I highly recommend that everyone read this article by River Devora on “The Revolutionary Art of Hearth-Keeping.“
August 21, 2017
Hearth
This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2017 at 6:22 pm and tagged with Hreda, Matronae and posted in Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
5 responses to “Hearth”
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Guan Sheng Di said:
"Man lives in the world. If he values loyalty, filial piety, honesty, and righteousness above all else, he will not fail in life.
However, if he doesn’t value loyalty, filial piety, honesty, and righteousness, although his body is alive, his heart is already dead. This is called stealing life.
Man’s heart knows the gods and the gods know man’s heart."
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August 21st, 2017 at 6:46 pm
Very interesting! Thank you for pointing this out!
August 23rd, 2017 at 12:55 am
It was my pleasure.
August 23rd, 2017 at 11:18 am
Thank you for drawing attention to this, it was a really interesting read.
In many of the Chinese texts I’m working with lately, true repentance is signaled by swearing an oath before the hearth. In the tales, it’s implied that this is because the Stove God carries news of one’s good deeds and misdeeds to heaven for tabulation and judgement, but after reading this article I’m thinking also about its symbolic function. How much more powerful is it because the oath happens at the center of community cohesion, merging spiritual nourishment with the literal place where bodily nourishment is prepared?
August 23rd, 2017 at 12:05 pm
Is that a situation of “more powerful,” though, or “also important/powerful”? From a polytheist perspective, it would have to be the latter…
August 23rd, 2017 at 9:14 pm
Whoa, that’s cool, I definitely have been thinking about the Stove God in relation to this article, but I didn’t know that about oaths of repentance! I suspect that the centrality and significance of the stove within the house is a big part of why the Stove God is understood as the level of the celestial bureaucracy assigned to the family (as opposed to the neighborhood or the city).