Rhosgobel Tent At TOT

[Playdo]

Beautiful vocals (female) on this. Ainulindale is the song of Creation in Tolkien's cosmology. The words they sing are on screen. Names of the solar system, the earth, the ones who helped craft the world and maintain it. A short a lovely hymn by an outstanding vocal ensemble.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdAE9NJIw98

I very much enjoyed that, thank you. Which entity does E� refer too?

In other news, I came across this article. Made me think of Norm Bergrun and The Ringmakers of Saturn. A photo of something exiting the rings. Pretty cool.

"Is Saturn Making A New Moon?"
http://www.universetoday.com/111233/...ng-a-new-moon/

[Melidae]

Purdy Girl looks like such a sweetheart, eaglespirit!

We just had to put one of our three dogs to sleep...17 human years old and the 'matriarch' of the other two.

I hear a lot about 'alpha' males, but Minnie definite 'ruled the roost' in our home in her own quiet, timid and stubborn way.

The other two dogs are still grieving...as am I.

[modwiz]

I very much enjoyed that, thank you. Which entity does E� refer too?

In other news, I came across this article. Made me think of Norm Bergrun and The Ringmakers of Saturn. A photo of something exiting the rings. Pretty cool.

"Is Saturn Making A New Moon?"
http://www.universetoday.com/111233/...ng-a-new-moon/

Ea represents the solar system that Arda is part of in such an intertwined fashion that one can refer to Ea as meaning Arda because Ea is like a shell that Arda is in. When people became stars they would be placed in Ea. Arda is the heart of Ea. I love the Enki/Sa'am association. I am not surprised since Tolkien pulled his world out of a common mythic matrix formed from collective race memory.

That was not easy. The material is scant on Tolkien's meanings that I have seen, so I had to grok my way to the answer.

[Playdo]

That's just too interesting. I came across this article from the Graham Hancock website. http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/NewmanH2.php

It shows similarities in architectural, megalithic stone structures around the world: Gobleki Tepe in Turkey, Tiwanaku, Bolivia, Peru, Egypt, etc....

Even your "H", Hradagast, is featured quite poignantly. I can only ponder the significance.....

[Calz]

Cats are better than dogs.

*PurpleLama yawns and begins licking his paw*

Ya ya ... we know you magical folks are bound to those cats ... we seen them thar harry potsmoker movies ...


Dogs???


Hey ... Johnny 6 pack loves em to death when the game is on ...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFg3HBMJyV4

[ronin]

now the weather is becoming warmer maybe we can sit outside with a fire,share stories,learn and teach amongst the moonlight and stars.

[modwiz]

now the weather is becoming warmer maybe we can sit outside with a fire,share stories,learn and teach amongst the moonlight and stars.

Fortunately, where I am headed to next week is very much like what you describe. I'll remember you as they happen. I go to a few, they happen quite often in the Lake Village where the worker bees live in large concentrations. Many in trailers. It is a tribal/community experience.

[Seikou-Kishi]

Veterans Today, Russia Today and Presstv are as far away from this story as they can be. I looked at RT-USA and there was one very generic neutral story. The awakening/correction is a threat to any and all archontic structures. Even those slowly morphing out of that. The dont tread on me snake has had it with the eagle you will see on the state flags Iran and Russia. Russia has one that is just the colors. Iran has a stylized one in the middle of their flag and there is the eagle of the USA.

Very interesting symbolism. When Putin did and interview a while back for reporters he had the two different flags to either side of him. IIRC, the one with just the three colors had no gold corporate fringe on it and the one with the eagle heads did. One sovereign flag and one corporate flag.

This is the Snake of Enki who would have had his creations be free and brilliant. Better able to contact with Source. He was overuled and forced to make an inferior species by Enlil, represented by the Eagle. It is amazing how these race memories are surfacing in this symbolic struggle. How the matriarchal life designers are against the patriarchy as they have been for millions of years.

The eagles want war and the snakes want a nice nest to climb into and a rock to sun on. Gaian life is meant to be sweet. All labor towards the goods and arts that are needed. Very organic and in rhythm with Life.

This is why I always wonder about people who call reptiles evil. Reptiles make my skin crawl, really, and I don't like them at all. I think they're stupid creatures incapable of the emotion of which more intelligent animals are capable (and thus do not make pets), but I do not suppose that my reaction to them says anything about them. They are not evil, they simply are what they are.

The term "reptile" is one that is very hard to define (it's defined more in terms of what it isn't or what it lacks rather than what it is or what it has (they are "the non-mammalian, non-avian amniota")) but reptiles as we know them are cold-blooded, which has wide-reaching ramifications on their lifestyles. Cold-blooded animals, for example, do not require anywhere near as much food as warm-blooded animals because they have fewer mitochondria and so their energy demands are lower. Because of this, any given ecosystem can support a greater number of reptiles than it can mammals or birds.

