In this home atop the Katskhi Pillar in the central Imereti region of the Republic of Georgia, monk Maxime Qavtaradze lives his life according to the teachings of the Stylites (a Byzantine religious order), who believe that living up high removes them from temptations and allows for plenty of prayer. The only way to reach the house is via a 131-foot ladder, which is a 20-minute climb. Brother Maxime is the first Stylite to live on the Katskhi Pillar in 600 years.
The Katskhi Pillar has been considered a sacred place since pre-Christian times, though it’s been uninhabited since around the 1400s. When climbers ascended for the first time in centuries in 1944, they found the ruins of a church and the bones of the last Stylite who lived there.
Brother Maxime took monastic vows in 1993. With the help of local villagers and contributions from donors, he has been working to rebuild the 1,200-year-old monastery complex, chapel, and hermitage for the last fifteen years. At the pillar’s base lies a chapel named after St. Simeon, considered the first Stylite. Though isolated, Brother Maxime is not a total hermit, coming down once or twice a week to counsel the troubled young men who come to the monastery at the base of the pillar (last photo) for his guidance.
The crypt under the chapel holds the bones of the previous unknown Stylite who made his home there (photo #6). Once Brother Maxime is too frail to use the ladder, he intends to remain at the top until his death, with his remains to be placed in the same crypt when his time comes.
So this has been the news of Ireland for the past day. 796 remains of children where discarded and hidden away by the Bon Secours nuns in a septic tank on the grounds of an old “mother and babies” home in Tuam Co. Galway from sometime in the 1920s until the 1960s. These homes were common in Ireland to where unmarried mothers were sent to because they’ve brought shame on their family in the eyes of their religion.
I’d appreciate it if this was spread around on tumblr because many people don’t realise that this was what happened in this country. The General reaction from Irish folk was dismay and disgust and most importantly many were “not surprised” when this report’s findings were released. And The Catholic Church still has a stronghold on the country today.
And in unsurprising news the Irish pro-life groups and infamous spokespeople have been silent so far in condemning the actions and atrocities of the Catholic Church.
I’d add this comment, from a pissed off Irish bloke on fb:
^ these people covered up the deaths of born children in a septic tank but they are the moral authority on whether women can get rid of unwanted pregnancies?
I don’t read the news and I haven’t listened to the radio in the last few days so I’ve no idea if this has been widely reported in the British news, but this is the first I’d heard of it. I’ve done a bit of reading now. My mum grewup in C Cork, near Galway (where the grave was found), and was a teenager in Ireland in the 60s. The thought that getting pregnant, whether consensual or not, could have landed her in one of these places, and my resultant half-sibling in a septic tank grave, is horrifying.
It’s worth noting this is not the first time mass graves have been discovered attatched to former Mothers and Babies Homes and Magdalene Lanudaries. In 1993, 155 corpses were exhumed from a Sisters of Our Lady of Charity home in Dublin. In that case, even as the bodies were exhumed (the Sisters had sold the land to a property developer to recoup losses they’d made on the stock market, yes really) it was not reported. However, as word spread outrage did grow, leading to the enquiries and damning reports into these institutions later in the decade.
In the above more recent case, it was apparently fairly common knowledge locally that the site contained a mass grave since two boys stumbled across it in 1975. It’s horribly safe to assume that these two cases aren’t isolated and that there are many more mass graves in Ireland.
The children died of ‘natural’ causes, but neglect, malnutition and abuse hurried many on their way, or killed otherwise healthy children outright.
Ahh see the thing is you’re imagining that bodies in Ancient Egypt were left to decompose without care. There’s really no such thing. There’s also no concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt either.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Most people believe that every Egyptian was mummified after death. This is simply not true. 99% of all Egyptians were never mummified, either because the practice was not yet invented (seriously, it took them a while to get it right), or because they simply could not afford it. It’s the age old adage of the 1% getting all the bells and whistles and the 99% getting nothing. Most of our surviving record is the burials of the elite, with little known about the regular citizens. It’s a bummer for Egyptologists.
