The three Gorgon sisters—Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale—were children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys (or Phorkys) and his sister Ceto (or Keto), chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound who places both trinities of sisters far off "on Kisthene's dreadful plain":

Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged

With snakes for hair— hated of mortal man—

While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as being beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of "fair-cheeked Medusa".[5]

In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," priestess in Athena's temple, She was that much beautiful that the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon was attracted to her. When she came for her, Medusa ran to Athena's temple thinking that the goddess will protect her. She didn't! Poseidon took her on the court room. Medusa prayed to the goddess for comfort but the goddess felt nothing but disgusted!!! The enraged Athena transformed Medusa's beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone.

[Model is one of my closest friend Tanha. And yes obviously she isn't terrifying like Medusa. You all know how make my title and stories. I can never make title and stories synchronized with the image. That's my bad. ]

Baridhara, Dhaka. Bangladesh 2010

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Copyright: Adnan Arsalan

E-mail: adnan.arsalan@gmail.com

The Temple of Artemis Brauron in Athens, Greece: Located on the eastern side of Attica, the Sanctuary of Brauronian Artemis was among the most important sacred sites in the ancient times. Vravrona (or Brauron), about 20 km from Athens, was one of the 12 towns of Attica that was united to Athens by Theseus. The first inhabitants were settled in Vravrona in about 3,500 B.C. and they were Pelasgians in tribe. Gradually the town developed around an acropolis and many important politicians of Athens originated from Brauron, including Miltiades, Cimon and the tyrant Pesistratus. In fact, it was the tyrant of Athens, Pesistratus, and his sons who originally founded this cult of Artemis in the 6th century B.C. The ancient temple of Artemis is of Doric style and flourished in the 5th-4th century B.C. According to a myth, this is the temple where Iphigeneia was brought by her brother Orestes, when they met in the land of Tauris, where she served as a priestess in a local temple of Artemis. Iphigeneia had been transfered to Tauris by goddess Artemis herself, when she saved her from the sacrifice in Aulis. Returning to Greece, Iphigeneia brought with her a wooden statue of Artemis from Tauris. In the Temple of Brauronian Artemis, the goddess was culted as the protector of nature and women. She was mostly culted as the protector of child delivery. In fact, women who had a good delivery offered their clothes and personal items to goddess Artemis, while the clothes of women who died during delivery were offered to the grave of Iphigeneia, who was considered a chthonic deity (deity of the Underworld). The grave of Iphigeneia can be seen even today in a cave in the archaeological site. Every four years, an important festival was also taking place to honor the goddess. A parade with girls aged 5-10 dedicated to the goddess would start from the centre of Athens and would terminate in the temple. The girls were wearing furs of bear, the sacred animal of the goddess. This was like a preparation process that symbolized the passage from childhood to youth and marriage. In fact, most items found in this archaeological site were female personal items, clothes and jewerly. In the ancient site of Brauronian Artemis, visitors can see today the remains of the temple, the sanctuary of Iphigeneia, the gymnasium and other buildings. Many findings have been transferred to the interesting Archaeological Museum of Vravrona and other in the new Acropolis Museum. The surrounding nature is lovely and you will see a stream crossing the site. This small river has been crossing the site since the ancient times and has caused many problems to the buildings. Actually it was due an overflow of this river that the temple was abandoned in the 3rd century B.C.

Within the rectangular field of this breast collar appliqué - part of the Letnitsa Treasure - bordered on three sides with gilded ovules, a standing human figure is depicted turned to the right toward a wriggling three-headed creature. The lavishly decorated dress and the hairstyle suggest that the figure is female. Her arms are bent at the elbows, the left hand touching the monster and the right one holding an object that resembles a mirror.

The beast has the flexible body of a snake, with three identical heads with oval eyes and ears adhering to the scaly neck. The hair, parts of the face, and the dress of the human figure are gilded. The meaning of the image is elusive, especially with so little known of Thracian mythology. The figure has been interpreted as a goddess of wild nature, but in many mythological traditions, the mirror has both nuptial and chthonic connotations. Its presence has provided grounds for interpreting the scene as a marriage between a maiden and a dragon.

Thracian, ca. mid-4th century BCE. Chance find near Letnitsa, Lovech Province, Bulgaria in 1963.

Lovech, Regional Historical Museum (605 A)

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Photographed at the Getty Villa Museum, at the exhibition 'Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece'

Ionic temple dedicated to Athena, Poseidon, Erechtheus, and other chthonic deities of Attica, 421-406 B.C.

4142 Samothrake Neue Archaeologische Untersuchungen auf Samothrake, ausgeführt im Auftrage des k.k. Ministeriums für Kultus und Unterricht mit Unterstützung seiner Majestät CorvetteFrundsberg Commandant Kropp von Alexander Conze Alois Hauser Otto Benndorf mit LXXVI Tafeln und 43 Illustrationen im Texte Wien Druck ubd Verlag Carl Gerold's Sohn 1880. Istituto tecnico ""Leonardo da Vinci"" Fiume Biblioteca dei professori

digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/conze1880/0002/image

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hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samotraki

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The Samothrace Temple Complex, known as the Sanctuary of the Great Gods (Modern Greek: Ιερό των Μεγάλων Θεών Ieró ton Megalón Theón), is one of the principal Pan-Hellenic religious sanctuaries, located on the island of Samothrace within the larger Thrace. Built immediately to the west of the ramparts of the city of Samothrace, it was nonetheless independent, as attested to by the dispatch of city ambassadors during festivals.

It was celebrated throughout Ancient Greece for its Mystery religion, a Chthonic religious practice as renowned as the Eleusinian Mysteries. Numerous famous people were initiates, including the historian Herodotus – one of very few authors to have left behind a few clues to the nature of the mysteries, the Spartan leader Lysander, and numerous Athenians. The temple complex is mentioned by Plato and Aristophanes.

During the Hellenistic period, after the investiture of Phillip II, it formed a Macedonian national sanctuary where the successors to Alexander the Great vied to outdo each other's munificence. It remained an important religious site throughout the Roman period. Hadrian visited, and Varro described the mysteries. The cult fades from history towards the end of Late Antiquity, when the temple would have been closed during the persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire.

Strobist info:

1 stofened SB-600 camera left.

Triggered with Nikon CLS.

I *think* there's a reflector on the right.

The gold on the wallpaper is the ambient tungsten light above.

The Temple of Artemis Brauron in Athens, Greece: Located on the eastern side of Attica, the Sanctuary of Brauronian Artemis was among the most important sacred sites in the ancient times. Vravrona (or Brauron), about 20 km from Athens, was one of the 12 towns of Attica that was united to Athens by Theseus. The first inhabitants were settled in Vravrona in about 3,500 B.C. and they were Pelasgians in tribe. Gradually the town developed around an acropolis and many important politicians of Athens originated from Brauron, including Miltiades, Cimon and the tyrant Pesistratus. In fact, it was the tyrant of Athens, Pesistratus, and his sons who originally founded this cult of Artemis in the 6th century B.C. The ancient temple of Artemis is of Doric style and flourished in the 5th-4th century B.C. According to a myth, this is the temple where Iphigeneia was brought by her brother Orestes, when they met in the land of Tauris, where she served as a priestess in a local temple of Artemis. Iphigeneia had been transfered to Tauris by goddess Artemis herself, when she saved her from the sacrifice in Aulis. Returning to Greece, Iphigeneia brought with her a wooden statue of Artemis from Tauris. In the Temple of Brauronian Artemis, the goddess was culted as the protector of nature and women. She was mostly culted as the protector of child delivery. In fact, women who had a good delivery offered their clothes and personal items to goddess Artemis, while the clothes of women who died during delivery were offered to the grave of Iphigeneia, who was considered a chthonic deity (deity of the Underworld). The grave of Iphigeneia can be seen even today in a cave in the archaeological site. Every four years, an important festival was also taking place to honor the goddess. A parade with girls aged 5-10 dedicated to the goddess would start from the centre of Athens and would terminate in the temple. The girls were wearing furs of bear, the sacred animal of the goddess. This was like a preparation process that symbolized the passage from childhood to youth and marriage. In fact, most items found in this archaeological site were female personal items, clothes and jewerly. In the ancient site of Brauronian Artemis, visitors can see today the remains of the temple, the sanctuary of Iphigeneia, the gymnasium and other buildings. Many findings have been transferred to the interesting Archaeological Museum of Vravrona and other in the new Acropolis Museum. The surrounding nature is lovely and you will see a stream crossing the site. This small river has been crossing the site since the ancient times and has caused many problems to the buildings. Actually it was due an overflow of this river that the temple was abandoned in the 3rd century B.C.

Ionic temple dedicated to Athena, Poseidon, Erechtheus, and other chthonic deities of Attica, 421-406 B.C.

In Greek mythology Medusa was a Gorgon, a chthonic monster, and a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. Gazing directly upon her would turn onlookers to stone. She was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. In classical antiquity the image of the head of Medusa appeared in the evil-averting device known as the Gorgoneion. I had fun making the snake headpiece :]

From the votive deposit (closed late 2nd/early 1st c. BCE) at loc. Privati above and south of ancient Stabiae (see on Pleiades). The sanctuary at Privati shows many similarities in material culture to that of the Doric temple in the triangular forum at Pompeii attributed to Athena.

Photographed on display at the Antiquarium of Pompeii.

Collection of the Antiquarium Stabiano.

Head of the hero Herakles wearing the leonte (lionskin) knotted at his neck. Examples from the same mold are known from the Doric Temple at Pompeii.

Early 3rd c. BCE(?)

From the votive deposit (closed late 2nd/early 1st c. BCE) at loc. Privati above and south of ancient Stabiae (see on Pleiades). The sanctuary at Privati shows many similarities in material culture to that of the Doric temple in the triangular forum at Pompeii attributed to Athena.

Photographed on display at the Antiquarium of Pompeii.

Collection of the Antiquarium Stabiano.

The serpent, when forming a ring with its tail in its mouth, is a clear and widespread symbol of the "All-in-All", the totality of existence, infinity and the cyclic nature of the cosmos. The most well known version of this is the Aegypto-Greek Ourobouros. It is believed to have been inspired by the Milky Way, as some ancient texts refer to a serpent of light residing in the heavens. The Ancient Egyptians associated it with Wadjet, one of their oldest deities as well as another aspect, Hathor. In Norse mythology the World Serpent (or Midgard serpent) known as Jörmungandr encircled the world in the ocean's abyss biting its own tail.

Vishnu resting on Ananta-Shesha, with Lakshmi massaging his "lotus feet". In Hindu mythology Lord Vishnu is said to sleep while floating on the cosmic waters on the serpent Shesha. In the Puranas Shesha holds all the planets of the universe on his hoods and constantly sings the glories of Vishnu from all his mouths. He is sometimes referred to as "Ananta-Shesha," which means "Endless Shesha". In the Samudra manthan chapter of the Puranas, Shesha loosens Mount Mandara for it to be used as a churning rod by the Asuras and Devas to churn the ocean of milk in the heavens in order to make Soma (or Amrita), the divine elixir of immortality. As a churning rope another giant serpent called Vasuki is used. In pre-Columbian Central America Quetzalcoatl was sometimes depicted as biting its own tail. The mother of Quetzalcoatl was the Aztec goddess Coatlicue ("the one with the skirt of serpents"), also known as Cihuacoatl ("The Lady of the serpent"). Quetzalcoatl's father was Mixcoatl ("Cloud Serpent"). He was identified with the Milky Way, the stars and the heavens in several Mesoamerican cultures.The demigod Aidophedo of the West African Ashanti is also a serpent biting its own tail. In Dahomey mythology of Benin in West Africa, the serpent that supports everything on its many coils was named Dan. In the Vodou of Benin and Haiti Ayida-Weddo (a.k.a. Aida-Wedo, Aido Quedo, "Rainbow-Serpent") is a spirit of fertility, rainbows and snakes, and a companion or wife to Dan, the father of all spirits. As Vodou was exported to Haiti through the slave trade Dan became Danballah, Damballah or Damballah-Wedo. Because of his association with snakes, he is sometimes disguised as Moses, who carried a snake on his staff. He is also thought by many to be the same entity of Saint Patrick, known as a snake banisher.The serpent Hydra is a star constellation representing either the serpent thrown angrily into the sky by Apollo or the Lernaean Hydra as defeated by Heracles for one of his Twelve Labors. The constellation Serpens represents a snake being tamed by Ophiuchus the snake-handler, another constellation. The most probable interpretation is that Ophiuchus represents the healer Asclepius.In many myths the chthonic serpent (sometimes a pair) lives in or is coiled around a Tree of Life situated in a divine garden. In the Genesis story of the Torah and Biblical Old Testament, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is situated in the Garden of Eden together with the tree of life and the Serpent. In Greek mythology Ladon coiled around the tree in the garden of the Hesperides protecting the entheogenic golden apples. Níðhöggr gnaws the roots of Yggdrasil in this illustration from a 17th-century Icelandic manuscript. Similarly Níðhöggr (Nidhogg Nagar) the dragon of Norse mythology eats from the roots of the Yggdrasil, the World Tree. Under yet another Tree (the Bodhi tree of Enlightenment), the Buddha sat in ecstatic meditation. When a storm arose, the mighty serpent king Mucalinda rose up from his place beneath the earth and enveloped the Buddha in seven coils for seven days, not to break his ecstatic state. The Vision Serpent was also a symbol of rebirth in Mayan mythology, fueling some cross-Atlantic cultural contexts favored in pseudoarchaeology. The Vision Serpent goes back to earlier Maya conceptions, and lies at the center of the world as the Mayans conceived it. "It is in the center axis atop the World Tree. Essentially the World Tree and the Vision Serpent, representing the king, created the center axis which communicates between the spiritual and the earthly worlds or planes. It is through ritual that the king could bring the center axis into existence in the temples and create a doorway to the spiritual world, and with it power". (Schele and Friedel, 1990: 68) The Sumerian deity, Ningizzida, is accompanied by two gryphons Mushussu; it is the oldest known image of two snakes coiling around an axial rod, dating from before 2000 BCE. Sometimes the Tree of Life is represented (in a combination with similar concepts such as the World Tree and Axis mundi or "World Axis") by a staff such as those used by shamans. Examples of such staffs featuring coiled snakes in mythology are the caduceus of Hermes, the Rod of Asclepius, the staff of Moses, and the papyrus reeds and deity poles entwined by a single serpent Wadjet, dating to earlier than 3000 BCE. The oldest known representation of two snakes entwined around a rod is that of the Sumerian fertility god Ningizzida. Ningizzida was sometimes depicted as a serpent with a human head, eventually becoming a god of healing and magic. It is the companion of Dumuzi (Tammuz) with whom it stood at the gate of heaven. In the Louvre, there is a famous green steatite vase carved for King Gudea of Lagash (dated variously 2200–2025 BCE) with an inscription dedicated to Ningizzida. Ningizzida was the ancestor of Gilgamesh, who according to the epic dived to the bottom of the waters to retrieve the plant of life. But while he rested from his labor, a serpent came and ate the plant. The snake became immortal, and Gilgamesh was destined to die.Ancient North American serpent imagery often featured rattlesnakes.

