ex-l wrote:b) something like the original meaning of the term "virgin" was not for a woman who had been stopped from having sex, but a women who was in control of her own sexuality/sexual activity.
There is nothing I can find in the etymology to suggest that other than it may be that the one way women could have some control over their sexuality was to deny it to any but their god e.g. the vestal virgins, priestesses etc.
In the Minoan times in Crete, the female bull dancers (who literally danced and did acrobatics with bulls, forerunners of bullfighting) were either virginal, chaste, or were sexual, including with the bulls, bestiality. The Minotaur (in the myth of Theseus) was the offspring of the queen who mated with a bull, supposedly a god or spirit in the form of a bull. Likely the idea was that during the ritual the animal ”became” the embodiment of the god.
This is not dissimilar to what BKs have in the Murli, about God entering Brahma (Brahmin bulls, Nandi the bull in the Shiva temples etc) and also said about Gulzar (being mounted). They have probably edited out these ‘racier” metaphors from the old Murlis, references to Vedic scriptures that were reinterpreted to suit BKism.
It also may be a variation of the Vedic horse ritual, when the queen would have ritual sex with a stallion ( from memory, I think it's in the Rig Veda) - considered to probably be the oldest extant, complete written work, i.e. ‘book' known.
Not an inconceivable ritual given its’s a culture, the aryans, whose dominance and conquests were based on the invincible union of human and horse, the development of the Chariot, and their refining of ore into iron ( 'iron' sounds like ‘ore’, and many think the word Aryan, pronounced oryan in many places, is the name for 'the people of the ore', who came out of the southern Caucuses - north Western Iran - and swept east and West to inhabit the Indian subcontinent and the Mediterranean.