At the turn of the common era, male cults devoted to a goddess that flourished throughout the broad region extending from the Mediterranean to South Asia. While galli were missionizing the Roman Empire, kalū, kurgarrū, and assinnu continued to carry out ancient rites in the temples of Mesopotamia, and the third-gender predecessors of the hijra were clearly evident. It should also be mentioned of the eunuch priests of Artemis at Ephesus; the western Semitic qedeshim, the male “temple prostitutes” known from the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic texts of the late second millennium; and the keleb, priests of Astarte at Kition and elsewhere.
Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy
Although the veld is too arid to bloom like that of the West Coast of Namaqualand, even when there is some spring rain, what does appear is highly unusual and often hauntingly beautiful. Vaalputs, a nuclear waste repository, has been sited between Bushmanland and Namaqualand, and acts as a de facto nature reserve. (South Africa)
“Climate change can feel like a looming apocalypse, but from a Christian perspective, doom also includes possibility.”
“Every something is an echo of nothing.”
― John Cage
“Again, it’s just the music. Feeling like transposed time is as tangible as a dream you’ve mixed up with an actual memory” (C Monster on American Zen, 2016).
Andrew Feenberg writes that “human beings can only act on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical consequence of being an embodied being. Every one of our interventions returns to us in some form as a feedback from our objects.”
the ability to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing,”
“meeting someone is God’s doing but parting is what humans do themselves”