Ningizzida has been popularized in the 20th century by Raku Kei Reiki (a.k.a. "The Way of the Fire Dragon") where "Nin Giz Zida" is believed to be a fire serpent of Tibetan rather than Sumerian origin. Nin Giz Zida is another name for the ancient Hindu concept of Kundalini, a Sanskrit word meaning either "coiled up" or "coiling like a snake". Kundalini refers to the mothering intelligence behind yogic awakening and spiritual maturation leading to altered states of consciousness. There are a number of other translations of the term usually emphasizing a more serpentine nature to the word—e.g. 'serpent power'. It has been suggested by Joseph Campbell that the symbol of snakes coiled around a staff is an ancient representation of Kundalini physiology. The staff represents the spinal column with the snake(s) being energy channels. In the case of two coiled snakes they usually cross each other seven times, a possible reference to the seven energy centers called chakras.

In Ancient Egypt, where the earliest written cultural records exist, the serpent appears from the beginning to the end of their mythology. Ra and Atum ("he who completes or perfects") became the same god, Atum, the "counter-Ra," was associated with earth animals, including the serpent: Nehebkau ("he who harnesses the souls") was the two headed serpent deity who guarded the entrance to the underworld. He is often seen as the son of the snake goddess Renenutet. She often was confused with (and later was absorbed by) their primal snake goddess Wadjet, the Egyptian cobra, who from the earliest of records was the patron and protector of the country, all other deities, and the pharaohs. Hers is the first known oracle. She was depicted as the crown of Egypt, entwined around the staff of papyrus and the pole that indicated the status of all other deities, as well as having the all-seeing eye of wisdom and vengeance. She never lost her position in the Egyptian pantheon.The image of the serpent as the embodiment of the wisdom transmitted by Sophia was an emblem used by gnosticism, especially those sects that the more orthodox characterized as "Ophites" ("Serpent People"). The chthonic serpent was one of the earth-animals associated with the cult of Mithras. The Basilisk, the venomous "king of serpents" with the glance that kills, was hatched by a serpent, Pliny the Elder and others thought, from the egg of a cock.Outside Eurasia, in Yoruba mythology, Oshunmare was another mythic regenerating serpent.The Rainbow Serpent (also known as the Rainbow Snake) is a major mythological being for Aboriginal people across Australia, although the creation myth associated with it are best known from northern Australia. In Fiji Ratumaibulu was a serpent god who ruled the underworld and made fruit trees bloom. In the Northern Flinders Ranges reigns The Arkaroo, serpent who drank Lake Frome empty, refuges into the mountains, carving valleys and waterholes, earthquakes through snoring.Naga (Sanskrit:नाग) is the Sanskrit/Pāli word for a deity or class of entity or being, taking the form of a very large snake, found in Hinduism and Buddhism. The naga primarily represents rebirth, death and mortality, due to its casting of its skin and being symbolically "reborn".Brahmins associated naga with Shiva and with Vishnu, who rested on a 100 headed naga coiled around Shiva’s neck. The snake represented freedom in Hindu mythology because they cannot be tamed.erpents, or nāgas, play a particularly important role in Cambodian, Isan and Laotian mythology. An origin myth explains the emergence of the name "Cambodia" as resulting from conquest of a naga princess by a Kambuja lord named Kaundinya: the descendants of their union are the Khmer people. George Coedès suggests the Cambodian myth is a basis for the legend of "Phra Daeng Nang Ai", in which a woman who has lived many previous lives in the region is reincarnated as a daughter of Phraya Khom (Thai for Cambodian,) and causes the death of her companion in former lives who has been reincarnated as a prince of the Nagas. This leads to war between the "spirits of the air" and the Nagas: Nagas amok are rivers in spate, and the entire region is flooded.The Myth of the Toad King tells how introduction of Buddhist teachings led to war with the sky deity Phaya Thaen, and ended in a truce with nagas posted as guardians of entrances to temples.

If you're wondering what the tiny white dots in this image are, magnify the photo and you'll see they're that kind of little white Italian Christmas lights that in the US are usually strung over trees in shopping-center parking lots.

Because they're Italian, they're supposed to be all high-toned and classy, and not at all as common and tacky as colored lights or illuminated plastic Frosty the Snowman figures. Personally, I'd like to see two Frosties here, standing in the windows of the CITY HALL inset. Now that would be a winter light show to write home about, eh? Ya, you betcha.

Our last look at this arrestingly red edifice zooms in a bit and shows that the locally quarried Jacobsville Sandstone certainly makes a decent carving medium.

There are various brands of Upper Michigan's Jacobsville and Wisconsin's Bayfield Group sandstones that come under the general architectural heading of Lake Superior Brownstone. Some, like the "Portage Red" variety of the Jacobsville, are a cheerful brick-red, very similar in tint to the Marquette Brick shown here.

But most, like the rock on display here, are a morose maroon that appealed in some very deep and chthonic way to the designers of the Richardsonian Romanesque and other nineteenth-century styles that eschewed the Greco-Roman ideal in favor of more Medieval-derived designs. And I must admit it really appeals to me, too.

Incidentally, take a good look at the ashlar blocks that form the pilasters on the sides. I think they're supposed to be rusticated, sort of. At any rate, they show some of the pale, reduction-zone banding and mottling found on lower-grade Jacobsville.

But Holy Wah! That Super-Dooper Yooper Marquette Brick really knocks your socks off, eh?

To see the other photos and descriptions of this series, visit

The Brownstone Chronicles album.

The serpent, or snake, is one of the oldest and most widespread mythological symbols. The word is derived from Latin serpens, a crawling animal or snake. Snakes have been associated with some of the oldest rituals known to humankind and represent dual expression of good and evil.In some cultures snakes were fertility symbols, for example the Hopi people of North America performed an annual snake dance to celebrate the union of Snake Youth (a Sky spirit) and Snake Girl (an Underworld spirit) and to renew fertility of Nature. During the dance, live snakes were handled and at the end of the dance the snakes were released into the fields to guarantee good crops. "The snake dance is a prayer to the spirits of the clouds, the thunder and the lightning, that the rain may fall on the growing crops.."In other cultures snakes symbolized the umbilical cord, joining all humans to Mother Earth. The Great Goddess often had snakes as her familiars—sometimes twining around her sacred staff, as in ancient Crete—and they were worshiped as guardians of her mysteries of birth and regeneration.Historically, serpents and snakes represent fertility or a creative life force. As snakes shed their skin through sloughing, they are symbols of rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing. The ouroboros is a symbol of eternity and continual renewal of life.In the Abrahamic religions, the serpent represents sexual desire. According to the Rabbinical tradition, in the Garden of Eden, the serpent represents sexual passion. In Hinduism, Kundalini is a coiled serpent, the residual power of pure desire.Serpents are represented as potent guardians of temples and other sacred spaces. This connection may be grounded in the observation that when threatened, some snakes (such as rattlesnakes or cobras) frequently hold and defend their ground, first resorting to threatening display and then fighting, rather than retreat. Thus, they are natural guardians of treasures or sacred sites which cannot easily be moved out of harm's way.At Angkor in Cambodia, numerous stone sculptures present hooded multi-headed nāgas as guardians of temples or other premises. A favorite motif of Angkorean sculptors from approximately the 12th century CE onward was that of the Buddha, sitting in the position of meditation, his weight supported by the coils of a multi-headed naga that also uses its flared hood to shield him from above. This motif recalls the story of the Buddha and the serpent king Mucalinda: as the Buddha sat beneath a tree engrossed in meditation, Mucalinda came up from the roots of the tree to shield the Buddha from a tempest that was just beginning to arise.The Gadsden flag of the American Revolution depicts a rattlesnake coiled up and poised to strike. Below the image of the snake is the legend, "Don't tread on me." The snake symbolized the dangerousness of colonists willing to fight for their rights and homeland. The motif is repeated in the First Navy Jack of the US Navy.Serpents are connected with poison and medicine. The snake's venom is associated with the chemicals of plants and fungi[10][11][12] that have the power to either heal, poison or provide expanded consciousness (and even the elixir of life and immortality) through divine intoxication. Because of its herbal knowledge and entheogenic association the snake was often considered one of the wisest animals, being (close to the) divine. Its divine aspect combined with its habitat in the earth between the roots of plants made it an animal with chthonic properties connected to the afterlife and immortality. Asclepius, the God of medicine and healing, carried a staff with one serpent wrapped around it, which has become the symbol of modern medicine. Moses also had a replica of a serpent on a pole, the Nehushtan, mentioned in Numbers 21:8.Serpents are connected with vengefulness and vindictiveness. This connection depends in part on the experience that venomous snakes often deliver deadly defensive bites without giving prior notice or warning to their unwitting victims. Although a snake is defending itself from the encroachment of its victim into the snake's immediate vicinity, the unannounced and deadly strike may seem unduly vengeful when measured against the unwitting victim's perceived lack of blameworthiness.

Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story "The Cask of Amontillado" invokes the image of the serpent as a symbol for petty vengefulness. The story is told from the point of view of the vindictive Montresor, who hatches a secret plot to murder his rival Fortunato in order to avenge real or imagined insults. Before carrying out his scheme, Montresor reveals his family's coat-of-arms to the intended victim: "A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel." Fortunato, not suspecting that he has offended Montresor, fails to understand the symbolic import of the coat-of-arms, and blunders onward into Montresor's trap.

In America some of the Native American tribes give reverence to the rattlesnake as grandfather and king of snakes who is able to give fair winds or cause tempest. Among the Hopi of Arizona the serpent figures largely in one of the dances. The rattlesnake was worshiped in the Natchez temple of the sun and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent-god. In many Meso-American cultures, the serpent was regarded as a portal between two worlds. The tribes of Peru are said to have adored great snakes in the pre-Inca days and in Chile the Mapuche made a serpent figure in their deluge beliefs. A Horned Serpent is a popular image in Northern American natives' mythology.In one Native North American story, an evil serpent kills one of the gods' cousins, so the god kills the serpent in revenge, but the dying serpent unleashes a great flood. People first flee to the mountains and then, when the mountains are covered, they float on a raft until the flood subsides. The evil spirits that the serpent god controlled then hide out of fear. The Mound Builders associated great mystical value to the serpent, as the Serpent Mound demonstrates, though we are unable to unravel the particular associations.

Medea is a woman in Greek mythology who was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children: Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides' play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his daughter, Creusa or Glauce. The play tells of how Medea gets her revenge on her husband for this betrayal.

The myths involving Jason also invoke Medea. These have been interpreted by specialists, principally in the past, as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the Trojan War, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek "Pelasgian" cultures of mainland Greece, and the Aegean and Anatolia. Jason, Perseus, Theseus, and above all Heracles, are all "liminal" figures, poised on the threshold between the old world of shamans, chthonic earth deities, and the new Bronze Age Greek ways.

Medea figures in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a myth known best from a late literary version worked up by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century B.C. and called the Argonautica. But for all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the late epic was based on very old, scattered materials.

Medea is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess Hecate or a witch. The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony. It was discussed briefly in the work Little Illiad from the 6th century B.C.

