What's it like living next door to a neighbourhood witch?

Mail Online

You'd think milkmen would be used to pre-dawn doorstep encounters with all manner of 'unconventional' folk, wouldn't you? Well, not in leafy Dorchester.

Grandmother Suky Burton roars with laughter as she remembers the day she and the man who delivers the pints locked eyes in a moonlit driveway.

'It was the early hours and I'd been to a ceremony at Stonehenge. Normally, I'd change out of my robes before coming home, but it was cold, so I didn't bother.

The milkman took one terrified look at me and scuttled off to his milk float as fast as his legs could carry him. I've never seen one of those vehicles move so quickly. He'd obviously never seen a witch before.'
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'Buddha's skull' found in Nanjing

The Telegraph
Chinese archaeologists have claimed that a 1,000-year-old miniature pagoda, unearthed in Nanjing, holds a piece of skull belonging to Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism.

The pagoda was wedged tightly inside an iron case that was discovered at the site of a former temple in the city in August.

The four-storey pagoda, which is almost four feet high and one-and-a-half feet wide, is thought by archaeologists to be one of the 84,000 pagodas commissioned by Ashoka the Great in the second century BC to house the remains of the Buddha.

Ashoka, one of India's greatest emperors, converted to Buddhism after waging a bloody war in the eastern state of Orissa. He is widely credited with spreading Buddhism throughout Asia, and across his kingdom, which stretched from Pakistan through Afghanistan and into Iran.

The pagoda found in Nanjing is crafted from wood, gilded with silver and inlaid with gold, coloured glass and amber. It matches a description of another of Ashoka's pagodas which used to be housed underneath the Changgan Buddhist temple in Nanjing.

A description of the contents of the pagoda was also found: a gold coffin bearing part of Buddha's skull inside a silver box. Although scans have confirmed that there are two small metal boxes inside the pagoda, experts have not yet peered inside. The pagoda is currently on display in the museum.

Qi Haining, the head of archaeology at Nanjing Museum, told state media: "This pagoda may be unique, the only one known to contain parts of Buddha's skull".
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St Catherine's Day

Catherine of Alexandria by Raphael, c. 1507

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, also known as Saint Catherine of the Wheel and The Great Martyr Saint Catherine is a Christian saint and martyr who is claimed to have been a noted scholar in the early 4th century. She is believed to have been born in Alexandria of a noble family and converted to Christianity through a vision.

In the beginning of the fifteenth century, St. Catherine's was one of the voices heard by St. Joan of Arc.

Considered to be the Patron Saint of:

apologists; craftsmen who work with a wheel (potters, spinners, etc.); archivists; attornies; barristers; dying people; educators; girls; jurists; knife grinders; knife sharpeners; lawyers; librarians; libraries; maidens; mechanics; millers; nurses; old maids; philosophers; potters; preachers; scholars; schoolchildren; scribes; secretaries; spinners; spinsters; stenographers; students; tanners; teachers; theologians; turners; University of Paris; unmarried girls; wheelwrights

Pagan couple make their new house a home by installing stone circle in garden

Mail online

When John and Suzy Burton decided to move to a smaller house, they informed the removal men that they would like to take a few precious stones with them.

To be more precise, 13 huge rocks from the garden.

Mr Burton, a druid, and his wife, a witch, were the proud owners of a stone circle which, they say, gives them positive energy.

So when the pagan couple left their historic £1million mansion, Abbotts Court in Weymouth, Dorset, a dozen men with a crane and a fleet of trucks took the rocks to their new home in Dorchester, ten miles away.

Neighbours watched in amazement as the stones, each weighing between half and three-quarters of a ton, were placed in the garden.

The couple - both antique dealers - had them aligned at special points around the extensive grounds of the £600,000, six-bedroom property to encircle themselves with energy.
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God is eclipsed by supernatural believers and tales of UFO sightings

Daily Mail

Tales of aliens and ghosts may seem far-fetched, but they are believed more than God.

A survey has found that while 54 per cent of us are convinced the Almighty exists, 58 per cent believe in the supernatural.

