Now if you know me, you know I think the goddess worship thing is totally bad as once again it makes a religion out of wicca. I believe wicca was never a religion but was an attempt to understand and celebrate and use natural law. That study was a craft not a religion until Gardner. With the best of intentions the perversion of the craft is not something that has moved us forward. Both religion and the practice of "worship" are antithetical to natural law. On the other hand, perhaps it is necessary to go through the religion to get beyond it. Many paths.

Additionally, nothing disgusted me more, than female artists portraying women with the same emphasis of men-two ice cream cones that were actually breasts with cherry nipples is the one "sculpture" that sticks out in my memory.

But mostly, the disgust was generated by the allegedly feminist, women's magazines about goddesses, wicca and politics with endless steams of representations of naked barbie dolls on their covers, some involved in sexual acts.

This we were told, was art that celebrated womanhood. Yeah right-well then Playboy celebrates womanhood also. They presented women only as sexual objects as if that was the sum total of the activity of the gender. The art was dead drawings of naked anatomically impossible women all who seemed to be under 23 years of age.

Having said that-there are woman artist who do use female anatomy in their art but who do it so intelligently that it does actually get to what all these other projects give lip service to-and I feel that two such artist are Judy Chicago and Mayumi Oda.

Well, the Utne Reader just did an article about Mayumi so I found a website with her work and I must say, the use of space and line is so interesting to me that I just am fascinated. And when I get over the relationships of form she establishes on a piece of paper and do look at the "goddesses" I am filled with joy because they capture that feeling.

The thing she calls "goddess" is portrayals of that high feeling of exultation, that is so rare; but when you do feel it - it transcends the flesh. And the goddesses are doing the sorts of things that will give the flesh that feeling.

She is right-when you are in that state-you are God and can do anything. I would like to own wallfulls of her works. The women are not sexual objects but are experiencing universal feelings which are immediately recognizable to the viewer. Done with such a perfect understanding and skill that the viewer feels the experience portrayed in their body as well as their mind.

Peppered with vivid stories and lush prints, Mayumi Oda's most recent book, I Opened the Gate, Laughing: An Inner Journey (Chronicle Books, 2002), tells the story of how her creativity was renewed through the sacred space of a garden.

In the footage, stray, lost, and unwanted dogs are crowded into urine- and feces-covered pens, many with no food or water in sight. We are told that the shelter is hidden away from and closed to the public, preventing potential adopters from looking for a companion animal and lost dogs from being reunited with their human families.

PETA has learned that dog wardens from Gallatin and Henry County attended and passed a euthanasia by injection certification course almost two years ago, in October 2000, but the footage reveals a lone worker (who we are told is solely responsible for housing, feeding, cleaning, and killing all animals) dragging dogs out of the facility by their necks on a catchpole, positioning them in front of a backhoe full of dead and dying dogs, and shooting them. The dogs are then suspended, their full weight hanging by the catchpole noose around their necks, and slammed, some still visibly alive, on top of the shot dogs piled in the backhoe.

Filthy Facility and a 2-Cent Bullet to the Head

PETA has written to officials in Gallatin, Henry, and Trimble Counties to ask that conditions and killings at the shelter be investigated and corrected immediately and that charges be filed against the person or persons responsible. For more information, or to read PETA's letter, please go to www.peta.org.

Please join us in politely but firmly asking these officials to provide homeless animals with humane, legal living conditions and, at the very least, a peaceful death.

Henry County magistrates:

John Allgeier
David Brown
Michael Fisher
Wayne Gunnell
Cecil McCarty
County Courthouse
P.O. Box 202
New Castle, KY 40050-0202
Tel.: 502-845-5707
Fax: 502-845-5708

Trimble County magistrates:

Norvel Barnes
Michael Dunaway
Stephen Stark
Richard Webster
County Courthouse
P.O. Box 251
Bedford, KY 40006-0251
Tel.: 502-255-7196
Fax: 502-255-4618

Gallatin County magistrates:

Elsie Ewbank
Sidney M. Gullion
Kenneth A. McFarland
Eric Moore
County Courthouse
100 Main St.
Warsaw, KY 41095
Tel.: 859-567-5691
Fax: 859-567-4764

Please copy your correspondence to the counties' judge executives also, using the same contact information:

Tommy Bryant, Henry County Judge Executive

George W. Zubati, Gallatin County Judge Executive

Ray Clem, Trimble County Judge Executive

Thank you! You are making a difference!

