Thursday, April 5, 2012

Judeo-Christian roots: Maundy Thursday

Joanna Green, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly (Wikipedia edit for Maundy Thursday)
St. Issa's disciples then and now: leftwing radicals to rightwing extremists. But is that a pig on platter in front of Rabbi Issa, seated next to his beloved wife Mary Magdalene? If there is one thing desert Jews would not be eating at a Seder it is pork (netglimse.com).

Maundy Thursday (also known as Holy Thursday, Sheer Thursday, Thursday of Mysteries) is the Christian feast, or holy day (holiday) that falls on the Thursday before Easter.

And, of course, Easter is the Pagan celebration of the Goddess Ester, which was taken over an re-purposed by the sexist, hegemonic, imperial church of Rome that killed to spread the faith.

And, of course, by "spread" we mean ram it down the throats of every indigenous culture it came across as it set out to join the merchants and military trying to take over the planet.

St, Issa, more popular than Elvis, was spotted recently on Wall Street protesting the love of money, which his bestseller claims is "the root of all evil" (theatlantic.com).

It commemorates the Maundy and final dinner ("Last Supper") of the Jewish-Buddhist St. Issa with his few yogi chelas as described in the Christian canon but not mentioned very much in the forbidden gospels.

It is the fifth day of Holy Week, and is preceded by Spy Wednesday and followed by Good Friday, all of which were co-opted from our very festive/festal Pagan forebears.

The date always ranges between March 19th and April 22nd. The exact date falls on different days depending on whether the Gregorian or Julian calendar is used liturgically. Eastern Orthodox churches generally use the Julian calendar, and so celebrate this feast throughout the 21st Century between April 1st and May 5th (now the more important American holiday of Cinco de Mayo) in the more commonly used Gregorian calendar.

The liturgy held on the evening of Maundy Thursday initiates the Easter Triduum, the period which commemorates the passion (suffering), death (coma or fake out), and "resurrection" of St. Issa, who was then spirited away back to Kashmir, India, where he lived a long life and is now entombed in the ancient formerly Jewish outpost of Kashmir with a Muslim cleric.

This period includes Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and ends on the evening of Easter. The mass or service of worship for the Maitreya Buddha (messiah savior) is normally celebrated in the evening, when Friday begins according to pre-Christian Jewish tradition, as the final dinner was held on the feast of Passover, which originally had a much deeper meaning than the cover story about blood on doorways causing killer extraterrestrial angels to kill the neighbors' kids while sparing the observant houses.

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