What did happen was that when someone died they were placed in a dug out hole, given grave goods, and then re-covered. However, the body would not decompose but instead dry out, thus forming a natural mummy, leaving most organs intact. This was an acceptable form of burial for the Egyptians and they would still get into the afterlife even though they’ve been left to ‘decompose’.
Both manually mummified and naturally mummified individuals would be able to enter into the afterlife as they still had the one organ that mattered in all of this: the heart.
You’ve probably heard of the ‘weighing of the heart’ whereby the heart was believed to be the seat of emotion and intelligence (as they hadn’t figured out what the brain did yet), and it was weighed against Ma’at (the feather of truth). Before this point the deceased had to go before 42 ‘judge’ gods and speak Negative Confessions to state they have not broken the laws of Ma’at. The heart is then weighed to make sure they’re telling the truth. Read more about the Judgement process here.
(Weighing of the Heart scene from Ani’s Book of the Dead – Source: British Museum)
If you balanced with Ma’at you could progress into the Field of Reeds; the Egyptian afterlife that is essentially just Egypt all over again, but this time with no manual labour. If you failed, and your heart was heavy with lies, then your heart was eaten by Ammit. Here she is looking as beautiful and as terrifying as all women wish to be when they enter a room. Get it girl:
(Thoth and Ammit from Ani’s Book of the Dead – Source: British Museum)
I’m gonna go on a slight detour before I explain Second Death, so I can address the concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt.
There isn’t such a thing as a ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt. Modern influence on the Ancient record has led us to impose the concept on the Egyptians as a way of explaining the religious implications of the Egyptian concept of self to the general public. Basically there are 5 parts to the Egyptian concept of self:
ib – (eeb) the heart – seat of knowledge and emotions
rn – (ren) the name – important for being remembered and accepted into the afterlife. No name, you don’t exist. This is why they scrubbed names off monuments of people like Akhenaten. Read more about Damnatio Memoriae. Oddly for the Egyptians, being on display in a museum wouldn’t be the worst thing as their name would continually be being said by visitors, thus causing them to live on forever. They even had inscriptions on their tomb walls asking visitors or passers by to say their name and say an offering of bread and beer to help them continue existing. Odd how that works out. Read more about the Egyptians and their interactions with the dead.
Swt – (sheut) the shadow – since it was always present the Egyptians believed is was an intrinsic part of the self.
bA – (bah) the personality –
comes into existence after death and is corporeal, eats, drinks and copulates. It can fly between the living world and the afterlife communicating with the gods and the living. It is thought that the Ba is not a part of the person but the person in their entirety, so very much unlike the Abrahamic religions concept of a soul.
kA – (kah) the vital spark – this is what distinguishes between a living and dead person. When a person died the Ka left the body and remained in the afterlife. It needed to be sustained by offerings of food and drink from the living otherwise it would die and go into ‘Second Death’. This could be worked around by having carvings or paintings of tables piled high with food on your tomb walls (because images were magic and came to life in perpetuity), or burying yourself with food.
So basically what you refer to in your ask is the Ka of the deceased dying if the body is left to decompose. As I’ve already stated, decomposition isn’t really a thing in Egypt if the body was buried, so the Ka of the deceased would live on as long as it was tended to. I’ll get on to what happens when it isn’t in just a bit.
The only way you could get a ‘decomposed’ body is through something catastrophic happening meaning that your family would be unable to retrieve it for burial. No body. No burial. No Afterlife. This is relatively rare, but would usually occur through things like drowning in the Nile and being swept away, being eaten by an animal (usually a Crocodile), or dying outside of Egypt. There’s a reason a lot of the curses you find in Ancient Egypt have to do with drowning or being eaten by Crocodiles, mainly because it was an excellent way of wiping the existence of a person from the face of the Earth. Read more about curses in this PhD thesis.
