THE SACRED BOAR HUNT

AT the March Equinox the Religion of Antinous commemorates the Sacred Boar Hunt.

In our Liturgical Calendar, it is the day when Hadrian and Antinous arrive at the sacred city of Bithynium/Claudiopolis, the home of Antinous, in the spring of the year 129 AD.

Imagine the jubilant welcome they must have received as the city's populace turned out en masse (including all of the extended family and acquaintances of Antinous) to see the imperial entourage with Hadrian and Antinous at the forefront.

The region is teeming with bountiful wildlife and so Hadrian and Antinous went on hunting forays while in Bithynium.

The Boar Hunt had deeply mystical symbolic meaning for Hadrian, as exemplified that it was elevated to mythic proportions for use in public monuments.

The image above shows Hadrian and Antinous (looking backwards) during the Sacred Boar Hunt, immortalized on the Arch of Constantine in Rome.

Flamen Antonius Subia explains the mythic symbolism this way:

In ancient times, boys would enter the forest armed only With a spear to test their courage as young men 
So it was that Antinous went with Hadrian
To hunt the wild boar of Phrygia, to test his manhood
The boar symbolizes strength, courage, honor, & truth
And was an emblem of warriors and of fearlessness
The Boar is sacred to the beautiful hunter god Adonis
Whom Venus so loved that she chased after him through Briars and thorns, and when he was killed by the Boar, Which was her jealous lover Mars in disguise
She compelled the world to mourn his death
Her love for Adonis was so strong that she brought him 
Back from the underworld again for half the year.
The Boar is the emblem of the fertility god Freyr
Whose mighty phallus purifies and protects the fields
The Boar is sacred to the sun god Belenus
Of the Cisalpine Gauls, of whom there is an inscription From Hadrian’s Villa that reads:
“Antinous and Belenus are equal in age and beauty
For this reason Antinous is also be worshipped like Belenus appropriately, by Quintus the Sicilian”
We praise the god Belenus, whose bonfires protect us
From the malevolent spirits of darkness and chaos
The beautiful Sun God Belenus is Antinous of the North
We praise Antinous as Mercurius, the son of Maia
Maia is the Bona Dea, leader of the Pleaides
She is the bringer of goodness and plenty of summer
We praise Diana the Huntress and ask her blessing
On this night of the Sacred Boar Hunt
May the Strength of the Boar be with us
May the Power of the Boar be with us
May the Courage of the Boar be with us
In celebration of Antinous the Hunter
We now consume the meat of the Sacred Boar
So we may be blessed
Ave Antinous – Adonis
Ave Antinous – Freyr
Ave Antinous – Belenus
Ave Antinous – Mercurius
May flesh of the Sacred Boar give us his blessing
Ave Antinous Venator!

~ ANTONIUS SUBIA

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE SAINT OF ANTINOUS

ON March 19 the Religion of Antinous honors Robert Mapplethorpe, Saint of Antinous.

In 1990, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director were charged with "Pandering Obscenity" after an exhibition of Mapplethorpe?s photographs. 

They were eventually acquitted but the event fueled a national debate over federal funding of the arts in the United States. 

The debate, which has affected American art ever since, focuses on whether tax dollars should be spent on projects which political conservatives deem objectionable. Specifically, the debate is over whether gay-theme art should be funded.

Robert Mapplethorpe died from AIDS in March 1989, at age 42, one year before his art spawned the controversy, so he was only able to speak through his photographs.

His subject matter portrayed homosexually charged images of nude men.

The controversy that Robert Mapplethorpe sparked exposed the double standard by which homosexual art is judged against heterosexual art. He revealed that nudity is most "obscene" to non-gays when it involves males.

We proclaim his sainthood to be heroic and dedicated to Antinous, because Robert Mapplethrope beautifully photographed a plaster statue of Antinous (shown at left), indicating that he must have known our God and in some way loved him.

HERODOTUS' FABLED SHIP FOUND AT EGYPTIAN SEAPORT ANTINOUS VISITED

A unique shipwreck of the sort described by the Greek historian Herodotus, but which was thought to be a myth, now has been found at an Egyptian seaport visited by Antinous.

The ancient wreck was discovered near the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion at the mouth of the Nile River.

Heracleion and its adjacent resort of Canopus in Egypt was the last place where Hadrian and Antinous were happy ... before Antinous died!

The vessel was constructed in a manner described by the 5th Century BC Greek historian, who visited Egypt and observed the construction of an unusual trading vessel. 

