Foundation And The Eleusian Mysteries.

From the Hmm, I Did Not Know That, and The No-one Who Reads My FB Feed Cares So This Goes To The Blog files comes this fascinating connection:

In Series 1 Epsisode 8, "The Missing Piece" of Asimov's Foundation on Apple+, "Brother Day embarks on a journey that no other Cleon has ever attempted." This is a religious ceremony that involves a long arduous walk in the sun without food or water that is deadly for many, called The Great Spiral. Br Day expects to reach a sacred cave, referred to as a womb by a priestess (note the rebirth motif) where salt in the water has some mind-altering property that may grant him a vision of the three goddesses (mother, maiden and ... cleaning lady?) and some enlightening message.

And hopefully some aloe vera for that sunburn.

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It just so happens that The Eleusian Mysteries of ancient Greece bear a striking resemblance, at least part, to this fictional ritual journey. The Mysteries involved a once in a lifetime experience for the elite of the time and requiring them (people like Marcus Aurelius!) to oversome some harsh trials/tests/etc? and reach a certain underground temple or cave, ritualistically descend into hades and return with the goddesses Persephone and Demeter (daughter and mother).

References to re-birth from a seed (it obviously began as an an agricultural festival), visions, a revelation of spiritual and mental enlightenment, and eventually, as the mysteries evolved, eternal life and maybe even becoming a god. Magic mushrooms or some other psychedelic may very well have been involved, but we don't know as the rites were (the clue is in the name) a Mystery.

Anyone seen Marcus?

E@L couldn't find a correpsondence to this TV show's Great Spiral subplot in the books by polymath Isaac Asimov. Well, research, as in he did a search for "cave" and "goddess" in the seven Foundation ebooks he has, with no result. Maybe the scriptwriters' put it in? Seems unlikely. It must be there. Anyone here read them all?

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Anyway, it was an interesting (to E@L) parallel, even though he has probably misread the details in the Wikipedia entry completely as he was drinking a double negronic (negrotonic? Anyway, negroni topped up with tonic) as he drafted this.

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No doubt a dunk into reddit or somesuch chat area, even Google, would provide E@L with a wealth of discussion on this obvious, to many, association and several PhD theses have already been submitted on it and Stephen Fry probably explained it on Qi (even though he doesn't do it anymore) or in his latest book, and it is only because E@L lives in isolation from the cultured world (the bars of Bangkok and breweries in Singapore?) that he can claim to claim it as his own discovery.

To be totally honest, the correspondence hit E@L while he was doing his daily constitutional around said culturally isolated home village, sipping his barista-brewed flat white, and listening to a recent Sam Harris podcast on the use of psychedelics in religious ceremonies in the ancient western world, and the blindingly obvious pagan origin of many Christian rituals, natch. The guest describes the Mysteries in as much detail as, even more than, any brain could hold onto, least of all the exploding one of

E@L

Belief and Knowledge

E@L saw somewhere recently a woman defending her atheism (someone look it up for me). And was asked if she was not rather an agnostic than an atheist. She dodged the question. Some guy on the video comments criticised her for not quite understanding the bias of the question.

Agnosis is about "knowing." Atheism is about "believing". You can, he said, be an agnostic atheist. They are not mutually exclusive. You don't KNOW, but you BELIEVE.

[And I guess, for the believers, if they BELIEVE that they KNOW about LTUAE, then they have what to them is a FACT in their hands. Which is why you can't really argue with them. But let's ignore this for the purposes of the blog, as it's already having been written. E@L]

So E@L is looking for an analogy and he gets as far as Schrodinger's Cat, at least initially.

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Heisenberg: Imagine, E@L, that this cat was put in its metal box several hundred millennia ago (but by whom?) and the nasty radioactive substance has been decaying and threatening to release the hydrocyanic acid gas to kill the cat ever since. Not counting the cat suffocating in the first 30 mins, or the hammer mechanism seizing up, etc... Say the cat has been there since around about when human's started thinking about the afterlife, and all-powerful tea-pots on the other side of the sun (Richard Dawkin's analogy) and Santa Claus and the like. Say that we can never open the box to confirm one non-probablistic result or the other. Let's look at that box.

E@L: Amazing material, what is that box made of?

Heisenberg: Omnium.

E@L: Cool. From The Third Policeman. I get it.

Heisenberg: Is the cat dead, or is there a psi-function following the Copenhagen principle that Herr Schrodinger (zat traytor!) has set out to mock, that still allows the cat to be (calculates decay of that radioactive substance over time) only 99.9999999999976% dead and 0.0000000000024% alive?

