Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
'Ten Commandments' (The Film): The Pagan Connection
Bet you didn't know it, but Cecil B. de Mille's 1956 epic schlockfest The Ten Commandments has a pagan connection.
Dianic high priestess and musician Ruth Barrett grew up Jewish in Southern California. Apparently, religious leadership runs in the family. Her father was a rabbi in the Reconstructionist movement, a modern Jewish “denomination” that views Judaism as an ongoing religious civilization. Reconstructionist Judaism tends to be ritually conservative and socially liberal.
(The standard joke is: “At an Orthodox wedding, the bride's mother is pregnant. At a Conservative wedding, the rabbi is pregnant. At a Reform wedding, the bride is pregnant. At a Reconstructionist wedding, both brides are pregnant.”)
Anyway, when C. B. was putting the film together, he looked around for someone skilled at blowing the various calls on the shofar, the ram's horn trumpet used since antiquity in Jewish ritual—at the first sighting of the First Crescent, for instance.
That's how Ruth Barrett's dad got tapped to do the shofar calls for the film The Ten Commandments. Next time you see the film, listen closely.
So let it be written, so let it be done.
Coda:
You might be interested to know that Sephora, wife of Moses, was played in the film by actress Yvonne de Carlo, who would later play Lily Munster in the lowbrow 1960s sitcom The Munsters, which a friend of mine once described as "The Addams Family for dumb people."
But that's not really pagan.
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