Riverwind (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 16, 2012 6:06 am
My fire pit is ready wood is covered so snow and rain wont bother it, we light the fire at midnight on the 20th/21st and keep it going for a day.
So Happy Yule to all.
River
PLEASE, Keep your pants on.
Else someone may see your "moon" and think that it is a planet and shoot at it....
Google end of the world 2012 and youll get over 4 BILLION hits (thats billion, with a B). There are websites, blogs, articles, tweets: yes, the world will end before the year is out; no, it wont; it must; it cant. Search Amazons website and youll find nearly 3,000 book titles: "Mayan Horror: How to Survive the End of the World in 2012"; "End of the World: It is Happening"; "Doomsday 2012: The Maya Calendar and the History of the End of the World"; "Apocalypse 2012 Cookbook" and so on and so on.
A world-ending cataclysm is common to many mythologies. The Biblical flood narrative is the best known and follows a fairly typical pattern: wrathful deity, mass destruction, surviving remnant. We owe our own survival to that one righteous man, Noah. Or to Utnapishtim, his counterpart in an eerily similar ancient Sumerian myth recorded in "The Epic of Gilgamesh," circa 2700 B.C. Or to Manu, lone survivor of a world-destroying flood described in the Hindu Vedas, of comparable antiquity.
Floods seem to have been the primal terror of early humans. Not earthquakes, or predatory beasts, or starvation or disease. Certainly not, as in our own day, environmental blight and catastrophic climate change; still less, presumably, arcane calculations based on ancient cryptic prophetic writings Biblical, Mayan or otherwise.
The Sumerian flood story has the gods exasperated not by mankind's evil but by his obnoxious profusion. There were too damned many of us. We disturbed the gods' peace. And so, "Errakal (god of the underworld) tore out the mooring posts of the world. . . . Adad (god of thunderstorms) flooded the land, he smashed it like a clay pot!" Later the gods themselves "became frightened of the deluge, they shrank back. . . . The gods cowered like dogs. . . . Ishtar (goddess of sex, love and war) screamed like a woman in childbirth." Never again, the chastened gods resolved, would they unleash such horror. Next time, "Instead of bringing on a flood, let the lion rise up to diminish the human race! . . . Let the wolf rise up to diminish the human race! . . . Let famine rise up to wreak havoc in the land. . . . Let pestilence rise up to wreak havoc in the land!"
The Biblical God's withdrawal of his wrath was more dignified: "God said in his heart, Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done."
Japan's mythological account of the world on the brink of annihilation is in a class by itself. Other stories of its kind are tragic, terrifying. Japan's is comic, even bawdy.
The sun goddess goes into hiding. She has been offended by her brother the storm god, an unruly, malicious spirit who damages his sister's rice fields and fouls the hall where she has been celebrating the festival of first fruits.
Outraged, the sun goddess withdraws into a cave. If that's the way the world is, she will decline to shine on it. The "eighty myriads of gods" take counsel. How can they lure her out? One of them, the "Dread Female of Heaven," lights a fire and dances a lewd dance, at which there is such hearty divine laughter that the sun goddess can't resist a peek outside to see what's going on. She is seized and dragged out, and the world is saved.
Maybe all we need to do is build great bonfires on the 21st and dance naked around them .
JesusA (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 16, 2012 5:55 pm
Outraged, the sun goddess withdraws into a cave. If that's the way the world is, she will decline to shine on it. The "eighty myriads of gods" take counsel. How can they lure her out? One of them, the "Dread Female of Heaven," lights a fire and dances a lewd dance, at which there is such hearty divine laughter that the sun goddess can't resist a peek outside to see what's going on. She is seized and dragged out, and the world is saved.
Maybe all we need to do is build great bonfires on the 21st and dance naked around them
….
<(~..~)>
That's just what I have been saying, my bonfire is ready to go.
Yes A-1 great minds you know.
River the 1st, you too can be part of my new kingdom A-1 all you need to know is how to dance.
