The Hagoita

(Photo of  seasonal Hagoita Market)

Although I visited Japan as a child and was utterly enthralled with it, I did not really study Japanese culture in depth.  I felt that, as a child of Northern Europe, it was more important to become as educated as possible in my own ethnic background, in the traditions of the Gods of the North.  My own daughter is named Freya for a very good reason!

Nonetheless, I always believed that mythology IS universal and the way to Truth is through the study of every road that has the same signposts upon it.  One can understand the old Eddic poems best if one knows the various myths that show similar features throughout the centuuries and throughout the world.  Loki does not stand alone as the Trickster God.  There is a Trickster in Native American cultures and indeed, when I studied the cultures of the Plains Indians in particular, I found amazing similarities between their traditions and those of the Vikings.  The berserker for example is as much a part of Native American religion as of Scandinavia.  There were Bear Lodges in both cultures and the shapeshifter, whether into Wolf or Bear, is common to both.

Recently, however, my involvement in Japanese games rekindled an interest in Japan in general.  Harvest Moon introduced me to many of the festivals of Japan.  Animal Crossing, with its goal of collecting items of all kinds, from furniture to decorative items, brought some new and wondrous symbolic items into my life, first in virtual form but ultimately in their real forms.

I first encountered the Hagoita in Animal Crossing.  A friend of mine came to my village with gifts of some rare items not sold by any local merchants and indeed, never offered for sale.  The only way to obtain them is by attending a specific festival, often in a specific part of the world, or by being given the item by a friend as I was.  Among these items was a Hagoita.

My friend did not know what it was, in fact, but found it very attractive.  When I attempted to study the tiny miniature virtual item, I only could see that it resembled a folded fan more than anything else with some ornaments on cords attached to it.  In fact, it is a very significant item in Japanese culture and represents a badminton paddle.    The little items that sometimes accompany it are two 'birdies'.

Oriuginally, the Hagoita was a rectangular paddle used to play a badminton-like game called hanetsuki.  This game was played only by girls at the New Year. It therefore must have been a game fraught with religious significance, much like the swinging games found throughout the world in Spring.  There are two possible sacrificial components to this game.  The first is the 'birdie' hit by the paddle.  In many ancient cultures, birds were sacrificed to the Goddess.  Birds represent the soul as well.

The second sacrificial component is the player.  I was interested to discover that, whenever a girl missed the birdie, a black ink stripe was drawn on her face.  The girl whose face was filled with stripes ultimately was the one who lost the match.  It is possible that this originally represented an ancient sacrifice of a virgin, chosen through a game rather than a practice of drawing lots.

Musings on the ancient Orphic tradition

From the Orphic traditions:

'Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another, from the Lake of Memory
Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it.
Say, 'I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.'
And of themselves they will give thee to drink of the holy spring-
And thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt have lordship.

[Plate from Eleuthernai in Crete, second century B.C.]

I am parched with thirst and I perish-Nay, drink of me (or, But give me to drink of)
The ever-flowing spring on the right, where the cypress is.
Who art thou?.....
Whence art thou?-I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.



[Plate from Thurii, South Italy, fourth-third century B.C.]

But so soon as the spirit hath left the light of the sun,
Go to the right as far as one should go, being right wary in all things.
Hail, thou who hast suffered the suffering. This thou hadst never suffered before.
Thou art become god from man.
A kid thou art fallen into milk.
Hail, hail to thee journeying the right hand road
By holy meadows and groves of Persephone.

[Three more tablets from Thurii, of roughly the same date as the previous One. ]

I come from the pure, pure Queen of those below,
And Eukles and Eubuleus, and other Gods and Daemons.
For I also avow that I am of your blessed race.
And I have paid the- penalty for deeds unrighteous,
Whether it be that Fate laid me low or the gods immortal
Or . . . with star-flung thunderbolt.
I have flown out of the sorrowful, weary circle.
I have passed with swift feet to the diadem desired.
I have sunk beneath the bosom of the Mistress, the Queen of the
underworld.
And now I come a suppliant to holy Persephoneia,
That of her grace she send men to the seats of the Hallowed.
Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be god instead of mortal.
A kid I have fallen into milk.'

