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and-then-the-trash · 3 years

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Judaism and Animal Crossing

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH TO READ THIS, IN FACT, PLEASE READ REGARDLESS OF WHETHER YOU’RE JEWISH OR NOT

i’m going somewhere with this i swear

actually probably multiple places because i’m ADHD and don’t often stay on just one thought but like,,,bear with me here

OK SO i am Jewish, ya know? like, i was raised in a conservative Jewish household, my mom and dad both come from Jewish families, i attended religious school at my synagogue twice a week in K-7th grade, i had a Bat Mitzvah, i went through confirmation class (though still haven’t technically been confirmed because of covid), i participate in Jewish youth group events and activities and even hold leadership positions in both my chapter and my region. most importantly, i believe in many of the stories and traditions of Judaism and consider these aspects of my life to be very important to me. i am a Jew.

i care about representation. i feel a bit left out during this time of year when i go out to a shopping center or really just anywhere in public, and i see Christmas wreaths and decorations and lights on every streetlamp, every building, every store. last night, my family went to help light the electric menorah that stands on the lawn of our local courthouse, and i commented on how there was a large Christmas tree, a scene of cardboard cutouts depicting the birth of Jesus, wreathes all around on the fence and gate surrounding the courthouse, and a Santa decoration standing right next to the menorah that was as large as the simple electric menorah that stood overshadowed by what was around it. Chanukah lasts for 8 nights. Christmas is one day, but it lasts for over a month.

this is going somewhere i swear. i’m gonna get to Animal Crossing.

the abundance of Christmas decorations and media and representation doesn’t surprise me; it never has. i expect it. expecting it doesn’t mean i’m not still disappointed when someone puts out a single tiny menorah next to a large Christmas tree and thinks that that’s representation.

i like to play Animal Crossing, specifically Animal Crossing New Horizons, though i did use to play New Leaf back when i had a DS. i like to participate in the festive days and celebrations and events in Animal Crossing. i participated in the festivities of Bunny Day earlier this year, though i’m still not really sure why, and that’s part of what this whole rant is about. Animal Crossing calls December 25th Toy Day, and leading up to it there are wreathes and festive decorations and announcements and twinkling lights. today, as i was playing, one of my islanders gifted me a Festive Wreathe and told me that they thought “everyone should have one of these during this season”.

i am a Jew. i celebrate Chanukah with my family every year. we light a menorah every night and we play dreidel and we fry latkes and we exchange presents. on Christmas, we do what many Jews in America do and we go to the movies and eat American Chinese food, sometimes even driving a few hours out to get kosher Chinese food so that i can eat something other than vegetarian lo mein, since i’m the only one in my family that still keeps kosher. i am saddened by the fact that i have yet to see any kind of Chanukah-like decoration or festivities in Animal Crossing. the holiday means Festival of Lights, something that i think would be a great name for a celebration in the Animal Crossing world!

so after all of this, can someone tell me why it is that i still want to display this festive wreathe that my islander gave me? why i bought a festive tree and fireplace back on my old copy of Animal Crossing New Leaf years ago? why i want to shake the pine trees that are draped in colored, twinkling lights, and find ornaments and craft the ornament wreathe DIY that Isabelle sent me?

i take pride in my Judaism. i tell others who are interested about my culture and my religion and what i know about the history and stories of my people, and i answer the questions they ask, and the ones i don’t know the answers to i ask my rabbi or my uncle who is also a rabbi. i share my traditions with others, inviting non-Jewish friends to come eat in my Sukkah during Sukkot, and play dreidel with me during Chanukah, and join my family’s seder during Pesach. i talk all the time about how much i want to be seen and represented and not be constantly overshadowed by Christianity. and i know that my religion is FAR from the only one to be overshadowed in this way. i know that Chanukah gets more attention than many other holidays and festivities of other religions, and Judaism gets more representation in the media than many other religions.

so why do i still want to participate in this same thing that i complain about once it’s brought into one of my favorite video games. am i becoming part of the same problem that i so badly wished could be fixed here in America? am i being brainwashed into thinking that as long as it “isn’t too religious” it should be fine, even though i know that it’s a tradition that stems from a specific religious holiday that isn’t mine? why do i want to participate while also wishing there was a menorah shining through the window of my ACNH house?

i know this is long and anyone who might’ve started it probably stopped reading by now, but if you made it to the end and might have answers as to why i want to participate in the game’s festivities and whether that’s okay or makes me part of the problem, please comment or reblog and tell me because i legitimately want to know. if you don’t have answers but think someone else might, please ask them or reblog or do SOMETHING because this is eating away inside of me.

i don’t want to abandon my beliefs and values because of a game, and i don’t want to feel like an event in a game is making me abandon those beliefs and values. i just want to be seen.

#acnh #animal crossing #animal crossing new horizons #animal crossing toy day #chanukah #christmas #jewish christmas #jewish #judaism #jewblr #jewish tumblr #jewish identity #jewish identity crisis #jewish representation #why am i like this #someone help me #:P

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suzey8888 · 3 years

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“I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. She was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching. “We elected him by a landslide – 98 percent of the vote,” she recalls. She wasn’t old enough to vote in 1938 – approaching her 11th birthday. But she remembers. “Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.” No so. Hitler is welcomed to Austria “In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates. Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs. “My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people – about 30 daily.’ “We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. “Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. “Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler. “We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed. “After the election, German officials were appointed, and, like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service. “Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn’t support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage. “Then we lost religious education for kids “Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school.. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler’s picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn’t pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles,’ and had physical education. “Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail.” And then things got worse. “The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. “We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had. “My mother was very unhappy,” remembers Kitty. “When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn’t do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly

any fun – no sports, and no political indoctrination. “I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. “Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time, unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. “It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy. “In 1939, the war started, and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn’t work, you didn’t get a ration card, and, if you didn’t have a card, you starved to death. “Women who stayed home to raise their families didn’t have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men. “Soon after this, the draft was implemented. “It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps,” remembers Kitty. “During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. “They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. “When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. “Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service. “When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. “You could take your children ages four weeks old to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, seven days a week, under the total care of the government. “The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had. “Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna.. “After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. “When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. “If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries. “As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80 percent of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. “All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing. “We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. “Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn’t meet all the demands. “Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control. “We had consumer protection, too “We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency

specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the livestock, and then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it. “In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps. The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. “So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. “I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. “I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. “They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness. “As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia. “Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law-abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long afterwards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily. “No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up. “Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.” “This is my eyewitness account. “It’s true. Those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity. “America is truly is the greatest country in the world. “Don’t let freedom slip away. “After America, there is no place to go.” Kitty Werthmann ***Re-read the part where she says “everything was free” - healthcare and so on. Very much worth reading twice.****

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eroticwound · 3 years

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ok i can’t stop thinking about jewish hawkeye... so i’m head canoning that he’s a patrilineal jew. his dad wasn’t super religious—the culture was more important to him.

so when hawk’s mom dies, his dad would want to keep aspects of her in his son’s life more than ever, so he raises hawk with more christian holidays: basically christmas and easter. i doubt they ever went to church unless it was an extended family sort of thing... or hawk was staying at a friend’s house saturday night to sunday morning.

the small pierce household wouldn’t really observe shabbat or attend shul or maybe even celebrate chanukah on their own, but hawk probably attended cousins’ bar/bat mitzvahs and passover seders and chanukahs, and definitely ate the food and soaked up all that yiddish and delicate art of complaining and arguing from them and especially his dad

hawk woulda been in a strange position because as a patrilineal jew a lot of his family wouldn’t really see him as jewish, add to that his dad wanting to keep his mom in his life with the christian holidays, but not really learning christian bible stuff... i don’t think hawk identifies as anything necessarily, but the jewish culture really seeped into him and is obviously very close to his core identity

the only fly in all this is pierce clearly isn’t a jewish last name. and i *could* see his mom being jewish and his dad being christian instead... in that scenario he wouldn’t have had a lot of direct jewish influence in the house after his mom died, so he’d only get that with extended family. i could see him clinging to those cultural ties to his mom, but not really getting into all the nuance and religious aspects because his dad wasn’t jewish. but if this were the case, i think he might feel more certain in a jewish identity since by any definition he would be fully jewish, and i just don’t see as much evidence of that on screen... either way, i don’t think he would’ve gotten bar mitzvahed

anyway tl;dr hawkeye is a patrilineal jew who identifies with the cultural aspects more than anything

#hawkeye pierce #benjamin franklin pierce #m*a*s*h #mash #jewish character #head canon #ok but i’m a jewish hawkeye truther #meta

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dianabluebonnet · 4 years

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Last Day Of Pride Month

It may be the last day of Pride Month but that doesn’t mean it’s time to stop being Proud! Now, more than ever we need to wrap ourselves in who we are; be loud and proud and push back any and all people who would want you, me, and your communities to go back into the closet. I, like everyone else, was gutted when I read the JKR conversion therapy tweet. At first, I was angry at her for saying it in such a public way. I mean, come on lady you’re a billionaire why can’t you just buy a private island and STFU about this? But then I was angry and scared for those who might be triggered by these words and sentiments; ones who might have been sent to these horrific places where they are told they are wrong; that who they are and who they love is wrong, starting them on a road of deep depression or worse, suicidal thoughts. When But, I’m a Cheerleader came out in the mid 90s, I was still unaware of my own sexuality and watched the film like it was a comedy. It was funny! As a 14-year-old it was beyond anything that I would have understood past the comedy and the ridiculous scenarios that were being acted out on screen. Later in life, when I found out that those places do actually exist, and they are not the funny times those kids were having I was heartbroken. I grew up in a very liberal leaning house, race and sexual proclivities was not talked about in the house, not because they couldn’t be talked about but because I was raised to never feel or think about any other human being as different. Everyone has their own form or “normal” and we have to respect it. Ask questions, yes, learn who they are and why they do the things they do in the most respectful way so you yourself can be a better human, but NEVER use their different views of what is “normal” against them. I always knew, and was always told, I didn’t matter who I brought home, man woman, black, white, as long as they were good to me, they would be welcome, and it took me years to realize that wasn’t the same for other households. And for the life of me I still, to this day, cannot understand why that is. Why does who I date matter to you? I don’t care if you sleep with a man, so why do you care if I sleep with a woman? I also wasn’t raised religious, we were not a religious household and when I did go to church or Temple with friends if I was spending the night from a Saturday to Sunday, I found the space and people very comforting; a group of people coming together for warmth and community, what’s not to like! I saw it as like a giant book club that met every week! But when I understood that the book, they were reading from was being used to tell others they were wrong, that they were less than, again, I couldn’t understand it. I did my Undergrad work in History/Human Rights/Religion mostly because to understand the history of human rights you have to understand the thinking behind it, and 90% of the time, it’s about one view of God being better than another’s view and understanding of God. I still am not religious, but my girlfriend is. Jess is Jewish, she is part of the Reform movement and they are welcoming to everyone; it’s in their charter to be so. She works at a Temple that has a major LGBTQ community and she is on the board of the Queer Teens Alliance of North Texas. Her faith and her community are not just a part of who she is as a Lesbian, it is they basis of her. We had a conversation not long ago about when she came out to her workmates and they were so happy and kept asking her to join Temple functions for the Queer communities and she said it made her feel closer to not only her faith but to her own self. I have loved all of the Reform Temples, Methodist and Unitarian churches that embrace and love the queer communities and feel that if I ever needing council of faith, this is where I would go. And I would, and have, suggested those types of places for friends and they have not only flourished but have felt a sense of community. All of this to say, you are seen, you are valid, you are loved, and you are supported. This Pride month has been one for the books in more way than one. But that just means that next year we will have a massive blowout all over the world and we will be together again. Pride is more than just a month of festivals and parades. It’s about the coming together and finding our community happier, healthier and stronger than the year before. If you or someone you know has been sent to one of these horrific places and you are struggling with the remnants of it, I am attaching a list of orgs for you to maybe find help. Know that you are not alone in this and If you read this and just want to talk, I am always here in my DMs. Remember you are loved and respected and all the other beautiful affirmations! https://www.thetrevorproject.org/ https://www.uua.org/ https://qvoicenews.com/2019/10/19/conversion-therapy-support-group-offers-hope-to-survivors/ https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-views-lgbt-equality

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bloodofrobertsmith · 4 years

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The Virgin Mary

I was first inspired to write this biography by an issue of LIFE magazine that was completely about Mary. As I was reading I realized that despite being raised in a Christian household, as well as being surrounded by Serbian Orthodox and Catholic families for most of my young life-- the only thing I truly knew of Mary was that she was the virgin mother of Jesus. It’s important for me to note that although my family was full of devout Christians, I had spent all of my life rejecting it as a non-believer. I still stick to this thought process today.