And finally back to Second Death…
So now we know that to achieve Second Death in Ancient Egypt was to either have no body or an abandoned Ka. What exactly was ‘Second Death’? It’s a bit of a tricky concept to get across, but essentially with second death the person dies again and falls into Nun. Nun (noon) is the deification of the primordial waters of chaos that the Egyptian’s believe the world originated from. So essentially, if a person is unfortunate enough to be subjected to ‘second death’ then their Ka falls into the waters of Nun and ceases to exist entirely. There is no comeback from this. When a person falls into Nun due to second death they can never comeback to the Afterlife and they are forgotten. That’s it. Gone. Kaput. It’s not Hell or Purgatory (there’s no such thing in Ancient Egypt), it’s just complete non existence. You either achieve the afterlife, and have used all within your power to maintain your Ka (family provides offerings/tomb wall carvings/heart scarab), or you get Second Death and cease to exist.
That, my friend, is what happens to an Egyptian when their body is lost and their Ka is not sustained.
around this time of year i see a lot of articles and op eds from muslims and non-muslims alike about what jesus means in islam and to muslims. which makes sense. there is undeniable year-round pressure to assure christians that muslims have jesus too, just in a different way, a pressure which only intensifies around christmastime.
but we also have mary. and what i often don’t see is talk of her, despite mary being one of the most important female figures in islam, despite mary being one to lead souls into paradise, despite the qur’anic story of the birth of jesus coming from a chapter named for his mother. and i think we should talk about mary more.
the qur’an tells us not just about mary as a single woman giving birth to a prophet, but as a woman who was once a little girl, who was once a surprising answered prayer from allah. mary’s parents were old and childless when her mother hannah saw a mother bird feeding her babies. the sight awakened a desire in hannah to have a child, so she prayed for a child, and as you may guess, allah granted her request and when hannah became pregnant, and her husband died before the child was born, she prayed again.
“Allah listened when a woman of the family of Imram said, ‘My Lord! I do hereby vow to you what is in my womb to be dedicated to your service.’…But when she gave birth she said, ‘My Lord! I have given birth to a female,’ and Allah knew best what she had given birth to, and the male she was thinking of was not like this female she had brought forth. ‘I have named her Mary and I commend her and her offspring to your protection from satan, the accursed.’” (3:35-36)
basically, hannah had expected a boy, and so promised that he would be raised in the service of god. so when she turned out to have a daughter, she went, “uhh, god? you gave me a girl,” and allah was like, “i know what i did,” and hannah said, “well, okay! i named her mary and i’m gonna follow through of my promise even though it’s gonna be kinda weird. please protect her and her future children.” so mary grew up in the temple under the care of the prophet zechariah.
and it was obvious that mary was blessed.
“Every time Zechariah visited her in her chamber, he found her with provisions. He said, ‘From where do you get all this, Mary?’ She replied with all conscientiousness, ‘It is from Allah. Allah provides whomsoever he wills without measure.’” (3:37)
and mary’s righteousness caused zechariah to pray for a child for himself and his wife elizabeth, despite his old age and her infertility, and the child they were blessed with was yahya, aka john the baptist, a prophet like his father.
and when an angel appeared to mary in the form of an attractive man, she immediately called out for allah to defend her from this strange man, bc women have always had reason to be afraid when finding themselves alone around men (and in one translation she says, “make him leave me alone” which i love for obvious reasons), but the angel reassured her, bringing her the message of the child she was about to conceive.
and mary did not have a joseph.
and mary went off into the desert all alone to give birth to jesus, and delivered her son under a dried up dead palm tree, and wished aloud, in her physical and emotional pain, that she had died before all this happened to her, before she would have to endure single motherhood, before she could experience the agony of labor, before she would have to cope with how her family and friends and society would treat her when she returned as a still-unmarried young woman with a baby.
and mary, hungry and dehydrated and without a support network and now with a newborn, wished that she had been utterly forgotten.
but mary would not be forgotten by allah, for after all, her mother had prayed for her protection, and for the protection of the child she had just given birth to, and allah listens to all things.
