Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Welcome to the metagrinder

w:Batsheva Dance Company theater crowd in w:Te...Image via WikipediaThis blog will be about things that are about things. So, maybe it's appropriate I begin it on Inauguration day, which is a day in which nothing actually gets done, but is all about what will be done.

By the way, the origin of the word inauguration, originally the ἱεροςγάμος (sacred marriage), a symbolic mating of the new king with the goddess of the kingdom [see kingship]. Scholars claim that the most famous of these inaugural fertility rites was the Feis Temro (feast of Tara), at which the new king married the goddess Medb [see also Lia Fáil]. The last instance of this event occurred in AD c.560. These rites were tenaciously recalled, with traditional rhetoric, in medieval Irish literature as metaphors of kingship, but by then the clergy had thoroughly christianized inauguration.
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