I had learned later in my first semester of college of the symbolism and religious rites that surround her, but I still did not know anything of the Historical life around her. Was she real? What kind of life did she live? And who really was she? I wanted to know the truth vs myth of who Mary was.

“The young Jewish girl goes to the stone synagogue in Nazareth. She offers devotions in the small women’s section adjacent to the main prayer hall. In chorus with the other congregants, the girl recites Psalms and absorbs their lessons: ‘Abandon yourself to God.’

One extraordinary day she is visited by an angel who asks if she’ll play a part in the birth of God’s son. She answers yes. Perhaps a little more than 2,000 years ago, she makes her way with her husband Joseph, a carpenter, to a village called Bethlehem. Perhaps Bethlehem; some scholars posit Nazareth as more likely. In a stable, for the inn was filled, Mary and Joseph celebrate the birth of a son. They lay the infant in a feeding stall and name him Yeshua -- in Greek: Jesus. she raises Jesus to be a strong, brave young man. A leader of other men. That is the story of Miriam of Nazareth. And that is all we really know,”

But how did we get to this story? If as stated by Jarslov Peikan, we could copy on an eight by eleven sheet everything there is about Mary in the New Testament. Then why is Mary so popular through the ages? I think Mary is the perfect and most original examples of what happens when an idea evolves and grows from its original source.

Miriam of Nazareth: Miriam was born in a small village in Galilee. Known as Mary to the masses, her real name would have been Miriam or Maryamme-- one of the most common names of the day. As a young Jewish woman living in Palestine, she was a second class citizen. Not knowing how to read or write, she worked alongside her mother since she could walk. Basically, she was a poor woman and modern depictions of her are usually able to recognize that, But, the catholic church had a huge role in presenting us with images of a fair-skinned woman robed in blue silk. When she was a Mediterranean woman of low class who would have most definitely worn a simple wool or linen tunics and a shawl over her head.

The political environment of Mary’s life was a complicated one with constant Jewish oppression in the form of Roman legions. The end of the dictatorship of Herod the Great had made way for the Romans to storm into Galilee and squash Jewish revolts. Which I think is a perfect breeding ground for Jewish prophecy of a savior to form in. Josephus, a Jewish writer records that many cities were burned and people murdered by the Romans

Mary and Joseph: So, where does Joseph come into the life of Mary? The popular image of Mary we have come to know is that of a young woman in her early twenties birthing the savior. But, if we think realistically of the time period, she was probably only 12 or 13 years of age when betrothed to Joseph. Who would have been much older than she. However, Mary became pregnant before her marriage to Joseph. Let’s see how the Bible addresses this:

(NCV) Luke 1:26-38:

“God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin. She was engaged to marry a man named Joseph from the family of David. Her name was Mary. the angel came to her and said, ‘Greetings The Lord has blessed you and is with you.’ But Mary was very startled by what the angel said and wondered what this greeting might mean. The angel said to her ‘Don’t be afraid Mary; God has shown you his grace. Listen! You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of King David, his ancestor. He will rule over the people of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end.’ Mary said to the angel, ‘how will this happen since I am a virgin?’ The angel said to Mary, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you. For this reason the baby will be Holy and will be the Son of God.’ Mary said, ‘ I am the servant of the Lord. Let this happen to me as you say.’ And the angel went away.”

For the millions of Christians, Catholics, and sub-sets of these practices, the Immaculate Conception is proven fact based on the actual fact the Bible records it as such. The apparently divine conceptions of Jesus Christ, is a miracle -- a simple and unquestionable matter of Faith. But the gospels tell us very little about Mary and the pregnancy itself. Nor does it cover the societal reaction of Mary exposing to her village, let alone her husband. When Joseph had found put, he would have most definitely thought of her as unfaithful. We do know that when Joseph found out, he had the idea to divorce her quietly, as not to expose her to shame and death from the village elders. But the Bible does state that an angel appeared to Joseph and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, Because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to name his Jesus, because he will save people from their sins.

Since most scholars today consider most of the Bible to be legend and mythology, it could be theorized that Mary, a young girl of no younger than 12 but no older than 16 had been raped by a stranger or Joseph himself. I believe it could be Joseph because I don’t know why he would have motivation to cover up another man’s rape child as the birth of the savior. I theorize essentially, that Mary and Joseph had premarital sex and Mary was impregnated. I will not determine that Joseph actually raped her as there was no such thing as statutory rape back then and they were already betrothed. I know that does not exclude it. But, given the context of the time, That is my estimate. No one will ever know what actually happened probably besides Mary herself.

But was the immaculate conception truly just a couples cover up? Maybe. We probably won't ever really know. I cannot prove or deny what is fundamentally the foundation of 2 major religions and its sub-branches. But, I as someone who believes in nothing, have a hard time thinking that this was simply a Hebrew God formulating the redemption of Man. However, the New Testament, and I suppose history; say that Joseph was a kind man, and did not give away Mary to the Elders or have her stoned for “adultery.” As far as how and exactly when the conception happened, that will continue to remain between Mary and Joseph... Or maybe Mary and herself. Even then, practically impossibly, it could be true that Mary gave birth to the Jewish Messiah.

Mary the Idea: It’s important to address the immaculate conception and life of Mary as the ultimate catalyst for what she would become. So how did Mary become the exalted Saint and Mother of All ideal to the populace?

When taking a look at Mary’s fame, it is not terribly difficult to see her evolution as the Virgin Mother of the Messiah to the Virgin Mother of all the Christian World. Though it is important to know that she is more popularly worshiped by catholic sects, Christianity also celebrated her above any other biblical figure, Save God/Jesus himself.

“Not everyone needs a brother or sister or savior, or accepts that a savior has arrived historically, or will do so one day. But everyone once had a mother.” Basically, even with all the majesty of the universe going on and changing around you, we all need a mother. Even though she is not the only saint to patron mothers, children, motherhood, and orphans-- she is regarded as the Mother of Mothers and Jesus/God is the King of Kings, Having a mother (with special circumstances aside) is the one most universal experiences of life. We all have one and we all want to love them and be loved in return. And Mary is clearly the finest and most ideal example of a mother in all of history. She is the mother of Jesus, How could she herself not be equally perfect?

But as we know, Mary as a mother is not really explored in the Bible. Basically through the centuries, as Christianity spread through European missionaries and expanded as an idea/religion, Mary expanded as well. If Christianity were not so against “false idols” I think she would be a Christian god in her own right. She was also a huge inspiration to poor people as an impoverished second class citizen becoming the “Queen of Heaven.”

Millions of people today and throughout history have turned to Mary for help, fortune, and love. She is the most named after woman in history and the most prayed to saint in all of Catholicism. Mary was a girl whose choices and circumstances made her into the most famous woman ever. Not all to her own credit as I hardly assume she could have predicted this, The spread of Christianity through colonialism was probably the biggest amplification of her life and story. Allowing her to become Mary, Mother of All.

#mary #the virgin mary #catholiscism #history #christianity #religion #jesus christ #the bible #catholic #christian #immaculate conception

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butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 5 years

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Oh they absolutely would have been.

Like, Jews were targeted in a very broad stroke, and the nazis were in no way rounding in favor of whiteness or gentile-ness or able-bodied-ness or anything else when they were deciding who was an undesireable. Standard practice was entire households being kidnapped, and Nazi eugenics often spoke of eliminating multiple generations forward and backward just to reeeeeeally scrub out any taint of the blood.

That said, it was ALSO fairly standard practice for the Nazis to take young children who happened to have idealized features from their "degenerate" families and try to raise them as good and honorable members of the aryan race, Hitler Youth, and National Citizenry. So like. Nazis were not known for being terribly consistent about their ethnic policies regardless. They basically did what suited them.

And listen. Even aside from the nazi's perspective on the issue, I want to be clear that a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. Converts are no less Jewish than anyone else, and their racial and ethnic situation can get complicated as a result. After all, is an ethnic Jew merely someone born to a Jewish family? Only someone born to a Jewish mother? What about adult children of late-life converts?

There's a woman at my synagogue who, when she finished her conversion and had her ceremony, established her Jewish line as being her grandchildren forward because her adult children already had religious affiliation but had agreed with her that their children should have a place in their spiritual and cultural heritage from her. Are they now ethnic Jews?

Who fucking knows! Religious leaders and philosophers have only been discussing that for thousands of years, how much longer could it take?

But back to the more specific question here. Not the question of who is ~really~ a Jew or of who would ~count~ to the Nazis with their twisted, no-basis-in-reality eugenic policies. The question you're really getting at here is "did converts die/get collected in the holocaust and could they again or are people co-opting an experience they have no claim to". They answers to those questions are yes, yes, and no. Converts DID die in the Holocaust. They died as Jew and for being Jews even if/when the Nazis erased their conversion or the cultural inheritance of their children. If we have another genocide of the Jews, converts will die alongside us the same as they basically always have because it doesn't matter what the Nazis think they ARE it matters what they represent, and converts, as with all Jews, represent our faith, our traditions, and our bloodline, which is a problem for anyone trying to get rid of Jews. Converts cannot "co-opt" general Jewish experiences because they genuinely are Jewish.

I can understand where your frustration might be coming from. And it may be worth looking further into exactly what people are doing that is setting it off. Like is there something specific you're seeing certain converts say that's frustrating and still would be if they were ethnic Jews? Are you having trouble understanding how "Judaism as an ethnic community" plays into conversion and racial conversations? Are you a person of color who struggles with seeing white people talk cavalierly about genocide? Like there are any number of reasons why what you're seeing might frustrate you that are reasonable concerns, unrelated to the status of a convert, and there are plenty more that may be based in stereotypes or misinformation. Either way, it's worth exploring your feelings on this further.

But I do want to zero in on a phrasing you used that I think might be part of what's happening here. "Otherwise white converts" are still white. Their race did not change when they converted even if their bloodline is now more complicated than society's understanding of whiteness allows for. We have done ourselves a great disservice by abandoning the word and concept of xenophobia in favor of exclusively talking about race. There's a reason most research and academia and philosophical thought usually discusses BOTH race and ethnicity. The two often overlap but are not the same. A white Jew (convert or no, and for all there are some people on this site who insist it's not possible, I know waaaay too many Jews who consistently refer to their own white privilege as white people because shockingly some Jews are actually white even when they're also ethnic Jews) is still a Jew, and they still share our ethnicity. That brings with it more than enough xenophobia and other bigotry to complicate any white convert's understanding of racial politics. But white Jews are still also, racially, white. Again, regardless of being an ethnic jew or a white jew.

And even that's contextual! In the 40's, you for SURE would not have seen very many people referring to Jews as racially white, and the one-drop rule of racial segregationist policy still applies to most of us to this day (that is no matter how distant we are from our culture and faith, or how much inter-marriage we've done, us and our children are still Jewish in the eyes of our oppressors). But these days, many Jews identify as white, and certainly white converts do not suddenly become POC despite a lifetime of whiteness. In both cases, their access to white privilege may be limited or even null depending on context, but that doesn't make them POC.

