Where is East?

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Many people never really consider the strange correlation there is between east and west, and north and south.

For instance, if you travel north, you will eventually reach the north pole; you will have found the middle of the north.

Likewise, if you travel south… there is a finite distance from the north pole to the south pole.

Once you reach the south pole you will have found the middle of the south.

But where is the middle of the east?

If you travel east and you, for instance, reach The Middle East… you can still go further east. Likewise if you go west and reach New York state, you can still travel further west in infinity as long as you do not change direction.

Between east and west there is seemingly an infinity while between north and south there is a finite amount of distance.

Where does the word “east” come from?

Well just as the word Easter, it most likely is derived from the Babylon Goddess of fertility Ishtar.

So, Babylon would be the land of Isht or “the east”… It would not be “mid east” were the real east is more eastern, rather it would be the very middle of the east.

The center of the Isht. Cultures changed and the people of the Isht no longer worship and occupy the city of Babylon… Yet, we still use Isht (east) to denote traveling towards the land of Ishtar and we sill call that land The Middle East.

It seems this was the land where all paganism originated on a large scale. This paganism was mass produced and exported to Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, Norse, Celt, Druid, Africa, Mesoamerica, Chinese… and became the basis for monotheistic religion also.

It was out of the land of the Isht that came what we refer to today as “religion” …

It is no wonder why the word “east” has survived and been perpetuated on to what seems an infinity of time.

One might consider where the word west comes from? For it might seem that west would have gone out in all direction from the center or middle of the east.

Or from the middle of a pagan center anything outside that center would be considered west. Or a “waste” land. Or a land unenlightened by civilization.

Religion has morphed, divided and taken on many forms, such that, the original religion is no longer recognizable in today’s sects.

The west has long adopted various forms of the religion of the east, so it can no longer be considered a waste and Babylon fell into ruin and no longer is inhabited by its former religious adherents.

Yet, the ideal of east and west persists…

So where actually is the east?

It seems that the east it exists within those who carry on the torch of the ideals embodied in the mysteries of the past. There it will be in the eastern light, shining through a window of ancient culture.

Matthew 2:1
"behold, wise men from the East came..."

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@TheCobbler,

Defining West and East as directions is very easy. The words West and East are derived from words describing sunrise and sunser; East
is simply the direction of the sunrise. Ishtar is the goddess of the dawn.

West and East as locations on the globe come from Europe. If you consider Europe as the center of the known world in the 1400s, West and East make sense.

I checked, the origin of the word "waste" is completely unrelated.

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@maxdancona,

I think it is a great stretch for me to use the word "waste" as a derivative of the word "west".

Since a goddess was used to denote the sunrise Ishtar, perhaps a goddess was also used to denote the sunset, maybe the Egyptian goddess Bast (west).

The sun rises in the Isht and sets in the Bast.

Bast was also a Goddess of the sun and later the Greeks attributed her as a Goddess of the moon.

She was also associated with much drunkenness... People would get bashed and get "wasted"... (west) waste lol

Photograph of an alabaster cosmetic jar topped with a lioness, representing Bast, an Eighteenth Dynasty burial artifact from the tomb of Tutankhamun (c. 1323 BC—Cairo Museum)

Wiki Excerpt:
Images of Bastet were often created from alabaster. The goddess was sometimes depicted holding a ceremonial sistrum in one hand and an aegis in the other

(A sistrum is a musical instrument of the percussion family, chiefly associated with ancient Egypt and Iraq.)

Comment:
I have a tendency to see things where they are not and associate things that are likely to have no real connection.

Excerpt Wiki
Herodotus also relates that of the many solemn festivals held in Egypt, the most important and most popular one was that celebrated in Bubastis in honor of the goddess.[9][10] Each year on the day of her festival, the town was said to have attracted some 700,000 visitors, both men and women (but not children), who arrived in numerous crowded ships. The women engaged in music, song, and dance on their way to the place. Great sacrifices were made and prodigious amounts of wine were drunk—more than was the case throughout the year.[11] This accords well with Egyptian sources which prescribe that lioness goddesses are to be appeased with the "feasts of drunkenness".