They found women were more likely to believe in the supernatural than men, and were more likely to visit a medium.
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Walking for rain

Cyprus Sunday Mail

DOES GOD have his hands on the heavenly tap? According to residents of Palechori village, if he doesn’t then the Virgin Mary does.

Hundreds of Palechori residents marched eight kilometres on Friday night, holding icons of the Mother of Jesus and praying for an end to the drought that has besieged the island.

Young and old donned their woolly jumpers and walked with the local priest through the mountainous village, singing liturgies in the hope that someone up there would answer their prayers and bring some much-needed rainfall.

...It seems the eight kilometres were not in vain as by Saturday morning, police released an announcement warning drivers of low visibility on the roads of Kofinou, Zygi and Kornos due to heavy rainfall. Warnings of rain and fog were also issued for Troodos....
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Feast Day of St. Cecilia

Carlo Dolci, St Cecilia at the Organ, 1671 (Dresden Gemäldegalerie)

Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians and Church music. Her feast day is celebrated in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic Churches on November 22.

Saint Cecilia was a Roman martyr of the 3rd century. From the 6th century onwards, she was referred to as a saint. According to one version of her life she was a Christian who converted her pagan husband and his brother. Because she refused to perform an act of idolatry before a prefect, she was condemned to death by suffocation with the steam and heat of her own bathroom. She survived this, but was then decapitated.

From the 16th century onwards Cecilia was regarded as the patron saint of musicians, perhaps because according to the account of her life, she sang 'in her heart' to God.

...no man is hurt but by himself

Diogenes said that, and he was right. Every person's
experience is created internally, by him or herself. No
one outside of you can tell you what anything means,
or whether you are "hurt" or not.

If you feel hurt by something or someone, it is the result
of your decision to feel that way. This may be tough to
hear, but it is true. You can change your mind at any
moment.about how something is affecting you.
Neale Donald Walsch

The spiritual miracles of Marianne

Irish Independent

If there is a textbook for life, Marianne Williamson seems to have it

"In any given moment , we can have an open-hearted response to the person in front of us or we can have a closed path. We can respond with love or we can respond with fear. We can gloat, we can blame, we can help the relationship. We can judge, send forth our desire to be at our most excellent or give into an attitude of 'I don't care'.

"At any given moment, we are deciding between the best that we are capable of or deciding for the lower aspects of our nature and if we make a right-minded choice for the sounder of the two, it's much like exercising a muscle, which over time becomes your personality."

I am sitting with one of the world's most celebrated spiritual teachers as she arrives from Britain, where her daughter has started university at Cambridge, and on the eve of her sell-out seminar.

Like her writing style , Marianne Williamson presents herself and her ideas in a clean and tidy manner, with no small talk cluttering the ground.

As the petite brunette, sporting a leopard-skin cardigan delivers her doctrine, my attention drifts to my history with this former jazz singer who teaches faith without dogma and religion without institution.
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Related Site:
Marianne Williamson - Official Site

Obama taps into our yearning for meaning, spirituality

Freep.com

The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States was a defeat for the Christian right, but that doesn't mean that faith didn't play a major role in Obama's resounding victory. While the Republican Party ran under the mantra of "God and country," Obama tapped into something possibly even bigger -- God and spirit.

A survey out this month revealed that 52% of Americans age 12 to 25 say that they don't trust organized religion, but that they are increasingly spiritual. According to the Minneapolis-based Search Institute, young people are turning away from their churches, mosques and temples and finding God in nature, music, friends and community service.
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Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul

New York Times

In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts “for my soul that is in this stele.”

University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible.
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World asked to help craft online charter for religious harmony

Breitbart.com

A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions.

The Charter for Compassion project springs from a "wish" granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.

"Tedizens" include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz.

Wishes granted at TED envision ways to better the world and come with a promise that Tedizens will lend their clout and capabilities to making them come true.

Armstrong's wish is to combine universal principles of respect and compassion into a charter based on a "golden rule" she believes is at the core of every major religion.
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'Buddha boy'

Daily Mail

A teenage boy who many believe is the reincarnation of Buddha has re-emerged from the jungle in southern Nepal, attracting thousands of devotees, officials said today.

