New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio

instagram.com/goldennumberratio

Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)

Titles include:

The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

facebook.com/goldennumberratio

And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!

Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)

instagram.com/45surf

I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...

Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/

Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

Follow me on instagram!

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio

instagram.com/goldennumberratio

Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)

Titles include:

The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

facebook.com/goldennumberratio

And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!

Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)

instagram.com/45surf

I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...

Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/

Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

Follow me on instagram!

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio

instagram.com/goldennumberratio

Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)

Titles include:

The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

facebook.com/goldennumberratio

And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!

Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)

instagram.com/45surf

I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...

Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/

Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

Follow me on instagram!

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Jet engine.

New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio

instagram.com/goldennumberratio

Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)

Titles include:

The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

facebook.com/goldennumberratio

And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!

Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)

instagram.com/45surf

I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...

Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/

Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

Follow me on instagram!

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio

instagram.com/goldennumberratio

Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)

Titles include:

The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

facebook.com/goldennumberratio

And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!

Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)

instagram.com/45surf

I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...

Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/

Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

Follow me on instagram!

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

view large on black (recommended)

The Hermetic philosophy says that " The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding ". For millennia the esoteric circles have been marked in this teaching to disseminate their information. Teachings were passed from master to disciple, disguised in various rituals and symbols. In this way, a certain book stands out for its teachings, which form the basis of all magic, the whole universe perceptible and imperceptible to our senses: The Kybalion . Written by one who calls himself The three started , it is a compilation of the teachings that (supposedly) came from ancient Egypt, by Hermes Trismegistus, who is perhaps the first of Avatars contribute to this planet.

Transcribe the text of the book itself the presentation of Hermes:

"Among the great Masters of Ancient Egypt, there was one that they hailed as the Master of Masters. This man, if indeed he was a man, lived in Egypt in ancient times. He was known under the name of Hermes Trismegistus. He was the father of the Occult, the founder of Astrology, the discoverer of Alchemy. The details of his life were lost due to the immense amount of time, which is thousands of years, and despite many ancient countries compete among themselves the honor of having been his home. The date of his sojourn in Egypt, in his last incarnation on this planet, is not now known, but it was fixed at the early days of the oldest dynasties of Egypt, very before the time of Moses. The best authorities regard him as a contemporary of Abraham, and some Jewish traditions say clearly that Abraham acquired a portion of his mystic knowledge from Hermes himself. Having spent many years of his passing from this plane of existence ( tradition states that he lived three hundred years), the Egyptians deified Hermes, and made ​​him one of their gods, under the name of Thoth. Years later, the people of Ancient Greece also deified by the name of Hermes, the God of Wisdom . The Egyptians revered for many centuries his memory, calling it the messenger of the Gods, and bestowing upon him, distinctively, his ancient title Trismegistus , which means three times great, great among the greats.

In the early days, there was a compilation of certain Basic Hermetic Doctrines, passed on from master to disciple, which was known under the name of The Kybalion , whose exact meaning is lost for several centuries. This teaching, however, is known by several men who were passed from lip to ear, since many centuries. These precepts have never been written or printed, so far as we know. They were simply a collection of maxims, axioms, and precepts not understandable to outsiders, but were readily understood by students and, moreover, were then explained and exemplified by the Hermetic Initiates to their Neophytes. "

A Master is not measured by the number of followers, or who speak it, but what he says and does. In the case of Hermes, all we have is the Kybalion, but this "little book" of 56 pages is of such depth and grandeur that I shudder to write about it. The book deals with the seven hermetic principles, stated in The Kybalion as initiates comment on them.

The Principles of Truth are Seven; one who knows perfectly possesses the Magic Key, with which all the doors of the Temple fly open.

(The Kybalion)

These are the Principle of Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect and Gender. Take the first transcribed the book:

I. The Principle of Mentalism

THE ALL is MIND, the Universe is Mental

(The Kybalion)

This Principle explains that everything is mental , that THE ALL is Spirit , is unknowable and indefinable in itself, but may be considered as a living mind infinite and universal . Also teaches that all the phenomenal world or universe is simply a Mental Creation of THE ALL, subject to the Laws of Created Things, and that the universe as a whole in its parts or units, has its existence in the Mind of THE ALL, in which Mind we live and move and have our being. This Principle, by establishing the Mental Nature of the Universe, it explains the mental and psychic phenomena that occupy much of public attention, and that without such an explanation would be unintelligible and defy scientific examination.

This Principle explains the true nature of force, Energy and Matter, how and why they are all subordinate to the Mastery of Mind. An old Hermetic Masters wrote, long ago: "He who understands the truth of the Mental Nature of the Universe is well advanced on the Path to Mastery.

_____________________

We see here a correspondence with one of the basic principles of quantum physics, the coherent superposition . But what is it?

When an electron (or any other particle) is observed, it presents with well-defined physical properties: it is located at a precise point in space at a given time, and their attributes can be measured (within certain limits set by the principle Heisenberg's uncertainty). Before the measurement is made, however, these properties and attributes do not exist. What exists is only the probability that the electron present such and such characteristics as well as other characteristics that are opposite. That is, the electron can either be at point x and at y or at the point z, and so on for each of your attributes (speed, angular momentum, spin, etc.).. Before we measure the electrons, all these attributes are interwoven, and it is this intermingling that produces waves of probability. Physicists call this the wave function or coherent superposition , because in this state, the odds of the electron overlap each other. During the act of measuring the entanglement vanishes and, among all possible sets of attributes to the electron, only one becomes "real." This time the superposition of waves vanishes is called the collapse of the wave function . While the electron is not measured, it has no specific characteristics. It is the measure that creates the characteristics of the electron, and thus in a sense, it is my observation that creates the electron. In other words, the reality I perceive is created by my perception. ( source )

A particle, something we think is solid, there is overlap in what we call, sparking a wave of possible locations, all at the same time. And when you look, it is now possible in only one of the positions. That is, things only become constants when you look at them. When it did not look like a wave, when we look at is as a particle.

The overlap means that a particle can be in two or more places at once.

It's a very bizarre concept, but it is a cornerstone of quantum physics. This finding made ​​the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking asked: The distinction (between the real and imaginary) is only in our minds?

Article in The Quantum Revolution and High Energy Physics , Roberto Claudio, we see that in reality, science can not prove that a subatomic particle exists to detect it before, not knowing where it will come, but to say that there is a probability it exists and to appear at a particular location. Four hypotheses try to explain this "measurement problem":

The Copenhagen interpretation says that this probability is all we can and what there is to know, is something totally random to know where the particle appears (the theory advocated by Niels Bohr and Werner Eisenberg),

The hidden variable theory says that quantum events do not are purely random, but that particles arise in a particular place for reasons that we have yet to discover hidden (advocated by Einstein, David Bohm and others),

The Many Worlds Hypothesis states that when a particle appears in one location, all other probabilities of occurrences happen in other universes entirely different. This hypothesis, although fantastic, was developed a very sophisticated mathematical style (proposed by Everett, Wheeler and Graham);

The connection Matter / Mind says it's possible that the very mind of the observer in the act of measurement, influence the manifestation of the event; the mind would be the factor that would interfere with the onset of the appearance and location of subatomic particles or even create (backed up by Eugene Paul Wigner, Jack Sarfatti, and Walker Muses).

Einstein, who favored the second theory, on the first screamed, " God does not play dice with the universe! ". The unpredictability of quantum was too much for him to accept, although Bohr and others, using their own theories of Einstein, explain all your objections. The dispute between the first two theories meant to prove that quantum mechanics was unpredictable or determined, and the last two betrayed that if the first were true, my mind would be able to choose my destiny, of all existing probabilities ( free will). So far science has been proving (successfully) the first theory.

Everything we call real is made ​​of things that can not be considered real

(Niels Bohr)

In the movie What the bleep do we know we see the physicist Amit Goswami explain: " The world has many potential forms of reality, to choose from. But as an object can have two states at once? Instead of thinking about things like possibilities, we have the habit of thinking that things around us are objects that already exist without my input, without my choice. You need to ban this form of thinking, has to recognize that even the material world around us - chairs , tables, rooms, rugs - are nothing but possible movements of consciousness, all the time and I am choosing these movements moments to express my current experience.

It's something we need to understand that radical, but it is very difficult, because we think the world exists independent of my experience. Not so, and quantum physics is clear. The very Eisenberg , after the discovery of quantum physics, said that atoms are not objects, are trends. Instead of thinking about objects, you should think in possibilities.

Everything possible is subconsciously " .

But speaking of particles does little to explain the consequences of quantum physics, so let's find a more easy-going, I found an article of Scientifc American: get a playing card with a perfectly sharp edge and try to balance it over the edge on a table. According to classical physics, the letter will remain, in principle, balanced forever. However, according to quantum physics (Schrödinger's wave function), the card will fall in a few seconds, even if you do your best to balance it - and both fall for the two sides , right and left. When it puts into practice this experiment with an actual card, it is concluded that classical physics is wrong: even if the letter falls. But what we see is that it falls to the right or left, seemingly at random, and never to the right and left at the same time as the Schrodinger equation would have us believe. This contradiction goes to the very heart of one of the most original and enduring mysteries of quantum mechanics.

Many Worlds

In the mid-50, U.S. Hugh Everett III, then a student at Princeton University, decided to review the collapse postulate in his doctoral thesis. He took the idea to the quantum limit, with the following question: "What would happen if the time evolution of the entire universe is always unitary?" In this scenario, the wave function evolves in a deterministic way, leaving no room for the mysterious collapse of non-unitary or God playing dice. In this case, our quantum card would really be in two places at once. Moreover, a person who was looking at the card would enter a superposition of two different mental states, each one seeing the results. If you bet money on the hunch that the letter would fall face up, a superposition would smile and frown, because the bet to win and lose simultaneously. Everett's brilliant insight that the observers in such a deterministic (but schizophrenic) quantum world could perceive the plain old reality with which we are familiar. More importantly, they perceive an apparent randomness, obeying the correct probability rules. The view became known as the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, because each component of which is a superposition observer recognizes or perceives its own world . When removing the collapse postulate, this viewpoint simplifies the underlying theory. But the price one pays for this simplicity is the conclusion that these parallel perceptions of reality are equally real.

Everett's work was ignored for nearly two decades. Many physicists were confident that would appear to show a fundamental theory that the world was, after all, classic in some sense, no weirdness like "a body being in two places at once." But a whole series of new experiments would put an end to that expectation. The experiment of "delayed choice", proposed by Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler, showing another feature of the quantum world that defies classical description: not only one photon can be in two places at once, but the experimenter can choose after the event, if the photon was in two places or just one. In short, the verdict of experience is: the weirdness of the quantum world is real, like it or not.

Even in the movie What the bleep ... , see Jeffrey Satinover talking about it: "Now you can see in many U.S. laboratories by objects that are large enough to be seen with the naked eye and are in two places simultaneously. You can even take a picture of it! I suppose if you showed this picture, people would say ' Great, I can see the colored light, a little there, a bit ... here is a picture of two dots, which is too much? I see two things. " No, It's one thing in two places at once. I think people do not impress, because I think they do not believe. Not to say that I am a liar, or that scientists are confused. I think it's not so mysterious you can understand how amazing it is.'ve all seen Star Trek and the teleportation, then ask, ' But who cares, what does that mean? " But we have to stop and think about what that really means. It's the same object and it is in two places at once! "

Returning to the Article of Scientific American , we see that the work of Everett left a crucial question: if the real world is so bizarre macroscopic superpositions, why do not we perceive them? The answer came in 1970 through an article by Heinz Dieter Zeh of the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He showed that the Schrödinger equation gives rise to the effect of decoherence . Our letter overthrow quantum is always receiving the impact of busybody photons and air molecules, which can prove whether the letter fell to the right or left, thereby destroying the superposition and making it unobservable.

