I wish I could bring Stonehenge to Nyasaland to show there was a time when Britain had a savage culture.
Masonry is identical with the Ancient Mysteries
The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.
The Inca honored the men of the blood royal by permitting them to bore their ears where women do today, but with larger holes … and this was the sign of nobility and royal caste ...
Theater originated with technology. People forget that.
The Christian Bible is a symbolic book, not a literal one. The one Christians know as Jesus was actually a symbol for the sun. Ancient sun worshippers believed the sun died at the end of the winter solstice and then three days later it would be reborn at the start of its cycle - December 25.
This is a coca leaf. This is not cocaine. This represents the culture of indigenous people of the Andean region.
From prescription, in the case of hypaethral edifices, open to the sky, in honor of Jupiter Lightning, the Heaven, the Sun, or the Moon: for these are gods whose semblances and manifestations we behold before our very eyes in the sky when it is cloudless and bright.
The Ancient Games are relatively obscure to most Olympians, but to understand just what the Games are about, it is really necessary to investigate the roots and the meaning that has transformed culture and society for so many years.
The temple of Ceres should be in a solitary spot out of the city, to which the public are not necessarily led but for the purpose of sacrificing to her.
I'm building a glass pyramid over the Egyptian escalator where my body will be mummified, so my customers can come and see me forever.
Tarot cards likely originated in northern Italy during the late 14th or early 15th century. The oldest surviving set, known as the Visconti-Sforza deck, was created for the Duke of Milan's family around 1440. The cards were used to play a bridge-like game known as tarocchi, popular at the time among nobles and other leisure lovers.
The deeper I go into mythology, the more I find. I originally did five 'Percy Jackson' books. I thought that would cover Greek mythology and I couldn't have been more wrong. It's ever-expanding.
How the early priests came into possession of these secrets does not appear, and if there were ever any records of this kind the Church would hardly allow them to become public.
First Moloch, horrid king, besmirched in blood, Of Human sacrifice, and parent's tears, Though, for the noise of drums and timbrels loud, Their childrens' cries unheard, that passed through fire, To his grim idol.
Incense. Books. Just weird.
For centuries, cultures throughout the world have used indigenous technologies to navigate life's complexities. From navigator-priests in Micronesia to mystics in India, vast sums of knowledge are available if we but recognize it.
I have long been convinced that the Christian Eucharist is but a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries. St Paul, in using the word teleiois, almost confirms this.
Shaking's great. Shaking's one of the oldest practices known to man. Standing round a fire and connecting with the earth and moving energy through the body because it's where a lot of our stuff can get trapped. Yeah, I would recommend it.
Death is the inseparable antecedent of life; the seed dies in order to produce the plant, and earth itself is rent asunder and dies at the birth of Dionusos. Hence the significancy of the phallus, or of its inoffensive substitute, the obelisk, rising as an emblem of resurrection by the tomb of buried Deity at Lerna or at Sais.
Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
The groves were God's first temple. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them,--ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood, Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks And supplication.
The Psalms offer us a way of joining in a chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures. Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent non-psalmic 'worship' based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy
All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.
The adoration of the sun was one of the earliest and most natural forms of religious expression. Complex modern theologies are merely involvements and amplifications of this simple aboriginal belief.
