ping
Voodoo and Hoodoo include ritual sweeping as important spiritual exercises.
The floor cleaning ritual was originated by an offshoot of the Mithraeae, a cult known as the “Bissells.”
Sunshine Carpet Cleaners?
Symptomatic of the later Roman Empire, when the various Emperors claimed the mantle of deity, that they were Gods themselves, equal to the modified Greco-Roman pagan pantheon. The problem with this practice is that it degrades the source belief and eventually it destroys both the claimant and belief! It is one thing to praise the ‘Divine Caesar’ or ‘Divine Augustus’, but when you get to the nadir, the year of the ‘Five Caesars’ (193AD), the public has become very jaded!
Thus comes the search for a real religion. While there were many in practice in the years leading to Constantine, the major popular one was the ‘Cult of Isis’, coming out of Egypt and its antiquity. At its height in the 200s under Caracalla, it rivaled the established Greco-Roman Pantheon and the official deification of the Emperors. A Goddess religion, it also was a cloaked religion, where initiates, male & female, participated in ‘the mysteries’
As always, where there is a Goddess, there is a rival God mystery religion that was the Mithraism of this thread. Male oriented, a bull as a representation, it appears to have come out of Persia and was taken up by the military as many had served on the eastern borders.
Yet, despised and persecuted, even more than the rebellious Jews, were the followers of the fish, the fisherman, the Christ, who came out of that troublesome Syria-Galilee area. They got no public temples, no right to worship and were instead prosecuted and persecuted for their aberrant belief. Still, every wave of martyrs produced more adherents with stronger affiliations. Bit by bit, belief in the risen God crept into Roman society to where slave and aristocrat worshipped together.
Then, in 306AD, Constantius, inheritor of his father’s rank as a Caesar in the Tetrarchy established by Diocletian, started from his base in Roman Britain to take control of the entire Roman Empire. In 312, Constantius fought his strongest rival, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome itself. Outnumbered, he gave his soldiers a new sigil, the Chi-Rho, ☧, a cipher of the Christ, that he said was given to him in a vision with the slogan of “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (In this sign thou shalt conquer). As history relates, he did conquer and united the fracturing Roman Empire under him as a single ruler by 324.
While he waited to his death (337) to accept Baptism and official personal acceptance of Christianity, it was his effort that created the ‘Edict of Milan’ which legalized ALL RELIGIONS within the Roman Empire. As such it removed the persecutions and restored confiscated properties. As history informs us, though all religions were legalized, it is Christianity that survives in direct line from those days!
A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896. |
LXII. Terence, this is stupid stuff |
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Heh, but how hard would that be? ;^)
Sounds like my wife's plans for my weekend activities.