BringerOfJoy wrote:Daryl wrote:
Did we miss the memo?
I think we did miss it some time back.
Because of this commandment, (not JUST the law of Moses; but one of the 10 commandments) Jews did not have any pictures, statues, etc. in their temples or synagogues of people or animals. They took it pretty seriously.
Not true. Their temples where choke full of sacred imagery and symbolism. Also, the Jews have always loved the words of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Joel, ext... Who all speak of strange animals, beast and imagery. Anyone who knows the origins of these images undoubtedly knows the language of the prophets. (symbols and images)
The first time it really struck me that perhaps we were missing the boat on this one; was when I was walking around Orem/Provo one day, and walked by this little store that had tons of little statues/busts out front of Joseph and Hyrum, and other quintessential mormon stuff that you could have them all over your yard as lawn ornaments.
Maybe this is why they removed all of the Joseph/Hyrum statues from the Salt Lake temple.? The SL temple use to be flooded with them. Sadly, yes sadly, they have ALL been removed because latter generations failed to see the symbolic meaning and thus became more and more difficult to explain. Like this one...
Very cool!
I grew up in Catholic country, and I remember all the little "Mary," and "Jesus" and various saints ornaments in the lawns. I knew then that we had "arrived." And not in any good way.
On another note (not intended for anyone in general. Might be a little off topic) Not sure how many are aware of this but ALL ancient cultures, including the Hebrews participated in "sun worship" which is equivalent to Saturn Worship. In fact the star-worshippers specifically distinguished it from our Sun today by calling it the best sun, the primeval sun, the central sun. Comparative mythology has established that almost without exception every ancient culture worshipped the planet Saturn as its earliest deity:
Early starworshippers esteemed Saturn as the founder of a lost Golden Age/Paradise which is a supreme tenet of the ancient mysteries. To these global traditions, we can now compare the archaic “Saturn myth”: Saturn as founder of the Golden Age; Saturn as creator-king; Saturn as primeval sun or best sun; Saturn as god of the day (the archaic "day" beginning at sunset); Saturn as the resting god or god ruling the "day of rest"; Saturn at the cosmic center and summit; Saturn ruling from the celestial pole.
Many ancient nations commemorated the era before the fall, the harmonious condition of the "first time," by designating one day of the week as a holy day, the Sabbath. Thus, The Hebrew Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, was the day of Saturn, and named the Sun accordingly. So was the seventh and most sacred day of the Babylonian and Phoenician weeks. For the Romans this commemorative day was Saturni dies, "Saturn's day." The same day passed into the Anglo-Saxon calendar as the "day of Seater [Saturn]," which, became our own Saturday.
At one point the Hebrews regarded their race as having been "Saturnian" in the beginning, when they lived under the rule of the creator El. That is, the Hebrews honored the same ancestral tie to Saturn as did the Romans.
There are many common misconception about the Book of Abraham, but an indisputable fact is Joseph's explanation of the facsimiles are what the Egyptians (idol worshippers) themselves believed the images to mean to them. I know, many here and many if not all church scholars would disagree with this, but just read Joseph explanations..."CALLED BY THE EGYPTIANS". Or Abraham 1:26 Egyptians didn't have the Priesthood, but the did there best to mimic it and good enough to be part of our Holy Scriptures and is the last of revealed scripture.
The Chaldeans called Saturn/God 'El', which is where Abraham recieved it, yet Abraham knew who truly deserved the name. Abraham was then told to go teach the Egyptians who Kolob (Saturn) was a type for, thus worshipping the hosts of heaven is an abomination, but the greatest of all the stars is like God, this is who we worship, the creator, not the creation.
Same thing applies to the Children of Israel, Moses had not even come down from the Mountain before they where making golden idols in the "IMAGE" of there god. Now why would they think that their god was a calf? In essence, they were worshipping the means/agents (image) that God Himself delivered them, and not giving credit to God. They worshipped the creations and not the Creator, even the True God. But regardless, these images were awe inspiring and the ancient world were more than familiar with them and all these images have direct relation to "the creation", "in the beginning". The image of the Beast that Isaiah describes in vivid detail had been around for ages. Isaiah barrows the image from the Babylonia creation myth and ritual. The battle between Murduk and Tiamat. Every ancient cultures reenacted this occasion in the most holy of places (Temple) and New Year festivals.
Saturnalia is the roman celebration of the return of Saturn to our earth, when we will enter a golden age, or millenium era. The role of this memory in the ancient cultures carries vast implications for our understanding of the events that provoked human imagination in the myth-making epoch. Early man yearned for a return to paradise. Every coronation of a king, every New Year's festival, monumental construction, every recitation of temple hymns and prayers, every holy war, every sacrifice to the gods was motivated by a desire to recapture some aspect of the Golden Age, to live, if only for a symbolic moment, in that enchanted, opening chapter in the book of gods and wonders.
The Saturn myth is just a window to a vastly larger story. It can now be demonstrated that there are hundreds of mythic archetypes or points of agreement between the early cultures. Together they reveal an eerie coherence that could not be accidental. Random speculations or self-serving inventions from one culture to another could not have produced the underlying unity that has been documented in recent years.
We’ve paid far too little attention to the motives driving the ancient world. Their desperate yearning to recover the semblance of a lost cosmic order. Their collective efforts to replicate, in architecture, the towering forms claimed to have existed in primeval times. Their festive recreations, through mystery plays and symbolic rites, of cosmic violence and disorder. Their repetition, through ritual sacrifice, of the deaths or ordeals of the gods. Their brutal and ritualistic wars of expansion, repeating on the battlefield the cosmic devastation wrought in the wars of the gods.
A global myth declares that the world has not always been as it is experienced now. In a former time, man lived in a kind of paradise, close to the gods. It was the Golden Age. Throughout an eternal spring, the earth produced abundantly, free from the seasonal cycles of decay and rebirth. And under this remarkable cosmic order, man experienced neither war nor sickness, neither hunger nor any requirement of human labor.
Bear in mind that the myth-makers did not just recount a charming tale; they strove desperately to recover what was lost. In the infancy of civilization collective activity reflects a singular reference to the age of the gods--the honoring of the gods through celebration, representation, reenactment, codification, and massive construction activity. In fact, there are numerous grounds for saying that civilization itself was the outcome of this fundamentally religious activity. Hugh Nibley completely agrees with this.
Perhaps the most accomplished analyst of mythology in modern times was the late Mircea Eliade, (Hugh Nibley's most favorite person to quote by far) chairman of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion. From his meticulous, lifelong survey of the subject, professor Eliade drew a stunning conclusion: literally every component of early civilizations--from religion to art and architecture--expressed symbolically the desire to recover and to re-live the lost Golden Age. That which symbolically transported the participant back to the First Time, the Golden Age, was sacred. That which did not was transient and mundane, of no interest.