The Myth of Jason and Medea

Medea's role began after Jason arrived from Iolcus to Colchis to claim his inheritance the Golden Fleece as his own. Medea fell in love with him and promised to help him, but only on the condition that if he succeeded, he would take her with him and marry her. Jason agreed. In a familiar mythic motif, Aeëtes promised to give him the fleece, but only if he could perform certain tasks. First, Jason had to plough a field with fire-breathing oxen that he had to yoke himself. Then, Jason had to sow the teeth of a dragon in the ploughed field (compare the myth of Cadmus). The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors. Jason was forewarned by Medea, however, and knew to throw a rock into the crowd. Unable to determine where the rock had come from, the soldiers attacked and defeated each other. Finally, Aeëtes made Jason fight and kill the sleepless dragon that guarded the fleece. Medea put the beast to sleep with her narcotic herbs. Jason then took the fleece and sailed away with Medea, as he had promised. (Some accounts say that Medea only helped Jason in the first place because Hera had convinced Aphrodite or Eros to cause Medea to fall in love with him.) Medea distracted her father as they fled by killing her brother Absyrtus. In some versions, Medea is said to have dismembered his body and scattered his parts on an island, knowing her father would stop to retrieve them for proper burial; in other versions, it is Absyrtus himself who pursued them, and was killed by Jason. During the flight, Atalanta was seriously wounded, but Medea healed her.

According to some versions, Medea and Jason stopped on her aunt Circe's island so that they could be cleansed after the murder of her brother, relieving her of blame for the deed.

Jason et Médée by Gustave Moreau (1865).On the way back to Thessaly, Medea prophesied that Euphemus, the Argo's helmsman, would one day rule over all Libya. This came true through Battus, a descendant of Euphemus.

The Argo then reached the island of Crete, guarded by the bronze man, Talos (Talus). Talos had one vein which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by a single bronze nail. According to Apollodorus, Talos was slain either when Medea drove him mad with drugs, deceived him that she would make him immortal by removing the nail, or was killed by Poeas's arrow (Apollodorus 1.140). In the Argonautica, Medea hypnotized him from the Argo, driving him mad so that he dislodged the nail and died (Argonautica 4.1638). In any case, when the nail was removed, Talos's ichor flowed out, exsanguinating and killing him. After his death, the Argo landed.

While Jason searched for the Golden Fleece, Hera, who was still angry at Pelias, conspired to make him fall in love with Medea, who she hoped would kill Pelias. When Jason and Medea returned to Iolcus, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. Medea conspired to have Pelias' own daughters kill him. She told them she could turn an old ram into a young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling it (alternatively, she did this with Aeson, Jason's father). During the demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw them into a pot. Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled to Corinth.

The Song of Songs IV

Found in the Song of Songs IV, a little of the atmosphere of large pictures on Genesis and Exodus. The composition is clearly dominated by the diagonal that takes on a winged horse, King David and Bathsheba. Its dynamic effect is increased by the movement of the wings courier and the presence of the city over which the crew appears projected in the sky.

Delicate pink previous paintings gave way to darker harmonies: Red orange accented with black lines. In this atmosphere of fire reappears the crowd of large paintings: maternity, rabbis wandering Jews, love. The crowd that celebrates the love of man and the famous woman through her their Creator.

The winged horse is a very old theme of legendary Russian. The symbolism of the horse is actually pretty much the same in all people, and is twofold: chthonic the origin and linked to the fire, it appears the impetuousness of desire, youth rights and fertility; but sometimes it leaves its dark origins to rise to heaven. Uranian and solar, heavenly white horse represents mastered and sublimated instinct.

We thought we knew all of the work of Marc Chagall ... The course painter but also a sculptor, ceramicist without forgetting mosaics, stained glass windows and the upholsterer . This is what we discover until January 11 at the Modern Art Museum of Troyes , a place that has already spent exposures to glass, ceramics and textile art.

Chagall is interested in Tapestry in 1962, when the Israeli government commissioned a decoration for the hall of the Knesset. The triptych of a monumental tapestry is entrusted to the renowned Gobelins . He will again appeal to the factory in 1973 for a tapestry located in the entrance of the Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice.

Meanwhile, in 1964, the artist met the supervisor Yvette Cauquil-Prince and is immediately seduced by its ability to achieve tapestries without losing the soul so special original paintings.

The exhibition represents 17 tapestries Yvette Cauquil-Prince who was inspired lithographs and paintings of Marc Chagall the exposed side to put them in parallel and compared.

These tapestries include Peace , loaned by the city of Sarrebourg Moselle, La Baie des Anges , Le Coq Rouge, Harlequin and A wife , a work by Chagall in homage to his Bella Rosenfeld wife died in 1944.

In these tapestries themes dear to Marc Chagall are all present , religion, nature, circus, musicians and animals, this lively and colorful medley that transports us like a dream and reminds this excerpt from a poem of Aragon:

" Chagall color is your people

Give games and bread

God it's nice when the shadow is red

and blue love "

Christophe Dard

to mark the 30 th anniversary of the death of Chagall, Marc Chagall National Museum invites the public to discover a wealth less known production of the artist: woven work.

After World War II, set in the south of France, Marc Chagall was introduced to other techniques as painting or engraving. The artist seeks to expand its plastic experiments: ceramics, stained glass, sculpture, mosaic and tapestry mobilize energy.

During his lifetime, Chagall and sees "fall of the loom" 20 tapestries for the decoration of public buildings or private collectors. Made from Chagall's works, these tapestries were executed in close collaboration with the weavers of the national Gobelins or with a large tapestry specialist, Yvette Cauquil-Prince.

Chagall and upholstery

The first tapestries are woven Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins in Paris between 1965 and 1968. This is a set of three monumental tapestries for the hall of the Knesset in Jerusalem. In 1970 - 1971, it is again the Manufacture des Gobelins is responsible for the execution of a tapestry for the future National Museum Marc Chagall Biblical Message in Nice.

But much of the work is performed woven from the works of Chagall led by Yvette Cauquil-Prince. Major protagonist of the revival of the tapestry in the XX th century, Yvette Cauquil-Prince (1928-2005) devoted his expertise and talent to the transcription tapestry works of the greatest artists of the time: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Paul Klee ... Chagall meeting in 1964. Since then, is established a fruitful dialogue that lasts two decades and beyond, in tapestries pursued Yvette Cauquil-Prince after the death of Chagall in 1985. brilliant performer of the master's work, she excels in the return of pictorial effects by means of the tapestry. It imports into the work woven throughout the expressive richness of the painted work, etched or drawn. The first tapestries, small size, are followed by large parts, giving see the model in a new format. As prime contractor, Yvette Cauquil-Prince does not limit its intervention to the reproduction of a model or its expansion. It proposes, by changing the medium and format, another reading of the work of Marc Chagall.

First tapestry exhibition at the National Marc Chagall Museum

This is the first time the Marc Chagall National Museum celebrates this technique, represented in its collections by a single piece, created for the museum, Mediterranean landscape .

The exhibition Marc Chagall. Woven works unfolds throughout the museum. It provides exceptional confrontation 12 shimmering tapestry or more nuanced and 12 original works by Chagall, who served as models for weaving.

The achievements will be discussed with the Gobelins tapestry created for the opening of the Museum (1973) and by the test printing, retail validated by Marc Chagall tapestries for the Knesset. Other tapestries presented show vividly the talented performer Yvette Cauquil-Prince.

The exhibition also explains the part of freedom of interpretation left to the contractor. One room is dedicated to the art of tapestry where the public can find the materials needed for weaving.

Monumental transposition of colorful verve of Marc Chagall, the woven work is an extension of the painted or engraved work. It invites to think the deregulation of creation, beyond the boundaries between artistic disciplines.

Police station

Anne Dopffer, general heritage curator, director of the National Museums of XX th century in the Alpes-Maritimes

Sarah Highlighting conservative Heritage National Museum Marc Chagall

troybooks.co.uk/a-witch's-natural-history.html

CHAPTER 12:

THE WITCH BY MOOR AND WOOD AND SHORE

The “secret, black and midnight hags” are waiting. He alights from his horse, his heel squelching into boggy ground. Behind him, a mosaic of moss and peaty pools stretches away to the horizon, buffeted by wind. There is not a tree in sight; the acid soil and exposure forbid the growth of anything above knee-height. Beside the pool at his feet, the moss draws water, a thirsty sponge plastered over the stone, inches thick, the air above it slick with moisture. Further out into the water, flowers hang above the surface like heads of nodding puppets, the stems blushing as if freshly bruised. Beneath the water, the plant bears little bladders, like shed reptiles’ scales adhering to the leaves. Crustaceans swim between the submerged stems, and the bladders gape like mouths, toothed with bristles. One touch of a branched antenna, and the valve trap springs and expands. Sucked inside, the crustacean struggles in vain as the sealed door slams, its prison walls exuding the juice of death. It may share its death-cell with an assortment of other partially digested insects and crustaceans, some of them still alive and threshing their appendages ever more slowly. The man knows nothing of these struggles between microscopic titans; he turns up the hill towards drier ground, where the first clumps of heather struggle to retain a foothold. His eyes are set on a triple cairn at the top of the hill, so he does not notice the plant underfoot, with its pale, curling leaves, sticky with their own exudations. Midges convulse in their death throes, their wings hopelessly glued to the surface of the leaves. There are other diminutive plants here too, with spatulate leaves bristling with appendages, all oozing a substance as sticky and seductive as toffee. A fly struggles on one of them, adhering haphazardly by one of its bulging compound eyes, doomed to buzz itself into its own minor oblivion. As it does so, the other tentacles on the leaf bend inwards to further ensnare the victim. The man pays them no heed, for he is heading up to the higher, drier heath, his mind reeling with the import of his meeting with the minions of Hecate. A wildcat yowls and bares its teeth at him, arching its back and twitching its grey bushy tail, before disappearing amongst the ling; no domestic cat – perhaps it is Graymalkin. He is Macbeth, King of Scotland, bent on his own struggle for survival, anticipating his assignation with three witches, who have already divined that they will meet him on this “blasted heath”.

Had Macbeth not been so oblivious to these struggles on a smaller scale, he might have knelt, and learnt much from the wortlore of bogland plants. The spasmodic death throes of their insect victims might have led him more quickly to his nihilistic conclusion that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The crustacean-devouring water plant was Bladderwort (Utricularia), and its terrestrial cousin with the scroll-like leaves was Butterwort (Pinguicula), so named because the digestive juices exuded by the leaves are a sort of herbal rennet. Indeed, the leaves may be added to cream in order to form butter, provided, of course, one picks the dying flies off them first. Beside this was the Sundew (Drosera), perhaps the most easily recognisable of the bogland carnivorous plants. Moorland folklore insists that the Sundew and Butterwort, together with the liliaceous, yellow flowered Bog Asphodel, are injurious to sheep and cattle, causing weakness in the bones. Although the latter is indeed poisonous to cattle, it is probably the moorland environment itself which causes the problem, since the soil, and everything that grows upon it, is calcium deficient. Paradoxically, it is also said on Colonsay that cows that have eaten Butterwort are safe from supernatural maladies and elvish arrows, and they have at times been used in conjunction with whin and juniper as a charm against maleficient witchcraft. On the Isle of Man, Sundew is traditionally used as a love-charm by hiding the sticky rosettes in the clothing of one’s intended lover, but the token might just as easily be used as a signal for a clandestine assignation. Another plant of the upland bogs, the Bog Myrtle is used as an insect-repellant, emetic and vermifuge, and in the 1860s it will figure as the main ingredient of a regenerative beer made by the landlady of the ‘Black Horse’ in Ampleforth, Yorkshire. The glands in its leaves secrete a wax which can be made into fragrant candles.

Macbeth will not pause on his way up the hill to chew on the stalk of the Heath Rush, for he is reliably informed that it causes hare-lips. Nor will he stoop to rip up the “tormenting root” of Tormentil, which jilted lovers burn at midnight on Friday to compel their lovers to return. He is soon knee-deep in heather, whose pink or purple flowers are said to be stained with Pictish blood shed in battle. It has long been used for tanning leather, it makes a refreshing dry ale, and its bell-shaped flowers are tempting to bees. Robert Graves makes an obscure and tantalising reference to an Irish tale of the goddess Garbh Ogh, collected by Dean Swift at Lough Crew. She haunted the heather moors, riding in a cart drawn by elks, accompanied by ten giant hounds, all with birds’ names, and she subsisted on venison milk and eagles’ breasts. Perhaps she was a winter goddess, for with the flowering of the heather, she built herself a triple cairn of stones and settled amongst the blooms to die, like a spent queen bee. Other parts of the moor may be covered with Bilberries, also known as Blueberries or Whortleberries, a delicacy picked in Ireland in anticipation of the feast of Lughnasadh.

The calcium deficiency in these acid soils limits the range of fauna Macbeth is likely to encounter. A stag may cross his path, the whites of his eyes visible as he hurls himself away from the likely hunter. A hen harrier may wheel overhead. There are other moorland birds too: the “treacherous” lapwing, as Chaucer called her, roused from her nest into flop-winged flight. She lets out a succession of pies and weeps the further she flies, the wan sky catching her silhouette. Now she wings a lap around the lone man, leaving her little ones behind and tempting him to follow her. Should he tread amongst them, they will scatter, spindle-shanked and peeping, with eggshells on their heads. In the distance, there may be the cackle of a grouse, prey to the hen harrier. At another time, Macbeth might have come upon the “lek”, a communal display ground used by the polygamous male grouse to attract mates. For now, the grouse pecks at the heather, scuds over sodden sphagnum bogs, bubbling and crooning to himself, and eluding the shadow of man. Since the reign of the gun-hung gamekeeper has not yet begun, he must also elude the tooth and claw of the native wildcat if he is to dance in his lek next year.

