Milk And Honey

a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey

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Autumn at the Pas by Ian Munro

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Shark Riders (film)

GoPro HD: Shark Riders - Dive Housing from GoPro on Vimeo.

Posted by Noelle Clearwater at 9:06 PM

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Labels: Beauty of the Natural World, Body as vehicle of self expression, love of animals

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Autumn Splendor

My Other Blogs

http://theangelswearfins.blogspot.com (since July 2010)

http://indabaonevoice.blogspot.com (since June 2011

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Milk and Honey

Not surprisingly, milk and honey figure prominently in the oldest cultures and religions of the Middle East. For example, the Egyptians, who kept bees as long as 5,000 years ago, sweetened their foods and wine with it. They also valued honey for its medicinal virtues and for its ability to preserve fruits. They used it as an embalming material, as well as a love potion.

The Egyptians, moreover, used milk and honey in their religious rituals. In the funeral ceremony performed for all but the poorest Egyptians, milk, it was chanted, should never be far from the mouths of the dead. Honey was "the lord of offerings and celestial food — for it is sweet to the heart: it opens the flesh, knits together the bones, gathers together all the parts of the body, and the dead drink the smell of it."

This is why Egyptian royalty were entombed with pots of honey (found unspoiled by modern archaeologists) to help ensure their resurrection in the Other World of their afterlife.

In all the earliest cultures in the Middle East, honey was viewed as a gift of divine origin. The ancient Semites attributed its presence to Astarte — the goddess of sexuality, fertility, maternity, love and war — who was more widely revered among them than any other Babylonian god; and this earth mother had provided them with it long before Jehovah appeared.

Milk and honey as symbols of fertility appear in the most ancient writings, and the well-recognized cross-pollination of these early cultures perpetuated them. Each one assimilated them, as in the Bible, where the land's fertility is likened to human fertility and sexuality.

Clearly, the biblical image of milk and honey has its roots in the most basic survival needs. It is not merely sensuous, but very sensual, as in the erotic love poetry of the "Song of Solomon," where the fertility figure of milk and honey suggests the paradise of a woman's body. By extension, a land flowing with milk and honey becomes metaphoric of a divine female figure.

Why Milk and Honey

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