That was under Cromwell and the Puritans and it applied in the Puritan colonies here as well. It wasn't so much that the day was pagan as that it was a day for feasting and boozing— and the Puritans of course were appalled at the thought of people having fun. They also relocated the Easter service from midnight to…

The "Easter was a pagan feast" meme is actually not true: The word itself is only used in two languages (English and German), most European languages have a variation of Greek "Pascha"— Passover— as the name of the holiday. Hence Spanish "Pascuas". And the date of Easter follows the Jewish system for determining…

Amaterasu, the sun goddess, is the chief deity of Japanese Shinto— but Japanese culture was no less patriarchal as a result.

The Inca were outwardly patriarchal, but with an odd feature that dead Incan chieftains were mummified and their bodies kept around as "advisors" to the current ruler. And to speak for them they had female mediums— who could overrule the living ruler. One of whom got so tired of this happening that he burned all his…

In the earlier Dune novels God is thought of as feminine— people swear by "the Great Mother". Herbert even explains this is an appendix to the first book: early space travel was deeply mystical and caused people to (somehow) reconceive God as female.

Well, to be fair the Virgin Mary has only a cameo role in the Easter narrative. If this were about Christmas instead she'd probably have a starring role.

They're limited by copyright and other legal concerns in what figures Media can portray. So far all of them have been deceased (Lucy, Bowie, Marilyn now Garland) and in older shows and movies. I doubt we could have Media show up as Lady Gaga or doing a Ru Paul imitation.

Bilquis though turns the table: she consumes the people (men and women both) who are using her. Who exploiting who?

News flash: goddesses of sex and fertility are going to be objectified as erotic. Do you think the ancient Ethiopians did not conceive of her along those lines (relative to their own cultural meshes)?
That's been true since some Paleolithic artisan carved the Venus of Willendorf figurine with enlarged genitalia and no…

True story: we had a bedbug infestation a few years back and NOTHING would get rid of the accursed things. Then some daddy long-legs moved inside from the garden and started chowing down on the bedbugs— and bedbugs were all gone. Some of the spiders still live in the house and I let them stay unmolested as long as…

Re: I feel they rapidly decreased in quality from Season 3 to Season 5 (maybe had I not read the books I wouldn't feel this way, but little things like Robb's wife being an entirely different character really showed to me they didn't understand the importance of 'minor' storylines.)

The witch business was cringeworthy after she fulfilled her needed plot role of getting rid of Nicole. But the show's attempts to work in the supernatural always went off the rails.

They should have had Greer with Mary at the end.

The second season made a huge flub in having Catherine go nuts and talk to ghosts. It isolated her from the rest of the action at the precise time everything else was going to the dogs.

They did mention that Darnley had a claim to the English throne too (but left out that he likewise had a claim to the Scottish throne). Lady Lennox was in fact Mary's aunt, her father's half-sister— they had the same mother, who was Henry VIII's sister.

I'm surprised it survived the awful 2nd season. I'm at least glad they did not show Antoine (Condé) in the final montage of flashback scenes. We can pretend that horrible plot line never happened.

Sadly, Claude and Liza both died in childbirth at no great age. Catherine outlived all her children except Henry. She was widely blamed for the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, though she probably didn't do it. Mary's brother James was eventually murdered as well by power seekers in Scotland. Poor young King James was…

Very few shows of any kind are willing to have multiple characters with the same name, though we all know this happens in real life. Catherine's daughter "Liza" was really an Elizabeth, but we already have a more prominent personage with that name, so Liza it is. (I have no idea why they turned Marguerite into Margot,…

At a guess a lot of people have heard of Cornwall, and probably know it's somewhere in England, but they probably aren't aware that it had its own separate Celtic culture and language.

I've heard any number of bad foreign accents from actors who are not native speakers. Even Spanish and French accents are fudged often enough, sounding all too much like the Frito Bandito or Pepi le Pugh respectively. And German and Russian ones are often comical. Ancient Romans of course all seem to talk like upper…