Wednesday, February 11, 2015

The Isle of Embracing



This one is called the Isle of Embracing. 
In supremely beautiful storytelling, the ancient Egyptians placed the story of the first marriage, on “the Isle of Embracing”... “a green lotus land,” beneath the life-giving boughs of the noble “ished-tree growing ‘in the Field of Turquoise… in the midst of Heliopolis’“ As Hugh Nibley Explained, it was  “(i.e., in the temple garden).”  It is this garden that brings “the King’s first parents and the first pair on the earth… together at the the New Year––the time of creation––to write the king’s name on the leaves of the sacred tree itself.” (MJSP 304) It is perhaps one of the oldest references to the solemnization of marriage as well as to the building of family tree, but also the ritual that led to the coronation of the king.
Nibley further explains, the young king “takes possession of the land in the manner of Adam exploring the garden, he embraces the Lady, whereupon life springs up out of nothing, the earth bringing forth spontaneously.” (MJSP 305) Egyptian poetry would later share this metaphor with all newlyweds, each becoming a first man, and first woman, each co-creators of their own civilization, poetically stating, “Joy has he whom she embraces, He is like the first of men!”
Scholars assure us that the “idea that the divine marriage must take place in a grove is  found all over the world” (MJSP 304) Greek and Roman traditions follow both the wrestle and embrace of Thetis and Peleus, while the orient celebrates the union of Fu Xi and Nu Wa as bringing life from the garden heights of Kunlun Mountain to the rest of the world. Similarly the “unified, complementing and integrated image of Lakshmi and Vishnu as wife and husband” notes Patricia Monaghan, is "the paradigm for rituals and ceremonies for the bride and groom in Hindu weddings".[10]
We could recite hundreds more examples, but one does not have to study long to realize that these are 
all parallel tellings of the Adam and Eve story, a paradigm which seems to find a natural home within 
the universal human hunger for origin and purpose.  From Jews to Muslims, Gnostics, Copts, and 
Western Christian Civilizations, each reverence a canonised form of this story. Even the Taoists idealize 
this male and female “harmonization of opposites” as the “Diagram of Ultimate Power.”

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