The Virgin, The Pope, And The Amazons

 

Diana of Ephesus

I have been asked a question about my view of the blessed Virgin Mary and I am working on it. This will take a few days since I have just finished the outdoor lights, set up the tree, put the tree lights on it, went down to the vault to get the decorations and put them on.

It was a good Christmas so far; only two red faced arguments which is pretty much below the national average. Now I have to go and replicate everything at my parents. They have no computer, no internet access. My mother seems to have become a latter-day Luddite who takes pride in her firm stance anti-e. Two weeks ago I bought a printer/copier for them to be used as a copy machine. It cost $ 20 on sale and rebate and had to be purchased. My wife thought its copies were not good, but I insisted on giving it to them, because it only had 3 control buttons, one of which was on/off!
No bewildering array to befuddle them...or me, for that matter.

Sunday past my mother called me to beseech me to give them the clue to starting a DVD in the DVD player. We had had this discussion before. She said that when one put in the DVD there was sound, pix, blah-blah, then there were parts of the film, only they repeated over and over forever. I said that somewhere on the screen you would see the word "PLAY" and you were supposed to depress a control button labelled "play" somewhere in the immediate neighborhood of the DVD machine.
Well, she denied this.
She said she had never seen the word "play", it did not show up, and obviously my brother OR his son, my electronic nephew, Electro, (a different nephew...not one of the infamous gang of three) would have to be contacted. I called a huff and went off in it.
So I called back Sunday and she had indeed started the DVD by using the "play" button on the DVD itself. The Universal Remote/Translator she had purchased from an intinerant salesman from Andromeda did not work. Now as I prepare myself to go and do Xmas thingeys, I know she thinks she will divert me into programming universal remotes. However, in my opinion, remotes are meant to be remote. The remoter, the better.

By the way, the "X" in Xmas is the greek "chi" which is the first letter in "christos". There seems to be a bit of a mental lacunae among "cultural warriors" about that.
Now, having mentioned the Virgin somewhere in the above, we swing into Pope Benedict. Not literally, of course. We are not actually taking a poke at his nibs. It is a metaphor I use to indicate that I have come back off an exasperating tangent.
The Pope visits Turkey. On the papal schedule, as I read it on the BBC, I see: 29 November Goes to Ephesus to say mass at site where Virgin Mary believed to have died.
I was amazed, no, shocked. I mean...really. Ephesus was the site of the famous temple of Diana - Artemis in Greek - and was of enormous importance in the pagan day. (I seem to recall St. Paul was kicked out of the city, but I'm not sure. He was kicked out of so many.)

Well, well, well. Let me wonder about the connection between Ephesus and the Virgin Mary for awhile. Oh, and Amazon is a Greek word usually interpreted as "without (a) breast", meaning one was missing - an interpretation which is fairly ludicrous, although it seems to hold the field in the philology jousts. The root word is "mazon" meaning "breast" and "a-" a privative meaning "without".
 However, "a-" can also be an intensifier and mean "many-", "greatly-" and generally intensify the meaning of the root word to which it is affixed. Hence, "amazon" could mean "many breasted", "big breasted", and generally take the notion of breast and kick it up a notch. Now, if you have ever seen the ancient statue of Diana of Ephesus that has about twenty to thirty breasts, then you suddenly realize that Diana was "a - mazon" in this depiction; she was "great breasted" and a potent symbol of Nurture.

Well, well, well. Sorry, Got to go.

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