Free love
Free love is a social movement that accepts all forms of love. The Free Love movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, adultery, it claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, no one else. Much of the free love tradition reflects a liberal philosophy that seeks freedom from state regulation and church interference in personal relationships. According to this concept, the free unions of adults are legitimate relations which should be respected by all third parties whether they are emotional or sexual relations. In addition, some free love writing has argued that both men and women have the right to sexual pleasure without social or legal restraints. In the Victorian era, this was a radical notion. A new theme developed, linking free love with radical social change, depicting it as a harbinger of a new anti-authoritarian, anti-repressive sensibility. According to today's stereotype, earlier middle-class Americans wanted the home to be a place of stability in an uncertain world.
To this mentality are attributed strongly-defined gender roles, which led to a minority reaction in the form of the free-love movement. While the phrase free love is associated with promiscuity in the popular imagination in reference to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s the free-love movement has not advocated multiple-sexual partners or short-term sexual relationships. Rather, it has argued that sexual relations that are entered into should not be regulated by law; the term "sex radical" is used interchangeably with the term "free lover", was the preferred term by advocates because of the negative connotations of "free love". By whatever name, advocates had two strong beliefs: opposition to the idea of forced sexual activity in a relationship and advocacy for a woman to use her body in any way that she pleases. Laws of particular concern to free love movements have included those that prevent an unmarried couple from living together, those that regulate adultery and divorce, as well as age of consent, birth control, homosexuality and sometimes prostitution.
The abrogation of individual rights in marriage is a concern—for example, some jurisdictions do not recognize spousal rape or treat it less than non-spousal rape. Free-love movements since the 19th century have defended the right to publicly discuss sexuality and have battled obscenity laws. At the turn of the 20th century, some free-love proponents extended the critique of marriage to argue that marriage as a social institution encourages emotional possessiveness and psychological enslavement; the history of free love is entwined with the history of feminism. From the late 18th century, leading feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, have challenged the institution of marriage, many have advocated its abolition. According to feminist critique, a married woman was a wife and mother, denying her the opportunity to pursue other occupations. In 1855, free love advocate Mary Gove Nichols described marriage as the "annihilation of woman," explaining that women were considered to be men's property in law and public sentiment, making it possible for tyrannical men to deprive their wives of all freedom.
For example, the law allowed a husband to beat his wife. Free-love advocates argued that many children were born into unloving marriages out of compulsion, but should instead be the result of choice and affection—yet children born out of wedlock did not have the same rights as children with married parents. In 1857, in the Social Revolutionist, Minerva Putnam complained that "in the discussion of free love, no woman has attempted to give her views on the subject" and challenged every woman reader to "rise in the dignity of her nature and declare herself free."In the 19th century at least six books endorsed the concept of free love, all of which were written by men. However of the four major free-love periodicals following the U. S. civil war, half had female editors. Mary Gove Nichols was the leading-female advocate and the woman most looked up to in the free-love movement, her autobiography became the first argument against marriage written from a woman's point of view. To proponents of free love, the act of sex was not just about reproduction.
Access to birth control was considered a means to women's independence, leading birth-control activists embraced free love. Sexual radicals remained focused on their attempts to uphold a woman's right to control her body and to discuss issues such as contraception, marital-sex abuse, sexual education; these people believed. To help achieve this goal, such radical thinkers relied on the written word, books and periodicals, by these means the movement was sustained for over fifty years, spreading the message of free love all over the United States. A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love; the all-male Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD shunned sex and slavery. They renounced wealth, lived communally, were pacifist vegetarians. An Early Christian sect known as the Adamites existed in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries and rejected marriage, they believed themselves to be without original sin.
In the 6th century, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage, like many other free-love movements favored
Khlysts
Khlysts or Khlysty was an underground sect, which existed from 1645 to the late 20th century. It split off the Russian Orthodox Church and belonged to the Spiritual Christians tendency.'Khlyst', the name applied to them, is a distortion of the name they used. The original name was the invented word Христововеры or Христы, their critics corrupted the name, mixing it with the word хлыст, meaning "a whip". It is possible that the word'Khlysty' is related to the Greek word'χιλιασταί', or with "klyster", meaning "one that purges". Millennialism has many different branches and sects and their teachings have common points with those of the Khlysty, it is said to have been founded by Daniil Filippovich, of Kostroma. The Khlysty renounced veneration of the saints, they believed in a possibility of direct communication with the Holy Spirit and of His embodiment in living people. Curiously enough, they allowed their members to attend Orthodox churches; the central idea of the Khlystys' religion was to practice asceticism.
