history, Rod Fleming's World

27/03/2024

Hot Cross Buns–Cakes for the Goddess

Originally posted 2013-07-08 16:49:11.

Hot cross buns. That’s what this article is about. So why do I have a picture of a Roman sculpture of a bull’s head here instead of a nice snap of some hot cross buns?

Hot cross buns actually originated in Assyria as a part of worship of the Moon Goddess Ishtar. At least that is the earliest record we have of them. The Egyptians continued the tradition of offering cakes to their Moon-Goddess Hathor. They decorated the cakes with bull’s horns, as the ox was the preferred sacrifice of the Goddess. The cakes, therefore, were symbolic of the sacrificed bull, whose flesh would be eaten by worshippers.

Hathor has been identified with Ishtar and Astarte, who was worshipped by King Solomon, as mentioned in the Old Testament (1 Kings 11, 2), and to whom he erected a temple or shrine in Jerusalem.

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27/03/2024

Pursuing the Goddess

Originally posted 2014-01-21 13:02:20.

Since 2002 I have been researching into something that I felt more than anything else. Something was nagging me. At the time I lived, as I do now, in France, and the signs of Goddess-worship were all around me. Cathedrals were full of images of the Goddess, the art replete with them. I could see this but I couldn’t define it, I couldn’t understand what it meant.

When I returned to Scotland I was a very busy man for a long time, building a house and trying to make ends meet from my freelance work, and also my own mother became ill and died, so the research went on hold. But it was always there in the back of my mind, and as I travelled round Scotland, that epicentre of dry Presbyterianism, I saw again and again the unmistakable mark of the Goddess all over the architecture and in the symbolism.

The Goddess was the principal focus of my Masters’ Degree research and even though I came a long way, I didn’t reach the answer I sought. When I came back to France I began to write, but in April of 2012 I had to stop. I was getting too confused.

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27/03/2024

Human Society is for reproduction. Sex matters.

Originally posted 2021-04-01 13:39:37.

I have said many times that ‘the Romans were right’ and so they were. Their understanding of human sexuality, which remains in place across the world but has been suppressed in the Anglosphere, is natural, intuitive and simple. It is based on a six axioms.

- boys go with girls and girls go with boys;
- opposites attract and likes repel each other;
- sexuality and gender are two sides of the same coin;
- to penetrate is to be male, to receive to be female;
- a homosexual male cannot be a man;
- men provide and protect, women make babies and nurture them.

Once these are understood, the whole of human sexuality — and society –resolves into focus.

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27/03/2024

The Menopause and Longevity: Who We Are 3

Originally posted 2020-05-11 13:26:25.

Fertile women cycle until they are around fifty years old, at which point a phenomenon called menopause occurs, when a woman ceases to produce eggs for fertilisation. Millions of ova develop within the female unborn baby, far more than the 450 or so that are ever used, so why has this cut-off point evolved?

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27/03/2024

Who we are 2: Cooking, Chattering and Time

Originally posted 2020-04-23 17:59:17.

Cooking is now seen as the definitive characteristic of modern humans, from which all others followed. It seems to have directly led to the development of tools, especially blade design, but it had many other consequences.

Cooking, particularly of meats and fats but also starches, partially pre-digests the food, making more energy available to us and allowing us to use less to digest it. We put this extra energy into growing brains. Growing big brains burns many calories and just running them consumes a significant part of our daily food intake. We know that the physical structures which allow us to speak were evolving at the same time as our brains were growing larger. Speech allowed more complex and efficient communication and cooperation. This encouraged conceptual thinking and other intellectual skills, again leading to the development of bigger brains.

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27/03/2024

Who We Are 1: the beginning of culture

Originally posted 2020-04-20 16:46:22.

Modern humans first appeared in Africa around 150,000 – 180,000 years ago; one of a closely-related group of hominids that had populated the savannah over the preceding three million years. During that time, our ancestors learned how to talk, how to make fire and cook and how to cooperate in groups. We probably lived in a similar way to earlier hominids, but something extraordinary happened: we developed culture.

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27/03/2024

The Beginning of Gender

Originally posted 2023-03-08 17:57:42.

Men and women select partners differently. Men are visual-target-oriented. They are the hunters. They see particular features and find them attractive, and so they tend to try to select mates that have them. Men are driven in this by female fertility. They are looking, in a long-term partner, for someone whom they think will be able to bear and rear children. This is the beginning of gender.

So who is the primary model for the ideal mother in a man’s mind? Easy; his own. So men tend to seek out women who in some way remind them of their own mothers, or rather, as their own mothers looked when they were young. There is evidence that men are most attracted to women of eighteen to twenty-two, which squares with this.

These traits were evolved over a long period of time, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, and during that time, women gave birth early, beginning at twelve to fourteen or so. So, again, the ideal ‘proto-mother’ that men seek is a young woman.

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14/02/2024

Roman Sex is important

Originally posted 2023-08-29 17:04:28.

Why is Roman sex so important, even today? And I don’t mean a knee-trembler up a dark alley in Milan with a hot tranny. I mean the model of sex and sexual behaviour which was central to Roman life. Why is it still important?

Western societies are essentially based on a Graeco-Roman model, with some aspects leaning more towards the Greek and some the Roman. Sex, despite centuries of Christianity, remains broadly Roman.

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13/12/2023

Jihad: the Islamic struggle for the World

Originally posted 2021-02-10 14:57:20.

When Islam, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, launched the attack on Europe that ended before Vienna, it was engaged in Jihad — fighting in the name of Allah, to make the world Islamic. The Caliph, his general and all the men who fought, were carrying out their religious duty — to conquer the world for Islam. This is Offensive Jihad, the most aggressive form. We see it today in Daesh and similar bandit groups today, but under the Ottomans, it motivated the biggest killing machine in the world.

There are other forms of jihad, and they may, in the right circumstances, be almost as effective at destroying other cultures and their values. They corrode them just by contact.

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13/12/2023

Aswangs: supernatural beasts in the Philippines

Originally posted 2021-02-09 18:22:12.

The Philippines is steeped in folklore and mythology. The very air seems supernatural at times and even today, Filipinos firmly believe in the supernatural creatures which also populate their country. Best known of these are Aswangs and Engkantos.

Many of these beliefs certainly date from the pre-colonial period and before the establishment of Catholicism as the dominant religion. Prior to this, the Philippines was not a unitary polity, but was made up of many small kingdoms and tribal areas. These all seem to have believed in a somewhat similar form of Animism but were all brought together under one faith and one colonial rule, by the Spanish.

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