After retreating into the jungle for more than a year, Ram Bahadur Bamjan, 18, re-emerged Monday near Nijgadh town, about 100 miles south of the capital, Katmandu.

Upon hearing the news, thousands of Bamjan's followers, some from as far away as India, traveled to the site Tuesday to see him, police official Abhaya Joshi said over the telephone.
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All Saints Day

Fra Angelico - 1428-30, Tempera on wood - National Gallery, London

The Church has always honoured those early witnesses to the Christian faith who died as martyrs. During the first three hundred years Christians were persecuted, often suffering torture and bloody death. They refused to deny Christ, even when this denial might have saved their own lives, or the lives of their children and families.

Many of those especially holy people whose names and stories were known, the Church later canonized (that is, the Church formally recognized that the life of that person was without any doubt holy, or sanctified -- a "saint" who is an example for us). The Church's calendar contains many saint's days.

But there were thousands and thousands of early Christian martyrs, the majority of whose names are known only to God -- and throughout the history of the Church there have been countless others who really are saints, who are with God in heaven, even if their names are not on the list of canonized saints.

In order to honour the memory of these unnamed saints, the Church dedicated a special feast day so that all living Christians would celebrate at a special Mass the lives and witness of those "who have died and gone before us into the presence of the Lord".

All Saint's Day, originated as a feast of All Martyrs, sometime in the 4th century. At first it was celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost. It came to be observed on May 13 when Pope St. Boniface IV (608-615) restored and rebuilt for use as a Christian church an ancient Roman temple which pagan Rome had dedicated to "all gods", the Pantheon. The pope re-buried the bones of many martyrs there, and dedicated this Church to the Mother of God and all the Holy Martyrs on May 13, 610.

About a hundred years later, Pope Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a new chapel in the basilica of St. Peter to all saints (not just to the martyrs) on November 1, and he fixed the anniversary of this dedication as the date of the feast.

A century after that, Pope Gregory IV (827-844) extended the celebration of All Saints to November 1 for the entire Church.

The vigil of this important feast, All Saint's Eve, Hallowe'en, was apparently observed as early as the feast itself.

Ever since then, the entire Church has celebrated the feast of All Saints on November 1st, and Hallowe'en on October 31.

Wikiipedia, All Saints for more information

Samhain

BBC
Samhain (pronounced 'sow'inn') is a very important date in the Pagan calendar for it marks the Feast of the Dead. Many Pagans also celebrate it as the old Celtic New Year (although some mark this at Imbolc). It is also celebrated by non-Pagans who call this festival Halloween.
More Information

Mysterious Britain
The festival marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter in the Celtic calendar, and is one of the four Celtic fire festivals - the quarter points in the solar year. It marked the point in the year were a time of plenty gave way to more lean times, in all probability the reason for its association with dread and eeriness. Traditionally it is when the gates of the otherworld are open, a time when dark forces are abroad in the realm of humans. This is a brief overview of Halloween examining its roots and folklore.

In the old Celtic calendar Halloween - or more correctly Samhain - was actually the beginning of the New Year, and the preparation for the coming hardship of winter. All the animals that were not breeding stock were slaughtered, and their meat salted and stored for the dark months. As one of the most important celebrations of the year, a great feast was held, and bonfires were lit throughout the countryside.
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Diwali - Festival of Lights

Diwali 2008 is on October 28, Tuesday

BBC

Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, is the most popular of all the festivals from South Asia, and is also the occasion for celebrations by Jains and Sikhs as well as Hindus.

The festival of Diwali extends over five days. Because of the lights, fireworks, and sweets involved, it's a great favourite with children.

The festival celebrates the victory of good over evil, light over darkness, and knowledge over ignorance, although the actual legends that go with the festival are different in different parts of India.

The Times of India summed up the modern meaning of Diwali:

Regardless of the mythological explanation one prefers, what the festival of lights really stands for today is a reaffirmation of hope, a renewed commitment to friendship and goodwill, and a religiously sanctioned celebration of the simple - and some not so simple - joys of life.
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One of the biggest festivals of Hindus, Deepawali or Diwali in India is celebrated with lots of enthusiasm and happiness. This festival is celebrated for five continuous days, with the third day being celebrated as the main Diwali or as 'Festival of Lights'. Fireworks are always associated with this festival. The day is celebrated with people lighting diyas, candles all around their house. Lakshmi Puja is performed in the evening to seek divine blessings of Goddess of Wealth. Diwali gifts are exchanged among all near and dear ones.