I suspect that what you're struggling to reckon with here is the notion of "no such thing as a white jew" that tumblr's weird game of telephone has made commonplace combined with the notion of "white people can and do convert to judaism" and that cognitive dissonance is causing you to fixate your concerns here on the seemingly more straight forward convert part rather than the more complicated question of racial and ethnic identity. But to that I say: White Jews died in the holocaust too, and they died in the states at the hands of neo-nazi and white supremacist groups just the same as non-white Jews did.

If someone decides to come for us again, why do you think they will target my family? Because I'm Jewish? Because my partner is converting? Because my sibling is MENA? Because I married a black person? Because my children will be black by virtue of the one-drop rule? That my children will be Jewish by virtue of the one-drop rule? Because we're queer? Because we're mentally ill and disabled? Because we're political dissidents? Because we're poor? Because we have questionable citizenship? Because some of us are people of color? Because those of us who are white MARRIED people of color?

Do you really believe they would just pick one of those? Maybe for our trials. But they would collect us for each and every one of those charges. For the sum total of our existences. Every aspect of us is an insult to their philosophies, a threat to their worldview, and proof of our degeneracy. They could and would collect us for any single one of those reasons but the reality is that we are all of them.

Even if no one looking at me on the street knew I was Jewish, even if my name weren't attached to my synagogue and my money weren't funding their social justice efforts, I am still a race traitor for marrying a black person and committing miscegenation. My partner is still married to a Jew even if they stop conversion right this very second and renounce Judaism.

They don't hate our identities first and then try to prove we carry them. They hate US first and then justify it with any identity we hold.

#holocaust #dark conversation #sorry yall this got....heavy #wall of words

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thecinephale · 6 years

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Faith in a Queerer Power: ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’ and ‘Novitiate’

*vague spoilers*

I was raised in the Church of American Suburbia. I had a very secure upper middle class adolescence in a community known for its good schools. Families competed to have the best names on their cars and clothes and who you were mattered less than who people thought you were. It was the late 2000s and it was okay to be gay. As long as you didn’t talk about it.

When I think about the reasons I’ve hated and hate myself, when I wonder how it took until I was 23 to even be aware of my transness, and still when I question if I really am who I feel I am, I think of my safe town. I was raised Jewish, but as a Reform Jew my day to day was not dictated by religion. My bible was the suburbs.

*** Most people know the term, gaslighting, comes from the play, Gaslight and its subsequent film adaptations. It’s a taut thriller about a man who covers up a murder by convincing his wife she is mentally ill. His main tactic is hiding their things and insisting she’s stolen them. She loses her grasp on reality, or, more accurately, she loses her grasp on her own reality.

Under an administration that lies more often than not, the term has gained a resurgence, used and misused often. But it’s important to remember that gaslighting isn’t just lying to someone. Like in the play, it’s a concerted effort to destabilize someone’s grasp on truth.

For too many of us, gaslighting is a tenant of queer experience. Whether shamed by a religious institution or simply brainwashed by society, most of us have doubted our feelings, or, at the very least, our identities.

*** Desiree Akhavan’s new film The Miseducation of Cameron Post portrays the most extreme example of this queer gaslighting: conversion therapy. Chloë Grace Moretz plays Cameron who is sent to God’s Promise after she’s caught having sex with her best friend during the Homecoming Dance.

The beginning of the movie fulfills the fantasy of any teen who has ever listened to Haylely Kiyoko’s “Sleepover” a dozen times in a row… or whatever the early 90s version of that was. They make eyes at each other during their pastor’s moralizing, they furiously makeout during Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts, and they deadeye their way through photos with their boyfriends.

The Homecoming sex scene is long and passionate. It captures the overwhelming all-consuming lust of adolescence. Cameron and her best friend press their faces together as if it’s possible to combine molecules.

And then she goes to God’s Promise.

Here they clinically call her feelings SSA (same sex attraction). They give Cameron a letter from her friend accusing her of taking advantage. They tell her that not only is she not a homosexual, but nobody is a homosexual. They insist that normalcy is possible for her, and who wouldn’t want to be normal?

The strength of the film is that these efforts work. Cameron is headstrong and stubborn and yet she begins to doubt. The other strength of the film is that Cameron is portrayed as a real teen and her captors as normal adults. These qualities make the film more than a remake of But I’m a Cheerleader with Akhavan’s unique brand of humor. They make the film about us all. Any gay person assumed to be straight, any non-binary person told there are only two genders, any queer person informed that it’s okay to be queer, just not that kind of queer, just not in that way.

I spent my life being told I was a boy. And on my worst days I still believe them.

*** Religion is a common enemy in stories about queerness, both fiction and non-fiction. But last year’s Novitiate, written and directed by Maggie Betts, suggests that the two concepts can actually be quite similar.

The film is about Kathleen, a young woman who decides to become a nun despite growing up in an atheistic household. Kathleen wants to feel loved and with no interest in boys she turns to God. She is driven by faith… and an especially attractive nun at her Catholic school.

Her mom is furious and here the parallels between Kathleen’s faith and a queer teen experience are most obvious. “Well I don’t get it! It doesn’t even make sense in love with God!” her mom yells with tears in her eyes. And she might as well be saying, “It doesn’t even make sense in love with another girl!” When Kathleen is just a child her mom calls religion silly before telling Kathleen she can make up her own mind when she’s older. This too is akin to a common queer experience. A parent may suggest it’s okay to be gay and in the same breath call gay people gross or weird or outcasts.

Once Kathleen is at the convent, her mother comes to visit and it’s clear she’s really trying to understand. But her remarks about the décor and the tears in her eyes communicate plenty. Watching this scene, I thought of my own parents, so much better than most, but still stinging me with their transparent emotions, their misguided comments. The gaslighting may be less conscious, but the effects remain the same.

When Kathleen has a dirty dream about a new novice, it’s revealed that her faith may in part be a mask for her queerness. But the film allows the religious narrative to continue through Melissa Leo’s frightening Reverend Mother. While a villain to the girls, her humanity is revealed in private as she grapples with Vatican II, new rules passed by Pope John XXIII that downgraded the status of nuns. When revealing these changes to the other nuns, tears in her eyes, she says, “The church gave me my work, my community, even my identity.” And now the men in the church are telling her that her beliefs are false, that who she has been for 40 years was a lie.

Unfortunately, Reverend Mother does not make the connection between her identity as a nun and Kathleen’s identity as queer. When Kathleen confesses her now physical relationship with the other novice, she is deeply shamed. Kathleen insists, “I don’t think it was a sin because it didn’t feel like a sin.” But Reverend Mother does not care about Kathleen’s point of view. She demands that she crawl on all fours and ask her sisters for penance.

I understood this scene deeply. Since coming out, I’ve been told that the burden I’m placing on others is great. Even among some who accept me and view me as a woman, I am told how difficult this was on them or how difficult this must be on others. I’m told that I should be grateful when people don’t abandon me. I’m told to grovel for simply being who I am.

*** The miracle of these two films is that they provide a solution to this loss of faith. They suggest a new religion, one that can certainly exist alongside more conventional churches, but a religion all the same. They suggest a religion of queerness.

If religion is a collection of beliefs, the experience of faith, and the forming of community, these films show that all three are possible, nay essential, for living as queer. The belief that being gay, being trans, or being whatever label feels good is real. The faith in oneself that we know our feelings and our thoughts better than anyone else. A community of others who can help us know that we are not alone. This is the Church of Queer.

The final shot of Cameron Post shows Cameron with her two best friends driving away to a new life. The final shot of Novitiate shows Kathleen looking up at a priest but really looking inside herself. Like any congregant our faith may waiver. But if we trust ourselves and trust our communities we can unlearn a false reality and find salvation together.

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hannahhostofheaven · 6 years

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New Hannah head canon! Hannah has died seven times up to this point.

I made a new Hannah head canon page and it’s pretty extensive and detailed and gives you an idea of Hannah’s life before, during, and after seasons 9-11. It also talks about Caroline Johnson. So for anyone RPing or planning to RP with Hannah please take a look! Also note that her backstory will be tweaked to fit our RPs.

Tagging my current and prospective Hannah Muse RPers (let me know if I am forgetting someone): @spooky-racoons, @heavensmostterrifyingweapon, @heavenly-soldier, @angelic-rebels, @gracedsoldier, @ourpieceoutoftime, @wellillgowithyou, @meg-deserved-better,

Trigger warnings: mentions of torture, disease, and various types of abuse abound. Hannah had a very rough past:

Note: This is just Hannah’s main canon compliant/divergent verse. If we do any AUs, I might tweak things accordingly.

Also note again: Yes I will RP Caroline Johnson if anyone is interested!

I also updated my rules so you can check that out too:

Head canons:

Hannah's personality, skills, and traits:

* Hannah is an angel’s angel, she lives by her rules, but she finds inner conflict with her feelings. She believes in law, justice, and order.

* She is a unique angel in that she has emotions. This makes her more intuitive than other angels. She is quite passionate and although she doesn’t always understand emotions, she just knows she has them. She has a temper, especially when someone taunts her or Castiel.

* Hannah has a fascination with Humanity, although she holds and maintains a distance with these creatures she doesn’t quite understand. She tends to find ‘human things’ like eating unsettling and disgusting, at first, but she is open-minded and when given enough encouragement, she will try new things.

* Hannah likes plants and plant life. She has an aversion to things like fences, borders, and barriers.

* I think Hannah has cream colored wings with golden yellow tips, see blog banner picture.

* Hannah is considered a relatively young angel. She is perhaps 5-10 million years old which when compared to the archangels which are perhaps billions of years old,is very young. She is older than humanity but wasn’t around to see dinosaurs.

Hannah Prior to season 9:

Hannah has been to Earth a few times before meeting Castiel. She has not been to Earth prior to the 19th century, so nearly 200 years. She is weary around humans, tends to not trust them and doesn't automatically volunteer for missions involving Earth. Her time in heaven has not always been great either. She has a somewhat rebellious streak despite her adherence to law and order. In particular, she has had some run ins with Raphael who oversaw her training when she was newly formed.

Raphael punished Hannah harshly for minor transgressions, and often times, her punishment was to be exiled to Earth for a few years. She spent time on earth in the 1860s, the 1770s, 1340s, 1095, the first century CE, and during the reign of the Pharaoh Ramses.

During each of these time periods, Hannah was stripped of her grace and made mortal. She's died six times only to be resurrected by Raphael and brought back to heaven.

First Death: The first time she warranted punishment was when she spoke out against heaven during the time of the 10 plagues. She didn't think it was right to judge an entire race of people. As punishment for speaking out, Raphael sent her to Egypt and locked her into the vessel of a Hebrew slave girl. This slave girl befriended the Pharaoh's second wife and the two fell in love. When the 10 plagues occurred, Hannah tried to save her lovers child with the cruel, abusive pharaoh. Her lover died after the pharaoh beat her to death and he had Hannah put to death. Cause of death: Execution by impalement.

Second death: Hannah was sent to Earth around 79 AD. She fell in love with a roman farmer but they both died when Vesuvius erupted and destroyed their Pompeii farm. Her vessel's body is still entombed in pompeii. Cause of death: vaporized by pyroclastic flow of a volcano.

Third Death: Hannah was sent to Jerusalem in 1095 for again protesting Raphael. This time, she was the wife of a Jewish merchant during the first crusade. She had a child named Miriam. Her life was cut short when the crusaders laid seige to Jerusalem. Her child was brutally murdered in front of her and she and her husband were locked in their synagogue and the crusaders set it on fire, killing everyone inside. Cause of death: Burned alive.

