The Bull Speaks!

As you may (or may not have) noticed, it has been a while since I wrote a reply to one of the Witches Weekly questions. Oft times the questions are on matters I choose not to throw out to the public. Pagan I am, but a private one these days.

This Weekly has a question that I feel should be addressed, though. Here it is…

What would you do if Christians came to a spiritual event that you were at, and recorded it, then publicized it and ridiculed it without your consent?

Well, if I were a member of the Raven’s Cry Grove I imagine I’d be rather pissed right about now. I might even be checking with the local DA to see if some sort of charges could be filed. IMNSHO though, I think the best course of action would be to make sure the rituals are a good bit more secure and then just let the matter rest.

Why?

Because those living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. That’s why.
Seems that anytime you get a group together – be they Pagan, Christian, Jew, or Muslim – someone else is going to be ridiculed. It’s just that simple. It is a wrong-headed way of thinking, true, yet it is still done everywhere. Frankly, it appears most often among Pagan churches as they don’t simply ridicule other Faiths, but other Pagan Covens and Groves as well.

It was this sort of behavior among all, along with a serious amount of elitism among some, that finally snapped the final cord tying this Pagan to the greater Pagan Community. This is not to say I’ve converted to some other Faith, but that I – and I say this publicly for the first time – have renounced all of the Degrees and Honors I earned or was bestowed over the years as a Wiccan. I now see that Greater Power more clearly than before and without all of the trappings of old. Oh, I still love to socialize with Pagans and go to Gatherings when I can, but I’ll never teach again nor will I join in Circle. I just don’t require, nor desire, all the trappings anymore. More important to me now are Family and Friends.
Covens, Circles, Groves and such come and go, but a Man’s Family and Friends are eternal.

I wonder how this post will go over? With my dearest friends, like Nancy Gail, Liz, & Malece, quite well I think. With those who were “hanger’s on”, less so. Well, ‘So Mote It Be’!

This being done I shall retire to where The Bull should be on a lazy Saturday morning at 7AM – in bed with my bride, Lady Beth!  

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Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Two years since The Bull Speaks! first hit the web with my bellowings against Tyranny, Terrorism, and General Stupidity (often in the form of Liberalism).

In these last two years my personal life has continued to improve and my happiness has grown. I’m still disabled. Still have medical issues. Still poor. I’ve had gains and losses. However, I’m a happier man than I was in September 2004. I feel I am a more educated man as well, for I have studied more in the last two years than in any other two year period since my youth.

Two years since I entered this blogging game as an Insignificant Microbe in the TTLB Ecosystem. Now I stand as a Large Mammal with aspirations to Playful Primate or even more. Two years since I began blogging just to keep from going mad with lack of sleep and complete night-time boredom. I had no idea what I was doing and no idea where this would go. To date, it has been a rather pleasent trip!

What has occurred in the last two years that stands out most in my mind?

Well, in the political field I let my opinion be known, and got to see the Truth come out about that treasonous sack of horse-shyte, John Kerry. Got to see him fail to take the White House from ‘Dubya’. That was a good day.

I saw the biological father of my step kids, MA1 Tony LaFrenier, go off to war as a local cop-become- reserve sailor and come home a year later as a real American Hero both to his children, but to me as well. Surprising, isn’t it?

I saw my eldest daughter, Clancy, enter her studies at the University of South Alabama. Now she is well on her way to becoming the Registered Nurse she has always wanted to be. She makes her old man proud.

I’ve had two Summers with my son, Jacob, thanks to a minor thawing of my ex-wife’s heart. My Gods! The boy is quickly becoming a man! Soon he will surpass his father – just as it should be.

Over the last two years I’ve watched three small children go from looking at me with distrust and perhaps a bit of fear to looking at me as a real “daddy” to them. Truly a great gift.

During the same period I’ve seen Lady Beth’s family go from looking and speaking at me with open suspicion to learning to trust me as a member of the family. (Or they have learned to cover up better! )

Most of all, I’ve had two more years of wedded bliss with my beloved wife, Lady Beth. No man could ask for anything more.

Well, let’s see if I can keep this going for another two years! That’s all for now.

Bull, out!  

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Now here is a story I saw nowhere in the American media, though I readily admit that I don’t read everything everyday. What struck me was seeing it where I did.

In al Jazeera of all damned places! For those of you that don’t want to point your browser towards the land of Islam I’ll post the story in its entirety here

Regardless, this is a pretty neat story. One worth the read and one that will make you go “Hmm…”
Let’s go!

Will Amazon’s Stonehenge rewrite history?
By Gibby Zobel in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Tuesday 27 June 2006, 22:14 Makka Time, 19:14 GMT

The ancient observatory was discovered in French Guiana. The recent discovery of a Stonehenge of the Amazon could rewrite the books on the development of ancient societies in South America. Brazilian archaeologists say the extraordinary discovery of what appears to be a pre-colonial astrological observatory in the rainforest in the state of Amapa near the border with near French Guiana, throws new light on the ancient peoples of the Amazon, illuminating a far more intricate and advanced society than previously thought.