That is, the world is always contributing to remain in the illusion that things are "normal", ie, that the letter will fall to only one side up, more or less as agents of the Matrix ensure that human remain in ignorance (as at the end of the episode haunted house in the Animatrix ). Any resemblance to the Buddhist theory of Maya is not a coincidence.

It is as if the environment play the role of observer, collapsing the wave function (a simple molecule of air is enough). For all practical purposes, this tiny interaction changes the superposition to a classical situation in the twinkling of an eye. But as a photon can play the role of "observer"? It requires a "conscience", a "trial" to interfere with reality? Then the photon is also part of consciousness?! And here we go back to Buddhism, where everything, absolutely everything is alive and has consciousness .

The general notions about human understanding (...) illustrated by the discoveries of atomic physics are far from being something entirely unknown, unheard, again. These notions have a history in our own culture, enjoying a more prominent and central position in Hindu or Buddhist thought. What we face is just an illustration of an encouragement and a refinement of old wisdom.

(Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb)

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion, based on experience, which refuses dogmatism. If there is any religion that could cope with scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.

(Albert Einstein)

The theory of decoherence explains why do not routinely see quantum superpositions in the world around. Not because quantum mechanics intrinsically stops working for objects larger than a certain size magic. In fact, it is virtually impossible to macroscopic objects like cats and playing cards, isolated from a distance that prevents non-coherence. Microscopic objects, by contrast, are more easily separable from its environment and thus retain their quantum behavior.

If we seek a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory, we must turn to those kinds of epistemological problems with which we faced in the past, thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu, in his attempt to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.

(Niels Bohr, father of quantum mechanics)

Reference: 100 years of quantum mysteries ; Experience "Schrödinger cat" ; Samba crazy physicist , Amit Goswami interview the Roda Viva program

Agfa 200 | Nikkor 50mm f/1.4

I picked this dress up in the Debenhams sale a few weeks ago and this was the first chance to wear it. I'm really pleased with it and how it hangs (it is a fluid silky jersey type fabric with mesh sleeves) and also was a bargain (just £16.50 from £55!)

New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

www.facebook.com/epiclandscapephotography/

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

More on my golden ratio musings: facebook.com/goldennumberratio

instagram.com/goldennumberratio

Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)

Titles include:

The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

facebook.com/goldennumberratio

And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!

Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)

instagram.com/45surf

I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

www.facebook.com/Epic-Poetry-for-Epic-Landscape-Photograp...

Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

www.facebook.com/lightimedimensiontheory/

Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

Follow me on instagram!

instagram.com/elliotmcgucken

Join my new 45EPIC fine art landscapes page on facebook!

facebook.com/mcgucken

Japanese Garden Design.

Below are a few of the guiding principles of Japanese garden Design. Read these before we visit the Japanese Garden at Cowra.

1.Nature is all important. You must recreate nature, even if symbolically. You cannot have items not found in nature i.e. a fountain (but you can have a waterfall) or a square pond (but you can have an irregular, natural shaped pond) etc. A pond or even the sea is often represented by raked gravel.

2.Balance or sumi is important. You cannot have a large rock in a small space. Rocks can be used to symbolise mountains. But the scale must be correct for the size of the area. Pools can represent lakes etc.

3.Emptiness or ma is important. Japanese gardens often have empty spaces as space or emptiness defines the other elements around it.

4.Wabi or sabi is another basic principle. Sabi is about capturing the ideal image of an item and wabi is about capturing the spiritual essence of an item. So a perfectly plain round boulder in a garden has no wabi or sabi, but an irregular, lichen or moss covered boulder typifies a rock in nature.

5.Time is an important feature of Japanese gardens. The garden must have attractions for all four seasons of the year.

6.Enclosure as a feature of Japanese gardening. To be a retreat to nature, the garden must be fenced and gated to keep out interference. The garden is a separate world, and gates have spiritual meaning. Fences, hedges and screens are meant to also hide items which then suddenly become revealed. This is called miegakure.

7.Flatness is important. Flat areas are used for meditation, often in front of temples or shrines. These areas are Zen in style.

8.Formality is another principle. Although tea gardens are always informal and often have rustic huts and chalets in them. A focal point is always the tea pavilion.

9.Rocks are the backbone of a Japanese garden. Stones are usually, but not always set in groups of three. They can be vertical or horizontal in form. Stones set in the ground are used for stepping stones. A wide stone across a path tells us to stop there and admire the view. The pathway represents the pathway of life.

10.Water is an important feature of a Japanese garden. Waterfalls, ponds, and the bamboo deer scarer which fills the water basis for ritual washing are all important features. Water flows through Japanese gardens and bridges are important. The movement of water symbolises the passage through life from childhood to adulthood and maturity. Crossing a bridge takes you from one world to another world. Some bridges are purely ornamental, but most cross flowing water. Carp are obligatory in ponds as they are part of nature.

11.Plants play a secondary role to stone in Japanese gardens. Common plants for a Japanese garden include pines, bamboo, cherries, maples, camellias, azaleas, water plants, grasses etc. Some Japanese gardens are almost monochrome and entirely green. Evergreen trees like pines symbolise eternity.

12.Stone lanterns, stupas and basins are important elements for the garden.

13.Above all the garden must have atmosphere, simplicity and elegance and this is often obtained through the use of extensive pruning and the shaping of plants.

St. Hilda’s By The Sea is a small Anglican church in Sechelt. Set among the verdant green trees of the temperate rainforest, it is an eclectic mix of old and new: retired British pensioners polish the altar crystal and set out flowers for Sunday services, presided over by a gay Chinese-Canadian priest. Tai chi mixes with Celtic mysticism in a melange that is somehow stronger than its parts. And isn’t that what community is all about?

From the official website:

Walking the labyrinth is an ancient spiritual act that is being rediscovered during our time.

Richard R. Niebuhr in Pilgrims and Pioneers

In Celtic Christianity, places where people felt most strongly connected with God’s presence were referred to as thin places. It was these places in nature (forest groves, hilltops and deep wells) that the seen and unseen worlds were most closely connected, and the inhabitants of both worlds could momentarily touch the other. Today our churches, temples and sacred sites are the new thin places to meet the Divine. Here, at St Hilda’s, we have opportunities to encounter many thinning places – whether it be during Eucharistic or Taize services, while singing or praying, or through the love of a welcoming inclusive community. The labyrinth is a welcome addition; and with the right intent can also become a new thinning place for the modern pilgrim/spiritual seeker.This outward journey is an archetype with which we can have a direct experience. We can walk it. It can serve to frame the inward journey – a journey of repentance, forgiveness and rebirth, a journey that seeks a deeper faith, and greater holiness, a journey in search of God.

This 360° High Dynamic Range panorama was stitched from 66 bracketed photographs images with PTGUI Pro, tone-mapped with Photomatix, processed with Color Efex, and touched up in Aperture.

Original size: 20000 × 10000 (200.0 MP; 1.04 GB).

Location: St. Hilda’s By The Sea Anglican Church, Sechelt, British Columbia, Canada

Lumière du soir avec rose, rose grimpante, petit pêcher, Tayberries, mûres sans épines, glycine, aikiba, sauge, raifort et rhubarbe - tous poussant sous un immense chêne.

Designer: Zhong Fujian (钟福建)

1989, September

Firmly support the Four Basic Principles, firmly support Reform and Opening Up

Jianchi sixiang jiben yuanze jianchi gaige kaifang (坚持四项基本原则坚持改革开放)

Call nr.: BG E37/506 (Landsberger collection)

Haveli is generic term used for a traditional townhouse and mansions in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh usually one with historical and architectural significance. The word haveli is derived from Arabic haveli, meaning "an enclosed place" or "private space" popularised under Mughal Empire and was devoid of any architectural affiliations. Later, the word haveli came to be used as generic term for various styles of regional mansions, townhouse and temples found in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangaldesh.

HISTORY

The traditional courtyard homes in South Asia is built on the ancient principles of Vastu Shastra. which state that all spaces emerge from a single point, that is the centre of the house. Courtyards are common feature in south asian architecture. The earliest archaeological evidence of courtyard homes in the region dates back to 2600–2450 BCE. Traditional homes in South Asia are built around courtyard and all family activities revolved around chowk or courtyard. Additionally, the courtyard serves as a light well and an effective ventilation strategy for hot and dry climates of South Asia. During medieval period, the term Haveli was first applied in Rajputana by the Vaishnava sect to refer to their temples in Gujarat under the Mughal Empire and Rajputana kingdoms. Later, the generic term haveli eventually came to be identified with townhouse and mansions of the merchant class.

CHARACTERISTIC

Socio-Cultural Aspects: The chowk or courtyard served as the centre for various ceremonies and the rituals. The sacred tulsi plant was placed here and worshipped daily to bring prosperity to the house.

Security and Privacy: The chowk, at times, separated areas for men and women, and provided them with privacy.

Climate: Treating open space in building design to respond to the local climate. Air movement caused by temperature differences is utilized in the natural ventilation of building.

Different Activities At Different Times: The use of the court in the day time, mostly by women to carry out their work, interact with other women in private open space. Mansions of merchant class had more than one courtyard.

Articulation Of Space: In Mor chowk, City Palace, Udaipur, there is the concept of courtyard as a dancing hall. Similarly, in havelis, a courtyard has several functions, commonly used for weddings and festive occasions.

Materials : Fired bricks, sandstone, marble, wood, plaster and granite are commonly used materials. Decorative aspects are influenced by local culture and traditions.

All these elements join to form an enclosure and give the chowk a composed secured feel. The architectural built form of havelis has evolved in response to the climate, lifestyle and availability of material. In hot climates where cooling is a necessity, buildings with internal courtyards were considered the most appropriate. It acted as a perfect shading technique, while also allowing light inside. The arcade along the court, or the high wall around it, kept the interiors cool.

Many of the havelis of India and Pakistan were influenced by Rajasthani architecture. They usually contain a courtyard often with a fountain in the centre. The old cities of Agra, Lucknow and Delhi in India and Lahore, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad in Pakistan have many fine examples of Rajasthani-style havelis.

FAMOUS HAVELIS IN INDIA

The term Haveli was first applied in Rajputana by the Vaishnava sect to refer to their temples in Gujarat. In the northern part of India. havelis for Lord Krishna are prevalent with huge mansion like constructions. The havelis are noted for their frescoes depicting images of gods, goddesses, animals, scenes from the British colonization, and the life stories of Lords Rama and Krishna. The music here was known as Haveli Sangeet.

Later on these temple architectures and frescoes were imitated while building huge individual mansions and now the word is popularly recognized with the mansions themselves. Between 1830 and 1930, Marwari's erected buildings in their homeland, Shekhawati and Marwar. These buildings were called havelis. The Marwaris commissioned artists to paint those buildings which were heavily influenced by the Mughal architecture.

