Women’s Right at Mt. Athos

Three years back, the Kannada actress Jaimala triggered a major controversy when she said that she had entered the sanctum santorum of Sabarimala. This triggered a debate on if women should be allowed to enter Sabarimala, discrimination of women in Hindu society and what not. In 1930s, Aliki Diplarakou, who had won the Miss Europe title, dressed up as a man and sneaked into Mt. Athos in Greece generating a similar controversy for only men are allowed there.
Mt. Athos is an autonomous monastic state on a peninsula in northern Greece. Though Greece protects the peninsula, it is self governed by the monks of the 20 monasteries of the Eastern Orthodoxy. Special permission is needed to visit Mt. Athos and only a few visitors are allowed each month. Mt. Athos does not permit women to enter and this ban has been in place since 1045 CE, since the time of the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos. Mt. Athos does not even permit female animals (female cats are allowed since they catch rats).

Entry to the mountain is usually by ferry boat either from the port of Ouranoupoli (for west coast monasteries) or from Ierrisos for those on the east coast. Before embarking on the boat all visitors must have been issued a diamoneterion, a form of Byzantine visa that is written in Greek, dated using the Julian calendar, and signed by four of the secretaries of leading monasteries. [Mt. Athos]

Amin Maalouf’s novel, The Gardens of Light, based on the life of the Persian mystic Mani (216-274 CE), mentions traditions of an all male Jewish sect which had similar feelings about women. In the palm grove where the sect lived, anything female was prohibited; the only women mentioned were Eve, Bathsheba and Salome. The other women in the scripture were never mentioned and sect members were prevented from mentioning their mother or wife.
While discriminating against women was not unusual in those times in the Middle East and Europe, you would think that would not be the case after the age of enlightenment. But when Greece joined the European Union – which does not support discrimination against women – a special clause was added for Mt. Athos.

Recognising that the special status granted to Mount Athos, as guaranteed by Article 105 of the Hellenic Constitution, is justified exclusively on grounds of a spiritual and religious nature, the Community will ensure that this status is taken into account in the application and subsequent preparation of provisions of Community law, in particular in relation to customs franchise privileges, tax exemptions and the right of establishment.[30 Jan 2001 : Column WA43]

When the Schengen visa came into effect, the monks saw it as Devil’s work. In 2003, the European Parliament criticized the ban on women on Mt. Athos and asked Greece to abolish the law which gives jail sentences to women caught entering this place. And guess what the answer was from the country which gave the West, rational thought:

“The Holy Mountain is subject to… a special status regarding which an insistence on the implementation of very important principles — such as equal rights of access, unrestricted movement, free trade or competition — would be in direct confrontation with fundamental, 1,000-year-old traditions, our faith and the monastic spirit of the Mountain,” Deputy Foreign Minister Tassos Yiannitsis said.[Athens defends Mt Athos ban]

How did Adam reach Sri Lanka?

In this picture, taken in 1885, you will see a small ladder placed near the top-right window. In this picture, taken more than a century later, you can see the ladder exactly at the same position. The building is Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built where Jesus is believed to be crucified and burried, and in Jerusalem, moving even a ladder requires divine intervention.
There is another place in the world, which is holy not just for Christians and Muslims, but also for Hindus and Buddhists where such problems do not exist. Located in Sri Lanka and currently called Adam’s peak, it was called Samanalakanda by the Sinhalese and Shivanolipatha Malai and Shiva padam by Hindus.So connection does Adam have with Sri Lanka and how did it become Adam’s peak? And how does a land which is holy for Hindus and Buddhists become holy for Muslims and Christians?
First, what’s at the top of the mountain.? Captain John Ribeyro who fought in the civil war in the 17th century described the summit^[5].

