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Christian penitents used to wear Cilices, AKA hairshirts. [For when they had been very, very naughty I guess]
Thank you for explaining that! There is a Barenaked Ladies song (What a Good Boy) that has a line about a hairshirt, and I had no idea what it was talking about.
I know I've read that John the Baptist represented a god of water, a very ancient figure in middle eastern religions. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. He's all about the water. For thousands of years rivers and bodies of water were thought to have their own gods, not just in the middle east of course. In Europe all the great rivers had their own gods or goddesses.
Baptisms weren't uncommon initiation rituals, especially for people obsessed with symbolic purity. John the Baptist might have been indeed a common Jewish person trying to convert "dirty" Gentiles into Judaism (for marriage and other such things). Most Jews practicing the providing of such symbolic taking of power (deep down your instincts would tell you that you could be drowned) might have justified taking the pagan/secular practice with some of the passages in their royal-religious books telling important people to purify themselves with a bath before wearing ceremonial garments or going into some sanctified places.
All rather hideous IMO... Except maybe the one made of the lacquered wooden lodge poles, has a cool Frank Lloyd Wright Mission, Contemporary Adirondack Lodge, Pacific Northwest look about it...
No accounting for taste I suppose, I wonder what kind of reception that last one gets?
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