Catching up -- a hodgepodge

Night after night, I have talked myself out of typing on this screen. It's not that I've had nothing to write about -- quite the contrary. So much has gone on in my life -- sometimes I am so busy living it that I find myself too tired to write about it.

Sarah Palin came to our state recently and I took a day off from work to go to the event. It was labeled as a rally, so that should have prepared me, but still, I felt slightly uncomfortable at the attempt to rouse my emotions that way. I never went to pep rallies in high school for that same reason -- even hated singing campfire songs as a kid because I don't like being told how I should feel, or having others work on my emotions.

Contrary to popular rumors, nobody screamed,"Kill Obama" or anything like that, at least at this rally.

This month, Sweetie and I also took our Niece to Her ballet practice. I killed time by scribbling down thoughts as they came to me there as well as details of what I saw and heard around me. I used to do that a lot. More on that later.

We took our neighbor out for dinner and made some new friends, a sweet, older couple. More, later.

I've also been reading intensively from about four different books. One is Thirteen Moons, a historical fiction novel set at the time of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Since I have so recently defended Columbus, perhaps I am hypocritical to feel utter contempt for Andrew Jackson and his role in that disgusting travesty of the American ideal. Still, contempt I feel.

The second book is Boorstin's The Discoverers, the most recently read chapter being about the invention of clocks. More on that later.

The third book is Encyclopedia of the Prehistoric World, all about the bumper-car antics of our planet's continents, and the weird creatures that have lived upon it. More later.

Lastly, I have read through the writings of the Early Christian Church Fathers, so now, before moving on into the age of Constantine, I've taken a little detour into the extinct (?) world of the Gnostics, supposedly heretical Christians at whom some of those ECFS took great offense.

For a movement that only lasted about a century before being obliterated by orthodoxy, and whose works also were consigned to oblivion until a jar of them was found in the Egyptian desert in the 1940s, it is astounding to read that no less than 4,000 books have been written on the subject.

There is so much that I could write, so many questions that pop up! What compelled an early Christian monk from a nearby monastery to collect and hide away these proscribed texts? What was he thinking about when he made that lonely trip into the desert with his jar of heresy?

What was in the minds and hearts of the people who wrote these texts -- certainly they were not all the slavering charlatans that Iranaeus and others made them out to be.

And Elaine Pagels, who in 1979 wrote the award-winning account of Gnosticism for the understanding of laymen -- what a fascinating life this Woman has had, as well! She started out a dancer with Martha Graham and then became a scholar in the field of ancient religion. More, much more, later.

Hoopla in the Heavens

I sat in my car, this morning, waiting on a certain work assignment, surrounded by welcome rain and enjoying Boorstin's "The Discoverers." I stopped short at a fascinating paragraph.

Somewhere in extant Babylonian literature that I somehow missed on my journey through it, is the story of how El, the great god, grew jealous of the bright lion that passed nightly across the sky, and smote it each day as the morning began.

The lion, of course, would be the planet Venus, the "morning star," which vanishes each day as the light returns.

Boorstin believes the Hebrews borrowed that myth, giving the smiting power to their own God and converting the sky-lion into The Light Bringer (Latin: Lucifer) who is made synonymous with Satan.

As in the famous Isaiah passage (chapter 14) from the Bible:

"How art thou fallen, O Lucifer,
son of the morning!
...For thou hast said in thine heart,
I will ascend into heaven ... "

I really don't want to get into a discussion about the reality or non-reality of The Evil One. But it is curious that in the Hebrew world, the aforementioned planet and associated sky-being, would be masculine and horribly evil; and if not so despicable in the alleged Babylonian original, still an affront to deity.

Whereas in the western world, the same celestial phenomenon was considered Feminine and delightful -- Venus/Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love.