“But he called her, ‘Do not grieve; your Lord has provided beneath you a stream. And shake toward you the trunk of the palm tree; it will drop upon you ripe, fresh dates. So eat and drink and be contented. And if you see from among humanity anyone, say, ‘I have vowed a fast to the Most Merciful, so I will not speak to anyone today.’” (19:24-26)
and so mary did not have to answer to anyone who would speak out against her when she returned home with an infant, defend herself against any name she would be called, because she answered to allah alone.
and – my favorite bit of all of mary’s story – is this:
“And remember when the angels said, ‘Mary, indeed Allah has chosen you and purified you and chosen you above all the women of the worlds.’” […] And remember when the angels said, ‘Mary, indeed Allah gives you good tidings through a prophetic word from him about the birth of a son, whose name will be Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary – distinguished in this world and the hereafter and among those nearest to Allah.’“ (3:42, 45)
and mary was chosen twice.
and the story would not be told casting her as mary, mother of jesus. no, it was and is mary’s story. and jesus, one of the most important prophets in islam, would be called, son of mary.
and mary would not be forgotten.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly NOW. Love mercy NOW. Walk humbly NOW. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.
Lo Alecha haM’lacha Ligmor, veLo Atah Ben-Chorin leHivatel Memenah / לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמוֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה / It is not your duty to complete the task, but nor it is your freedom to withdraw from it
– is something which is not shared nearly enough, something which is not repeated nearly enough, something with is not SHOUTED FROM THE FREAKING ROOFTOPS nearly enough.
Design is available here! Just print out on 8.5×11″ paper, cut along the gray lines, paint the back of the paper with craft glue (i used Mod Podge) and wrap it around a plain glass pillar candle. Voila: your very own secular and/or idolatrous Space Mom candle! Please remember that Carrie Fisher’s dad was Jewish every time you look at it, cause, you know. He was.
And to justify cutting Welfare and defunding food programs, Republicans disingenuously equate having the basic necessities needed to live — like food — to dignity. Following that logic, are we to believe that wealthy people somehow have more dignity than poor people, because they have more access to more resources like housing, food and clean drinking water? Do the mostly white residents of Bismarck North Dakota have more dignity than the Native Americans at Standing Rock? Do Donald Trump’s children somehow have more “dignity” than does Little Miss Flint? Because Trump’s children don’t need to depend on free lunch programs?
Wealth ≠ dignity.
Access to resources ≠ dignity.
People living in or born into poverty do not have less dignity. They have less wealth and less political power.
Providing free school lunches to children living in poverty doesn’t “give kids an empty soul” it simply feeds hungry children. Feeding a hungry child lunch is not “giving them undue comfort” or making them lazy, it’s simply feeding a hungry child. How did feeding hungry children become a controversial act for “Christian” conservatives?
Intentionally starving children to teach them the “dignity” of hunger is inhumane.
Stop stigmatizing poverty. Stop equating poverty with a lack of dignity. Stop reinforcing the notion that poor people have no dignity just because they’re poor. There is no nobility in starvation, and there is no benevolence in allowing children or anyone else to go hungry when you possess the power to prevent it.
Interesting you should bring up the ‘Christanity’ of these people, because there’s something the man himself has to say about that: Matthew 25:34-40 – Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, my Father has blessed you! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you took me into your home. I needed clothes, and you gave me something to wear. I was sick, and you took care of me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’ Then the people who have God’s approval will reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or see you thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you as a stranger and take you into our homes or see you in need of clothes and give you something to wear? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ The king will answer them, ‘I can guarantee this truth: Whatever you did for one of my brothers or sisters, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did for me.’
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