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The following paragraphs offer a brief history of the "Mother Mary doctrine." It was originally written for the "Sensibility: 1-Minute" writing.
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If knowledge of the next world is resisted even by those already inhabiting the next world, then we shall not be surprised if ones still in the flesh attempt to offer rebuttal. They can try. Shall we be impressed?
Counterargument, lame as it might be, tends to center about the following:
“I believe in Mother Mary, she helps me in my life and answers my prayers.”
Well, that's nice, but what's really happening is that you have Spirit Guides who help you, as you allow for help, and it is not Mary who leads you.
“I don’t appreciate my beliefs being called a cult. I don’t belong to a Jim-Jones group. My church is respectable and does much charitable work in the world.”
Cults always define "cult" to exclude themselves. The root idea of “cult” is “to cut,” that is, to pare and refine, to systematize and order. What is being redistilled? A version of reality itself – an errant one, in favor of private agenda of some Dear Leader.
Jim Jones was just an extreme example of drinking the kool-aid. Your church or political party or scientific materialism may be respectable, but only among those led by a subsuming fear of death, which animates every cult. Your church may do much charitable work in the world, but so do many secular organizations (see "CharityNavigator.com"). And there are good people in every group. Charitable work is done in spite of fear-based doctrines, not because of them.
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more than drinking the koolaid
The long reach of cultism encompasses much more than crackpot churches. The root idea of cult offers the sense of "cut." This core concept of "cut" leads us to images of refinement and refashioning and, by extension, development, control, pattern, order, and system.
Cultism as systemization finds a ready home in religion and philosophy which seek to regulate and redistill the patterning and ordering of ideas. However, in a larger sense, the spirit of cultism extends to every facet of society. We find it scheming and sedulously at work in politics, academia, family, corporations, entertainment, science, artistry – anywhere power might be gained by capturing credulous and fear-based minds.
See the “cultism” page for a full discussion.
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“I think the book by Charlotte Dresser is just someone’s imagination. We know nothing about what happens after death.”
This very charge is a product of imagination. The scientific evidence for the afterlife has been accepted by 20 Nobel laureates, and petty gainsaying by detractors will not overturn what’s firmly known. We understand a great deal about the other side, and only those who fear this knowledge attempt to deny it.
“The doctrine of Mother Mary [or some other deity] has been around for centuries. Who do you think you are speaking against this holy teaching?”
I think I’m a human being, with critical-reasoning faculties, and as I survey the evidence for this teaching, and a great many insubstantial others, I find there’s much less here than meets the eye.
But don’t worry. No one’s going to force you to believe anything or do anything you don’t want to do. You can believe in Mother Mary as much as you like – until you cross over, and it doesn’t work for you anymore, as you suffer, terrorized, in a “dark closet without walls.”
There's a natural process of education and purification in play here. But why wait until suffering forces you to be more open-minded? Seek the truth now, live in it, and rejoice in what you’ll find to be something far greater than Mother Mary. Find your joy within, and not from any external source.
Mary, dear person that I’m sure she is, has long ago taken up residence in much higher levels of existence, and all of the idolatrous commotion, down here, about her vaunted "sainthood" and "godhood," that she is the real power in heaven, that she is more compassionate than God, deeply, and more than deeply galls and sickens her.
Editor’s note: See historian Kenneth Clark’s survey of how the Mary doctrine arose more than a thousand years after the time of Christ and developed into a new political tool of power-and-control by Big Religion. The early church knew nothing of this pagan idea - mirroring the ancient mystery cults' ubiquitous Queen Of Heaven - and would have quickly disowned it. As one reads the thousands of reports from citizens of Summerland, there is not one word, one atom, of any presence of a deified Mary over there. Here's why:
Clark outlines the rise of Mary in the Church’s pantheon of the gods. “The earliest cult figure of the Virgin and Child of any size is a painted wooden statue in St Denis [Cathedral] which must date from about 1130.” The troubadour-poetry movement began c.1100.
The ascendancy of Mary in the Church was fueled by a general rise of optimism about life itself after the year 1000. Prior to the new millenium, the masses of humankind lived in dread of a Second Coming with a “rule by rod of iron.” When the year 1000 failed to produce a warlord Jesus, it’s as if civilization - what was left of it after the Dark Ages - began to breathe easier. Confidence and hope in the future began to assemble itself and emerge. However, this is only a small part of why Mary became coronated as goddess.
Clark informs us that none of several early cathedrals were dedicated to The Virgin. However, after the construction of Chartres Cathedral, largely completed by 1220,
“the greatest churches in France were [now, suddenly,] dedicated to her -- Paris, Amiens, Laon, Rouen, Rheims. What was the reason for this sudden change? I used to think [said Clark] that it must have been a result of the crusades: that the returning warriors brought back an admiration for the womanly virtues of gentleness and compassion, as opposed to the male virtues of courage and physical strength which they themselves represented. I am not so sure about this now…”
What was happening in Western Europe in the thirteenth century that provided amelioration for the worship of Mary?
