From the 1970’s: Who are they? Spanish? Mexicans? Italians? Pagans? Romani?
I grew up in a neighborhood in Arcadia California called Mayflower Village. Some of the neighbors spoke a Spanish called Caló. Because of the man who said he was my father or maybe somebody else we were called the Califs. So according to the Spanish Americans I knew, where I lived was roughly called Mayflower Village or Mayflower Varrio not a barrio — a varrio. Some people called the language they used Caló but it was older than that. According to a online dictionary: “Caló a language used by Chicanos or Mexican-Americans, derived from the name of the Spanish Gypsy (gitano) dialect, Caló.” (1) There were Romani, Sinti and Kalderash from multiple countries that lived near us so in their worldview it was a varrio and our world had almost nothing to do with local Mexican American culture. Sounds weird but it’s true.
UNCOS Los Angeles: The National Holocaust Sanctuary and Shrine of Hekate and Aphrodite/Venus at the Crossroads. The Witchholocaust sanctuary and shrine was dedicated by the council of the indigenous world religions called The Church of Opposition. [église d’opposition, церква опозиції opozytsiyna tserkva, Oppositionskirche] The council represented the indigenous (ex: Ukrainian Slavic, Celt, Norse) and ancient (Roman, Greek) religions to organizations and other members. Currently the classical, neo-classical and modern indigenous and ancient religions are named as the Pagan, Neo-Pagan and Wicca religions in the United States of America and are 100% legally recognized by the Hague and Geneva conventions. We provide publishing and consulting services.
2001 The Hekate Crossroads Sanctuary and Shrine moves to a different site in Southern California still unpublicized at the time. The dedication ceremony for The Hekate took place over two weekends. It was estimated that 250 to 400 cars arrived on Saturday and Sunday each weekend for a total possible number of 1500 to 2000 people.
The church council —organized around a crossroads shrine—was supposed to be a secret Los Angeles and San Francisco area coalition church 50 years ago, but now there is a new country and legal recognition in the United States of America of the ancient and modern religions. Without the legal recognition of the United States military the general population did not take the Pagans seriously. Prejudice has existed for centuries but we forgot about the Ukrainian Holocaust in the United States of America where millions of Christians were murdered. I am glad to see finally in the videos of the euromaidan revolution that the “Ukrainian National Church Council” had a Pagan on stage with them during euromaidan. Whether he was part of the UNCC or not it does not really matter to the public, the fact is there was a person in pagan clothing up there with the priests in black. If you did not know it the indigenous Slavic Religion is Paganism. In Europe the majority of Pagans killed in the Holocaust were Ukrainian.
The reason that the Ukrainian Holocaust shrine was never built in Los Angeles is a surprising one to many people. The majority of the people massacred were Christian and Christian/Pagan (~75%) The other 25% identify solely as Jewish or Gypsy and Pagan. All of them were Ukrainian+ . The country the shrine would have been in involved with in the 1970’s through 1991 was the USSR. Politically and legally you could not have a communist USSR Holocaust shrine in the United States. It would have been very offensive on the surface to the Jewish community in Los Angeles.
The resistance church members were still trying to get people out of the USSR and into Israel at the time so moving the holocaust survivors families behind the iron curtain took precedence. It was also deemed too risky a project to Holocaust families in the United States and the USSR. It would have exposed names to nazis and people that were still hunting and killing Jews, Gypsies and Pagans 10 to 20 years after WWII. Today the fear is still the same one of putting relatives of people in the United States—who live in certain countries—in political prisons overseas— hopefully not in The Ukraine but it still goes on today. This is why we will always be vigilant with our members and donor’s identities. This is why it was a secret for so long. The Israelis have their own country, for millennia all we had was Hekate and our crossroads shrines.
Coming soon you will be able to find it on the internet as thewitch.us as well as thehekate.com currently pointing to this website. If you are interested in opportunities with The Hekate Witch Sanctuary and Shrine please contact us through the verified Google business listing or through the older shrine Webpage:https://gypsypagan.com
Thank you for your patience all these years we are almost ready for the Public andPrivate 501C3 non-profitstage. The featured image is from our website https://gypsypagan.com
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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 wereindigenous 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
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.
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 thatwhen 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 doubtthat 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 religiouspractices. 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-classicalandmodern paganfaiths and religions to finally be accepted by the US federal government.
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]
[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]
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.
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]
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