Did God Have a Wife?: William G. Dever
Dever, one of the world's most renowned archaeologists has finally asked the BIG question, and his research, archaeology, and scholarship have come up with the most stunning answer. Yes, God was married!
His analysis of the folk religion, and how the common folk worshipped was one of the powerful aspects of this book, the stuff that never made it into the Bible, yet is reflected in the archaeology of the people in the countryside. This is archaeology at its level-headed best.
A very shocking book, as well as revealing for his amazingly coherent, and provocative challenges, and answers to the nay-sayers of Asherah being God's wife.
I highly recommend it. (*****)
Giorgio Santillana, Hertha von Dechend: Hamlet's Mill
This is not the easiest book to read or understand, but it is by far one of the most influential ones I own for the sheer power of generating ideas and themes to research and write on. It is archeoastronomy detective work like no other text. Scholarly, erudite, difficult, astounding, breath-taking. I also rate this one as one of those books in my all time favorite top 10.
I know others have not found their overall thesis convincing, but archeoastronomy is indepted to this book for having a serious start, and it has also come a long way since, especially with John Major Jenkins work on "Maya Cosmogenesis 2012" and "The Galactic Alignment."
Archeoastronomy became a hobby of mine directly because of this book. I highly recommend it. It was reprinted for the 3rd time in 1992, and well worth shelling out the dough for it. (*****)
Jason Lotterhand: The Thursday Night Tarot
In his down to earth style and humor, Lotterhand opens up the world of the Tarot symbolisms and what they can mean for us in our every day to day lives. Without stuffy erudition, nor with New Age silliness, Lotterhand goes through the Major Arcana of the Tarot Cards and analyzes their interpretations as he understands things. You can't help but come away from this book feeling good. This is the collection of his classes he has taught for years and years, including questions from many of his students and his responses.
I have read it many times, and will continue reading it as a perfect introduction as to what the Tarot symbolisms and use really means, not what phony prognosticators of the New Age Movement have hijacked the Tarot to mean. Their use of it is an "adulterated use" to quote Paul Foster Case, another of the true Tarot interpreter geniuses.
The overall view of the Tarot following Lotterhand's interpretation is one of love.... love for God, our fellowman, as well as for ourselves. That Tarot has nothing at all in any form to do with Satan worship, devil loving wickdness, and magic is more than proven by Lotterhand's scholarship in this fascinating area. I highly and strongly recommend this cure for the disease of understanding Tarot as an evil Devil inspired system. (*****)
Leonora Leet: The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah
This book just simply stunned me. It is one of the most fascinating analysis of Sacred Geometry and modern Quantum Physics along with a detailed discovery after discover after discovery of the Jewish religious system called Kabbalah.
Leet's geometric charts make the book even easier to understand, but the depth of her cogent reasoning concerning the cosmos, geometry, and music is a sight to behold.
Her follow up book "The Universal Kabbalah" is quite interesting in the first few chapters and then bogs my mind down with so much detail and analysis that it is far over my head, though I am working on deciphering it.
Leet spent over 20 years analyzing and writing about her discoveries. The most significant one concerns the Kabbalah Tree of Life diagram which is remarkably elucidated by Leet, both in the historical aspects of its changes, as well as the reasons why it is the shape and form that it is, and the meaning of sacred geometrical extensions of the already existing lines of the Tree of Life.
A most significant contribution, not only to my own understanding of Kabbalah and Geometry, but for my own enthusiasm of learning more about the Kabbalah (****)
Margaret Barker: The Great High Priest
With her astonishing range of scholarship and working with ancient archaeological and linguistic data, Barker has changed our understanding of the ancient Hebraic Priesthood as well as religion. This book is a milestone. (*****)
Menas Kafatos, Robert Nadeau: The Conscious Universe
The Quantum Physics notion of Complementarity (two particles being connected, no matter how far apart they are in the universe), as well as understanding how the part relates to the whole is what is explored in this gem of a little book.
This is no spiritual guru linking of science and religion together by mis-representing one or the other or both of the disciplines, but a sober, real look into the ideas of consciousness, and how Quantum Physics has come around to recognizing the universal aspect of consciousness in *all things*. An amazing book, quite technically written, but with amazing conclusions. The main conclusion being that consciousness can no longer be separated from the problem of the way science operates. (****)
Robert Eisenman: The New Testament Code
Again, with his impeccible schoalrship and thirst for detail Eisenman extends his analysis and evidence for a First Century Early Christian provenance for the Dead Sea Scrolls using the internal materials of the scrolls themselves, their literary usages, their dramatis personae, and their descriptions of what sins abound with the wicked foreign leaders, which can only possibly apply to the Herodians.
I wish Eisenman's writing style was easier however. For this reason I can't give it a 5 star rating. His information is astonishingly useful however, and rather controversial, my kind of book! (****)
Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism: Howard Schwartz
Magnaminous! This compilation from all periods of Jewish mythology, using hundreds, if not thousands of the texts, shows without doubt or question that there was a Jewish mythology, and its power of presentation for relevance is unsurpassed in all of mythology.
