RE: Hindu hell
January 29, 2019 at 9:46 am
(This post was last modified: January 29, 2019 at 10:23 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Shinto does have a hierarchy. There are people priests and beings all arranged by rank and order, even the shrines have a conceptual rank..shakaku seido.
Meiji Jingo is the royal shrine, Ise Jingo is the imperial shrine. Then you have the jinja....a few of which called taisha, grand shines..and kasha, government shrines. Some shrines have offshoot shrines called bunja. There are twenty two ni-ju-ni-sha, which are set aside as "privileged" shrines, with seven high, seven mid, and eight low ranking shrines among them.
Before the end of WW2, there was actually an administration that ranked those shrines, called the Jinja Cho.
Individual shrines to ones departed father are not even included in this system, as they're beneath any official mention or recognition, as ones departed father likely was.
Animism is only noticed as existent by whatever animist theme it operates on, specifically what representation is found most commonly in art. If people are carving a billioin jaguars (as they did in meso-america pre-civ) you can be confident that they see the jaguar as having some privileged place in a cosmic hierarchy. Similarly, shamanism (n american or eurasian) and it's totems can hardly be classified as an egalitarian separation of sacred power.
For a very long time, the organization of the gods or the sacred into the hierachy represented earthly divisions of power..and stories of zues being confounded, tricked, or subjugated in whatever form they take are representative of the warring proto states and their divine patrons...and just as commonly their legendary establishment heroes.
Plato an aristotle's concept of god is very much -not- the christian concept of a god. The christian god would be placed lower in -their- hierarchy of the divine. Christians absolutely do not believe in that concept...but for whatever reason, as they rediscovered classical thought and sought a greater philosophic syncretism and credibility, they sort of drew an equals sign anyway. This distinguished their god philosophy as somehow above or greater than or more refined than whatever the dirty heathens out there in the wilderness may think (and the dirty heathens out in the wilderness appear to have thought much the same in return).
Now, we see this organization everywhere - every culture, throughout all time. It may be that humans are innately obsessed with their place in the universe...and religious or divine schemas are a comment on human beings place. Any comment on a human beings place in the cosmos will create differential variance either explicitly or implicitly. We may see some outlier where a human life is placed lower than..say, cattle..but this isn't an exception, it's a demonstration of the same. The same is true of a schema that places humans at or near bottom with nature itself as the adjudicating force of dispensation. Ultimately, what we put primacy in and where we rank ourselves (and other things) seems to be entirely bound up in realities of life at the time of the formation of dogma. It's no coincidence that redeeming gods are said to elevate or rise us up through their favor. This was not meant to be taken as a merely procedural comment (ala whisking us up to heaven in the clouds), but some indication of our improved (or repaired) status with regards to all that we see around us.
Buiddhism, even with no gods, has an immense hierarchy.
-For Boru. Dubnos of Tech Duin is the celtic analog for hell. Ruled over by Don, god of the dead and ancestor of gaels. You stopped along that way en route to the other otherworlds, as you mentioned just more pleasant versions of our earthly lives..but not everyone made it past the screening process. Ellis Island for the dearly departed.
Meiji Jingo is the royal shrine, Ise Jingo is the imperial shrine. Then you have the jinja....a few of which called taisha, grand shines..and kasha, government shrines. Some shrines have offshoot shrines called bunja. There are twenty two ni-ju-ni-sha, which are set aside as "privileged" shrines, with seven high, seven mid, and eight low ranking shrines among them.
Before the end of WW2, there was actually an administration that ranked those shrines, called the Jinja Cho.
Individual shrines to ones departed father are not even included in this system, as they're beneath any official mention or recognition, as ones departed father likely was.
Animism is only noticed as existent by whatever animist theme it operates on, specifically what representation is found most commonly in art. If people are carving a billioin jaguars (as they did in meso-america pre-civ) you can be confident that they see the jaguar as having some privileged place in a cosmic hierarchy. Similarly, shamanism (n american or eurasian) and it's totems can hardly be classified as an egalitarian separation of sacred power.
For a very long time, the organization of the gods or the sacred into the hierachy represented earthly divisions of power..and stories of zues being confounded, tricked, or subjugated in whatever form they take are representative of the warring proto states and their divine patrons...and just as commonly their legendary establishment heroes.
Plato an aristotle's concept of god is very much -not- the christian concept of a god. The christian god would be placed lower in -their- hierarchy of the divine. Christians absolutely do not believe in that concept...but for whatever reason, as they rediscovered classical thought and sought a greater philosophic syncretism and credibility, they sort of drew an equals sign anyway. This distinguished their god philosophy as somehow above or greater than or more refined than whatever the dirty heathens out there in the wilderness may think (and the dirty heathens out in the wilderness appear to have thought much the same in return).
Now, we see this organization everywhere - every culture, throughout all time. It may be that humans are innately obsessed with their place in the universe...and religious or divine schemas are a comment on human beings place. Any comment on a human beings place in the cosmos will create differential variance either explicitly or implicitly. We may see some outlier where a human life is placed lower than..say, cattle..but this isn't an exception, it's a demonstration of the same. The same is true of a schema that places humans at or near bottom with nature itself as the adjudicating force of dispensation. Ultimately, what we put primacy in and where we rank ourselves (and other things) seems to be entirely bound up in realities of life at the time of the formation of dogma. It's no coincidence that redeeming gods are said to elevate or rise us up through their favor. This was not meant to be taken as a merely procedural comment (ala whisking us up to heaven in the clouds), but some indication of our improved (or repaired) status with regards to all that we see around us.
Buiddhism, even with no gods, has an immense hierarchy.
-For Boru. Dubnos of Tech Duin is the celtic analog for hell. Ruled over by Don, god of the dead and ancestor of gaels. You stopped along that way en route to the other otherworlds, as you mentioned just more pleasant versions of our earthly lives..but not everyone made it past the screening process. Ellis Island for the dearly departed.
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