Hindus believe that this depression on the mountain which resembles a giant foot is the foot step of Shiva; for Buddhists it is the foot print of Buddha. Chrisitians believe that it belongs to St. Thomas and there are many other traditions which attribute the foot print to Jehovah, Eunuch of Candace and Satan^[1]. It is Muslim tradition that attributes the foot print to Adam, their first prophet.
In fact there is a made up explanation for how Adam, a person from a middle eastern stories, reached Sri Lanka. God, upset by Adam and Eve, threw them out of heaven and Adam landed in Sri Lanka creating an impression on the peak. He repented for a millennium when Gabriel took him to Arabia where Eve had landed. They both then returned to Sri Lanka and propagated the human race^[4].
Soleyman, an Arab merchant who visited Ceylon in the ninth century, mentioned the Adam tradition, which suggests that it was prevalent within two centuries of Islam’s founding. Sindbad the Sailor’s tales, believed to be partly based on real sailors tales, also mentions a pilgrimage to the place “where Adam was confined after his banishment from Paradiese.” It is believed that this tradition originated among the Copts (Egyptian Christians) of the fourth and fifth centuries^[4]. There is also a story which mentions that a group of three Arabs led by Sheikh Seijuddin, who according to tradition, converted Cheraman Perumal of Kodungallur, were on a pilgrimage to Adam’s peak.
Diego de Couto, a Portuguese writer of the 16th century did not believe it was the foot print of Adam; he thought it belonged to St. Thomas. Marco Polo had heard from Muslims and Christians that there was a monument to Adam, but he did not agree with that it had anything to do with Adam. This was because, according to the scripture of Marco Polo’s Church, Adam belonged to another part of the world. Instead he believed the Buddhist version and that the teeth, hairs and bowl of some “venerable figure” was commemorated^[2].
When he heard about the relics, Marco Polo’s patron Kublai Khan sent emissaries to Ceylon to ask Parakkamabahu II, a Sri Lankan King without a Wikipedia entry, for these items. It took three years for the emissaries to reach Ceylon and they got two molar teeth, some hair, and the bowl. According to Marco Polo, Kublai Khan received these items with respect^[2].
Marco Polo never climbed the mountain, but Ibn Battuta did. He went to Ceylon specifically for mountaineering. With an entourage of 10 Brahmin priests, 15 porters, 10 courtiers and 4 yogis (provided by Martanda Cinkaiariyan of the Aryacakravarti dynasty) he made the trip to the peak and back. The final climb was quite hard – a vertical ascent “by means of little stirrups affixed to chains suspended from iron pegs.” There he prayed with Buddhists and Muslims but does not mention seeing Christians^[3].
The mountain was officially renamed to Adam’s peak by Major James Rennell, the British geographer who worked in India.
If you read the story of the Cheraman Perumal conversion after a trip to Mecca, you will find that it is all made up. There is no evidence that Cheraman Perumal went to Mecca. You will find the same set of people — Muslim sailors and the Portuguese Christians — people who don’t have the concept of Ishta — involved in manufacturing such myths. It is the same with Adam as well. As they end up in new lands, they want to build a connection to their motherland and some rights. What better way than create a myth of Adam’s peak.
References:

The History of a Mountain By Elise Reclus, Bertha Ness, John Lillie
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu by by Laurence Bergreen
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta by Ross E. Dunn.
Adam’s Peak by William Skeen
History Of Ceylon: Presented By Captain John Ribeyro To The King Of Portugal, In 1685 (1847)

(Image Credit: Munir)

Ancient Rome in 3D

Google Earth 4.3 now has the Ancient Rome in 3D layer which will transport you to 320 CE. You can fly through the Forum, Colosseum and the city.
Now only if we could have layers which will fly us through Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Kalibangan, Ghaneriwala, Pataliputra, Nalanda, Hampi, or Thanjavur.

Quote of the Day

History is grabbed by the roots when it is used to remind a new generation of the accomplishments of the past, when it is used to inspire a people to accomplish what they can and prevent what they must. The invocation of history is particularly powerful when it is used to remind a nation of aspirations long cherished but not fully achieved. [Best of the ’08 Campaign: The effective use of history—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)]

The author is writing about American elections, but it could be true anywhere.

Lost Years of Jesus (2)

Few years back The History Channel showed a documentary titled, The Lost Years of Jesus which suggested that Jesus could have been in India or England or Qumran or leading a revolution against the Romans in the missing years.

There is a new documentary which says that he was not in all of the above places, but in Egypt. According to this film, titled Jesus: The Lost Years, Joseph, Mary and Jesus escaped to Egypt and “Jesus performed miracles in different towns, he destroyed temples and idols.”

Few months back, there was news about a Jesus Bowl, found in Alexandria, which had an inscription which a French epigrapher translated as “by Christ the magician.” Later it turned out that the words on the bowl did not refer to either “Christ” or “Magician”. That seems to be the case with this theory as well.

Jeffrey Siker, a professor of biblical studies and chair of the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said that from a historical perspective, little else is known about Jesus’ youth other than he probably lived in a rural village, spoke Aramaic, studied the Torah and worked in his father’s carpentry trade.

“If you are asking what we do know about the so-called missing years, the answer is nothing,” Siker said. “The lost years of Jesus are always going to be a Christmas special because it sells commercials and is inherently interesting, even though we know nothing about it.” [Documentary explores ‘lost years’ of Jesus – Salt Lake Tribune]

Technorati Tags: Lost Years of Jesus, Egypt

The Jesus Bowl

“Was Jesus Christ a magician?,” asks a Times of India headline. In fact this query comes from a recent discovery of a bowl in Alexandria by French marine archaeologists.

