alright well xxxxxxxx xxxxx hola saying hello to all my students in Apache xxxxxxx in Spanish and English and today we're going to be talking about love across the globe and history so we'll start with some older images and some classic images and think about the different expressions of love so I begin with this image of lovebirds because this maybe part of our conception of love in contemporary times love birds are paired for life they mate they stay with each other for their life span which can be a decade or so and this is not what we find in terms of early religion we don't find early sense of gods and goddesses to be such that there is a pairing forever eternal pairing that's a lot more complicated than that so let's go onto a human tradition and that's a little bit more fallible so we'll begin with very ancient figure of "mother goddess" and I put that in quotes because nobody is sure exactly what these figures mean we do see carved a figure of a woman who appears to be pregnant she has large breasts as though lactating she has a large stomach as though you know with advanced pregnancy and so a question though is as this meeting is to extend did men know they were involved in procreation so at this point in contemporary US society we believe that men and women are equally capable of been involved with procreation of creating a next-generation but this is not the case ancient culture necessarily there's some cultures in which sexuality is not the greatest part of actually conceiving a child there may be prarus necessary maybe rituals there may be multiple sex acts it is ingrained in us to know necessarily how children come about so well know for certain that women are aware that they are birthing children and perhaps this is why a lot of the early figures of humans are those of women who appear to be pregnant and this may have to do with the veneration of what some scholars now called the mother goddess or the great mother and these are some of our earliest images of people so it appears that in early religion women were predominant in terms of worship and had a large role people's belief system we can move on to a much later finding in archaeology it would take us to Turkey to Gobekli Tepe about 9,000 before the Common Era and what is puzzling about this site is that it is so ancient this appears to have been built before Whitesburg agriculture was available to people so it may have been a center for people to come together together to pray for hunters and gatherers to come together and to find a commonplace so again because there are no written records at this time we're not exactly sure what this rather large temple is built for however we have to wonder if it's religions bring people together so with the advent of writing we have more goddess figures we have Inanna/ishtar and Mesopotamia 4000 years BCE and she is a goddess of love fertility and war so there appears to be a dual nature for Inanna/Ishtar and we have writings from the Epic of Gilgamesh the first religious writings we have record of and xxxx in the near East so there is a dual nature one of sexuality another of war for Inanna or ishtar so the young Inanna of Sumerian poetry who says and this is a quote "plough my Vulva man of my heart if no left desire is in the Inanna ishtar xxxx xxxx let us enjoy your strength so put your hand and touch our Vulva" accordingly Inanna ishtar was recipient of prayers regarding impotency or unrequited love Inanna Ishtar was also a patron goddess of prostitutes so in this figure then we have multiple interpretations about sexuality the ability to seduce the idea of seduction as a power and figure to whom people could pray to conceive children and to seduce Inanna ishtar is also fond of making war quote "a battle is the feast to her" unquote the like aspect of the goddess to be expressed simply charge contacts they wished the goddesses praised in connection with raw power and military might this is also visible and the old Acadian period when naram sin frequently invokes the war-like ishtar and his inscriptions and becomes more prominent in the neo-assyrian veneration of Inanna Ishtar whose two most important aspect this period namely ishtar of the xxxxx and Ishtar of Arbella were intimately linked to the person of the King the warrior aspect of Inanna Ishtar which does appear before the old Acadian period emphasizes her masculine characteristics where as her sexuality is feminine as we look at the music essay number one we'll be writing we will think more about the influence African cultures the Yoruba culture in particular and also of Santeria which is the xxxxxx practice of the Yorduba religion from Africa coming to the Carribean so we want to note here Oshun the goddess of love and a first concept that we can think about is that of Ashe so Ashe is the primal energy that comprises the power, grace blood and life force of all reality the creator Olodumare cedes is Ashe to the Orishas like Oshun who is a goddess of rivers and her mate Chango who is a Masculine force of war and lightning many Orishas are linked with natural forces like Yemaya the mother ocean and Oko the harvest and Iku death who reside in the cemetery this is according to Miguel De La Tore in the book Santeria we also have an image of Oshun offering of honey and to the left we see Chango with his characteristic axe that is representing lightning and also the ability to go to war so we know the yellow color that the altar contains and the yellow offerings so one important offering for Oshun would be honey and it may be a practice for some to attract a mate to attract a love to put a photograph of the one who is desired on a plate of honey and leave that as an offering to Oshun in this way Oshun will hear the prayers and will put in that person's heart the desire to reciprocate the love that is being desired by the original person we move onto Navajo culture and Navajos are indigenous nation of the southwest Navajo Nation exists within the poor sacred mountains and it is officially in Arizona New Mexico and Colorado here we have image from a couple films and the saying which i'll read Sa' qh naaghai bik ' eh hozho and that means something like a balance of naaghai which is strength and female hozho which is beauty so we have a balance of masculine and feminine qualities one reading of a landscape for example that some Navajo give would be that of peaks and valleys so we are able to see the mesas and to read the peaks as masculine areas in the valley is the famine areas so in this way we can understand that all aspects of creation are both masculine and feminine are while some aspects are more masculine and other aspects more feminine there's always that mixing of the two so there may be dominance a feminine for some aspects of the cosmos and dominance of masculinity for other aspects of the cosmos but there's always a potential for each aspect of the cosmos to suddenly get more qualities of one or the other we also want to emphasize the matchilinual nature of the Navajo people also called Dine so there's another image of the film called the sixth world by Nana Patekar a navajo director here in Los Angeles and in her hands she is holding both the white male corn in the yellow female corn navajo believes are such that they're four directions and each direction has a different color this is seen on the Great Seal the Navajo Nation where we have the four different directions colored there's white in the east the Sun is rising on the Great Seal the seal to the right is actually blue and or turquoise and the that's the South mountain the western mountains yellow the northern mountains is black so between these four mountains reside the Navajo in the nation and those colors are getting used in ceremony for a creation of people an old tradition where the people are created with the help of yellow corn and white corn representing male and female aspects that go into creation so the idea here is balance and harmony that to be extremely one thing or another be unhealthy they could needs the culture needs both male and female to flourish and when we have the figure here up what showman chanting helping to create life she does so again with both male and female aspects of creation both yellow and white corn