Damian Robinson of Oxford University said the hull is the first such ship to be found, proving that Herodotus was writing the truth.

Known as a "baris," the ship had a crescent-shaped hull made from thick planks connected with tenon-ribs fastened with pegs, rather than mortice-and-tenon joints. 

The archaeological evidence has helped scholars to understand the ancient text.

"Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs," Robinson said. 

"Nobody really knew what that meant…. That structure's never been seen archaeologically before. Then we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying."

In 450 BC Herodotus witnessed the construction of a baris. He noted how the builders "cut planks two cubits long [around 100cm] and arrange them like bricks."

He added: "On the strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them… They obturate the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus...."

Robinson said that previous scholars had "made some mistakes" in struggling to interpret the text without archaeological evidence.

"It's one of those enigmatic pieces. Scholars have argued exactly what it means for as long as we've been thinking of boats in this scholarly way," he said.

But the excavation of what has been called Ship 17 has revealed a vast crescent-shaped hull and a previously undocumented type of construction involving thick planks assembled with tenons ... just as Herodotus observed, in describing a slightly smaller vessel.

Originally measuring up to 28 meters long, it is one of the first large-scale ancient Egyptian trading boats ever to have been discovered.

About 70 per cent of the hull has survived, well-preserved in the Nile silts. 

Acacia planks were held together with long tenon-ribs – some almost two meters long ... and fastened with pegs, creating lines of "internal ribs" within the hull. 

It was steered using an axial rudder with two circular openings for the steering oar and a step for a mast towards the center of the vessel.

Robinson said: "Where planks are joined together to form the hull, they are usually joined by mortice and tenon joints which fasten one plank to the next. Here we have a completely unique form of construction, which is not seen anywhere else."

Alexander Belov, whose book on the wreck, "Ship 17: a Baris from Thonis-Heracleion," is published this month, suggests that the wreck's nautical architecture is so close to Herodotus's description, it could have been made in the very shipyard that he visited. 

Word-by-word analysis of his text demonstrates that almost every detail corresponds "exactly to the evidence."

Heracleion and its adjacent resort of Canopus in Egypt vanished in an earthquake and tsunami in ancient times, submerging colossal statues, temples ... ships.

This was the last place where Hadrian and Antinous were happy ... before Antinous died!

Hadrian recreated Canopus at his Villa near Rome. 

Historian Royston Lambert writes: "Hadrian and his circle in late August removed themselves from the Alexandria along the canal to the elegant and relaxed pleasure resort of Canopus with its elegant villas, its vine-threaded arches straddling the water to shade its revellers and its splendid Serapeam." 

In Marguerite Yourcenar's novel "Hadrian's Memoirs," it is at Canopus that Hadrian and Antinous consult a "heka" (Egyptian magic) mistress. She says Hadrian's lifespan could be extended ... through human sacrifice. Hadrian rejects the idea. So Hadrian and Antinous return to Alexandria and Hadrian considers the matter closed. Only later does he learn that Antinous secretly goes back to Canopus. "He paid another visit to the sorceress," Hadrian writes in his memoirs .

CHARLOTTE VON MAHLSDORF SAINT OF ANTINOUS

SAINT Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who was born on this day in 1928, was a Berlin trans/gay who survived the Nazis and East German communists and about whose life a Pulitzer Prize winning play, "I Am My Own Woman", has been staged at theatres around the world.

The title is misleading since the original German is "Ich bin meine eigene Frau" and the word "Frau" can mean either "Woman" or "Wife". 

The phrase was Charlotte's answer to her mother's question: "Don't you think it's time you got a wife?"

Charlotte was her own man and her own woman and her own husband/wife. In a long life amidst dictatorship, war and oppression of human-rights, Charlotte learned to create her own identity. We honor Charlotte as a Saint of the Religion of Antinous.

St. Charlotte, who liked to wear frumpy house dresses with a clunky handbag and a strand of pearls and matronly shoes, somehow managed to survive the Gestapo, the East German Stasi secret police and assaults by neo-Nazis. In doing so, Charlotte made serious ethical compromises along the way in order to stay alive. 

Charlotte amassed a huge collection of Victorian antiques which some said came from the homes of Jewish Holocaust victims and (later) from homes of people fleeing East Germany.


But Charlotte DID stay alive in dangerous times during which others perished. Charlotte's life forces you to ask yourself what YOU would have done in similar circumstances.

After German unification, Charlotte became something of a reluctant gay icon in Germany in the 1990s. Charlotte never had any pretensions of being intellectual or a political activist. 