From Mircea Eliade

As these are engraved funerary plates, one tends to believe that they represent the Orphic devotions far more accurately than anything written by writers of the time, whether as detractors or supposed devotees.  After all, one of the fundamental principles of any mystery religion is its secrecy.  Only true devotees of the faith are allowed to learn the rites and usually forbidden to speak or write of it.  How then should we take anything that has been written about the rites of Adonis, Attis or Dionysus seriously?  As I have come to believe that Jesus was himself part of this ancient tradition, I have come to feel that the so-called 'New Testament' is lacking in veracity.  Every one who wrote about him had his own 'axe to grind' or political agenda.  His Jewish disciples wanted him to be part of the Jewish religion and therefore grafted verses from the Old Testament to their narratives.  Saul aka Paul was the worst of the lot.  A convert from Judaism himself, he possessed the usual fanaticism of the convert, seeking to prove himself more devoted than any of the individuals who actually KNEW the Christ.

These Orphic testaments deal with life after death and the choice of destination.  There are two springs.  Only one is the true 'spring of Memory'.  Like the Well of Mimir, in which Odhinn placed the eye he himself sacrificed, the spring of Memory gives the one who imbibes from it extraordinary vision.  That is simple enough to comprehend.  More difficult is the familiar but cryptic utterance of: 'A kid I have fallen into milk'.

This forms part of the Dionysian tradition as well.  What does it signify?  It is interesting to note here that one of the Celtic rites of royal sacrifice required the king to be boiled in a cauldron of milk.  Milk, of course is, far more than water, the giver of life to the newly born.  Perhaps this is why one of the scenes in the Villa of the Mysteries shows a kid suckling from the breast of a Nymph.

In many myths, a hero is nurtured by an animal as in the case of Romulus and Remus who were nursed by a she-wolf.   This is mirrored in tales from many other cultures and is not any kind of secret history.  The idea of an animal being nursed by a human woman is, however, more arcane.  It is only when one equates the god himself with the animal that it makes sense.  Dionysus often is depicted as a kid or associated with the kid.  There are accounts of clothing a kid or calf in buskins to resemble the god before sacrificing him.

Here is the account by Frazer:

'Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of his names was “Kid.” At Athens and at Hermion he was worshipped under the title of “the one of the Black Goatskin,” and a legend ran that on a certain occasion he had appeared clad in the skin from which he took the title. In the wine-growing district of Phlius, where in autumn the plain is still thickly mantled with the red and golden foliage of the fading vines, there stood of old a bronze image of a goat, which the husbandmen plastered with gold-leaf as a means of protecting their vines against blight. The image probably represented the vine-god himself. To save him from the wrath of Hera, his father Zeus changed the youthful Dionysus into a kid; and when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat. Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a live goat and devoured it raw, they must have believed that they were eating the body and blood of the god. The custom of tearing in pieces the bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw has been practised as a religious rite by savages in modern times. We need not therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of antiquity to the observance of similar rites among the frenzied worshippers of Bacchus.	8
The custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine more in detail further on, belongs to a very early stage of human culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes (which are always the kernel of the conception) as the final and sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so, the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood connexion with the anthropomorphic gods who have developed out of them. The origin of the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to explain either why it was spared or why it was killed. Devised for the former purpose, the myth would tell of some service rendered to the deity by the animal; devised for the latter purpose, the myth would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal on the god. The reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus exemplifies a myth of the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him, it was said, because they injured the vine. Now the goat, as we have seen, was originally an embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had divested himself of his animal character and had become essentially anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his worship came to be regarded no longer as a slaying of the deity himself, but as a sacrifice offered to him; and since some reason had to be assigned why the goat in particular should be sacrificed, it was alleged that this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine, the object of the god’s especial care. Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as the deity is supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the god’s old self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is represented as eating raw goat’s blood; and the bull-god Dionysus is called “eater of bulls.” On the analogy of these instances we may conjecture that wherever a deity is described as the eater of a particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing but the deity himself. Later on we shall find that some savages propitiate dead bears and whales by offering them portions of their own bodies.	9
All this, however, does not explain why a deity of vegetation should appear in animal form. But the consideration of that point had better be deferred till we have discussed the character and attributes of Demeter. Meantime it remains to mention that in some places, instead of an animal, a human being was torn in pieces at the rites of Dionysus. This was the practice in Chios and Tenedos; and at Potniae in Boeotia the tradition ran that it had been formerly the custom to sacrifice to the goat-smiting Dionysus a child, for whom a goat was afterwards substituted. At Orchomenus, as we have seen, the human victim was taken from the women of an old royal family. As the slain bull or goat represented the slain god, so, we may suppose, the human victim also represented him.'

