Al Bore has won the ultimate seal of global messianism, so what's in it for us?
There is something marvellously ridiculous about Nobel Peace Prize what with Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat and some North Korean tyrant I can't name getting it but this is the worst of the lot. There was at least a semblance of argument that those awards were for, you know, peace. But, what exactly this pendulous piece of human flesh done for the humanity?
It is not enough for Democratic candidates to routinely aspire and rarely win US presidency. That presidency is only a preparatory course to Messiah-hood when they become some kind of reincarnate jesuses bestowing benedictions on everybody else. Cut short on the anointed eight years to transform the world and you have an automatic messiah in the making (Jimmy Carter). Give them their eight year run, they will take time to become a messaiah but become they will (Bill Clinton). Nowadays, they are not even bothering to run for the Presidency but directly to Messiah-hood (Barak Obama).
Al Gore was ofcourse denied the preparatory course for the Messiah-hood. But that didn't stop him. I wrote a small tribute to Atlas Shrugged down below. There is an incident in the novel where a Budhist hippie champions soya crops as the alternative to America's dietary ills, managing to kill the agricultural sector of the nation in the process. Al Gore is just such a hippie whose crusade from being a joke has suddenly turned deadly serious when things like the ethanol drive are driving food prices up everywhere. It is one thing to endure sillines like banning of the light bulbs but it is another thing again to submit the world to poverty and hunger. In the last decade alone, capitalism has erased hunger and poverty like no other altruistic, liberal program has in the history of the world. What does the liberal brotherhood do in response? Concoct an elaborate scheme, a grand scheme so stultifying in stupidity that it defies description and bring the world down to the knees again.
There is a cultural underside to this too. It shows clearly that European elites are, for all their pretensions to the contrary, stumpy maidens waiting to be included in the American politcal drama. For years, Gore's supporters have held that Bush stole their election from him and Europe was positively indignant about how their president was cheated out of the top job. How can you restore cosmic order and anoint your messiah? Do the next best thing and award him the Nobel Prize. He's too too good for the US presidency, anyway.
It maybe dying but Old Europe has bit back hard.
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It's 50 years since Atlas Shrugged was first published, one of the greatest books ever written in history.
I had already read The Fountainhead and I was fourteen. The next book to buy was of course, Atlas Shrugged. And for a fourteen year old child, that book came as a fairy godmother one never finds in real life. It bewitched pumpkins into twinkling carriages and took me on an intellectual journey which has never stopped since.
Of course, I have read it millions of times and of course I love it.
Have it outgrown it? many people claim that they loved it at one point of time but eventually grow out of it. Well, in a sense, I have. Too many people think that to love Rand is to be circumscribed by her. Many allege that this was a tendency perpetuated by Rand herself.
I did find new things to love, new boundaries so to speak, new pastures to graze. I may have come far from my intellectual hometown but is that straying too far? However far, I may have come, I have scrupulously followed one Randian dictum: THINK.
So, on the fiftieth birthday of Atlas, here's to my intellectual father (I am sure Ayn would approve of that term). FIFTY MORE YEARS.
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Ciao America 2002. Starring Vincenzo Amato. Its plot described thusly:
Lorenzo Primavera is an unsettled Italian American college graduate who travels to Italy to coach American football to a team of Italians in Italy’s fledgling American Football League. It’s a league where everyone can kick but no one can catch. While coaching, Lorenzo meets and falls in love with Paola Angelini, a headstrong young music student who forces him to face the same decision as his immigrant grandfather some seventy years earlier. It is a decision, the outcome of which, will decide his very future.
Golden Door 2007. Starring Vincenzo Amato again. Its plot described thusly:
The turn-of-the-century voyage of a poor family from rural Sicily through the "golden door" of Ellis Island and into America. On a perilous steamship journey from his Sicilian village, the widower Salvatore Mancuso encounters a ravishing, mystery-shrouded Englishwoman, Lucy, Amid a harrowing crossing, an unexpected love story unfolds all the way to the halls of Ellis Island, where both Salvatore and Lucy will stop at nothing to make it to the America of their imaginations
America, we are ready to love you again. Just don't elect evil Republicans!
"Thus a long list may be made out of female deities who show the general characteristics of Phrygian Cybele: the Lydian Mother, Cybebe or Cybele; Rhea of Crete; Hecate of Samothrace and Lagina; Bendis of Thrace and Lemnos; Cappadocian Mâ; Britomartis, or Dictynna, of Crete, who is Aphaea at Aegina; the Syrian goddess of Hierapolis; several forms of Artemis,--of the Tauric Chersonese, of Brauron, of Laodicea of Ephesus, Artemis-Aphrodite of Persia." The quote is from Florence Mary Bennett's Religious Cults associated with the Amazons, a book which I reviewed elsewhere.
