lilairen, posts by tag: theology - LiveJournal

Winkelwagentjestheologie!

Winkelwagentjestheologie!

Winkelwagentjestheologie!

"Little Gidding", first part of part V, by T. S. Eliot:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

"Dude. Dude. Dude dude dude."

I was thinking about temples and foundations, as I often do.

"What?" teinedreugan asked me.

"There's a thing," I explained, "where you sit and stare at it and you don't get anywhere and then suddenly you know what to do and you can do research and...." I kissed him.

"Bye!" said whispercricket, as I packed up my computer and prepared to scurry up to the office.

"whispercricket understands!"

"I wasn't even really paying attention," she comments.

I am pulling books off the shelves, flipping through the indexes, muttering 'stretching the cord', which I looked up on a few websites, but I want things in books, for citations. I toss Seth: God of Confusion onto the bed in its notebook, and add Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture, and go through several books and put them back.

Then I pause, and take one of those books down off the shelf again. "86, 86...."

I was actually looking for page 87, but close enough.

I read. "At Edfu, inscriptions in the temple tell us that it was oriented from Orion in the south to the Great Bear in the north."

I put the book down.

My mind is exploding.

Pedj-shes.

Trying to comb the tangles out of my life is a fiddly, fiddly thing. It's a two steps forward, one step back thing at all times, and this has been a rough while - hell, it's been a rough year - which means it feels like a lot more back steps than forward steps even if I look at it closely and recognise that's not right, really.

Possibly it's that I have too much pirouetting and not enough promenade.

KJ likes to run in circles around things. "Baby run circle!" she proclaims. "Run circle mama!" when she's orbiting me. Like that, only I don't enjoy it as much as she does?

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The basic problem with the axioms of reconstructionism in paganism is that, as a descendant of Puritans, the religion of my ancestors turns out to be Unitarian Universalism.

Some gaps no amount of lore can fill.

This is a first draft, I'm trying to get my thoughts in order. Suggestions for useful revisions are extremely welcome.

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The Unitarian Universalist church I attend opens each ceremony with a short prayer, an affirmation, which begins "Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law." (Or 'goal'. Some do it differently, and I can't recall which one is in the order of service right now.) It and I are both descended from the Puritans, who would probably not approve of aspiring to godhood or teachings about finding the divine, holy spark in each other, but nonetheless here we all are.

So now that I have a few people looking at the draft of the Traveller's Guide so I can do a last few tweaks before submitting the manuscript to publisher(s), I'm working on the project that has been referred to on the Cauldron for a while as the onion-hoeing book.

It is amazing how different this project is.

Okay, here's the thing: the Traveller's Guide was a romp. It is a thoroughly academically researched, information-dense romp, but not only is the premise pretty much a gigantic joke it has stuff in it like a limerick about the importance of raising the djed pillar, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. It has a lot of stuff in it from a Kemetic perspective, and I think it has a lot of stuff that might be of use to a magician-type who wants to deal with a reasonably authentically Egyptian flavoring to stuff they're doing, but mostly what that book is is a lot of fun that also happens to be chock full of data.

The onion-hoeing book isn't like that at all.
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A month ago I was sure I knew how to organise this thing, and now that I'm trying to do so it's coming apart in my hands in weird ways. And it's hard stuff, and I need to do at least a half-decent job on it.

"I'm better at stylised than representational."

"Most people are. That's why humans didn't develop representational art for ages. You do a human, you don't try to make it look like Bob. You put stuff that Bob likes around it, everyone who knows Bob knows it's him."

"And you put his name on it."

"Yeah."

"And if you're Egyptian, you put in a fishing float!"

"... why?"

"Bob... bob... bob..."

"Oh."

"Also fishing is symbolic of sex and regeneration, so you really want it in there."

Last night I spent an excessive chunk of time rattling around reading blogs, in a weird compilation of some rereading of the things I wrote for last year's Pagan Values Month blogswarm thing, coming across someone sneering that of course Christianity didn't invent original sin, that's just a normal religion thing, and some discussions that are apparently related to Wiscon, and it got me thinking about structural stuff around religion again.

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Shorter version: hug your children so they have souls. Thank you, goodnight.

A couple of quotes pulled out of context:

"My backbrain just said 'It is bad spiritual engineering for your landwight agreements to have single fail points on loadbearing royalty.'  This is why I'm not allowed to talk to normal people."

"... Tain Bo Kachina...."

I think 'Loadbearing Royalty' is probably my favorite phrase for this week, by the way. It's hard to work it into a conversation, though.

In other news, I just wrote a serious theology essay about American Idol. (Well, using bits of this past season of American Idol as prime illustrative example, to be fair.)