Fourth Death: Hannah came to Cornwall, England during the Black Death. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner who died and left her in the care of her cruel step mother and step sister. She became their peasant servant. She was treated terribly, especially when her mother found out about the affair she was having with a wealthy courtesan woman from the palace. When plague hit, Hannah and her lover both died. Cause of death: Plague.

Fifth Death: Hannah lived on a Massachusetts farm. She was hired by a cruel man as an Irish scullery maid (cook). The man beat her for the littlest mistakes. He was a British soldier who fought against the Americans during the revolution. He would adopt children from the orphanage in order to use them as slave labor. One such girl, a 5 year old named Scarlett formed a bond with Hannah and Hannah considered claimed her as her own daughter. But Scarlett came down with diphtheria and died and the cruel soldier told everyone that Hannah killed her. Hannah later became pregnant herself through forced assault and both she and her unborn child died of diphtheria. Cause of death: Diphtheria.

Sixth death: In 1863, Hannah lived in Wales at this point. She was the daughter of a merchant who came to the US during the Civil War. Her father was arrested by the southern confederates after being suspected of collaborating with the north. Hannah ran west with a pioneer caravan. While living in a wild west town, she was forced to live in a brothel. She died of cholera while living in the brothel. Cause of death: Cholera.

After her sixth death, Hannah learned to be more obedient. It was ingrained into her by then. She still possesses this spirit of rebellion and when Castiel rebelled, she secretly admired him for it even though she had never met him at that point. She would never openly defy Raphael again and even fought against Castiel on the side of Raphael. When Castiel killed Raphael, Hannah thought she could finally be free, but the fall happened a few years later, and she met Castiel for the first time.

Hannah while with Castiel seasons 9-11 (Her seventh death)

Hannah is much like Castiel was in season four. She is strict about obeying the laws of heaven and chastises other angels for their disobedience. But few know her secret past. During her time spent with Castiel, she learned to be more open minded towards humans and she began to open up to humanity again. Though she made some mistakes in her relationship with Castiel, she developed real feelings for him and she ended up dying defending him from Efram and Jonah. Cause of death: Angel blade, killed by Efram.

Hannah from season 11-13

Season 11: Hannah woke up from the Empty soon after her death but she wasn't allowed to return to Heaven or to Earth. Instead, the cosmic entity sent her to Purgatory.

Season 12: She spent a year in hell after escaping purgatory. She was tortured by demons until she finally made it back to Earth.

Season 13: Hannah spent the year graceless. She is rejoined and reunited with her older vessel Caroline Johnson only to discover that Caroline has not had the best life since they parted ways. When Hannah took over her body for the second time, she and Caroline suffered together.

Caroline Johnson:

* Caroline Johnson was born February 25th, 1980 in Great Falls, Montana. She is a Pisces.

* In this head canon, Caroline and her husband were not on the best of terms. Depending on RPG, Joe can be seen as neglectful at best, abusive at worst, and there was a reason why Caroline said Yes to Hannah in the first place. This may or may not contradict canon, depending on your interpretations of it.

* Caroline was a bit of a daydreamer and animal lover. She dreamed of traveling the world.

* Before her first encounter with Hannah, Caroline was raised in a religious household, though she was a bit of a skeptic herself. Her mother died of cancer when she was 7 and her father, depressed after losing their horse ranch due to financial hardships, committed suicide by shooting himself when Caroline was 14.

* Caroline spent her teenage years in foster care and married her high school sweetheart, Joe shortly after he joined the marines and returned from boot camp.

* Even back then, Joe displayed signs of being a narcissist. He was very controlling and very jealous. He would check Caroline's phone and ask her where she'd been. She learned to deal with his personality because she thought she loved him and he promised to show her adventures.

* After Caroline had a miscarriage, Joe got worse and it was at this time that Hannah came to Caroline and asked her to be her vessel. In an act of anger and defiance towards Joe, Caroline said yes.

* Her time as Hannah taught Caroline a strength she never knew she had. After awhile though, she missed Joe and when Hannah released her, she thought she could work things out with her husband. She thought wrong.

* In the year since she disappeared, Joe became more abusive and possessive and when she returned, he decided to punish her for ever running off on him. She was subjected to frequent beatings.

* When Hannah came to possess Caroline a second time, she found her vessel beaten and dying on the floor of the house she was being held prisoner by Joe. Caroline agreed to be possessed again and Hannah released her soul to heaven. But being graceless, Hannah was unable to convince Joe she wasn't Caroline anymore and so, Joe abused her, that is, until Hannah poisoned him and ran away. She has no idea if Joe survived the poison or not, she didn't wait around to find out.

So this is Hannah and Caroline's story. Depending on the RP, some tweaks and changes can be made to fit the RP.

#Hannah #Muse #headcanon

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spiritroots · 6 years

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Hi Yejide. Recently, I've been feeling a calling to explore root workin' and ancestral veneration. I've been raised Baptist and still maintain a relationship with Christ, but lately I've just been feeling this internal pull to honor my ancestors. I don't know exactly how or where to start. My entire life, I've been raised to believe that doing any kind of root work is witchcraft and inherently evil. How did you decolonize your mind and break out of that fear?

Hi anon (: Welcome to the struggle! I’m happy for you that you’re feeling the ancestral call, and I hope some of this very long response (+1.4k words, I counted lmao) is helpful in one way or another.

First off, I want to emphasize a couple different things. For one, hoodoo/rootwork is NOT the same as witchcraft at all. It can be overlapped with witchcraft and/or it can be referred to as a form of witchcraft by black folks who wish to call it that, which is a perfectly valid, personal terminology choice. However, historically, rootwork/hoodoo derives from the various ATRs (African traditional religions) that were practiced by black slaves brought to the US.

ATRs are not witchcraft either, they are traditional religions practiced by peoples indigenous to Africa that deserve the same amount of respect as any other religion in the world. The negative stereotypes about them are based on racism and attempts to dehumanize African peoples and their descendants in the diaspora who practiced their ancestral traditions. Any time you start to slip into that way of thinking about ATRs, remind yourself that they are religions as deserving of respect as any other religion.

Most African slaves in the US were forced to practice various denominations of Protestant Christianity and abandon their traditional religions or face severe punishments - even death. Hoodoo/rootwork is largely the result of many different practices and beliefs from ATRs combined together and syncretized with Christianity. It is a folk magic tradition that was developed not only during slavery but also largely within the black church. The ties between hoodoo and Christianity are very deep. You don’t have to be Christian to practice rootwork, but it’s not at all un-Christian to practice it either if that’s something you’re interested in doing. (Since you mentioned you still maintain a relationship with Jesus, I figured that might be something you’d wanna look into.)

The majority of traditional rootworkers in the US have always been and still are Protestant Christian. It’s traditional in hoodoo to pray to Jesus during workings, and it’s said that Moses himself was the very first rootworker in history. Why? Because the original Christian rootworkers viewed rootwork as powerful prayers, asking for the help of God to heal, protect, and sometimes issue divine judgment. Hoodoo wasn’t traditionally seen as witchcraft at all, and in fact, has long been used as a method for fighting against witchcraft. Many of the most respected and famous rootworkers in history were also preachers and pastors. Some consider being a good church-going Christian as a pre-requisite to being a rootworker. The Bible itself, especially the Book of Psalms, is traditionally viewed as a powerful source of hoodoo magic.

Now, I’m not sure if you were already aware of any of this or if this information is helpful to you, but I think it’s important for anyone studying hoodoo to understand this side of its history whether you want to connect with these aspects of it or not. If you’re curious at all about my personal journeys of dealing with Christian views on witchcraft and also decolonization within my magic and religious practices, see the mini-novel I ended up writing at 3 am for this ask under the read more line below 😂😂😂

[ Ask me anything ] [ Buy me a coffee ] [ Spirit Roots Shop ] [ About Me ]

It took me about a solid ten years to get to where I am now with decolonizing my mind and breaking out of Christianity-related fears around magic practices. I’ll still always be in the process of decolonization for the rest of my life, but within the past few years, I’ve made some big strides that I’m very proud of for myself. As I hope most of my followers know, I’m not a witch and don’t identify as one for personal and historical + cultural reasons within the context of Africana traditions. BUT that being said, for much of my life I did identify as a witch and actively study witchcraft for a very long time.

I declared myself a Wiccan at the age of thirteen, which was inspired by watching Charmed, yes, but that didn’t lessen the seriousness of it for me as being an actual religious path and practice I wanted to commit myself to. Being an only child who told my very liberal parents everything, I quickly confessed this to them expecting acceptance and happiness for me. Unfortunately, their Christian knee-jerk reaction alongside concerns about a thirteen-year-old learning about witchcraft, fertility rites, and sex-related rituals was enough for them to give me an ultimatum to stop being both a Wiccan and a witch.

That sent me deep into secrecy about it for around a solid 8 years or so - essentially all the way through high school until I had more independence in college. During that whole time, I always felt like I was genuinely a witch and Wiccan and no other religion fit me, but I was too scared to practice because of my parents’ reaction and them having “banned” it. I remember that constant longing mixed with fear of being a witch in my heart while feeling like it would never actually be accepted by anyone in my life.

During college, I finally realized that I could practice it more actively without worrying about my parents anymore. I remember going through all the stages of testing the waters with that, the ex-Christian pangs of guilt and intrigue, the concerns about what Drew and my friends would think and then being the cool and edgy witchy friend after finally mustering the courage to tell them. It was like I could finally be who I always knew that I was inside, but it had required a long process of unraveling the shame and the guilt and the fear, too.

Now, to be totally honest with you, I wouldn’t consider ANY of that decolonization. That was really just my journey of breaking away from a mostly Christian upbringing (my Jewish roots didn’t really play an anti-witchcraft role at all tbh) and finding the freedom to more openly be a witch and deepen my practice of witchcraft and of Wicca. Beginning to decolonize for me was a whole other journey that started soon afterward.

Fast forward to after I started studying Wicca in enough depth as a college student that I realized it really wasn’t for me and ended up converting to Buddhism instead. In a roundabout way, it was converting to Buddhism that sent me down a very different path. I was and still am a very devout Buddhist, but even though the buddha dharma is universal, Buddhism as a religion is deeply rooted in Asian cultures which is not a part of my heritage. As my Buddhist practice deepened over time, so did my longing for ancestral traditions and practices. This is what got me started with ancestor work and studying hoodoo, which is what eventually led me to an interest in ATRs and Ifá in particular. Even reconnecting with my Jewish heritage and identity was a part of this journey to tap back into my ancestral practices and spirituality.

The more I learned about these Africana traditions, the further away I got from Eurocentric ways of thinking about spirituality and magic. Converting to Buddhism from Wicca began my big push away from Eurocentric frameworks, and getting involved with hoodoo and Ifá only cemented that even further for me. Yes, witchcraft can be defined in whatever way one wants so I’m not saying people can’t practice completely non-Eurocentric witchcraft - some people absolutely do that. But for me personally, leaving the concept of “witchcraft” and the identity of “witch” behind completely was even more liberating than reconnecting with it in the first place had ever been. This was a huge part of my personal decolonization process for many different reasons.

That’s all a very long story and explanation, but that’s essentially my point. It can literally take decades to undergo the personal journeys necessary for unraveling and growing beyond what you were raised to believe and what society impresses upon you. Growing up in a very Christian household and in a Western society that enmeshes you in Eurocentric ways of thinking makes it extremely difficult because that’s all your surrounded by for most of your life.

