10/25/11

Rituals: if you do something correctly, everything will be alright.   You need to do the thing exactly as prescribed.  If rituals are not done correctly, the order of the universe will be set off balance.  The world is filled with rituals and if they are not done correctly, things can be very bad.  The insistence on burying people correctly has been vital during human history.  Antigone.  She was Oedipus’ daughter. Antigone believes in the familial law: everyone, even if they are a traitor, deserves a proper burial.

Here is a picture of Antigone: 

Halloween: Halloween as a mythological event.

What we are not familiar with is where all of this came from.  Here is some background: Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while "some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, it is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, whose original spelling was Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)". The name of the festival historically kept by the Gaels and celts in the British Isles which is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end".

But Symbols and the artifacts change over time.  Over time Halloween went from a celebration of all souls to the rites of kenosis.  (emptying out; its a Greek word for emptying).  Emptying ourselves of all the things that could have been contagious and evil during the year.  Tote Tage or the day of the dead.  Means that none of the rules that applied to you during the year are not in effect for this day.  NYE-liberation from the rules.  

Nacirema: The original use of the term was in Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, which satirizes anthropological papers on "other" cultures, and the Northern American Culture. Horace Miner wrote the paper and originally published it in the June 1956 edition ofAmerican Anthropologist.

In the paper, Miner describes the Nacirema, a little-known tribe living in North America. The way in which he writes about the curious practices that this group performs distances readers from the fact that the North American group described actually corresponds to modern-day Americans of the mid-1950s. The article sometimes serves as a demonstration of a gestalt shift with relation to sociology.

Some of the popular aspects of Nacirema culture include: latipso ("Hospital" spelled backwards and the 'H' removed) Medicine men and women (doctors, psychiatrists, and pharmacists), a charm-box (medicine cabinet), the mouth-rite ritual (brushing teeth), and a cultural hero known as Notgnihsaw ("Washington" spelled backwards).

Though generally viewed to be on the west coast, there are several places given the name of Nacirema, including certain streets and very old neighborhoods on the east coast.

Growing Pains= Metamorphosis.  

Elusinian Mysteries" http://www.eleusinianmysteries.org/