Pagan Culture

What better way to show God you appreciate him than to squander his most precious gift, life, in a miasma of ruthlessness and gore? In addition to justifying Crusades, Witch Trials and Wars, this theological breakthrough is also the main justification for the time-honored practice of human sacrifice. Sacrifices are perhaps the most ancient method to honor deities, going right back to the earliest ancestor-worship religions of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The original theory was "everyone needs to eat," including the ancestor-gods. So priests would dutifully leave food sitting out for the gods, who would never actually eat the food.

It was embarrassing to have all this food sitting around, so the priests eventually began burning, cutting or bleeding the sacrifices instead of just leaving them out to rot. As time went on, the original theory of feeding the gods was forgotten and the practice became a ritual which was essentially meaningless to its participants (like the use of chrism in a Christian baptism, just for example). The first sacrifices consisted of food and meat, but the emphasis slowly shifted to animal sacrifice and from there to blood sacrifice. Once you've moved past the notion that you're actually feeding the gods, an animal hierarchy kicks in, so a goat is a better sacrifice than a chicken, and a cow is better than a goat. So what would be the bestest sacrifice of all? Eureka! There is some controversy about when the practice of human sacrifice actually began.

Some argue for a prehistoric origin, but the evidence for these claims unfortunately tend to be 10,000-year-old bodies found in Northern European bogs, which leaves room for a not-insignificant amount of interpretation. There's a better than even chance those bodies were the result of early executions or ritual killings, among all of which there is an admittedly fine line. Human sacrifice is more or less defined here as the ritual killing of a person to appease or coerce a god figure. The scholars don't really agree on where to draw the lines, but the bloodthirsty bastards have a marked tendency to designate just about any ancient death a "human sacrifice" for no defensible reason. Virtually every culture and region has a history of human sacrifice, from the Romans to the Celts to the Aztecs... Hell, even the Dutch...

There are countless deities associated with love and/or sexuality in every culture throughout history, here are some..

Aphrodite: In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. According to Hesiod, she was born when Uranus (the father of the gods) was castrated by his son Cronus . Cronus threw the severed genitals into the ocean which began to churn and foam about them. From the aphros ("sea foam") arose Aphrodite, and the sea carried her to either Cyprus or Cythera. Hence she is often referred to as Kypris and Cytherea. Homer calls her a daughter of Zeus and Dione. After her birth, Zeus was afraid that the gods would fight over Aphrodite's hand in marriage so he married her off to the smith god Hephaestus the steadiest of the gods. He could hardly believe his good luck and used all his skills to make the most lavish jewels for her. He made her a girdle of finely wrought gold and wove magic into the filigree work. That was not very wise of him, for when she wore her magic girdle no one could resist her, and she was all too irresistible already.

 She loved gaiety and glamour and was not at all pleased at being the wife of sooty, hard-working Hephaestus. Aphrodite loved and was loved by many gods and mortals. Among her mortal lovers, the most famous was perhaps Adonis . Some of her sons are Eros, Anteros, Hymenaios and Aeneas (with her Trojan lover Anchises. She is accompanied by the Graces. Her festival is the Aphrodisiac which was celebrated in various centers of Greece and especially in Athens and Corinth. Her priestesses were not prostitutes but women who represented the goddess and sexual intercourse with them was considered just one of the methods of worship. Aphrodite was originally an old-Asian goddess, similar to the Mesopotamian Ishtar and the Syro-Palestinian goddess Ashtart. Her attributes are a.o. the dolphin, the dove, the swan, the pomegranate and the lime tree. In Roman mythology Venus is the goddess of love and beauty and Cupid is love's messenger...

For many Halloween is a time for fun and dressing up, but for others it has a greater significance - some believe it to be a time for tradition and celebration while others perceive it assomething altogether more sinister."Witches, beware.

Mummies, be gone. Halloween may be a celebration of all things creepy and macabre, but a growing number of US communities are shunning traditional ghoulish festivities, seen by some as tainted by associationwith paganism and the occult."

View: Full Article | Source: AssociatedPress

A massive altar dedicated to an eastern cult deity has emerged during excavations of a Roman fort in northern England.

Weighing 1.5 tons, the four-foot high ornately carved stone relic, was unearthed at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, which was built by order of the Emperor Hadrian between 122-30 A.D.

The Romans built the defensive wall across the north of Britain from Carlisle to Newcastle-on-Tyne, to keep out invading armies from what is now Scotland.

What should have been part of the rampart mound near to the north gate of the fort has turned out to be an amazing religious shrine," said archaeologist Andrew Birley.

A jar and a shallow dish is depicted on one side of the altar, while the other side shows a god-like figure standing on the back of a bull, with a thunderbolt in one hand and a battle axe in the other.

Romans called this god Juppiter Dolichenus, but it was originally an ancient weather god, known to the Semitic peoples of the Middle East as Hadad and to the Hittites as Teshab.

It was in its war-like representation that the Anatolian god Juppiter of Doliche became a favorite deity among Roman soldiers.

Indeed, an inscription indicates that the altar was dedicated to the Dolichenus god by "Sulpicius Pudens, prefect of the Fourth Cohort of Gauls."

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