Charlotte never quite fit in with post-Stonewall activists, who were a bit puzzled by her dowdy grand-motherliness and her passion for 19th Century Renaissance Revival style antiques. Like Quentin Crisp (also a Saint of Antinous), Charlotte belonged to another era.

But unlike Quentin Crisp, Charlotte wasn't especially witty or campy (despite her appearance) and was not an artist of the arch one-liner the way Quentin was. In appearances on talk shows, she would sit there, smiling politely, with not a great deal to say unless it was about collecting and restoring 19th Century antiques. But what she did say was eloquent in its simplicity: 

People should be kind to each other and let each other get on with their lives the way they want to.

Above all, she didn't much like being a celebrity. Too many people  expected things of her. She became a target for neo-Nazis, mostly drunken, youthful vandals in the 1990s. Not surprisingly perhaps, considering all she had lived through, she became somewhat paranoid towards the end of her life. In the end, she fled to Sweden where she spent her final years in virtual isolation before dying in 2002.

We honor St. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf for being someone who was not afraid to be openly trans/gay in the face of totalitarian dictatorships and police states. Someone who survived the Nazis and the Stasi secret police ... wearing a dress, a strand of pearls and a handbag.

THIS IS THE DAY THE WISEST MAN DIED AND ROME BEGAN TO FALL

MARCH 17th is the anniversary of the death of Marcus Aurelius and we in the Religion of Antinous set aside this day each year to remember the last of the great philosopher-emperors, and a man who knew both Hadrian and Antinous.

What follows, is adapted from writings over the years by Flamen Antinoalis Antonius.

As a young boy Marcus Aurelius had caught the eye of the Emperor Hadrian. He was appointed by the Emperor to priesthood in the year 129 (just a year before the death of Antinous), and Hadrian also supervised his education, which was entrusted to the best professors of literature, rhetoric and philosophy of the time.

Marcus Aurelius discovered Stoicism by the time he was 11 and from his early twenties he deserted his other studies for philosophy. The Emperor Antoninus Pius, who succeeded Hadrian, adopted Marcus Aurelius as his son in 138.

Antoninus Pius treated Aurelius as a confidant and helper throughout his reign; Marcus Aurelius also married his daughter, Faustina, in 139. He was admitted to the Senate, and then twice the consulship. In 147 he shared tribunician power with Antoninus. During this time he began composition of his Meditations, which he wrote in Greek in army camps.

At the age of 40, in 161 Marcus Aurelius ascended the throne and shared his imperial power with his adopted brother Lucius Aurelius Verus. Useless and lazy, Verus was regarded as a kind of junior emperor; he died in 169. After Verus's death he ruled alone.

Most of his reign was spent fighting and negotiating with the Germanic barbarians who were steadily crowding around the borders of the Empire. Marcus was able to hold them back with a succession of victories and peace treaties. In 177 he made his son, Commodus, joint-Emperor, though Commodus had no interest in the responsibility, caring more for the gladiatorial sports, but Marcus, the philosopher- king, took no notice of his son's blood-lust, which was to later cost the Empire dearly.

For much of his reign, Marcus Aurelius had suffered from severe illness, but his calm devotion to stoic virtue gave him the strength to continue without rest and without his poor health interfering with his duties. While with the legions on the German frontier, Marcus Aurelius suddenly died on March 17th in the year 180AD.

His ashes were conveyed to Rome and placed in Hadrian's Mausoleum. Commodus assumed power and began the chain of tragic events that are said to have brought the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

For his wisdom, and strength, and because he was the last instrument of Hadrian's plan that brought so much glory, and prosperity to Rome, we venerate the deified Marcus Aurelius as a god of the Religion of Antinous.
An important feature of the philosophy was that everything will recur: the whole universe becomes fire and then repeats itself.

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web. (from The Meditations)

THE FEAST OF HORUS AND THE SEVEN SCORPIONS

MARCH 17th is the feast of Horus and the Seven Scorpions. Horus is the son of Isis and Osiris. 

When Seth murdered Osiris, grief-strickent Isis searched for his corpse. Isis entrusted baby Horus to Selket/Serqet the scorpion goddess. 

The Egyptians knew that scorpions are very good mothers. A mother scorpion carries her babies on her back ... and she attacks anyone who dares to approach too close! 

For added protection, Selket became seven scorpions, thus providing seven-fold protection to Horus. 

Selket is the guardian of Horus and ... by extension ... she is the guardian of Antinous. When you REALLY need protection: call upon Selket!