When Macbeth reaches the cairn on the flattened summit, the witches will ply him with a hallucinogenic brew. The ingredients sound disgusting, but most of them are code-words for herbs gathered somewhere in the lowlands. Shakespearean tragic heroes are fond of such places in a crisis: King Lear and his Fool came to such a place when he was insane, and learned wisdom. On his way back down the hill, a less preoccupied man might stop at a solitary rowan tree by a stone wall – the only standing tree for miles. He has need of it, for its white flowers and red berries make it a goddess tree, a tree of inspiration. He might need to pick his way through the gorse, for here it has not been piled and burnt, and were he of more tender disposition, he might repeat the old adage, “Kissing’s out of fashion when the gorse is out of bloom.” Little does he know that the witches themselves will retire to this thorny bower if ever they are pursued. But his thoughts are on matters of state: trivial, irrelevant questions to bring to this ageless place. Of course, in the end, the witches tell Macbeth nothing that the bladderwort in the bog, the wildcat in his path, the harrier in the welkin, or the bleak and pitiless moor itself could not have told him: the truth about himself.

*

Of course, she is quite as beautiful as all of the other young Russian girls throughout history who have one day become wives to a Tsar: a simple, uncomplicated beauty which is scorned in her own house, but would be sufficient to light up the throne room in her future palace. But today, her brow is knitted in furrows and her body trembles as she runs. In her hand she clutches a little wooden doll, her magical saviour in times of crises, and her knuckles whiten for fear of losing it. In the distance, dimly visible between the moonlit boles of the birches, there glows a great arc of paired lights: a dull, greenish glow that sets her teeth on edge. Everything within her is telling her to seek the safety of darkness in the woods rather than hurry towards the ring of light, for she knows why the lights glow from paired orbs: they are human skulls, glowing in the sockets with a magical luminescence. Beyond the skulls, which are mounted on stakes around the perimeter of a fence knitted from human bones, there stands a wretched little hut – or rather, it doesn’t stand exactly – it prances and scratches about in the dust, for it is mounted on a pair of grotesquely oversized hen’s legs. A thin plume of smoke rises from the chimney of this hovel, and momentarily obscures the moon, for its occupant is at home. She is the Baba Yaga, a hideous hag who always puts her guests to the test, and eats them if she finds them wanting. No doubt she is also the lingering folk memory of a dark goddess, for when she is not flaying the skin from warriors’ backs, she teaches her initiates the hard way, and they return to their own land filled with arcane wisdom. The young girl catches at the stitch in her side with her spare hand, and looks ahead in fear. She is Wassilissa the Beautiful, and whether she likes it or not, she is the Baba Yaga’s next initiate into the mysteries of the forest – or, if she is unworthy, into the mysteries of the cauldron, as viewed from the inside.

When Wassilissa overcomes her fear and presents herself to the Baba Yaga, she is taken into the squalid hut and imprisoned there. On successive days, she is given a series of increasingly absurd and impossible tasks which need not concern us here, and whilst her magically animated wooden doll is wiping away Wassilissa’s tears and solving all her problems, the Baba Yaga has locked the door behind her, climbed into her giant iron mortar, and is now flying out across the woods, rowing along through the air with her pestle, and sweeping away her trail with her kitchen broom. Some say she is off to fight magical battles in the chthonic underworld, but more likely she is off to seek her own wisdom from the woodlands that surround her home – or, given her novel mode of transvection, those farther afield.

Any normal mortal who explores a wood is likely to begin by searching for helleborines, twayblades or wood anemones in the spring and summer, or fungi in the autumn. However, for the Baba Yaga, like many other denizens of the forest, the odyssey starts not on the woodland floor, but in the treetops. Many of the birch trees in her own woodland carry “witches’ brooms” – bunched and twiggy growths which hang from the branches. To the uninitiated, these look like clumps of mistletoe; in fact, they are galls caused by a fungus which persists from year to year, sometimes producing brooms a metre in diameter, and comprising three or four hundred twigs. A single birch tree may carry nearly a hundred such excrescences at the end of its comparatively short life span of a century. Amongst the plethora of galls which afflict the neighbouring, longer-lived oak trees, one of the commonest is the “oak apple”: a rose-pink or yellow spongy ball of abnormal plant tissue which is the tree’s defensive response to the insertion of parthenogenetic eggs into the developing bud by a wingless female cynipid wasp. Every oak apple is pleurilocular, containing around thirty chambers, each a cradle for a developing grub which gorges its bloated body on juices from the tree. In late summer, the imagoes gouge their way out, leaving the oak apples riddled with tiny holes. In Britain after the Restoration of Charles II, these curious plant-tumours were worn by Royalists on May 29th, Oak Apple Day, to commemorate his birthday and return from exile. In school, children who failed to wear the regulation oak-sprig were whipped with nettles. The oak was the ideal tree to symbolise the Royalist cause, given the popular rumour that the king hid himself from his Puritan pursuers inside a hollow oak tree at Boscopel. Although the fashionably sceptical Professor Ronald Hutton has persistently denied that the celebrations might pre-date the Civil War, many have concluded that Oak Apple Day is the remnant of a pagan fertility rite. Certainly, it has gained its own neo-Pagan associations in recent centuries. When Roger Deakin attended Oak Apple Day in the Royal Forest of Grovely in Wiltshire, he found a whole range of contradictions in the involvement of conservative country people in obviously pagan rituals, apparently supported by the church, and despite the Royalist history of the rites, deeply influenced by socialist responses to the Enclosure Acts. Oak Apple Day was an “annual reassertion of rights to collect wood” on common land. In the midst of this controversy, however, no one appears to have asked the obvious question, which is why oak apples specifically should be worn. It seems a strange – or, for those with republican sympathies, oddly appropriate – symbol of monarchy: a sham fruit, a spongy cancer writhing inside with parasitic grubs. As a symbol of fertility, however, it is potent: it reminds me of nothing so much as the ontological eccentricities of the sixteenth century miller Menocchio, resurrected for posterity by that admirable historian Carlo Ginzburg, who maintained that the origin of the universe lay in putrefaction: the world was a piece of cheese from which worms spontaneously arose. In any case, it is doubtful whether the Royalists realised that the wasps responsible for this ambiguous symbol have a curious and cryptic double life-cycle. In July, the winged imagoes mate, and the females penetrate the soil, for the next generation will be infants suckling on subsided sap, parasites not of growing buds, but of hidden roots in the humus. A descent into the underworld indeed.

In late July, the oak leaves are heavily mined by tiny caterpillars which live beneath the epidermis, most of them larvae of micro-moths. The Baba Yaga’s flight through the canopy is the more pleasurable because of the Purple Emperor butterflies, largest of the Lepidoptera in northern climes. The male will choose the tallest oak for his throne, and will only be tempted to the forest floor by things white and glittering, or by rotting carcasses which he can probe with his hungry tongue. Perhaps the Baba Yaga will follow him: he is unlikely to find the carcase of a badger, for they like to intern their dead within their own setts, until their skulls, forever interlocked with their jawbones, are carelessly unearthed when the dwellings require extension. It is too late, too, for the flowers of the early purple orchid, whose tubers were once the source of the invigorating, semen-thick, starchy drink known as salop, a favourite refreshment of Victorian labourers, and a renowned aphrodisiac. It was once said that there were enough purple orchids growing in Cobham Park to pleasure every seaman’s wife in Rochester. Perhaps this was another form of sympathetic magic: the twin tubers of orchids look like bollocks. The Purple Emperor flits on, over those withered stems, and alights instead on the corpse of a roebuck, already rotting. Its juices are rank and leaching into the soil, attended by burying beetles and maggots; the eye sockets are sunken. As the butterfly’s tongue begins to probe, the Baba Yaga surely pays her respects to this horned one of the woods. Modern humans think of deer as the enemies of the forest, for they chew the shoots of newly coppiced trees. Whilst this is certainly true, there ought to be room for gratitude: a deer-filled wood is a bluebell wood, for the deer clear enough foliage for these plants to gain their requisite sunlight. More importantly, in the Middle Ages, when forests were royal preserves, the trees were maintained as cover for the deer; without the deer, the woods would have been felled for pasture, and there would have been nowhere for Robin Hood to hide.

At the edges of the clearings in our wood of oak and birch, the smaller trees flourish. A hazel bends over a stream, waiting to drop its wisdom-filled nuts into the water, where, perhaps, the salmon of knowledge may swallow them. The spindle tree grows here too, and when all is gaunt in winter, her rose-pink, poisonous berries will shrink to reveal orange seeds: joyful punctuations of the prevailing gloom. No doubt the Baba Yaga has cut the spindle to make wands, for its white and lightweight timber is admirably suited. Indeed, it is said that a despairing seamstress who thrusts her spindle (derived from this tree) into the ground, will soon be delighted to perceive it taking root, producing greenish-white flowers and fruit as red as roses. No wonder the archetypal witch is often depicted with distaff and spindle.

These woods are the haunt of mustelids: not just the badger, but also the stoat and weasel. In winter, the stoat becomes the ermine, whose snow-white coat is a long and undulating sentence ending in a black full-stop: the tip of the tail. These tail tips, sewn with alarming profusion into trimmings of royal gowns, are the black wisps in the fluffy whitenesses which adorn the necks of mediaeval kings and queens, but in its natural state, the stoat is a wily creature with whom any witch should identify. Gamekeepers hate them, and cleave their skulls whenever they can find them, for they are crafty of mind and supple of body, and can take down creatures many times their size. The weasel is even smaller: a beady-eyed, ripple-bodied killing machine with teeth like needles. The late twelfth century Breton poet, Marie de France, who was a champion of misunderstood lovers and werewolves alike, has been one of the few authors (even the enlightened Kenneth Grahame fails in this regard) to ascribe noble qualities to the weasel. In her extraordinary lay known as Eliduc, the hero’s lover lies dead, and his longsuffering wife feels for him in his despondency. She sits weeping beside the bier of the woman who has been bedding her husband, when all at once, a weasel runs past, only to be struck dead by a stick-throwing servant standing nearby. Moments later, a second weasel, the first one’s mate, comes and finds her dead. He runs outside and picks a flower with his teeth, and uses it to revive her. In what must qualify as one of the most selfless acts in all romantic literature, Eliduc’s wife retrieves the flower, resurrects her husband’s adulterous lover, and graciously retires to a convent, and the weasels, one hopes, live on to perpetuate their species.

The mixed woodlands of oak, birch and ash lie in the lowlands. The beechwoods of the chalky uplands are quite different, and the Baba Yaga would fly far to find them. Mature beeches allow little sunlight to filter down to the forest floor, and as a result, the vegetation is sparse. One flower, however, has found a niche, and its perspicacity must arouse the admiration of any witch. The bird’s nest orchid contains no chlorophyll, and as a consequence, it is not green, but yellow and fleshy, with a purplish tinge. The flowers are not gaudy, but brown, designed to attract flies, and the plant does not photosynthesise, for it is saprophytic, deriving its nutrients not from the sun but from an underground fungus with which it shares a symbiotic relationship – and the fungus, in turn, is dependent on the humus provided by the rotting foliage of the beeches. Every year, the orchid flowers by the bole of the beech, unless perchance its underground rhizomes encounter a stone. Should they do so, the plant will flower underground. A model of perverse and persevering persistence, it is surprising that the bird’s nest orchid does not play a bigger role in folklore; indeed, the only explanation for this is the fact that it is hardly ever noticed, for without green colouration, plants are nearly always presumed to be dead.

It would be impossible for the Baba Yaga to frequent these woodlands without encountering a fox, and it would be unlikely indeed that she should fail to identify with him. Since the Middle Ages, the French have understood the fox most intimately, immortalising him as Reynard, the trickster who always has the last laugh. Sometimes he disguises himself as a monk, tonsuring the unsuspecting wolf with a cauldron of boiling water. On other occasions, he shams his own death, enticing birds within reach of his snapping jaws. Chaucer lets him sink his teeth into the neck of the narcissistic cockerel Chantecler, and in the mediaeval French romances, he even creates a martyr, Coupée the chicken, whose earthly life was so cruelly cut short. He presides laughingly over the castration of his rival Tybert the cat by a fornicating priest, and personally engineers the trapping of Bruin the Bear inside a cleft oak. Ever victorious, Reynard is the archetypal guiser. If you don’t believe it, seek him out yourself in a summer glade where the rabbits are chewing cowslips: he sidles along, respectfully distant, and all at once he is turning somersaults as though he has gone mad, biting the dirt and threshing at his own tail with his hindlegs. The rabbits are mesmerised by this vision of a predator turned insane; slowly they creep closer. Reynard’s game is an eloquent essay in predatory hypnosis. One rabbit strays too near, and the muscles ripple on the fox’s muzzle, the canines bared. The pupils in the yellow irises congeal into sharp lozenges of dark. Suddenly, the fox-fool is a lethal machine, and the rabbit curls, screaming in agony in the fox’s jaws. The Baba Yaga is not dissimilar in her dealings with her own victims.

