But For A Penis… - Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.

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of the bark.

      Wilmore knew so many things that you could never be bored in his company. Eleanor also liked Wilmore and asked him many questions, and he often brought her small gifts; a fruit from the forest, or maybe a flower, a shell, a piece of white flint or an obsidian, which is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock. Obsidian is produced when felsic lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth.

      Certain individuals have been endowed with a blessing, or in some cases a curse when they are able to design a dream which they are able to “call-up”, such was the case with Richard and in this magical state he was able to possess the child of his dreams, the girl of his life, the woman he would marry. Because they were raised as brother and sister, there was a sibling bond as definitive as earth to water but as they grew from children to the teen period the love they felt as siblings melted into a fanatically enhanced romantic attraction which they recognized and discussed openly between each other.

      Wilmore was the only person with whom they had shared this oxymoronic relationship which posed sensitive and life changing prospects for both of them, as well as for Wilmore. As much as the Duke had come to love Richard, as an adoptive parent, his love for Eleanor was without bounds; was without explanation, and it was obvious the Duke had a vision for her to inherit his kingdom and to rule it wisely in his stead into the future. That future did not envision Eleanor mating with Richard, or marrying her. The Duke saw Richard as Eleanor’s finger…there to scratch an itch; there to know and love her in a protectorate capacity as a big brother…not, in any way as a lover!

      Eleanor’s father, William X was not a man to ire, he took no prisoners and he was quite direct, often counseling Richard on trips to hunt and fish. It was as though the Duke was setting a path for Richard to follow without fail, in much the same way Richard’s father had served the Duke into his own death.

       When the sun was really high, Wilmore stood up, emerged from the shade, and shouted, “Kic-ard!” This was the way he pronounced Richard’s name. Then we walked quickly through the thick fields where we stopped to eat at Wilmore’s father’s house…the house with the sky blue roof.

       ************

       At daybreak, when the sky was growing light, Richard and his cousin Loche’ walked along the dirt track which led to the fields. By climbing over the high walls they got into the chase where the deer on the large estates lived. Loche’ knew where he was going. His father was very rich and had taken him to all the properties. He had gone as far as the houses of Famarin Estates; and right up to Volmar and Sedine far in the North. It was forbidden to go into the chase; Richard knew his father would be very angry if he knew the boys were going into the estates. He had told him how dangerous it was. He told him there could be hunters or that he could fall into a trap, but Richard believed it was mainly because his father did not like the people who owned the big estates. He said everyone should stay on their own property.

       The boys walked carefully as though they were in enemy territory, and they were. In the distance, in the gray scrub, the boys glimpsed some shapes disappearing quickly into the undergrowth…was it deer, they asked each other?

       Then Loche said he wanted to go as far as Famarin Estates. They came out of the chase and walked once more on the long dirt path. Richard had never gone this far and he told Loche’. Once, Richard had gone with Wilmore to the top of Kourelle, where you could see the countryside and from there he saw the roofs on the houses and the thick smoke coming from the processing refinery’s tall smoke stacks.

      Gods vs. Heathens

      To understand the crusades it is not essential that we are Greek scholars, but the Greek society has given us much to abide. Let us visit therefore briefly that we might better understand what Eleanor was thinking when she led an army of the faithful, leaving families and friends to rid the Spanish of the Moor infidels, the Muslims who without gall absorbed the prima facia, (: pry-mah-fay-shah)adj.Latin for “at first look,” referring to a lawsuit or criminal prosecution in which the evidence, before trial is sufficient to prove the case unless there is substantial contradictory evidence presented at trial. A prima facia case presented to a Grand Jury by the prosecution will most often result in an indictment.) basis of Christianity with the fanatical dogma of Mohammed who did not come to be until the 7th century, six hundred years to learn what it took the Christ of the Piscean Age (*see next chapter IX) to do in less than twenty from the Hindu’s.

      The Greeks had no word equivalent of our ‘religion’, (derived from the Latin ligare ‘to bind’, owing to the sense of [binding awe] felt by humans in the face of super-normal or supernatural phenomena). Nor did they distinguish in quite the ways we would…the ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’ or the ‘secular’. The Greek’s vocabulary of sanctity and piety revolved, rather, around concepts of appropriateness and order, and depended on matter and purpose of persons being allocated to, and remaining in their proper places. The Greeks, therefore would have fallen on the side of the Crusades since the Moors invaded Spain.

      But perhaps the chief obstacle to comprehending Classical Greek religion, for those of us brought up within one or the other monotheistic religious culture which is the ‘relationship to or characterized by the belief that there is only one God’ is the Greek polytheism, which is the belief in more than one god. The ancient Greeks adored their gods; Apollo, Athena, Dionysus and Zeus. Theirs was a world ‘full of gods’, as Thales of Miletos (ft.c.600) is supposed to have said. Or, as Carlo Levi much more recently wrote of the incompletely Christianized peasants of Gagliano in southern Italy, there was no room in their mental world for religion ‘because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not symbolically divine’.

      There are of course important continuities as well as discontinuities between the belief of the Christians and that of the Muslims; not only was Christianity born within the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire, but in a crucial sense it could not have been born without it. But the differences between developed Christianity and paganism are far more important, indeed central and essential. In order to bring out this difference of essence, and thus obviate the harm which can be done by interpreting ancient Greek religion in the false light of Christianizing assumptions, it may be helpful to begin this chapter by listing some of the strong contrast between Christianity (seen as an ideal type, ignoring all doctrinal and sectarian fissures within and between the Christian community communions) and Greek paganism.

      Christianity, like one of its tutors (Judaism), is a spiritual monotheism. It is premised on faith in revelation which transcends rational belief and is accompanied by a fervency of emotion. By contrast, the Classical Greeks ‘acknowledged’, that it pays to worship the gods its community recognized. So that its faith was chiefly a matter of piety in the performance of cult acts. Christian faith in revelation and the centrality of that faith are anchored to the possession of uniquely treasured text, a professional priesthood, and a church of differing denominations. The Classical Greeks did without sacred books and dogmas for their civic religion, they were innocent of any notion of heresy, and had no vocational priesthoods-or priestess hoods. Unlike Christians, the Greeks made women equal and asserted that they were indispensable. Just another of the positions which the Greeks would have supported against the Muslims who maintain the only worth and reason for women is sex; fixing food, cleaning house, mowing yard, child baring and sex, sex, sex.

      Though we have never seen a written word from the Christ, Christianity has from the founder onward drawn a sharp line between religion and other spheres of social interaction or private experience, most between religion and politics: (‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s’)or, as later redefined, between church and state. The cleavage was to have important historiographical as well as historical consequences. The classical Greeks, on the other hand, though they were able to distinguish what they called ‘the devine’, (to theion) or ‘the things of (the) god(s)’(ta tou theou/ton theon) from that which was purely or largely human, their polis (unlike Augustine’s City of God) was both a city of gods and a city of men simultaneously: religion and politics (and economics, and war, and so on) were for the Greeks...

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