Hino da Umbanda

To Night

Night, parent goddess, source of sweet repose, from whom at first both Gods and men arose,
Hear, blessed Venus, deck’d with starry light, in sleep’s deep silence dwelling Ebon night!
Dreams and soft case attend thy dusky train, pleas’d with the length’ned gloom and feaftful strain.
Dissolving anxious care, the friend of Mirth, with darkling coursers riding round the earth.
Goddess of phantoms and of shadowy play, whose drowsy pow’r divides the nat’ral day:
By Fate’s decree you constant send the light to deepest hell, remote from mortal sight
For dire Necessity which nought withstands, invests the world with adamantine bands.
Be present, Goddess, to thy suppliant’s pray’r, desir’d by all, whom all alike revere,
Blessed, benevolent, with friendly aid dispell the fears of Twilight’s dreadful shade.

-from the Orphic Hymns as translated by Thomas Taylor

To the Muses

Daughters of Jove, dire-sounding and divine,
Renown’d Pierian, sweetly speaking Nine;
To those whose breasts your sacred furies fire
Much-form’d, the objects of supreme desire:
Sources of blameless virtue to mankind,
Who form to excellence the youthful mind;
Who nurse the soul, and give her to descry
The paths of right with Reason’s steady eye.
Commanding queens who lead to sacred light
The intellect refin’d from Error’s night;
And to mankind each holy rite disclose,
For mystic knowledge from your nature flows.
Clio, and Erato, who charms the sight,
With thee Euterpe minist’ring delight:
Thalia flourishing, Polymina fam’d,
Melpomene from skill in music nam’d:
Terpischore, Urania heav’nly bright,
With thee who gav’st me to behold the light.
Come, venerable, various, pow’rs divine,
With fav’ring aspect on your mystics shine;
Bring glorious, ardent, lovely, fam’d desire,
And warm my bosom with your sacred fire.

-Translated by Thomas Taylor

On the Divine Frenzy – II

This is not enough. For multiplicity still remains in the soul. There is added, therefore, the mystery of Dionysius, which by explanations and sacrifices, and every divine worship, directs the attention of all the other parts to the intellect, by which God is worshipped. In this way since all the other parts of the soul are reduced to the intellect alone, the soul has already been made a certain single whole out of the many.

-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love

On Initiation

Or: Why the Church is the way it is right now

Recently I was reading neo-pagan John Opsopaus’ essay on Pythagorean theology, particularly the section on theurgy. Those who have been with me for several years know that I have written on theurgy before, and a lot of the content of Opsopaus’ essay was not new to me. However, it does gather a lot of ideas that would take some time to find in many other sources. I highly recommend it.

What I want to address this time is the idea of initiation that he describes in the last part of work. Opsopaus describes a series of initiations in the ancient world that a Christian cannnot help associate with our own rites of initiation. In these ceremonies, the initiate or desmos prepares himself for the entrance of a god into his soul. This includes ritual washing, the use of lights and smoke, and other material rites that prepare the soul with union with the Divine. After the service, the symbolic death and burial of the initiate, he “is transformed into a Theios Anêr (God-Man), one of the Perfected or Immaculate Beings (Akhrantoi), who by Their very presence on earth bring grace to humanity and to all of Nature”. Comparisons to baptism and Christian theosis here are not very far-fetched.

On the Power of the Stars

And some random reflections

[Image by Robert Place found on this site]

But what is remarkable about the Florentine cupolas is that they represent no merely random arrangement of the stars: the artist has preserved the aspect of the sky exactly as it appeared at a given day and hour. Why was this done? Without the slightest doubt, because some event of decisive importance for the Church had taken place at that very moment – an event over which the celestial powers then above the horizon had presided. Aby Warburg was able, in fact, to prove that the arrangement of the stars shown in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo corresponds exactly to their position in the sky above Florence on July 9, 1422, the date of the consecration of the main altar.

-taken from The Survival of the Pagan Gods by Jean Seznec

Maria Lionza

Deus deorum

Christ as the Fulfilment of Pagan Theology

In the past, I have criticized the “grand march of monotheism” view of history. In this view, people agonizingly climbed their way out of a mental cave that is haunted by spirits, ghosts, gods, and all of the other usual suspects in the polytheistic cosmos. Little by little, one small group of people, the Hebrews, grew out of this worldview to realize that their was only one God, and all of the other religions were either superstition or the manipulation of devils. Even from the founding of the Church, we are becoming more monothesitic, more Biblical, and more knowledgeable about the Christian religion as time passes. People feel, for example, that St. Anselm’s idea of the vicarious satisfaction of Christ on the Cross was a remnant of the pagan ethos: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would never demand blood from His own Son in payment for the sins of the world. We know the Gospel better since we are farther away from the pagan past. We have cleaned the outside of our vessels. We have whitened our sepulchers. We have a better idea of God than our ancestors.

A Debate About Syncretism

First, I must give credit to the Cruising Down the Coast of the High Barbaree blog for directing me to this article on the syncretic attitudes of Hindus and Thomas Christians in Kerala. It is well-worth a thorough read, and Josh S. and I get into an interesting discussion on the post cited above.

Of course, my Lutheran interlocutor on the thread cited this article as representing the dangers that apostolic Christianity has of falling into superstition, and no doubt a number of Catholics will also find the actions of the Thomas Christians described here highly objectionable. I personally think that they crossed some lines that should not have been crossed.

On the other hand, in a lot of ways, the Christianity of the laity is often about what we can get away with. ( I am thinking here specifically of some of the quirks of my grandmother, que Dios la tenga en Su gloria). I am beginning to think that the shepherding of our pastors in the Church is not as simple as they lead and we follow. As I have written in the past, the cult of the saints in my mind did not arise as a “from the top-down”, but rather as a “from the bottom-up” phenomenon. In other words, the emergence of the Catholic ethos was not a strictly “by the book” affair, and it can at times resemble a wrestling match between God and man, pastors and laity, as to the shape and flavor of their beliefs and practices. While I think the Christians of Kerala have taken their syncretism too far (as have some Mexicans in their cult to Holy Death), I do not see these actions as part of a process that is contrary to the Gospel, but rather as one that is very much a part of it. It is just an issue of regulating these things so that they don’t get out of hand.