When winter comes, the broadleaved woods are bare, and only hollies and the occasional yew can relieve the monotony. At this time, no doubt, the Baba Yaga steers for the coniferous woodlands, eschewing only those of larch, which alone among the cone-bearing trees are deciduous. She seeks a creature every witch should revere. Of course, if we have had any contact whatever with modern environmental movements, we in Britain are immediately sure what creature she is after. It must be the red squirrel – that totemic creature whose imprint ensures fundraising success for every wildlife charity. Ousted from the woodlands of the south of our islands by the American grey – so this myth insists – the red squirrel persists in the Scotch Pines of the Highlands, staunch to the end like some latter-day Dad’s Army. We conveniently forget that it is we who introduced the grey squirrel, so that we can demonise it, and that it is we in our unprecedented population explosions of the twenty-first century who turn our woodlands into minute islands in the sea of homogeneity, dooming the less resilient species to extinction. But the Baba Yaga does not seek the red squirrel. She is after something far more elusive: a lissom-limbed creature whose every movement is sinuous, smearing pungent scents on the bark of the pine bough. His pelt is the warmest brown: dark chocolate laced with white, and had he not been persecuted to near extinction in our country, the grey squirrel would never have extended its range. Should the fresh meat run out, he is resilient enough to resort to caterpillars, or even bilberries. These days, it takes a witch to find him, led onward by the pricking of her thumbs, and even then she must crane her neck, or mount once more to the treetops in her mortar, for this creature scampers where most men scorn to look. Furtive, trembling with the pulse of a hungry metabolism, the pine marten claws the bough. Like the eyes of Wassilissa’s doll, its pupils are aglow.

*

The path beneath my feet is an ancient wickerwork of the roots of elms, and the ivied trunks beside me are columns in a cathedral of green, for Dutch Elm Disease has never ravaged the trees on the Isles of Scilly. Chiff-chaffs and wrens, roof-boss creatures come to life, peer between the leaves with beady eyes, and beside the raised path the little fenland supports a hundred tiny chapels of hemlock water dropwort, twinkling woodbines, and green and fleshy liverworts on gleaming walls of soil. A choir of hoverflies is singing, a tracery of elm twigs arching above them. I am on my way through the shrine to nature known as Holy Vale, heading towards Porth Hellick, a bay gouged into the granite on the eastern side of the island of St. Mary’s. As I emerge from the fenland, where herons and egrets curl their harpoon-headed necks like question-marks, the dromedary-shaped geological feature known as Camel Rock looms in front of me. Shallow sea-water laps over the bladder-wrack as I make my way past it, and out in the deeper water, I glimpse the arched Roman-nose of a grey seal, his nostrils flared to drink in the air. Suddenly, he submerges, and I time the interval before his re-emergence, not daring to hold my own breath. He has exhaled before diving, every pocket of air expelled from shrunken alveoli, his bloodstream constricted, for this reduces his buoyancy. His blood is almost black in colour, for it is packed with haemoglobin in order to carry additional reserves of oxygen during the dive. Three, four, five minutes, and his head is bobbing up ahead, like a stub-nosed buoy with whiskers. Gulls skim the sea’s dark undulations. A cormorant dives, and turnstones cry. The sun turns the sea mercurial, and the shoreline is a mirror with a glazed meniscus. As the old seal breasts the surge, I almost hear the slop of mercury, and then the sun shifts, the sea a green glaze crusted with foam. The boulders beside the path are mounded with unsalvaged disjecta: a winkle, a pebble, a cormorant’s skull.

Beyond Camel Rock, an ancient stairway has been cut into the stone. Ahead of me, the cliff forms a great overhang, known locally as Clapper Rock. One can imagine it rapping like a gargantuan castanet on a windy night, and in the past I have taken children here on bivouacs, and they have scared each other sleepless with tales of the ghosts of suicides. As I mount the stairs, the light intensifies; the stones seem to be vibrating. Spectral figures climb the stairs ahead of me, shawled and murmuring, disappearing behind a curve in the rocky cleft. I know who they are. In 1750, Robert Heath wrote the first ever book about the Isles of Scilly, and in it he described a collective of Healing Aunts whose traditions had been handed down from time immemorial. “They are all good Botanists,” he tells us, “and have added a great many Herbs to their Catalogue… Their Systems and Hypotheses are to help those in Distress for Pity’s sake rather than for Profit.” In 1750, the most senior amongst them was Sarah Jenkins, a wise-woman and midwife of considerable local standing. That she was also a witch seems very likely: in her youth she certainly knew of the fairies which inhabited the chambered cairn of Buzza Hill near Hugh Town, whose “nightly Pranks, aerial Gambols, and Cockel-shell Abodes are now quite unknown.” Supposedly, they were “charm’d” or “conjur’d out of the islands” by cunning-men from Cornwall, but surely I have seen them myself, belted with leather of Laminaria, their menfolk in britches of kelp, their women skirted with Porphyra, with purses of bladder-wrack, stitched with strands of Chorda. I am sure that to this day they dance to tunes of fiddles fashioned out of the skulls of guillemots, and beat on urchin drums.

I think I know where the ghosts of the Healing Aunts are going. They are heading across the heath towards the beach of Pelistry, beyond which lies Toll’s Island, a grassy clump of rock connected to the beach by a sand-bank at low tide. In the eighteenth century, Toll’s Island would have hung under a pall of noisome smoke, for it was covered with kelp-pits tended by wizened old ladies puffing perversely on blackened clay pipes. The kelp was burned to a fine ash and then exported for use in glass-making, a meagre source of revenue for the poverty-stricken island folk. Beyond the kelp-pits stands Pellew’s Redoubt, a relic of the Civil War, from which not even these islands, twenty-eight miles into the Atlantic, were entirely free. At the far end, the sea slops and gurgles against the rocks, and it is here, I am sure, that the Healing Aunts are heading. The rockpools here are a candy-shop of colours: Coralina plants, articulated like puppets and pink as musk, kelps, oar shaped, made of chocolate leather, and edible sea lettuces, pistachio green. I bend down and dip my hands in the water. There is the sideways scuttle of a retreating crab, a frightened goby’s blinkless eye, the urchin’s serried army bristling. There are limpets and pixie cups and slowly moving snails clearing trails in sand. Despite the turmoil and pounding of the sea, delicate anemones spread their tentacles, or lie above the waterline like globules of blind red jelly.

Here the Healing Aunts will find Dillisk, a membrane-thin ribbon of red seaweed known to the Scots as Dulse, Rhodymenia palmata. Shawled in ragged wool, Sarah Jenkins bends hunchbacked over the rocks, plucks with scrabbling fingers the limp Dillisk from the stone, or rolls up her grubby sleeve, and picks it where it swells in swirling ribbons underwater. It clings to her skin as though it has been smeared with bacon grease. Rich in iodine, Dillisk has long been an essential component of the diet of coastal peoples, and during the Irish potato blight, it doubtless saved lives. Hanging in the kitchen, it withers at the edges, grows a powdery crust of salt, and stiffens like red parchment, until wet weather leaves it hanging flaccid: it is, in fact, the world’s first barometer. Combined with sea lettuce and mixed with oatmeal, it is fried to make nutritious cakes. The seaweed known as “Irish moss” grows here too, its fronds rainbowed with bioluminescence under water. Medicinally, it is an anticoagulant, and a treatment for bronchitis, bladder infections and kidney irritation; it is also an effective gelling agent. The seaweeds are used here for fertilisers too, and wrack-cutters were equipped with special scythes for the purpose of harvesting the larger plants. Other seaweeds had folkloric significance: Viking descendents on Iceland were afraid of a hideous child-eating troll-woman named Grýla, whose coat was made of seaweed, and whose fifteen tails were made of the knotted wrack, Ascophyllum nodosum. In addition to her child-devouring cat, she had a string of husbands, none of whom could bear her carnivorous habits for very long, until at last she found a sort of happiness with Leppalúði, who was able to quell his nausea for long enough to father a multitude of offspring upon her, all of whom preyed upon human children. Similarly, Norse burial grounds on the Orkneys were later identified as homes of the Trows, semi-aquatic monsters who preyed on human souls. According to Jo Ben, writing in the early seventeenth century, the Stronsay Trows “very often go with the women there”, and they are clad in red seaweed, with horse-like bodies. A Trow’s penis, too, “is like that of a horse”, and the testicles are particularly large. At the opposite extreme of Britain, Scilly too is covered with cairns and tombs, and it seems reasonable to suppose that in former ages, these also had their fair complement of seaweed-clad monsters. On a windy night on Scilly, it is difficult to believe that they do not exist.

No doubt the Healing Aunts did not confine their ministry to St Mary’s. There are five inhabited islands in Scilly today, but in their day, Samson too was inhabited by two wind-worn families, the Woodcocks and the Webbers, who eked out an existence by fishing and kelp-burning before they were evicted in the nineteenth century by the lord of Tresco, Augustus Smith, who built a deer-park on the island, only to find that the deer scorned the place and swam back to Tresco. It is certain that there were magical traditions – not all of them entirely benevolent – on the other islands too, for the well of St. Warna on St. Agnes was once filled with bent pins, each designed to cause a shipwreck, and St. Agnes herself is represented in paintings with a stang, luring tall ships onto the rocks. However, today I will follow the Healing Aunts back to Hugh Town, and take their spectral boat to Samson. On the way, a sandwich tern is above me, slouch-winged and still in the air as a strained lever. All about the boat now, they hover, their necks cocked like flintlocks, their stretched wings bracketing the wind, the watchspring wound, near to breaking. The flintlock springs, and one bird makes a soundless plunge, harpoon-billed and hollow boned. For a moment, it is a stab of white cleaving the water. A sand-eel writhes, and the tern bursts shimmer-feathered back into the air. Riding this swell in winter, I might meet the Immer Loon, or Great Northern Diver, a bird whose ancestors once swum with ichthyosaurs.

There is no jetty on Samson: the spectral boat beaches on the sand of Bar Point at low tide. The beach is a white hump, with a single line of weed. At the top, there is dune grass bleached by brine, and in the spring, pyramidal orchids bloom in profusion. On Dune Hill, the first of Samson’s two granite humps, there is a string of cairns from the days when Scilly was known as Ennor. There is yellow furze, gnarled ling, and a petering path, lined with thrushes’ anvils, each with its own snail-shell cairn. Always, there are the wind-flayed sternums of gulls, rock-pipits, and once fearless wrens, the bleached wings still attached. I will follow the Aunts down the hill, towards the spume-worn Neck, and enter this empty, roofless home to my right, stooping beneath the rafter that would have been. There is an uncanny, unfathomable silence. I can almost hear the wheeze of a Woodcock, his clay pipe clenched in stained incisors. The air here is thick, and it is hard to breathe, for there is an emptiness, like the orbs of a gull’s skull. Up the slope towards South Hill, another house beckons me, armpit deep in foxgloves and red-campions, and fringed with nettles - nitrogen-loving plants which frequent the past abodes of human beings. The hard-hewn lintel is perched precarious as a bird, and inside, the low hearth is lichen-bearded. There is the same silence, the same thickness, the same constriction of the throat; I know I am breathing ghosts, not air. I half-hear the sigh of a Webber, worn from kelp-burning, aching to rest her legs beside the fire that would have been. And now I am back out into the vacancies of brown bracken, walking by bluebells, grown wild from some garden long-gone.

The silences of Samson, here at the Atlantic end of the British Isles, hold within them the profoundest lesson a witch can learn. We humans are transitory: we are walking ghosts. Our hearths encrust; our lintels fall. Our clay pipes lie crushed in the strand. Our remnants are chipped flints, stone bottle stoppers, plastic flotsam. Our broken boats encrust with goose-barnacles. The Healing Aunts knew this: they have brought me here so I may know it too. The wounds we inflict on nature are skin deep; it will master us in the end. If you don’t believe me, take the tourist-boat to Samson – the modern Scillonians will gladly take your money. Sit up there on South Hill and listen. Hear their yawls and cries. Glance down at their mottled eggs on the peaty pathways. Samson does not belong to human beings. It is owned by gulls, and the ghosts of all that would have been.

Euboea, Eretria

Tetradrachm circa 160, AR 16.85 g. Draped bust of Artemis r., hair in korymbos, bow and quiver over her l. shoulder. Rev. EΡETΡIEΩN Cow standing r., with filleted horns, head facing; in exergue, ΦIΛIΠΠOΣ. All within wreath. Regling, ZfN 38, 1928, 57 (this obverse die). Thompson, ANSMN 5, p. 27, 3 (this coin, not illustrated). Waggoner, ANSMN 25, 1980, p. 9 (this coin cited). Mørkholm, Early Hellenistic Coinage, pl. XLI, 612 (this coin). BCD Euboia 342 (this coin).

Extremely rare and in exceptional condition for the issue. A wonderful portrait of Hellenistic style, lovely old cabinet tone and extremely fine

Ex Leu 28, 1981, 106 and Lanz 111, 2002, BCD, 342 sales. From the Anthedon hoard of 1935 (IGCH 223).