It may be useful to read the rest of Frazaer's account of Dionysus to find comparisons with the Christ:

'IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that in antiquity the civilised nations of Western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites of alternate lamentation and rejoicing. But if the celebration was in form dramatic, it was in substance magical; that is to say, it was intended, on the principles of sympathetic magic, to ensure the vernal regeneration of plants and the multiplication of animals, which had seemed to be menaced by the inroads of winter. In the ancient world, however, such ideas and such rites were by no means confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon and Syria, of Phrygia and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to the religious mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the races of livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who inhabited the shores and islands of the Aegean. We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that these Western peoples borrowed from the older civilisation of the Orient the conception of the Dying and Reviving God, together with the solemn ritual, in which that conception was dramatically set forth before the eyes of the worshippers. More probably the resemblance which may be traced in this respect between the religions of the East and West is no more than what we commonly, though incorrectly, call a fortuitous coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting alike on the similar constitution of the human mind in different countries and under different skies. The Greek had no need to journey into far countries to learn the vicissitudes of the seasons, to mark the fleeting beauty of the damask rose, the transient glory of the golden corn, the passing splendour of the purple grapes. Year by year in his own beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the bright pomp of summer fading into the gloom and stagnation of winter, and year by year he hailed with natural delight the outburst of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to personify the forces of nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a train of gods and goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the shifting panorama of the seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and sorrow, which found their natural expression in alternate rites of rejoicing and lamentation, of revelry and mourning. A consideration of some of the Greek divinities who thus died and rose again from the dead may furnish us with a series of companion pictures to set side by side with the sad figures of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. We begin with Dionysus.	1
The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the grape. His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling music, and tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness. Its mystic doctrines and extravagant rites were essentially foreign to the clear intelligence and sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness to revert to savagery which seem to be innate in most men, the religion spread like wildfire through Greece until the god whom Homer hardly deigned to notice had become the most popular figure of the pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies present to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and modern times to hold that Dionysus was merely a disguised Osiris, imported directly from Egypt into Greece. But the great preponderance of evidence points to his Thracian origin, and the similarity of the two worships is sufficiently explained by the similarity of the ideas and customs on which they were founded.	2
While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general. Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to “Dionysus of the tree.” In Boeotia one of his titles was “Dionysus in the tree.” His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to show the nature of the deity. On a vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing out of a low tree or bush. At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of Dionysus is said to have been found in a plane-tree, which had been broken by the wind. He was the patron of cultivated trees: prayers were offered to him that he would make the trees grow; and he was especially honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their orchards. He was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst which apples and figs are particularly mentioned; and he was referred to as “well-fruited,” “he of the green fruit,” and “making the fruit to grow.” One of his titles was “teeming” or “bursting” (as of sap or blossoms); and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae in Achaia. The Athenians sacrificed to him for the prosperity of the fruits of the land. Amongst the trees particularly sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree. The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree “equally with the god,” so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies. In art a wand, tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his worshippers. Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a Dionysus Ivy; at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos, where figs were called meilicha, there was a Dionysus Meilichios, the face of whose image was made of fig-wood.	3
Further, there are indications, few but significant, that Dionysus was conceived as a deity of agriculture and the corn. He is spoken of as himself doing the work of a husbandman: he is reported to have been the first to yoke oxen to the plough, which before had been dragged by hand alone; and some people found in this tradition the clue to the bovine shape in which, as we shall see, the god was often supposed to present himself to his worshippers. Thus guiding the ploughshare and scattering the seed as he went, Dionysus is said to have eased the labour of the husbandman. Further, we are told that in the land of the Bisaltae, a Thracian tribe, there was a great and fair sanctuary of Dionysus, where at his festival a bright light shone forth at night as a token of an abundant harvest vouchsafed by the diety; but if the crops were to fail that year, the mystic light was not seen, darkness brooded over the sanctuary as at other times. Moreover, among the emblems of Dionysus was the winnowing-fan, that is the large open shovel-shaped basket, which down to modern times has been used by farmers to separate the grain from the chaff by tossing the corn in the air. This simple agricultural instrument figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus; indeed the god is traditionally said to have been placed at birth in a winnowing-fan as in a cradle: in art he is represented as an infant so cradled; and from these traditions and representations he derived the epithet of Liknites, that is, “He of the Winnowing-fan.”	4
