Interesting conversation. I had stuff to add, but I've also got the beginnings of a migraine, so all my actual thoughts went off somewhere with the swirly lights. Maybe coherent thoughts later.

These pagan temples had "priestesses" who were essentially whores, because an aspect of these pagan religions was ritual sex w/the temple prostitutes. The hair thing comes in b/c the temple prostitutes had shaved heads, on purpose.

Hmmm, I think I'm getting a glimmer of a past life in Corinth. Or, you know, I'm just having a new Corinthian fantasy.

Hec, you make me laugh. I can't help it.

Hec, you're nothing if not consistent. (If you write it, I'll read it.)

Speaking of good, Annabel has been so good lately I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. She's just...content. She sleeps well at night. She takes naps on a semi-regular schedule. She doesn't like it if we're out of sight for long, but she's perfectly happy to play in the playpen while I sit here at the computer and work and natter for half the day. She's suddenly gone low-maintenance, and it's weird.

That's it--there's a conspiracy going on, Susan. Owen's been good as gold, too. I have a sinking suspicion he's saving it up for something.

A friend of mine just emailed me and said her daughter will be in an ad for Joanne Fabrics. Right place-right time thingy with a neighbor who was a photographer and who needed a child that fit into a particular sweater. So all you crafty folks--look for a beautiful blue-eyed baby girl in blue on an end cap or in the ads. That'll be Meredith.

Chikat's niece has killed me. Mostly dead. Nononono. Completely dead. I still don't have the guts to give O pasta with sauce on it. I just roll it in parmesan cheese.

Hec, if Emmett's still into piratey things--go here and play the clip "all for me grog".

'Cause it's so cute I'm ready to buy yet a third Dan Zanes CD for Owen.

Hec, you make me laugh. I can't help it.

Previously I was limited to ancient Egypt (mmmm, Nefertiti) and the Vestal Virgins. Now...Corinthian temple whores!

Hec, if Emmett's still into piratey things--go here and play the clip "all for me grog".

Actually, Emmett's new obsession is Prince. Who has been known to wear a piratey shirt or two.

On that same subject, Jilli! I ganked the Adam Ant video for "Stand and Deliver" - pure Highwayman fashion porn.

On that same subject, Jilli! I ganked the Adam Ant video for "Stand and Deliver" - pure Highwayman fashion porn.

Yay!

I ganked the Adam Ant video for "Stand and Deliver" - pure Highwayman fashion porn.

Squeee! My favorite!

crawling back in

So tired. So sluggish. Got ashes, though, and generally feel more peaceful and less like chewing my own arm off.

Re Paul, Tep said pretty much what I would have said, which I got from The New Eve In Christ, a book by a British theologian and Bible languages expert named Mary Hayter, which sadly appears to have never even been published in the U.S. at all. Hayter took a fresh look at Paul by taking a very, very old look at him -- tossing all the English translations she had and going back to the oldest surviving texts of his letters in an attempt to get as close to the originals as possible (this was oh so many years ago and I can't recall whether she was reading Latin or Aramaic, but I think maybe Latin).

And what she found was that a lot of the words in more recent Latin translations, and all English translations, that raise womens' hackles were in the oldest texts either a lot less value-laden or not there at all. As Tep notes, Paul considered some women colleagues, and there's by now pretty decent evidence that a good chunk of the people performing priestly functions (there wasn't a codified "priest" position as such yet) in the early decades of Christianity were women.

Which was a problem, since the only experience any of these communities had of women actively participating in worship services was the temple prostitutes. And for the first couple of decades of its existence, Christianity considered itself a sect of Judaism, and practicing Christians wanted desperately to not have to sneak around underground but to be accepted by their larger faith. Most of Paul's strictures about women covering their heads and keeping silent were specifically addressing that fear of scandal: in order to make it clear that their presence and participation had nothing to do with the sexual pleasure of the men in attendance, women should dress with dignity, speak with calmness and dignity (the word "silent" was an interpolation by a later translator), and cover their heads. That way they'd visibly signal to everyone that they were full participants, nobody's prostitutes, and on an exactly equal footing before God with the men, and the larger community wouldn't be scandalized.

Hayter did marvelous linguistic detective work in this book. She went over every passage in Paul, looking not only at the offending words but every word, as well as at other letters and stories and legal and political documents written by his contemporaries. She checked for context, looked for all the possible nuances of meaning for various ambiguous words, compared translations of a particular word in Paul to translations of that word in non-Pauline texts A, B, C, etc.

And the conclusion she came to was that he'd been by and large dicked around with by his translators; that in the closest thing we have to the original texts, he's clearly uncomfortable with women in priestly authority, but also accepting that it's happening despite his discomfort, and trying to set standards to let it to keep happening without wrecking either the women's reputations, their new little communities, or the larger communities by whom they were still trying to be accepted. And in later centuries, when that small gasping breath of egalitarianism had been totally smothered, translators looked at what he'd written, said, "No fuckin' way, Jack!", and wrote down what they thought he really must have meant, because he couldn't possibly mean what they were seeing, because only a nutjob would say things like that about women, who as we know may not even have souls at all.