Recipients:
Tommy Bryant, George W. Zubati, Ray Clem, Henry Co. magistrates, Trimble Co. magistrates, & Gallatin Co. magistrates

Unfinished Business: A Democrat and a Republican Take on the 10 Most Important Issues Women Face
by Julianne, Dr. Malveaux, Deborah L. Perry, Soledad O'Brien

Also Interesting:

Inside the Cuban Revolution by Julia Sweig

Cuba Confidential by Louise Bardach
This is the book I have been looking for a long time. On the Cubans in Miami "They're angry and they have tools"

Saudi Arabians attacked us-Iraq did not

El Quada took refuge in Pakistan not Iraq

Iraq has the oil most sought after by commercial developers

We are going to attack Iraq

What hypocrites and we elect them again and again - oops

I forgot we dispensed with that illusion

Yet all the DNR and Wisconsin legislators can talk about is how much money hunting brings into Wisconsin. We must do everything we can to preserve the hunting culture because it brings in so much money.

The DNR is asking for $12 million to eradicate and test deer for CWD but they do not ask for the elimination of game farms or to use the sharp shooters to shoot contraceptives into the deer. No, the DNR asks for more hunting seasons so no one else can use the outdoors but the killers.

So instead of reducing the number of fawns born and isolating the sick deer we are going to spread it around by the delicate process of butchering and carcass disposal. Moreover we will keep the incubators of disease, the caged killing fields, instead of shutting them down. Hey. it brings a lot of money to the DNR, oops- I mean Wisconsin. The deer farms bring a lot of money to Wisconsin? More then $12 million into the state budget?

The game farms are going to spread tuberculosis to the cattle herds just like they spread CWD and there is no question that tuberculosis is transmittable to humans. It spreads rapidly in humans. Just like CWD, the game farms will try to hide the fact that their animals are sick until humans start dying.

Deadly Feasts: The 'Prion' controversy and the Public's Health
by Richard Rhodes

Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat
by Howard F. Lyman

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (California Studies in Food and Culture)by Marion Nestle

Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future
by Sheldon Rampton, John Stauber

Milk: The Deadly Poisonby Robert Cohen, Jane Heimlich

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
by Eric Schlosser

When did Egypt begin to exist?

Explore more than 3.000 years of Ancient Egyptian history, from the end of prehistory at around 3.000 BC to the closing of the last Egyptian temple in 535/537 A.D. A time-line on this site helps you navigate through history and discover the formidable Pharaohs of Ancient

"Nearly every god of the earliest part of Egyptian history was visualized in the form of an animal, bird, or even an inanimate object. Thus Bastet, the local goddess of the town Bast (modern Tell Basta) in the eastern Delta, became associated with a lioness, the god Thoth of Khemenu (Hermopolic Magna, modern El-Ashmunein) with an ibis, Khnum of the first cataract region with a ram, the goddess Hathor, whose worship was known from several places, with a cow, and the god Sobek with a crocodile. See, Hathor. The precise reasons for such associations are not clear, but natural logic seems to have influenced the choice. Thus, the cults of the bull were popular in the cattle-grazing area of the Delta, a crocodile cult was known from the marshy Faiiyum, etc. The god could adopt the form of an animal in order to become manifest, but this did not mean the animal itself was regarded as a deity."

"We can conjecture that each of the larger chiefdoms at the end of the Predynastic Period [5000/4500-2925 BC] was connected with a cult-center and a shrine or temple of the local deity. The fortunes of Egyptian gods waxed and waned with those of their home districts, and the development of relationships among deities went side by side with the creation of one state. Almost all of the deities of later times were known during the earliest dynasties, usually in the forms of animals, birds, or fetishes."
- Jaromir Malek, In the Shadow of the Pyramids

The Sphinx for example is a representation of a lion, and is one of the earliest works of Egyptian art. The sphinx has the head of the pharaoh, and the body of a lion, showing the pharaoh's power and importance. According to Allbritton, Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of fate, controls the Tablets of Destiny; therefore, the fate of humanity lies in her hands, or rather her paws .

As in most societies, the original tribes were matriarchies during the Prehistory. A change that marks the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period is the rise of urbanism. Inhabitants of small settlements throughout the country abandoned their homes and moved to larger communities and cities. Early Period 3000-2575

It was during this period that the divine kingship became well established as Egypt's form of government, and with it, an entire culture that would remain virtually unchanged for the next 3000 or more years.

. By 3100 BC, Egypt had a centralized government controlled by a line of hereditary rulers. These kings, called pharaohs, kept a royal court of advisors and nobility, and oversaw the governors of the provinces of the kingdom. They were also commanders of the Egyptian army. Even the priests and priestesses who officiated at the complex religious ceremonies and attended on the gods, served the pharaohs.

Fully domesticated cats in Egypt as companions to humans probably originated around 2000 BCE They were usually captured from the wild as kittens to be domesticated. House cats in Egypt were likely descended from the African wildcat and little swamp cats. Pictures depicting domestic cats have been found in the Middle Kingdom, but skeletons of cats date back to the period before the dynasty. Their original home was probably somewhere in the Near East, so they may well be indigenous to Egypt.

