7 Interests Meme Again. . .
Oct. 6th, 2007 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosYou know the rules: post a comment here and I will ask you about seven of your interests. You answer in your own LJ and include these instructions.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laotzuribbon asked me about
Adult Fairytales: This is where my interests in sexuality, spirituality, and storytelling overlap. I love reading (and sometimes writing) stories in which the underlying sexual tensions of old fairytales -- or brand new ones -- are expressed in engagingly explicit ways.
Inanna: Sumerian goddess of sexuality, sovereignty, law, and battle. I love her. She was my first patron goddess and continues to be important to my spirituality and self-understanding. The story of her Descent to the Underworld was a critical step in my healing from an emotionally abusive relationship. The sacred marriage hymns are a passionate expression of the rituals of sovereignty that legitimize the rule of the king by his status as husband of the goddess. Less well known is the story of how she won the me, or laws of civilization, from her father by getting him drunk. She is not a Great Mother Goddess, but she is a powerful, complex divine figure.
Swedenborg: Emanuel Swedenborg was an Enlightenment-era scientist and nobleman who at age 56 suddenly began having dreams and visions of the spiritual world. He turned from a scientific career and spent the rest of his life focusing his considerable intellect on the revelations he received about Heaven and Hell. He did not set out to found a new sect of Christianity, but believed that his revelations would renew the existing church. He believed that the essential attributes of God are Love and Wisdom, and that any spiritual person who truly pursued those qualities were focused on God. He believed that a person's "ruling love" was the primary indicator of godliness, and that where a person invested their time and energy demonstrated the state of their soul, no matter what they said about their beliefs. The Swedenborgian Chruch -- or the Church of the New Jerusalem -- continues to this day, with two denominations: a fundamentalist one that believes in the literal truth of The Writings, and a more liberal one which is open to the idea that much of it is metaphor. When I found the Swedenborgian Church about seven years ago, it was an important milestone in my spiritual life. I am no longer formally affiliated with them, but continue to be enriched by Swedenborg's theology.
This Wiki article is actually pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg
His writings are all online here: http://www.heavenlydoctrines.org/
Peace with Justice: This expresses my interest in the tension between a desire for peace and an unwillingness to let injustice and violence run roughshod over the world. I'm in favor of peaceful solutions wherever they can be found, but I also believe that sometimes it is necessary to use force to resist. Don't ask me for a neat rule to express where that boundary lies, because this is something that I'm working on, not something I've figured out.
Sacred Prostitutes: There is a widespread belief that in the ancient world some priestesses slept with kings and/or anyone as an expression of either the love of the goddess, or in the context of rituals of fertility or purely joyous expressions of sensuality. I wrote my MA thesis on this topic, under the guidance of professors who are fluent in the language of these ancient texts, and came to the conclusion that there is virtually no textual or artistic basis for these beliefs, that the 'evidence' so often cited by both academic and lay authors is based on suggestive but unconclusive texts, and/or the disparaging remarks of others. (The Sumerian sacred marriage texts are the major exception, and those depict a ritual between the king and the representative of Inanna -- hardly an expression of "prositution".) At the same time, the sacred prostitute is a powerful archetype for the healing of sex-spirit split, and there are numerous women (and men) in today's world who have claimed this archetype as a vocation. Personally, I had some amazing experiences working with this archetypal energy withuncrowned_king, and know how powerful it is.
Arianrhod: A goddess who appears in the Mabinogian and the poems of Taliesin. In the Mabinogian, she is called to be the king's footholder -- a position that can only be held by a virgin. She says she has not known a man, but when she steps over a druid's wand, she gives birth to twin sons, one of whom is thrown in the sea. The other is fostered, and she curses him by saying he will never have a name or weapons unless she gives them to him, nor will he have a human wife. Eventually she is tricked into giving the boy both a name and weapons. Taliesin wrote that he sojourned seven times in Caer Sidi, the castle of Arianrhod which was believed to be in the Aurora Borealis. She is considered a goddess of initiation and is one of the patrons of my priestess training.
Colliding Galaxies: In 1977, when I was twelve years old, I started writing The Journeys, a series of stories which would eventually become the fundamental mythos of my life for the next two decades. In order to make sense and provide coherence for the stories, I needed a reason for my heroine to journey between worlds. I came up with the idea that multiple galaxies were going to collide and that in order to avert chaos and war when that happened, there would need to be someone known and trusted across the worlds, a Link. At the time I came up with that, I thought it a contrived device, since I had heard that everything in the universe is expanding away from everything else. I was stunned when one day in 2001 (or so) I came across a Hubble image showing galaxies in collision. "Colliding galaxies" not only refers to my Journeys, it's an expression of how vast and mysterious the universe is.
laotzuribbon asked me about Adult Fairytales: This is where my interests in sexuality, spirituality, and storytelling overlap. I love reading (and sometimes writing) stories in which the underlying sexual tensions of old fairytales -- or brand new ones -- are expressed in engagingly explicit ways.
