-Caveat Lector-
On Thu, 4 Jan 2001 19:57:15 EST William Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
>-Caveat Lector-
>>From Sex to Superconsciousness - http://www.truthbeknown.com
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>The Scholars and the Goddess.
>
>http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/01/allen.htm
>
>Historically speaking, the "ancient" rituals of the Goddess movement
>are almost certainly bunk by Charlotte Allen
>WICCA, sometimes known as the Goddess movement, Goddess spirituality,
>or the Craft, appears to be the fastest-growing religion in America.
Thirty
>years ago only a handful of Wiccans existed. One scholar has estimated
that
>there are now more than 200,000 adherents of Wicca and related
"neopagan"
>faiths in the United States, the country where neopaganism, like many
formal
>religions, is most flourishing. Wiccans -- who may also call themselves
Witches
>capital W is meant to distance them from the word's negative
>connotations, because Wiccans neither worship Satan nor practice the
sort of
>malicious magic traditionally associated with witches) or just plain
pagans
>(often with a capital P) -- tend to be white, middle-class, highly
educated,
>and politically involved in liberal and environmental causes. About a
>third of them are men. Wiccan services have been held on at least
fifteen
>U.S. military bases and ships
Starhawk offers a vivid summary of the history of the faith,
>explaining that witchcraft is "perhaps the oldest
>religion extant in the West" and that it began "more than
>thirty-five thousand years ago," during the last Ice Age. The religion's
>earliest adherents worshipped two deities, one of each sex: "the Mother
>Goddess, the birthgiver, who brings into existence all life," and the
"Horned God,"
>a male hunter who died and was resurrected each year.
> In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true.
>The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly
>new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic
>ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and
the
>occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of
history are
>deeply flawed. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no
>indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any
ancient
>people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess -- a conclusion that
strikes
>at the heart of Wiccan belief. IN the past few years two well-respected
>scholars have independently advanced essentially the same theory about
>Wicca's founding. In 1998 Philip G. Davis, a professor of religion at
the
>University of Prince Edward Island, published Goddess Unmasked: The Rise
of >Neopagan Feminist Spirituality, which argued that Wicca was the
creation of
>an English civil servant and amateur anthropologist named Gerald B.
>Gardner(1884-1964)
Enough. Modern Wiccan, Witchcraft, etc has the same relationship to the
past practices of witchcraft and shammanism as Modern Christianity has to
Abraham, Moses or Jesus. Almost none. They are all different
manifestations of the same belief system. Whether the belief is in
multiple gods and goddess' or in one god, makes no difference. Some
people have always needed to believe in something to explain what they do
not know. Prayer of any kind can allow the mind the freedom to heal the
body or do any number of other "miraculous" things. Science is not
proving that. I can tell you that the Archaeological record has better
documentation for early belief systems than they do for the folk lore in
the bible.
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