Mary's impromptu and sudden deification was part of the Troubadour movement
Dr. Joseph Campbell said this:
"The whole troubadour tradition was extinguished in Provence in the so-called Albigensian Crusade of 1209."
The early 1200s witnessed the extermination by the RCC of the Troubadours [who, from Summerland, inspired “The Wedding Song”], of courtly love, of chivalry, a state of devotion, says Clark - an
“utter subjection to the will of an almost unapproachable woman; this belief that no sacrifice was too great, that a whole lifetime might properly be spent in paying court to some exacting lady or suffering on her behalf -- this would have seemed to the Romans or to the Vikings not only absurd but unbelievable; and yet for hundreds of years it passed unquestioned. It inspired a vast literature -- from Chretien de Troyes to Shelley … [to this day] we still retain a number of chivalrous gestures; we raise our hats to ladies, and let them pass first through doors, and, in America, push in their seats at table. And we still subscribe to the fantasy that they were chaste and pure beings, in whose presence we couldn't tell certain stories or pronounce certain words.”
Clark says that, as one studies the sensuous poetry of 800 years ago, often one cannot be certain if the woman in view is The Virgin or another woman as object of desire! I think the ambiguity is offered by design.
This generalized wave of adoration and idealization of women in the thirteenth century found near-sensual expression in the worship of Mary, suddenly elevated to the throne, now deemed to be “Mother of God, Queen of Heaven.” Before the 1200s, however, this would have been a very new idea, raising eyebrows, not a few. Early Christianity would have quickly rejected this notion as utter heresy.
tool of Satan, origin of evil
The Great Rogue Church, for centuries, had preached, via the "church fathers," that women were second-class, unfit for leadership, tool of Satan, downfall of Adam, origin of sin in the world, cause of Christ's death, and the like. There was even open debate among Church intellectuals as to whether women were "made in the image," meaning, were they, in fact, human beings?!
Tertullian: “And do you not know that you (women) are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert — that is, death — even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself… Eve, expelled from paradise, (Eve) already dead, would also have coveted these things, I imagine!” Tertullian goes on to offer argument that women’s desire for ornamentation might be traced back to the sinning angels that fell from God’s grace.
Jerome: women are the root of all evil.
John Chrysostom: Concerning biblical women, they "were great characters, great women and admirable… Yet did they in no case outstrip the men, but occupied the second rank … the male sex enjoyed the higher honor. Man was first formed; and elsewhere he shows their superiority…. He wishes the man to have the preeminence in every way… The woman taught once [in Eden], and ruined all.”
Council of Elvira: decreed that “a woman of the faith who has left an adulterous husband of the faith and marries another, her marrying in this manner is prohibited. If she has so married, she may not at any more receive communion—unless he that she has left has since departed from this world.”
Editor’s note: Certain writers as “defenders of the faith” attempt to mitigate this draconian record by pointing out that minority sects within the Church offered a kinder, gentler view; also, that there were deaconess offices for women. All this is true, but the fact remains that women were not offered any leadership positions worthy of note and none of these allowed women to teach in terms of public presence. We are more convinced by what actually happened than by spin-doctors’ efforts to rewrite history.
began as one thing, became another
Fast forward about a thousand years after the “church fathers.” Having instantiated a view of the female as agent of the devil and even questionably human, the Church is now confronted with the rising tide of Troubadour influence. Attitudes were changing concerning the value and dignity of women.
What was the Church to do against this growing wave of appreciation of women’s role in society? An "infallible" church could never admit error, and so it responded in a political, Machiavellian way. If it could no longer credibly vilify women, then it would assume the role of “leader of the parade.”
The "doctrine of Mary" began as one thing but developed into another. The Mary-concept was hijacked, taken from the Troubadours.
Despotic Ecclesia adopted the "Mary doctrine" as its own and even claimed authorship of the idea; suggesting that, but for its blessing, Mary could not have been honored - eventually, they made her "queen of heaven," and created all sorts of holy days and rituals for her.
In the two "Weaponized Art" writings, we saw this two-faced political maneuvering, this "leading the parade from behind" tactic, often employed in Church history. See what the Church did in the case of Francis of Assisi; after burning his followers at the stake, they made him a saint - just as they did with Mary, after demonizing all women.
Editor’s note: “The Wedding Song”, a message from Spirit-Guide Troubadours, redresses an historical imbalance in play for millennia, that of patriarchal societies subjugating women. See discussion in this regard including the “Mary doctrine” on the “verse two, part two” page of TWS.
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