Includes articles and resources on the religion pertaining to the Vedantas, spirituality, the soul, deities, and quotations from the scriptures. Concentration Camp Lists. Afghanistan Land of the Afghans Arachosia Khorasan British South Asia Southern Turkestan. The Death of God A Speculation. I have been reading William Butler Yeats strangest book, A Vision, for thehow many times has it been now At least once for each of his twenty eight phases of the Moon, surely, since I first picked up a battered paperback copy from a used book store in Seattle, one of those cramped and marvelous places where bookshelves lean whispering to one another over the top of narrow aisles. Yeats, as I hope most people still dimly remember, was a brilliant poet fewer recall that he was also one of the leading figures in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the premier magical order in Britain at the turn of the last century. A Vision came out of the marriage of those two passions of his, and also out of his marriage with fellow Golden Dawn adept Georgianna Hyde Lees, who provided most of the raw material for the book. A Vision is a book about cycles. Starting from the basic concept of two forces, one moving toward unity and the other toward differentiation, Yeats sets out a sequence of twenty eight phases of the cycle formed by these forces, related symbolically to the twenty eight days of the lunar month he then shows that every human personality falls into one of these phases then he goes on to trace out the same cycle, with the same twenty eight phases, in each individual life, in the process of reincarnation, in the rise and fall of styles and fashions and artistic movements, and in the rise and fall of civilizations. ZDE-0Q4wO3k/0.jpg' alt='Film Mahabharata Full Episode Sub Indo' title='Film Mahabharata Full Episode Sub Indo' />It really is a bravura performance, with few parallels other than the I Ching, the great Chinese treatise on the theory and practice of cyclical change. Each time I reread A Vision, though, some different theme strikes me more forcefully than the others. This time its the way Yeats talks about the history of religion. In the preface, dedicated to his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound, Yeats wrote Oedipus lay upon the earth at the middle point between four sacred objects, was there washed as the dead are washed, and thereupon passed with Theseus to the woods heart until amidst the sound of thunder earth opened, riven by love, and he sank down soul and body into the earth. I would have him balance Christ who, crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body, and I see him altogether separated from Platos Athens, from all that talk of the Good and the One, from all that cabinet of perfection, an image of Homers age. Then, later in the same introduction What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, St. Catherine of Siena and Michelangelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt ends of a seesaw What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular one wise, the other foolish one fair, the other foul one divine, the other devilishWhat if there is an arithmetic or a geometry that can exactly measure the slope of a balance, the dip of a scale, and so date the coming of that somethingThose of my readers who are Christians, or who grew up in one or another of the Christian sects and have not quite left it behind, may find Yeats equation of Christ and Oedipus blasphemousand of course that was wholly deliberate on his part, and helps make his point. When he penned the introduction to A Vision in 1. Oedipus had haunted the collective mind of Europe for a good many years already. Eliphas Levis book The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, which kickstarted the modern magical revival when it first saw print in 1. Oedipus and the cycle of Greek legends in which his life plays a central role paintings of Oedipus and the Sphinx were accordingly standard fare for the Symbolist painters of the next half century, most of whom at least dabbled in occultism. Ive wondered more than once, for that matter, if Sigmund Freud chose the figure of Oedipus as the iconic image for his most famous theory as part of the covert conversation with occultism that plays so large a role in his psychology, and burst into the open with the work of his student and rival Carl Jung. It bears remembering, though, that the ancient Greek play from which Yeats borrowed the image was originally performed as part of a religious festival, and had the same sacred character at that time that the passion play at Oberammergau had two thousand and odd years later. Oedipus unknowingly committed the worst sins the ancient Greeks could imagine by killing his father and marrying his mother he tore his own eyes out when the truth was revealed he was shunned thereafter by all but his daughters, who stayed beside him in his wanderings and he finally received pardon from the gods and descended alive into the body of the living earth. To the ancient Greeks, that made him as potent a talisman of human salvation as later generations found in Christ, who was traditionally without sin, suffered injury at others hands rather than his own, was surrounded by adoring crowds in his wanderings, finally pardoned the worldFather, forgive them, they know not what they doand was received alive into Heaven. Sometimes, gazing out my study window on the roofs of the largely Catholic and working class neighborhood where I live these days, I wonder what was it like to live at that period in the ancient world when the meaning and power was trickling out of the story of Oedipus, and an entire world of spiritual experience was slowly becoming opaqueThen I stop, and remember that the same process is unfolding around me right now. Im far from the only person to notice that something very strange has been happening to Christianity for quite a long time now. The liberal denominations that used to be the mainstream capitulated to atheism back in the 1. God whose weekly worship theyre paid to conductand now function mostly as charitable foundations and political action committees with a sideline in rites of passage. The conservative denominations that took their place on the public stage in the 1. Jesus, their faith amounts in practice to defending the social customs of the 1. Republican candidates. Its not at all uncommon, historically speaking, for religious institutions to turn into sock puppets for competing political elites, and thats an important part of whats happened here. Still, Ive come to think theres something deeper going on. Ministry Of Sound Electro House Sessions 2. My position as a sometime spokesperson for a quirky minority faith that gets nearly all its members from those whove left the mainstream has given me an unusually detailed idea of why people bail out of the established religions of our time. We can leave aside the people who grew up as atheist materialists and found the secular religion of progress unsatisfying their concerns are important, but not relevant to the topic Im trying to explore just now. Its the former Christians I want to discuss here. People quit Christianity for a great many reasons. Abuse of power by religious professionals is a massive factor. Every single person whos ever talked to me about why they quit the Roman Catholic church, for example, cited personal experiences of serious, repeated abuses of power by Catholic clergy and religious, which were condoned and enabled by the church hierarchy, as the chief thing that drove them away.