Like other gods of vegetation Dionysus was believed to have died a violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred rites. His tragic story is thus told by the poet Nonnus. Zeus in the form of a serpent visited Persephone, and she bore him Zagreus, that is, Dionysus, a horned infant. Scarcely was he born, when the babe mounted the throne of his father Zeus and mimicked the great god by brandishing the lightning in his tiny hand. But he did not occupy the throne long; for the treacherous Titans, their faces whitened with chalk, attacked him with knives while he was looking at himself in a mirror. For a time he evaded their assaults by turning himself into various shapes, assuming the likeness successively of Zeus and Cronus, of a young man, of a lion, a horse, and a serpent. Finally, in the form of a bull, he was cut to pieces by the murderous knives of his enemies. His Cretan myth, as related by Firmicus Maternus, ran thus. He was said to have been the bastard son of Jupiter, a Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter transferred the throne and sceptre to the youthful Dionysus, but, knowing that his wife Juno cherished a jealous dislike of the child, he entrusted Dionysus to the care of guards upon whose fidelity he believed he could rely. Juno, however, bribed the guards, and amusing the child with rattles and a cunningly-wrought looking glass lured him into an ambush, where her satellites, the Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it. But his sister Minerva, who had shared in the deed, kept his heart and gave it to Jupiter on his return, revealing to him the whole history of the crime. In his rage, Jupiter put the Titans to death by torture, and, to soothe his grief for the loss of his son, made an image in which he enclosed the child’s heart, and then built a temple in his honour. In this version a Euhemeristic turn has been given to the myth by representing Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera) as a king and queen of Crete. The guards referred to are the mythical Curetes who danced a war-dance round the infant Dionysus, as they are said to have done round the infant Zeus. Very noteworthy is the legend, recorded both by Nonnus and Firmicus, that in his infancy Dionysus occupied for a short time the throne of his father Zeus. So Proclus tells us that “Dionysus was the last king of the gods appointed by Zeus. For his father set him on the kingly throne, and placed in his hand the sceptre, and made him king of all the gods of the world.” Such traditions point to a custom of temporarily investing the king’s son with the royal dignity as a preliminary to sacrificing him instead of his father. Pomegranates were supposed to have sprung from the blood of Dionysus, as anemones from the blood of Adonis and violets from the blood of Attis: hence women refrained from eating seeds of pomegranates at the festival of the Thesmophoria. According to some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus. The grave of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue of Apollo. However, according to another account, the grave of Dionysus was at Thebes, where he is said to have been torn in pieces. Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not mentioned, but in other versions of the myth it is variously related. According to one version, which represented Dionysus as a son of Zeus and Demeter, his mother pieced together his mangled limbs and made him young again. In others it is simply said that shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven; or that Zeus raised him up as he lay mortally wounded; or that Zeus swallowed the heart of Dionysus and then begat him afresh by Semele, who in the common legend figures as mother of Dionysus. Or, again, the heart was pounded up and given in a potion to Semele, who thereby conceived him.	5
Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans celebrated a biennial festival at which the passion of Dionysus was represented in every detail. All that he had done or suffered in his last moments was enacted before the eyes of his worshippers, who tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth and roamed the woods with frantic shouts. In front of them was carried a casket supposed to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild music of flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the infant god had been lured to his doom. Where the resurrection formed part of the myth, it also was acted at the rites, and it even appears that a general doctrine of resurrection, or at least of immortality, was inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing to console his wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus. A different form of the myth of the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. The local Argive tradition was that he went down through the Alcyonian lake; and his return from the lower world, in other words his resurrection, was annually celebrated on the spot by the Argives, who summoned him from the water by trumpet blasts, while they threw a lamb into the lake as an offering to the warder of the dead. Whether this was a spring festival does not appear, but the Lydians certainly celebrated the advent of Dionysus in spring; the god was supposed to bring the season with him. Deities of vegetation, who are believed to pass a certain portion of each year underground, naturally come to be regarded as gods of the lower world or of the dead. Both Dionysus and Osiris were so conceived.	6
A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation, is that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape, especially in the form, or at least with the horns, of a bull. Thus he is spoken of as “cow-born,” “bull,” “bull-shaped,” “bull-faced,” “bull-browed,” “bull-horned,” “horn-bearing,” “two-horned,” “horned.” He was believed to appear, at least occasionally, as a bull. His images were often, as at Cyzicus, made in bull shape, or with bull horns; and he was painted with horns. Types of the horned Dionysus are found amongst the surviving monuments of antiquity. On one statuette he appears clad in a bull’s hide, the head, horns, and hoofs hanging down behind. Again, he is represented as a child with clusters of grapes round his brow, and a calf’s head, with sprouting horns, attached to the back of his head. On a red-figured vase the god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated on a woman’s lap. The people of Cynaetha held a festival of Dionysus in winter, when men, who had greased their bodies with oil for the occasion, used to pick out a bull from the herd and carry it to the sanctuary of the god. Dionysus was supposed to inspire their choice of the particular bull, which probably represented the deity himself; for at his festivals he was believed to appear in bull form. The women of Elis hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his bull’s foot. They sang, “Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea; come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull’s foot, O goodly bull, O goodly bull!” The Bacchanals of Thrace wore horns in imitation of their god. According to the myth, it was in the shape of a bull that he was torn to pieces by the Titans; and the Cretans, when they acted the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth. Indeed, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves appear to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. When we consider the practice of portraying the god as a bull or with some of the features of the animal, the belief that he appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred rites, and the legend that in bull form he had been torn in pieces, we cannot doubt that in rending and devouring a live bull at his festival the worshippers of Dionysus believed themselves to be killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.'		7