Indigenous Indians are thought to have built the observatory 2,000 years ago, placing 127 three-metre-high granite blocks in circles to mark cosmological movements. “Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a monument,” archaeologist Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (IEPA), told Aljazeera.net. She said that the site resembles a temple and may have been used as an observatory.

Astro-archaeology
Eduardo Goes Neves, an archaeologist at the University of Sao Paulo, says that there are no other similar structures like it anywhere in Brazil. “I think it adds to the picture of more cultural and social diversity in pre-colonial Amazonia than was previously thought. Previous thinking considered pre-colonial Amazonian societies as fairly homogenous. The more we work in the area, the more diversity one finds,” he says. “We still don’t know much of the archaeology of this area, despite more than 100 years of research. It’s hard to tell what rituals they took part in. The idea of the place being a sort of observatory is a good one, but we still need to test it.” That’s down to astro-archaeologists, who practise a branch of science which studies former astronomical knowledge as inferred from archaeological remains, which was first popularised when Gerald Hawkins proposed that Stonehenge was a kind of Neolithic computer.

Astral symbolism
Many of the world’s indigenous peoples are thought to use symbolism of the sky on earth to harness the power of the celestial world. One famous example being the theory that the Pyramids of Egypt were an Earthy reflection of Orion’s belt, a series of three stars in the constellation Orion. In their groundbreaking book Heaven’s Mirror, authors Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia (cr) attempted to prove that the mimicking of the sky on earth was endemic in the ancient world.

“A great pan-cultural theory of the meaning of life and mystery of death and the possibility of eternal life illuminated the ancient world. They left behind in all cases a distinctive package of myths, monuments and spiritual beliefs based upon complex astronomical cycles. “These cycles are so minute and so obscure that they could have only have been detected by means of precise observations of the heavens consistently carried out over thousands of years,” they wrote. Neves says that the Amazonian alignments were first reported in the 1920s by German-Brazilian anthropologist Curt Nimuendaju. But it has taken until now for Cabral’s team to prove the winter solstice theory.

Stonehenge-Amazon link
The Stonehenge comparison with the Amazon discovery is due to the astronomical significance of both sites. When the sun rises in Stonehenge on summer solstice the first rays hit the centre of the monument. In the Amazon, the alignment is with the winter solstice. Stonehenge, built in Wiltshire, England, pre-dates the Egyptian pyramids. The circle of standing stones were erected 4,500 years ago, but the earliest markings – holes for pine posts – have been found under the modern tourist car park estimated to be 10,000 years old.

The Amazon site is much younger and was discovered in Calcoene, just north of the Equator, in the state of Amapa. The site raises interesting questions of the origins of civilisations in the Amazon. Neves says that there is general agreement that the Amazon observatory was the work of the ancestors of the Palikur indigenous peoples. “This is based on the fact that these people and their ancestors have been living in the area for roughly 1,500 years, on comparison of contemporary and archaeological ceramics as well as the oral tradition. The structures may be more recent though, but my opinion is that they date from before the arrival of the Europeans,” he says. He says that for any hunter-gather group, like the Palikur, who lives with nature, a knowledge of the celestial bodies in inevitable. Today there are estimated to be less than 1,000 Palikur in Brazil and another 500 in French Guyana.

Mythical universe
Their mythical universe is created in three parallel layers, the deep world, the earth and the celestial. In the deep world, just below the surface of the earth, live the supernatural in human form. A “hole” allows travel between these two layers with the supernatural reappearing on earth ‘dressed’ as animals. The celestial layer is made up of several layers of skies according to research by Curt Nimuendaju. Today, as a result of evangelism by missionaries, their religious world is a confusion between old and new beliefs. Jesus Christ, they say, lives on the highest level, while the vulture with two-heads lives on the second.

One of the great mysteries of Stonehenge is how the giant blocks of bluestones were transported by hand from 320 kilometres away in Wales. But it seems the Palikur didn’t have to go to so much trouble. One study claims that the blocks came from just one kilometre away. Another theory claims that the blocks could have been made on site with some method of liquefying and reforming, like concrete.

Another dimension
The discovery adds to another rather more modern Brazilian ‘Stonehenge’ – that of its very parliament. The science-fiction-like city of Brasilia was created from scratch in the middle of thick jungle in the 1950s. In designing the congress building, the architects aligned the two giant towers at the centre of the structure so that the sun rises directly between them on Republic Day, April 21. To achieve such a feat with the parliament, the architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, had to plan the entire city around this alignment, which has the 8km axis of government buildings at its core. But they couldn’t have imagined that this futuristic Stonehenge could have had its’ roots in their own country, on the edge of the Amazon.

Winter Solstice, eh? I see a pilgramage of pagans to French Guiana just as there is to Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Bull, out.  

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