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Wrong Journal, but Fuck It.
Dec. 10th, 2006 08:46 am
This should really go on my kiyotesong journal, but I'm here now. It's a pleasure to be able to read again without it being Give Me Freedom! An American History. Yeah, I've been reading my bathroom book, but that's more of an intensely analytical dissection of whether I want to keep Healing the Past on my shelf or not. More and more, I'm thinking Villoldo is just too... namby pamby for me. In light of my frame drums I had bought When the Drummers Were Women by Layne Redmond, and I took it to work with me Friday night. I've been training Harley for relief audit, and the boy is a serious chatter-box. I've been bombarded by stats for Magic: The Gathering Online and I feel like it's 1997 all over again. I got to crack it open on my lunch break Friday since Harley was out in the parking lot w/his girlfriend of the moment. (How one fucks in an MR2 is beyond me - something like the logistics of fucking in a Yugo, probably).
So tonight I was all alone at work, getting paid some serious OT to... sit and surreptitiously read. I kept looking around the corner of my cubicle waiting for the supervisor to roam down the hall & catch me loafing. I'm about halfway through Drummers and I gotta say this much: it's all about Cybele. Cybele, Inanna, Hathor, Dionysus, Ariadne, the maenads... it's rich stuff, like honeyed wine to my soul. I normally stay distanced from the concept of deity, but I can't hide from the fact that in my heart I'm still a priestess and worshipper of the Mountain Mother and the Daughters of the Moon. It equates the relationship between bulls and Ariadne and the cults in Catal Huyuk to the resemblance of a bull's head to the uterus & fallopian tubes. The bull is sacred to the Goddess because it's in all of us women. The artist has researched her material well... dragged up all these forgotten images of women, priestesses & Goddesses holding the simple frame drum, tambourines and sistrums. Even I'd forgotten about Cybele's drum...
She also brought up something I knew once & had forgotten. Rome borrowed Cybele from Anatolia when the Sybil told them She would lead Rome to glory. They built Her a temple called the Phrygianum at the heart of what is now Italy. When the Christian cults finally overran the Roman Empire and destroyed the Phrygianum, you can guess what they built on top of it. Yup, the basilica of the Vatican.
This is amusing to me for one reason. One reason with two versions. In one version, Attis, consort to the Goddess (and He's one of the dying vegetative solar Gods on top of it), castrated Himself in a fit of madness... (the book says he felt guilty about a sexual indiscretion or Cybele punished him for an act of sexual indiscretion, but being a consort to a Goddess like Cybele in a place/time like Anatolia in the late b.c.e.'s sexual infidelity doesn't make much sense). In another version, Cybele was originally an hermaphrodite, and the other Gods & Goddesses wanted Him/Her to give birth to the Earth or something along those lines, and they castrated Her/Him. In honor of this act (or the Attis castration), Her priests would castrate themselves in ritual frenzy. It may even be that Attis castrated Himself out of grief for Cybele's loss.
Considering the monastic vows of celibacy the Catholic priests inflict on themselves, I wonder how long Cybele's been pointing & laughing. Her penisless priests could fuck as much as they wanted... Rome's priests have penises but aren't allowed to use them. "Sorry, boys, the joke's on you."
So tonight I was all alone at work, getting paid some serious OT to... sit and surreptitiously read. I kept looking around the corner of my cubicle waiting for the supervisor to roam down the hall & catch me loafing. I'm about halfway through Drummers and I gotta say this much: it's all about Cybele. Cybele, Inanna, Hathor, Dionysus, Ariadne, the maenads... it's rich stuff, like honeyed wine to my soul. I normally stay distanced from the concept of deity, but I can't hide from the fact that in my heart I'm still a priestess and worshipper of the Mountain Mother and the Daughters of the Moon. It equates the relationship between bulls and Ariadne and the cults in Catal Huyuk to the resemblance of a bull's head to the uterus & fallopian tubes. The bull is sacred to the Goddess because it's in all of us women. The artist has researched her material well... dragged up all these forgotten images of women, priestesses & Goddesses holding the simple frame drum, tambourines and sistrums. Even I'd forgotten about Cybele's drum...
She also brought up something I knew once & had forgotten. Rome borrowed Cybele from Anatolia when the Sybil told them She would lead Rome to glory. They built Her a temple called the Phrygianum at the heart of what is now Italy. When the Christian cults finally overran the Roman Empire and destroyed the Phrygianum, you can guess what they built on top of it. Yup, the basilica of the Vatican.
This is amusing to me for one reason. One reason with two versions. In one version, Attis, consort to the Goddess (and He's one of the dying vegetative solar Gods on top of it), castrated Himself in a fit of madness... (the book says he felt guilty about a sexual indiscretion or Cybele punished him for an act of sexual indiscretion, but being a consort to a Goddess like Cybele in a place/time like Anatolia in the late b.c.e.'s sexual infidelity doesn't make much sense). In another version, Cybele was originally an hermaphrodite, and the other Gods & Goddesses wanted Him/Her to give birth to the Earth or something along those lines, and they castrated Her/Him. In honor of this act (or the Attis castration), Her priests would castrate themselves in ritual frenzy. It may even be that Attis castrated Himself out of grief for Cybele's loss.
Considering the monastic vows of celibacy the Catholic priests inflict on themselves, I wonder how long Cybele's been pointing & laughing. Her penisless priests could fuck as much as they wanted... Rome's priests have penises but aren't allowed to use them. "Sorry, boys, the joke's on you."