E@L: If I didn't see it for myself, I wouldn't BELIEVE it! You did all those calculations on a fucking slide rule! Dude, you 30's scientists fuckin' RAWK! Anyway, to answer your question, I do not KNOW that the cat is dead. But fuck you and your fuzzy photos of reality, I BELIEVE that after all these thousands of years, the cat is dead. It has ceased to be.

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Good analogy? Not really perfect is it? There is still that tiny, teeny weeny chance. (Cue Sfx: muffled meiaowww)

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How about --

Schrodinger: E@L, you and I are locked in your bedroom behind the closed door FOREVER! How comfortable are you in your sexuality? OK, joking. But, you're typing this blog post and I am indulging in other wave-function related internet activities, and I hear a noise in the lounge room.


E@L: I didn't hear anything. Are you sure? The footy is on TV: the Cats are trouncing Melbourne.

Schrodinger: No, it was more of a big thump. Man, I reckon there is an elephant in your lounge room! In fact I BELIEVE there is a baby elephant in the lounge-room. I'm going to pray to it!

E@L: Pray for a Cat's victory and pray for it not to change the channel. You can't prove that about the elephant.

Schrodinger: You can't prove otherwise. You can't tell me for certain that the elephant is not there.

E@L: OK, I admit it. I don't KNOW if there are elephants in my lounge-room or not, however I aggressively and vehemently BELIEVE there are no elephants in my lounge room. It's 3/4 time. Score check.

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Or, (and this is more my true position) --

Rosen: I moved an invisible and intangible table through time and space (from the Emu Heaven shop, yesterday) into your lounge room next to the other one.

E@L: Where? What the fuck are you talking about?

Rosen: You can't see it or feel it, or use it, but it is there.

E@L: You're a fucking nut-job.

Rosen: Don't you have FAITH?

E@L: In an invisible table? No.

Rosen: Einstein told me it is there - you trust Einstein, don't you? There are spirit photographs of the table on the web. I heard a podcasts about it. I believe there is a table in your lounge-room. I am going to pray to it.

E@L: Einstein has been misquoted and misinterpreted since forever (relatively). If I can't see a table or touch it or use it for any practical purpose, there can't be a table there. A table that is not manifest in the world doesn't in effect exist.

Rosen: But I have seen the photos! This table cured my niece of hiccups! It has an aura! I can see it.

E@L: Those photos are fake, just painting done up with photoshop - it is so fucking obvious. I scared your niece into not hiccuping in a manner I will not divulge. Your aura is a migraine coming on from me about to thump you.

Rosen: How do you KNOW that?

E@L: Because there is no table there. I'm looking: No table.

Rosen: Oh table, grant E@L the faith to believe in you.

E@L: I don't need to BELIEVE that there is a table there or not. There is no table. Repeat. There is no table. I KNOW there is no table there. However, I BELIEVE a cup of tea from the Great Tea-Pot on the other side of the sun would be nice. Milk, no sugar.

E@L

Happy Circumcision Day!

Why today? Why tomorrow? Why is THIS new year for us?

It isn't for the Chinese, the Sinhalese, the Thai (except for business purposes), nor for dozens of other regions, countries, and religions who have their New Year all over the place (in a temporal sense as well as the physical one).

For example, for both the Tamil in India and many of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, Jan 14 is considered New Year. But for different reasons. The EOC of "Georgia, Jerusalem, Russia, the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine still use the Julian Calendar", (Wiki, above link). Since 2008, the state of Tamil Nadu has adjusted the New Year to an allegedly more secular date. People don't like governments fiddling with their holidays (unless it is to add more) so, meanwhile, many objecting Tamils continue to celebrate New Year in... mid-April, the time of the advent of Spring!

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I grew accustomed to thinking that the West's (the so-called christian world) New Year, Jan 1st, was arbitrary; a relatively random date, stolen from the Romans, close enough to the summer equinox and to the saturnalia festival to be like, hey, why not now? As it doesn't correspond directly to any celestial timing landmark, nothing lunar or solar - no equinox, solstice, full moon, new moon or alignment of the planets exactly on that day - I was a tad confused, but not overly concerned.

But I was brought up Catholic. I went to Church and pretended to listen, giggled uncontrollably when the priest said "virgin", etc... At school we had Religious Education every day at noon, twenty minutes of unanswerable questions fobbed of with answers that amounted to, essentially, "because!" Some of this must have sunk in for, despite evidence to the contrary such as this blog, I am quite moralistic in many ways. Fortunately for my sanity, most of the contradictory details and ridiculous assertions of the Bible and the attendant accumulation of mythology, the suspect explanations and circular arguments in the explications upon it, washed off my back and flew through my ears. But as I once had a terrific memory (when? I've forgotten) certain factoids must have become lodged in an otherwise inconsequential matrix of neural firings. So I knew deep down somewhere in the amygdala (the cerebellum? I've forgotten), that momentous knowledge, the significance of the great and holy feast we get pissed at tonight, but I had forgotten-slash(as it were)-suppressed it.