The havelis were status symbols for the Marwaris as well as homes for their extended families, providing security and comfort in seclusion from the outside world. The havelis were to be closed from all sides with one large main gate.

The typical havelis in Shekhawati consisted of two courtyards - an outer one for the men which serves as an extended threshold, and the inner one, the domain of the women. The largest havelis could have up to three or four courtyards and were two to three stories high. Most of the havelis are empty nowadays or are maintained by a watchman (typically an old man). While many others have been converted into hotels and places of tourist attraction.

FAMOUS HAVELI IN MAWAR AREA (SIKAR DISTRICT)

"Nadine Le Prince Haveli"

FAMOUS HAVELI IN MAWAR AREA (JODHPUR DIVISION) Havelli Heritage, Ahore

The towns and villages of Shekhawati are famous for the embellished frescoes on the walls of their grandiose havelis, to the point of becoming popular tourist attractions.

The havelis in and around Jaisalmer Fort(also known as the Golden Fort), situated in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, of which the three most impressive are Patwon Ki Haveli, Salim Singh Ki Haveli, and Nathmal-Ki Haveli, deserve special mention. These were the elaborate homes of Jaisalmer's rich merchants. The ostentatious carvings etched out in sandstone with infinite detail and then painstakingly pieced together in different patterns each more lavish than the next were commissioned to put on show the owner's status and wealth. Around Jaisalmer, they are typically carved from yellow sandstone. They are often characterized by wall paintings, frescoes, jharokhas (balconies) and archways.

The Patwon Ji ki Haveli is the most important and the largest haveli, as it was the first erected in Jaisalmer. It is not a single haveli but a cluster of 5 small havelis. The first in the row is also the most popular, and is also known as Kothari's Patwa Haveli. The first among these was commissioned and constructed in the year 1805 by Guman Chand Patwa, then a rich trader of jewellery and fine brocades, and is the biggest and the most ostentatious. Patwa was a rich man and a renowned trader of his time and he could afford and thus order the construction of separate stories for each of his 5 sons. These were completed in the span of 50 years. All five houses were constructed in the first 60 years of the 19th century. Patwon Ji Ki is renowned for its ornate wall paintings, intricate yellow sandstone-carved jharokhas (balconies), gateways and archways. Although the building itself is made from yellow sandstone, the main gateway is brown.

FAMOUS HAVELIS OF PAKISTAN

There are a number of historically and architecturally significant havelis in Pakistan, most of which are situated in the Punjab province and constructed during the Mughal period.

Below is a list of some of the historically and architecturally significant havelis in Pakistan:

Kapoor Haveli in Peshawar

Fakir Khana Haveli and Museum, in Lahore

Mubarak Haveli in Lahore

Haveli Asif Jah in Lahore

Haveli Wajid Ali Shah in Lahore

Choona Mandi Haveli in Lahore

Haveli Nau Nihal Singh in Lahore

Haveli Barood Khana in Lahore

Lal Haveli or Chandu Di Haveli in Lahore

Haveli Man Singh in Jhelum

Lal Haveli in Rawalpindi

Saad Manzil in Kamalia

Khan Club in Peshawar

Waziristan Haveli in Abbottabad, home of Osama bin laden

Janjua Haveli in Malowal, Gujrat, Pakistan

Haveli Mubashar Ali Janjua, in Matore, Kahuta, Rawalpindi

HAVELIS IN POPULAR CULTURE

Haveli is an also a novel by Suzanne Fisher Staples and is a sequel to her Newbery Award-winning novel Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind. The story takes place in an old-fashioned haveli in Lahore, Pakistan.

WIKIPEDIA

"It is just preposterous the idea that if a party comes third in the number of votes, it still has somehow the right to carry on squatting in No 10..."

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Ralph Waldo Emerson. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca: On entering a temple we assume all signs of reverence. How much more reverent then should we be before the heavenly bodies, the stars, the very nature of God!

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Greetings mate! As many of you know, I love marrying art, science, and math in my fine art portrait and landscape photography!

The 45surf and gold 45 revolver swimsuits, shirts, logos, designs, and lingerie are designed in accordance with the golden ratio! More about the design and my philosophy of "no retouching" on the beautiful goddesses in my new book:

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And here's more on the golden ratio which appears in many of my landscape and portrait photographs (while shaping the proportions of the golden gun)!

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'

The dx4/dt=ic above the gun on the lingerie derives from my new physics books devoted to Light, Time, Dimension Theory!

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Thanks for being a fan! Would love to hears your thoughts on my philosophies and books! :)

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Beautiful swimsuit bikini model goddess!

Golden Ratio Lingerie Model Goddess LTD Theory Lingerie dx4/dt=ic! The Birth of Venus, Athena, and Artemis! Girls and Guns!

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I am working on several books on "epic photography," and I recently finished a related one titled: The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography: An Artistic and Scientific Introduction to the Golden Mean . Message me on facebook for a free review copy!

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The Golden Ratio informs a lot of my art and photographic composition. The Golden Ratio also informs the design of the golden revolver on all the swimsuits and lingerie, as well as the 45surf logo! Not so long ago, I came up with the Golden Ratio Principle which describes why The Golden Ratio is so beautiful.

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Dr. E’s Golden Ratio Principle: The golden ratio exalts beauty because the number is a characteristic of the mathematically and physically most efficient manners of growth and distribution, on both evolutionary and purely physical levels. The golden ratio ensures that the proportions and structure of that which came before provide the proportions and structure of that which comes after. Robust, ordered growth is naturally associated with health and beauty, and thus we evolved to perceive the golden ratio harmonies as inherently beautiful, as we saw and felt their presence in all vital growth and life—in the salient features and proportions of humans and nature alike, from the distribution of our facial features and bones to the arrangements of petals, leaves, and sunflowers seeds. As ratios between Fibonacci Numbers offer the closest whole-number approximations to the golden ratio, and as seeds, cells, leaves, bones, and other physical entities appear in whole numbers, the Fibonacci Numbers oft appear in nature’s elements as “growth’s numbers.” From the dawn of time, humanity sought to salute their gods in art and temples exalting the same proportion by which all their vital sustenance and they themselves had been created—the golden ratio.

The Birth of Venus! Beautiful Golden Ratio Swimsuit Bikini Model Goddess! Helen of Troy! She was tall, thin, fit, and quite pretty!

Read all about how classical art such as The Birth of Venus inspires all my photography!

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"Photographing Women Models: Portrait, Swimsuit, Lingerie, Boudoir, Fine Art, & Fashion Photography Exalting the Venus Goddess Archetype"

A cheat sheet of animation principles that can be applied to the field of interaction design. Based on a presentation at Devoxx '09 that you can find over at Parleys: www.parleys.com/#st=5&sl=43&id=1578

Your ATTITUDE shows your MINDSET while you wait!

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All my photography celebrates the physics of light! The McGucken Principle of the fourth expanding dimension: The fourth dimension is expanding at the rate of c relative to the three spatial dimensions: dx4/dt=ic .

Lao Tzu--The Tao: Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

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"Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life." --John Muir

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“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” --John Muir

Epic Poetry inspires all my photography: geni.us/9K0Ki Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art Nature Photography with the Poetic Wisdom of John Muir, Emerson, Thoreau, Homer's Iliad, Milton's Paradise Lost & Dante's Inferno Odyssey

“The mountains are calling and I must go.” --John Muir

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All art is but imitation of nature.-- Seneca (Letters from a Stoic - Letter LXV: On the First Cause)

The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul. --Chrysippus (Quoted by Cicero in De Natura Deorum)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. --To Autumn. by John Keats

Photographs available as epic fine art luxury prints. For prints and licensing information, please send me a flickr mail or contact drelliot@gmail.com with your queries! All the best on your Epic Hero's Odyssey!

name: Jodi Youngman

school: Willow River Elementary School

town: Hudson,

state: Wisconsin

This church is located on Phibsborough Road so I am not sure whey it is described as being in Grangegorman.

All Saints Church, Grangegorman is a Church of Ireland church located in Dublin.

It was built in 1828, to designs by John Semple, and formed as a parish in 1829 from the areas of St. Michan's and St. Paul's. It is a constituent member of the Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin Parish Group alongside St. Michan's Church, Dublin and St. Werburgh's Church, Dublin. This church in noteworthy on the basis that it is numbered among the first in Ireland to worship according to Tractarian Principles, and was the subject of protest and sanction by the Protestant community in Ireland in the 19th century.

New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

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Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

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Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

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Let me know in the comments if you would like a free review copy of one of my photography books! :)

Titles include:

The Tao of Epic Landscape Photography: Exalt Fine Art with the Yin-Yang Wisdom of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching!

The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

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And I am also working on a book on photographing the goddesses! :) More goddesses soon!

Best wishes on your epic hero's odyssey!:)

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I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

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Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

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Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

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Big ideas “go beyond discrete facts or skills to focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes.”

-Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design (1998), p. 10

. . . half Shiva, half Parvati

___________________

Ardhanarishvara (Sanskrit: अर्धनारीश्वर, Ardhanārīśvara),(Tamil:அர்தனாரீஸ்வரர்) is a composite androgynous form of the Hindu god Shiva and his consort Parvati (also known as Devi, Shakti and Uma in this icon). Ardhanarishvara is depicted as half male and half female, split down the middle. The right half is usually the male Shiva, illustrating his traditional attributes.

The earliest Ardhanarishvara images are dated to the Kushan period, starting from the first century CE. Its iconography evolved and was perfected in the Gupta era. The Puranas and various iconographic treatises write about the mythology and iconography of Ardhanarishvara. While Ardhanarishvara remains a popular iconographic form found in most Shiva temples throughout India, very few temples are dedicated to this deity.

Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies of the universe (Purusha and Prakriti) and illustrates how Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from (or the same as, according to some interpretations) Shiva, the male principle of God. The union of these principles is exalted as the root and womb of all creation. Another view is that Ardhanarishvara is a symbol of Shiva's all-pervasive nature.

NAMES

The name Ardhanarishvara means "the Lord who is half woman." Ardhanarishvara is also known by other names like Ardhanaranari ("the half man-woman"), Ardhanarisha ("the Lord who is half woman"), Ardhanarinateshvara ("the Lord of Dance who is half-woman"), Parangada, Naranari ("man-woman"), Ammiappan (a Tamil name meaning "Mother-Father"), and Ardhayuvatishvara (in Assam, "the Lord whose half is a young woman or girl"). The Gupta-era writer Pushpadanta in his Mahimnastava refers to this form as dehardhaghatana ("Thou and She art each the half of one body"). Utpala, commenting on the Brihat Samhita, calls this form Ardha-gaurishvara ("the Lord whose half is the fair one"; the fair one – Gauri – is an attribute of Parvati). The Vishnudharmottara Purana simply calls this form Gaurishvara ("The Lord/husband of Gauri).