Unfortunately, there’s no handbook or manual guide for all this. It’s very challenging and difficult. One thing I wish I had had more of through all of it was support from role models and mentors to understand better where I was going and where I wanted to end up. Maybe if I had, these journeys might have been a bit shorter and smoother. If you can, find communities and mentors who can help you grow, but also always listen to your instincts and your own intuition. I wish you the best of luck on your way

#ask #personal #witchcraft #christianity #hoodoo #rootwork #conjure #psalms #buddhism #eurocentric #eutradtattoo #wicca #atr #ifa #aboutme #slavery #blackhistory

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uberoll-oystercrackers · 6 years

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random larsadie headcanon

so anyway i was bullshitting in a larsadie discord when someone asked for prompts. i was like, lol, “lars and sadie go to church”.

but now that’s it has been like a day i was thinking about it, and.. actually wow!! cute! cutecutecuuuuute!!!! i like this idea actually!!!

idk about all the specifics but i love the idea of Lars being Roman Catholic (the most common religious identity in the Philippines). i can imagine Sadie making an Easter basket for Lars, and coming over early on the holiday morning to drop it off. She goes to knock on the door, but Lars swings it open before she does, wearing a nice short-sleeve dark blue button up and black dress slacks. He blinks down at her, a faint trace of annoyance held at bay by his early morning grogginess. She kinda snorts at first, surprised to see him in clothes like that, but admittedly kind of thinks he looks cute dressed up like that. “Uh, hey. I put together this basket for you and your parents,” she lifts the basket up so he can see. He blushes juuuust a little bit, taking it from her. “Oh, cool, thanks...” is all he can manage to spit out b4 his parents come from behind him, also dressed in their Easter best.

“Oh, Laramie, who’s this?” Martha asks, delighted. “I think it’s that young lady we saw him run into the Universe household with,” Dante says, then looking to Sadie.

“Haha yeah, um, my name is Sadie, actually. Nice to meet you-meet you,” she smiles shyly, realizing she hasn’t really interacted with them to this extent.

“Happy Easter!” Lars’ parents say in unison, and Sadie begins to wish them a happy one in return but Martha gasps, saying, “Oh, we’re running late!” and she scoots her lil mens out the door, shutting it behind them. Lars is still holding the basket, his face becoming redder and redder as the embarrassment of the entire situation starts waking him up fully. Sadie notices his state and steps aside, allowing the Barrigas space to get to their car in the driveway. She tentatively waves, and Lars exaperately waves back, shuffling over to the car. As soon as he opens the back door, his mom cheerfully asks Sadie if she would like to come with them to Easter service.

Lars, of course, turns into a solid block of ice and shatters into about three million pieces. Naturally, he can’t protest like that. >:3c

“Oh, wow,” Sadie stammers, smiling bigger than before. “That’s so nice of you! Really, I, I would like to come, but...” she gestures at her clothes, a plain light grey tee shirt and blue jean shorts. “I feel like this isn’t appropriate attire, heh,”

Lars relaxes just a bit, curling around the inside of the opened car door and watching this interaction with narrow eyes. If he thought he was escaping such an awkward situation as bringing his crush to EASTER MASS with his PARENTS, an already pretty embarrassing situation, well.. he had quite another thing coming.

“Oh hunny, a pretty package doesn’t always need a bow, but...” Martha reaches into her hair, unclasping a white wooden hairclip decorated with beautiful carved sampaguitas (national flower of the Philippines). She leans down, and as though there were much more familiarity between the two women then there truly is, Martha secures the clip just above and behind Sadie’s left ear. “There,” she said, clasping her hands together in giddiness. “You look perfect! You can sit in the back with Laramie. :)” Lars slams himself over to one side of the car as Sadie curiously climbs in their car, fastening her safety belt. Her entire face pink, a small smirk creeping at the corners of her mouth, she glances at Lars’ fumbling hands around the basket in his lap, his flustered expression only revealed to her from his reflection in the window. ‘Guess I better text my mom,’ Sadie thinks to herself as she pulls out her phone.

‘I am SO not going with them next year, oh my god,’ repeats in Lars’ head the entire drive.

---

I thought it would be really cute that after that experience, Sadie might consider why she and her mother aren’t religious. She one day gets the moxie to ask her mother about it, and Barb mentions that she was raised Lutheran Protestant, but as she grew older religion didn’t really have much of a place in her life. Sadie is almost satisfied but then she courageously asks: “Wh... what about, my dad? Was he Lutheran, too?”

Barb lowers her eyes to the floor for a moment, but then laughs warmly. “Your dad was Jewish, actually! Religion was a lot more important to him than it was to me, that’s for sure.”

And thus begins Sadie’s interest in researching Judaism. She follows a few Jewish religion and culture bloggers, she buys a few study texts, and just for fun she learns to count to ten in Hebrew. She mostly keeps this all to herself, but one day she realizes it’s kind of lonely to do communal things without anyone else. Not wanting to put her mother through any stress by reminding Barb of her father, Sadie nervously texts Lars for help with the one part of Judaism he might know about.

“Hey, uh, I know this is kind of coming from no where but... do you know how to make cholent?”

He takes about 20 minutes before he responds.

“y”

Sadie frowns, but rolls her eyes and replies immediately.

“I wanted to make some, but you know a lot more about cooking than I do and I wanted to ask you for help. *angel emoji*”

this time, he responds after only three minutes.

“do u already have all the ingredients”

Sadie wonders why he’s asking that now instead of just answering her question, but she checks her pantry after pulling up a recipe on her phone.

“It looks like I have just about everything except for... pearl barley? Idek what that is tbh lol”

She presses send, leaning against her kitchen counter as she awaits his response.

“b there in 30 mins.”

he sent that one in about 30 seconds, which really took Sadie aback. she didn’t mean she was going to make it today! but, his enthusiasm impressed her a little bit, and she felt good in choosing him of all people.

She sets everything up, and after looking over the recipe again, she starts boiling some water for the beans.

It takes 37 minutes, actually, but the knock on her door after that time passes is distinctively Lars’, a package of pearl barley in tow. Completely in contrast to his performance at the Big Donut, Lars remains methodical and focused, occasionally asking her to read things off from her phone. She tries to help, but he kind of ends up doing most things by himself. She doesn’t really mind, because she can learn by watching him. Eventually she becomes a little embarrassed at the situation, a bit too pleased that he is here and helping her like this. She almost wanted to give him a hug for it... almost.

After a couple of hours they could just set it on the stovetop and wait, and Lars finally seems to snap back into his usual personality and asks her, “Why cholent? I’ve never seen you eat cholent,” squinting his eyes at her, it finally dawns on him that this might be some kind of setup. Was he too eager? Oof!

Sadie blushes, unaware that he’d been paying attention to the things she ate in any capacity. “Well...” she sighs, pulling a chair out from the kitchen table and sitting down. She looks at him, the slightest amount of pain etched into her chubby face. Lars’ brows furrow, his eyes opening fully again. He shyly makes his way to the opposite side of the table, flipping the chair around and sitting on it backward. “You remember when your parents kinda... just decided I was going to church with you guys?”

Lars grimaced, “Mass,”.

“Mass,” Sadie repeatedly apologetically. “That’s kinda it, I’m not... I’m not so good at this religious stuff yet, haha...” and she finally begins to tell someone in her life what she’s been thinking about with regards to religion, and how she thinks learning more about Judaism will help her understand herself and her dad better, and that maybe it shouldn’t be so important to her but it just kind of became important to her.

After her lengthy explanation, the stove timer immediately began going off. She had begun tearing up a bit, so she took the opportunity to wipe her face off on her shirt when Lars shot up to take the pot off the burner to rest. He turned the heat off, sheepishly looking over his shoulder back at her, face still buried in the collar of her own shirt. He tiptoed back over, standing about a foot away from her chair.

“Okay!” he announced, surprising her enough to peek her eyes out from inside her shirt, pretty brown eyes puffed and glossed over. “I can guarantee this cholent is going to be amazing, so,” he grabs his arm, digging his fingers in nervously as he struggles to maintain eye contact with her. Sadie fully emerges from the inside of her shirt, brushing loose strands of hair from her face. “S-so, no crying!” he almost shouts, and the subtle crack in his voice at the end makes his blush deepen. Sadie sniffles, smiling up at him from the table.

“Okay,” she giggles. “No crying.”

#larsadie #lars barriga #sadie miller #steven universe #religion #ube on a roll #ube in a can #that's my brand spankin new tag for headcanons hope y'all love it #long post #y'all like tags for long posts right

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saeculorum-amen · 3 years

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Gaslighting, Otherness, and Gospel

Experiential literature.

The Gospels are not persuasive. Although Matthew may in places attempt to fit Christ into Jewish prophecy in order to place him into the context of the messiah long-awaited, that is at most something necessary, a foundation for the actual argument, and an argument which does not appear explicitly. There is no recounting of facts, there is no framing of what exactly one should do in response to reading them. It feels to me less like they are trying to persuade you about something, and more that they are inviting you into something.

I feel that most acutely in the Gospel of Mark, with its immediacy, and in the Gospel of John, with its intensity of emotion. These are works of experiential writing which try to bring you into the experience that the apostles shared. They cannot name how this will transform you, but they hope that it might, by the experience of it, do so nonetheless, as it transformed each of them in their individual ways. If we imagine the foundation of the synoptic gospels being records of the sayings of Jesus, this is all the more clear: not statements of fact to be absorbed, but the experience of listening at the feet of Jesus, and feeling flashes of insight, glimpses of the Kingdom, as he spoke.

Perhaps the religious as a whole is of that nature, an experiential reality which can be glimpsed, but not measured and recorded — but which can, perhaps, be shared.

I find that in the letters of Paul, certainly, as I enter into his struggle to lead Christian communities, and feel the sense of responsibility that he felt, by virtue of the love that he felt for each and every person. I hear not only what he said to them, and how he told them to live, but what it felt like to say those things, to implore them. What his hopes were, so much more so than his teachings. What he taught is only sometimes relevant to my life, and the lives of those with whom I preach and teach, but the posture of love and hope and concern, of steadiness and urgency, of patience and frustration: that is always relevant. So, too, to imagine what it felt like to be in those communities, and to hear Paul’s letters written to us and our fellow-travellers in this strange and difficult way.

Much of the religious record, indeed, is concerned with the efforts to convey the experience of something which may be universal, or may be profoundly rare, but which nonetheless cannot be collapsed down into a set of facts and figures. The bush which burns and is not consumed. The flood. Ezekiel’s calling. John’s revelation. The experience of being Jonah. The experience of being the crowd which calls for the execution of Christ. We enter into and share of these things, however familiar or foreign they may be. We gain a facility with inhabiting them, whether to find our way to awe, or to gain the conviction required to decide to live differently.

Enlightenment and disappointment.

I am very much a child of the enlightenment, although I am at an age where it feels increasingly preposterous to call myself a child of anything. I was, though: I grew up surrounded by personal computers, in a household led by a deeply gifted engineer who had worked on the Apollo program. My family talk about how I was programming using the macro language of an early text editor before I had even entered school. I tell that story, too, as part of the foundational mythos by which I continually recreate my own life. It captures something very real about who I was raised to be, and perhaps hints at some more elusive things about who I deeply am.

I am no great and gifted historian or philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it seems a meaningful referent for that upbringing. I was taught to see the world in an exacting and scientific way, and to reject things which were mere superstition, or otherwise irrational. I was formed to master language, not as a way to communicate with other people, but as a way to be precise about ideas and facts. If something was true, there would be some evidence for it which could be clearly described, and provably measured — and if it was true, it would be true always and everywhere.

That is a very narrow world, more narrow than the world of Hume or Locke or Spinoza — a kind of fundamentalism of objectivity, in which there was very little room for a person to live, for a person to exist as a subject, rather than an object. The ideal human being was a data logger, not even a flawed individual striving after objectivity.

It grated at me that I could not determine whether other people experienced colours as having the same perceptual quality as I did. I was acutely sensitized to the ways in which adults seemed to be arbitrary and capricious, and to engage in proof by assertion of the legitimacy of all their rules. There was no rigour, no structure which really captured the rough edges I continually ran up against in the course of living. Indeed, I had my own experiences rejected as fabrications and lies, even experiences that would have been readily measurable, like allergies that were present from my early life, and instantly recognized once I sought diagnosis as an adult.

