear what your intuition is telling you.

" (I was cashiering for the exhibit at minimum wage and had no spare cash, so I didn't - I have since learned that such economy isn't worth the money it saves)"

so true.... if you have two pence spend one of them on bread and the other on tulips huh? :D

"Anyway, you never finished the set."

It isn't incomplete. Triads are one form of mythical language (in the broadest sense of language). Often they comprise a small, middle and big or a start, continue and stop. Often they don't - there are 3 scenarios above but I don't think they have a mythic ordering. You not resonating to the father, son and spirit trinity doesn't devalue it and I am puzzled that you think that it is more "artifical" created in the way it was by the theologians than, say the father son mother one created by you. What do you mean by artificial? both are constructs, everything is filtered by culture and, specifically, language. If you want a triad then I'll go for Grandfather Father Son as in generations of computer backups.

"Does it just look to you to be so artificial as to be irrelevant?"

why would artificiality lead to irrelevance? Perhaps you could start at the other end with "this is something which seems to have meant a lot to a lot of people over a long time....."

"Also - I am interested in understanding how the feminine divine, which seems to me so much a part of the pattern of normal human religious feeling, can seem so inobvious and unintuitive to you. "

The reason I asked you about the gendering of the spirit was a broad hint that you were missing something. Much modern protestant christianity, theology and practice, experiences the spirit as "feminine" in so far as we are concerned with gender at all. We are stuck with the confines and history of whatever language we work in, and the toils of the churches in dealing with modern social and cultural revelations is ongoing and public. But the lack you protest about isn't there. (can you have a negative lack?)


"I may or may not ever understand, but you don't learn by not trying. It does not follow, however, that you are interested in seeing the reverse pattern, and if not it could get annoying to have someone constantly turning trying out different lights and saying: "Look! Right there! No, there! How can you not see that?" So if you don't care if you never grasp this facet (or just would prefer to be instructed by someone who knows the devotion first-hand), please for your own sake say so up front before we reach that point. "

Physician, heal thyself ! as they say.:D From this end you seem to have started off with a number of givens including

- BVM used as tool for political conversion

- trinity artificial and incomplete

- the feminine divine unobvious and unintuitive to me? Piskys? Xians? scots? europeans?

I suggest that your premises are flawed and cant be upheld. And no, I have no idea why you don't write non-fiction. Is it another of these "of courses" which just aren't coming across?


Kath
 
I see! We're talking past each other and each responding to something slightly different than what was meant. We will presume this to be my fault, since I'm the one making assumptions and I appear to have misunderstood you first, and then expressed myself poorly.

Never having experienced the Holy Spirit in my life, I am not qualified to gender it; but, my overwhelming impression is, that it is genderless. It's generally pictured as a dove, right? Can you tell male doves from females? I can't. Certainly no one I know has ever given me a hint that the Spirit was gendered. Streetcorner preachers who call on people to let the Spirit into their lives talk as though it's an abstract quality, real in the way that light or the wind are real, but without human or personal qualities.

Once I got old enough to think about these things systematically, and to discuss them, and read about them, the idea of God the Father came to seem a mere linguistic convenience. Anything big enough to be God would be too big to need a gender. So I (and I believe most of the adults in the churches I was raised in around the U.S. - United Methodist, liberal; much bigger on works than theology) presumed the gendering of God to be a convenience for human comprehension. This was bolstered by the lack of shock evinced by adults around me when (this was the 70s) Christian feminists started referring to God as She. The only aspect of God for which gender was relevant was the Son, during his period of incarnation. However, the imagery surrounding God was overwhelmingly male - Father, Son, and some vague abstract neutrality called the Holy Spirit. And though it wasn't true in my church, in churches around me I witnessed plenty of consternation at the idea of God as anything but masculine. If the Spirit is perceived as female then no, you don't need the BVM to fill that role. (Hmm...I'm conflating gender and sex a lot more in this paragraph than I usually do...have to sort that out more...)

Anyway - I wasn't positing some big political conspiracy. I think conspiracies tend to fail and screw up far more often than they succeed, and that the harder a small cabal tries to impose order on the chaos of human society the less control it's going to have. I thought that the historical orthodoxy on the conversion of Europe was that the priests coming into new areas, armed with varying degrees of literacy and theological acumen, but a strong practical ability to deal with people, did not attempt brute-force conversions like a televangelist, but took familiar elements and changed the pattern. You can mass-baptize all the villages you want, but women who want to get pregnant will still want a blessing from the appropriate spiritual figure. When orthodox Christian imagery didn't work with the audience, the canny priest would adapt pagan imagery to their emotional needs - and the Virgin was the handiest mother figure. (Weird as that sounds.) Am I wrong in thinking that, although the big showy Marian cults may have been a later development, the development of the imagery is continuous from pagan to Christian? And that this demonstrates a continous emotional need in the - well - consumer? And that, had the imagery of Father/Son/Holy Ghost satisfied the need for the feminine divine, the gradual accretion of extra-Biblical material around the BVM wouldn't have been necessary?

In the New World, the Spanish did attempt brute force conversion, with the result that Mission Indians died in droves. Today's devout Mexican Catholics are, historically, the result of the destruction of one large institutional religion by another, creating a kind of spiritual monopoly at the macro level; and, at the micro level, the wholesale merging of diverse peoples with little in common except the ubiquitous church. I cannot tell you what is in the hearts of the people who leave work to get ashes every Ash Wednesday; but I know that in everyday life they are family-centric, have powerful gender roles, and put the Virgin of Guadalupe on everything.

And I can't write non-fiction because I can't keep my sources straight and I think in little quantum leaps without noticing it. When you're actively engaged in research for story purposes, it's possible to at least keep track of where you've synthesized data and where you've theorized ahead of it, because you're focused - I'm pretty reliable on the American Pleistocene, for instance, even if my notes are illegible - but in a general way, stuff gets added to the great compost heap of the brain, and I don't know where it comes from. I tell stories well. I explain my ideas much less well (especially when, as here, they aren't my ideas per se, but my understanding of an argument I haven't worked out for myself); and I often expect a story to convey an idea, even when I know better.

Do you teach? I bet your students all write much more clearly and carefully on the last day of class than the first, if so.
 
McAvennie said:
The daftest one ever was that fencepost in Australia. It was a freaking fencepost! You could walk up and touch it and say 'Hi, I'm touching a fencepost'.
But no, it was the Virgin Mary really. We're all just duff-brained sin monkey's if we cannot see that that piece of wood is infact an apparition of the Virgin Mary. :rolleyes:

Daftest ever? This would have to be my nomination.

http://bongojava.com/nunbun.html
 
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