None of the books of the New Testament were written during the life of Christ.  None of them were READ by him or approved by him.  Why then do we accept them as 'gospel'?  There really is nothing to support such a conclusion.

If, however, we access what little we know of the ancient mystery religions of the area, a far more accurate presentation of the life and sacrifice of Christ is possible.

First of all, there is a native mystery cult known as the Nazarites or Nazarenes.  Christ exhibited all the traits of a Nazarene and was declared to be one by the New Testament.  Samson was a Nazarite or Nazarene  They believed their strength to be in their hair and therefore never cut it.  They lived a life of celibacy.  A woman could become a Nazarine, so long as she had the consent of the male head of her household, whether that be her father, her son or her husband.  A child could be dedicated to the Nazarines while still within the womb.  Thus, Jesus was dedicated to the Nazarines while still within the Virgin Mary's womb.  I expect she herself was a Nazarine.

What I did not realise until I actually studied the cult was that its duration varied according to the vow taken.  Samson was a Nazarine for life but ordinarily, a vow could be made that could last as little as a day or as long as 'there are grains of sand on the shore'.  The vow having been made, it could not be cancelled except by royal or priestly decree until the time set elapsed.

The son of David named Absolom was a Nazarite and his death by hanging from the bough of a tree probably actually was a royal rite of sacrifice as opposed to the gloss given in the Old Testament, that he was punished by God for his rebellion against his father. 

Evidently, the cult predates the invasion of the Hebrews into Palestine and originally, there were no prohibitions against consumption of the 'fruit of the grape' nor of contact with the dead.  These are Jewish laws.  The ability to limit the time frame of belonging to the cult is a later innovation as well.  In the days of Samson, the Nazarite vow was a lifetime one.  He was another Nazarite who was dedicated to the cult while still within the womb.  His mother was a Nazarite.

Samson's name is derived from the ancient word for the 'Sun'.  The Sun God was named 'Shams' and in Arabic the word still signifies the Sun.  He therefore was either a god or a representative of the God on Earth.  His death by being buried by the temple he himself pulled down has to be another case of a royal sacrifice. 

Traditions of Spring: Cherry Blossoms, Peach Blossoms, Martisor and the Wearing of the Green

The advent of the Spring season, internationally, has more popular traditions and festivals attached to it than the onset of Summer.  It was more significant in a sense to the ancients, as it was the time when Death was vanquished by Life, when the Earth and all its creatures and plants were revitalised and reborn.