ORIGINS AND EARLY IMAGES

The conception of Ardhanarishvara may have been inspired by Vedic literature's composite figure of Yama-Yami, the Vedic descriptions of the primordial Creator Vishvarupa or Prajapati and the fire-god Agni as "bull who is also a cow," the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad's Atman ("soul") in the form of the androgynous cosmic man Purusha and the androgynous myths of the Greek Hermaphroditus and Phrygian Agdistis. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says that Purusha splits himself into two parts, male and female, and the two halves copulate, producing all life – a theme concurrent in Ardhanarishvara's tales. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad sows the seed of the Puranic Ardhanarishvara. It declares Rudra – the antecedent of the Puranic Shiva – the maker of all and the root of Purusha (the male principle) and Prakriti (the female principle), adhering to Samkhya philosophy. It hints at his androgynous nature, describing him both as male and female.

The concept of Ardhanarishvara originated in Kushan and Greek cultures simultaneously; the iconography evolved in the Kushan era (30–375 CE), but was perfected in the Gupta era (320-600 CE). A mid-first century Kushan era stela in the Mathura Museum has a half-male, half-female image, along with three other figures identified with Vishnu, Gaja Lakshmi and Kubera The male half is ithyphallic or with an urdhvalinga and makes an abhaya mudra gesture; the female left half holds a mirror and has a rounded breast. This is the earliest representation of Ardhanarishvara, universally recognized. An early Kushan Ardhanarishvara head discovered at Rajghat is displayed at the Mathura Museum. The right male half has matted hair with a skull and crescent moon; the left female half has well-combed hair decorated with flowers and wears a patra-kundala (earring). The face has a common third eye. A terracotta seal discovered in Vaishali has half-man, half-woman features. Early Kushan images show Ardhanarishvara in a simple two-armed form, but later texts and sculptures depict a more complex iconography.

Ardhanarishvara is referred to by the Greek author Stobaeus (c. 500 AD) while quoting Bardasanes (c. 154–222 AD), who learnt from an Indian embassy's visit to Syria during the reign of Elagabalus (Antoninus of Emesa) (218–22 AD). A terracotta androgynous bust, excavated at Taxila and dated to the Saka-Parthian era, pictures a bearded man with female breasts.

Ardhanarishvara is interpreted as an attempt to syncretise the two principal Hindu sects, Shaivism and Shaktism, dedicated to Shiva and the Great Goddess. A similar syncretic image is Harihara, a composite form of Shiva and Vishnu, the Supreme deity of the Vaishnava sect.

ICONOGRAPHY

The iconographic 16th century work Shilparatna, the Matsya Purana and Agamic texts like Amshumadbhedagama, Kamikagama, Supredagama and Karanagama – most of them of South Indian origin – describe the iconography of Ardhanarishvara. The right superior side of the body usually is the male Shiva and the left is the female Parvati; in rare depictions belonging to the Shaktism school, the feminine holds the dominant right side. The icon usually is prescribed to have four, three or two arms, but rarely is depicted with eight arms. In the case of three arms, the Parvati side has only one arm, suggesting a lesser role in the icon.

MALE HALF

The male half wears a jata-mukuta (a headdress formed of piled, matted hair) on his head, adorned with a crescent moon. Sometimes the jata-mukuta is adorned with serpents and the river goddess Ganga flowing through the hair. The right ear wears a nakra-kundala, sarpa-kundala ("serpent-earring") or ordinary kundala ("earring"). Sometimes, the male eye is depicted smaller than the female one and a half-moustache is also seen. A half third eye (trinetra) is prescribed on the male side of the forehead in the canons; a full eye may also be depicted in middle of forehead separated by both the sides or a half eye may be shown above or below Parvati's round dot. A common elliptical halo (prabhamandala/prabhavali) may be depicted behind the head; sometimes the shape of the halo may differ on either side.

In the four-armed form, a right hand holds a parashu (axe) and another makes an abhaya mudra (gesture of reassurance), or one of the right arms is slightly bent and rests on the head of Shiva's bull mount, Nandi, while the other is held in the abhaya mudra gesture. Another configuration suggests that a right hand holds a trishula (trident) and another makes a varada mudra (gesture of blessing). Another scripture prescribes that a trishula and akshamala (rosary) are held in the two right hands. In the two-armed form, the right hand holds a kapala (skull cup) or gestures in a varada mudra. He may also hold a skull. In the Badami relief, the four-armed Ardhanarishvara plays a veena (lute), using a left and a right arm, while other male arm holds a parashu and the female one a lotus.

The Shiva half has a flat masculine chest, a straight vertical chest, broader shoulder, wider waist and muscular thigh. He wears a yagnopavita (sacred thread) across the chest, which is sometimes represented as a naga-yagnopavita (a snake worn as a yagnopavita) or a string of pearls or gems. The yajnopavita may also divide the torso into its male and female halves. He wears ornaments characteristic of Shiva's iconography, including serpent ornaments.

In some North Indian images, the male half may be nude and also be ithyphallic (urdhavlinga or urdhavreta: with an erect phallus), or with a full or half phallus and one testicle. However, such imagery is never found in South Indian images; the loins are usually covered in a garment (sometimes a dhoti) of silk or cotton, or the skin of a tiger or deer), typically down to the knee, and held in place by a sarpa-mekhala, serpent girdle or jewellery. The right leg may be somewhat bent or straight and often rests on a lotus pedestal (padma-pitha). The whole right half is described as smeared with ashes and as terrible and red-coloured or gold or coral in appearance; however, these features are rarely depicted.

FEMALE HALF

The female half has karanda-mukuta (a basket-shaped crown) on her head or well-combed knotted hair or both. The left ear wears a valika-kundala (a type of earring). A tilaka or bindu (a round red dot) adorns her forehead, matching Shiva's third eye. The left eye is painted with black eyeliner. While the male neck is sometimes adorned with a jewelled hooded serpent, the female neck has a blue lotus matching it.

In the four-armed form, one of the left arms rests on Nandi's head, while the other is bent in kataka pose and holds a nilotpala (blue lotus) or hangs loosely at her side. In the three-armed representation, the left hand holds a flower, a mirror or a parrot. In the case of two-armed icons, the left hand rests on Nandi's head, hangs loose or holds either a flower, a mirror or a parrot. The parrot may be also perched on Parvati's wrist. Her hand(s) is/are adorned with ornaments like a keyura (anklet) or kankana (bangles).

Parvati has a well-developed, round bosom and a narrow feminine waist embellished with various haras (religious bracelets) and other ornaments, made of diamonds and other gems. She has a fuller thigh and a curvier body and hip than the male part of the icon. The torso, hip and pelvis of the female is exaggerated to emphasize the anatomical differences between the halves. Though the male private parts may be depicted, the female genitalia are never depicted and the loins are always draped. She wears a multi-coloured or white silken garment down to her ankle and one or three girdles around her waist. The left half wears an anklet and her foot is painted red with henna. The left leg may be somewhat bent or straight, resting on a lotus pedestal. In contrast to the Shiva half, the Parvati half – smeared with saffron – is described as calm and gentle, parrot-green or dark in colour. She may be draped in a sari covering her torso and legs.

POSTURES AND VAHANA

The posture of Ardhanarishvara may be tribhanga – bent in three parts: head (leaning to the left), torso (to the right) and right leg or in the sthanamudra position (straight), sometimes standing on a lotus pedestal, whereupon it is called samapada. Seated images of Ardhanarishvara are missing in iconographic treatises, but are still found in sculpture and painting. Though the canons often depict the Nandi bull as the common vahana (mount) of Ardhanarishvara, some depictions have Shiva's bull vahana seated or standing near or behind his foot, while the goddess's lion vahana is near her foot.

EIGHT-ARMED FORM

The Parashurameshvara Temple at Bhubaneswar has a dancing eight-armed Ardhanarishvara. The upper male arms hold a lute and akshamala (rosary), while the upper female ones hold a mirror and a book; the others are broken. Another non-conventional Ardhanarishvara is found at Darasuram. The sculpture is three-headed and eight-armed, holding akshamala, khadga (sword), pasha, musala, kapala (skull cup), lotus and other objects.

OTHER TEXTUAL DESCRIPTIONS

The Naradiya Purana mentions that Ardhanarishvara is half-black and half-yellow, nude on one side and clothed on other, wearing skulls and a garland of lotuses on the male half and female half respectively. The Linga Purana gives a brief description of Ardhanarishvara as making varada and abhaya mudras and holding a trishula and a lotus. The Vishnudharmottara Purana prescribes a four-armed form, with right hands holding a rosary and trishula, while the left ones bear a mirror and a lotus. The form is called Gaurishvara in this text.

LEGENDS

The mythology of Ardhanarishvara – which mainly originates in the Puranic canons – was developed later to explain existent images of the deity that had emerged in the Kushan era.

The unnamed half-female form of Shiva is also alluded to in the epic Mahabharata. In Book XIII, Upamanyu praises Shiva rhetorically asking if there is anyone else whose half-body is shared by his spouse, and adds that the universe had risen from the union of sexes, as represented by Shiva's half-female form. In some narratives, Shiva is described as dark and fair-complexioned, half yellow and half white, half woman and half man, and both woman and man. In Book XIII, Shiva preaches to Parvati that half of his body is made up of her body.

In the Skanda Purana, Parvati requests Shiva to allow her to reside with him, embracing "limb-to-limb", and so Ardhanarishvara is formed. It also tells that when the demon Andhaka wanted to seize Parvati and make her his wife, Vishnu rescued her and brought her to his abode. When the demon followed her there, Parvati revealed her Ardhanarishvara form to him. Seeing the half-male, half-female form, the demon lost interest in her and left. Vishnu was amazed to see this form and saw himself in the female part of the form.

The Shiva Purana describes that the creator god Brahma created all male beings, the Prajapatis, and told them to regenerate, which they were unable to do. Confronted with the resulting decline in the pace of creation, Brahma was perplexed and contemplated on Shiva for help. To enlighten Brahma of his folly, Shiva appeared before him as Ardhanarishvara. Brahma prayed to the female half of Shiva to give him a female to continue creation. The goddess agreed and created various female powers from her body, thereby allowing creation to progress. In other Puranas like the Linga Purana, Vayu Purana, Vishnu Purana, Skanda Purana, Kurma Purana, and Markandeya Purana, Rudra (identified with Shiva) appears as Ardhanarishvara, emerging from Brahma's head, forehead, mouth or soul as the embodiment of Brahma's fury and frustration due to the slow pace of creation. Brahma asks Rudra to divide himself, and the latter complies by dividing into male and female. Numerous beings, including the 11 Rudras and various female shaktis, are created from both the halves. In some versions, the goddess unites with Shiva again and promises to be born as Sati on earth to be Shiva's wife. In the Linga Purana, the Ardhanarishvara Rudra is so hot that in the process of appearing from Brahma's forehead, he burns Brahma himself. Ardhanarishvara Shiva then enjoys his own half – the Great Goddess – by "the path of yoga" and creates Brahma and Vishnu from her body. In the repetitive cycle of aeons, Ardhanarishvara is ordained to reappear at the beginning of every creation as in the past.

The Matsya Purana describes how Brahma, pleased with a penance performed by Parvati, rewards her by blessing her with a golden complexion. This renders her more attractive to Shiva, to whom she later merges as one half of his body.

