Occasional literary links, amusements, culture, politics, and rants

On literary prizes

by Maud | February 8th, 2013

At the New York Times’ Room for Debate, some of my thoughts on literary prizes. (And on only recently discovering Rabindranath Tagore.)

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The Begats

morgandria:
Beloved ones, gone but never forgotten.
I didn’t realize exactly how prevalent ancestor veneration was in Western Europe before Christianity intervened. The church triumphed so fully over ancestor altars and household gods, switching in the saints, that most Americans of European descent aren’t even aware of this history.
The best book I’ve read on the subject (despite the slightly awkward translation from the French) is Claude Lecouteux’s The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the dead were the stakes in an ideological struggle that aimed to replace the worship of the dead — which was of capital importance in pagan beliefs — with funeral rituals and adoration of the saints. The abrupt irruption of revenants and ghosts into the texts of the era is moreover connected with a modification of kinship relations. Ancestor worship made way for the cult of saints, and the old revenants disappeared to the benefit of immaterial ghosts (the results of hallucinations and nightmares). Only the dead that manifested in good visions (i.e., those originating in God) had the right to be cited.
Some modern Pagans — like morgandria — do practice Samhain.
02/25/15

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