This created all kinds of inward and outward problems. I doubted my own reality, to the point of living with debilitating panic attacks in which my own perspective seemed to fight for control with some other realm of possibilities. I could not trust the ground beneath me, because what if some hidden law, some unknown variable, were to govern it to give way instead. I felt swallowed up in the ocean-like waters of the universe itself, as though there was no way for me to get to dry land, to real life, to the right plane of existence. I had to work hard to learn that the world, and I, would continue to exist as I went from one point to another, rather than disappearing in a kind of unstable variation of Zeno’s paradox transposed into the cosmology of simulation theory.

This introjected doubt was projected onto the world around me, too. How could I know whether what someone else said was true? How could I trust anything which happened outside of my view? Hell, how could anyone know anything?

The politics of doubt.

This pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion was not unique to my objective fundamentalist upbringing. The authority of measurement is almost unquestionable in our society, which prefers technocracy to anything more sentimental. While public debate may take on the rhetorical character of aesthetics, we find a way to turn our rules for action into something you can quantify. You will always be able to know whether or not you can cut down a tree, or dump waste into a waterway, by using a published table of figures. You don’t have to stop and think about whether you should or not, which might be unsettling and subjective, only whether you’re allowed to, which is knowable.

In the grip of my epistemological wounds, I found as a teenager that a certain kind of defiant libertarianism held enormous appeal. Political correctness was a favourite topic in the discourse I was exposed to at home and at school, which is perhaps the ideal target for this politics of sneering contempt and doubt. How was anyone supposed to know what they could or couldn’t say? Who got to decide, who got to make the list? How could someone else tell you not to say a word when they couldn’t give you criteria for deciding so? Where was the proof that words did harm?

You could prove to someone that words were meaningless by shouting the words you weren’t supposed to say, over and over. It’s just a sound, after all. It only signifies something if you let it, and it’s only dangerous if someone does something real and measurable while they happen to be saying the word, at which point the word doesn’t much seem to matter, does it? So you make the sound again and again, while behaving in an upright and respectable manner in all other respects, so that you are above reproach. Whoever hears it and feels pain has inflicted the harm upon themselves.

It’s one of those things that’s true as far as it goes, but doesn’t actually lay claim to as much as it thinks it does. It’s like treating science and religion as overlapping magisteria, as though their claims and methods existed within the same realm and spoke to the same things at all times and in all places. We recognize that doing that does violence equally to religion and to science, because the tools of one are not the right tools for the other. God exists beyond measure, but if God is calling us to build an ark, we had better use tools and measures to guide its construction, and not our ecstasy and wonder. Science sinks in the deep water of religion and vice versa.

This doubting suspicion loves not only to attack what seems arbitrary to it, but to mistake subjectivity for a compromise of objectivity. Hume thought that art was not entirely objective, but that an art critic could, with sufficient dedication, strive for objectivity in how they engaged with their work. You can use your subjective experience to serve something other than your personal biases, albeit imperfectly.

However if someone claims a subjective experience which is outside of the sort of teenage libertarian I was, someone steeped in suspicion and anxiously desperate for the objective, then perhaps it simply does not exist. If a Black person describes their systemic oppression, that seems like a fanciful and implausible explanation for the material facts of their existence. If an Indigenous person describes being shot at by strangers, that seems to border on the fantastic or the farcical. I think of the oft-repeated anecdote about Freud deciding that if all of the daughters of upstanding men claimed to have been sexually abused, this was a sign of rampant gendered delusion, and not rampant sexual abuse by upstanding men. That seemed more likely.

It always seems more likely, to the person who is troubled by the great divide between their own subjective experiences and the subjective experiences of others, that the other is at best confused, but perhaps more likely is lying and being manipulative. It stirs up a cognitive dissonance about the limitations of our own reality, when in fact it is not a threat to the objective reality of our existence, but merely to our omniscience.

So it is that the suspicious person rejects the subjective accounts of others as being inherently untrustworthy. They might engage in what has been called “sealioning”, in which they ask repeatedly for proof, they state their willingness to be convinced, and simply demand that the other person gain legitimacy by finding a way to do so. If their claims were real, after all, they would be able to find some way to do so. The fact that they cannot is not recognized as the game itself being rigged, but as proof that the suspicion was warranted.

To lie and to illumine.

We talk in the information age about information warfare, about the ability of governments to sow doubts about basic facts and to generate confusion about what is true, to the point that coördinated action becomes impossible, and the whole is weakened. We know full well the danger of conspiracy theories, for individuals and for our collective health and well-being, whether it takes the form of anti-vaccine agitation, or paranoid collective fantasies which lead to people ending their own lives, or others’, to stem the tide of global corruption. To someone committed to a politics of doubt steeped in their own epistemological wounds, even this may be a challenging statement: who is to decide who is allowed to make facts, and how? How can you know whether something is a conspiracy theory? How is a conspiracy theory any different to claims of systemic racism? Either they’re all fantastic and unfalsifiable, or none of them are.

The most deeply wounded will not settle for simply resisting belief of others’ subjective accounts, but in fact feel a deep pressure to convince others to lose their faith, too. Governments and market manipulators may know the value of lying, but the wounded make lying itself their weapon. Their goal is not to convince someone of a different truth, but that no one is to be trusted.

They do this by lying, by being disingenuous, to the point of gaslighting, i.e. of trying to get people to doubt their own sanity. They talk about this among themselves as a kind of clownishness, as though they were jesters for the masses, who could bring out uncomfortable truths by defying convention and expectation. It is a chaotic clownishness, however, with no principles and unspeakable truth. There is a reverie in disruption itself.

Some of them end up promoting a kind of sadistic nihilism, but equally common seems to be falling back on an anti-intellectual faith in the status quo. The former seems obvious, but the latter is more surprising. In essence, since there is no grounds on which to make the fuzzy decisions about society, those things should not be changed. There’s no way to engage in creation from a blank slate of how a society should be ordered, but we happen to have a society nonetheless. Therefore there is no position from which action to change society can be taken, except by objective and rational means.

If someone advocates, then, for deviance from the status quo for subjective reasons, it is useful not only to demand that they prove themselves (which they cannot), but to remind them and everyone around them that people are unreliable. They will lie brazenly, even openly, like the teenage libertarian saying a swear word or a slur repeatedly. They want to show you how effortless it is, that anyone can do it, that anyone can make themselves do it. They want to show you that mere words are meaningless, and other people are not to be trusted.

The demands of empathy.

I do experience these people (and I have had more dealings with them than I would like) as wounded, rather than as master manipulators. I think that they are telling the truth, albeit perhaps not intentionally, when they say that they would like to be convinced. They would like to be surprised by an argument, to find out that there is something they have been missing. They do so feel like something is missing, but nothing seems to be able to make it appear.

They watch videos of people suffering, even dying, wondering how it can be that it has ceased to stir up emotion. They read with delight accounts of the stalking of people who don’t seem entirely real to them. In a way, they have fallen into the perennial trap of the gnostic heresy: the belief, perhaps, that there is a divine spark in them, but the suspicion that it is not present in everyone.

Their rhetoric talks about non-player characters, people either not enlightened enough to be fully alive, or who are perhaps not actually people at all. This language comes from the world of role-playing games, in which some characters are directed by the dungeon master or the game itself in order to provide a backdrop for the hero’s life, and to create the difficulties that impede their progress. The non-player character is an explanation both for the seeming absence of the divine spark in others, and also for the frustrations and failures of the individual’s life, for which no other explanation can be accepted.

There is something so innocently wounded at the core of this, like the teenager who discovers at their first kiss that the music does not swell, the lighting does not change, and their perspective does not shift as the camera pans in or out. There is an intensity which is missing from life itself that we know must exist because we see it in movies. Where has it gone, and who has taken it? This leads either to a solipsistic nihilism, or to a politics not only of doubt but of resentment. Someone else is programming the game to be against me, which I know because by every objective measure I should be winning.

The trouble is that the experience of other people’s subjective realities, the thing that lets you glimpse the divine spark in them, is to be open to the experience of them. You have to move beyond the world of ideas and wishes. You have to stop watching from afar. This seems pointless or even destructive, though, when you expect only another disappointment. Empathy comes slowly, and starts with the leap of faith of seeing the other person as a subject like you, too. There is a self-reinforcing structure to these things, and their reality is purely relational. It is not the case that if it were real you’d be able to directly apprehend it against your will.

The pain.

I spent several hours recently dealing with someone engaging in sealioning who was being openly dishonest, with the goal of displacing outpourings of empathy for a marginalized community, and creating a landscape of doubt instead. I thought that that was the end of the story, but as I digested the experience and let myself think about what was going on in the interaction, I found something truly unpleasant come over me. For the rest of that day, I became enraged at interactions which felt emotionally insubstantial, or in which another person seemed to be acting by rote. This caught me by surprise, as although those things might annoy me normally, the intensity of my reaction was wildly out of proportion. Indeed, I found a part of myself almost felt compelled to show that I could act out of proportion.

There were two forces at work there. In the one instance, I had simply spent time exploring a pattern of mind that I then found myself inhabiting a little bit. After all, it wasn’t a world of ungrounded fantasy, but an outlook which has a few kernels of truth that have been massively distorted, and that massively distort the experience of the world in turn. In fact, it was a world view I had known very well, and had worked hard to leave behind, through developing relationships with other people, through my theological development, and through lots, and lots, of psychotherapy.

I have probably even been primed by the pandemic to return to that experience of the world. I don’t leave the house much, I don’t see friends, and I spend too much time in front of computer screens. People exist as ideas, as abstract things I think about. My own feelings feel very far away when my life starts to fall back into that shape, and I normally work hard to keep it from being that way. And yet.

So those old disappointments were present to me, and brought their emotional weight back up to the surface. They were accompanied by a double urgency, however, in the form of a second force: reality testing.

I wanted desperately to remember what it was to feel, to feel empathy, to experience the subjective reality of another person’s life. I urgently needed to remember that the wounded worldview was wrong, and I lashed out in hopes of finding something that would make me feel something. I did — I felt bad. That repeated a few times, until it started to feel almost absurd. I knew better, but it all felt less substantial than I wanted it to.

That was very hard at the time, and it’s very hard to share. It’s still a little challenging, no doubt worsened by the limitations of pandemic life as I have experienced it, but I know what the path back looks like. I’ve let myself talk with friends to remember what other people are like, and I’ve got plans to see some friends for a connection that will be more substantial. Something where my attention isn’t split between a dozen open tabs, or with all the work tasks hanging over my head, or with the task of driving, or thinking about how to respond to a violent troll on social media.

The hermeneutic of curiosity.

It is a core religious value for me that other people exist, and that they have an interior life like mine, and a subjective reality that is every bit as full and real as mine. Jung talks about psychic reality, i.e. subjective reality, as being the most real thing there is, because it is the very thing we apprehend and experience most directly, entirely unmediated. I find that powerfully compelling, and as a religious person I find it enticing.

The religious task, after all, involves that sharing of experiential reality which cannot be reduced to facts. Gregory of Nyssa talks about the inability of the mind to grasp things which are beyond spatial metaphors and reasoning. So it is that I find other people a holy thing: filled with otherness, but enticingly close. But if you engage with another person as an object, you will not find those secret and elusive things: their interiority, their soul. You can glimpse, though, and how glorious it is to glimpse, something of the inner life and the spirit by opening yourself to them, by listening deeply to them, and by engaging in substantive conversation and exploration together. This is the religious task itself.

