Fragments, 11/17/02

1:07 a.m.

iconolatry, n. [icon- image + -latry, fr. Gr. latreia service.] Image worship.

If Christ is the image of God, then Christianity is iconolatry. It is the worship of the image of God.

this may help explain a poem I posted recently....

"[T]he Fall would stand for man's forgetting of his divine nature, for involvement in the illusion of individuality. Salvation would be the recollection (anamnesis) of his divinity, the awakening or birth of Godhead in man."--Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity, p. 81.

This passage parallels a footnote on a later page: "Anamnesis, usually translated as 'memory', 'memorial', or 'recollection', is no mere reminder of a chronologically past event. Strictly speaking, anamnesis is much more than the simple sign of a fact distant (in time) from itself; it is rather the actual 're-collection' of a truth which eternally is, so that to recollect the sacrifice of Christ is to make it really and effectively present."--Ibid., p. 95.

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LOGOS

Word: an empty carrier
of meaning,
the hardened shellac seedpod
encasing precious contents within,

itself nothing
but the transmitter.