Comment:
Sounds like a waste or bash to me ... Smile

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@TheCobbler,

East is up.

Duh.

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@DrewDad,

lol

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@TheCobbler,

I don't believe that anyone used the word "wasted" to refer to being drunk until the 1960s in the US. I assume you know that people didn't speak English in ancient Babylon.

The word "waste" comes from the Latin word for "void". It is related to the word "vast". The word "West" has a Germanic root meaning "evening". It is related to the word "vespers".

Not all words that sound similar have similar roots. The cool thing about the internet is that you can look up where words actually come from.

Don't forget that the language you are working in... English... is fairly modern. Many of the connections you are making don't work in any other language.

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This is interesting.

The term "Middle East" seems to have been invented in England in the 1800s (during their colonial empire). The term makes perfect sense to anyone who accepts that England is the most important country in the world. Someone from England would travel a long way in an generally easterly direction to reach the "far east". They would travel a somewhat shorter distance to reach the "middle east".

We continue to have a very Eurocentric view of geography.

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@maxdancona,

I bet the dictionary did not mention the the word "east" came from the name Ishtar did it? Smile

I rarely trust word origins in dictionaries.

Vespers does seem a likely origin of west.

Like Carpe Diem is generally translated seize the day where I would have translated that capture the day.

Someone "wasting away" has a much earlier date than the 60s

The word also existed in Old English as westan. Meaning "to lose strength or health; pine; weaken" is attested from c.1300; the sense of "squander, spend or consume uselessly" is first recorded mid-14c.; meaning "to kill" is from 1964. Wasted "intoxicated" is slang from 1950s. The adjective is recorded from late 13c.

Smile

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@TheCobbler,

TheCobbler wrote:

Like Carpe Diem is generally translated seize the day where I would have translated that capture the day.

Literally translated carpe diem means "pick the day".

"West" is the direction in which the sun 'lingers, stays overnight' or on which it 'descends', thus the connection with the Latin "vesper".

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@TheCobbler,

Non-Euclidean Geometry is a bitch Smile

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@rosborne979,

East and west not unlike a compass and a protractor wherein lies all of the dimensions of the earth. Smile

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East is, of course, an arbitrary designation. If one could sit on the edge of the plane of the ecliptic of this star system, and observe the movements of the objects in the system, east would be to the right, and west would be to the left. In fact, most objects in the star system move from left to right--from west to east. This is literally observable in some of the satellites of planets in the system. Phobos and Deimos, the two satellites of Mars, are obviously captures. Deimos is very likely the older of the two, in the sense of having been captured by the Martian gravity well long before Phobos. If you could stand on the Martian equator and observe them, Deimos would rise in the west, and set in the eat about 60 hours later. It is at a much higher altitude than Phobos, and appears to be moving toward being tidally locked to the planet. Phobos is only somewhat more than 3000 miles above the planet, and moves very fast, compared to Deimos. If you were standing in that spot, when you saw Phobos-rise, it would cross your visual "dome" to the eastern horizon in about four and a half hours.

Of course, east and west were originally concepts to describe the apparent motion of our star across our visual dome. East is where the sun "rises." This star system is fascinating, and the more we learn, the less regularity and conformity we find in the system.

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@TheCobbler,

TheCobbler wrote:

I rarely trust word origins in dictionaries.

Because you'd rather make **** up? Doesn't that sound a bit like those who rarely trust mainstream media, preferring the paranoid rants of a load of fascist shock jocks.

Word definitions and their etymology are researched by experts, you can't accept expert advise in one area and reject it in another because it interrupts your musings.

If you want toi do some stream of consciousness thread where you make your own connections and do a bit of pondering fair enough, but you can't get stroppy when you're given the actual etymology of something you'd merely pondered.

Btw, Easter comes from the Celtic goddess Eostre, not saying she has no connection with Ishtar, but the direct attribution is Celtic not Babylonian.

http://images.inpurespirit.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/eostre5.jpg

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@izzythepush,

The entire Norse pantheon is based upon Babylonian region as is all paganism.

