Where the hell did we come from ???

[jetro 5,349]

2 hours ago, jetro said:

 

17 MARCH, 2014 - 12:36 APRILHOLLOWAY

The Day of St Patrick and the myth of snakes being cast out of Ireland

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Today marks Saint Patrick’s Day, or the Feast of Saint Patrick, a cultural and religious holiday celebrated every year on 17 ^th March in Ireland and by Irish communities around the world.  The celebration marks the anniversary of Saint Patrick’s death in the fifth century and represents the arrival of Christianity in the country.  The Irish have observed this day as a holiday for over 1,000 years, and while the festival began as a religious feast day for the patron saint of Ireland, today it has become an international celebration of Irish culture.

Over the centuries, the mythology surround the life of Saint Patrick has become ever more ingrained in the Irish culture.  Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is credited with expelling all the snakes from Ireland, and today, not a single snake can be found there. But the true meaning of the casting away of all snakes runs much deeper.

Saint Patrick was born in Roman Britain in the 4 ^th century AD, into a wealthy family. According to the Declaration, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of sixteen and taken as a slave to Gaelic Ireland. There he spent six years working as a shepherd and during this time he “found God”. The Declaration says that God told Patrick to flee to the coast, where a ship would be waiting to take him home. After making his way home, Patrick went on to become a priest.

According to tradition, Patrick returned to Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. The Declaration, a Latin letter which is generally accepted to have been written by St Patrick, says that he spent many years preaching in the northern half of Ireland and converted "thousands". Tradition holds that he died on 17 March and was buried at Downpatrick.  Over the following centuries, many legends grew up around Patrick and he became Ireland's foremost saint. While his true name was Maewyn Succat, he later became known as St Patrick, named after his place of burial.

The symbol of the shamrock

On St Patrick's Day it is customary to wear shamrocks and green clothing. St Patrick is said to have used the shamrock, a three-leaf clover, to explain the Holy Trinity to the pagan Irish. This story first appears in writing in 1726, though it may be older. In pagan Ireland, three was a significant number and the Irish had many triple deities. The triple spiral symbol, or Triskelion, appears at many ancient megalithic and Neolithic sites in Ireland. It is carved into the rock of a stone lozenge near the main entrance of the prehistoric Newgrange monument in County Meath, Ireland. Newgrange, which was built around 3200 BC, predated the Celtic arrival in Ireland but has long since been incorporated into Celtic culture.

An Irish shamrock on the left, and the triple spiral symbol on the right.

St Patrick banishes the snakes from Ireland

The absence of snakes in Ireland gave rise to the legend that they had all been banished by St. Patrick chasing them into the sea after they attacked him during a 40-day fast he was undertaking on top of a hill.  However, all evidence suggests that post-glacial Ireland never had snakes.  Water has surrounded Ireland since the end of the last glacial period, preventing snakes from slithering over; before that, it was blanketed in ice and too chilly for the cold-blooded creatures. Scholars believe the snake story is an allegory for St Patrick’s eradication of pagan ideology.

The snake was the symbol of the Celts and their spiritual elite, the Druids - who inhabited the island of Ireland long before the arrival of Christianity in the 5th century AD.  When Patrick arrived, the only “pesky and dangerous creatures” that St Patrick wished to cast away were the native Celts.   

Since snakes often represent evil in literature, "when Patrick drives the snakes out of Ireland, it is symbolically saying he drove the old, evil, pagan ways out of Ireland [and] brought in a new age," said classics professor Philip Freeman of Luther College in Iowa.

An Image depicting St Patrick casting the snakes into the sea. Image source

St Patrick features in many stories in the Irish oral tradition and there are many customs connected with his feast day.  Over the centuries, these traditions have been given new layers of meaning – the symbolic resonance of the St Patrick figure stretches from that of Christianity’s arrival in Ireland to an identity that encompasses everything Irish.

Today, St Patrick is a patriotic symbol along with the colour green and the shamrock. St. Patrick's Day celebrations include many traditions that are known to be relatively recent historically, but have endured through time because of their association either with religious or national identity.

