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UNCOS Hekate Memorial Los Angeles

The History of The UNCOS “Pagan” Hekate Memorial Los Angeles.
Excerpt warning: contains explicit links:

The History of The UNCOS “Pagan” Hekate Memorial Los Angeles 40+ years ago. The internationally recognized original UNCOS Hekate Memorial Los Angeles (@the_hekate) started as the Ukrainian National Holocaust Memorial Church Coalition Los Angeles and San Francisco. (a Pagan led United States of America Council) in exile under the USSR over 40- 50 years ago. This was done to represent the living survivors and the remnants of the Ukrainian and other national holocaust resistance shrines, sanctuaries, churches,  the living and the dead in World War Two. The ancient Hekate sanctuary was chosen as the temple because it was perhaps older than the Titans (3–5000 BCE)

This was only 15-20 years after World War II when Greek Orthodox, Alexandrian Coptic, Russian Orthodox and people of the Jewish faith as well as a few other religions and organizations got together and decided that they should meet together to talk about inter-church issues. Due to the fact that in the Soviet Union the only religion was the state everyone agreed that the Church to head it up was the pagan church council. This was a LA and San Francisco Church Coalition or Council that was based loosely on supporting holocaust families in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as social and cultural support in general. The “un named pagan church” (the name always changed for security reasons or it was called “the church with no name”) (*) was chosen to head it as it was recognizably famous and seemingly atheist or without god—they were the religion neutral national resistance church. It was organized and headed by a famous author and his family as well as other families across the United States of America. They had a newsletter and it was safe to meet with them in public without physical danger from the terrorists. (White supremacists, Racists and Nazi’s)

They represented the resistance not the terror, and would not totally trust the “other christians” ever again.

Catholic involvement was only with the California Mission System San Gabriel not the archdiocese, they did coordinate during the LA Riots, and afterwards asked for advice in special circumstances. The San Gabriel Mission is the base from which the pueblo became the city of Los Angeles. Land rights flow from the indigenous population through the mission system, Spanish colonial rule, mexico and finally the United States of America. It was and is impossible for the Catholics in California to not recognize the LACOS or UNCOS. Title to land ownership and recognizing international canon law is the issue. Los Angeles became a international city with multiple consulates due to everyone’s efforts at understanding and implementing the social program messages. (1)

The Ukraine was chosen to be the Non-Jewish Los Angeles memorial because in addition to the 1 million Jewish people, 3 million more civilians who might have practiced a dual belief system (2) were murdered systematically in the Nazi final solution during the years 1941 to 1943. Two million people were executed a year in addition to the civilian and military war dead. The Nazi’s stated written objective was wholesale population reduction in the occupied areas. The Ukraine general population was supposed to be reduced 60% by special groups of executioners the Einsatzgruppen, the Order Police battalions, and local Nazi collaborators. According to the Nazi records they achieved greater than a 50% reduction in two years.

With the loss of over half of the countries population to killings by Germans —the majority of them who were christian on both sides of the killing— everyone realized that perhaps preserving and reconstructing the original indigenous religions to demonstrate the common elements of culture across borders was a national consideration for multiple nations in Europe and around the world. These days I am heartened by Egypt spending money on preserving it’s Jewish Heritage sites especially in Alexandria. (Link 2) Why not, it’s a non-christian heritage site and the Egyptian government and the people are making a real cultural effort gesture on behalf of visitors from around the world. Someday maybe UNESCO will spend money on pagan sites as well. Turkish Universities are going to commence another archaeological dig at Hekate’s sanctuary in Anatolia Turkey very soon also. Things are moving forward again.

People were looking for answers to why it happened. How did the mass murder happen. Was it a disease? Was the answer lying dormant in some esoteric or “occulted or occluded” regional religion? What were the Nazi’s really after? What made them believe in Hitler? 40 million of them were Protestant 20 million were Catholic Christians in 1933. A full two thirds + (85%) of them were christians 60 million Germans out of 70 million in 1940. (rough numbers) Think about that for a minute, why would those Christians do that to other Christians. The majority of the people killing Christians were “the other” Christians.

That is not the total loss of people in the Ukraine during WWII, these are the numbers for 1941 through 1943 from Nazi German records:
The population of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine taken by census was 37,000,000 in 1941 and 16,910,008 in 1943 for a total of 20.1 million people killed. The Soviet census of just the Ukraine in 1939 was 30.96 million. We have no census data following the war. The German administrative district included adjacent areas of Belarus and the Second Polish Republic.

