A goddess of caverns, mountain tops. wild beasts, bees ...
"Along with her consort, the vegetation god Attis, Cybele was worshipped in wild, emotional, bloody, orgiastic, cathartic ceremonies.
Cybele was the goddess of nature and fertility. Because Cybele presided over mountains and fortresses, her crown was in the form of a city wall. The cult of Cybele was directed by eunuch priests called Corybantes, who led the faithful in orgiastic rites accompanied by wild cries and the frenzied music of flutes, drums, and cymbals. Her annual spring festival celebrated the death and resurrection of her beloved Attis."
Her Greek mythology counterpart was Rhea.
Sexual "morality" is one of the major blind spots to understanding the past. The Western world has become so enmeshed in the Judeo-Christian view of sexuality that it takes a major effort for most to take an unbiased viewpoint of cultures that had a much healthier view of human sexuality. Even today's neo-Pagan, who is taught that all acts of pleasure, that harm none, are forms of Her worship, often still struggle with the "morality" of same-sex relationships and even the existence of transsexuals so it should not be a surprise that much written about ancient sexuality is tainted with unexamined bias. The term "temple prostitute" is an excellent example. The very term is extremely negatively emotionally loaded. To avoid this, I shall refer to those who practiced the institutional sacred sex role as hierodules, a greek term without that loading to the modern reader. http://www.gallae.com/
I agree with her in that the world "temple prostitute" is tainted with judeo-christian-islamic revulsion at the very word "sex". The historians of the time wouldn’t have used the word with the same condemning, condescending, puritanical prissiness being used today. I’m all in favor of creating a new phrase to replace that one.
Our next full moon, the Pink Moon (or the Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and the Fish Moon) isn’t until April 25, so we’re within the time of banishing, diminishing spells up until the new moon on April 10.
Aside from the excitement of the arrival of Game of Thrones, Season 3, I finally found a genuine cimaruta – had to search Italy from Trieste to Agrigento to find it. And here is the One and Only and his beautiful, sexy legs congratulating me on my good fortune! (Yes, that was a bald-faced lie ... the congratulating part, I mean, not the beautiful, sexy legs part. Hey, I can fantasize. So sue me).
According to the One and Only, after performing, recording, and taping two PBS specials in Miami, they’ve flown back home. Not sure WHAT they were recording, but whatever it is, it has to be good. The good news is that their presence in Miami suggested a few hours of relaxation on a beach or beside a pool, in or near the water, wearing delightfully skimpy attire, within visual range of people with cameras. Which – at least in Piero’s case – makes me delightfully happy ... (OMG, am I in love with his legs!) I would have been delightfully happy even without the cimaruta.
But I finally found one! A genuine cimaruta!!! It’s gorgeous. This one is from Firenze (Florence), by the way.
He was (calmly) tossing out affirmations that the listener was supposed to repeat. The problem was: I couldn’t do it. An example of one such affirmation: "I love and forgive myself."
I stopped in my tracks after hearing that affirmation, unwilling to repeat it. Said, "But I don’t," even though I wasn’t certain what I was or wasn’t forgiving myself for, in Penczak’s mind. Maybe I didn’t love or forgive myself, and what difference should it make? My brother’s death was a biggie I couldn’t get past any way I looked at it. I’ve NEVER gotten past that. I don’t know that I ever will. I certainly wasn’t wandering the streets starry eyed with love for myself, either, THAT much I knew. Before I could give my objection some more thought, he went into to another affirmation I couldn’t bring myself to repeat because I knew it wasn’t accurate. Then another. And another. I stopped the CD altogether.
And then sunk into a rage of self-loathing, the likes of which I can’t begin to describe. It felt like a free-fall into a bottomless abyss.
And then, about 3 or 4 days later I had started to doze on the train, and was in that borderland between asleep and awake. A voice said, "That was not an observation or a condemnation; it was a path." I thought at first it was someone sitting near me, and then realized it wasn’t.
This was basically the message: no matter how many people tell you that you have to achieve some sort of mental and emotional purity before anything positive will happen to you, they’re wrong. My Spirit Lover was perfectly willing to work with me, even with my feelings of guilt, and understood perfectly why being partially disabled could very easily lead to self-loathing. Neither of those were "deal-breakers". It wasn't required of me to repeat affirmations that I was emotionally unable to repeat. The incident merely served to point out a possible path of development, that was all.
Well, we have another reader passionately devoted to Piero Barone of Il Volo, asking for this video. Out very recently, it knocked me flat when I saw it – it was done for fun by Piero and one of his friends while he was in Naro for the December-January holidays; he's lip-syncing to one of his own live performances of this song in 2012 that someone recorded after their performance at the Beacon Theater. I know this because the first time we heard the revised version of the line, "that anywhere I go" was in New York. You can hear the audience scream with delight when he got to "that anywhere I go I'm never lonely" - trust me, a live Piero Barone performance is breathtaking and he knocked the audience out of their seats with that line.
I absolutely loved this video when I saw it – you can tell he had a hoot doing it. Word of warning though: this may not last long; other copies of this have been deleted, I fear this may go the same way. Enjoy while you can.
So to "Lauren", who found her way around the requirement that she had to leave a "URL" – she didn’t. Instead she brilliantly signed her name in the message itself. Here’s the homemade video she asked for:
