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Heather Frank

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There you have the Navy Hymn, repeated twice. In the first video, the screen shows the words, and the location of the country. The second video shows the flag. In the first version, the musicians have recorded the song as it is sung in church hymnody, by everyone. The second video is illustrated by a painting showing what people who put the music into field practice actually do.
 
The composer of the song was an Englishman named Gustavas Theodore von Holst, often mistakenly believed to be a German. he was born in the English city of Cheltenham, and his father's name was actually Adolph von Holst. When I took my music classes in Oxford, I do remember once overhearing another student say that the IRA and the German army of WWII were both blaspheming Gustav Holst. Holst composed his seven-movement symphony between 1914 and 1916. In other words, he wrote them during the Great War, (WWI, the war to end all wars). While the educated and civilized Holst, often slandered as a German, was composing a great symphony for public performance in London, the IRA, always undercover spies and traitors, were sneaking around claiming to be English subjects and oppressed.
 

Movement one of the famous symphony introduces Mars, described as the bringer of war. Do you believe in Mars? There is a red planet called Mars. I'll capture a picture for you online.
 

Now the true Mars, as we HIGHLY EDUCATED TOTALLY MODERN people understand it, is depicted in this photograph taken from a NASA space probe. If you're very interested in modern Astronomy, a free and up to the minute academic book fully describing it is available on Kindle. The book is titled Astronomy and is published by Open Stax.

However, that is not what the Manly Holst was writing about. The first movement of Holst's Symphony is about The Bringer of War. The modern Holst knew of the planet Mars, yet at the same time the classically educated Holst, fighting in Europe, knew of the Ancient Roman belief that war is above and beyond the works of man. War was thought a god in Roman times. Mars was much more powerful than a small human spy ring, or even a conspiracy in the government of the country.
 
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As to Ancient Roman religion, some people do think that aside from the fact that it wasn't Hebrew Messianic worship in Jerusalem, and other than just to acknowledge that most anyone at any place and in any time can be either good or evil, one thing about it that a modern Christian should recognize is the use of the words "invoke" and "evoke". An invocation is a formal prayer spoken out loud in church by a priest. Private people may also invoke. Invoking is speaking to the deity religiously. There are requirements. The person who wishes to invoke must know the name of the deity. The person must believe that the deity exists. Please note that the deity does not have to exist for the human speaker to invoke. What is needed for the person to invoke is simply for the person to be religious enough to believe that there is a deity to speak to, and for the person to care to do so.

Evocation is another practice. People who evoke try to incarnate the deity in their daily lives. There are Christians who believe in a doctrine called the indwelling, and the religious practices of such people who seek the condition of being indwelt is that which is properly termed evocation. The main difference between invocation and evocation is that a person may say prayers, live by pious rules, believe whether right or wrong and invoke, whether the deity exists or not. The practice of evocation, however, relies almost exclusively on at least a human soul or spirit existing. In other words, you can talk to a god who isn't there if you want to. It's not supposed to be illegal to speak, even if you are alone. However, evocation, or becoming an "indwelt vessel" as the Christians put it, is totally absurd unless a deity exists.

I would remind you that anything is debatable. It might not be true that people need a lot of piety and education to invoke. People pray to gods they don't know by name all the time. People pray to God without believing in God. Some people talk to themselves as the work or run errands, this habit is most common among workers in private offices or studios.
 
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Anyway, I hate atheists who beat around the bush. Have you ever met one of those irritating non-believers who run around looking for God all the time, knowing full well as they do so that there is no God to find? They like to "Beat around the Burning Bush." Every time a materialist atheist comes across a Burning Bush, the fool gets out a pair of bellows and says, here, let me fan this fire a bit, so I can get in perspectivally closer and examine the fire, to see if the substantial event has Godlike qualities. The atheist then spreads the wildfire all over the Negev desert, causing property damage to Midian's sheep, and seriously disturbing the reveries, lyre practice and day's work of Jethro's Son in Law. Those atheists. They do too much work always running around looking for God. It sets a really bad example for the youth of the labor force, it's just really bad for the economy of effort lessons we're trying to instill in them! Anyone would think that a logical atheist, who didn't believe in the existence of God, would get out a bucket of water and PREVENT THE WILDFIRE!

But they never do. And they never get around to killing the abusive Egyptian overseer, either.

So, let's not beat around the bush. Let's instead, talk about what it would mean to speak with Mars, The Bringer of War.
 
There were seven principles of Ancient Roman Prestly service.

A priest of say, well the universal or catholic Roman name for God was Jove (see the complete works of Pliny the Elder). An ancient Roman catholic at his alter was a partitioner of seven pious branches of knowledge.

The practices are called:

Invoke
Evoke
Renounce
Denounce
Conjure
Abjure

To invoke, evoke, renounce, denounce, conjure and abjure is to observe or practice, or to officiate over a religious service devoted to well, English speaking people normally just say "God", although the Hebrew word Jehovah also appears in the King James Translation. Pliny said Jove, creator of the seculorum or world who gave life to Rome and geniuses (meaning souls) to the people. An Ancient Roman who presided over these seven sacraments was much like an Apollonian Priest in Ancient Greece. Ancient Greeks conceived of God in much the same way as Pliny the Elder did. An Apollonian temple in Athens or Sparta was one that was accepted, approved, and really most important, it was one that was out in in the open. It met by the light of day, or at least it wasn't secret, "orientalist" or occult. Apollo was the name of the Sun. It Apollo was really just a word for the Sun, modern astronomers still call the Sun Sol, just as modern Christians call the life of a human the soul, although spirit is a popular word.

The opposite of Apollonian was Dionysian.
 
In this context the most important thing to understand is that an ancient Jovian who did this really believed in what he was doing. Not very many people enter professions they really think are false, and if they begin to believe in time that the profession they entered was based on an actual lie, or that it's really immoral in some real way, or that it should be illegal even if it is not, they almost always leave the field. This is not to deny that there are simply greedy people who will do any kind of labor for a large salary, but at the same time, few avaricious people will do a very difficult job, most such people are more inclined to steal, or to do easy, convenient things in society and say that what they are doing is work. The way to really tell a true professional from someone who is just getting by is in times when the person's profession is not legal, and he still carries it on because he does believe in it. Quitting doing something or refusing to do something that you really honestly actually think is immoral can be tricky. It may only entail not making a good salary. It might just be that you will be out of step with societal convention and be ostracized, which can be a real problem. Refusing to follow even an actually illegal order in the Army can still get you killed. Since I'm on the first movement of the symphony, I'll just say that illegal orders are extremely tricky. I have no idea why someone would join the Army in a time of peace and then be against killing the enemy after an atrocious assault like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. That's a hard case. I've never had that happen to me, so I'll keep my comments to a minimum, but assuming that the individual had a real grievance, it wouldn't be that he had decided in advance not to deploy as instructed, the person in question would actually be refusing an actual illegal order, not just exhibiting personal cowardice.

At any rate, Mars was a god in the time of Horace. A mass could have been said to Mars, Mars could have been invoked. A very good modern example of something today perfectly English, and in fact originating in Christian times in Catholic Rome, is the Oratorio Sanctum Michael.
 
People have mass. I think that might have been Holst's point. For example, many present-day Christians attend a mass service at midnight on December 26. Jesus Christ is said to have been born in a stable, upon a midnight clear, in the bleak midwinter. A baby has an amount of mass. His mass, as he lies in the manger in the stable, is his SIZE. The Childe's weight is not determined by his size, it is a rational function of his mass compared to the pull of Earth's gravity. Ancient Romans knew this before the time of Issaac Newton. Ancient Greeks knew this, before the time of Rome. Democritus, the atomic theorist, knew of mass and density. The density of the Childe's body is His mass divided by His volume. His mass is told by enumerating the exact number of atoms in Him. His volume is how much water his skin would hold if it were a flask, or a glass, or a clay pot. Planets have masses too. How much the planet weighs is a rational function of its density, the Sun's gravitational pull, and the total distance between the Sun and the planet. The gravities of planets between the Sun and the planet to be weighed is also influenced by the gravities of planets intermediary between the Sun and the planet.
 
A person who attends that kind of mass is part of the group of people (people who are in civilian and possible even formal civilian clothes in a church or other public place and not formed up in regimental parade are masses of humanity. As in its ok you can take your dog tags off for an hour and wear something other than that starched shirt. There are masses of people who in that speech and response prayer thing (I think that might be called the liturgy) evoke. That's the evocation part of the service of the mass. They all become Christian bodies by taking part in the communal bread and wine sacrament. They go in there, those Christian masses, and they dedicate themselves bodily to the service of Christ in this lifetime. Mass is therefore temporal, it occurs at a set TIME, as well as in a certain place. One could also do the same exact thing in a service dedicated to Mars. The God of War, or also known as Minerva. Greeks called Mars Minerva.
 
In spite of the fact that Mars is War, and that war might not be an actual God, I must invoke Mars. I have to speak to Mars. Rhetoric just doesn't work, meaning that it CANNOT be practiced, without invocation. Invocation is part of rhetoric, meaning public speaking. People in parliament speak to bills all the time. Sometimes people in parliament even address laws. They talk to (because that's what address means) farms, terrorism, war, anything that comes up in parliament. Parliament is a political body. Political bodies have agendas. Members of Parliament have even been known to address agendas.
 

A blessed Christmas.

A blessed Christmas to you too ...

They use part of “the Bringer of Jollity” … Jupiter, … for this piece … Made me look just behind where I sit and there is a 1971 LP “Holst, The Planets” conducted by William Steinberg with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, propped up on a shelf. It's a good interpretation but not my favorite. Steinberg in my mind seems rushed in areas … I have a couple of other versions on CD that to me are more emotionally involving …

To be honest it's been a few years since I've played any … used to alternate this with Moody Blues, “On The Threshold of a Dream” … back in my exploratory past …

 
Oh yes, Jupiter. That reminds me, I'm just meditating here in a certain context. It's about 1916. There's a song by the Kingston Trio called Three Jolly Coachmen.
 
Oh yes, Jupiter. That reminds me, I'm just meditating here in a certain context. It's about 1916. There's a song by the Kingston Trio called Three Jolly Coachmen.

Maybe we are connected more than we think, … 1916 this song was inevitably sung in the trenches of WW1. That year one of the main battles was The Somme. My grandfather fought in that battle, as he did in most every battle in that war as a member of Canadian 27th Light Horse, mustered at Valcartier Quebec 23 September 1914. That year (1916) he fought at Ypres Salient, Mont Sorrel, and the Somme.

I have all his papers etc. including a small chunk of the Ypres bell he made into a small horseshoe lapel pin. He even brought home a small handheld bomb used by early aviators.

When you first posted this thread it made me get out all his stuff and I had been going over it the last day and a bit …

Anyways, is that what you were thinking of with regard to the song ...?

The song is older than 1916 … goes back a couple centuries …

Thanks for posting, … it caused me to remember a good man that I miss terribly …

:tiphat:
 
Oh yes, Jupiter. That reminds me, I'm just meditating here in a certain context. It's about 1916. There's a song by the Kingston Trio called Three Jolly Coachmen.

Maybe we are connected more than we think, … 1916 this song was inevitably sung in the trenches of WW1. That year one of the main battles was The Somme. My grandfather fought in that battle, as he did in most every battle in that war as a member of Canadian 27th Light Horse, mustered at Valcartier Quebec 23 September 1914. That year (1916) he fought at Ypres Salient, Mont Sorrel, and the Somme.

I have all his papers etc. including a small chunk of the Ypres bell he made into a small horseshoe lapel pin. He even brought home a small handheld bomb used by early aviators.

When you first posted this thread it made me get out all his stuff and I had been going over it the last day and a bit …

Anyways, is that what you were thinking of with regard to the song ...?

The song is older than 1916 … goes back a couple centuries …

Thanks for posting, … it caused me to remember a good man that I miss terribly …

:tiphat:
I was actually referring to something else. There's this American novel called The Patriot Game. It's about the 1916 Easter Rising in its time of publication. There's a song by the Kingston Trio mentioned in the original book. The Kingston Trio wrote the song in the style of the Handbook of Irish Home Rule which also predates 1916. Tom Clancy's novel is about a person who is involved in the conflict. Since Tom Clancy is a republican, he phrases his novel in a Latin style, in the vein of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. You may have heard of this book. The hero is in the Marines, so he has a Latin motto. It's basically an ideological book about war and peace, they always claim that the Irish revolution is Catholic vs Protestant. Anyway, I'd compare it to maybe CS Lewis' musings on the draft in England. It's not about church and state, it's about warfare and beliefs.

Alternatively, what it's really about being sort of dragged into a foreign war. It's also about how something like that (well that particular issue specifically) continues, even though there has been an armistice declared and a peace treaty. It's about terrorism and the Carl von Clausewitz school of thought on war.

Ypres, that's an interesting one. There is a book by that title, and I can't remember who wrote it. I found it in Apple books on my iPhone. And I'm not sure it isn't by a German. If you happen to have a late model Apple, I went into books and looked for some histories of war in that era. The Great War? It's very eerie, in a few ways. I can't tell you what they were called, I read them and then I just had to go ahead and delete them because I just don't have that much memory in the device, and I didn't know what to think. I don't do this professionally!

I think Ireland is just utterly bizarre. Reading Irish history is like learning physics from Michio Kaku. Everything is a secret, you have to guess, you have to know the right theory and have seen the right films. Or have been there.
 
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Getting back to what I was saying about the English language, well, actually what I was trying to say about ancient times and the Roman occupation, I consider that foundational to that which they call "linguistics" in schools. I got the Wheelock's books which were published for the US Forces after Operation Overlord, (some people call it a whole entire course in how to give an order in Latin, or just how to take over Rome. It's not, it's just some Latin books, but people really try to go to town on it.) Oh. The seven parts of proper public speaking. I just wanted to post an example of a properly constructed Roman speech. But first I need to explain a few things.
 
Linguistics is fully a matter of what we call it vs. what they call it. An Englishman calls his Capitol City London, while the theoretical mathematician form Italy, Leonard Euler, calls it Koenigsberg. Euler posed the world's first topology problem, the question about the bridges of Koenigsberg.

The Frenchman calls the Capitol City of his country Paris. But the German calls it Ypres. The trick is to remember that people of other nationalities don't change their languages or their grammar any faster than we do.

Another thing to know is that whether or not someone is foreign is relative. It's relative coming from their end not yours though. If he says that you are foreign, that means he isn't your friend. If he was your friend and knew you, he'd say so, and if he maybe hadn't met you personally or been around you much but would want to be your friend, he'd describe you as a neighbor. The definition of an alien is that the person is from another country is in your country AND defines you as a foreigner.
 
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