From the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine:
The general demographic loss of Ukraine including those killed; deported, evacuated, the victims of concentration camps, and those who went into exile along with the retreating Nazis add up to at least 14 million people. This is the greatest single loss compared with the losses of other countries and nations in World War II. The USSR lost about 26.6 million lives in World War II. In comparison, the total losses in Germany were about 6 million. In fact, the total Ukrainian losses likely vary between 40 to 44 percent of the total casualties of the USSR.

Notes:

(1) Safe Passage, Sanctuary and Safe Surrender were the official social program messages and were directly based on the Ukrainian holocaust experiences. Today they are publicly slightly different than the original program messages. One example is this statement: Police can not enter churches <–this was the original issue in the United States of America especially in California where secularization (taking church land) of the Catholic mission lands by Mexico was the original issue. Freedom of Religion and the Separation of Church and State means that the police cannot raid or drag people out of church for civil law enforcement actions.

(2) Dual belief system refers to a practice of having two  belief systems.
The official church of the state. Usually this was what the King practiced or what kind of prayers were said at state functions (if any)
The private religion your family practices i.e., which god or goddess your house follows. Which is your home temple was a usual  question.

Wikipedia sheds some light on the twin faith issue here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_paganism

The Christianisation of the Slavic peoples was, however, a slow and—in many cases—superficial phenomenon, especially in what is today Russia. Christianisation was vigorous in western and central parts of what is today Ukraine, as they were closer to the capital Kiev, but even there, popular resistance led by volkhvs, pagan priests or shamans, recurred periodically for centuries.[2] Even though the Byzantine Christianization firstly has slowed down the Eastern Slavic traditions in Rus’, it has preserved the Slavic traditions in the long term. While local Slavic figures and myths, such as Baba Roga in Croatia were forgotten,[4] Slavic culture continued to exist and even flourish in the Eastern Slavic countries. In the case of a Christian Latinization of the Eastern Slavic countries, this may not have been the case.

–end–

Please stop copy pasting for dark social here.

UNCOS Los Angeles home page screen shot
UNCOS Los Angeles home page screen shot

After this is a personal  note to my two biological sister(s) and maybe a brother who I have not seen in 10 years now. Go ahead and please use this image:

(*) (Double edged sword, yes I see the double edged sword Z, nice choice but I wanted to make you one when I grew up.)

Star and moons

UA Moons
Seeds of faith moons

crescent moons

Painting by Rado Javor: -https://www.deviantart.com/radojavor/art/Sunflower-fields-562097517-Click Picture Link to Abramovich Artem Volodimirovich at -ukraine-memorial.org-

Image and story from Euromaidan Press

[ED: These two tanks (Russian and Ukrainian) did not shoot at each other in 2014 but rammed each other,.. both reactive armor systems exploded.]

http://euromaidanpress.com/2019/02/18/russian-war-with-ukraine-a-clash-of-civilizations-ikhlov-says/

Artist: Rado Javor  Link 2  Link 3

Interesting:
http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/09/09/for-russians-ukraine-is-a-south-korea-to-russias-north-zhordan-says/

https://medium.com/practice-of-history-2018/euromaidan-social-media-in-the-revolution-of-dignity-142084c30202

Shot of Square Protest Before Revolution
–https://medium.com/practice-of-history-2018/euromaidan-social-media-in-the-revolution-of-dignity-142084c30202

Featured image is from:
https://pxhere.com/en/photo/591272
License:
https://pxhere.com/en/license

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Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama

Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama

Ritual drama subject research
Links to institutions and papers
Posted on the night of the full cold moon

Explaining Cultic Theatres and Ritual drama to the modern non-christian requires a definition. Rather than a definition an example would be:  The Cultus of Aphrodite would be practiced in the Temple of Aphrodite and/or the Sanctuary of Aphrodite. [A cult is the care of a God or Goddess. The cultus is the system or variety of religious worship] A cultic theater play or ritual and enactment is what they performed during feasts as well as for other ceremonies. As far as we know some of the Cultic Theater and Ritual Drama performed in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the latter half of the 20th century after WWII had not been enacted or performed for thousands of years. With help from the academic community in the University of California and The California State University, research and practical knowledge was shared between practitioners and professors.

One of the questions discussed with the professors was the subject of Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama which was a major obstruction to the recognition of ancient religious practices by the state, local and federal governments of the United States of America. This is NOT a small issue and was directly tied into the 1960’s and 1970’s religious civil rights movements. This simple question of what was a governmentally recognizable religious observance of a prayer, a ritual or a rite was and still is a major topic when we begin to consider various forms of care and worship that were indigenous public and private observances, rituals and ceremonies. Some of these early observances were forcibly broken up by various US federal, state and local police agencies. Indeed the problem remains to this very day that people do not understand that the religions are now 100% legal. The pieces are finally in place to accurately describe and protect one of the most sacred American liberties. The Freedom of Religion

UN Fight for Freedom Poster 1943
Poster created during the Second World War (1943), according to the Declaration of the United Nations of 1942. This poster is important because it represents the origins of the United Nations as a wartime alliance (before it was a concrete organization).
As a work of Office of War Information, a branch of the United States Federal Government, this work is in public domain.

