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hieros gamos |
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hieros gamos(Greek: “sacred marriage”) Sexual relations of fertility deities enacted in myths and rituals, characteristic of societies based on cereal agriculture (e.g., Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, and Canaan). At least once a year, people dressed as gods engaged in sexual intercourse to guarantee the fertility of the land. The festival began with a procession to the marriage celebration, which was followed by an exchange of gifts, a purification rite, the wedding feast, preparation of the wedding chamber, and a secret nocturnal act of intercourse. |
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| Not incidentally, the Priory also practices hieros gamos. b/ the marriages on which fairy tales end are an image of the spiritual marriage between God and the soul (Weil 23)--there is little doubt that the prospect of the Prince and Daylight's marriage, on which chapter 28 closes, is a metaphorical evocation of North Wind's death, for death is just another name for the hieros gamos (von Franz 121) or Union with the divine (also symbolized in the book by the Diamond/Ruby syzygy). It is an interesting illustration that the idea of the hieros gamos seems still to have been not only operative but credible at the time--however gullible the victims were. |
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hieros gamos