The full engraving on the bowl reads, “DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS,” which has been interpreted by French epigrapher and professor emeritus Andre Bernand as meaning either, “by Christ the magician” or “the magician by Christ.”

“It could very well be a reference to Jesus Christ, in that he was once the primary exponent of white magic,” Goddio, co-founder of the Oxford Center of Maritime Archaeology, said.

For a moment assume that this inscription actually reads “by Christ the magician” and the Christ here refers to Yeshua, then it brings up few issues which have been suppressed by the gospel writers.

In the opening scene of The Betrayal: The Lost Life of Jesus: A Novel by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, two Zealots, Dysmas and Gestas, come to meet Yeshua asking him to be their leader in attacking the Romans. During the entire conversation they call him “magician”.

In the footnotes of the book the authors mention that gospel translators took out most references to Yeshua as a magician, but still some remain. When Yeshua is taken to Pilate he is referred to as an evil doer, which in Roman terminology referred to a magician. Suetonius in the Life of Nero writes that Christians were involved in magical practices and sorcery. The magician role of Yeshua is also mentioned in Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician and John Hull’s Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition, but this aspect is seldom seen in modern biblical studies.

The problem with the inscription on the bowl is that it does not refer to either “Christ” or “Magician”

This cup has nothing to do with Christ. The Greek on the cup has CHRESTOU not CHRISTOU (or CHRSTOU as the newsreport has it!). CHRESTOU was a well-known title for one of the Sethian Gnostic archons, ATHOTH. It means “EXCELLENT ONE”. It is found in several Sethian texts, including the Gospel of Judas. I do not yet know what OGOISTAIS is, but I am going to work on it. But it doesn’t mean “magician.” This magical bowl is possibly a GNOSTIC magical bowl with an invocation to ATHOTH on it. So don’t believe the hype for minute. This bowl had absolutely nothing to do with CHRIST or with CHRIST as a magician. BUT it is totally fascinating if this object is actually SETHIAN! [Magical Cup has nothing to do with Christ]

The bowl was dated to the late 2nd century B.C. and the early 1st century A.D which means

it cannot in any case refer to Jesus Christ. The epithet Christ was not added to the name of Jesus of Nazareth until after the crucifixion, in the 30’s of the first century. And Jesus of Nazareth did not exist in the 2nd or 1st century BCE (unless he was an infant in the closing years of the 1st century BCE, as seems probable). [The Jesus Bowl: Another Crock]

The Tunnel Problem

When they decided to build the Chunnel, the British and the French invited bids from reputed construction companies. While most of them quoted astronomical amounts for the job, two Sardarjis/Mallus/Biharis/Poles (take your pick) put a bid of $1000. Members of the Channel Tunnel Group called the two of them and asked for an explanation.

“I will dig from England and my brother from France”, one of them explained. “We meet at the center and the tunnel is complete”, the other completed.

“What if you don’t meet”, asked a naïve European.

The two entrepreneurs had thought about that. They looked at each other, smiled and replied.

“Then you get two tunnels.”

Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the longest tunnel built till the time without any intermediate shafts, was dug underneath Jerusalem in 701 BCE. This 1700 feet tunnel mentioned in the Bible was built during the reign of Hezekiah. From the Siloam inscription found on wall, we know that the tunnel was dug by two teams from opposite ends. The question is: how did they meet underneath? Why didn’t they create two tunnels?

This tunnel is not in a straight line. While a straight line would have produced a tunnel of 1050 feet, the architects took a convoluted route which added 700 extra feet. Still they managed to accurately meet and complete.

While many theories were proposed, including one which suggested that the tunnel diggers expanded a natural tunnel, they were all proved wrong. The latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review has the answer.

The tunnelers were guided by communications from the surface, that is, by hammering on the bedrock above. Experiments conducted by Shimron and Frumkin demonstrated that communication by means of a hammer tapping on the bedrock above the tunnel could be an effective means of communication to a tunnel up to 50 feet below the surface and could be detected up to 80 feet. In short, “Acoustic messages between tunnel and surface must have been the dominant technique which controlled the complex proceeding underneath.” (Acoustic communication has been for centuries the method used for locating people trapped in mine catastrophes and earthquake collapses.)[Sound Proof]

The Bible's Buried Secrets

What would happen to your religious lives if, hypothetically, all history were voided or made inaccessible to you or somehow falsified beyond hope? In other words, imagine that due to some strange reasons, the details of which are irrelevant, you have to live your lives without having any knowledge passed down from God through any historical events whatsoever. What would you do? Would it be possible for you to lead religious lives, and if so, by what authority would you do so? In other words, can you discover the spiritual truth for yourselves without dependence on historical sources, or would you be lost if such historical sources were simply unavailable or unreliable? [Myth of Hindu Sameness]

That was a question Rajiv Malhotra asked a room full of attorneys in New Jersey and they were stumped. Does this mean that Abrahamic religions are dependent on historical episodes and would be meaningless without them?