What we see, however, is that reptiles are rarely apex predators and those that are are not the same menace as those warm-blooded predators. About the only apex predators to be found among reptiles are the crocodillians and pythons. Apex predators that we tend to think of as cold-blooded (such as great white sharks, large, predatory pterosaurs and carnivorous dinosaurs) are/were either warm-blooded or, in the case of sharks, warm-blooded in their core if not in their extremities. All of those reptilian apex predators are ambush hunters (the komodo dragon, another apex predator, feeds on carrion or on animals seized by ambush) and it is much easier not to be preyed upon by an ambush hunter: avoid it. Cold-blooded animals do not have the energy to engage with warm-blooded animals in anything more than brief encounters, and so they do not have the lioness's ability to harry prey or the wolf's ability, founded in its highly energy-expensive brain, to arrange hunting manoeuvres of military precision.

Compare this with the birds: absolutely fantastic, warm-blooded animals that emerged from reptilian lineages in the Jurassic period of the mesozoic era. Birds have developed warm-bloodedness independently of mammals (but not independently of their dinosaur forebears) and because of this have a much higher energy expenditure than reptiles. They consume more food and are much more dynamic. Their energy-rich diet enables a greatly increased cognitive faculty and the tenacious hunting abilities that come with it. We have predatory birds like eagles and owls that can soar high above the land and pick out prey animals by sight from miles away or, in the case of owls, even pinpoint their location by the sound of their burrowing beneath feet of snow. We have animals like the keas — large, omnivorous parrots of New Zealand — that will land on the backs of sheep and, rather than killing them, dig their claws in and use their sharp beaks to tear away the fat while leaving the animal alive, though possibly fated to die from infection. The hunting styles of even apex reptiles is much more passive in comparison.

A crocodile might grab you, drag you under the water and eat you if by chance you happen to be passing, but it is the warm-blooded that are the hunting machines. You don't find packs of crocodiles performing raids on African villages the way lions or leopards do. That they have much larger brains than cold-blooded animals enables us to train many of them and make them allies, like dogs, but that brain arose as a tool in the Darwinian drive for predatory competitiveness (most large-brained animals are, of course, meat eaters which benefit from the boosted processing power in hunting; finding vegetation that can't run away is not so taxing). Cold-blooded animals might be more numerous because their low energy demands enable any given ecosystem to support more of them than expensive-to-run warm-blooded creatures like us, but even where the cold-blooded are numerous, their impact on other animals in the ecosystem is much smaller than that of warm-blood animals.

Those cold-blood animals that are apex predators are suffering the final deathblows of the age of the ascension of the mammals: crocodilians in South America are prey for jaguars because, although they have the power of bodies that have stood the test of time for 250 million years (compared with the panther genus of cats, to which jaguars belong, which emerged only 4 million years ago at most), their brute strength is overcome by the ingenuity of the well-fed and well-invested-in big cats. If you exclude the warm-blooded crowning glory of the reptiles (i.e., the birds), it becomes readily apparent that, for all they are stupid animals incapable of the high-powered cognition of mammals and birds, reptiles are not evil. They more than any other animal, perhaps, typify the idea of animals as beings incapable of malice (we only have to look to elephants to see not all animals are incapable of malice or revenge — and here, see that it is a mammal, not a reptile), and neither do they aggregate in packs that function together as one the way many predatory mammals do.

Reptiles are daunting for all their otherness, but none of their features are features solely belonging to reptiles. The large claws are bested by the claws of extant or extinct mammals and birds, their fearsome teeth likewise. Their lack of thought and the inability we have because of that to bring them round to our side, so to speak, intimidates us because we see them as implacable and most people consider it impossible to be completely safe around them because of that. We do not like reptiles because we cannot buy them with food or shelter the way we can buy dogs and cats; they will take what we offer as mere pragmatism and nothing is given in return. They do not recognise such a relationship because they cannot. Many people have snakes and lizards as "pets", but unlike mammals they are kept securely in their tanks and one needn't look far to find stories of escaped snakes that have killed their owners. The one feature of reptiles that is much less common in warm-blooded creatures is that many reptiles are venomous: it stands to reason that an animal which doesn't have the power output to give chase to a mammal is going to have to find another solution to the mammal's ability to run away, and in the case of mammals with their high energy processes and rapid heart beat, venom is a potent tool. But all of these characteristics point to reptiles as passive creatures that are easily avoided. They are not the wicked killing machines they're made out to be, if only because they do not have the capacity to think in such terms: it is only the intelligent animals that are able to divide the world into friend and foe.

[Curt]

And yet, snakes are indeed powerful symbols of wisdom.

I posted this a while back on PA, and hopefully it will be relevant here in the wizard's tent.

.................................................. ....................................

Snakes are part of human myth going back to the stone age.

The Eden myth borrows and transforms the snake from much older stories. It makes him the villain.

He never was a villain in the previous stories.

The ancient mind saw the snake shed its skin to be born anew.

This was linked by analogy with the way the moon sheds its skin- regrows each month, only to repeat the cycle.

The moon brought the dew that refreshed and made the earth fertile.

These waters were linked with Woman, and her natural, lunar menstrual cycles.

The Moon, the snake and Woman represented the same principle.

They represented the sacred power of the cycles of life--and were thought to be the embodiment of the knowledge of generation and regeneration.

They were the keys to birth and life itself.

They represented the wisdom of the creative powers of life itself.