In March, there are a number of popular festivals that still are celebrated in various regions.  In Japan, there are the festivals that are connected to the blossoming of the Cherry and Plum trees.  Among them is Girls' Day or Hina-matsuri.  In Eastern Europe, there is the festival of Martisor, connected to the blossoming of the Snowdrops.  In Celtic Europe, there is St. Patrick's Day, connected to the Shamrock or Four-Leaf Clover and the wearing of the colour Green.  The latter became politically charged at one point in history but began as a symbol of Life and Fertility.

I have been doing more research on Japanese traditions and dolls recently than on Martisor and St. Patrick's Day and in the course of doing so, realised once again how much Japanese feminine traditions are synonymous with beauty and grace and male culture is synonymous with honour and courage.  There is, of course, grace and beauty, honour and courage in the ideals of both genders.  Western civilisation had much of this as well, but Japanese culture was far more rigid for far longer in history, partly because of the cult of the Emperor and the rejection of outside influences.  This created a very rigid definition of all aspects of art and culture and indeed, in its negative form, too much of an expectation of perfection.  I do believe that the high rate of adolescent suicide in Japan may be the result of this where, in the West, we almost expect that our children will experiment with life, change their minds and goals more than once and perhaps trip once or twice before they succeed and attain happiness.

It was a bit startling to me as well to discover how much of our Western interest in dolls may have been inspired by Japanese doll traditions.  In Japan for centuries, dolls were far more than toys for children.  Originally imbued with spirit, much like 'voodoo dolls' or 'poppets', they were created to be set afloat on running water, to be borne away from the life of the person each represented.  That tradition may have been the origin of the Hina-matsuri Festival in ancient times.  There still are regions in Japan where dolls are set afloat on lakes or rivers or even sent into the sea.  Unfortunately, this tradition resulted in a number of dolls being tangled in fishermen's nets and it thus became rather unpopular.

I believe that the newer tradition of displaying a set of dolls that represents the Emperor, Empress and their court probably had something to do with ancestor worship as well as the old belief that the Emperor was descended from the Goddess of the Sun and therefore to some extent her agent on earth.  Another reason, apart from the propaganda value to the royal family may have been the desire to preserve native Japanese traditions, culture and fashions after the appearance of Perry and the threat of Western cultural invasion.   A full Hina display is much more than a group of dolls.  It consists of food items, trees with symbolic significance, weapons, food, tools and even transport.

In the Metropolitan Museum iin New York, some rooms devoted to the civilisation of ancient Egypt have elaborate displays of grave goods that consist of entire villages with small dolls that are busy performing the various tasks that occupy human lives on Earth.  Fascinating and well-worth a visit!  The reason for these was to provide the deceased with everything he/she would need in the afterlife, including housing, a working economy and slaves.  I meantion it because a full Hina display, although never associated with tombs or the afterlife, reminds me a bit of the ancient Egyptian miniature villages.

Enough of those musings, however.  March in many ancient cultures was the first month of the year.  The Asian Lunar New Year is closer to the ancient New Year than our solar one.

The first flower of the year in Northern European traditions is the Snowdrop and Martisor's most popular symbol perhaps is the Snowdrop.

In my own life, the Snowdrop represents the first flower that I ever planted in my own garden, even though I was not the owner of the land.  About two decades ago, I found some snowdrops growing wild in an old churchyard and took a few of the bulbs home to plant behind the house.  As the years passed, the clusters of snowdrops increased.  I took a few to plant beneath the weeping cherry tree at the new house but when the owner decided to build a new patio late last Spring, the workers ignored my pleas to save my little bulbs.  They rather coldly insisted that I could buy new ones and did not comprehend why that would not do.  In fact, the Snowdrop really is a wildflower and it is not common to find them in nurseries.

This has been a particularly brutal Winter and I could not even see the ground beneath the weeping cherry until this week began.  Although snow still lies deep in certain corners of the garden, the area beneath the Cherry is mostly clear.  My heart leapt a little when I found a single Snowdrop beginning to bloom there.

I had planted far more but it is amazing that even one survived.  When I returned briefly to the old house this morning, I was surprised and delighted to see that my Snowdrops there had multiplied, despite the fact that I had taken a couple of large clumps from there last year.