Atb j 

He didn't do much for international relations between Ireland and Britain lol

Atb j 

[Lenmcharristar 9,779]

1 minute ago, jetro said:

He didn't do much for international relations between Ireland and Britain lol

Atb j 

He was prob too busy sticking his walloper in the alter boys, his grave is 30 mins from where I live

[jetro 5,349]

6 minutes ago, Lenmcharristar said:

He was prob too busy sticking his walloper in the alter boys, his grave is 30 mins from where I live

LOL. 

I was reading another article before, stating he never came south of Ulster. 

It's amazing how a religion can nearly wipe out some culture's, in the name of a god. 

Atb j 

[jetro 5,349]

8 minutes ago, Lenmcharristar said:

He was prob too busy sticking his walloper in the alter boys, his grave is 30 mins from where I live

Just goes to show, that even back then the British were trying to kill us irish off in some way

And that's meant as a joke before some one gets offended 

Atb j 

[Lenmcharristar 9,779]

3 minutes ago, jetro said:

LOL. 

I was reading another article before, stating he never came south of Ulster. 

It's amazing how a religion can nearly wipe out some culture's, in the name of a god. 

Atb j 

You not a believer jetro? 

[jetro 5,349]

1 minute ago, Lenmcharristar said:

You not a believer jetro? 

No Len.

It's not my belifes, saying that iv nothing against anyone that does.

Atb j 

[Lenmcharristar 9,779]

Just now, jetro said:

No Len.

It's not my belifes, saying that iv nothing against anyone that does.

Atb j 

I always thought you southerners were staunch church goers, there’s always the Mary statues everywhere too

[jetro 5,349]

Just now, Lenmcharristar said:

I always thought you southerners were staunch church goers, there’s always the Mary statues everywhere too

Most are, and yes it's true about the statues lol.

But not me. I don't follow that faith. 

I follow polytheism, nature, more or less.  

Atb j 

[jetro 5,349]

16 minutes ago, Lenmcharristar said:

I always thought you southerners were staunch church goers, there’s always the Mary statues everywhere too

Across the road from me on the way to the beach 

Atb j 

[jetro 5,349]

Another interesting article 

Head cult. (1/2)

In the light of comparative ethnography, we are beginning to better understand the customs of the Celtic populations, too often distorted by explanations that compared them to the customs of classical civilization instead of bringing them closer to those of wild or semi-civilized populations, the interpretation of certain sculptures and coins has brought to light the Celtic [BANNED TEXT] of severed heads.

But we have not yet assembled, in a systematic study, all the texts and monuments that can shed light on this custom. In the course of research on the religious character of the wars, with the weapons used and the conventions that regulate them, it seemed to me that the best way to recover the original value of this [BANNED TEXT] of the severed heads would be to group together all the documents concerning it around the few precise texts and well-known monuments that show its persistence in Gaul on the eve of the Roman conquest. Some light may be shed on all the rites and customs concerning war trophies, whose importance for the history of our origins needs no mention.

Let us begin by translating and commenting on the two capital texts of Diodorus and Strabo. We know that they summarize that of Posidonius of Apamea, who travelled to Gaul about ten years before the Roman conquest (c. 80-70 BC). Posidonius tells us: 'To fallen enemies they cut off the heads and tie them to the necks of their horses. As for the blood-stained remains, they hand them over to their squires and take them away as spoils with a triumphal march and singing a victory hymn; for the trophies they nail to their houses like we do in respect of certain animals killed in the hunt. For heads of the most illustrious enemies, they carefully embalm them (…) with cedar oil and keep them in a box. They show them to strangers, boasting that one of their ancestors, or their father or some other, did not want to sell it, no matter how much money was offered to him. Some even boast that they did not want to give up a head for its weight in gold, showing in this a pride of savages. For while it is noble not to put a price on the insignia of bravery, to make war on people of one's own race even when they are dead is an act of ferocious beast.”

Doidorus: “Clothes are therefore properly considered as booty, but only the clothes. You can see the head and the weapons have a spell on them... particular. The heads are considered to be first-fruits.”

Diodorus did not use this word without reason: for Greeks of his time the clothes are the booty that the soldiers share, the first-fruits reserved for the gods, exactly at the top of the heap(s) formed with the remains. The Gauls used to have precisely the habit to form a heap of all the spoils.

