Manse Everard and his Tyrian guide, Pummairam/Pum:
"...threaded their way through jostling, shouting, odorous throngs." (p. 265)
Pum:
"...had become an acolyte at a dockside temple of the comparatively unimportant god Baal Hammon. (Everard harked back to tumbledown churches in the slums of twentieth-century America.)" (p. 266)
And I read about Everard in twenty-first-century Lancaster where, in Market Square today, there were:
Evangelical preachers accompanied by black musicians;
Jehovah's Witnesses displaying pamphlets in English and Polish;
left newspaper sellers;
curries, samosas and bhajis sold by an Asian man and his two sons - the older son informs me that he is conservative in religion but not in politics.
I observe all this, read Poul Anderson, remember Baal Hammon and feel kinship with humanity throughout the ages.
7 comments:
Note, though, that most of the traditional paganisms had a 'transactional' attitude to religion, at least for most people. You sacrificed to the Gods, then they came through for you.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I might have used a blunter word than "odorous," such as "stinking."
Mr. Stirling: Judaism/Christianity is different, "we" have to change, to do our part.
Ad astra! Sean
In Buddhist practice, we do it all ourselves.
Paul: in -some- Buddhist traditions.
Yes. And I think in the Buddha's teaching.
Kaor, Paul!
Confucianism, despite its share of inadequacies, appeals far more to me than something as abstract, arid, remote, etc., as Buddhism. The former is analogous in many ways to Greco-Roman Stoicism.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Zazen meditation is immediate and concrete, not abstract, arid or remote.
Paul.
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