16 de março é a festa de Horus e os Sete Escorpiões. Horus é filho de Isis e Osíris. Quando Seth assassinou Osíris, a Isis, que sofreu um sofrimento, procurou seu cadáver. Isis confiou o bebê Horus a Selket / Serqet a deusa do escorpião. Os egípcios sabiam que os escorpiões são mães muito boas. Uma mãe escorpião carrega seus bebês em suas costas ... e ela ataca qualquer um que se atreva a aproximar-se muito perto! Para maior proteção, Selket se tornou sete escorpiões, proporcionando assim sete vezes proteção a Horus. Se você realmente precisa de proteção: chamar Selket!

El 16 de marzo es la fiesta de Horus y los Siete Escorpiones. Horus es el hijo de Isis y Osiris. Cuando Seth asesinó a Osiris, Isis buscó su cadáver. Isis le confió a Horus a Selket / Serqet la diosa del escorpión. Los egipcios sabían que los escorpiones son muy buenas madres. Una madre escorpión lleva a sus bebés sobre su espalda ... y ella ataca a cualquiera que se atreva a acercarse demasiado cerca! Para mayor protección, Selket se convirtió en siete escorpiones, proporcionando así siete veces protección a Horus. Si realmente necesita protección: ¡llame a Selket!

ANTINOUS WORKS MIRACLES FOR YOU WHILE YOU DAYDREAM AT WORK

NEXT time you have a difficult problem to solve, and concentrating on it just isn't getting you anywhere, consider this: Maybe you're thinking too hard.

"Walk over to a window and think about the people or cars going by for a few minutes, until you get bored," suggests Josh Davis, research director at the New York Neuro-Leadership Institute. 

"Let your mind wander."

How will that help? "Always being 'on' blocks the brain processes that occur when we daydream," says Davis. 

His new book, TWO AWESOME HOURS Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done, draws on new discoveries in brain science.

The idea is certainly not new. The Ancient Priests of Antinous knew that zoning out for a few minutes allows your brain to tackle tasks it can't handle when you're busy. 

They called it the medium for Antinous to work miracles in your life.

In ancient times, Antinous was known as a miracle worker. His worshipers prayed to him for miracles, oracles, visions and answers to problems in their daily lives.

The Egyptian hieroglyphs on the OBELISK OF ANTINOUS state clearly that Antinous answers the prayers of all who call upon him through dreams and visions, for example.

The hieroglyphs also make cryptic references to his ability to work magic through his heart. This is a reference to the Ancient Egyptian concept of the "Intelligence of the Heart."

The Egyptians knew that the brain is the center of motor activity and sensory perception. 

But they believed the heart is the center of a form of intelligence which has baffled most mainstream Egyptologists ... who assume the Egyptians believed the heart was where cognitive thinking occurs.

But the Egyptians had a very different view of the universe from our rational, scientific view of the universe. 

We dissect facts and analyze them. But while the Egyptians were very good at analyzing facts, they also retained the Zen-like ability to see the whole ... which leads to contemplation ... not analysis.

The Egyptians understood that if you want to find an intelligent solution to a problem, your brain can do the work. You have all the necessary intelligence inside the bone in your skull.

However, most people use their brains the same way they use their muscles. You can strain your head just as if it were a muscle, and work very hard trying to arrive at an answer, but it doesn't really work that way.

When you really want to find an answer to something, what you need to do is contemplate the problem. Visualize your question as well as you can, and then simply wait.

If you don't, and if you instead try to find the solution through brute mental strength, you may be disappointed, because any solution that comes in that way is likely to be wrong.

But when you have waited for a while, the solution will come of itself. That is what the Egyptians called the Intelligence of the Heart ... using your heart instead of your head.

It will work for you in the same way your stomach will digest your food for you without your having to supervise it consciously. Our attempts to supervise everything consciously have all led to consequences that aren't too good for our stomach, and the reason for that is quite simple.

Conscious attention, which employs words, cannot think of very much. We are forced, therefore, to ignore almost everything while we are thinking. We think along a single track, but the world doesn't proceed along a single track.

The world is everything happening altogether everywhere, and you just can't take all that into consideration because there isn't time.

However, the Intelligence of the Heart can take it all into consideration because it is capable of handling innumerable variables at once, even though your conscious attention cannot...

The hieroglyphs on the Obelisk of Antinous promise that Antinous the Gay God enables us to discover the Intelligence of the Heart ... the Intelligence of HIM ... he opens his heart to you ....