Hierosgamos may be generally defined as an overt spiritual or sacred act of physical sexual intercourse between a deity and a man or woman for the purpose of gaining divinity for the human partner. Symbolically, the celebration of the Eucharist is the same thing. In ancient Sumeria, for instance, a hierodule participating in the act with a god became a deity of the goddess Inanna in the same manner as the taking of bread and wine represents the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist communion today. The roots of this ancient act run deep even today in some religious and neopagan cults, but the fact that it is also ritualized in many Christian faiths, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, seems to indicate that the myth of copulation between gods or goddesses and human beings is based in physical reality. Read no further into the Holy Bible than the 6th chapter of Genesis and you will find that sons of god marry daughters of men: "And it came to pass, when men began to...

"Every organized [patriarchy] works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny." - Robin Morgan Considering the huge flap over the Halloween-influenced hanging of Sarah Palin in effigy, I wonder what today's social circles would think of the real thing -- the actual hanging of an innocent female -- except that in this case the murderers were the politically and socially elite ones, and the female victim the scapegoat for those men and women who had come before her and an inhibiting omen for those who would come after her. It happened on a July afternoon in 1889. The following is excerpted from the Preface to my historical novel manuscript, presently in an edit iteration, The Sweetwater Conspiracy: the Legend of Cattle Kate. In the summer of 1889, during the settling–up of the American west, a sensational news story drifted off Wyoming's high plains, making international headlines, and shaking the resolve of the westward pioneering spirit. The story told of th...