Hello to you too,

    Well glad to see you have the same two books I have, and have found the
time to thumb through them to find the passages you were looking for to
append with smiley faces. You have confused some rather specific details
with the general thesis which certainly is farther and wider than just an
Attis/Cybele cult and Barry Fell type flights of fancy. "The postulates on
which our hypothesis rests are, I submit, well within the bounds of historic
possibility." She qualifies. p.116 :-)
    There's too much to go into here, but for my money it would be hard to
find a Parish priest, Anglican minister or any Christian apologist who could
refute her (Weston's) arguments (and Frazer's) without resorting to the
regurgitation of oft-quoted gospel lines and the invocation of faith until
it all resolved as it always does to its "tu quoque" dead end. That is if
the usual cavalier dismissal didn't suffice.
    "There is a stream of tradition, running as it were underground, which
from time to time rises to the surface, only to be relentlessly
suppressed." -Weston (1913).
    And that's what I like about Ezra. He did not stop dipping into that
stream for his whole lifetime and, as a result, exposed the historical
blackout. And he took the blows for it like a man. He didn't run for cover
behind some unassailable institutionalized reward-and-punishment system of
the lily-livered.
    "This is precisely the feat which our earlier Aryan forefathers
ascribed to their divine hero, Indra; the 'Freeing of the Waters' is the
greatest boon that can be bestowed upon man." Weston (1913) And guess what
causes the Wasteland in the first place? After "The Wasteland" possums and
cats?
    "...the Grail is a living force, it will never die; it may indeed sink
out of sight, and, for centuries even, disappear from the field of
literature, but it will rise to the surface again, and become once more a
theme of vital inspiration even as, after slumbering from the days of
Malory, it woke to new life in the nineteenth century, making its fresh
appeal through the genius of Tennyson and Wagner." -Weston 1920
    "Thou, Indra, has slain Vritra, by thy vigour, thou hast set free the
rivers." -Rig Veda

Shantih,
Chas
----------
>From: Richard Seddon <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Cantgo ergo possum physic
>Date: Mon, Jan 27, 2003, 10:04 AM
>

> Hello:
>
> Wasn't it Weston's argument that the Grail legend was derived from a
> theoretical colony of Attis followers in Roman England?   She does allow, I
> think, that the sect may have been also gnostic Christians but insists that
> the elements of the Grail legend are from their Attis worshiping past.  I
> thought that her basic argument was against the ultimate Christian origin of
> the legend.
>
> I think that any serious understanding of Eliot's conversion (which Pound
> was surely not engaged in) has to proceed from an understanding of the
> English word "Parish".   Eliot was looking for what we carelessly call "his
> roots" and he found those in the Anglican church and its "Parish".  Those
> elements of Christian faith that Pagan Pound found to poke fun at may have
> had little or nothing to do with Eliot's conversion.
>
> Rick Seddon
> McIntosh, NM