Tamil temple lore narrates that once the gods and sages (rishi) had gathered at Shiva's abode, they prayed their respects to Shiva and Parvati. However, the sage Bhringi had vowed to worship only one deity, Shiva, and ignored Parvati while worshipping and circumambulating him. Agitated, Parvati cursed Bhringi to lose all his flesh and blood, reducing him to a skeleton. In this form Bhringi could not stand erect, so the compassionate ones who witnessed the scene blessed the sage with a third leg for support. As her attempt to humiliate the sage had failed, Parvati punished herself with austerities that pleased Shiva and led him to grant her the boon of uniting with him, thereby compelling Bhringi to worship her as well as himself in the form of Ardhanarishvara. However, the sage assumed the form of a beetle and circumambulating only the male half, drilling a hole in the deity. Amazed by his devotion, Parvati reconciled with the sage and blessed him. The seventh-century Shaiva Nayanar saint Appar mentions that after marrying Parvati, Shiva incorporated her into half of his body.

In the Kalika Purana, Parvati (called Gauri here) is described as having suspected Shiva of infidelity when she saw her own reflection in the crystal-like breast of Shiva. A conjugal dispute erupted but was quickly resolved, after which Parvati wished to stay eternally with Shiva in his body. The divine couple was thereafter fused as Ardhanarishvara. Another tale from North India also talks about Parvati's jealousy. Another woman, the river Ganga – often depicted flowing out of Shiva's locks – sat on his head, while Parvati (as Gauri) sat on his lap. To pacify Gauri, Shiva united with her as Ardhanarishvara.

Only in tales associated with the cult of Shakta (in which the Goddess is considered the Supreme Being) is the Goddess venerated as the Maker of All. In these tales, it is her body (not Shiva's) which splits into male and female halves.

SYMBOLISM

Ardhanarishvara symbolizes that the male and female principles are inseparable. The composite form conveys the unity of opposites (coniunctio oppositorum) in the universe. The male half of Ardhanarishvara stands for Purusha and female half is Prakriti. Purusha is the male principle and passive force of the universe, while Prakriti is the female active force; both are "constantly drawn to embrace and fuse with each other, though... separated by the intervening axis". The union of Purusha (Shiva) and Prikriti (Shiva's energy, Shakti) generates the universe, an idea also manifested in the union of the Linga of Shiva and Yoni of Devi creating the cosmos. The Mahabharata lauds this form as the source of creation. Ardhanarishvara also suggests the element of Kama or Lust, which leads to creation.

Ardhanarishvara signifies "totality that lies beyond duality", "bi-unity of male and female in God" and "the bisexuality and therefore the non-duality" of the Supreme Being. It conveys that God is both Shiva and Parvati, "both male and female, both father and mother, both aloof and active, both fearsome and gentle, both destructive and constructive" and unifies all other dichotomies of the universe While Shiva's rosary in the Ardhanarishvara iconography associates him with asceticism and spirituality, Parvati's mirror associates her to the material illusory world. Ardhanarishvara reconciles and harmonizes the two conflicting ways of life: the spiritual way of the ascetic as represented by Shiva, and the materialistic way of the householder as symbolized by Parvati, whose raison d’être in Hindu mythology is to lure the ascetic Shiva into marriage and the wider circle of worldly affairs. The interdependence of Shiva on his power (Shakti) as embodied in Parvati is also manifested in this form. Ardhanarishvara conveys that Shiva and Shakti are one and the same, an interpretation also declared in inscriptions found along with Ardhanarishvara images in Java and the eastern Malay Archipelago. The Vishnudharmottara Purana also emphasizes the identity and sameness of the male Purusha and female Prakriti, manifested in the image of Ardhanarishvara. According to Shaiva guru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami (1927–2001), Ardhanarishvara signifies that the great Shiva is "All, inseparable from His energy" (i.e. his Shakti) and is beyond gender.

Across cultures, hermaphrodite figures like Ardhanarishvara have traditionally been associated with fertility and abundant growth. In this form, Shiva in his eternal embrace with Prakriti represents the eternal reproductive power of Nature, whom he regenerates after she loses her fertility. "It is a duality in unity, the underlying principle being a sexual dualism". Art historian Sivaramamurti calls it "a unique connection of the closely knit ideal of man and woman rising above the craving of the flesh and serving as a symbol of hospitality and parenthood". The dual unity of Ardhanarishvara is considered "a model of conjugal inseparability". Padma Upadhyaya comments, "The idea of ... Ardhanārīśvara is to locate the man in the woman as also the woman in the man and to create perfect homogeneity in domestic affairs".

Often, the right half of Ardhanarishvara is male and the left is female. The wife traditionally sits to the left of the husband and is often called vamangi – "the left-sided one". The left side is the location of the heart and is associated with feminine characteristics like intuition and creativity, while the right is associated with the brain and masculine traits – logic, valour and systematic thought. The left side is also the inferior side, reserved for the dependent one in a relationship. Shiva, the master of spirituality and restraint, is considered superior to the indulgence (bhoga) and materialism celebrated in the female form. The female is often not equal in the Ardhanarishvara, the male god who is half female; she remains a dependent entity. These interpretations of Shakthi as not being equal to Shiva are mostly interpretations of few western scholars and are not supported by most scholars who believe that they are in fact like two sides of a coin. Shiva is incomplete without Shakthi and himself says so to his devotee Bhringi who refused to worship Shakthi Ardhanarishvara is often described as a form of Shiva, and rarely as that of the goddess, as in her Shakta sects. Ardhanarishvara "is in essence Shiva, not Parvati". This is also reflected in mythology, where Parvati becomes a part of Shiva. It is likewise reflected in iconography: Shiva often has two supernatural arms and Parvati has just one earthly arm, and his bull vahana – not her lion vahana – typically accompanies them.

WORSHIP AND ADORATION

Ardhanarishvara is one of the most popular iconographic forms of Shiva. It is found in more or less all temples and shrines dedicated to Shiva all over India and South-east Asia. There is ample evidence from texts and the multiple depictions of the Ardhanarishvara in stone to suggest the male-female equality is embodied in Hinduism. Though a popular iconographic form, temples dedicated to the deity are few. A popular one is located in Tiruchengode, while five others are located in Kallakkurichi taluk, all of them in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In 'Thiruvilaiyalgal' (sacred plays of Shiva and Parvathy), Shiva and Parvathy have contests on who is superior, the male or the female and they finally settle on equality on a 50/50 basis.

The Linga Purana advocates the worship of Ardhanarishvara by devotees to attain union with Shiva upon dissolution of the world and thus attain salvation. The Ardhanarinateshvara Stotra is a popular hymn dedicated to the deity. The Nayanar saints of Tamil Nadu exault the deity in hymns. While the 8th-century Nayanar saint Cuntarar says that Shiva is always inseparable from the Mother Goddess, another 7th-century Nayanar saint Campantar describes how the "eternal feminine" is not only his consort, but she is also part of him. The renowned Sanskrit writer Kalidasa (c. 4th–5th century) alludes Ardhanarishvara in invocations of his Raghuvamsa and Malavikagnimitram, and says that Shiva and Shakti are as inseparable as word and meaning. The 9th-century Nayanar saint Manikkavacakar casts Parvati in the role of the supreme devotee of Shiva in his hymns. He alludes to Ardhanarishvara several times and regards it the ultimate goal of a devotee to be united with Shiva as Parvati is in the Ardhanarishvara form.

WIKIPEDIA

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Professor Mohammad Taghi Rohani Rankoohi lecturing on "Principles of Database Design" in his class in Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in Shahid Beheshti University (National University of Iran) on the day before his 63rd birthday, Wednesday, April 21, 2010. He was my professor more than 20 years ago, and I had the honor to be his colleague when I was a lecturer in Shahid Beheshti University between 2001 and 2005. His birthday is on April 22, and I used to visit him on his birthday every year from 1987 when I was his teaching assistant on the "Machine Structure and Language" course in Faculty of Informatics of Shahid Behesthi University. After graduating from the University on 1989, his birthday was a reason for me to visit him and take a walk around the university. On this occasion in 2010, he let me take photos of him in his Database class while teaching. This was the last semester that he lectured in the old building of the ECE, ex-Informatics, department. The next semester he lectured in the new building and then he quit working in Shahid Beheshti University after almost thirty years. After that he just lectured in Sharif University of Technology.

استاد محمدتقی روحانی رانکوهی در حال تدریس "اصول طراحی پایگاه های داده ها" در دانشکده مهندسی برق و کامپیوتر دانشگاه شهید بهشتی (دانشگاه ملی ایران) یک روز قبل از شصت و سومین سالروز تولدشان در روز چهارشنبه اول اردیبهشت 1389. بیش از بیست سال پیش دانشجوی ایشان بودم. بین سالهای ۱۳۸۰ تا ۱۳۸۳ این افتخار را داشتم که در دانشگاه شهید بهشتی همکار ایشان باشم. سالروز تولدشان دوم اردیبهشت ماه است و از سال ۱۳۶۶ که من کمک استاد ایشان در درس ساختمان و زبان ماشین در دانشکده انفورماتیک دانشگاه شهید بهشتی بودم، کم‌و‌بیش هر سال سالروز تولدشان را حضوری تبریک گفته‌ام. بعد از فارغ التحصیلی از دانشگاه شهید بهشتی در سال ۱۳۶۸، سالروز تولد ایشان بهانه‌ای بود که به ایشان و همینطور به محل تحصیل دوران لیسانسم سری بزنم. سال ۱۳۸۹ هم که برای دیدنشان به دانشگاه رفتم، لطف داشتند و به من اجازه دادند که در کلاس از ایشان عکس بگیرم. این آخرین سالی بود که در شهید بهشتی تدریس می‌کردند. این کلاس هم آخرین کلاس ایشان در محل سابق دانشکده انفورماتیک، دانشکده مهندسی برق و کامپیوتر، بود. یک ترم پس از این کلاس، در پاییز ۱۳۸۹، در محل جدید دانشکده تدریس کردند و بعد از آن هم بخاطر برخی مشکلات، همکاری با دانشگاه شهید بهشتی را پس از حدود سی سال به پایان رساندند. از آن پس تنها در دانشگاه صنعتی شریف تدریس کردند.

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Did you know that you could just walk into your local Starbucks and request a "Green Apron Book", that outlines the principles of Starbucks? I heard about this little booklet from a recent book I had read about the company and went in to my local Starbucks and asked for a copy. I was a tad surprised when the employees were extremely happy to give one to me. There's something to be said about a company that is not afraid to share their core principles with their customers. There's much more to say when they do it so enthusiastically.

Mosaic Pavement and Indented Skirting facing East.

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The Mosaic Pavement

by GABRIEL VASILE OLTEAN

Expert Inspector of NGLR for Western Region; Past Worshipful Master, ZAMOLXIS Lodge, no. 182, Deva

"The interior decoration of a masonic lodge comprises ornaments, accessories and insignia. The ornaments are: the mosaic on the floor - respresenting spirt and matter, the shining star and the laced edge, which remind us always the first of the presence of God and the second of the protective wall" - cites Charles W Leadbeater from the ritual of mixed masonry in his work "Freemasonry - Rites and Initiations."

