five questions for this week
unfeatured questions stolen from the featured question chatboard, dated from November of 2007
What’s your opinion on the death penalty?
flipnautick
Is saving the environment, or helping other people more important?
guildelf9
If the internet never existed and thus you couldn’t blog on xanga, what would you doing with the time you spent on here?
PreciousOnyx
Do you think we would have morality if religion in general didn’t exist?
flipnautick
Do u think that Mexicans coming over here is ok???
miley211
Answer any one or all of these questions in the coming week. I try to mix the whimsical with the serious here, so hopefully there is at least one question here for everyone.
April 12th
This is the first day of the Cerealia. Games introduced at the founding of the temple of Ceres were held from the twelfth to the nineteenth of April. In later times, another festival to Ceres was established in August. While the Megalesia was mainly a patrician holiday, the lower classes had the Cerealia. This was a time to pray for peace. Offerings of grain (spelt), salt, and incense were left on the hearth. White is Ceres’ proper color. She was prayed to for peace, good government, and abundance.
In Taiwan, the goddess who presides over birth, Chu-Si-Niu, is honored annually with a religious festival. Pregnant women go to her temples in order to receive blessings for their unborn children.
The Nepalese New Year occurs in the middle of an eight day festival called Bisket. According to tradition, a princess was possessed by two serpent demons who killed all of her lovers. A foreign prince arranged a tryst, but unlike his predecessors, he came prepared. After they made love, he resolved to stay awake and keep watch. Two dark thread-like tendrils rose from her nostrils, expanding and solidifying into two snakes which he promptly killed.
This is the first day of the Japanese Kamo-Tama-Yori-Hime festival. O-yamakui-no-kami and his wife Kamo-tama-yori-hime were honored from April twelfth to fourteenth. They each have two shrines, one for his (or her) entirety, and one for his (or her) soul or spirit of the outside world (aramitama), equaling four shrines in all.
On the first day of the religious festival (matsuri) the two aramitama, whose shrines are side by side, are brought down in two portable shrines (mikoshi) and left in the adytum (i.e. haiden) of the main shrines consecrated to the soul or spirit of the inner world (nigimitama) of the God. At 9 pm, they are married – the two mikoshi are joined, back to back and left there all night.
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If I didn’t have a computer, I’d probably spend all this time reading books. Shocker, I know.