Inanna: Sumerian goddess of sexuality, sovereignty, law, and battle. I love her. She was my first patron goddess and continues to be important to my spirituality and self-understanding. The story of her Descent to the Underworld was a critical step in my healing from an emotionally abusive relationship. The sacred marriage hymns are a passionate expression of the rituals of sovereignty that legitimize the rule of the king by his status as husband of the goddess. Less well known is the story of how she won the me, or laws of civilization, from her father by getting him drunk. She is not a Great Mother Goddess, but she is a powerful, complex divine figure.
Swedenborg: Emanuel Swedenborg was an Enlightenment-era scientist and nobleman who at age 56 suddenly began having dreams and visions of the spiritual world. He turned from a scientific career and spent the rest of his life focusing his considerable intellect on the revelations he received about Heaven and Hell. He did not set out to found a new sect of Christianity, but believed that his revelations would renew the existing church. He believed that the essential attributes of God are Love and Wisdom, and that any spiritual person who truly pursued those qualities were focused on God. He believed that a person's "ruling love" was the primary indicator of godliness, and that where a person invested their time and energy demonstrated the state of their soul, no matter what they said about their beliefs. The Swedenborgian Chruch -- or the Church of the New Jerusalem -- continues to this day, with two denominations: a fundamentalist one that believes in the literal truth of The Writings, and a more liberal one which is open to the idea that much of it is metaphor. When I found the Swedenborgian Church about seven years ago, it was an important milestone in my spiritual life. I am no longer formally affiliated with them, but continue to be enriched by Swedenborg's theology.
This Wiki article is actually pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg
His writings are all online here: http://www.heavenlydoctrines.org/
Peace with Justice: This expresses my interest in the tension between a desire for peace and an unwillingness to let injustice and violence run roughshod over the world. I'm in favor of peaceful solutions wherever they can be found, but I also believe that sometimes it is necessary to use force to resist. Don't ask me for a neat rule to express where that boundary lies, because this is something that I'm working on, not something I've figured out.
Sacred Prostitutes: There is a widespread belief that in the ancient world some priestesses slept with kings and/or anyone as an expression of either the love of the goddess, or in the context of rituals of fertility or purely joyous expressions of sensuality. I wrote my MA thesis on this topic, under the guidance of professors who are fluent in the language of these ancient texts, and came to the conclusion that there is virtually no textual or artistic basis for these beliefs, that the 'evidence' so often cited by both academic and lay authors is based on suggestive but unconclusive texts, and/or the disparaging remarks of others. (The Sumerian sacred marriage texts are the major exception, and those depict a ritual between the king and the representative of Inanna -- hardly an expression of "prositution".) At the same time, the sacred prostitute is a powerful archetype for the healing of sex-spirit split, and there are numerous women (and men) in today's world who have claimed this archetype as a vocation. Personally, I had some amazing experiences working with this archetypal energy with
uncrowned_king, and know how powerful it is. Arianrhod: A goddess who appears in the Mabinogian and the poems of Taliesin. In the Mabinogian, she is called to be the king's footholder -- a position that can only be held by a virgin. She says she has not known a man, but when she steps over a druid's wand, she gives birth to twin sons, one of whom is thrown in the sea. The other is fostered, and she curses him by saying he will never have a name or weapons unless she gives them to him, nor will he have a human wife. Eventually she is tricked into giving the boy both a name and weapons. Taliesin wrote that he sojourned seven times in Caer Sidi, the castle of Arianrhod which was believed to be in the Aurora Borealis. She is considered a goddess of initiation and is one of the patrons of my priestess training.
Colliding Galaxies: In 1977, when I was twelve years old, I started writing The Journeys, a series of stories which would eventually become the fundamental mythos of my life for the next two decades. In order to make sense and provide coherence for the stories, I needed a reason for my heroine to journey between worlds. I came up with the idea that multiple galaxies were going to collide and that in order to avert chaos and war when that happened, there would need to be someone known and trusted across the worlds, a Link. At the time I came up with that, I thought it a contrived device, since I had heard that everything in the universe is expanding away from everything else. I was stunned when one day in 2001 (or so) I came across a Hubble image showing galaxies in collision. "Colliding galaxies" not only refers to my Journeys, it's an expression of how vast and mysterious the universe is.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-07 01:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-07 03:27 pm (UTC)Theotokos
Pan
Laura Nyro
Twr
Ravenswood
Jean Shinoda Bolen
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-07 05:07 pm (UTC)Any interest in getting together sometime in November?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-09 02:25 am (UTC)