In the center of the Temple, on the ground, there is a rectangular floor, with black and white tiles, called the mosaic pavement (theoretically, cubes seen perspectivally), where a relgaion obtains between the sides, either 2:1 (the long square) or 1.618.../1 (the golden number), thus coming up with a surface proportional to the total area of the Lodge. Thus we see that practically the moasica, placed in the center of the Lodge is a microcosmic representation of the whole of creation and is by itself a sacred central area - whence the interdiction to ever step on the mosaic when the work of the Lodge is underway. The pavement symbolizes the indisociable operative complementarity of the two cosmic principles: the initiate must know how no longer let himself be dominated by the confrontation between positive and negative forces, to know (it is indispensable) how to use it, to master it so as to work constructively.

In Ancient Egypt, the mosaic was never stepped on except by a candidate and the masters of ceremony, and only at precise moments (by the Past Worshipful Master for the fulfilment of his tasks, by the First Expert when he took the light of the sacred fire, or by the sexton when he spread frankincense on the altar of the Temple. An extremely important aspect of the mosaic pavement is that, being placed in the middle of the Temple, framed by the three colonettes (which represent the Worshipful Master, the Senior and Junior Wardens), must be avoided by walking in a square, in a symbolic sense. The current of energy cross the floor, some along the length, some along the width, in lines that remind of the warp of a canvas.

Upon opening the work, the Trestle Board is depicted on this pavement, which varies with the first three degrees. The mosaic pavement signifies different things according to the traditional mode of work in the lodge, or the masonic rite employed.

The French Rite specifies that the pavement adorned the threshold of the geat porch of the Temple and showed that this is one of the ornaments of the Lodge, being the emblem of the intimate union among masons. Here it was explained to the Apprentice that he "could not stand on the mosaic pavement to contemplate the interior of the edifice". This started above from the seventh step, as we can well conclude by an attentive research of the Trestle Boards of the first two degrees.

The Rectified Scottish Rite speaks too little of this pavement, noting that "the mosaic pavement adorns the threshold of the great veranda of the Temple. It covers the entry to the subterranean part of the Temple between the two columns, to a crypt that held holy idols and especially the pledge of the alliance between the chosen people and the Creator: the Royal Ark (Ark of the Covenant).

The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite does not describe in any way this ornament. As to the decoration of the Lodge, it is said however "the floor of the lodge is the pavement in alternative black and white squares. When it is thus decorated, a pavement is achieved wit the shape of a long square, placed in the center of the Lodge, decorated on the model of the latter".

The York Rite affirms that "the mosaic pavement represents the floor of the Temple of Solomon", having the added laced edge. It is obvious enough that it is about a symbolic contribution in what regards the floor of the Lodge, because in the Bible the floor of the Temple isn't described as an series of black and white squares: "and the floor of the Temple was made from cypress planks" (3 Kings 6:15).

Whereas in the Emulation Rite (the Anglo-Saxon Rites are more precise in their descriptions) specifies that "the mosaic pavement may rightly be considered the wondrous tiling of a freemason Lodge due to its diversity and regularity. Thus the diversity of beings and objects in the world surfaces, as well the ensouled ones as those that are not". In the complementary course of the Rite of Emulation (in the fifth part) it is specified: "our lodge is adorned with mosaic pavement to mark the uncertainty of all terrestrial vanities... as we step on this mosaic, our thought must return to the original idea that we imitate and act as honorable men and masons". Mosaic pavement is presented as an image of faith, harmony, understanding..

Outside the definitions offered by different masonic rites, the mosaic pavement may be approached under many aspect, two of which seem edifying to us:

• The floor of the Lodge,

• The route of squares for the tracing of planes,

When we approach the mosaic pavement as floor of the Lodge, we are forced to distinguish between the pavement of operative and speculative Lodges.

In the first case, we specify that Lodges were usually annexes to the construction site, attached to the construction on the Southern side of the Work (to receive more light and to have the wall of the edifice for protection. It is extremely clear and evident that in this case no floor was imposed (nor would any be functional). The tiling that constitutes the mosaic is fragile in contradiction with the dimensions (weight) of the tools of freemasons (sledgehammers were very heavy). If we are talking about a surface for permanent cutting and polishing of rock, we can easily imagine that the floor of such a place was permanently covered by fragments, remains, abrasive dust. Not in the last place, we must note the fact that mosaic was principally fixed in especially prepared mortar in which designs were first marked that etched the image or drawing that was the purpose of the mosaic.

In the other approach, that of the speculative Lodges, a symbolic rug laid in squares may be laid on the floor, or it may be build from alternating black and white tiles, the decision being that of the Lodge. The notionc of mosaic pavement cannot be discussed before the appearance of Grand Lodges.

As a route of squares - as network of right angles - to trace planes is another mode of approach specific to operative lodges, which must distinguish:

A directory route of the edifice that must be understood after we describe the Medieval constructin site at the beginning of the work: on a leveled and cleared surface (treated with charcoal), a scheme of the main lines of the edifice was traced with the help of a rope covered in chalk. There

are documents to this effect that attest the describe practice, which reminds of certain answers from the masonic catechism. To the question: "how do you serve your Master?", there is the answer: "with charcoal, chalk and clay".

A technical assistance set of squares would be another variant of this approach. An amenably arranged surface, spread in regular squares through lines traced for inumerable uses, the first and most important being that of assembly table. It also served to establish easily a series of angles, in an approximate way that was sufficient for a mason (taking four divisions on a line, and on the perpendicular seven at one extremity, a reasaonbly 60° angle is obtained). In fact, we can imagine the banal math copybook paper that has helped us trace with more facility (and more precision) the geometrical shapes that tortured (or didn't) us in the geometry problems in elementary school.

The black and white, chessboard-like pavement is thus the mosaic pavement. In what pertains to the term "mosaic", there are two different opinions, one refering to Moses and one to the technique of decoration. Each school has its pros and cons, more or less logical and valid.

"The canvas of ours lives is a mixed thread, the good together with the bad" wrote Shakespeare. Anything is characterized by a combination of good and bad, light and shadow, joy and sadness, positive and negative, yin and yang. What is good for me may be bad for you, pleasure is generated by pain, etc.

Following the thread of the current Paper, we may say with certainty that the mosaic is not mart of the elements of Judaic architecture and that the mosaic pavement is a contribution of modern speculative Masonry, operative lodges never having been squared this way. It is obvious that the current exposition is not and does not wish to be an exhaustive work. It is a somewhat complex approach of an important symbol in the decoration of the masonic Temple and it wishes in fact to the a paper addressing an open question:

- The mosaic pavement is the floor of the Lodge (as the rituals consider it) or is it the space limited by the three pillars Power, Wisdom, and Beauty?

A good thought accompanied by the triple brotherly accolade!

Copyright Forum Masonic

A suspended 'G' in the centre of the lodge above the Masonic Altar.

The masonic letter G

Source: Masonic Vibes

by Paul Foster Case

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. St. John 1:1

All in all that is all there is to the letter G. But I have found that if you make things to simple people tend to take them as unimportant.

I have not been able to determine when the letter G was introduced into Speculative Masonry as a symbol.

The letter G is not derived from the Operative Masons of the Middle Ages, and formed no part of the architectural decoration of old cathedrals.

LetterG.jpeg

Whether it entered the symbolism under the influence of those Rosicrucian’s and Qabalists who joined the Order during the last half of the 17th century, or whether it was introduced at some time subsequent to 1717, when the first Grand Lodge was established at the Apple-tree Tavern in London, is impossible to tell.

The letter G is the initial of Geometry. This makes it a symbolic summary of the entire Masonic system. The heart of Freemasonry is a doctrine founded on the science of geometry. In the old Masonic Constitutions it is specifically stated that Masonry and Geometry are one and the same.

It is no secret that the letter G is a symbol for the Deity. It so happens that God is the English name of the Grand Architect of the Universe. The fact that G is the first letter of God is not the only connection between the symbol and the Deity.

Its Greek equivalent is the initial of Gaia, the earth Mother, eldest born of Chases, whose name is the root of the noun geometria, geometry.

Gimel, the Hebrew correspondence to G, is the initial of gadol, majesty, and of gebur, strong, words used to designate the Deity throughout the Hebrew sacred writings. Gimel itself is regarded by the wise men of Israel as being the alphabetical sign of the sacred wisdom which is founded on the science of geometry.

So basically we are back to St. John 1:1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

When I was raised to a Master Mason, I was told to learn the following lesions:

The Pot Of Incense Symbolizes man, the pot being the physical body, the Incense being the mind of man, and when they are lit, the heat given off being the spirit of man as given to him by God.

The Beehive Symbolizes unity of purpose, with just one leader, for life and just one goal, the betterment of the hive.

The Anchor And Ark The Anchor is an emblem of Jesus Christ who gave his life to ensure us a safe harbor to find rest in. The Ark is an emblem of God, that divine ark that carries us through a lifetime of trials and tribulations, and finally to our Heavenly home.

The 47th Problem of Euclid Is commonly excepted to represent the physical body, the psyche, and the spiritual, and this figure being the complete man. Let us just suppose the 47th problem of Euclid represented the life spirit, the human spirit, and the divine spirit. The life spirit being Friendship, the human spirit being Morality, and the divine spirit being Brotherly Love. This figure could represent the perfect man.

The Hour Glass Is an emblem of human life. Like the hour glass, when the first grain of sand falls it is a fact that the last grain of sand will fall too. When man is born it is a fact that he will also die. The difference being that man has control over how he lives his life and the sand only falls down.

The Sword Reminds us that we should be ever watchful and guarded in our thoughts, words, and actions, because all of these will be recorded in the Great Book of Life, that all men are judged by when" they die.

The Scythe Is used as an emblem of Death but it is in reality an emblem of transition from one life to another. Because as this mortal life comes to an end it brings with it the beginning of a spiritual life.

When I went through York Rite Masonry, it was explained to me the meaning of all these lesions.

When I went through my reception into Scottish Rite Masonry, even more lesions were taught and explained to me.

When I was admitted to the Thirty-Third Degree, came the Surprise of my life. No more lesions, no more explanations, I was only told to remember a few simple facts and to do one thing, which changed my whole outlook on life.

1. Any man who fails, in his duties to God, fails mankind and himself.

2. While you live, you should work to secure for all people their rights and voice in its government.

3. You must labor to enlighten and teach mankind.

4. To teach the people their power and their rights.

5. To let the enemies of mankind be your enemies.

6. Come to no terms with them, but complete surrender of their ways.

7. That even though I been exalted to the Thirty-Third Degree, I would still be among my equals in every Blue Lodge and that all “worthy” Master Masons are my Brothers.

Now the one thing that changed my life was, I was informed that it was not enough to just know or just understand the lessons of Masonry, I had to live the lessons of Masonry.

Believing this I feel that I will be “A life time Apprentice” my whole life. When the time comes to return this physical body back to the ground from wince it came.

The sprit that lived in this body will be returned to God as a “Fellow Craft” and then at the feet of God the labors of my sprit will be judged by God.

Then and only then, if God finds the work of my sprit as “true work, good work”, will my sprit be raised from a dead level to a living perpendicular on the angle of a square by God.

In this belief, I will live my life as “A life time Apprentice”, always trying to subdue my passions and learning to improve myself.

Uses balance, unity, and variety.

principles of neural science, basic pathology, surgery cases

The UK government's design principles.

New book! Epic Landscape Photography: The Principles of Fine Art Nature Photography!