A variety of coins were struck from archaic through Roman times on Euboea, an island off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland that, as its name suggests, was “a land rich in cows.” Being so-named, it is no surprise that cows are a prominent badge on the coins of the island. Issues were produced at the cities of Chalkis, Eretria, Histiaia and Carystus, as well as by the Euboean League. BCD has observed that the cities tended to stop striking their independent coinages when the league coins were in production. Eretria was a prosperous coastal city located opposite the northernmost tip of Attica. It had two major phases of coinage. The first, from c.525 to 465 B.C., consists of tetradrachms and staters that show on their obverse a cow standing left, with its head reverted to receive a scratching from its left rear hoof. The reverses portray an octopus with the tips of its tentacles artfully curled. There was a degree of variety in the composition of these designs, and on the smallest fractional silver coins, obols and hemiobols, the obverse bore only a facing cow’s head. This enchanting tetradrachm is one of the flagship coins of the second phase, which may have began c.180 B.C., about a generation after the island had been freed from Macedonian rule in 196 by the proclamation of T. Quinctius Flamininus. (Oddly enough, in 198 Flamininus had virtually destroyed Eretria in an effort to defeat the Macedonians within, taking with him many works of art as his share of the spoils.) The style and fabric of these issues have matured considerably, and they represent some of the finest workmanship from the age of Hellenistic coinage. Artemis had a thriving cult nearby at Amarynthus, thus she is portrayed on the obverse. The reverse shows a laurel wreath in which a docile cow stands with its head facing the viewer. The fillets hanging from the cow’s head indicate it has been selected for sacrifice. This almost certainly is the case, for the worship of Artemis Amarysia locally had two aspects: a chthonic Artemis to whom defective or maimed sheep were offered, and Artemis Olympia, for whom bulls were sacrificed. This particular coin was part of the Anthedon hoard (ICGG 223) found in Boeotia in 1935. It is an important hoard that contained more than 25 silver coins, including four tetradrachms and one octobol of Chalcis, six tetradrachms and four octobols of Eretria, and ten New Style tetradrachms of Athens. The find was much discussed by those trying to establish absolute dates for the New Style coinage because it contained the first four issues of that series. Margaret Thompson was convinced that the Eretria tetradrachms in this hoard were struck in about 196, immediately after the city’s liberation from Macedon, and based upon that presumption and this hoard she tied the start of the New Style coinage to 196/5 B.C. D.M. Lewis, who championed a ‘low chronology’ which down-dated Thompson’s estimate by some 30 to 35 years (which is still the most widely held view), was not convinced that the Eretrian coins were stuck right after its liberation, and suggested that the Anthedon hoard was buried in about 161 B.C.

NAC78, 261

ceramica comune

2nd half 6th c. BCE

From Pontecagnano (see on Pleiades), southern sanctuary (santuario meridionale) of Apollo

The Etruscan graffito inscription reads:

manθ

"Manth"

Manth was an Etruscan infernal deity, assimilable to a chthonic Apollo

Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Pontecagnano, Campania, Italy

inv. 138714

#1 texture on the CD package (more shots below) of the new chthonic album

CHTHONIC Japan Tour "演武の道 The Way of Ian-Bu"

the First day, 2014. 02. 21. at Fukuoka Drum Be-1.

Chthonic supporting Satyricon at O2 Academy Islington on 14/11/2013[Daniel Gray www.deadbysunrise.co.uk www.facebook.com/deadbysunrsiephotography]

Public Art "Reclining Figure" (1981)

Henry Moore (1898 - 1983)

Bronze Edition 2/9

Considered an iconic example of the British sculptor’s mature work, Reclining Figure by Henry Moore was a gift from The Angels of the Arts, a major supporter of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. It has a prominent place of honor between Center Tower and the upper entrance to Segerstrom Hall, at the top of Peter Walker’s entrance garden to each building.

Reclining Figure, like the majority of Moore’s public works in cities around the world, is based on the human figure—usually standing, sitting, or most often, reclining on a plinth. No other sculptor’s imagination was more manifestly connected to his past than Moore’s. His work consistently refers to women like his mother, a stalwart matriarch from a mining town who always nurtured and sheltered her family.

Moore’s sculptural process was one of modeling and smoothing the “body” of a single mass rather than constructing forms. His impulse was to preserve the traditional values of carving and casting that went back to his Yorkshire childhood and further to its ancient roots. Vital and mysterious, like the chthonic spirit embodied in the dolmens of Stonehenge, Moore’s reclining female forms are, the artist believed, universal shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned to respond.

The Tempio di Castore e Polluce (or Tempio dei Dioscuri) is probably Agrigento's most iconic temple, even a symbol of Classical Sicily. Unfortunately, it is misleading, because the northwest corner of which is in a modern reconstruction from 1836, created using pieces from various other temples. It includes four columns and a portion of the entablature. The traces of stucco are original. The temple itself measured 31 m à 13.39 m (101.7 ft à 43.9 ft), and would likely have been a Doric peripteral with 6 x 13 columns, dating to about the mid-5th century BC.

The Dioscuri twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, were sons of Leda and Zeus, who transformed himself into a swan to seduce her.

The temple rises inside the sanctuary of the chthonic divinities (Demeter and Core) and is therefore likely to have been built in honor of these deities and not of Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri).

=======

Valle dei Templi, an archaeological site in Agrigento, is one of the most outstanding examples of Greater Greece art and architecture and the largest archaeological site in the world (1,300 hectares).

Valle dei Templi, Sicily. 2018

The Samothrace Temple Complex, known as the Sanctuary of the Great Gods (Modern Greek: Ιερό των Μεγάλων Θεών Ieró ton Megalón Theón), is one of the principal Pan-Hellenic religious sanctuaries, located on the island of Samothrace within the larger Thrace. Built immediately to the west of the ramparts of the city of Samothrace, it was nonetheless independent, as attested to by the dispatch of city ambassadors during festivals.

It was celebrated throughout Ancient Greece for its Mystery religion, a Chthonic religious practice as renowned as the Eleusinian Mysteries. Numerous famous people were initiates, including the historian Herodotus – one of very few authors to have left behind a few clues to the nature of the mysteries, the Spartan leader Lysander, and numerous Athenians. The temple complex is mentioned by Plato and Aristophanes.

During the Hellenistic period, after the investiture of Phillip II, it formed a Macedonian national sanctuary where the successors to Alexander the Great vied to outdo each other's munificence. It remained an important religious site throughout the Roman period. Hadrian visited, and Varro described the mysteries. The cult fades from history towards the end of Late Antiquity, when the temple would have been closed during the persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire.

Taf 001 7734 Samothrake Taf I. Samothrake Neue Archaeologische Untersuchungen auf Samothrake ausgeführt im Auftrage des k.k. Ministeriums für Kultus und Unterricht mit Unterstützung seiner Majestät Corvette Frundsberg Commandant Kropp von Alexander Conze Alois Hauser Otto Benndorf mit LXXVI Tafeln und 43 Illustrationen im Texte Wien Druck ubd Verlag Carl Gerold's Sohn 1880. Istituto tecnico ""Leonardo da Vinci"" Fiume Biblioteca dei professori

Feb 2018 Vatican museums..

Feb 2018 Vatican museums

he Apollo Belvedere or Apollo of the Belvedere—also called the Pythian Apollo[1]—is a celebrated marble sculpture from Classical Antiquity.

It was rediscovered in central Italy in the late 15th century, during the Renaissance. From the mid-18th century it was considered the greatest ancient sculpture by ardent neoclassicists, and for centuries epitomized ideals of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world. It is now found in the Cortile delle Statue of the Pio-Clementine Museum of the Vatican Museums complex.

The Greek god Apollo is depicted as a standing archer having just shot an arrow. Although there is no agreement as to the precise narrative detail being depicted, the conventional view has been that he has just slain the serpent Python, the chthonic serpent guarding Delphi—making the sculpture a Pythian Apollo. Alternatively, it may be the slaying of the giant Tityos, who threatened his mother Leto, or the episode of the Niobids.

The large white marble sculpture is 2.24 m (7.3 feet) high. Its complex contrapposto has been much admired, appearing to position the figure both frontally and in profile. The arrow has just left Apollo's bow and the effort impressed on his musculature still lingers. His hair, lightly curled, flows in ringlets down his neck and rises gracefully to the summit of his head, which is encircled with the strophium, a band symbolic of gods and kings. His quiver is suspended across his left shoulder. He is entirely nude except for his sandals and a robe (chlamys) clasped at his right shoulder, turned up on his left arm, and thrown back.

The lower part of the right arm and the left hand were missing when discovered and were restored by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli (1507–1563), a sculptor and pupil of Michelangelo.

Freddy of Chthonic live at Taipei.

Photo By Handerson_Yau Photography

Chthonic@WOA2014

Located in southern Athens, between the Acropolis and the Ilissos river, the Olympeion was the sanctuary of Olympian Zeus. Here stands one of the greatest ancient temples of Zeus and, according to Vitruvius, one of the most famous marble buildings ever constructed. The sanctuary's foundation is attributed to mythical Deukalion. The site also comprises the temple of Apollo Delphinios - the sanctuary of Apollo Delphinios was traditionally associated with Theseus - and a tripartite building with a south courtyard of ca. 500 BC. The latter has been identified as the Delphinion Court, which was allegedly founded by Aegeas.

The site of the Olympeion was a place of worship of chthonic deities and of ancient Athenian heroes Athens since prehistory. Peisistratus the Young initiated the construction of a monumental temple in 515 BC, but failed to complete his project because of the fall of tyranny. The temple remained unfinished for approximately 400 years, until Antiochus IV Epiphanes resumed its construction in 174 BC. It was completed in AD 124/125 by Emperor Hadrian, who associated himself with Zeus and adopted the title of Olympios. A large poros temple dedicated to Apollo Delphinios was also built on the site around 450 BC. It was abandoned in the third century AD. The temple was Doric peripteral with two columns in antis on the front and back. In the second century AD, Hadrian built a Roman temple of the Doric order, with a built enclosure and an outdoor altar, probably of Kronos or Rea. A Roman peristyle for the meetings of the Chapter of the Panhelleloi was also constructed in the same area, and a possible residence of a prominent member of the Chapter was added on the rock of the Olympian Land in the Late Roman period.

Photo shoot before the Barfly gig.

There is a story here. There was supposedly an "official" photographer taking pics who to be quite honest was little more than a fanboy. And he annoyed me. Lots. This was shot in sodium light in a housing estate with no flash and the 50mm f1.4. While he was poncing around. Grrr.

Long-range, noisy pic of Doris "Thunder Tears" in action at the Illingen gig.

Last gig of the European tour. Amazing show. Sad it's all over.

The Erectheum is situated on the most sacred site of the Acropolis. It is said to be where Poseidon left his trident marks in the rock, and Athena's olive tree sprouted, in their battle for possession of the city. Named after Erechtheus, one of the mythical kings of Athens, the temple was a sanctuary to both Athena Polias, and Erechtheus-Poseidon. Construction took many years, being halted during the brief respite of the Peloponnesian War referred to as the Peace of Nikias, and resuming in 410 BC. Best estimates have completion around 395 BC. It has been used for a range of purposes including a harem for the wives of the Turkish disdar in 1463. It was completely destroyed by a Turkish shell in 1827 during the War of Independence causing hated disputes over restoration.

The Erectheum has three main parts: the main section of the temple, the north porch, and the Porch of Caryatids. The main section is divided into an eastern and a western cella. The western cella housed altars to Poseidon, Butes and Hephaestus and a snake pit dedicated to the chthonic gods. A 32 foot beam ran across its length (cuttings for supporting struts are still visible) rosettes decorated the walls. The ledge above the door to the Caryatid porch held Kammimachos' famous gold palm-tree lamp.

In front of the western cella sit Athena's olive tree and the pre-invasion terrace wall of the old temple. Pausanias perpetuates the myth that the day after the Persians burned the Acropolis in 480 BC, the tree produced a new shoot four feet long. Tradition has it that this tree traces its roots back to the tree Athena originally planed in her bid for Attica. Although the tree was cut down by numerous invaders from Sulla in 86 BC to the Turks in 1456, each time a sprig was saved and replanted. The last replanting was made in 1952 by the American School, who saved it after the Germans cut it down during the 1942 occupation.

The columns of the North Porch sport a guillache pattern and held glass inserts of four colors. A hole in the floor allows one to see the marks of Poseidon's trident, and an open space in the ceiling allows Poseidon to re-hurl his trident, should he wish. Although certainly remarkable, this three-pronged mark in the rock is not the site of the salt water well that Poseidon caused to be by striking the ground with his trident. That long-lost well would have been just inside the north door to the cella. Near the north porch of the Erechtheum is the grave of Erechtheus, mythical king of Athens.

The South Porch is commonly called the Caryatid Porch. The women are caught midstride, with the three on the left sporting bent left knees and the remaining bent right. The identity of the Caryatids is unknown. Theories range from criminals forced to bear a heavy burden to the Arrephoroi chosen to deliver the peplos to Athena to young initiates of Artemis at Brauron to upper-class Athenian women. The southwest corner of the porch lies atop the Grave of Cecrops, so they could be his defenders. The ceiling coffers of the Caraytid Porch are almost entirely intact. Historians differ on whether they were paneled and painted dark blue with gold stars or inset with panels of colored glass.

2009 July

ChthoniC 閃靈

New MV making....

Bignor Roman Villa was a large Roman courtyard villa which has been excavated and put on public display on the Bignor estate in the English county of West Sussex. It is well-known for its high quality mosaic floors, which are some of the most complete and intricate in the country.

This Medusa's head is still so fresh and clear that it could have been constructed recently. If you did not know better, the coloured tessarae pieces could have been laid a few days before. She stares out at us from a long distant past. The hands that so carefully made her are long gone but the ancient mythology she represents reminds us of tales still handed down to today's generations. Especially in the two versions of the 'Clash of the Titans' films.

In Greek mythology Medusa , was a Gorgon, a chthonic (spirits of the underworld) monster, and a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. Gazing directly upon her would turn onlookers to stone. She was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. In classical antiquity the image of the head of Medusa appeared in the evil-averting device known as the Gorgoneion.

