Back in the days when pyramids were still being built, losing a war brought with it retribution. Since every nation, and even every city, had its own gods, the conqueror would sometimes adopt the vanquished foes gods and place them in his own arsenal of armoury. After all, was the winners thought, as long as the god was being worshipped, what cared he as to who was worshipping him. And you could never have enough gods on your side. However, these were the more benign victors. The more ruthless ones wanted no part of anything belonging to the vanquished. And, indeed, they did everything to expunge their very existence in the pages of time. Temples, gods, the very name of the gods, would be destroyed or cut out from any surface where the god was mentioned. Although we would like to think that time has brought enlightenment, and no one in his/her right mind would try to obliterate that which has obviously existed, we know such is not the case. We have seen the instances of books whose ideas and philosophies we have not agreed with, being burned in public places as if these thoughts and philosophies have never been part of the human experience. Closer to our time, like right now, we are going through the process of political correctness where childrens books by such a writer as Enid Blyton are either censored or modified because, written as they were in different times with different accepted standards, they offend todays sensibilities. In some parts of the world we no longer use the word spinster as denoting a persons marital status, because of the perceived derogatory connotations. Perceived is the right word, for the word itself has nothing belittling about it. The word spinster was derived from what most home-bound women used to do spin. Remember the story of Snow White? She was a spinster who used to spin. In some parts of the world, when a girl married, the groom would enter her house and ceremoniously burn her spinning wheel. Although this suggests to the modern mind that from that point of time she stopped spinning, we know that isnt true. What she stopped from doing was spinning in her fathers house. She would still continue to spin in her husbands house. The burning was symbolic, denoting the end of a life in one setting, to the beginning of a life in another. |