Despite this, a few people believe that cats may have been imported from Persia about 4000 years ago, or from Nubia during the New Kingdom. They preyed on cobras, vipers, rats, mice, and other creatures harmful to the human population. Cats and humans spent about 1000 years building their relationship; and cats, unlike other animals were allowed to come and go as they saw fit. The women domesticated the cat by a power of attraction and observation of the animal. They had to share the water with them. They treated them with respect and in return the cats protected the granaries.

Cats were also used in many ways not usually associated with feline companions. Wilkinson (1988) noted that cats, instead of hunting dogs, retrieved birds that were shot in marshes. From 1000-350 BCE, however, cats were also seen as deities, and worshipped as such.

So there is the belief that cats were worshipped in Egypt but Egypt lasted a long time. The Bast cult can be traced back to about 3200 BC, and she became a national deity when Bubastis became the capital of Egypt in about 950 BC.

While cats might have been revered when they were first domesticated, as the civilization deteriorated, about the time of Rameses, when males were priests at Bubastis instead of females, at the end of the New Kingdom-the 20th Dynasty, during the later years of Ramesses XI, 1136 - 1070, according to this PBS special; the Egyptians began raising cats in cages to be sold to the great unwashed as sacrifices.

The more cats you bought for the priests to kill, the more blessings you received. But not everyone will agree.

M Epstein tells it this way: "Cats were mummified after death, and mice, rats, and saucers of milk were placed in their tombs. However, X-rays of 55 mummified cats showed that several had broken necks, implying that the Temple priests may have killed kittens to keep down their population, and used them as offerings to Bast (Bisno, 1997)".

The above is garbage as I saw the cat mummies and those were some big, big cats, not kittens. Cat cemeteries line the Nile River and cat mummies can be found in the tombs of Egyptians (Coll, 1997). The city of Bubastis, contains around 300,000 cat mummies.

So were the holy practices degraded after the matriarchy. The truth is, that as the rulers became corrupted by wealth, and the culture began to emphasize the afterlife, in order to get away with making the here and now a living hell on earth for everyone except the rulers, the Theben priests may have bred cats to kill as sacrifice. Another way to insult and degrade the old beliefs. To help the people accept the new way. The patriarchs were very paranoid about their illegitimate power. Read Ariadne by June R. Brindel

Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the holy Circle; thou art indeed the Great Cat.

... (Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes)

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party to Receive Permanent Home in the Brooklyn Museum of Art - Brooklyn, NY April 23, 2002

The Brooklyn Museum of Art today announced the gift of Judy Chicago's iconic feminist installation The Dinner Party from The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. The Dinner Party will be on temporary view from September 20, 2002 through February 9, 2003 in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery on the fifth floor and will be permanently installed in 2004 on the fourth floor of the Museum.

Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman said, "We are extremely grateful to The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation and to its president and BMA Trustee Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler for making this truly remarkable gift to the collection and for providing The Dinner Party with a permanent home where it will be seen by generations to come. An extraordinary work of art, it is as relevant today as it was when it was first created in the 1970s."

"It has been an honor and a joy to guide The Dinner Party back to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was seen more than two decades ago. It is my hope that the permanent housing of The Dinner Party provides ongoing visual joy and intellectual opportunities for all who come to visit. It is a monumental work that I feel certain shall anchor its place in history, awaken our sensibilities to the past, and inspire possibilities for the future," stated Dr. Sackler.

Since it was first presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, The Dinner Party has been seen by more than a million people at fifteen venues in six countries on three continents. The Brooklyn Museum, where it was on view October 18, 1980 through January 18, 1981, was the fourth venue. The Dinner Party is a symbolic history of women in Western civilization.

Triangular in configuration, The Dinner Party employs numerous mediums including ceramics, china painting, and needlework to honor women's achievements.

An immense open table covered with fine white cloths is set with thirty-nine place settings, thirteen on each 48-foot side, each commemorating a goddess, historic personage, or other important woman.

Ishtar, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, Theodora of Byzantium, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sojourner Truth, Sacajawea, Susan B. Anthony, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf are among these 39 women selected by Judy Chicago to have their own place settings at the table. The Dinner Party rests on a porcelain surface, the Heritage Floor, inscribed with the names of 999 women.

The Dinner Party took more than five years to complete. For two years (1974-1976) Judy Chicago worked alone in her Santa Monica, California studio, conceiving and executing her extraordinary vision. The undertaking proved so ambitious that eventually 400 women and a few men from all over the country became involved, volunteering their time, from one month to several years.

"One of my aims in creating this work was to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women's achievements are repeatedly written out of the historic record and a cycle of repetition that results in generation after generation of women struggling for insights and freedoms that are too often quickly forgotten or erased again.

I am honored that The Dinner Party has found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Elizabeth Sackler's act of generosity and vision demonstrates that one individual can still make a difference, in this case, interceding in history to help ensure an ineradicable place for women," stated Judy Chicago.

There is a new book just out called Judy ChicagoEdited by Elizabeth A. Sackler