Khlysty practiced the attainment of divine grace for sin in ecstatic rituals that were rumored to sometimes turn into sexual orgies. Flagellation was rumored due to the similarity of their name to the word for "whip". Secret Khlysty cells existed throughout pre-revolutionary Russia; each cell was led by a male and a female leader, who were called the "Christ" and the "Mother of God" respectively. The cells themselves were referred to as'Arks' among members and messages were carried between them clandestinely in order to facilitate communication, they were subject to persecution and perceived as a subversive element by the nineteenth century Russian authorities and ecclesiastical bodies. In 1910, Grigori Rasputin was accused of having been a Khlyst by Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, a governess of the Grand Duchesses of Russia, after being horrified that Rasputin was allowed access by the Tsar to the nursery of the Grand Duchesses, when the four girls were in their nightgowns. C. L. Sulzberger, in his book The Fall of Eagles, says that Rasputin "adopted the philosophy" of the Khlysts.
Sulzberger goes on to say the Khlysts' "...foremost idea was that salvation could be attained only by total repentance and that this became far more achievable for one who had transgressed.'Sin in order that you may obtain forgiveness,' was the practical side of the Khlysty."Rasputin's daughter contested these claims, writing that her father investigated but rejected the sect. The number of cells dropped drastically in the Soviet times. However, a few secluded Khlysty communities existed in Soviet Russia in Tambov, Kuibyshev and Northern Caucasus and in Soviet Ukraine. Silver Dove, Andrei Bely's first novel is based on khlysty; the Skoptsy, a Russian cult and apparent offshoot of the Khlysty from the same time period, who believed in castration, self-mutilation and total sexual abstinence. Kartanolaisuus, Finnish cult with influences from Khlysts and Skoptsys Panchenko, Aleksandr. "Strange faith" and the blood libel Radzinsky, Edvard. The Rasputin File. Anchor. ISBN 0-385-48910-2. Rasputin, Maria.
Rasputin - The Man Behind the Myth, A Personal Memoir. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-753129-X. Emeliantseva, E. "Situational Religiosity: Everyday Strategies of the Moscow Christ-Faith Believers and of the St Petersburg Mystics Attracted by This Faith in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Thomas Bremer and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths, 98-120
Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g. by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting, he led a workshop, the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500. Mantegna was born in Isola di Carturo, Venetian Republic close to Padua, second son of a carpenter, Biagio. At the age of eleven he became the apprentice of Paduan painter Francesco Squarcione. Squarcione, whose original profession was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, a faculty for acting. Like his famous compatriot Petrarca, Squarcione was an ancient Rome enthusiast: he traveled in Italy, also in Greece, collecting antique statues, vases, etc. making drawings from them himself making available his collection for others to study.
All the while, he continued undertaking works on commission, to which his pupils, no less than himself, contributed. As many as 137 painters and pictorial students passed through Squarcione's school, established around 1440 and which became famous all over Italy. Padua attracted artists not only from the Veneto but from Tuscany, such as Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi and Donatello. At the time, Mantegna was said to be a favorite pupil of Squarcione, who taught him Latin and instructed him to study fragments of Roman sculpture; the master preferred forced perspective, recollection of which may account for some of Mantegna's innovations. However, at the age of seventeen Mantegna left Squarcione's workshop, he claimed that Squarcione had profited from his work without sufficient payment. Mantegna's first work, now lost, was an altarpiece for the church of Santa Sofia in 1448; the same year he was called, together with Nicolò Pizolo, to work with a large group of painters entrusted with the decoration of the Ovetari Chapel in the transept of the church of the Eremitani.
It is probable, that before this time some of the pupils of Squarcione, including Mantegna, had begun the series of frescoes in the chapel of S. Cristoforo, in the church of Sant'Agostino degli Eremitani, which are today considered a masterpiece. After a series of coincidences, Mantegna finished most of the work alone, though Ansuino, who collaborated with Mantegna in the Ovetari Chapel, brought his style from the Forlì school of painting; the now critical Squarcione carped about the earlier works of this series, illustrating the life of St James. This series was entirely lost in the 1944 allied bombings of Padua; the most dramatic work of the fresco cycle was the work set in the worm's-eye view perspective, St. James Led to His Execution; the sketch for the St. Stephen fresco survived and is the earliest known preliminary sketch which still survives to compare with the corresponding fresco; the drawing shows proof that nude figures—which were painted as clothed—were used in the conception of works during the Early Renaissance.
