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I originally intended this page as a set of links to online resources giving access to complete compies of various religious texts. However, I was tempted to add a link to The Perfumed Garden after finding an online copy of it on the web. Once I had added a link to the Perfumed Gardem I found I was tempted to add a link to The Arabian Nights (or the 1001 nights) the stories told by Sheherazad. Once I had included a link to this book it seemed reasonable to include a link to Grimm's Fairy tales. I was then in the realms of literature, rather than religion so a link to Shakespeare's plays seemed almost compulsory. I expect it to grow from there.
In the sections that follow there are a number of links to bible passages. In general I will have taken these from the New Revised Standard Edition of the Bible, as made available through the Bible Gateway Website at web address: www.biblegateway.com.
I would not claim to obtain a great deal of religious benefit from reading the bible. However, I do believe that it is great literature. I would thoroughly recommend reading it as such. I am hoping you will disagree with me when I say this. I am hoping that you have been brought up in an environment where the bible is regularly quoted in such cliched ways that you have taken to dismissing it as having absolutely nothing to say to you. I am hoping you feel that it is a book which is completely irrelevant for the real world. If you do, I think I might have a pleasant surprise for you? For example: Try reading Samuel Book 2 in the New Revised Standard Version of the bible. I can assure you that it is at least as interesting, exciting and challenging as an entire series of The Sopranos, an award wining American T.V. series about the New Jersey Mafia.
Before I start to direct you to any specific Bible stories I would like to recomment that you look at the Bible Gateway Website at web address: www.biblegateway.com/. This is a great website. Using this website one can select to read one's passage of choice from any one of a number of different translations of the Bible. I have noticed that one gets a very different sense of the bible depending on which translation one reads. Take for example: Judges Chapter 19, verse 22. If you read the New Revised Standard Edition of the Bible you get a pretty good idea of what is going on here. If you read the same verse in the King James version of the bible then, I would suggest, you do not. Judges chapter 19, is the story of a particularly vicious gang rape. The perpetrators had intended a homosexual rape, they are persuaded (by the intended victim and his host) to rape a woman instead. Verse 22 describes the exact moment when the would be rapists call out and demand that their victim of choice, a levite (i.e. a man from the tribe of levi) be sent out to them. In the King James version of the Bible, with its euthemistic language, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were just being friendly. They could almost be asking him to join them for a nice friendly drink down the pub. The translater has them saying "Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him". I cannot help but feel that the language of these people would have been a lot more direct than that. I think we can agree that the sense of what they were saying was: "We saw the stranger who entered your house. Bring him out here. We want to have sex with him!" I leave the reader to draw his, or her, own conclusions as to the type of language they might have used in order to frame the last of those three sentences.
I now include a number of personal selections from the bible. In so doing I hope to show that the bible is as relevent today, as it ever was:
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I will not attempt a biography of Mr Graves. I could not do him justice. If the reader wishes to see a biography, I would recommend him (or her) to view Robert Graves's biography on Wikipedia. I will say that his translation of Lucius Apuleius's amazing work The Golden Ass, is absolutely fabulous. In particular, his rendition of Chapter 17, entitled The Goddess Isis Intervenes, and telling of how the Goddess comes to Lucius's aid, in his hour of need, is absolutely fabulous. In particular, the section of this chapter in which Isis reveals herself to Lucius is pure magic. It can send shivers running up and down your spine. Here, so you can see what I mean, is a small excerpt from it.
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The Perfumed Garden, by Shaykh Nefzawi is a book about human sexuality, which was translated by Sir Richard Burton in 1886. There seems to be some dispute concerning the date of the original work so I will not attempt any discussion of it here.
I first came across The Perfumed Garden when I was a young man of about 16 years of age. At that time I knew nothing about sexual matters. However, that did not stop me from being very dismissive about the treatment of one of the matters discussed at the start of Chapter 7. Chapter 7 of The Perfumed Garden treats of, "Matters which are Injurious in the Act of Generation". The matter in question concerned sex between a man and an older woman. The Perfumed Garden suggested that this was harmful. As a younger man I took exception to this assertion because I was extremely attracted to older women at that time. I believe that many young men feel the same way. Now that I am older my views have changed.