From the Creation, the the Shekhinah as the wife of God, to Israel's woes, and successes, this detailed, and humorous, insightful, powerful book has so much in it from the lives of the Patriarchs, the prophets, and the rabbis, that it will take many months to read all the way through it. I have referenced it several times, and spent not a few very delightful evenings (even rainy days) browsing through its pages, and the excellent scholarly discussions by Schwarts itself placing things in context. This is a book I turn to again and again and again with new "Aha!" insights from every single page. (*****)
A very interesting analysis of Margaret Barker's new book on early Christianity and temples is at T&T Clark Blog. Worth looking at!
http://tandtclark.typepad.com/ttc/2008/05/responses-to-ma.html
I recently read an argument that we Mormons are hiding our history and not giving "full disclosure" on many things that some folks ask about and learn later on once they convert. Is this dishonest? Are we hiding our history? Do we even yet comprehend it? I argue we don't. And I know critics against Mormonism don't, based on decades of experience reading their own knowledge of Mormon history, rather lopsided at best.
My first question is, is it even possible?
Continue reading "Are We Dishonestly Hiding Our Own History in Mormonism?" »
As only he can do. Mad with delight at his amusing, yet truly accurate perspective. The man just rocks! If I am even half near this wonderful when I get to be his age (that probably won't happen either), then I will consider myself absolutely Godly blessed!
Pres Hinckley spoke in the Priesthood Session about anger and how it is a major factor in problems today. He mentioned a person who was upset because a negative article about him was in the paper. A friend told him not to worry about it, because 1/2 the people didn't read the paper. Of those that did, 1/2 wouldn't notice the article. Of those that did, 1/2 wouldn't read it. Of those that did, 1/2 wouldn't understand it. Of those that did, 1/2 wouldn't believe it. Of those that did, 1/2 were nitwits.
"[In the mystic Swedenborg's philosophy, reincarnation] depends entirely
upon the thought of the person. All things in the universe arrange
themselves to each person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such
that his affection and thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by
virtue of knowing and understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of
the world are broken up. Interiors associate all in the spiritual world.
Whatever the angels looked upon was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to
himself a man; to those as bad as he, a comely man: to the purified, a heap
of carrion. Nothing can resist states: everything gravitates: like will to
like: what we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come
into a world that is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast
is not bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of
men there present. Every one makes his own house and state" (Emerson,
"Swedenborg; or, The Mystic," _Representative Men_).
"You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such an image of one's god is a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.…
"When you experience your god as with form, there is your envisioning mind, and there is your god. There is a subject, and there is an object. But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with one's god. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear. There is nobody there, no god, no you. Your mind going past all concepts, has dissolved in identification with the ground of your own being, because that to which the metaphorical image of your god refers is the ultimate mystery of your own being, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well."
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, pp. 262–63
From a discussion which I believe is worth sharing many, many times over! There is profundity and spiritual insight here that is enormously useful and quite practical... Truly! I shall list the discussants as Q (Question), and A (Answer):
Q
I and my wife have had several discussions about 'testimony', and I see this discussed in other groups I frequent. Were talking about that 'burning in the bosom' thing, right. I've come to call it 'the warm fuzzies'.
A:
I generally choose not to call it that (or even “that ‘burning in the bosom’ thing”), since the language is dismissive. “Our personal definitions of the meaning of our experiences constitute suggestions which are accepted, without reservation, by our subconsciousness. Thus, in a sense, every man makes his own law, writes the constitution of his own personal world, and finds that his life-experience is a reproduction of that constitution through the working of subconscious responses" (Case, Tarot: Key to the Wisdom Of the Ages 66).
Besides, such language fails to distinguish between...
The thing the alchemists are seeking to make is a "stone" which will turn
all things into what they always call "sol," the Latin name for "Sun" .And
that stone is Ehben in Hebrew, equivalent through its number, 53, with
Khammaw, the poetical name for "Sun." To see that all things are from ONE,
to see "that which is above is as that which is below," this is the result
we achieve from success in the Great Work. . . . When we arrive at this
personal consciousness of the Oneness of All, we shall find Nature unveiling
herself to is in our times of meditation. Here is one of the many direct
hints that the Great Work of the alchemists is aimed at a change in human
consciousness which will enable mankind to perceive, and not merely assume
that a stone is actually condensed solar energy. When that change occurs the
"new creature" is born, and this is the reason why Regeneration is given in
the Tarot . . . as the meaning of the letter Resh. - Paul Case
From a good acquaintance of mine:
Pantheists believe that God is everything. And panentheists like myself believe that not only is God everything, but that everything exists within God. You know the scripture: "for in Him we live and move and have our being." I believe this is literally true; i.e., we are (b)eing within (B)eing. I thought that worth pondering....
Related to this, of course, is this further elucidation....
Continue reading "Pantheism or Panentheism, Are They The Same?" »
The Weeping God
Years ago Hugh Nibley showed how the Enoch literature displayed God weeping, and noted this same phenomena in the Pearl of Great Price. in the Joseph Smith version, the amazing thing is that when God himself weeps and Enoch says, "How is it that thou canst weep?" ("Moses 7:29), Enoch bears testimony that the God of heaven actually wept. It is a shocking thing to say, but here again, if we go to another Enoch text, there it is! When God wept over the destruction of the temple, we're told in one of the midrashim that it was Enoch who fell on his face and said, "I will weep, but weep not thou!" God answered Enoch and said, "If thou [Enoch] wilt not suffer me to weep, I God will go whither thou canst not come and there I will lament"—in other words, it's none of your business if I want to weep. The significant thing is that the strange conversation in both stories is between God and a particular individual—Enoch. How would Joseph Smith know that?
In another text we are told,
Continue reading "The Pearl of Great Price God Weeping; A Nifty Jewish Touch" »
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