Help me identify a Christian saint

[brewer]

Christians make few women saints, and portray none with a rack like hers.

[The Grand Nudger]

I mean WTFQ? Does this mean that Christians were stealing other people's mythology?

They were, actually, yeah.  Part of their strategy to convert and appropriate the locals.  Though what you're thinking of when you see the pictures is the fact that the classical greek style dominated long after the collapse of pagan antiquity.

Give you two of my favs

There was this cat named Oison who'd fallen in love with Niamh of Tir na nog, a goddess and queen in paradise, the land of eternal youth. He went to live with her there. Then, one day, missing home and friends and family he decides to go back. There's only one condition, he can never dismount from his horse. When he gets there, though, he realizes that everyone he'd ever known had been dead for centuries, the kingdom was dust. The people were small and feeble. He's sobbing along trotting down the road back to Tir na nog when he sees an old man trying to move a stone..so he stops to help the man, but, as he does, his saddle straps break and he falls to the ground, instantly turning into an old man. As he lays there dying, who should walk up but old Pat himself who has questions for this stranger. They end up debating the greatness of goodness of the land that Oison remembered and christian civilization. St. Patrick wins the debate, then Oison dies and Patrick lives.

Then, there's the curious case of St Brigid of Kildare....who looks a whole hell of alot like a goddess by the same name, and who's feast day is conveniently on the same day as the goddesses. She either lived sometime around the 500's or was a member of the Tuatha De, lol.

The truth in both cases is a bit of the middle. Monks created propaganda and grafted the details of traditional pagan beliefs and folklore to the christian apparatus and claim. Was there a Patrick or Brigid, as real identifiable and singular people? Meh, maybe, though whomever they were if they were was heavily mythologized and spun into legend. You know, like jesus, lol.

[The Grand Nudger]

For completeness, hell and the devil as we see them today have more to do with dante and n. european paganism than greek myth.

Allow me to introduce you to Hel.

n the Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, and Heimskringla, Hel is referred to as a daughter of Loki. In the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning, Hel is described as having been appointed by the god Odin as ruler of a realm of the same name, located in Niflheim. In the same source, her appearance is described as half blue and half flesh-coloured and further as having a gloomy, downcast appearance. The Prose Edda details that Hel rules over vast mansions with many servants in her underworld realm and plays a key role in the attempted resurrection of the god Baldr.

-and it's no coincidence that satan as depicted in med art (and believed) commonly took the form of a blue chimeara who was appointed by the high god yahweh to babysit a portion of the dead along with his many demonic minions in the underworld.

Allegedly, Hel met satan, and said, in effect, bitch get out my house.

The Old English Gospel of Nicodemus, preserved in two manuscripts from the 11th century, contains a female figure referred to as Seo hell who engages in flyting with Satan and tells him to leave her dwelling (Old English ut of mynre onwununge). Regarding Seo Hell in the Old English Gospel of Nicodemus, Michael Bell states that "her vivid personification in a dramatically excellent scene suggests that her gender is more than grammatical, and invites comparison with the Old Norse underworld goddess Hel and the Frau Holle of German folklore, to say nothing of underworld goddesses in other cultures" yet adds that "the possibility that these genders are merely grammatical is strengthened by the fact that an Old Norse version of Nicodemus, possibly translated under English influence, personifies Hell in the neutral (Old Norse þat helvíti)."[34]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hel_(being)

It's phenomenon called cultural contamination. We've seen it play out in modern (and importantly, historical and well documented) times - notable examples being westward continental expansion and the wartime pacific islands.

[TwoKnives99]

@Fake Messiah

The image you provided is a 3rd century Roman mosaic called 'The Triumph of Neptune and Amphirite'

It is not a picture of a Christian saint..

Google's reverse image search FTW

Source:

The site I found the image at

So I nailed it?? Neptune is the Roman version of the Greek Poseidon....

Yeah, you nailed it

[onlinebiker]

So I nailed it?? Neptune is the Roman version of the Greek Poseidon....

Yeah, you nailed it

It kinda figures ----


I was going for a laugh - and religion is a ( bad) joke.....

Guess I couldn' t miss.

]