My belief these days is that, up to a certain age, sex between a young man and an older women can be beneficial for both parties. However, I now believe that, when a man gets beyond a certain age, he should seek out a younger woman as his partner. I do not say this because I have adhered to this advice myself. I say so because I have to some extent experienced the perils of failing to do so. As to what The Perfumed Garden has to say on the subject I will leave the reader to discover for him or her self by reading Chapter 7 of this book.
The Perfumed Garden appears to have arisen from within the Moslem Tradition. However, I would hesitate to refer to it as a Moslem work. It's author was clearly a Moslem. Clearly too, he lived at a place and time when the Moslem faith was the prevalent belief system. However, whether the book itself should be regarded as a religious or a secular work I will leave you, dear reader, to decide for yourself. Perhaps you will find more information on this point within the work itself. At the time of writing I have merely glanced at it. I cannot claim any in depth knowledge.
As well as translating The Perfumed Garden, mentioned above, Sir Richard Burton also translated The Arabian Nights. This book of short stories is very highly regarded as a source of wisdom, in much the same way as Bruno Bettelheim expresses a high regard for Fairy Stories within the European Tradition in his book The Uses of Enchantment.
Grimms Fairy Tales were collected by The Brother's Grimm. Their first volume of collected fairy tales was published in 1812. A second volume followed a few years later.
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I have just found a pearl of great wealth. I was in the middle of editing another section of this website and I found myself wanting to quote Oscar Wilde's "Letter to Bosie", a long letter more formally known as Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis". I wished to say that I would like to "Play gracefully with ideas" and I was keen to get the exact quote. Things like this are important to me. Humour me please!
Anyway, most of my books are in boxes scattered around this tiny bedsitting room (no don't ask!). Consequently, I do not know where my hard copy of "The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde" might happen to be right now. I might search for the text string: "Play gracefully with ideas" on Google. Big Mistake! Everybody quotes Oscar Wilde so there were a huge number of hits. The trouble was, every single one of them seemed to be an HTML file hosting the words of someone who wished to quote Oscar Wilde, none of them seemed to be an HTML file giving the text of Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis", which was what I actually wanted. I next tried searching for that line together with a line that follows, viz: "Play gracefully with ideas" + "violence of opinion" regretably all this did was take me to a Web Page that contained an Index to some of the author Frank Harris's writings about Oscar Wilde rather than the works of the great man himself. However, I did subsequently find a portal that does give access to at least some of the works of Oscar Wilde online. Needless to say, I immediately broke off from what I was doing, to make a note of the Web Address. The following is a link to that website.
The following excerpt is taken from the Robert Graves translation of Lucius Apuleius's book, The Golden Ass. I am including it because, although there are complete translations of The Golden Ass on the Internet, the Robert Graves translation is not available online. I think this is a pity. To my mind the Robert Graves translation of The Golden Ass is superior to anything else I have ever seen on the subject.
All the perfumes of Arabia drifted into my nostrils as the Goddess deigned to address me: 'You see me here Lucius in answer to your prayer. I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the shining heights of heaven, the wholesome sea-breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below. Though I am worshiped in many aspects, known by countless names, and propitiated with all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me. The primeval Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, Mother of the gods; the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropian Artemis; for the islanders of Cyprus I am Pathian Aphrodite; for the Archers of Crete I am Dictynna; for the trilingual Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; and for the Eleusinians their ancient Mother of the Corn.
'Some know me as Juno, some as Bellona of the battles; others as Hecate, others again as Rhamnubia, but both races of Aethiopians, whose lands the morning sun first shines upon, and the Egyptians who excel in ancients learning and worship me with ceremonies proper to my Godhead, call me by my true name, namely, Queen Isis. I have come in pity of your plight, I have come to favour and aid you. Weep no more, lament no longer; the hour of deliverance, shone over by my watchful light, is at hand.