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Karen Tate's avatar

You're doing a wonderful job! Too often today people interested in Goddess think it's just about the flowing clothes because so much out there now is shallow and frivolous. Thanks for keeping it real. I love your work and you are uncovering so much new material and bringing it to the public. Thank you for us and for Her!

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Carla Ionescu PhD's avatar

Thank you Karen, I appreciate you, this means a lot to me.

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emie -`♡´-'s avatar

Well-written article! I really enjoyed reading this. Like others have said, I appreciate how you didn’t sanitize or water down history but represented it in its honesty (with room for the uncertainty and mystery of course!)

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Carla Ionescu PhD's avatar

Thank you so much, I really believe we can hold both truth and mystery at the same time, and I’m glad that came through. I appreciate you taking the time to read it!

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Nancy Young's avatar

Thank you so much, Carla, for another amazing and informative talk. So thought provoking! I'm blown away by your intelligence and the depth of your knowledge, not to mention your passion and dedication.

This talk on blood and bleeding sacrifices makes me wonder about the very idea of sacrifice. It is a strange behavior. Your thoughts about blood sacrifice as a male attempt to emulate female menses is fascinating.

My thought is this: from what I understand, for the Greeks sacrifice seems to be mainly a version of gift-giving to display love and reverence (but with the added element of displaying how much the gift costs the gift giver, with self-sacrifice being the ultimate cost and ultimate gift). The idea of sacrifice as punishment for offense is there but maybe not predominant.

The Christian tradition seems, maybe, to reverse that order: sacrifice as punishment for sin predominates (we will burn in hell for eternity thanks to Eve), and sacrifice as gift of love comes in with God giving his son to save us all from eternal damnation.

Well, as you note, sacrifice is a vast topic.

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Carla Ionescu PhD's avatar

I agree with your thoughts on Greek and Christian sacrifice, there’s so much to unpack when we think about sacrifice. In ancient agricultural societies, animals were deeply valuable, so offering them really meant something. Today, we still talk about sacrifice, but it’s more metaphorical, giving things up for goals, family, or personal growth. And when you add death, blood, and ritual into the mix, it gets even more layered and symbolic. Definitely a broad and complex issue! Thank you for reading it 😍

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Michelle's avatar

This was a great response and explanation to someone deciding to leave because of a previous post you shared. I don't understand how we are currently living in a time where so many people want to believe in the nicer way of history and tell themselves truths that aren't true. We are looking at people and cultures from a modern time and we can't look at it in that way we have to look at what was going on and what people believed in and how that impacted the way they lived their lives. Keep doing the work you are doing it is very important and is necessary.

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Carla Ionescu PhD's avatar

Thank you so much, and you are absolutely right, we have to try and meet the ancients where they were, and do our best to observe without modern bias. And my hope is that our observations will then lead us to more in-depth discussions :)

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Myth and Mystery's avatar

Excellent post! I completely agree with everything you said. It's important to study ancient religion in all its complexity. I was teaching Roman religion last term and I made it clear to the students early on that some of the topics may be unsettling. A few students left after I gave a few examples. I told the rest of them that education is not to cater to their sensibilities and provide comfort, it is to challenge assumptions and find ways to explore difficult questions.

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Carla Ionescu PhD's avatar

I feel the same. Ancient religion isn’t meant to be comfortable, and it’s so important to approach it with honesty and depth.

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Indra's avatar

That was a fabulous post. It’s a shame you lost a follower. You’ve just gained a new follower in me.

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Carla Ionescu PhD's avatar

Thanks, and 👋🏼 😍

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Wild Essence Space's avatar

It’s important not to sanitise history. The goddesses (and as you note, the gods) are not all ‘love and light’ and flower crowns and we do well to remember that. If we are to understand ancient cultures, we need to understand them in their fullest context, and yes, that might make us feel uncomfortable, but that does not mean we should shy away from the evidence.

And let’s not forget that the Old Testament speaks of animal sacrifice and stoning of humans (though examples mainly seem to be of women), yet that doesn’t seem to come in for much ethical commentary…

As an educator in the field of ancient history, you would do us all a disservice if you didn’t take an objective stance in your work. Thank you for helping us to understand the ancient world, warts and all!

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