"Mysteries Of The Middle Ages'

NYT ^ | 12-24-2006 | Thomas Cahill

[blam]

‘Mysteries of the Middle Ages’

By THOMAS CAHILL
Published: December 24, 2006

The Cult of the Virgin and Its Consequences

In the first decade of the twelfth century, a little girl from the Rhineland town of Bermersheim, near Mainz, was offered by her parents as a sacrifice to God. Her name was Hildegard; her parents were Hildebert and Mechthild, a pious knight and his pious, well-born wife. Hildegard was eight years old when she was left for life with an anchorite named Jutta von Sponheim, who lived alone in a cell attached to the abbey church of Saint Disibod. (Disibod was a whimsical Irish monk-bishop of the seventh century who, disappointed at the lack of response to his preaching by his own countrymen, traveled to the Rhineland, became a protÈgÈ of the English Saint Boniface, evangelist to the Germans, and founded Disibodenberg, where he seems to have been rather more successful than he'd been in his native land.) Not only does Hildegard's story embody many of the cultural currents that reached their ebb in her time or soon after; this outwardly obedient daughter, her childhood cut so cruelly short, was destined to become one of the most important women of her age.

Using a living child as a religious oblation was no Christian invention. Greeks and Romans had ancient traditions of chaste priestesses and Vestal Virgins; and in the oldest records of both pagans and Jews we find evidence of "set-asides," human offerings devoted to a divinity. In the earliest archeological records, these offerings are literal human sacrifices, such as the bog burials of Scandinavia. Jewish tradition yields such offerings in surprising numbers, starting with Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his only son and continuing through Joshua's command to his troops to "devote" the people of Canaan to God under

[Little Bill]

As about half Scots Irish myself, the book wasn't to bad, Webb is a jerk though.

One of the funniest things that happened to me was, I was walking in to work one day and we had a new Security Guard, a Black Kid. The Kid looked at me and said to a friend, "Who is that 'Cracker looking Mother F---Ker'", I am in charge of fire and security and a Swamp Yankee, turned out to be real good kid, stuck in a mind set."