As Christmas allegedly celebrates the birthday of Jesus, and his being Jewish, he had to be circumcised* on the eight day of His precious and not-inconsequential life. Penis? Chop chop mistah.

Presuming the male infant (miraculously delivered from a virgin who obviously lost her hymen from the inside out) survived to that venerable age of course.

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Why wait? Weeeeeeell... You know how it is with closed communities, when cousins marry sort of thing: birth defects like renal agenesis and inborn errors of metabolism like Gaucher's disease, glycogen storage disease, thalassaemia, etc... Many are fatal in about four to five days, some even sooner. Seen it only a few times thankfully, when I was (really) working. Sad.

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So they waited, and we wait, eight (8, count 'em) days.

Yes, on that day, on THIS day (i.e. tomorrow), the prepuce** of the penis of Our Lord was stretched out, perhaps over an infibulator***, and snipped off. The bris, tossed to the cats. Foreskin for the pussens, mmrrrgniaow.

The 1st of January way back when. Ow.

Hurt? Hurt so much He couldn't walk on water for nearly a year!

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This is why we (you) celebrate New Year today. I know that you too needed to be reminded of this.

It is the Day Of The Newly Exposed Glans Penis!

Jesus was therefore on target for the Covenant of Abraham. Remember how it goes? I'll give you a land of milk and honey, life eternal in heaven, etc... if your males remove some redundant skin from their genitalia. Simple as that. Snip your way to Jewish Nirvana.

Notice how religions have this obsession with all things genitalian and reproductive? (See above re: inbreeding.)

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I wonder if, perhaps, the goal of many young men like myself back when, in our post-pubertal teens when the hormones were raging, was to be "in" (as in penis-in-vaginated) on the stroke (as it were) of midnight. I kid you not, it was a big goal in our town. Some instances of this carnal celebration even involved women.

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New Year is Jan 1st and Jan 1st is New Year because of a circumcision.

Yes, you may not have realized it, but New Year is a religious holiday. Please tune your mind to that dubious and concerned (and damn ugly) baby Jesus above, about to lose part of its Godly schlong (a micro-penis, plus microcephaly and a touch of the Benjamin Button about the face, according to this pic - see above re: birth defects) so that the world could later be redeemed (redeemed? I'm not seeing that) from its sins by His cruci-fiction and death, as you pop the cork (not a metaphor) tonight.

E@L


* For those of you uncertain of the technique of this insane religious torture, there are some nice illustrations here. Yada yada, incidence of AIDS is lower, but Jesus was not a fag, allegedly, so why?


** The Holy Umbilical Cord is a first class Catholic relic (that which is composed of a body part) of Christ. Christian teaching generally states that Christ was assumed into heaven corporeally. Therefore the only parts of his body available for veneration are parts he had lost prior—hair, blood, fingernails, milk teeth, his prepuce and the umbilicus remaining from his birth. Wiki. Not his lymph, shit, piss, vomit, snot, tears, sweat, phlegm or ejaculate however.


*** Infibulation and Infibulators

Infubulation may refer to the tying up of the male foreskin to some device, like a cloth belt, to prevent masturbation. IKYN.

It is also a practice by those fucking butchers who perform radical female circumcision to stitch closed the labia to prevent normal intercourse and the enjoyment of sex by women.

Many African Muslims believe that female circumcision is required by Islam. In fact the practice is mentioned nowhere in the Quran, although the Sunnah contains several references to the custom. In particular, Mohammed instructed one infibulator, "Yes, it is allowed. Come closer so I can teach you: if you cut, do not overdo it, because it brings more radiance to the face and it is more pleasant for the husband."via

An infibulator is person who performs the infibulation.

For the purposes of this blog post however the infibulator is a small metal conic device for protecting the glans penis. The foreskin is draped over it so that religious or medical excision can be performed without danger to the rest of the poor kid's tiny little dicky-bird.

Never heard of it? Me neither until I heard the following story --

It concerns the late Australian billionaire Kerry Packer. He was having one of his monthly heart attacks at a race track (or was it a cricket match? whatever) and someone called urgently for an infibulator! He lifted his head and hoarsely called out with what might have been his last breath (we should have been so lucky) that he was having a fuckin' heart attack, not a fuckin' circumcision! Get me a defibrillator! The emergency helicopter ambulance arrived and did not have either, but Packer survived. He later gave #insert large sum of money# to the ambulance service to place defibrillators in all medical evacuation helicopters. Allegedly true (ish).

Readen Riten and Religen

via

E@L