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Working on a couple photography books! 45EPIC GODDESS PHOTOGRAPHY: A classic guide to exalting the archetypal woman. And 45EPIC Fine Art Landscape Photography!

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Greetings all! I have been busy finishing a few books on photography, while traveling all over--to Zion and the Sierras--shooting fall colors. Please see some here: facebook.com/mcgucken

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The Golden Number Ratio Principle: Why the Fibonacci Numbers Exalt Beauty and How to Create PHI Compositions in Art, Design, & Photography

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I love voyaging forth into nature to contemplate poetry, physics, the golden ratio, and the Tao te Ching! What's your favorite epic poetry reflecting epic landscapes? I recently finished a book titled Epic Poetry for Epic Landscape Photographers:

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Did you know that John Muir, Thoreau, and Emerson all loved epic poetry and poets including Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and Robert Burns?

I recently finished my fourth book on Light Time Dimension Theory, much of which was inspired by an autumn trip to Zion!

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Via its simple principle of a fourth expanding dimension, LTD Theory provides a unifying, foundational *physical* model underlying relativity, quantum mechanics, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, and the second law of thermodynamics. The detailed diagrams demonstrate that the great mysteries of quantum mechanical nonlocality, entanglement, and probability naturally arise from the very same principle that fosters relativity alongside light's constant velocity, the equivalence of mass and energy, and time dilation.

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MiNr. 2696 France 200. Jahrestag der französischen Revolution Stilisierte Friedenstauben in der in den Landesfarben für Freiheit Gleichheit und Brüderlichkeit Stylized peace dove in the in the national colors of liberty equality and fraternity 1. jan. 1989. RaTdr. Michel Europa Katalog West 5102 M

-

History has never been easy for the French. It has, for them, probably more than for any other European people, produced a mix of exultation and anguish. Ninety-nine years ago, the French celebrated the 100th anniversary of the beginning of their great Revolution of 1789, and, by a rather extraordinary coincidence, they did so only a couple of years after inaugurating for the first time a permanently republican form of government, finishing a century-long alternation between monarchy and anarchy. The moment was full of exultation. Hope and confidence in the future prevailed. The principles of 1789, the rights of man and citizen and the concept of constitutional law, seemed finally to have been embodied in government. An Exposition Universelle was held, attracting more than 25 million paying entrants, whose centerpiece was Gustave Eiffel's extraordinary tower, in itself an awesome symbol of the belief in the perfectibility of man through reason, science and democracy.

To be sure, mingling with the triumphalism of the newly empowered republicans were discordant notes, sharp strains of anguish and opposition. Hippolyte Taine, as the French historian Pascal Ory has pointed out in a collection of volumes entitled ''Les Lieux de la Memoire'' (''The Places of Memory''), was publishing his antirevolutionary ''Origins-of Contemporary France'' in those years. Church figures railed against the revolution as Antichrist. The Republic was still shaky. Its enemies -clerics, monarchists, antiparliamentary demagogues - were out in force. But perhaps because the Republic was perceived to be fragile, or, at least, wondrous, certainly long awaited, the popular mood was weighted heavily in favor of the richness of memory. The official will, the French historian Mona Ozouf has written, ''was to drown the celebration in the ocean of a Universal Exposition.'' Mr. Ory cites a contemporary commentator, Charles-Louis Chassin, a self-conscious counterweight to Taine, proclaiming that the centennial showed ''the legitimacy of the demands of our fathers.'' Another century has rolled by now. The French will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Revolution next year facing a kind of paradox.

The danger to the Republic has long since passed. The classic right has, at long last, appropriated the Revolution as its own, admitting it as the founding act of modern France whose underlying principles can never be repudiated. The left has lost its monopoly on that notion, thereby justifying the historian Francois Furet's observation of several years ago that, after nearly two centuries, ''the Revolution is over.'' It is no longer the centerpiece of France's political struggles.

And yet perhaps the very absence of any real threat to the Republic has encouraged a mood of ambivalence over the looming bicentennial. The revolution is generally perceived to have created a nation ''coupe en deux,'' cut into two irreconcilable parts, thereby giving French history its special whiff of the unreasonable, its taste of conflict, insurrection, class antagonism. It took most of these two centuries for the French to heal the wounds. And so it is odd that just now, when the country is more united than at any time since 1789, more governed from the political center, it has fallen into a political and scholarly quarrelsomeness over the revolution.

It is said in Paris these days that one of President Francois Mitterrand's minor purposes in declaring himself a candidate for the second presidential term he won in May was to be in office to deliver the address next year on July 14, when the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille will be celebrated. The President's Socialist Party and many others wanted to consecrate the Revolution as the Great National Event, to fuse it conceptually with the nation itself. Indeed, Mr. Mitterrand hoped to mark the bicentennial with a second Exposition Universelle. But there was too much opposition to that idea for it to survive, too much of a sense that the Revolution, which produced the Terror and the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, and then the Empire - not to mention nearly two centuries of a country ''coupe en deux'' - was worthy less of celebration than deep and sober reflection. And so, at the moment, no World's Fair is being planned. Meanwhile, new articles and books - there are 200 titles announced for publication in the next year - have contained the elements of the struggle for interpretation over what the event represented for France and the world.

The polemic centers around a very old and fundamental issue that can be put in the simplest, starkest terms: was the Revolution, on balance, good or bad? For, if it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and included the Constitution of 1793, which embodied the principles of freedom and equality before the law, it also gave birth to fundamental conflicts that, in turn, produced a familiar problem: was it appropriate to violate the newborn principles of the Revolution to defeat counterrevolutionaries? And, who, in any case, was a counterrevolutionary? The Terror of 1793, consciously implemented by the Committee of Public Safety, whose guiding figure was Maximilien Robespierre, answered in the affirmative. The ''revolutionary government'' must ''act like a thunderbolt,'' Robespierre said. After what was viewed as the counterrevolution (a term that was to have a rich history in later decades) threatened to gain the upper hand in March of that year in the region of western France known as the Vendee, tens of thousands were massacred by both sides. Did the establishment of the principles vindicate what Mr. Furet called the derapage - the skid - into chaos? Was the derapage inevitable? Those are the questions.

As the French grapple with them, two themes stand out. On the one hand, the French are examining not merely the Revolution but the history of the history of the Revolution, looking back on the way the event has been used and misused by past generations of scholars and writers, as if to stress that the great divide of French history has always divided the French. Second, if a few general lines can be discerned in recent publications, there has been a resurgence of a powerfully skeptical mood about the Revolution, of a post-revisionist school of thought with echoes of Taine and other antirevolutionary interpreters. To the great anger of those more inclined to praise the event than to discredit it, that very charged word, genocide, has been applied to the bloodshed of the Revolution, which its enemies see not as the inaugural blow of freedom but as a grim historical precedent, an ideologically motivated attempt to annihilate an entire class of people.

Magazine covers reflect the national ambivalence. ''La France Divisee, la Fete Menacee'' (''France Divided, the Celebration in Danger'') -was already last year the cover story of Lire, the country's most widely read literary magazine. ''Is it possible to celebrate the French Revolution?'' Ms. Ozouf, the author of ''La Fete Revolutionnaire'' (''The Revolutionary Celebration''), asks in the pages of Le Debat, a highbrow quarterly edited by Pierre Nora, chief nonfiction editor at Gallimard. Ms. Ozouf's answer is that commemoration is ''difficult.'' It would lead precisely to the sorts of discoveries and divisions that make celebration impossible. ''The discordancies of the event,'' she writes, ''would render into two the history of France and also the French themselves.''

''Should we be afraid of 1989?,'' responded Pierre Agulhon, another major historian of the Revolution, writing also in the pages of Le Debat. ''Can one plead reasonably here for a commemoration without being taken for an idiot, a Stalinist, or an official spokesman?'' he asked. He then went on to make just such a plea, proclaiming as justification ''the positive correlation between liberty and the Revolution.''

''You don't have to be a great expert in the history of France to know that the successive stages of freedom and democracy are owed to the men, the groups and the regimes who laid claim to 1789,'' Mr. Agulhon wrote. ''Each time, by contrast - and this is proof in contrario - that freedom and democracy were excluded from France, or suffered reversals or threats, it was because power was held by the declared enemies of the principles of the Revolution.''

Something odd has happened in the last five years, Mr. Nora said. ''For the first time, we were just at the point where the history of the revolution could be written not by militants but by historians. And yet, perhaps because of the resurgence of the extreme right, there has been a bizarre resistance to the revolution, an unanticipated return of the counterrevolutionary repressed. The left-right split that we thought had been buried has now come alive again.''

Perhaps the most anticipated book of the year provides the background for this. It is ''Dictionnaire Critique de la Revolution Francaise'' (''A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution''), to be published by Gallimard later this year. The book, edited by Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, has a symbolic value because Mr. Furet is generally perceived to be the leading figure in what has been for nearly two decades the dominant school of interpretation, one that removed the Revolution from the rosy and apologetic embrace of the Marxist left and turned it back into the hands of apolitical neutrality and moderation. Indeed, as Mr. Furet himself points out in one of the essays in the dictionary, for much of the century the interpretation of the French Revolution was dominated by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ''illustrated the necessity of the dictatorship and of the terror.'' A sign of the Marxists' domination, exercised earlier in the century by such figures as Albert Mathiez and Albert Soboul, was the replacement of Danton, the republican figure lionized by the prorevolutionary 19th-century historians, by Robespierre and the Montagnards, who ushered in the Terror of 1793, as the heroes of the event. Not surprisingly, the Terror bears more than a coincidental similarity to the Stalinist terror of the 1930's.

''And so,'' Mr. Furet says, ''the mechanisms by which the Revolution and its heroes are identified with present events operated as much on the historians of the 20th century as on those of the 19th.'' Mathiez read back into the French Revolution what he saw as the tribulations of the Russian one, claiming Jacobinism and Bolshevism to be ''two dictatorships born of the civil war and the foreign war'' and ''having an identical aim, the transformation of society.'' Mathiez, admired by Mr. Furet for carrying out the first major study of social classes in the Revolution, is nonetheless criticized for using documents ''in the fashion of a lawyer, in order to demonstrate what he already knows.'' The basic thrust of the Marxist historians, in any case, was to treat the Revolution as a whole - ''La Revolution est un bloc,'' Clemenceau once said -seeing the Terror as justified by the Revolution's ends, as made necessary by the ferocity of the counterrevolution.

It is this point of view - the romantic and very French belief in the purifying effects of acts of revolutionary violence - that Mr. Furet has combated in his own work, particularly, ''Penser la Revolution Francaise,'' published in 1981 by Oxford University Press under the title ''Interpreting the French Revolution.'' Mr. Nora calls that work ''a vast liquidation of the entire manner of thinking of the Marxists, which was so deeply embedded in the academic culture that historians dealt with the revolution in a Marxist manner without knowing that they were Marxists.'' Mr. Furet saw in the Revolution the advent of democracy in France, its birth amid deep contradictions, but the difficulties were so great and divisive that it took a century for its basic ideas to become facts. He compared the

French revolution unfavorably to the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 as models of social development, arguing, somewhat in the fashion of Edmund Burke, that it disconnected France from its historic roots. So, while the Marxists had excused the violence of 1791-94, Mr. Furet and what came to be called the revisionist school saw the headlong slide into the Terror, the massacres of the Revolution's prisoners in September 1792, the bloody civil war in the Vendee and the Dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety as tragic and unnecessary. Moreover, while the Marxists had attributed the derapage, to the gathering forces of reaction, the plotting of emigres and the schemes of Prussia and England, Mr. Furet saw it as an interior product, the unleashing of conflicts among French classes and sects.