Strabo added a barbaric and inhuman custom, which is found in most northern nations: “after the battle they hang the heads of the slain on the horses their necks, and bring them back with them for to fix the heads in spectacle to the big gate of their houses'. Posidonios said that he had often witnessed it.

As for the heads of the great characters, they showed them to foreigners kept in cedar oil and refused to sell them, even by their weight in gold. This fact should have been brought to light more clearly: cedar oil is the one that the Egyptians used for embalming, probably because Osiris was passing by for being buried in a cedar. The older scholars saw this as further evidence of the distant connections between Gauls and Egyptians. What is certain is that the cedar grew only in Syria and Cilicia, Cyprus and Crete, Africa, maybe also in Phrygie and Thrace. If it's not another resinous tree that Posidonios referred to (it is confused sometimes with the juniper), the reported fact is to be added to all those which show the extent of the commercial relations of the Gauls: The Persians also knew how to embalm the heads of their enemies, as Herodotus wrote. The Romans put an end to these practices of the Gauls.

This last remark must have been added by Strabo, when, about the year 21 AD, he put the last hand at his work. It provides us with the extreme limit for the use of decollation of the enemy killed. The custom, as was seen among the Gauls in Caesar's time, dated back at least to the fourth century. In 295 BC, before the Battle of Sentinum, where Decius was unable to wrest the army Roman to the Gallic fury than by devoting himself to the infernal gods, an entire legion was surprised by the Gauls and annihilated to the last man. The consuls were not informed of this until they were in sight of the Gauls, “until Gaulish horsemen appeared with the heads of the slain hanging from their horses' chests and fixed on the points of their spears, whilst they chanted war-songs after their manner”. (Tite Live, X, 26, 11.). If the horsemen carried the heads cut on the chest of their mounts, they were probably tantassins who used to spear them at the tip of their spears.

Some years later, the same custom among the invading Gauls no longer Italy, but Greece: the head of the defeated Macedonian king, Ptolemy Keraunos, is carried by the victors on the tip of a spear, the Gaesates brought back to their kings the head of Consul Atilius killed in action. A third variety of the [BANNED TEXT] we are dealing with is indicated by Tite Live about the surprise when, in 216 BC, Consul L. Postumius perishes with two legions under the blows of the Boïens: “The Boii, having cut off his head, carried it and the spoils they stript off his body, in triumph into the most sacred temple they had. Afterwards they cleansed the head according to their custom, and having covered the skull with chased gold, used it as a cup for libations in their solemn festivals, and a drinking cup for their high priests and other ministers of the temple.” (Liv. XXIII, 24) Kroum the Bulgarian, drank likewise from the skull of Nicephorel, who was embedded of a golden circle.

It was therefore a habit of the Gauls to consecrate in their temples with the severed head of the enemy leader: they garnished gold the skull and it was thus used by the priests and his acolytes for the solemn libations. It is obviously for this purpose that alluded to Florus, when, among the ferocious features of the Scornful Gauls, he reports they were propitiating the gods... by human blood and drank from skulls.
The use to drink from a skull was practiced in Gaul since the Paleolithic period. It is attested in Syria around 570 (the Bishop of Jerusalem Jacob drinking from the skull of the martyr Theodotus); it has been reported that the habit was in use amongst Fijians, Andamans, Fuegians, Konds from India, New Zealand... Mecklenburg, in Guinea; also found are many of amulets made from skulls.

According to Posidonius, this custom was widespread among most peoples of the North. There is a body of text to support this claim. Among the Germans, in the most famous of their victories, that of the Teutoburg Forest, the [BANNED TEXT] had to be performed. Germanicus, in the year 21 AD, finds, amidst the ruins of the camp of Varus, the bleached bones of the dead, in the very place where they died, the weapon fragments, the limbs... horses, "heads attached to tree trunks and.., in the nearby woods, the altars on which the Germans ...had immolated the Tribunes and the First Centurions."(Tacitus, Ann. I, 61) Perhaps it was the result of an earlier vow. Thus, according to Florus, IV, 12, before going to war against Drusus, the Cherusks, the Sueves and the Sicambres had, by burning alive twenty centurions, divided up the booty in advance: the Cherusks had chosen the horses, the Swedes the gold. and the money, the Sicambres the prisoners. Every people had to have their share. A clue that Arminius had devoted to the infernal gods the entire Roman army is that it doesn't seem that he kept prisoners: all of them seem to have been or hanged or buried alive.

