Clivedurdle

Wiki is poor on the celts - it notes there was no urbanisation. But Bibracte France was minting coins from 300 BCE and covered 330 acres, it was a substantial town based on nearby mines. In Southern Germany between Stuttgart and Ulm is a celtic town with walls enclosing a conurbation of six square miles - Rome was a quarter of that size in the first century CE.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Clivedurdle,



I don't see a connection with the Mary in Caesar's Messiah.

I don't really see the Druid connection either. I see her more as a Jewish High Priest's daughter who ran off to become a Mime Actress. She wrote a really terrific play with a great role for herself in it and voila...

Warmly,

PhilosopherJay

Clivedurdle

But for a woman to take on a priest's role must have had a precedent - look at the hassles in modern xianity about women priests.

The Celts had no problem about this - the Romans and many others did!

I do not believe people come up with completely alien concepts - if you look carefully it is probably from the mind set of someone else in close contact who legitimises the alternate beliefs.

I am unaware of a feminist streak in Judaism, but maybe it has been hidden. All I am saying is that these alleged pagans and dabblers in sorcery did have feminist views, with human sacrifice.

I love the idea of xianity being the invention of a woman! I am trying to build up some foundations of what influenced her!

PhilosopherJay

Hi Clivedurdle,

One should remember that for 9 of its 78 year existence as a free and independent state in ancient times, Israel was ruled by a woman, Queen Alexandra. Compare that to the United States where no woman has ruled for its entire 230 year history. One may well argue that the power of women in an ancient Jewish society was far greater than in a Christian dominated society in modern times. Josephus writes constantly of their power in Judea.

During the early first Century, with the liberal inheritance laws brought about by Livia Drusilla and Augustus Caesar, women obtained great economic power in Judea and other Roman provinces. So I don't think we need to see Celtic culture as having necessarily an influence in this case.

Incidently, the importance of actresses at that time can be observed in something that Josephus (Ant. 19.1.5) reports. He talks of the actress Quintilla, "he made use of Quintilia for a witness to them; a woman she was much beloved by many that frequented the theater, and particularly by Pompedius, on account of her great beauty." The torture of this actress led directly to the assasination of Emperor Caius (Caligula) in 41.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

mountainman

The Romans before they were conquered by Constantine with the new
and strange religion were Hellenic. The goddess, the Oracles... the
Hellenic priests were often women. Or should we call them Pagan
priests so as to confuse the issue that they were once by tradition
Hellenic, for many many hundreds of years BCE.




Pete Brown

mountainman

Hi Jay,

Some comments:

1) Where a story could not be comitted to the written word
it was remembered often in verse and song, without the
recourse to writing. One example of this is the modus
operandi of the sophists during the Second Sophistic
period in the second and third century Roman empire.
This may need to be referenced amidst your options.

2) Literature can also arise under sponsorship deals which
may involve other motives for writing other than the narration
of history. eg: Josephus, Philostratus. This is not to say such
written under sponsorship may not be history, only that there
is introduced, apart from the author and the work, a sponsor
of the author and the work, and the motivations of both
parties may not necessarily coincide.

3) To what extent has there been any summarisation of the
non historical positions in all those sedimentary layers of
comments upon comments by scholarship? And specifically,
have any other authors in the past made reference to a
perceived necessity to differentiate between the frames
of reference of history, and literature. From other threads,
if I read the vets here, bulk scholarship still "lives and breathes"
in the historical positionality frame of reference, and very
little if any alternate dimensionality (either myth or literary)
has been formally explored.


Best wishes,



Pete Brown