The Magic of Miniatures in Japanese Festival Traditions

I encountered the Hina-matsuri Festival and its traditions a number of years ago but never really thought of owning a set of hina dolls, apart from the purchase of a three-dimensional card from Japan that showed a traditional hina display.  I made a shadow box for it from an empty Clementine crate from Morocco and placed it on my wall.    That was the extent of my participation in a tradition that speaks eloquently to every fibre of my being.

Here are some photographs of a miniature contemporary Hina display:

Above is the completed display with its box behind it.

This photograph shows the box and the one below it shows how the contents were packed:

I took a chance when I saw this set offered for sale on the internet at a small price.  It had to be sent from Asia and I knew it would not arrive in time for Girls' Day but it appealed to me so much that I bought it anyway.  It arrived today in a very small box that the seller made from a larger electronics box.  I did not know what to expect, but I was very pleasantly surprised.  Although it is plastic, the details are quite intricate and it is very traditional.  The entire display with the stand is less than six inches in height.  The tiny figures of the Emperor and Empress are probably no more than half an inch in height.  They are truly miniatures.

As I began to take the tiny pieces from their plastic bags to assemble the scene, all the years of adulthood gradually fell from me and I suddenly felt like a child again, wrapped in the aura of magic that was so easy to summon in those days.  I became a participant in the Japanese court and could imagine the weeping charry trees outside, the arched bridges and the stone palaces and temples of the era.  It is amazing how powerful miniature scenes can be even now.  I really felt a bit of a thrill putting it all together.

A few bits of plastic and I'm in seventh heaven!  What does this say about me?  I rather hope that it is a positive quality and not a character flaw.  After all, it is important to find joy in every day, even when those days are clouded by physical pain.

Lou Reed once wrote:  'Heroin be the death of me.  It's my life and it's my wife...'   It seems to me that even if the desire to collect small exotic items is a vice, it is a simple, non-destructive one and it does fuel an eternal desire in me for more knowledge.  Knowledge is not wisdom, I know, but apart from all this, why does everything have to be serious?  Perhaps it is sufficient that it is FUN.

Here is a charming video with a traditional Hina-matsuri song as well as some marvelous images of different types of displays, including a cake!

Hina-matsuri Song

And another video about Hina-matsuri, showing the floating of the dolls upon water as well as other images:

Hina-matsuri with contempoary Characters

This second video shows some of the bizarre contemporary modifications to the traditional display, including the depiction of the Emperor's Court as Disney characters.  I am not keen myself on this!

The song with lyrics in Japanese:

Hina song and displays

And finally, some truly gorgeous hina sets as well as hina displays in the form of mobiles:

Hina Displays
My study of comparative mythology and folk tales through the years widened to include international festivals and folk traditions.  In some fashion, it is the miniature symbols of these festivals that enchant me most, partly because I lived a transient existence for much of my life in foreign countries and cities far from home and partly because of my childhood love of dolls and dollhouses.

I actually never owned a proper dollhouse.  I still would love to have one someday.  When I was small, I used shelves in a glass case as my dollhouse and made all the furniture and furnishings from household items and seashells.  Even so, that miniature life became very real and the characters who inhabited that home and visited, whether human or otherwise (two were mice made of real fur named Jonathan and Peter) had a reality that was almost tangible to me.  Their friendships and romances, the search for a new item of furniture or a set of 'dishes' made of matching shells or other tiny items was very real to me.  In a childhood where I had absolutely no control over my life and no room of my own, those shelves in the glass case were the closest to a sanctuary where a table set with tiny dishes and food would remain undisturbed and there was a sort of peace and continuity to their existence.    My mother's almost frantic ambition for a never-ending social life spilled over into my own life and guaranteed that I seldom could read a book or even go to sleep without some interruption from a drunken visitor searching for the loo or the incessant noise from the piano and the loud echo of elephantine dancing at all hours.

I still somehow feel that there is less threat to miniature possessions than to full-size ones.  After all, if everything one owns could be packed into a single valise, one could take it anywhere.  Unfortunately, at this point in life, I have much that is not portable but I still love the concept of tiny scenes and landscapes.

As a child, one of my favourite series of books was 'The Borrowers'.  There were a number of concepts in those books that resonated in me.  One was the idea that small scraps and bits of stuff that might otherwise be meaningless could become elegant tapestries and marvelous weapons or tools in the hands of the tiny people who 'borrowed' items from larger humans.  The other was the idea that somewhere there was a world that could be accessed through a keyhole or a tiny hole in the wall... a world that was free from the noise and bustle of our reality.  I did not like the fact that the cat in the books was an enemy lbut I suppose it does make sense that a cat would see a tiny creature as a playmate and not comprehend its fragility!

