Candlemas St Birgid Fire Water

Wherein RantWoman free associates about light, liturgy, fire cults, purification after birth, fertility, smithcraft, gender and technology, recent anniversaries of two fiery space shuttle calamities, and what are a passing radio reference to Chernobyl or the Egyptian internet going dark doing in here too? If RantWoman writes out her whole excursion, can RantWoman just have some WonderWoman bracelets too?

RantWoman started out by posting some naive questions in response to references to Imholc, Candlemas, and St. Birgid's day.
http://aquakerwitch.blogspot.com/2011/02/blessed-brigid-to-you.html

RantWoman was hoping for some well-digested review of topical symbolism at a tad more depth than the blog post or the post history tagged the same way. RantWoman got back, basically, invitations to go read Wikipedia her own dang self--along with exhortations not to believe everything she reads, particularly since it's all meant to be mythopoetic in the first place. Okay, careful what you ask for.

Understand, RantWoman's background is really Protestant with very minimal interaction with the liturgical year, well beyond Advent, Lent, sometimes Passover, Easter, Pentecost. RantWoman has a time or two been witness to several days running of the wanderings of unprogrammed Quaker worship. Oh heresy; the holiness of everyday life notwitstanding, these wanderings sometimes actually make RantWoman appreciate liturgy for applying oh maybe just a smidgen of structure to the whole range of human emotions and experiences and cycles of day and year and life.

Unless someone wrote good music about something on the liturgical calendar, though, RantWoman is unlikely to have encountered it. See for instance Candlemas, the presentation of Jesus to the temple, the end of purification after a mother has given birth, typically in modern eras also a time when a family will start toting their newborn to more social activities than right after the birth. Anyway, RantWoman had to go Wikipedia Candlemas.

The presentation of Christ at the temple, the purification of Mary 40 days after the birth, conveniently melding Jewish law, presumably various local practices and Christian tradition. RantWoman notes the acting out of rituals in pre-literate societies where otherwise people might not have obvious ways to help remember the calendar and planting points connected with the stories. RantWoman also notes that if Candlemas falls during Lent the rituals are modified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlemas

RantWoman, occasional technology geek broadly understood, that she is notes that the Bible, the New Testament in particular is not necessarily a terribly good source for meditations on many technological questions. RantWoman has been especially thinking about that following links from the Wikipedia article. The items above all mentioned Imbolc and St. Brigid, so off RantWoman went on excursions about water, fire, light, springs, wells, fertility, animal husbandry. RantWoman still has no clue how St. Brigid's connections with smithcraft arose. Needing some historical connections longer than the Biblical eras though, evoking the Bronze Age does nicely. RantWoman for the time being is content just to believe the associations and run with the metaphors. RantWoman is happy to grab the fire and light and molten metal and see where that goes.

Links from the item above about Imholc and St. Birgid, a goddess of water and fire, poetry, smithcraft, the timing of this sabbath with the birth of lambs and first planting, more calendar things that the ritual helps track.
http://www.witchology.com/contents/february/imbolc_static.php

http://www.applewarrior.com/celticwell/ejournal/imbolc/brighid.htm


But for this occasion, RantWoman continues to meditate about a high proportion of serious fog and blur in what passes for her own visual experience even if Light is otherwise clear, strong, and bright about ongoing evolution of several simmering matters.

RantWoman will close with two more conceptual excursions. First, RantWoman is seized from time to time with an urge to have a tantrum in the direction of the Baby Boom, the ENTIRE Baby Boom. Technically, by some versions of how the Baby Boom is reckoned, RantWoman IS the tail end of the Baby Boom. In fact, RantWoman would be the Korea generation if the RantFather had ever had any military service AND the children of that era did not just get swallowed up in the Baby Boom. RantWoman from time to time wishes she had older siblings to help break her parents in, to save RantWoman some trailblazing, to let RantWoman slack off about some or another weighty responsibility. RantWoman thinks sometimes of this wish for older siblings when she grumbles about the Baby Boom: that is not what she had in mind.

RantWoman would consider a tantrum only because the Baby Boom all starts turning 65 this year, with all their high expectations and overhang of weird fiscal practices and underinvestment in infrastructure and a whole bunch of dumping on future generations. RantWoman thinks it is PROBABLY not fair to paint the representatives of the Baby Boom she regularly interacts with in all the colors of her exasperation, but who said anything about fair? On the other hand, RantWoman has no idea what form of purification to prescribe; more to the point, RantWoman has more than enough to do just tending her own endless internal compost heap.

But if it's Candlemas, the season for presenting babes to the temple, RantWoman and the Purifying Baby Boom present to the world scene a whole bunch of countries like Egypt where a huge percentage of the population is under 30 or even under 18, underemployed, and overeducated. RantWoman is most assuredly meditating on what transformations this reality implies for the future but for today will be glad that the Egyptian internet is again alight with the torrents of unbounded content we have all become accustomed to.


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A curiously also topical item that speaks to RantWoman's condition
http://onequakertake.blogspot.com/2011/01/equality.html