United States or Barbados ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the home provinces the warrior-priests of Nara sought to avenge the chastisement they had suffered at Yoshinori's hands, and among the immediate entourage of Muromachi, the Hosokawa, the Hatakeyama, the Shiba, and others engaged in desperate struggles about questions of succession. Even when he reached man's estate, Yoshimasa proved wholly incompetent to deal with these complications.
I venture to throw the two ideas together, and to say that we may here find an ideal of the Christian community as being a great company of warrior-priests on the march, guarding a sacred deposit which has been committed to their charge. Look, then, at that combination in the true Christian character of the two apparently opposite ideas of warrior and priest.
The men average tall and handsome; they look like veritable warrior-priests in their flowing white costumes, and they make a strange picture of mingled barbarism and aestheticism as they loaf in lazy magnificence about the tumble-down ruins of the konak, toying with their roses in silence.
The one bright spot was the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro, which stubbornly maintained its freedom under a long succession of warrior-priests. Large settlements of refugee Serbs from Turkey followed their spiritual chief to Croatia, Slavonia and the southern plains of Hungary between 1690 and 1740.
We know now, absolutely, and indubitably, that these Sword Dances formed an important part of the Vegetation ritual; is it not easily within the bounds of possibility that, as the general ceremonial became elevated, first to the rank of a Mystery Cult, and then used as a vehicle for symbolic Christian teaching, the figures of the attendant warrior-priests underwent a corresponding change?
This shows that our Sannyasi was not one of the naked travelling monks, but a true Akali; one of the six hundred warrior-priests attached to the Golden Temple, for the purpose of serving God and protecting the temple from the destructive Mussulmans. His name was Ram-Runjit-Das; and his personal appearance was in perfect accordance with his title of "God's warrior."
Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light. The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the normal atmosphere of every day.
Word Of The Day