I think I am blessed in a way to live in the era of cyberspace, now that I am disabled.  There was a time when one could travel vicariously through the power of imagination by reading a book and that still is magical but now, one actually can obtain rare or fascinating items from other countries simply by searching on the internet.  When we went on a cruise to the Mediterranean a few years ago,  I was frustrated by the fact that we had little time ashore at any port and furthermore, that I had very little money for souvenirs.  When I returned home, however, I was able to find souvenirs of all the best aspects of the places we had visited on the internet!  I paid far less for them and found BETTER items than would have been possible in the 'tourist traps' that were the only places accessible to cruise visitors.

I look at my little hina set and realise that, were I in Tokyo on Girls' Day, I might not have been able to find THIS set at all.  Ebay was packed with hina sets depicting Micky and Minnie Mouse as Emperor and Empress as well as Hello Kitty in the same roles.  I would not have wanted those and I wonder if that was what is most popular at present.

The most beautiful hina sets of course are the antique ones.  I saw a few on sale for a fairly hefty price.  The Japanese have described the beauty of used items eloquently in a curious little game called 'Animal Crossing' that may be the most popular and long-lived game in the world.  There is a shop called the 'Re-Tail' shop that sells used items.  You can place items for sale there or find items that other villagers have placed for sale.  It is a way to find rare items as well as persuading villagers to buy better or more beautiful items for THEIR homes.  In my own village, there is a character named Kyle (a wolf, I believe) who told me just today that:  'Every item that comes through here always has such special memories attached to it.  If you think like that... don't you feel like even the simplest item holds a special meaning?'

Another pronouncement: 'You may be able to get rid of an item... but the memories you had with it stay with you, Eugenia!'

Incidentally, 'Animal Crossing' is proof of the axiom that Education CAN be fun.  If any one is looking for a game for a child that will be fun to play but will teach him/her about fossils, fish, classical art work and insects, as well as encouraging the old art of letter-writing and common courtesy, you need look no further.  One of the goals of Animal Crossing is to stock the local museum fully and this is accomplished by fishing, catching insects with a net, buying art from a shady character named Redd who, when he visits, brings three fake art works and one genuine piece, thereby teaching the buyer how to discern a genuine painting by Botticelli from a fake copy and finally, by excavating fossils.  Fossils are found in parts and one has to complete them before they will be given a detailed description in the museum.  Furthermore, it includes cultural festivals throughout the globe.  I rather deprecate the fact that certain items conneccted to these festivlas are available only in the countries that celebrate them but as one of the aspects of the game that Nintendo encourages is trading with players from other countries, I suppose that does make sense.   In Japan, they gave out special items for Girls' Day, including a full Hina display.  A friend of mine who belongs to forums where items are traded managed to obtain one for me.  Other items available only in Japan are special headgear that the player's character can wear in the form of an Emperor's Cap and an Empress Tiara.  It really is a very detailed, engrossing game that can become an obsessionj if one is not careful.

In any case, the Animal Crossing hina set is very detailed but I do like having a real one, even if it only includes the Emperor and Empress and the traditional rice cake offering, cherry blossom lanterns and the plum and peach trees.

Animal Crossing really does have some clever amusing dialogue although some can be simply silly.  It was developed for players of all ages and endeavours to 'speak' to children with a silly sense of humour as well as being witty on occasion.

For example, Rosie told me:  Some people call that storage but I call it a fashion hotel for all my clothes'.  That made me laugh.

It was in Animal Crossing New Leaf that I first encountered the hagoita actually and became fascinated with it.  The hagoita is a traditional gift for girls at the New Year, I believe, and is based on the ancient game of badminton known as Hanetsuki.  The hagoita is a paddle sold usually with a feather shuttlecock.  The paddle can be very intricately decorated with figures of famous Kabuki characters, geishas or princesses from historical eras.  Were it not for Animal Crossing and my firned, who gave the virtual hagoita to me, I might never have known about it!

Above is the view of a traditional Hagoita market.  These are temporary usually and can be found during the month of December.