Vision Serpent

Higgins

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I'm looking at Maya Cosmos...Freidel et ali, 1993, a speculative and probably out-of-date book on Mayan shamanism and Kingship.

My intention is to bring up some questions about religious myths or myths about religion.

AS a way of beginning in a round-about-way...I refer to this image of Lady Xok ( Lady Shock) and her vision serpent.

http://archaeology.about.com/od/northamerica/ig/Ancient-Americas-/Maya-Lady-Xok.htm

Where apparently Lady Xok is "conjuring" an originally 4th century Teotihuacanian war god. Only in the image that vision serpent is only a way of communicating with the founder of the dynasty of which Lady Xok is a member...but the founder defeated the Teotihuacanians and appropriated their god.

In what ways are myth and religion a part of our view of Lady Xok's image? In what way were they parts of her own actions?
 
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Shweta

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It's an interesting image and background, but I'm failing to comprehend the question.
This might just be me being out of it...
 

kdnxdr

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I got that you want to discuss myth and religion. I interpreted your post to say that you believe them to be essentially one and the same.
 

Shweta

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What I'm wondering is if we should be pondering syncretism in particular or religion in general.
 

Higgins

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context

It's an interesting image and background, but I'm failing to comprehend the question.
This might just be me being out of it...

In the context of last week: a now-banned theist was complaining in the non-theist subforum that people had a lot of misconceptions (or "myths" in the
ghastly quasi-ideologically pseudo-"charged" language of our day) about "religion" (by which he apparently meant some box where you go and listen to sermons that make you a "better" person). I said fine, I'll go start a thread on myths in relation to religion and see what happens.
As I expected, nothing did and now I have to explain this all as a rhetorical gesture gone wrong for the basic reason that people who want to "debate" (another idiotic term) actually have only a very narrow and ideologically motivated view of whatever they are "debating"....
 

Higgins

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Sci Fi

And what's with that big picture of a bomber at the bottom of your posts? Image? Religion? Myth?

It sort of stands in for my WIP:

Erotic Classic High Cold War High-Fi Sci-Fi: Lots of vacuum tubes and Thermonuclear Devices and High Heels. The B-58 Hustler is still the top model. When this Baby Blows, Greenland is going to look like Iceland, only more radioactive. So far I haven't gotten the MC out of his Bachelor Pad, but maybe he will be venturing out soon.

The irony of the B-58 was that it was such a perfectly Cold War fantasy aircraft (built for making supersonic high altitude nuclear attacks) that it was more or less useless under real conditions and incredibly expensive to maintain and was only in service for a few years after its operational introduction in 1962. The Teotihuacanian War god was a far superior weapon technology even as somebody else's vision transfer device for looking into the deep past of their own dynasty.
 

Higgins

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Terms

I got that you want to discuss myth and religion. I interpreted your post to say that you believe them to be essentially one and the same.

My theory is that the terms "myth" and "religion" cover a tremendous mass of highly diverse material.
 

McDuff

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In what ways are myth and religion a part of our view of Lady Xok's image? In what way were they parts of her own actions?
I need to check - you're asking about what we see the balance is between the Mayan conception of religion during their own lives, as opposed to the weight which we give it from a historical perspective, right? Because if you are, I'd say that it's impossible to know for certain whether the religious bias of the artifacts remaining from most ancient cultures is because religion was highly important to them, because religious types were responsible for the narratives and thus manufactured a disproportionate amount of information-conveying artifacts, or if our own biases tend to make us interpret ordinary things as having a spiritual significance that an ancient Mayan would have been surprised to find there.
 

Higgins

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Dysfunctional Religion

I need to check - you're asking about what we see the balance is between the Mayan conception of religion during their own lives, as opposed to the weight which we give it from a historical perspective, right? Because if you are, I'd say that it's impossible to know for certain whether the religious bias of the artifacts remaining from most ancient cultures is because religion was highly important to them, because religious types were responsible for the narratives and thus manufactured a disproportionate amount of information-conveying artifacts, or if our own biases tend to make us interpret ordinary things as having a spiritual significance that an ancient Mayan would have been surprised to find there.

The Classic Maya make a good test case. Their preserved symbol system has been interpreted as a dysfunctional religion in at least two ways: first as a totally esoteric astronomically-obsessed elite cult that was not in touch with political reality (ie everybody up to Titania P.'s work in 1960) and more recently as a symbolic order too closely tied to the day-to-day politics of very local dynasties to either create empires or even weather minor social upheavals.