Mar 24 2009
The Day of Blood
If we were ancient Romans we’d now be enduring the toughest day of an two week long religious festival. March 24th was the “Day of Blood” during the Feast of Cybele. This celebration was held to ensure agricultural fertility for the next year. The festival commemorates the death and resurrection of Cybele’s son and lover Attis. He died when he castrated himself by allowing a pig to bite off his genitals.
The Day of Blood was the high point of the festival. Cybele’s priests would publicly draw massive amounts of blood from their arms and offer it to the goddess. At this point the worshippers had reached such frenzy that some would castrate and flagellate themselves in the streets, in imitation of Attis. Others would cut off various parts of their body and run through the city throwing fingers, penises, genitals, hands, and sometimes even arms in houses at random.
The Taurobolium often occurred on this day as well. This was a ritual where worshippers (usually males) who were looking to have their sins washed away and be “born again” were bathed in the blood of a castrated bull.
Talk about holiday stress.
As weird as that sounds to everyone…
That’s exactly how weird every religion sounds to me…
Yeah, I see where you and Monsieur dsent are coming from. I sort of wrote this up with you two in mind.
But I do beleive there is a God and I don’t think I’m nuts for believing in one. I do not conceive of God in the form of Cybele, or Dr. Manhattan, or a white bearded old man sitting in a throne on high.
I do believe there is some sort of overriding intelligence that designed us, our world. and our universe. Call it the collective unconscious or “The Force”. Seems logical to me that there is a Creator.
Otherwise you gotta believe we are just here through some random process. Which is the same as saying that your home was built by firing all the building material 300 feet into the air and that it all came down as a complete building with running water and electricity.
Now that belief is just plain nuts to me.