From Wikipedia:  Cult is literally the “care” (Latin cultus) owed to deities and to temples, shrines, or churches. Cult is embodied in ritual and ceremony.
Its present or former presence is made concrete in temples, shrines and churches, and cult images, including cult images and votive offerings at votive sites. For more on the Ancient Greek religions or cults please click the eponymous link here.

Google books description of Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama:
[full description]
This well-illustrated book thoroughly investigates the relations between East and West in the Ancient world as seen through the lens of ancient religious practices. The author has concentrated on one aspect of the cult, the ritual drama, and its setting, the cultic theatre. The point of departure is the presence of a great amount of theatrical structures in the sanctuaries in Greece and Italy. Many of these structures were not proper theatres in the modern sense of the word, but rather primitive rows of seats, ‘a place to watch from’. These structures have never before been examined from a functional viewpoint, and the author proposes that their primary raison d’etre was the performance of ritual dramas at the great seasonal feasts. For various reasons, which she describes, the author points to the relative obscurity of this religious institution in the Greek and Roman world, and notes that as a result, it has received scant attention from scholars. In contrast, it is well known that ritual dramas had been performed in the distant past at the great seasonal feasts of the Orient, and the book includes an excellent overview of the development of this institution as well as the setting chosen for it in the Egyptian, Syrio-Phoenician and Anatolian cults, both in their homelands and in their new host countries in the West. This is a fascinating book for archaeologists and classicists, as well as for anthropologists and historians of religion, but it also gives food for thought for those who simply want to learn more about Oriental religious practices and the origins of theatre.  [end Google books full description]

I/we were taught that when those ritual dramas were performed in those temples or sanctuaries it was said that the actual deities were present in their spirit forms. The actors and participants who also included the priests and priestesses who were said to be the vessel of the spirit of whatever deity it was. They were honored as such because for a moment in time they were part of the pantheon or all the gods of the people. Modern paganism perhaps has forgotten that and we have waited lifetimes for confirmation of what we were taught as children and what our ancestors believed and passed down through the ages. Some of the rites and rituals had not been done for thousands of years so we drew down the gods and goddesses for the souls of all humanity.

We do not have to doubt that what we were taught was true anymore. We also now do not have to worry about going to hell for participating in our first religion and first nations cultural and religious practices. They are legitimate practices and can either be thought of as cultural activity—if you are of some other faith—as well as the primary spiritual connection in your life.

Over 50 years ago there was a special church group in San Francisco and Los Angeles called the church of opposition. We performed public enactments (ritual dramas) of myths and legends as correctly as we could with the help of the academic community. . It helped start something that 50+ years later led to several classical, neo-classical and modern pagan faiths and religions to finally be accepted by the US federal government.

Universität Hamburg - research, teaching, education, homepage

Archaeological Institute
Managing Director 
Prof. dr. Inge Nielsen
Johnsalle 35, 20148 Hamburg

Inge Nielsen Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama in ancient Rome
Inge Nielsen  University of Hamburg, Archäologisches Institut,
Department Member |  Archaeology  Hamburg, Germany

First Paragraph:
When one studies ancient sanctuaries there is a tendency to focus on their primary functions, namely the rituals surrounding the cult itself, that is, the sacrifice to and the worship and the invocation of the deity. The historians of religions are of course well aware that the sanctuaries during the festivals, which were the only times when they were really the centre of religious action, served many secondary functions as well. The classical archaeologists have in this connection concentrated primarily on the so-called pan-Hellenic sanctuaries in Greece with their installations for sports, drama, choral singing, poetry and epic and, to a lesser degree, the sanctuaries for ludi in Rome. It is, however, important to remember that both in Greece and Italy not only this kind of sanctuaries, but also the “ordinary” sanctuaries, that is, those, which were not specially adapted to that kind of games, served other functions than the primary ones as well. One of these functions, I think, was the performance of ritual dramas, which may be defined as non-literary dramas based on the myth of the deity in the sanctuary in question, and performed at the great seasonal festivals, at which the myth illustrated the power of the god to conquer the various crises which society and its members had to go through. These crises could be, and often were in the agrarian society of antiquity, connected to the various transitions of the agrarian year, like sowing and harvest. But they could also refer to the transitions connected to the worshippers, such as the transition from child to puberty, the preparation of the young girl to her wedding, the change from youth to citizen, or, of course be connected to death, the so-called rites of passage.[end of first paragraph]

 

JSTOR Home

From the American Journal of Archaeology
https://www.jstor.org/journal/amerjarch

Used under the Open Access Creative Commons License
Changes made to formatting and coding.

