why I am not a Hindoo

[David Morris]

--- Courtney Givens (God knows why) continue a charade:
> HI! This is so very interesting!
> 
> >From: Thomas Eckhardt :
> >
> >David answered to the Hammer:
> >
> > > I take it you posit an earth-mother based RCism is the pure kind that you
feel Pynchon promotes here in V.
> 
> WOW! Is Pynchon promoting RC? WOW again. That doesn't sound exactly right.
Fausto's RC is clearly the good one here, not pure, but the one that is opposed
to the Bad Priest's RC.

Well, Fausto never actually opposes the Bad Priest, but the distintion can
slide unless you push it someplace.

> You all were talking about Abortion.

No, YOU were.

> This seems to me to be on of the critical keys.
> Fausto, Paola, both are nearly aborted. Esther is going
> to have one. We needn't get too philosophical. The
> Sick Crew Chapters can serve just as well as the
> "historical" chapters. In fact, the two are woven
> together, i.e., "the dance of death." At the end of Chapter
> Four we read,
> 
> "Such was the (as it were) Jacobean etiology of Esther's
> eventual trip to Cuba; which see." Remember that Schoenmaker
> is altering Esther's natural body. He is making a "mother" for
> his child. So when he cuts into her, she is passive and
> lifeless rock. He wants to give her larger breasts and
> even alter her pelvis. Note how Pynchon describes
> Rachel's pelvis and how she uses it.
> 
> Jacobean? That's odd I thought when reading it, Jacobean.
> Then there is the "etiology." "Jacobean etiology"??
> 
> What the hell? The Jacobean will take us into history and
> I don't have the time.

Although I don't catch this meaning yet either, I suggest that "Jacobean" will
need to be "cracked" in order for any of the rest of this connection to have
validity.  Here might be a clue:

http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/01-1/doermilt.html
" What has not been sufficiently noted (or at least stated) is that Milton,
with Donne, Herbert, and others, owes a tremendous debt to a [Jacobean] church
which (though it did not neglect the biblical sacraments) was dominated by the
Word.[20] This was true of the English church as a whole (before the Laudian
changes), not just the puritans within it. Georgia Christopher appropriately
draws attention to the links between Milton and the writings of Luther and
Calvin in terms of their common "word-based piety," since Milton "shared their
attitude toward sacred texts and their belief in a 'verbal" sacrament."[21] The
Thirty- Nine Articles make the church's strongly biblical position clear, as
Milton acknowledged in his 1673 tract Of True Religion: 

With good and Religious Reason therefore all Protestant Churches with one
consent, and particularly the Church of England in Her thirty nine Articles,
Artic. 6th, 19th, 20th, 21st, and elsewhere, maintain . . . as [a] main
Principle . . . of true Religion . . . that the Rule of true Religion is the
Word of God only . . . . (CPW 8.419-20) " [end of quote]

The Jacobean Church brought us the King James Bible too, didn't it?

> The etiology takes us to Chapter 13.
> 
> Stencil (3rd person)  "He is afraid. Because if she went there to wait out
one war, a war she'd not started but whose etiology was also her own."
> 

> >Indeed, it seems impossible to reconcile the concept of an earth-mother or a
womb of rock with the Virgin Mary within the framework of orthodox Roman
Catholic belief.
> 
> Maybe so, but this is what Pynchon is up to. Isn't it? [...]
> The RC say, Holy Mary MOTHER of god.

If Pynchon is connecting the two, then he is forging an unorthodox RC, but
that's OK w/ me.  As you imply below, RC has from its start always been an
amalgam of Xianity and "paganism."  I don't see him as opposed to Pantheism
(paganism), though, as you seem to imply.  Indeed, if "Jacobean etiology" forms
an indictment of "The Word" superceding ritual and tradition, then a retreat
into Paganism seems just what the doctor is ordering.  Again, P is not so
simple, but he does like to set up dichotomies...

> Ever been to a RC mass in  Africa? How about a RC funeral on a Native
American Rez? Ever been to Malta?


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