In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid, Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," priestess in Athena's temple, but when she and the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon lay together in Athena's temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa's beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well-deserved.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bignor_Roman_Villa

"Cupressus sempervirens, the Mediterranean Cypress (also known as Italian, Tuscan, or Graveyard Cypress, or Pencil Pine) is a species of cypress native to the eastern Mediterranean region, in northeast Libya, southern Albania, southeast Greece (Crete, Rhodes), southern Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Egypt, western Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Malta, Italy, western Jordan, and also a disjunct population in Iran. It is a medium-sized coniferous evergreen tree to 35 m (115 ft) tall, with a conic crown with level branches and variably loosely hanging branchlets.[1] It is very long-lived, with some trees reported to be over 1,000 years old.

The foliage grows in dense sprays, dark green in colour. The leaves are scale-like, 2–5 mm long, and produced on rounded (not flattened) shoots. The seed cones are ovoid or oblong, 25–40 mm long, with 10-14 scales, green at first, maturing brown about 20–24 months after pollination. The male cones are 3–5 mm long, and release pollen in late winter. It is moderately susceptible to cypress canker, caused by the fungus Seiridium cardinale, and can suffer extensive dieback where this disease is common. The species name sempervirens comes from the Latin for 'evergreen'.

Contents [hide]

1 Uses

2 Iran's ancient cypresses

3 Symbolism

4 Notes

5 References

[edit]Uses

Mediterranean Cypress has been widely cultivated as an ornamental tree for millennia away from its native range, mainly throughout the central and western Mediterranean region, and in other areas with similar hot, dry summers and mild, rainy winters, including California, southwest South Africa and southern Australia. It can also be grown successfully in areas with cooler, moister summers, such as the British Isles, New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest (coastal Oregon, Washington and British Columbia). It is also planted in south Florida as an ornamental tree. In some areas, particularly the United States, it is known inaccurately as "Italian" or "Tuscan Cypress"; although the species is very commonly cultivated in Italy, it is not native there. The 'Stricta' group of this plant has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.[2]

4000 years old Cypress of Abarqu, Iran

The vast majority of the trees in cultivation are selected cultivars with a fastigiate crown, with erect branches forming a narrow to very narrow crown often less than a tenth as wide as the tree is tall. The dark green 'exclamation mark' shape of these trees is a highly characteristic signature of Mediterranean town and village landscapes. Formerly, the species was sometimes separated into two varieties, the wild C. sempervirens var. sempervirens (syn. var. horizontalis), and the fastigiate C. s. var. pyramidalis (syn. var. fastigiata, var. stricta), but the latter is now only distinguished as a Cultivar Group, with no botanical significance.

It is also known for its very durable, scented wood, used most famously for the doors of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City, Rome. Cypress used to be used in distilleries as staves to hold mash ferments to make alcohol before the invention of stainless steel.[3] Commonly seen throughout New Mexico, the Mediterranean Cypress is also known as the "drama tree" because of its tendency to bend with even the slightest of breezes.

In cosmetics it is used as astringent, firming, antiseborrheic, antidandruff, antiaging and as fragance.[4]

[edit]Iran's ancient cypresses

Cypress, Cupressus sempervirens was the first choice for Iranian Gardens. In all of the famous Persian Gardens, such as Fin Garden, Mahaan, Dowlat-Abad, and others, this tree plays a central role in their design.[citation needed] The oldest living Cypress is the Sarv-e-Abarkooh in Iran's Yazd Province. Its age is estimated to be approximately 4,000 years.[5]

[edit]Symbolism

Cypresses (1889) by Vincent Van Gogh, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

In classical antiquity, the cypress was a symbol of mourning and in the modern era it remains the principal cemetery tree in both the Muslim world and Europe. In the classical tradition, the cypress was associated with death and the underworld because it failed to regenerate when cut back too severely. Athenian households in mourning were garlanded with boughs of cypress.[6] Cypress was used to fumigate the air during cremations.[7] It was among the plants that were suitable for making wreaths to adorn statues of Pluto, the classical ruler of the underworld.[8]

The poet Ovid, who wrote during the reign of Augustus, records the best-known myth that explains the association of the cypress with grief. The handsome boy Cyparissus, a favorite of Apollo, accidentally killed a beloved tame stag. His grief and remorse were so inconsolable that he asked to weep forever. He was transformed into cupressus sempervirens, with the tree's sap as his tears.[9] In another version of the story, it was the woodland god Silvanus who was the divine companion of Cyparissus and who accidentally killed the stag. When the boy was consumed by grief, Silvanus turned him into a tree, and thereafter carried a branch of cypress as a symbol of mourning.[10]

Fastigiate Mediterranean Cypress Cupressus sempervirens 'Stricta', planted in Hawaii

In Greek mythology, the cypress is associated with both Artemis and Cyparissus, a boy beloved by Apollo. Ancient Roman funerary rites used it extensively. Cupressus sempervirens is the principal cemetery tree both in the Western and Muslim worlds. Cypresses are used extensively the Shahnameh, the great Iranian epic poem by Ferdowsi.In Modern times cypress is assoiated with Hecate a Greek chthonic goddess of the magic,cross roads,underworld.

[edit]Notes

^ See also Uses section for the differing cultivated variants

^ apps.rhs.org.uk/plantselector/plant?plantid=605

^ Makers Mark

^ Carrasco, F. (2009). "Ingredientes Cosméticos". Diccionario de Ingredientes\ 4ª Ed. www.imagenpersonal.net. p. 267. ISBN 978-84-613-4979-1.

^ Craig Glenday, ed. (2011). Guinness World Records.

^ Servius, note to Vergil's Aeneid 3.680.

^ Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 17.7.34.

^ Natalis Comes, Mythologiae 2.9.

^ Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.106ff.

^ Servius, note to Vergil's Georgics 1.20.

[edit]References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cupressus sempervirens

Conifer Specialist Group (1998). Cupressus sempervirens. 2006. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. www.iucnredlist.org. Retrieved on 11 May 2006.

Farjon, A. (2005). Monograph of Cupressaceae and Sciadopitys. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. ISBN 1-84246-068-4.

Zsolt Debreczy, Istvan Racz (2012). In Kathy Musial. Conifers Around the World (1st ed.). DendroPress. p. 1089. ISBN 9632190610."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupressus_sempervirens

Cy was named after Cynodon, or, as we children used to call it in south-eastern Australia, Windmill Grass, one of the commonest weeds in lawns and cricket-pitches. He had spent the first half of his life as an experimental rabbit, involved – so far as my childish understanding could make it out – in research into allergens and the production of antibodies. Specifically, I think, Cy’s duties involved sitting in a very small cage and producing antibodies to the pollen of Cynodon. He was so desirable for experimentation because he was a lop-eared rabbit, and therefore had large veins in his ears, suitable for bleeding by syringe. And here – again, remembering that in witnessing all this, I thought and understood as a child – was where the alchemy played its part. When my father reads this, he will explain it all, so that it becomes not alchemy, but science. Here is the childish version:-

The blood – or more precisely, as I knew, the serum (or was it perhaps the antiserum?) was somehow conveyed to microscope slides covered with a clear gel with the consistency of agar. Each slide was like a transparent domino: it had five pits in each half, arranged like tessaries in a mosaic. (I was, incidentally, and still am, a demon dominoes player, which is odd considering my outright, rabbit-dazzled fear of mathematics). This was immersed, along with several other slides, symmetrically arranged, into a gleaming, prismatic glass box, which was filled with the purest lilac liquid. This liquid smelled alluring but astringent, like a chemical absinth. After this, I was at a loss. Things happened, by laws immutable, and the memories are untrappable, as bubbles in an alembic.

And here is the glorious part: my father – who suffers from hay-fever as I do, and no doubt is allergic to the pollen of Cynodon, unable to countenance the callous euthanasia of Cy when he reached middle age, brought him home to me in a cardboard box. In fact, he didn’t just bring Cy: he brought Lo (short for Lolium, a parti-coloured rabbit with different-coloured eyes, and ever a jester), and he brought Z-2 (the provenance of his name eludes me, but he was the most gloriously beautiful rabbit, with precisely the colouring of a chocolate brown Burmese cat, but with more than a hint of purple), and several others whose names elude me, all of them baptised in grass pollen. I am almost certain that my father was in contravention of article such-and-such, subsection so-and-so of the labyrinthine legislation which ties into pretzels almost everything that people try to do in the Australian Capital Territory (a Utopia for bureaucrats), but he brought an excess of delight to the heart of a four-year-old child. The retired experimental rabbits were joined by a more conventionally domestic rabbit, Potterishly christened Benjamin, but it was Cy who lived the longest – at least eight years, and possibly more – and it was Cy who crystallised my thinking on Life and Death.

Cy was, you see, the Black Rabbit of Inlé. Readers whose childhoods were culturally dominated, as mine was, by Richard Adams’ twentieth century classic Watership Down will instantly understand what I mean. Other readers will not, so I beg the patience of the former. The Black Rabbit of Inlé was the Grim Reaper of rabbits: everything that was chthonic and terrifying. In Garfunkel’s song, ‘Bright Eyes’, he is the blank-eyed silhouette who arches across the hedgerows like the shadow of a crow, beckoning caricatured bunnies to their allotted Valhallas. In the original novel, he is much more: he brings myxamatosis, ‘the White Blindness’, the rabbits’ Black Death, and he compels El-Ahrairah, the archetypal rabbit, to substitute his own ears for dock leaves which have to be constantly replaced when they grow limp, for fear of the fleas that spread the virus. He dwells in the bowels of the earth, a bit deeper-down than other rabbits, and his eyes shine like red-hot coals. He would perhaps be a slavish allegory of the Christian Devil if he were not so merciful when the rabbit was at the snare, or in the teeth of a snarling fox. This was no fiction for me: it was an everlasting Truth, stringent as scripture, and Cy was my living, lolloping proof.

I say ‘lolloping’ because this was precisely the word my mother used at a moment I can remember, but cannot place in time. It is not a word that in forty years I have encountered in any other context, but it precisely describes the gait of Cy, in which the actions of four rabbit-hopping legs were augmented by a pair of large and flaccid ears. In a surge of testosterone, Cy once fought with another rabbit (Lo, I believe, and Cy unwittingly caused his demise when the wound became infected), and in the course of that epic conflict, one of his ears was ripped, if not from side to side, then certainly well beyond the median line. And so Cy’s ears lolloped even more, like lopsided chandeliers in a ramshackle museum after the Blitz, and my ducks - Waddly and Scratch (the genius of whose naming I can rightly claim, and who came into my life when I was four years old) - were decidedly exhibits. They sat there, staunch and starched as Tenniell Dodoes, as Cy snitched the bread from under their bills. They chuntered “tus-tus-tus” (as Muscovies often will: they do not quack) when he ran them ragged while the wheat was winnowed out for the chickens. (My ducks were, incidentally, lesbians by necessity, and used to almost empty the garden pond in their love throes, much to my childish amazement; Scratch, the big white one, was invariably on top. Cy cared nothing for this.)

For the life of me, I cannot remember the time when Cy died. He lived by human terms to be a Harry Patch at least, but the details are lost to me. But I do remember digging up his bones a few years later, deep in the vegetable patch where my new passion for herbs was in its embryonic phase. And this was the curious thing: his bones were deep red, as though sprinkled with ochre, and the orbs of his skull gazed at me with an omniscient vacancy. In a life in which digging has been a recurring theme, and in which uncloseted skeletons have played a preternatural part, I confess that I have never before or since, when arrested by the face of kindly Death, re-buried the bones so quickly.

Photograph by Giles Watson, aged about 10 years.

My father has added the following notes:

Dear old black rabbit Cy had been used to produce antiserum for the pollen of CYNODON DACTYLON, colloquially called 'Couch' in Australia (where it is used for cricket pitches), and Bermuda Grass in Britain (where it is rare) and in the USA (where it originated). We demonstrated via the antiserum from Cy and friends that hay-fever sufferers sensitized only to the pollen allergens of Cynodon were unlikely to be allergic to pollen from (e.g.) the main lawn grasses used in England (Lolium, Agrostis, Dactylis), and vice versa; and drew attention to the undesirability of medical allergy specialists and commercial suppliers of grass pollens intended for medical applications using colloquial names (since 'Couch' means different things on different continents). The point being that you can be sensitized if they 'desensitize' you with the wrong extract!

Many believe Dionysus is frequently misunderstood as simply a party guy instead of a party guide which began with the Romans who called him Bacchs. Writing for quora.com, Sarah McLean gives us an excellent description of the other ways to approach the Carnaval god. Check out our significantly expanded 2022 visual guide here: www.pinterest.com/carnavalbz/dionysus/

Hedonistic: This kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? Dionysus’ whole thing is that pleasure and ecstasy can be a transcendental, spiritual experience. Dionysus is not a god of excess, or at least, he doesn’t have to be. His simplest message is enjoy life! Pleasure can be a thing worth living for, as long as it’s productive and not “empty” (i.e. a means of avoidance, “drowning your sorrows”).

Laid-back and fun-loving: As gods go, Dionysus is relatively down-to-earth and approachable. He doesn’t always approach humans as a lofty, intimidating, and overwhelming deity. He is comfortable engaging with humans on their terms and appearing as easygoing and friendly. Sit down, have a drink! The gruff and jaded Dionysus of Percy Jackson just doesn’t sit well with me. I personally think that Dionysus is able to laugh at himself — The Frogs, which outright mocks him, was written and presented to him at his festival.