On November 18, 2008, PBS is premiering a 2 hour program titled The Bible’s Buried Secrets which “vividly recounts the saga of the ancient Israelites and digs deeply into both the Bible and the history of the Israelites through the archeological artifacts they left behind.” The program tries to find out who wrote the Hebrew Bible and if there is any historical basis to Moses, Abraham, Exodus, and King David.

The findings of the program are not going to make a lot of people happy

But the film challenges long-held beliefs. Abraham, Sarah and their offspring probably didn’t exist, Meyers said.

“These stories are unlikely to represent real historical events, but rather there’s some kernel of ancient experience in there which has survived and which helps give identity to the people at the time the Bible finally took shape centuries and centuries later,” Meyers said.

There’s no archaeological evidence of the Exodus, either, Meyers said. “It doesn’t mean that there’s no kernel of truth to it,” she said.

Apsell said she found it “extremely shocking” to learn that monotheism was a process that took hundreds of years.[Orlando Sentinel – “Bible’s Buried Secrets” from PBS’ ]

Already online petitions are up calling for an end public funding for PBS.

The Workers Paradise

With the Soviet archives opening up, more details of the Communist paradise are finding the light of the day. The antics of the saints who adorn the wall of Communist party offices in India can now be read in Paul R. Gregory’s Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives. This includes details of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-38 when 700,000 people were shot dead and the murder of 21, 857 Polish POWs in 1939. According to a Newsweek review, the book “reveals Stalin and his successors as trigger-happy liars who never saw a fact they couldn’t twist.”

Such moving stories explain why this slim book is just the right antidote to the often daunting studies most scholars produce after working in the archives. The hefty books certainly serve their purpose. But Gregory has wisely chosen to reach out to a broader audience by providing a highly accessible primer on the deadly workings of the state that proclaimed itself the workers’ paradise. In the process he provides a timely reminder of how quickly a utopian vision can be transformed into a nightmarish reality.[Declassifying the Kremlin | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com]

Domestic and International Hindu Disputes

(Preah Vihear temple. Image credit: mofaitsontd)

An beautiful idol of Lord Lashminarayan found in the river Kosasthalaiar is now the reason for a fight between two villages in Thiruvallur district. When the idol was discovered during quarrying, the villagers of Nemili and Adukkalpat claimed ownership. To maintain peace, the RDO has locked up the idol and informed the archaeology department officials.

Meanwhile an international dispute has erupted between Thailand and Cambodia over the ownership of the 900-year-old Preah Vihear temple. This temple dedicated to Shiva was built by kings Suryavarman I (1002 -1050) and Suryavarman II (1113 -1150) and has been at the center of a fifty year dispute between Cambodia and Thailand. In 1962, the International Court of Justice had ruled that the temple belonged to Cambodia.

Recently Cambodia filed a request with United Nations to approve the Preah Vihear temple as a Heritage site and Thailand’s Govt. actually offered support for this. Then Thailand’s Constitutional Court questioned this support and asked the Govt. to get parliament approval. Opposition leaders suddenly became like Bruce the Shark, who got a whiff of blood and decided to campaign to remove the Foreign Minister from his position.

It got more interesting as three Thai protestors reached the temple and Thailand send troops to get them back. During their travel, the Thai soldiers forgot to cross through the immigration checkpoint, which was unusual in South East Asia, but a daily ritual in the Indian subcontinent. In the subcontinent, such trespassers are sent back with gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but the Cambodians held the Thai troops.

Thailand sent four hundred troops to the border; Cambodia eight hundred. All of them sat in the Shiva temple, singing Om jaya Jagadiśa hare, Swāmi jaya Jagadiśa hare. The Cambodians and Thais again did something which is popular in the subcontinent – talks. The talks, like all other talks, failed, but produced something priceless. Both sides agreed that ” force must not be used to resolve the nearly week-long crisis over disputed land.” It is as if they stole the template file from the Indian Prime Minister’s office.

In a move that would have made Chacha Nehru proud, the matter was taken to the UN Security Council. By then the Thai troops had increased to 4000 and were running out of bhajans. Bill Clinton, if he were President would call this the most dangerous spot in the world; President Bush probably has no idea where Cambodia is.

Now both Thailand and Cambodia have found a way to defuse the tension in Preah Vihear. This is a brilliant solution which can be used in the subcontinent as well; it would do good if foreign policy experts paid attention. They have started a new dispute over the Ta Muen Thom ruins along the border and Preah Vihear is no longer the top news. The alternate plan was to send the RDO from Thiruvallur district to Cambodia.