In the preliminary sketch, the perspective is less developed and closer to a more average viewpoint however. Despite the authentic Classical look of the monument, it is not a copy of any known Roman structure. Mantegna adopted the wet drapery patterns of the Romans, who took the form from the Greek invention, for the clothing of his figures, although the tense figures and interactions are derived from Donatello. Among the other early Mantegna frescoes are the two saints over the entrance porch of the church of Sant'Antonio in Padua, 1452, an altarpiece of San Luca Altarpiece from 1453, with St. Luke and other saints for the church of S. Giustina, now in the Brera Gallery in Milan; as the young artist progressed in his work, he came under the influence of Jacopo Bellini, father of the celebrated painters Giovanni Bellini and Gentile Bellini, met his daughter Nicolosia. In 1453 Jacopo consented to a marriage between Mantegna. Andrea seems to have been influenced by his old preceptor's strictures, although his subjects, for example, those from the legend of St. Christopher, combine his sculptural style with a greater sense of naturalism and vivacity.
Trained as he had been in the study of marbles and the severity of the antique, Mantegna avowed that he considered ancient art superior to nature as being more eclectic in form. As a result, the painter exercised precision in outline. Overall, Mantegna's work thus tended towards rigidity, demonstrating an austere wholeness rather than graceful sensitivity of expression, his draperies are tight and folded, being studied from models draped in paper and woven fabrics gummed in place. His figures are slim and bony. Tawny landscape, gritty with littering pebbles, marks the athletic hauteur of his style. Mantegna never changed the manner which he had adopted in Padua, though his coloring—at first neutral and undecided—strengthened and matured. Throughout his works there is more balancing of
Cybele
Cybele is an Anatolian mother goddess. She is Phrygia's only known goddess, was its national deity, her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies around the 6th century BC. In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception, she was assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, the harvest–mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains and city walls, fertile nature, wild animals lions. In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater.
The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire; the meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, remain so in modern scholarship. No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Cybele's Phrygian cult, she may have evolved from a statuary type found at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, dated to the 6th millennium BC and identified by some as a mother goddess. In Phrygian art of the 8th century BC, the cult attributes of the Phrygian mother-goddess include attendant lions, a bird of prey, a small vase for her libations or other offerings.
The inscription Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya at a Phrygian rock-cut shrine, dated to the first half of the 6th century BC, is read as "Mother of the mountain", a reading supported by ancient classical sources, consistent with Cybele as any of several similar tutelary goddesses, each known as "mother" and associated with specific Anatolian mountains or other localities: a goddess thus "born from stone". She is ancient Phrygia's only known goddess, was the highest deity of the Phrygian state. In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Pausanias attests to a Magnesian cult to "the mother of the gods", whose image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus; this was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess, was attributed to the legendary Broteas. At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess—identified by the Greeks as Cybele—took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron, may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity; this was the aniconic stone, removed to Rome in 204 BC.
Images and iconography in funerary contexts, the ubiquity of her Phrygian name Matar, suggest that she was a mediator between the "boundaries of the known and unknown": the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead. Her association with hawks and the stone of the mountainous landscape of the Anatolian wilderness, seem to characterize her as mother of the land in its untrammeled natural state, with power to rule, moderate or soften its latent ferocity, to control its potential threats to a settled, civilized life. Anatolian elites sought to harness her protective power to forms of ruler-cult; as protector of cities, or city states, she was sometimes shown wearing a mural crown, representing the city walls. At the same time, her power "transcended any purely political usage and spoke directly to the goddess' followers from all walks of life"; some Phrygian shaft monuments are thought to have been used for libations and blood offerings to Cybele anticipating by several centuries the pit used in her taurobolium and criobolium sacrifices during the Roman imperial era.
Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed, subsumed, by the influences and interpretations of her foreign devotees, at first Greek and Roman. From around the 6th century BC, cults to the Anatolian mother-goddess were introduced from Phrygia into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of Magna Graecia; the Greeks called her Mātēr or Mētēr, or from the early 5th century Kubelē. Walter Burkert places her among the "foreign gods" of Greek religion, a complex figure combining the Minoan-Mycenaean tradition with the Phrygian cult imported directly from Asia Minor. In Greece, as in Phrygia, she was a "Mistress of animals", with her mastery of the natural world expressed by the lions that flank her, sit in her lap or draw her chariot, she was assimilated to the Minoan-Greek earth-mother Rhea, "Mother of the gods", whose raucous, ecstatic rites she may have acquired. As an exemplar of devoted motherhood, she was assimilated to the grain-godd
Celibacy
Celibacy is the state of voluntarily being unmarried, sexually abstinent, or both for religious reasons. It is in association with the role of a religious official or devotee. In its narrow sense, the term celibacy is applied only to those for whom the unmarried state is the result of a sacred vow, act of renunciation, or religious conviction. In a wider sense, it is understood to only mean abstinence from sexual activity. Celibacy has existed in one form or another throughout history, in all the major religions of the world, views on it have varied; the Romans viewed it as an aberration and legislated fiscal penalties against it, with the sole exception granted to the Vestal Virgins. The Islamic attitudes toward celibacy have been complex as well; some Hadiths claim that Muhammad denounced celibacy. Classical Hindu culture encouraged asceticism and celibacy in the stages of life, after one has met his societal obligations. Jainism, on the other hand, preached complete celibacy for young monks and considered celibacy to be an essential behavior to attain moksha.
Buddhism has been influenced by Jainism in this respect. There were, significant cultural differences in the various areas where Buddhism spread, which affected the local attitudes toward celibacy, it was not well received in China, for example, where other religions movements such as Daoism were opposed to it. A somewhat similar situation existed in Japan, where the Shinto tradition opposed celibacy. In most native African and American Indian religious traditions, celibacy has been viewed negatively as well, although there were exceptions like periodic celibacy practiced by some Mesoamerican warriors; the English word celibacy derives from the Latin caelibatus, "state of being unmarried", from Latin caelebs, meaning "unmarried". This word derives from two Proto-Indo-European stems, *kaiwelo- "alone" and *libs- "living"; the words abstinence and celibacy are used interchangeably, but are not the same thing. Sexual abstinence known as continence, is abstaining from some or all aspects of sexual activity for some limited period of time, while celibacy may be defined as a voluntary religious vow not to marry or engage in sexual activity.
Asexuality is conflated with celibacy and sexual abstinence, but it is considered distinct from the two, as celibacy and sexual abstinence are behavioral and those who use those terms for themselves are motivated by factors such as an individual's personal or religious beliefs. A. W. Richard Sipe, while focusing on the topic of celibacy in Catholicism, states that "the most assumed definition of celibate is an unmarried or single person, celibacy is perceived as synonymous with sexual abstinence or restraint." Sipe adds that in the uniform milieu of Catholic priests in the United States "there is no clear operational definition of celibacy". Elizabeth Abbott commented on the terminology in her A History of Celibacy: "I drafted a definition that discarded the rigidly pedantic and unhelpful distinctions between celibacy and virginity"; the concept of "new celibacy" was introduced by Gabrielle Brown in her 1980 book The New Celibacy. In a revised version of her book, she claims that "abstinence is a response on the outside to what's going on, celibacy is a response from the inside".
According to her definition, celibacy is much more than not having sex. It is more intentional than abstinence, its goal is personal growth and empowerment; this new perspective on celibacy is echoed by several authors including Elizabeth Abbott, Wendy Keller, Wendy Shalit. The rule of celibacy in the Buddhist religion, whether Theravada, has a long history. Celibacy was advocated as an ideal rule of life for all monks and nuns by Gautama Buddha, except for Japan where it is not followed due to historical and political developments following the Meiji Restoration. In Japan, celibacy was an ideal among Buddhist clerics for hundreds of years, but violations of clerical celibacy were so common for so long that in 1872, state laws made marriage legal for Buddhist clerics. Subsequently, ninety percent of Buddhist monks/clerics married. An example is Higashifushimi Kunihide, a prominent Buddhist priest of Japanese royal ancestry, married and a father whilst serving as a monk for most of his lifetime.
Gautama known as the Buddha, is known for his renunciation of his wife, Princess Yasodharā, son, Rahula. In order to pursue an ascetic life, he needed to renounce aspects of the impermanent world, including his wife and son. On both his wife and son joined the ascetic community and are mentioned in the Buddhist texts to have become enlightened. In another sense, a buddhavacana recorded the zen patriarch Vimalakirti as being an advocate of marital continence instead of monastic renunciation, the sutra became somewhat popular due to its brash humour as well as integrating the role of women in laity as well as spiritual life. In the religious movement of Brahma Kumaris, celibacy is promoted for peace and to defeat power of lust and to prepare for life in forthcoming Heaven on earth for 2,500 years when children will be created by the power of the mind for householders to like holy brother and sister. In this belief system, celibacy is given the utmost importance, it is said that, as per the direction of the Supreme God those lead a pure and celibate life will be able to conquer the surging vices.
