Most people have some passing familiarity with the theories about amanita muscaria and indo-european culture – well, these folks made a funny song and video about it. Cmon, it’s cute.

Erowid on amanita, images of amanita muscaria, discussions board about amanita muscaria,  soma,  soma shamans, and most famous of all, and now rare, Gordon Wasson’s [...]]]>

Most people have some passing familiarity with the theories about amanita muscaria and indo-european culture – well, these folks made a funny song and video about it. Cmon, it’s cute.

Erowid on amanita, images of amanita muscaria, discussions board about amanita muscaria,  soma,  soma shamans, and most famous of all, and now rare, Gordon Wasson’s Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality.

What’s the saying – “Keep the Saturn in Saturnalia”. Holidays, rituals and ritual behaviors, festivals and symbolic activities are one of the ways we humans orient ourselves as groups, familes, tribes, and herds to the flow of time and change here on this surface of our planet. It’s an oppurtunity to practice conscious religion, religion as an art form, or even to try practicing what I have called “final religion”.

Gotta love the autumnal equinox – a mysterious time of the year, the day’s length changing so fast.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/22/gop-candidates-witchcraft-dabbling-worries-wiccan/

Selena Fox on Beliefnet

There’s an irony to the timing of this hubbub, says Selena Fox, [...]]]> It was sweet to see Selena Fox in the news. And on the autumnal equinox as well.

Gotta love the autumnal equinox – a mysterious time of the year, the day’s length changing so fast.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/22/gop-candidates-witchcraft-dabbling-worries-wiccan/

Selena Fox on Beliefnet

There’s an irony to the timing of this hubbub, says Selena Fox, 60, who led her first Pagan ritual in 1971.

Twenty-five years ago, almost to the date, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) – who Fox says called Wiccans Satanists – led the charge to try to pass legislation that would have taken away tax-exemption status for Wiccan churches. This attempted infringement on her church’s constitutional rights led Fox and others to form the Lady Liberty League, to educate lawmakers and others, dispel misconceptions and promote Pagan civil rights.

“It was the first time in American history that Wiccans, other Pagans and those of other religions and belief systems came together to defeat an unconstitutional piece of federal legislation directed against the Wiccan community,” she says.

Pagan, she explains, is the “umbrella term for nature religion practices with roots in Old Europe.” Wiccans represent one branch of Paganism, as do Druids and Heathens, for example, she says.

Nailing down the exact number of Wiccans and practitioners of related Pagan paths in America is next to impossible, Fox says, in part because of people’s fears of discrimination. But her church, which sits on a 200-acre nature preserve, has been in contact with more than 250,000 practitioners in the U.S. since it started in 1974. She’s also heard estimates that the U.S. numbers are anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million.

Numbers measured by the American Religious Identification Survey, most recently completed in 2008, suggest that practitioners may be getting more comfortable owning up to their beliefs. Those identifying as Pagans jumped from 140,000 to 340,000 between 2001 and 2008, according to the survey.The number of Wiccans skyrocketed as well in that time frame, climbing from 134,000 to 342,000.

This was a pretty good simple overview of Mithra worship, concentrating on the many Mithraem, Mithra temples, usually underground, that have been found, including many recent finds.

MITHRA – [...]]]> The Mithra mystery religion probably gave us December 25 as “Christ-mas”, the christian fusion of Yeshuah’s “birthday” with the older winter solstice practices of pre-christian religions.

This was a pretty good simple overview of Mithra worship, concentrating on the many Mithraem, Mithra temples, usually underground, that have been found, including many recent finds.

MITHRA – Bull Killer, Sun Lord

In later years, Christian commentators recognized similarities between Mithraic and Christian rites and were quick to condemn them. In Chapter 70 of Dialogue with Trypho, the 2nd-century Christian author Justin Martyr writes that Mithras’s worship in a cave and his “rock birth”–a frequent depiction of the god, emerging from a stone–is taken from Daniel 2:34 and Isaiah 33. The Mithraists “have no understanding” of these Scriptures, says Justin.

Justin Martyr LXXI: “And when those who record the mysteries of Mithras say that he was begotten of a rock, and call the place where those who believe in him are initiated a cave, do I not perceive here that the utterance of Daniel, that a stone without hands was cut out of a great mountain, has been imitated by them, and that they have attempted likewise to imitate the whole of Isaiah’s words?”

Daniel 2:34: “While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them.”

In Chapter 66 of First Apology, Justin claims that “wicked devils…imitated” the Eucharist by creating a Mithraic communal meal. In Chapter 40 of The Prescription Against Heretics, the 2nd-century Christian writer Tertullian notes that Mithraists “celebrate also the oblation of bread and introduce an image of a resurrection.” Aside from Tertullian, however, no other ancient source scholar mentions the image of resurrection in Mithraic ritual.

Jesus was not the only deity with whom Mithras shared similarities. In the later Roman Empire, Mithras blended in with another sun god, Sol Invictus, the “unconquered sun.” Both gods appeared in the Spanish provinces around the same time, according to Jaime Alvar, an ancient history professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Some 1st-century votive offerings in Rome even conflate the two gods into one deity, “Sol Invictus Mithras.”

By the 5th century, Mithraism faded. However, Mithras and Sol Invictus have echoes in the worship of Jesus Christ. Martin believes the ideas of brotherhood in Mithraism and apostleship in Christianity descend from collegia, or Greek social and political clubs. “My own take is that you’ve got two religions developing at the same time and in the same place and in the same culture and they’re going to develop similar kinds of expressions, symbolic expressions,” he adds.

(I mispelled his name – my apologies, spelling is a personal weakness. His name was Isaac Bonewits. I leave my original mispelling as evidence [...]]]> If you don’t know who Issac Bonewitz is, that’s not necessarily a surprise, for he represents an earlier more idyllic time in the study of the art form of intentional religion.

(I mispelled his name – my apologies, spelling is a personal weakness. His name was Isaac Bonewits. I leave my original mispelling as evidence of my error.)

http://neopagan.net/blog/?p=259

I would say that much of the work that he ended up doing was “silly, but necessary”. Someone had to act out those intentional religion and recreated religion ideas, and he got the job.

He was a religion geek of the first order. And there are worse things to be, on this planet and in this life.

I regard his books more as curiosities and cultural artifacts than as anything that it’s important to read, but it wouldn’t hurt you to read them if you come across them, and you have any interest in the whole pagan neopagan conscious religion thing.