Book Review
Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama: A Study in Regional Development and Religious Interchange Between East and West in Antiquity
https://www.ajaonline.org/book-review/480


[First paragraph]
Ritual drama was an important feature in antiquity—more important than the paucity of evidence suggests. No scripts have survived, since they were generally unnecessary, though we have a few accounts from inscriptions or literary sources about what was done and said. Ritual drama might typically be a reenactment of a myth, such as a fight between a king/god and a monster; the disappearance, return, and sacred marriage of a young god; or wanderings in the underworld. Historians of Greek and Roman drama would naturally like to know much more. A few paintings and reliefs seem to depict costumed performers of ritual drama; often they were priests or cult members, not professional actors. Masks discovered at religious sanctuaries certainly indicate the existence of religious performances. [End first paragraph]

Pontus Hellstrom Uppsala University, 
Department och archaeology and ancient history,
Emeritus |  Ancient Greek Architecture

A Cultic Theatre at Karian Labraunda

Antike.Architektur.Geschichte
Edited by Stephan Faust, Martina Seifert und Leon Ziemer

[First paragraph]
In her work Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama, Inge Nielsen has shown that many sanctuaries in the ancient Mediterranean world can be expected to have had a theatron of some kind for ritual dramas or performances. Among her examples feature some sanctuaries in Karia, such as those of Hekate at Lagina, Artemis at Amyzon, and Zeus at Panamara 1. I suggest that Labraunda should be added to the list 2. The written sources are silent about ceremonies and rituals at this sanctuary of Zeus, but the archaeological material may provide some clues. In this paper I propose that the Monumental stairs in the Propylon courtyard at Labraunda may have been used as the theatron of a cultic theatre and not only as processional steps 3. The Propylon courtyard, the forecourt of the sanctuary, would have served as the orchestra.
[End of first paragraph]

The above reference came to my attention thanks to
Aytekin Büyüközer who bookmarked it.


Selcuk University (Selçuk Üniversitesi), Archaeology, Faculty Member. One of her recent  papers is this one: “The Sanctuary of Hekate at Lagina in the 4th Century BC”, Arkhaia Anatolika 1 (2018), 15-30. DOI: 10.32949/Arkhaia.2018.1   (Caria) www.selcuk.edu.tr

 

A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World , First Edition. 

Edited by Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke.© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Logo and Seal of the Freie Universität Berlin
Susanne Gödde 
Institut für Religionswissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin

Chapter 25
Theater
Susanne Gödde
[The first two paragraphs]

Introduction: Theater and Cult
Throughout Antiquity, Greek – and later Roman – theater was closely tied to religious practice due to its integration into religious festivals and its spatial proximity to temples and altars. Whereas in classical Athens the performances of tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays had been restricted to the cult of Dionysus, this exclusivity gradually dissolved, with the result that plays could, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, also be performed at festivals in honor of other gods. Starting with the first Roman stone theater, the famous Theater of Pompey in Rome, dedicated in 55 BCE, one occasionally finds the combination of theater and temple within a single structure, unified by a strict spatial arrangement along a shared axis. In his standard monograph, John Arthur Hanson (1959) described these structures as “theater‐temples”, but their function is subject to ongoing debate (cf. Sear 2006: 44–5). Despite the historical and “genetic” proximity between theater and cult, it remains difficult to decide whether the theater of Antiquity was a sacred or profane institution, not least because the border between these two spheres – especially in Greek culture – is so fluid.
Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that theatrical performances also took place as part of cult – in forms quite independent of the written evidence of the surviving plays. Inge Nielsen (2002) and others have shown that structures similar to theaters existed in many Minoan (3000 to 1050 BCE) and Mycenian (1600-1050 BCE) palace‐ and temple‐complexes. The most well‐known are the stepped “theatral areas” in Cnossus and Phaestum (Nielsen 2002: 69–76).Temples of later date also show assembly and audience areas (theatra) which may have been used for cultic performances (cf. Anti 1947: 27–51; Sear 2006: 44–6; critical of the idea that these were predecessors of later theaters: Pöhlmann 1981: 136; Isler 2002:260). Based on the assumption that so‐called “cultic dramas” were staged in these locations, structures of this kind are termed “cultic theaters” or “sanctuary theaters” in modern ~~~
[end of first two paragraphs]