Remember Also That The Sun Is A Star.

Remember also that the sun is a star.

@mistixs

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Am I more than you bargained for yet?

Mystic-lite and substance-strained

Foolish, listless, garbled, pained

Seeking silence, craving peace

Murdering dreams in waves of sleep

Medicated though I be

Restless fervor powers me

And of this silence none can tell

What ought to be and ought to hell

So page by page here writ my mind

Hollowed out I now confide

In you my readers, friends, and foes

To look beyond the stilted prose

And find the dreams I all but lost.

My rhyme declines.

But finding you is worth the cost.

How can I cope with the shame of this perfection? My unstoppable force meets your immovable object The sacred pulsar pings off my dead ventricle walls Consuming fire, cauterize my heart before I die a thousand deaths by smoke inhalation. The good Lord left off your allergy labels WARNING: CONTAINS THE UNIVERSE And your stars aligned with mine though you know not who you are You are Castor and I am Pollux You are justice and I am praise And what looked like the Fates' collision course Was an ill-fated skew line Eros striking us with different arrows Cast down but forsaken Verboten but not forgotten Symbiotic but not uniform You will never know how I die daily at your altar Though I paint the night sky with my blood. Now we see through a glass darkly And though never face to face Your smile is worth the sacrifice.

Someone asked a good question yesterday that got me thinking: why are some mythologies more “mainstream” than others? Where I’m from, everyone knows at least a couple things about the Egyptian, Norse, and Greek (and sometimes Roman) pantheons, but no one’s ever discussed those of East Asia, or South America, for example. 

My theory: Eurocentrism and colonialism.

Egypt, Greece, and Rome all have some relevant proximity to the history of Christianity. Egypt features prominently in the Exodus, and Greece and Rome were important cultural shapers in the time of Jesus and Paul. When Christianity spread and gained the force of empire through Constantine and others and spread up through Europe, it dominated nearly all the local traditions in its wake. This domination continued through the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, India, and others -- history is written by the colonizers, so it makes sense that the prominent revival pantheons among European-descended pagans aren’t those of the conquered people but those of their own people (Norse) and those that are “necessary” to provide historical weight to Christianity.

Completely conjecture, but this was interesting to think about today.

Organization vs. Mobilization: "We coagulate like organelles in an amoeba, like a swarm to a colony, ferrous fragments to a magnet of hope And as one mind, axon to axon advance to bend the very fabric of time"

That’s really interesting and something I hadn’t thought of; pagan traditions based on the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons really are solely revival traditions. It seems strange to me that those traditions that are still in practice would be the ones to be overlooked. I mean, there are LIVING PEOPLE that we can learn from and we (by we I mean a lot of European-descended people, myself included) choose the religions that have been in dormancy for centuries... it’s like we needed one more way to assert colonial dominance: not letting people of color be the experts or owners of any of our religions....

That went a little into rant territory, but your point is very well taken.

Someone asked a good question yesterday that got me thinking: why are some mythologies more “mainstream” than others? Where I’m from, everyone knows at least a couple things about the Egyptian, Norse, and Greek (and sometimes Roman) pantheons, but no one’s ever discussed those of East Asia, or South America, for example. 

My theory: Eurocentrism and colonialism.

Egypt, Greece, and Rome all have some relevant proximity to the history of Christianity. Egypt features prominently in the Exodus, and Greece and Rome were important cultural shapers in the time of Jesus and Paul. When Christianity spread and gained the force of empire through Constantine and others and spread up through Europe, it dominated nearly all the local traditions in its wake. This domination continued through the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, India, and others – history is written by the colonizers, so it makes sense that the prominent revival pantheons among European-descended pagans aren’t those of the conquered people but those of their own people (Norse) and those that are “necessary” to provide historical weight to Christianity.

Completely conjecture, but this was interesting to think about today.