Like the entire cursed army had fallen to them, the officers had been sacrificed on altars as prisoners: it were their heads that were nailed to the trees, a clue is in the care the Germans took in the head of Varus: They went so far as to exhume it, so that it would not fail to their triumph. According to Velleius, Varus' head was sent by Arminius to Marbod. This custom persisted in the Rhine regions among the Alamans: we see Gregory the Great writing in Brunehaut to prevent "sacrilegious holocausts of severed heads". - The Thuringians who are devastating the Lorraine under Thierry I, still hang the children from the trees. According to Lucain's well-known scholism, hanging from a tree would be precisely the torture preferred by the Gallic Mars: Hesus Mars. It is known that the king of Lombardy Alboin made a cup with the skull of the King of the Gepids whom he had killed; in the poem of the Niebelungen, the Burgonde Goudroun transforms the skulls of Atli's children into cups. (Etzel or Attila) and gives them to their father.

The scalping, which was called the decalvatio, also appears to be practiced in invaders from across the Rhine: to scalp is provided for as a penalty in the Visigoth code. If the ecclesiastical tonsure appeared to the hairy Franks, the new masters of the Gallia comata, such a profound decline for their princes, is it not by some remembrance of the particular value attached to hair?

At the other end of the Germanic world this custom is attested for by the Daces by the Trajan Column where we see heads on the stakes of their ramparts and by the treasure vase of Nagy Szent Miklos where a horseman is holding in the same hand a captive by the hair, and a severed head. We know that the Daces were a mixture of Moesians and of Thracians: we see them, before the battle, dedicate the entrails of slain generals to their deities and are shown to us after a cavalry fight against the Romans, in 171 B.C., brought back singing - like the Gauls - the head of a slain general, at the point of an spear. (Titus Live, XLII, 60) Diomedes, a Thracian hero, beheads Dolon. Perseus, god of war of one Thracian tribe cuts off the head off Medusa, and the Thracian Menades cuts off Orpheus' head.

It can be found, moreover, in primitive Rome and its neighbors, some traces of the same use: thus Consul Cossus, in 437 BC, after having killed and stripped Tolumnius, king of the Venetians, wears his head upon the tip of his spear. (Liv. IV, 19): at the same time, the Aequi are seen triumphantly walking around the severed head of Legate Furius ; still in 21 AD Tib . Gracchus promises freedom to those slaves trained in two legions that will bring back an enemy's head. (Liv. XXIV. 14-13) In 207 BC, the head of Asdrubal is thrown into the camp of Hannibal (Liv. XXVII, 52).

The custom of processions wearing severed heads in the Thracian cult of Dionysus derives from the Bacchic cults: after being the grimacing heads of the victims torn and ritually eaten, they became the grotesque heads of Satyrs or Silenes, either shaped into comedy masks, either carved on these marble discs who kept the name 'oscilla', moving heads.

(Adolphe Reinach, Revue Celtique 34, 1913.)

[Greb147 6,809]

My DNA test has arrived, I'm not sure I want to do this.

[Greb147 6,809]

4 minutes ago, Balaur said:

Come on ,.exciting

I've read my name origin is Scandinavian brought here to the north of England by the vikings, it's quite unusual tbh. 

Most people think it's German and pronounce it wrong. 

Edited May 13, 2020 by Greb147

[Born Hunter 17,763]

Nobody cares about your name! Are you a pureblood or a muggle? 

[Greb147 6,809]

2 minutes ago, Balaur said:

Not sure how they can say anything regarding your name origin unless the base it on your DNA origin but who know. I know mine is English but could've originated from Germany, lots of names get changed along the way.....

Your name doesn't really mean anything if your great-nan was having it off with the neighbour.

[Greb147 6,809]

Just now, Born Hunter said:

Nobody cares about your name! Are you a pureblood or a muggle? 

I'm going 99% pure mate.