The Society for the Confluence of Festivals in India has a beautiful site with lots of information including:

- Diwali Recipes
- Deep in Diwali
- Tradition of Playing Cards
- Pooja Thali Decorations
- Making Diwali Cards
- Diwali Essay
- Diwali Poems
- Diwali Songs
- Diwali Mela
- Diwali Wallpapers
- Diwali Decorative Items

Solomon's real mine?

Mail Online

3,000 years on, archaeologists uncover fabled site in desert...
In a discovery straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, archaeologists believe they have uncovered one of the lost mines of King Solomon.

The vast copper mine lies in an arid valley in modern-day Jordan and was created in the 10th century BC - around the time Solomon is believed to have ruled over the ancient Hebrews.

The mines are enormous and would have generated a huge income for the king, who is famed for bringing extraordinary wealth and stability to the newly-united kingdom
of Israel and Judah.

The announcement will today reopen the debate about how much of the Old Testament is myth and how much is history.
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The Big Question: What was the Holy Grail, and why our centuries-old fascination with it?

The Independent

Why are we asking this now?

Because a new exhibition at the Royal Academy, which brings together hundreds of relics from more than 1,000 years of the Byzantine Empire, has stirred up renewed and fevered excitement over the idea that the Holy Grail is in town.

Curators spent five years bringing together a host of archaeological treasures including mosaics, jewellery, icons and manuscripts to create the first exhibition in Britain on Byzantine art in more than 50 years. But the item causing the most frenzied excitement is the Antioch Chalice, a sixth century silver cup on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art which – to grail aficionados – is one of the most credible contenders to be the Holy Grail itself.

Professor Robin Cormack, the exhibition's curator said: "[The chalice] has an inner plain cup with an ornate covering. The outer cup can be dated to the sixth century but nobody can say for sure when the inner cup was made. There is still a plausible argument that it is the Holy Grail."

What is the grail actually meant to be?

The Holy Grail is an expansion of the legend surrounding the Holy Chalice, the vessel used by Christ during the Last Supper. According to grail legend, Joseph of Arimathea used the cup to collect Jesus's blood and sweat as he was dying on the cross, giving the vessel magical, life-sustaining properties. Credited in the Gospels as the man who generously gave up his own tomb to bury Christ's body, grail legend extends Joseph of Arimathea's story further by making him the first keeper of the Holy Grail.
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Related Site:
Royal Academy of Arts - Byzantium Exhibition

Burning fall leaves can hold spiritual significance

CourierNews - Chicago

In the eighteenth century, Charles Wesley wrote a hymn known as Earth and All Stars.

The second verse is a stirring tribute to the extremes of the elements and nature. One line in particular, "Flowers and trees! Loud rustling dry leaves!" is especially appropriate at this season. We can all identify with it.

After all, it's autumn! What is more common in this part of the country than loud rustling dry leaves?

We kick those leaves out of the way, rake them, heap them into compost piles, bag them (in special bags, yet!), or, if we are particularly fortunate, burn them, relishing the aroma of the sacrificial smoke as it wends its way heavenward.

A lot of symbolism and memories are bundled with those colorful remnants of the greenness of summer, symbolic ever since God created autumn.

...Whatever faith we proclaim, whatever we hold sacred (and everyone holds something sacred), we are symbolic creatures. Burning leaves for the garden is a ritual of autumn. It is one thing to ban an event; quite another to ban a ritual, as the early church discovered. That is why so many symbols seemingly out of place in Christian worship are there: as transitional motifs from our symbolic nature into the divine.
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Peace Prayer of St. Francis

O Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace!
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sorrow, joy.

Oh, Divine Master, grant that I may not
so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Prayer of Peace
Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi

Roman Catholic friar, founder of the Franciscans
Known as the patron saint of animals, birds and the environment

His feast day is October 4