This is some weird occult sh#t . . .
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Agreed. Red heffers, burnt offerings, rebuilding temples and Armageddon… Oh my.
In the spirit of “weird shit that’s in the Bible which we treat as completely normal” I offer exhibit A for your amusement.
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Does anything actually surprise nowadays? Sure it’s barking crazy, but it’s totally plausible given what see and hear on our travels.
Extra thanks because I love a good one, and this is up there and it makes a change from the usual kind of bovine stories we’re fed.
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I’ll watch the full vid later (it’s playing in the background audio only) but this was one of the topics in the crazy, but entertaining book discussed here
The Grahams Hancock and Philips have discussed similar beliefs and there is plenty of stuff in the Mahayana suttas (and many other myths from India etc) that are way way weirder. Being in two places at once, time travel, instantly moving from one place to another, and emitting pink rays from the eyes. This was an ability of the Buddha, apparently, or so says the Diamond Sutta iirc. c.f. Philip K Dick Valis.
I will second @LocalYokel: as time goes by the weird and deranged seems less and less so.
On a slightly different tack, actually two… I’ve been reading (very gradually) a book about myths by Claude Lecouteux. I forget the title but it is about how places become ‘tamed’ or claimed. In other words how elite groups conquered areas or nations and kept them. Bravely vanquishing a dragon was often a feature of the legends. This might have been a metaphor for defeating the local ‘gods of the land’, used as justification for shooing away the indigenous people, using pointed sticks or worse if they need extra persusasion.
My limited familiarity with Rene Girard’s writings may be pertinent also. He argues that religion supplanted sacrifice (or possibly even incorporated it in some cases) as a way of coping with unbearable social tensions. (Glaring contradictions for example.) The other ways of coping were waging war (a form of sacrifice of course) and the use of the scapegoat, sent into the wilderness, and a virtual sacrifice also.
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