We might think of the religious task as contemplation of the divine, and looking for something of the divine subject to reveal something of themselves to us, but as the First Letter of John reminds us, we can see one another, and we cannot see God. If we are going to learn how to experience the intersubjective reality of union with the divine, we surely start by being open to doing so with the other person. After all, if you will not experience the interior reality of the other person, who is so like you in every respect, how can you expect to experience the interior offering of the divine, who is utterly unknowable in every respect?

Perhaps it’s easier with God because there’s no material distractions, no illusion that the other person exists primarily to be beautiful, or primarily to frustrate us. There is no possibility that God is a non-player character. A non-player character has substance but no essence, while God is pure essence. God is the energies which make the game go, and is not programmed by anything, as we, ourselves, are at least a little programmed, by language, by culture, by society.

We have rightful yearnings for the other, but they ought to be mutually reinforcing. We are captivated by the beauty, by the difference, or something else enticing about the other, but we are not to mistake them for an object to be possessed, a way to access beauty or something we lack within ourselves. We are called to relationship, to the interpenetration of mind and spirit, by our yearning, and to let ourselves yearn for the transcendent beauty the same way we are enticed by material beauty. The transcendent other, too, loves and made each and every living being, and fills them with breath, so if we are curious about God, we ought to be curious also about God’s people.

This hermeneutic of curiosity has to not only be open to the subjective, but has to not count the cost. Paul talks about this as foolishness, as something which is wise in God’s sight, but which the world will look at and think is absolutely reckless. This is being willing to try to help someone even if it might not work. This is giving of your own resources even if you might get nothing in return. This is being willing to risk believing someone, even though you know that people lie.

Yes, Christ sent the disciples out, and sends all of us out, with an admonition to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. You can wonder about the motives of others. You should be curious about your own suspicion, even, because it might be telling you something valuable. The question is if you are willing to be transformed for the Kingdom of God: if you would rather believe something which causes you to act more kindly than is required, or if you would rather avoid taking any material risk, even if it causes you to disbelieve someone whose suffering you could have alleviated.

The empty tomb.

Martin Buber shares a piece of Hasidic wisdom which suggests that everything that exists, everything that God has created, has some purpose for the person of faith, some religious value, which must be found, even atheism. The value of atheism being that it calls us to act as though we were responsible for the state of the world, rather than God. It can be so tempting to engage in spiritual bypassing by displacing all responsibility off to God, but we are sojourning together on this little piece of rock, and whether we like it or not, this coëxistence is what we have been called to live rightly within. It’s not about whether we would live well together in the Kingdom of God, but whether we are willing to live as we would in the Kingdom even now.

This brings us to the knife’s edge of disappointment once again. What if it doesn’t feel good? What if it doesn’t feel right? What if it isn’t good enough? Perhaps it is better not to try.

That would be foolishness in the wrong realm. That would be expecting things to feel right, here and now, when in fact it might be very uncomfortable to do what God calls us to. This bitterness may, like the scroll Ezekiel eats, come to taste sweet once we let ourselves enter into it, but it may just be difficult. I think of how many of us in adulthood expect that at some point all the grown-up tasks will become easy and effortless, because they looked that way to us as kids, when in fact they remain a slog and a time-sink, and that’s just part of the sad reality of life.

There has to be something we believe in more than gratification, and more than that our success and our feelings of meaning look like the climactic scenes in movies. For me it is the joy of encounter with God and with other people. It is the substantial beauty of seeing what is real and loving it because it is real, and not because it appears as I wish it would. I do not always manage that. Still, I know that is what I want to give my heart to, even if it’s difficult.

If you love something, you can follow where it leads, instead of perpetually being frustrated that it isn’t going down the path you expected. If you really need to go down that path, go down it, but don’t imagine that something else owes it to you to make the way clear. This is the realm of the Holy Spirit, which may lead you to two divergent paths, not to test you, but because that is what is real. Something which is beyond the spatial things the mind can understand, but which may exist in the reality of God. It may be that the paths will merge after a time, and it may be that we could take either path just as well, and that they really do diverge. Perhaps there is more to us than just one thing.

We are invited to experience the reality of what is, not what we expect. This is what the Gospels call us to: to share in the slow revelation by Jesus of some truths about us, about God, and about the world, and the image of a life which awaits us, and a life which is possible for us here and now. Jesus points out again and again that these things are all the out-pouring of a single truth that cannot be named, but that can be gestured at and felt among us all the same. He tells us that love made us and calls to us, and that we can live according to love, too, but that this is not the path of light and life. Love encompasses all that is, and love leaves nothing out.

You cannot tell someone that. There is no fact to be conveyed. There are a set of truths which must constellate in your mind, and which as soon as they seem settled, suddenly become elusive once again. You can feel disappointment and suspicion, that this thing which should have been true always and forever has changed, or you can let yourself be curious, and follow after it down a different path. It may all at last make sense once more, only to yet again appear fragmented and destroyed. It may not make sense at all except in hindsight. It will probably not all fit in our perspective this side of death itself, but this is the journey we are called to.

So it is that the women who came to Christ’s tomb found it empty. The empty tomb had its own reality to reveal, a baffling revelation, an unnameable experience. Some of the other disciples would not believe it until they saw it themselves, but found that the women’s account had been true all along. The empty tomb could be a disappointment. The empty tomb must be the path to life. That is something that we may experience, by the experiences shared by people we have never met, now long dead themselves. It is something we can never, fully, know. Beyond measure and explanation, so foolishly we place our hope in the absence of something, someone we never met while he was alive.

All of this is in God, as Christ is in God. May we meet Christ in one another. May we yearn across the chasm. May we find Christ in the empty tomb. Amen.

#christianity #theology #politics #philosophy #sealioning #solipsism #nihilism #personhood

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theloreyouknow · 6 years

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Happy Easter from the ancient Germanic goddess Eostre, and her adorable bird-turned-hare companion, who has laid colorful eggs as a symbol of fertility during a springtime festival held in the deity’s honor!

I mean, they seem lovely, I’m sure they would wish you a Happy Easter, even though there’s no substantive evidence that they were ever part of any folklore... yeah. Oof. So bite the ears off that chocolate bunny, yank off that Easter bonnet, and let’s go-a myth-busting.

To begin, I should mention three things:

First, I am a skeptic at heart, and though I was raised in a Christian household, I've been a one-foot-over-the-line-into-atheism brand of agnostic for quite some time (20-ish years), and I tell you that to tell you this: I couldn't care less about the "IT'S PAGAN!" - "NO IT'S JUDEO-CHRISTIAN!" thing. I'm just reporting the facts.

Second, what I'm not going to get into here (minus passing mentions) are where modern Easter practices have come from, nor traditions involving hares in general/beyond Easter that have been passed down through largely unconfirmed folklore.

Third, this is a very conversational write-up because my love of academia aside, good night nurse, can their articles be snoozefests. Plus, some on the religious end of the spectrum can bend preachy, then at the atheist end they can bend snotty. This strives to be neither, just aims to be a fun, informative read.

Feedback is fuel, so - as always - be it for this or anything else coming from here, let me know what you think.

- THE NON-EXISTENT GODDESS & BEDE THE B.S.’ER -

May as well kick off with the hard drop:

There is but one reference to a pagan goddess named Eostre, and its source leaves much to be desired.

An English monk called Bede wrote a book called "De temporum ratione" (“The Reckoning of Time”), in 725, and it was about this ongoing nattering amongst various Christian groups - we get to that in a sec - about when exactly Easter was, and by that I mean to say they were fussing over When did Jesus do his die-and-rise. So Bede's jam was working out a calculation for his fellow monks so this could be settled. And in doing all this, he goes to town on calendars in general.

He talked about the the traditional Old English names of the months, breaking down the etymology, and proposed that some seem to stem from agriculture cycles, such as Weodmonath ("weed month) = August, or Thrimilcemonath ("three milkings") = May. Okay. I don’t quite track with ya, Bedes, but I’m also not of 8th century stock.

Then he postulated on some he thought referred to Pagan tradition. There’s Halgemonath ("holy month) = September, for instance, Bede saying it was "a month of sacred rites” that had to do with harvest. Then he asserts two were named after goddesses: Hrethmonath = March, after Hretha, and Eostremonath = April, after Eostre. The hitch in Bede's get-a-long?

There's no references to a goddess called Eostre, like, anywhere. So what the what, Bede?!? The "what", according to some scholars, is that Bede didn't have the first damn clue as to where "Eostremonath" came from, so he made up the goddess to tie a nice little bow on his etymology fact droppage.

But fine, fine, fine - let's give the Bede-man an out, cotton to his assertion and say there was a goddess Eostre whom people honored via springtime get-togethers. Let's say her name was co-opted into English for a month of the year (wondering why Charlemagne - you know - the German dude who ended up Holy Roman emperor- would up and go with “Aprilis” when he modified the ol’ Julian calendar notwithstanding, because we’re going with Bede, here), and since it was "her" month, later got co-opted onto said month's big holiday. Great.

Revised hitch: zero evidence of anything to do with this - symbols, rituals, ceremonies, take your pick - being associated with some Eostre in Anglo-Saxon England Pagan circles. So if Eostre was super popular, enough for Christians to do the co-opting, then there should be some evidence of the source.

Christians had been doing the Easter thing since, at minimum, the second century, before they would've met these Eostre devotees in order to snitch ideas from them. Point is, Easter as a Christian celebration has been happening for about 1300 years. There's records of all of it. This Eostre chick would've come up. And the old-school historians weren't hiding some big secret about theft of concepts from pagans, and how do we know that? Because they pony up when they have. Here's an example - you've heard of the Anglo-Saxon deities Woden and Thor, yeah? Wednesday and Thursday, meet your namesakes.

And on the subject of other deities, Thor and Woden are paralleled in Germanic and proto-Christian traditions, and plenty more in other cultures (think Greek-Roman gods, how Aphrodite and Venus are essentially the same thing) with overlap like this, yet there's none for Bede's gals Eostre or Hretha.

Oh, did I not mention that? Bede probably invented the goddess Hretha, too.

Dang it, Bede!

Further down - because it's more in line with the bunny talk - I mention a dude who claimed he could kinda see a parallel with a Celt goddess, and it is such the shaky connection. Because it's based on the bizarre thing that is touted about Eostre and this bird that she turned into a rabbit. Yes, you read correctly - that’s covered below, too.

This Celt goddess Abnoba - based upon my admittedly cursory dive - is touted by numerous blogs and wikis and whatnot as a "goddess of the hunt" and, of course, being female, you know what's coming next. Throw a rock at any female deity in any culture, and any that you hit will have this on their CV: either they'll be primarily functioning as a goddess of fertility (and love and sexuality), or some/all of that'll be listed as a sub-function. What the hunting thing would have to do with Eostre/Ostara's shtick is beyond me, and the other factors, like I said, are evergreen lady godfigure traits.

Lookit, Bede wasn't exactly the best go-to for origin stories, he whiffed on other things. In his book, he says a winter shindig called Modranecht (Mōdraniht or Modranicht - Old English "Night of the Mothers" or "Mothers' Night") was called that because of "ceremonies they enacted [that] night". Well. Yeah.

Oh, Beeeeeede.

So what about Ostara? The alt version of Eostre's name? Well, a certain linguist, folklorist, and author named Jacob Grimm (yup, of those Grimms), seemed to want to believe that sneaky Bede, and he tried to find an explanation, saying in his 1835 book "Deutsche Mythologie" that maybe Eostre was some sort of local version - local to Bede, that is - of a "widespread" Germanic goddess. One whom Grimm named Ostara.

Make sure you caught that: not "who was named Ostara" or "who was called Ostara". Grimm named this mystery goddess himself. And historians can't find evidence of her, that she ever existed anywhere but in (heh) Grimm's fairy tale.

Dang it, Grimm! Stick to frightening children with mermaids, man.

