Rick:
I guess my non-literalness is showing. And my non-scholarliness.  Yes,
pogan, but I interpret all that rather according to my own lights. Pound
liked the pagan manifestations within the "ancient" Christian ethos, in
Italy especially, and those things I see as essentially "religion." The
Roman Church at its best easily incorporated a lot of paganism because a lot
of paganism is true. The Protestant thing got its back up about all this
terrible "pagan" stuff and would dish, for example, the Great Mother, and
look what has happened to Protestantism! In my book Adonis is a prefigure of
Christ. We are told Joseph was a type of Christ. That's from the Hebraic
tradition. But Adonis, Dionysius, Osiris are types, too, from Greece and the
utterly mysterious Egypt, just not very popular nowadays with people strung
up tight by the (to me) rather dreadful Calvin (or Voltaire).

The Attis side of the Christ is a tad more complicated and takes us into
tough country if people are going to insist on being made equally nervous by
honest celibacy and by full-blown sexual expression. Not a place for
pussy-footing.

I hold with the concept of the Philosophia Perennis et Universalis as
enunciated by A.K. Coomarswamy, among others: all genuine, authentic
religion is the anthropomorphic expression of a metaphysical unity (aka the
Truth); almost all of the unnecessary, bitter religious quarreling is about
distasteful or unfamiliar anthropomorphic details. Differences in culture,
not in the reality.

I believe in the Reality and accept, revel in, my native Christian
expression of it.  But I don't for a second think that rules out other
"seedings" from what Gurdjieff called sometimes "The All High Endlessness."
I haven't got much use for people who have bought the rationalist,
Enlightenment project as a sufficient interpretation of life and the world.
Too thin, too straightened, too surprised when the "dark underneath" shows
through.

Speaking of Vegetative Rituals: How about the Eucharist, theophagy, the
bloodless bloody sacrifice, a full-blown vegetative ritual involving grain
and wine, and at the same time an echo of human sacrifice, cannibalism.
Gurdjieff again: it is as old as Egypt. Others would say directly from
Atlantis.

Etc. I'll cut this stuff out on this list henceforth. Think it's getting to
be too much.
Tom



> From: Richard Seddon <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 18:59:07 -0700
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Cantgo ergo possum physic
>
> Tom
>
> "Pagan" is how Pound characterized himself.
>
> Weston is not referring to an esoteric Church but rather is making reference
> to the occult concept of a secret history/tradition being passed from
> initiate to initiate within the Attis/Adonis cult.  The secret
> history/tradition is of course the Vegetative Rituals.
>
> Rick Seddon
> McIntosh, NM