Doesn't get much wiser than that.

In those days god was a woman. The snake was venerated, and the moon didn't represent lunacy, but wisdom.

Fast forward a few thousand years and god becomes a man. Everything changes.

God is put outside of, and beyond, nature. Nature is made evil, fallen.

The Judeo-Christian god is not part of nature. He is above it. He is supernatural.

The emphasis becomes overcoming and conquering nature. The world is seen as something which needs controlling.

Woman loses her place, and with her the goddess, the snake and the moon.

Even in the story of Eden, Woman and snake work together. The old partnership.

Except here they're cast as the bad guys.

In the new tradition where nature is evil, both the snake and Woman, as representatives of the wisdom of nature, are seen as evil, too.

But here's another reading of the snake and the apple: because of the snake, mankind is born into the world.

Man is expelled from the safe womb of the garden where his every need was met, and is given full life: and access to all the good and evil that comes with it.

In a theology where nature isn't evil, there is no original sin, and the snake is performing a vital service to mankind- without which we would never fully have been born.

There is a lot of talk recently of shadow work, and synthesizing aspects of the self into a healthy whole.

The snake may be a key symbol in helping to achieve this.

[Seikou-Kishi]

True. In writing my post I was mindful of the view of snakes as wise. It is really only in the last two millennia or so that that image has reversed in some parts of the world. Perhaps it is an underlining of the distinction between intelligence and wisdom; intelligence is a function of the mind, but wisdom has a higher origination.

At the same time, the snake is a very curious animal. It is the only tetrapod to have no legs at all, and the various forms of locomotion snakes use are all fluid. Indeed, for all it is the only animal in the world that gets around on its ribcage rather than limbs, the snake's motion appears effortless when compared with the mechanical motion of bipeds and quadrupeds. Their evolution from burrowing animals gives them an association with the earth and all that is chthonic, both giving life and receiving the dead — a parallel perhaps emphasised by the venom of many snakes and their ability to dislocate their jaw like the ever-wide gates of the underworld. Their habit of hibernating beneath the ground during the cold season brings with it images of Persephone's annual captivity in the underworld.

Snakes remind me of the dark and therefore often-feared aspects of divinity. The wolf might be a teacher, but humans and wolves have a long, engaged relationship and many wolves are friends of humans (recent genetic evidence does not support the idea that wolves and dogs are two separate species). The snake is the teacher that does not want to be your friend.

Also, snakes, without any capacity for self-reflection or self-deception, cannot be other than what they are. A snake cannot be convinced into becoming a beloved family pet, even if humans can convince themselves of it. Snakes are what they are and cannot and do not try to be anything else. That is a good lesson for humans, who routinely deny their own nature and convince themselves and everybody else that they are other than they are.

[Curt]

Joseph Farrell makes a very interesting point that, in the West, we have a debt-based theology. I'm paraphrasing.

He makes the point that it's esentially (though, not merely) a banking metaphor.

We are born in debt, a debt we can never repay, and we spend our lives in service to said debt. Sound familiar?

When I heard this, it was a lightbulb moment.

It's easy to see where this sort of theology could be useful to an elite priest-class of people.

And from a certain perspective it even explains why banks are built like temples.

But that's only skating along on the surface of things.

Going deeper, it seems Jesus was really the ultimate symbol for achieving individual sovreignty.

He was a symbol of the sublime power and potential of a mankind made up of individuals who are free from the yoke of this collective 'debt.'

Jung's Undiscovered Self comes to mind. So does the work of Joseph Campbell. It speaks to Christ as a symbol, not as a biographical figure. That's key.

It sheds light on Jesus' exchange with the moneylenders in the temple. It also goes some distance to explaining the significance of Jesus' preoccupation with the one lost sheep- the individual sheep- and why saving him was so important.

Jung makes the point that the collective is made up of individuals, and that the individual is the only place where true human potential exists.

Jesus was concerned with the individual.

'Let the dead bury their dead.'

Think of the Borg riding their black, saturnian cube through space to assimilate and absorb. Jesus is an opposing symbol to this sort of tyranny.

Be wise as serpents, indeed.

Pity that when I visited St Paul's cathedral during the Occupy protests two years ago I hadn't pieced more of this together.

[Curt]

Wow. Reading that last post back I can see I've slammed quite a few things together. It's either the most lucid thinking I've ever done, or else I need a nap.

[Curt]

Right. I'm off for that nap.

[modwiz]

I think it is time to shed light on an archontic mind disease that has to be dealt with and that is the idea construct of punishment.
I will post initially as buttons are sure to be pressed with this topic. I am especially looking for proponents of punishment as an idea of any sovereign utility. They can serve as a focused jump of point for this conversation.

I do not speak of organic consequences of a system that has to deal with pathogenic issues. I speak of punishment as either vengeance or "justice". Correction is another term mis-applied to this form of torture. This is no coincidence but a "blasphemy", so to speak.

Childhood punishment is included in this conversation.

My definition of torture is: the inflicting of pain or discomfort, with pain and discomfort being the intent.

[norman]

I speak of punishment as either vengeance or "justice".

yup, how often to people receiving "justice" feel it is "unjust" ?