The power of celibacy creates an unseen environment of divinity bringing peace, purity and fortune. Those with the powe
Dionysian Mysteries
The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which sometimes used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques to remove inhibitions and social constraints, liberating the individual to return to a natural state. It provided some liberation for those marginalized by Greek society: women, slaves and non-citizens. In their final phase the Mysteries shifted their emphasis from a chthonic, underworld orientation to a transcendental, mystical one, with Dionysus changing his nature accordingly. By its nature as a mystery religion reserved for the initiated, many aspects of the Dionysian cult remain unknown and were lost with the decline of Greco-Roman polytheism; the Dionysian Mysteries of mainland Greece and the Roman Empire are thought to have evolved from a more primitive initiatory cult of unknown origin which had spread throughout the Mediterranean region by the start of the Classical Greek period. Its spread was associated with the dissemination of wine, a sacrament or entheogen with which it appears always to have been associated.
Beginning as a simple rite, it evolved within Greek culture into a popular mystery religion, which absorbed a variety of similar cults in a Greek synthesis across its territories. However, all stages of this developmental spectrum appear to have continued in parallel throughout the eastern Mediterranean until late in Greek history and forcible Christianization; the ecstatic cult of Dionysus was thought to be a late arrival in Greece from Thrace or Asia Minor, due to its popularity in both locations and Dionysus' non-integration into the Olympian Pantheon. After the deity's name was discovered on Mycenean Linear B tablets, this theory was abandoned and the cult is considered indigenous, predating Greek civilization; the absence of an early Olympian Dionysus is today explained by patterns of social exclusion and the cult's marginality, rather than chronology. Whether the cult originated on Minoan Crete or Africa – or in Thrace or Asia, as a proto-Sabazius – is unanswerable, due to lack of evidence.
Some scholars believe it was an adopted cult not native to any of these places and may have been an eclectic cult in its earliest history, although it certainly obtained many familiar features from Minoan culture. The original rite of Dionysus is associated with a wine cult, concerned with the grapevine's cultivation and an understanding of its life cycle and the fermentation of wine from its dismembered body. Most however, the intoxicating and disinhibiting effects of wine were regarded as due to possession by the god's spirit. Wine was poured on the earth and its growing vine, completing the cycle; the cult was not concerned with the vine itself, but with the other components of wine. Wine includes other ingredients adding to its quality and medicinal properties. Scholars have suggested that, given the low alcoholic content of early wine, its effects may have been due to an additional entheogenic ingredient in its sacramental form. Honey and beeswax were added to wine, introducing an older drink.
Károly Kerényi postulated that this wine lore superseded earlier Neolithic mead lore involving bee swarms associated by the Greeks with Dionysus. Mead and beer were incorporated into the domain of Dionysus through his identification with the Thracian corn deity Sabazius. Other plants believed to be viniculturally significant were included in wine lore such as ivy; the bull and goat were part of the cult seen as manifestations of Dionysus. Some of these associations became part of his new role. An understanding of vinicultural lore and its symbolism is key to understanding the cult which emerged from it, assuming a significance other than winemaking that would encompass life and rebirth and providing insight into human psychology. Assuming the Dionysus cult arrived in Greece with the importation of wine, it first emerged about 6000 BC in one of two places—the Zagros Mountains and borderlands of Mesopotamia and Persia, or from wild vines on the mountain slopes of Libya and other regions in North Africa.
The latter provided wine to ancient Egypt wine from about 2500 BC, was home to ecstatic rites involving animal possession—notably the goat and panther men of the Aissaoua Sufi cult of Morocco. In any case Minoan Crete was the next link in the chain, importing wine from the Egyptians and Phoenicians and exporting it to its colonies; the Mysteries took shape in Minoan Crete from about 3000 to 1000 BC, since the name "Dionysus" exists nowhere other than Crete and Greece. The rites were based on a seasonal death-rebirth theme, common among agricultural cults such as the Eleusinian Mysteries; the Osirian Mysteries paralleled
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