The list is a a partial list of the mother goddesses whose worship involved a special cult of service, often violent. It usually invloved self-mutilation of some kind and may have invloved even human sacrifice in some cases. The mutilated priests often lived a life as temple devotees adn lived a life of wretchedness. Curiously enough for female goddesses, their priests tended to be generally male. Females were occasionally used.
In the case of males. the priests were often castrated and lived a life of sexual purity as eunuchs. In the case of females. the priests were obliged to undertake sacred prostitution. This double polarity has always fascinated me and I must say, i haven't been impressed so far by the various attempts at explanation that I've read.
The most famous of these mothers was of course Cybele. whose order of priests included the galli, the corybantes and the dactyls. Each of them were distinct.
The attendants of Rhea were called curetes and those of Bendis, fanatici. The Persian goddes mentioned here is Anahita who had her own followers. There were a couple of other goddesses, not mentioned in the above quote, like Kotys of Thrace who worshippers were called baptes. The Syrian Goddess is Atargatis and I have written about Lucian's famous account of her, elsewhere.
There were other kinds of mothers and other kinds of worship but the violent nature of these cults is special. Bennett even imagines Amazons to be nothing more than one such cult.
I am not a neo-goddess freak, just somebody who loves the romance of the ancient world and one of the more exotic aspects of that vanished world are these mother-goddess cults. Curiously, I am not aware of any male gods who inspired this kind of self-mutilation or prostitution.
Is it then part of wanting to be female? In a world which lacked sex transplant operations was self-castration the only remedy to transcend your gender? But ancient world possessed enormity of eunuchs, seraglios full of them. Not all of them were castrated in a fit of religious dementia. The mutilation went further; Bendis inspired people to cut their arms or breasts off. Also, it doesn't explain sacred prostitution and I think the Goddess who inspired men to saw off their genitals is the same one who inspired women to sell their bodies to strangers. I think both are related.
One can only wonder about the relgious sentiment that made people commit such actions in public processions.
Have you heard the story of Dido, the queen that Aeneas left behind so heartlessly? She is a Phoenician princess. Have you heard the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, the sculptor who fell in love with the statue he carved and prayed to Aphrodite that she be given life? He was a Phoencian king. Have you heard of Moloch, the terrible monster-like God to whom young children were sacrificed? He was the main god of Phoenician pantheon and yes, children were routinely sarcificed to him. Have you heard of Europa, the nymph whom Zeus carried away as a bull? She was a Phoenician princess according to the story and more likely, she was a Phoenician goddess. Have you heard the story of Hannibal and how he almost destroyed Rome? He was a Phoenician general who almost overrun the Roman empire.
These are probably the most well-known cultural references that have come down to us from both Western(that is Greek and Roman) and Judaic sources and the Phoenicians remain in the background and animate the shadows of both these traditions. Unlike other shadowy people, we know much more about them because they have left huge imprints of their civilization behind.
They come to the fore after the invasion of the Sea Peoples, except unlike the Philistines, these have occupied the long stretch of Lebanon coast. They built magnificent cities along this narrow coast: Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Amrith, Berytus and later they colonised the whole of Mediterranean Coast and built the city that rivalled Rome in power and prestige, Carthage. Berytus, is of course, the modern Beirut.
They were the pre-eminent sailors, hence they filled in the role of abductors and pirates in legends. They were also known for the purple dye they produced, hence their name Phoenicia.
But, I think the Phoenicians were more influential than that. There is a version of thought that major Greek Gods like Aphrodite and Adonis were actually Phoenician imports. Though not an expert, I think the same too. More importantly, a whole lot of mythology that involves Thebes and Cadmus down to Oedipus and others, has at least a familial link to Phoenicia that survived in the stories themselves. I think that there must be a more intimate link.
The more I know about ancient near-East religions, the more I realise how Judaism (and Christianity) was shaped by its environment. Remember the famous story where Abraham was required to sacrifice his child and God finally spared him. The Old Testament God is called merciful when by your modern sensibilities he looks quite vengeful. I never understood him until I came to know about the wide-spread practice of child sacrifice. Yahweh is merciful because he has spared his followers the necessity of this grim practice in exchange for his protection.
Gods are bringers of new cultures. Just as Dinoysus is worshipped because he introduced vines and Athena because she brought olives, Yahweh is worshipped among other things because he got rid of the actual sacrifice and replaced it with a symbolic one. This is a new cultural invention. But, if you want to know the grimness of what Yaweh replaced, you should read about Moloch and his tophets, the death chambers where little children were burned to death and you would be stuck with a kind of horrible fascination about the civilization which practiced this as a normal ritual
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