To sum up: Ostara is purportedly in Germanic folklore, except she's not, at least, not anywhere but in Grimm's imagination, evidence-wise. Eostre was supposedly an Anglo-Saxon goddess, except she's not, because there's no evidence in Pagan sources, and the only Christian source she pops up in was ya boy Bede's book.

- PAGAN V. JUDEO-CHRISTIAN: TRADITIONS & MYTHS -

We touched on tradition/deity overlap a little above, but let's dig deeper. A common sentiment is that Easter was "changed" to being a Christian thing from a Pagan thing when Constantine "Christianized" the Roman Empire.

Nah.

Seems Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 and, interestingly, the next year he actually decreed there should be toleration of all religions, the point being to end the continued, albeit down to periodic, persecutions of Christians. But he didn't demand that the citizens under his rule convert - smart dude, he'd have alienated all the Pagans. Turns out, a healthy amount of the higher class folks were Pagan, and he needed their support/involvement. Granted, there were later edicts that shut down official state sponsorship of pagan cults (temples, meeting places, etc.) and public pagan ceremonies, but hey - you claim neutrality, it's gotta apply to all religious practices across the board. Well. Assuming he did the same regarding Christianity. But that's another topic.

Bottom line, the Roman Empire was not formally declared a Christian state til Theodosius, who proclaimed it as the official religion in 380. Constantine had died about 43 years prior. Still, I can possibly see where the rumor started, as Constantine seemed to be the first big-deal-figure who was open about his Christianity. And it might have also piggy-backed off of the work of the First Council of Nicea, which went down in 325. Y'know, not after he kicked the ol’ Roman situla.

Basically, the Council aimed to settle disputes happening amongst the Christian churches, and while they were at it, they ruled on when celebrations of Easter should go down (see above, RE: Bede the Balla still dealing with it in his time), as this was, it seems, A Very Big Deal.

A dude named Eusebius - historian, later bishop, straight outta Caesarea - said there had been fussing happening all the way back to 190. The bonnets were bee-heavy because they (who is "they"? "They" are always such a PITA) couldn't decide whether to make Easter a whole week, a la the Jewish Passover, or just on a Sunday, since they were convinced Jesus died on a springtime Friday, meaning the rise happened on Sunday. The west side of the Empire was doing it up on just the one day, and the east was kickin' it all week. The Council ended up going with Sundays, and said this new jam would start on the first Sunday that followed the first full moon after March 21st.

Now, a mention in one of the cited sources below notes that some attest Passover itself has roots in a pre-historic Semitic spring festival, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole (heh), knock yourselves out. Point is, Easter is related to the aforementioned vernal equinox - that full moon thing - because it coincides with Passover. It's a Judeo-Christian thing, not a rip-off of a Pagan festival thing, best historians know via the evidence.

- HARES & BUNNIES & EGGS, OH MY! -

There's no eggs or animals of the rabbit persuasion in Biblical gospel narratives, so the assumption was it must have stemmed from a Pagan tradition. You’ll see things pop up in social media feeds, images touting (some) Christians’ claims that eggs symbolize Christ's rebirth (but.... what? And why? And.... whatever). There's evidence of medieval Christians decorating eggs and then eating them at Easter, and that actually might have a logical reason, at least, beyond folks of Ukrainian descent carrying on a tradition past generations might’ve carried over when migrating (more on that below).

Many religions across the board have guidelines - for some, heavy rules - surrounding fasting for lots of reasons (look it up yourself), and some of those are part of festivals and such throughout the liturgical calendar (a.k.a. - designated times for public community celebrations). In the evidence pile for Easter, there's a "festal letter" from this guy Athanasius in 330 who talks about a 40-day fast that ended on Easter Sunday. I'd like to point out here that this happened post-Nicean council decree, keep that in mind.

Why this is possibly of import is it turns out, Constantine had exiled Athanasius for being mouthy about grain or something, and he booked it back to Alexandria after Connie bit the dust.... only to be exiled again the next year when Connie, Jr. - Constanius - found out. But Athanasius was apparently a charmer, and knew how to take advantage of a situation, so he ends up in Rome under the protection of Connie's other son, Constans - ah, so I guess Connie, Jr.: The Sequel - who was emperor in the west. You know, the west, the crew who liked making Easter a one day throw-down vs. drawing it out. I would be delighted to learn that Athanasius was trying to get everybody on board with a long celebration just to shoot a post-mortem bird at Constantine. Atty-boy ended up being made a saint, so aside from that grain kerfuffle, appears he was a popular guy, had a "flock" as it were, which is how historians have all the Festal Letters, including ones talking about the date(s) of Easter parties and this fast.

And, again, "fast" can mean a variety of things - total abstaining, sure, but even Jesus would give you side-eye over 40 days of nothing, you ain't rising from anything after that - but lots of times it was just cutting out certain things, food or otherwise (hello, Lent). And many of those are specifically about food from animals, so there's meat, to be sure, but in addition to that, the products of animals, meaning milk, cheese, butter, and - say it with me, now - eggs.

No refrigerators means lots of wasted food, so the people had to eat up what they had and - duh - not slaughter for meat, don't milk the cows/goats, and don't make any butter or cheese. Easy. But chickens don't give a rat's ass about calendars and religion, they're gonna keep cranking out the goods and, again, not eating them in real time means a 40 day sulfur cloud looming over the area. Reason dictates they boiled them, problem solved. I mean, I wouldn’t crack open a month-old boiled egg, but folks of the before-years-had-four-integers variety had bellies that could handle a lot of things that would have us hugging porcelain thrones for weeks. That’s another discussion, one I cannot promise we’ll ever have.

It took a bazillion years to make cheese, and butter was no quick work, and neither was curing meat (look it up) - those wouldn't be ready for Sunday. And sure, you could pop out and milk something, lay waste to some cow for fresh steaks, but hell - to cover everybody, you'd have to knock off more than one. Way more than one, probably to the detriment of the sustainability of a mini-herd on a given family farm. Realistically, most of the feast would be any nasty, salted-out jerky somebody had leftover from pre-fast, more veg and fish and bread, which would all suck - but wait. WAIT. Eggs.

Cock-a-darn-diggly-doodle-doo.

So, in the week before Easter, they'd have been boiling like crazy, one would think, as part of the prep for the major gullet-stuffing coming up that Sunday. There's references to the eggs getting glammed up to be extra festive at least as early as the 13th century, and I suppose it's not a stretch to say they were beyond happy to have at least one of their food options back on deck and wanted to make things extra special - you can’t really glitter up fish and potatoes, after all. In any event, the fast-related thing is the most logical regarding Easter-egg association, and as I mentioned, maybe a touch of family tradition, which brings me to the next part:

Wabbit season.

There's another book called "Deutsche Mythologie", from 1874, and the author, Adolf Holtzmann, talked about the German Easter hare - which, historians are certain of, is where the Easter bunny comes from - and speculated on its possible source. What he suggested is reportedly the first documented instance of a certain somebody, perhaps you've heard of her, spoiler alert: it's Ostara.

"The Easter Hare is inexplicable to to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara; just as there is a hare on the statue of [the Celtic goddess] Abnoba.”

We covered that random Abnoba comment above, but.... Adolf....what? So how did rabbits get hooked up to Ostara? And what’s up with the hare laying eggs?

By the way, the hare must once have been a bird, because it lays eggs....

Well, sure, of course.

The essence of the current party line is that Ostara transformed a bird into a hare, and because it was once a bird, it retained its ability to lay eggs and to thank Osara for what she’d done - no clue why she did it, but if hare’s cool, I’m cool - it laid a bunch of colored eggs to spruce up her festival.

Fine. Moving forward. In 1883, a book by one K. A. Oberle hit the shelves - and if you speak 19th century German, wanna check out the original, godspeed - and he got super specific:

Some time ago the question was raised how it came that, according to South German still prevailing folk-lore, the Hare is believed by children to lay the Easter-eggs. I venture now to offer a probable answer to it. Originally the hare seems to have been a bird which the ancient Teutonic goddess Ostara (the Anglo-Saxon Eàstre or Eostre, as Bede calls her) transformed into a quadruped. For this reason the Hare, in grateful recollection of its former quality as bird and swift messenger of the Spring-Goddess, is able to lay eggs on her festival at Easter-time

As specific as that was? No specific sourcing. Minor shout-out to Bede, though. And there was a mention of a general source.... Holtzmann.

Great.

Shifting gears - but stay with me - to way-back-when in the Ukraine. They had a folk tale about the origins of pysanka, a.k.a. "painted eggs", but that definition is actually incorrect. Pysanka are not painted, they're "written on" via a beeswax-dyeing technique. They are absolutely stunning - the side of my family with Eastern European roots blessed us of the newer gen by passing down Christmas ornaments fashioned in this style, and they are my favorites. Here's a random google image of some of these works of art:

The wikipedia article on the history of pysanka has some decent citations, so I’m comfortable using it as a source. The Reader’s Digest version for their existence - based on passed-down folktales and analyzation done of symbols on what archaeological samples have been found - back in the pre-Christian era was warding off evil to keep the world going, keep nature growing, the ongoing “rebirth” of plants and animals, make the sun deity happy.

Because of that sun deity element - if it’s correct, because, again, brittle eggshells and faded symbols call for educated guesses vs. hard truths - of the pysanka thing, an argument could be made that it should be filed under Pagan. Then because the Eostre thing is touted as Pagan, and because nature springs back to life from winter in, well, spring, and (I’m assuming) because rabbits mate like their tails are on fire, the whole shebang was rolled into this big, fantastic ball of nature-goddess-bunny-rabbit-spring-equinox-pretty-eggs untruth.

Christians have melded stuff and mutated folktales and cultural traditions to suit their religion, no doubt, and I could write multiple articles on things Christians claim as fact that have no evidentiary basis; it just seems like here, as time rolled on, this is something that Pagans got duped by when legends - and some outright lies - got pushed as indisputable fact.

And as far as untruths go, this seems minor. It’s fun to guess at things, make up our own headcanon, but if we’ve got facts? If those facts disprove something we may have our hearts set on believing? Well, accepting them is part of being a grown-up. Which sucks. But here we are.

Besides, who cares, truly? Is this Easter customs thing really important? Isn’t the time spent with family and friends and people in your community what’s most important? Hell, be like Bede & Co.: make your own traditions. And anyway, SO MUCH CANDY is gonna be on sale tomorrow. #hail Eostre #goddess of chocolate bunnies #whose delicious ears #I shall happily chomp

We'll close with my favorite quote from my research:

"Some still claim Eostre's name is the root of the word oestrogen, ignoring that human eggs are microscopic and that the real etymology of oestrogen in fact relates to the gadfly."

Bet you didn't think this Easter tale would conclude with estrogen and gadflies, and yet, I can think of no stranger point upon which to end this convoluted tale.

Happy Hippity-Hops to you all!

------ SOURCES -------

Eleanor Parker - “Some Anglo-Saxon Easter Customs”

Tim O'Neill - “Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs”

Adrian Bott - “The Modern Myth of the Easter Bunny”

Steven Winick -

“Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think”

“On the Bunny Trail: In Search of the Easter Bunny”

“Here Comes Peter Cottontail: Some Cultural History”

H/T Tom Holland

Images:

Silas Toball (left) & Sophie Gardiner (right)

Note:

All of these sources are robust and wonderful, however most of them are what I'd label "dense". The exception is the brief article by Mr. Bott, should you want an even more concise round-up than what I've presented here. Yes, compared to what’s linked, hand-to-Cadbury, my article was concise.

Should you want an A/V roundup, in 2016, Mr. Winick was featured in a segment on the (US show) CBS Sunday Morning, called "The Real Story of the Easter Bunny", and Eostre is discussed as well. [You can stop around the 2:50 mark, as from there they go on to discuss rabbits in general]

There are also additional sources referenced and/or linked in every citation above, should you want more clarification on their assertions.

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