And no, not because I like to make **** up but because it is often wrong.

Do you like to make **** up? Your tone is condescending.

The past is highly speculative considering many things we simply may never know...

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@TheCobbler,

What do you mean by paganism, exactly?

"Pagan" in the religious sense is a pejorative term used by Christians to refer to non-Christians.

If you mean it to include all religious ideas other than Christian or monotheistic ones, then your assertion is wrong in regard to animism which predates polytheistic and monotheistic religious ideas.

Also, where does the idea come from that Mesoamerican religions were exported from the Middle East? In regard to written religious ideas, Mesoamerica was populated millennia before any Middle Eastern texts were written. It's more likely that these religions which incorporate both animistic and polytheistic ideas developed much earlier in the evolution of humanity.

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@TheCobbler,

Condescending? Probably, what else would you suggest the correct response would be to someone who prefers conjecture to research and evidence?

You can't have it both ways. If you're allowed to put imaginings over hard facts for something like word origins how can you criticise those who do the same over current events?

Putting Ishtar's relationship to Eostre to one side, the direct root of Easter is Eostre not Ishtar.

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@izzythepush,

https://www.gotquestions.org/Ishtar-Easter.html

There are several theories concerning the origin of the word Easter that are more credible than the Ishtar theory. One is that Easter got its name from Eostre, an eighth-century Germanic goddess who (it is assumed) was celebrated around the time of Passover every year. But even this theory has major problems, since there is no real evidence that anyone ever worshiped a goddess named Eostre—we have no shrines dedicated to Eostre, no altars of hers, and no ancient documents mentioning her. Others contend that the word Easter ultimately derives from the Latin phrase in albis, related to alba (“dawn” or “daybreak” in Spanish and Italian). In Old High German, in albis became eostarum, which eventually became Ostern in modern German and Easter in English. The French word for “Easter” is Pâcques, based on the Latin and Greek Pascha, meaning “Passover.”

Comment:
So it is equally "made up" that Easter is based on the goddess Eostre.

But, there is a direct connection of Eostre to Ishtar as fertility goddess worship began in Babylon. There is a direct connection of the Roman pantheon to the Greek pantheon and so on back to Babylon.

Besides, the Celts are not that far East at all. Smile

Now who is the one who "prefers conjecture to research and evidence"?

I admit to my own conjecture and speculation.

Did the Egyptians have electricity? I have no idea...

But a lot of documentaries have been made asserting that "speculation"...

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@TheCobbler,

TheCobbler wrote:

The entire Norse pantheon is based upon Babylonian region as is all paganism.

This is utter bullshit.

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The bullshit in this thread is incredibly deep. "Druid" does not describe a people. Many Kelts (from the Greek Keltoi) had Druids among them, but it is sheer idiocy to claim that Druids practiced a religion in the sense of either today, or of ancient Sumer. The Norse had a set of beliefs similar to other Germanic people, but not identical. Our source for their mythology is primarily Snorri Sturluson, but it clearly has no roots in the silly superstitions of the middle east. The "gods" of Norse mythology don't give a rat's ass about humans, and humans just hoped not to piss them off, and among the fighting men, to impress Thor, in the hope of enlisting his aid.

The Sumerians have no known linguistic or cultural "cousins." The Akkadians, clearly Semitic, took over from them. The European nations, Kelts and Germans, are descended from Indo-Iranian people, and have no direct relationship with the Semites or the Sumerians.

You're making **** up as you go along. Really, I should have known better than to respond to one of your idiotic threads.

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@Setanta,

Talk about condescending... You can be so high and mighty and so wrong...

I respectfully disagree with you Setanta, I am not the one making it up, I have a wealth of quotes from those who are far better scholars on the subject than you are. My sources are not perfect (neither am I) but, they are exhaustive and easily prove many of these assertions.

Did I say "druid" describes a people?
It describes a people who followed a "mystery religion".
Apparently, no one let you in on the secret.

Chinese are not a country either. China is a country...

I wrote it in a hurry and I stand by my speculation.

The druids also got their religion from Babylon as did all of the others I mentioned.

Prove me wrong. lol

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