Manic and savage: Of course, the flip side of this is that he also embodies the “dark” side of alcohol — the violent, chaotic, maddened savagery that comes with ecstasy, the impulse to scream and tear and destroy. Frenzy. It can be really scary! It simultaneously brings the human to a divine state and also to an animalistic state. All humans have this savagery within them, no matter how “rational” and “logical” they believe themselves to be. It’s healthiest to let it out in a safe environment, like after a few drinks at a party, lest it manifest in much scarier ways.

Loud: One of his most common epithets, Bromios, means “the noisy.” “Loud-shouting” is another common variant used to describe him. And by loud, I don’t just mean loud like your perpetually drunk friend. I mean primal screaming.

Melodramatic: This is just my personal interpretation, but he’s literally the god of theater and theatrics. Why wouldn’t he have a theatrical personality? He certainly agrees with Shakespeare that “all the world’s a stage,” and the stage acts as a mirror for reflecting back human society, human failings, human temperaments. I imagine that he is as flamboyant as a diva with the histrionic passion of every theater nerd in high school. It doesn’t come across as affected, though. It’s just the way he prefers to express himself.

Bohemian non-conformist: The hippie movement in the 1960s and 70s must have basically been a secular resurgence of the Dionysian cult. Let’s strip naked, bathe in the nearest spring, make love, and get high as a kite! YEAH! Add some transcendental spirituality, shamanistic practices, and primal screaming… and yeah, you’ve got a Bacchanal, lacking nothing. In various parts of its history, the Cult of Dionysus has been popular among the hedonistic overlords of society and also various marginalized groups. Likewise, Dionysus tends to take everything society values — reason, logic, grandeur, sophistication, gentility, gender norms — and throw them straight out the window. He’s called “the liberator” because he frees people from their own inhibitions and from societal norms.

Subversive and unsettling: Dionysus is a trickster, but not a traditional trickster god like Hermes. He doesn’t pull pranks or screw people over; he likes making them uncomfortable. Like I said above, his existence forces people to question social norms and reassess their values. He expresses all taboos, like death, sex, effeminacy, and decadence. Because of this, he can come across as disconcerting, like a pair of crazed eyes staring right at you from behind an animal mask. He’s kind of like the Cheshire Cat, and equally mad.

Both merciful and ruthless, lacking pettiness: He’s kind of the exception that proves the rule, here. As Greek gods go, he’s tough to anger, and he doesn’t punish unreasonably. The only things that really piss him off are denying his divinity, and committing crimes against his worshippers. For these transgressions, he will drive you insane, or literally have you dismembered by a bunch of madwomen! I like to think he’d be the type to grin and giggle coquettishly before giving the command to have you torn to shreds. His power is to be respected, but he is usually inclined towards mercy.

Sensual: As gods go, he’s very carnal. He embodies the fusion of the sensual with the spiritual, the achievement of enlightenment through pleasures of the flesh. Not just sex, but also dance, uncivilized music, wine, milk, and honey, running, screaming, singing, throwing yourself down in the grass and writhing in it. I perceive Dionysus as a beautiful, androgynous young man with long hair, wearing only vines and a scarf, dancing seductively in the woods.

Dual-natured: If you haven’t gathered by now, Dionysus is a dual and liminal god. He can be kind, gentle, and easygoing, or completely insane and violent, and that switch can happen pretty quickly. He is both human and divine, both an Olympian and chthonic, both carnal and spiritual, both male and female. He stands between life and death and at the edge of sanity. To me, Dionysus represents is the process of confronting the dark self, the savage self, the masked self. Like Dionysus, each and every one of us is dual.

Doris Yeh of ChthoniC at Bloodstock 2012

Heracles (/ˈhɛrəkliːz/ herr-ə-kleez; Ancient Greek: Ἡρακλῆς, Hēraklēs, from Hēra, "Hera", and kleos, "glory"[1]), born Alcaeus[2] (Ἀλκαῖος, Alkaios) or Alcides[3] (Ἀλκείδης, Alkeidēs), was a divine hero in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, foster son of Amphitryon[4] and great-grandson (and half-brother) of Perseus. He was the greatest of the Greek heroes, a paragon of masculinity, the ancestor of royal clans who claimed to be Heracleidae (Ἡρακλεῖδαι) and a champion of the Olympian order against chthonic monsters. In Rome and the modern West, he is known as Hercules, with whom the later Roman Emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximian, often identified themselves. The Romans adopted the Greek version of his life and works essentially unchanged, but added anecdotal detail of their own, some of it linking the hero with the geography of the Central Mediterranean. Details of his cult were adapted to Rome as well.

Extraordinary strength, courage, ingenuity, and sexual prowess with both males and females were among his characteristic attributes. Heracles used his wits on several occasions when his strength did not suffice, such as when laboring for the king Augeas of Elis, wrestling the giant Antaeus, or tricking Atlas into taking the sky back onto his shoulders. Together with Hermes he was the patron and protector of gymnasia and palaestrae.[5] His iconographic attributes are the lion skin and the club. These qualities did not prevent him from being regarded as a playful figure who used games to relax from his labors and played a great deal with children.[6] By conquering dangerous archaic forces he is said to have "made the world safe for mankind" and to be its benefactor.[7] Heracles was an extremely passionate and emotional individual, capable of doing both great deeds for his friends (such as wrestling with Thanatos on behalf of Prince Admetus, who had regaled Heracles with his hospitality, or restoring his friend Tyndareus to the throne of Sparta after he was overthrown) and being a terrible enemy who would wreak horrible vengeance on those who crossed him, as Augeas, Neleus and Laomedon all found out to their cost.

Architecture

Lombard style bell tower illuminated.

The church of Our Lady of the Assumption is one of the most beautiful Romanesque churches Brionnais and one of the most interesting of Romanesque Burgundy by the quality of its carved decoration and its harmonious proportions.

The building, with its height two-story relates to the ancient architectural tradition of Burgundy. It is the antithesis of architectural principles illustrated in Cluny III.

The church plan

The church of Our Lady of the Assumption is, classically, facing east, toward Jerusalem.

Its floor plan replicates that of the church of Charlieu and recalled the ties between the two monasteries founded in the Carolingian period. The main vessel is a three-nave of five bays under edges. The transept, salient, is to arm with oriented apses. The whole forms a Latin cross. The choir and transepts are crowned by a series of five apses behind. This plan offers a picture perfect in its simplicity and in the rightness of its proportions.

Construction is medium blond limestone unit, uneven and grouted. Unlike the masonry of the apse and transept, compared to that of the nave, recalls that the church of Anzy-le-Duc was conducted in two campaigns, from the mid / late eleventh and early twelfth.

Outdoor Architecture

South side of the church, the corbels that support the entablature cornices are almost carved.

The transept and the main facade is highlighted by their stilted gables.

The bell tower

The church of Our Lady of the Assumption has a remarkable octagonal tower novel.

The elegance of this tower makes it one of the most beautiful Romanesque bell towers of Brionnais. Its high silhouette give slenderness to the entire building. Its octagonal building decorated with three floors of Lombard arches recalls the Romanesque bell towers of northern Italy.

It is decorated with the three upper floors of twin arched windows separated by pillars and topped with Lombard bands.

The western façade has a remarkable portal whose lintel, the eardrum and the archivolt double arch have a very rich sculptural decoration.

The eardrum dated twelfth. The church of Our Lady of the Assumption in three had originally. Today, one of them is located in Hiero Museum Paray-le-Monial. The eardrum visible on the building face Christ in glory in a mandorla. He sits on his throne. The mandorla is a symbol of rebirth, is supported by two angels with wings and whose feet are anchored to the ground. This iconography symbolizes the return of Christ on earth, to the end of time to judge the living and the dead.

The lintel is the scene of the Ascension.

The badly damaged lower arch as well as the four capitals, the 24 elders of the Apocalypse, crowned head, holding in his hand a cup and harp, celebrating the glory of the risen Christ. The 24 elders represent the 12 prophets and patriarchs and the 12 Apostles. They symbolize the meeting of the Old and New Testaments. This image is from a vision of St. John described in the Apocalypse.

The moldings were restored.

The sculptures were hammered during the period of the French Revolution.

The south facade

The south portal of the priory tells the story of the salvation of mankind. Tympanum represents the Adoration of the Magi and the Original Sin. The architrave shows the punishments imposed on the damned in hell, and its left end, a brief allusion to the heavenly Jerusalem. Figures could include the influence of the workshop Gislebertus Autun, although their flexibility departs somewhat from the impetuosity which characterizes the sculptures of the Saint-Lazare Cathedral of Autun. The style is much cruder. Perhaps we there see the hand of an artist who spoke at the Church of Neuilly-en-Donjon, located on the other side of the Loire.

The bedside

Like the second abbey of Cluny, the church of Anzy-le-Duc has a bedside level with five apsidal chapels.

interior architecture

The nave [change | modify the code]

The church of Anzy-le-Duc is regularly oriented.

The architecture of the nave is two stories with large arcades surmounted by tall windows.

The bays of the nave bear groin vaults separated by arches that give rise to simple architectural lines and great harmony. The quality of vaulting demonstrates the skills mastered craftsmen and architects. This bias construction is found in other Romanesque churches of Burgundy, including Vezelay. However, there is not here this momentum verticality that will characterize the buildings have adopted the principles of Cluny III. The vertical and horizontal lines are balanced to generate a feeling of peaceful serenity.

The capitals of the nave date from the eleventh. They are among the earliest examples of this form of typically Romanesque art.

They are carved mostly from plant or animal motifs are of great aesthetic value. There are approximately forty of which a head of cattle, Daniel and the lions, an acrobat, an angel fighting a demon, Samson controlling a lion ...

Saint Michael fighting the devil. He guards the entrance of Paradise. In its shield, the monstrous devil planted his trident, the handle and the right arm holding the were broken (3rd pillar to the left, entering the nave).

This scene could be the man, attached to the right, however, must fight against physical forces or the forces of evil. Nu (nudity in Roman art can represent the innocence of origins), he clings with both hands in the ring that forms the basis of capital. The ring is a symbol of a branch of the tree of life in Genesis. Two monstrous snakes to interlaced rings are preparing to bite his torso and heel. (2nd pillar to the left, entering the nave)

This capital, located on the 5th pillar to the left, entering the nave could illustrate the theme of the quarrel. Two figures evil their tongues, classic iconography in Roman art of lying, slander or insults. The lie is generating conflicts and wars. In the left corner of the tent, two characters kiss: a reconciliation? a hypocritical gesture as might suggest the two heads like monkeys. The monkey wants to imitate the man as the devil tries to imitate God. The monkey is a symbol of heresy, paganism, of all that is false, anything that distracts man from his likeness to God.

Here, in contrast, the most recent works it is possible to see in Autun and Saulieu, the block formed by the marquee itself is not entirely hidden: include seem like stone applied on their support. Yet we already discern a principle of composition which will remain true Burgundian sculpture submitted to the architectural structure of the capital, the figures of angles resume the role of ancient scrolls. They announce the development of the Cluny sculpture twelfth.

The choir

The choir is composed of a span with aisles that end in the apses. It extends an axial central apse and chapels.

The choir, vaulted cul-de-four with frescoes, and the transepts are crowned by a series of five apses behind. The octagonal cupola on tubes.

Two capitals, almost symmetrical, represent two majestic eagles with outspread wings. They open your eyes wide and yet set the rising sun. At the top of the wings, is carved a swastika, ancient Hindu symbol of the sun spinning. The eagle symbolizes the soul that rises above the vicissitudes of earthly experience. That is the spiritual equivalent of the temporal power of the lion. The eagle is the opposite of the snake, chthonic animal. It symbolizes the soul that rises to the Light, to Knowledge as the eagle, king of birds can fly in / from the sun. It is the oldest capitals of the church (circa 1050).

The murals are of medieval origin but were heavily restored in 1850 by a painter of Drill, Jean-François Maurice. The vault in this cul-de-four Ascension. The risen Christ joined his Father in heaven. Standing, surrounded by an oval glory, he blessed the people of believers. Two angels are for 12 Apostles and three holy women remained low. They say, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus who comes to you be taken to heaven, will come in the same way that you saw up there. " Under this Ascension in four areas bounded by pilasters, are represented the symbols of the four evangelists: the angel, emblem of St Matthew, the bull for Luke, the lion of St. Mark and the eagle for John. These four figures were the haloed head and holding the holy book, ie the Bible. Under the angel symbolizing St Matthew Letbald is shown. It was the lord of Anzy-le-Duc, who, in 876, donated his land to the Benedictine monks of Autun. Opposite, under the eagle of St. John, was his wife slope, Altasie.

The crypt

Recent excavations have rediscovered the crypt, clearing a passage of stairs from the north transept. This crypt dated eleventh century served as a burial place to Hugues de Poitiers. It is one of the Christian shrines preserved among the oldest of all the brionnais country. MM. of Canat and Surigny, made the plan of the crypt and worked in the study of sculptures and murals, the date is not earlier than the twelfth century.

It communicated with the church by two staircases that had come together in a single release in front of the choir. The vault is supported by pillars, two gray breccia from the broken barrel of an ancient column, whose base was still visible.

In 1576, the tomb of Hugues de Poitiers is desecrated by Huguenots. The body is thrown into the fire and the ashes scattered to the winds.

The crypt was decorated with frescoes of which only a fragment.

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