''The English and the American Revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries conserved their religious attachments and their historical continuity,'' Mr. Furet wrote in a recent essay, contributing to the renewed current debate. ''Hence their extraordinary consensual force.'' By contrast, he goes on, ''the French Revolution broke at the same time with the Catholic Church and with the monarchy - that is, with religion and with history. It wanted to found society, to create the revolutionary man, but on the basis of what? It had neither Moses nor Washington, nobody and nothing on which to fix its rudder.''

In a new and controversial book, ''Le Genocide Franco-Francais: La Vendee-Venge'' (''The Franco-French Genocide: The Vendee Avenged''), published by Presses Universitaires de France, a young historian, Reynald Secher, takes some of the elements of the revisionist school and transforms them into a counterrevolutionary diatribe. Mr. Secher, a protege of Pierre Chaunu, the dean of the current antirevolutionary school, examines a single commune in the region of western France that in 1793 saw one of the most horrific outbreaks of fraternal violence in European history. But whereas numerous volumes have in the past examined the massacres in the Vendee as a conflict between ''patriotic'' revolutionary forces and those of the counterrevolution, Mr. Secher sees in the violence a kind of precursor to the absolute ruthlessness of 20th-century totalitarianism.

From the outset, Mr. Secher notes, the events of 1789 were welcomed in the Vendee, both by the local peasantry and by the clergy; however, by 1791 the mood had turned sour, local incidents multiplied and Jacobin attacks on priests - who rejected the effective nationalization of the church in 1790 and refused to take the mandatory oath of fealty to the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy - produced a guerrilla war. In the end, using a host of charts and maps, Mr. Secher estimates that a minimum of 15 percent of the Vendean population of about 800,000 was massacred in the nine months of the insurrection. But what is more thematically important and what gives this work its quality of portent for the 20th century, Mr. Secher spurns the notion that the massacres were the inevitable product of the ferocity of civil conflicts. They were ''premeditated massacres,'' he says; they were ''organized, planned, committed in cold blood, massive and systematic, undertaken with the conscious and proclaimed will to destroy a well-defined region, and to exterminate an entire people . . . in order to extirpate a 'cursed race' judged ideologically unredeemable.'' The Vendee, in other words, was the first ideological crime, history's first instance of utopianism gone wild.

Mr. Secher's is far from the only look at the darkest side of the Revolution. Rene Sedillot, in ''Le Cout de la Revolution Francaise'' (''The Cost of the French Revolution''), estimates that two million deaths occurred because of revolutionary violence and social dislocation. Jean-Francois Fayard, one of the co-authors of a forthcoming dictionary of the revolution (a rival to the Furet-Ozouf volume) has written ''La Justice Revolutionnaire: Chronique de la Terreur'' (''Revolutionary Justice: A Chronicle of the Terror''), examining 400 cases judged between 1792 and 1795, the period when the very guarantees enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man were suspended and the guillotine was used for some 17,000 executions.

Surprisingly, these works have not been met by an equally energetic response by the Revolution's defenders. It is as though the left, from whose camp the defenders have traditionally come, has held sway for so long that it has become a bit complacent. Nonetheless, one well-known figure from the Socialist Party, Max Gallo, a novelist and biographer who was once Mr. Mitterrand's official spokesman, made a stir with the publication of a slender volume entitled ''Lettre Ouverte a Maximilien Robespierre sur les Nouveaux Muscadins'' (''An Open Letter to Maximilien Robespierre on the New Dandies'') - the muscadins were the elegant, foppish royalists of the revolutionary era who pursued the Jacobins after Robespierre's fall.

Mr. Gallo's ''Letter,'' more cri de coeur than scholarly contribution, aims its sharpest thrusts at the argument that the Terror and dictatorship of 1793 led eventually to the Gulag Archipelago. Mr. Gallo asks for a ''detached and lucid'' examination of the Revolution, one free of partisan thrusts and ulterior motives. The concept of the revolution as the world's first ''ideological genocide'' not only puts 1789 on trial, he argues, it ''calls into question the very spirit of the Republic.''

The Revolution was attacked by the counterrevolution, which caused its derapage, Mr. Gallo argues, but it also invented the concept of the rights of man and, in any case, was made by ''men and women sharing the hope - sometimes illusory and always fragile - for bread a little less expensive, for some time away from daily labor, to live a little more freely.''

There are more sober, less politically anguished, efforts to deal with the perennial questions about the French Revolution than this. ''La Revolution en Questions'' (''The Revolution in Questions'') by Jacques Sole, published by Seuil, enumerates the questions that have stirred the passions of the French and others for 200 years and attempts to elucidate them in light of the latest scholarship. Mr. Sole, a professor of history at the University of Grenoble, is less driven by ideological passions than either Mr. Gallo or his antirevolutionary antagonists, and his questions seem the right ones: Could the monarchy have reformed? Was the derapage inevitable? Why did the Revolution end up in the personal dictatorship of Napoleon? Do contemporary revolutions derive from 1789?

Mr. Sole, who expresses a great debt to British and American historians of the French Revolution, does not treat the derapage as inevitable; like Francois Furet, he sees it as the tragic result of perhaps unavoidable mistakes. The church, for example, the center of opposition to the Revolution in the Vendee, was not actually hostile to the Revolution in the beginning. Many bishops and priests had absorbed the lessons of the philosophes and, while hostile to the overt anticlericalism of some 18th-century figures, particularly Voltaire, were as fervent about that new concept, the rights of man, and as opposed to manorial rights as the early Jacobins were. But, as Mr. Sole puts it, the clergy ''did not intend to put into question the central role of their institution in national life.'' The great divide came when the church was put under state control in 1790. ''This political disaster,'' Mr. Sole writes, ''inevitably transformed itself into a permanent source of disorder.'' The importance of religious attachments in places like the Vendee were reflected in the antirevolutionary uprising there, led by a clergy far better rooted in the local area than were the revolutionary bureaucrats.

No doubt the agony and the discomfort, the sense both of richness and ambiguity produced by the Revolution, will remain even after Mr. Sole's effort to resolve the main problems. Aware that the debate will continue, he does emphasize one element of historical certainty, a matter of definition for later generations. The word ''revolution'' was first used in its modern sense at the end of 1789 by the French, who meant by it something that went beyond a mere coup d'etat, a change of rulers. It was, as Mr. Sole puts it, ''a mass uprising aimed at transforming society.'' There, perhaps, is what gives 1789 both its main link with the 20th century and its universalist, polemical thrust.

The point is that if the French created the world's first revolution (in the new, 1789 sense of the word), they also invented the moral anguish that surrounded it then and still does. It is worth noting these days that the Soviet people, basking in relative openness, have been reconsidering Stalin and Bukharin and even Lenin, just as the French have been reflecting on Danton and Robespierre. The underlying issue is the same in both cases. Can there be revolution without derapage, without the guillotine or the gulag? It is a measure of its gravity and difficulty that 200 years later, that question is among the few remaining things that still cut the French in two.

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Francuska građanska (buržoaska) revolucija započela je 1789. godine, a trajala do 1795., po nekima i 1799. godine. Najveće je dostignuće toga procesa ukidanje feudalnih odnosa u Francuskoj i u velikom broju ostalih europskih zemalja. Sve prijašnje revolucije imale su drukčije osobine. Ova je revolucija nešto posve radikalno, te označava epohu slobode od feudalnog pritiska i nepravednosti, ukidanje formi ovisnosti i osobne neslobode ljudi.

2019 Women’s Empowerment Principles Forum: Organized by UN Women, UN Global Compact and UN Office of Partnerships. Annual flagship event on gender equality for the private sector, bringing together 500+ other leaders and innovators from business, government, civil society, academia and the UN. The Forum participants gain exposure to new knowledge on strategies for advancing women's empowerment in the future of work, through gender-lens investing and by addressing sexual harassment in the world of work.

speakers included:

Robert Skinner, Executive Director, UN Office of Partnerships; Phumzile Mlambo-Ngucka, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UN Women; Lise Kingo, CEO and Executive Director, UN Global Compact; Ambassador Maria Marinaki, Principal Advisor on Gender and the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, European Union; Isabelle Durant, Deputy Secretary General, UNCTAD; Patricia Greene, Director, Women’s Bureau, US Department of Labour; Suzanne Biegel, Founder, Catalyst at Large; Carlos André, Executive Director, Banco de Brasil DTVM; Michael Denham, CEO, Business Development Bank of Canada; Sarah Chen, Co-founder and Managing Partner, The Billion Dollar Fund for Women; Stephanie Queda Cruz, Head of Gender, Diversity and Inclusion, Inter-American Development Bank; Deborah Gibbins, Chief Operating Officer, Mary Kay; Diana Kobas Deskovic, Founder, Mamforce; Alan Joyce, CEO, Qantas; Michael Ptasznik, CFO, Nasdaq; Banu Isci Sezen, General Manager, Turkcell Academy, Turkcell; Anne Claire Berg, Diversity and Inclusion Director, Danone; Purna Sen, Executive Coordinator and Spokesperson on Sexual Harassment and Other Forms of Discrimination, UN Women; Ibukun Awosika, Chairman, First Bank of Nigeria; Valeri Chekheria, CEO, Adjara Group; Emmanuel Lulin, Senior Vice President & Chief Ethics Officer, L’Oreal; Lebo Ramafoko, CEO, Soul Institute; Katherine Bell, Editor in Chief, Barron’s

Photo: UN Women/Amanda Voisard

Fatehpur Sikri (Hindi: फ़तेहपुर सीकरी, Urdu: فتحپور سیکری‎) is a city and a municipal board in Agra district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The city was founded in 1569 by the Mughal emperor Akbar, and served as the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1571 to 1585. After his military victories over Chittor and Ranthambore, Akbar decided to shift his capital from Agra to a new location 37 km WSW on the Sikri ridge, to honor the Sufi saint Salim Chishti. Here he commenced the construction of a planned walled city which took the next fifteen years in planning and construction of a series of royal palaces, harem, courts, a mosque, private quarters and other utility buildings. He named the city, Fatehabad, with Fateh, a word of Arabic origin in Persian, meaning "victorious." it was later called Fatehpur Sikri. It is at Fatehpur Sikri that the legends of Akbar and his famed courtiers, the nine jewels or Navaratnas, were born. Fatehpur Sikri is one of the best preserved collections of Indian Mughal architecture in India.

According to contemporary historians, Akbar took a great interest in the building of Fatehpur Sikri and probably also dictated its architectural style. Seeking to revive the splendours of Persian court ceremonial made famous by his ancestor Timur, Akbar planned the complex on Persian principles. But the influences of his adopted land came through in the typically Indian embellishments. The easy availability of sandstone in the neighbouring areas of Fatehpur Sikri, also meant that all the buildings here were made of the red stone. The imperial Palace complex consists of a number of independent pavilions arranged in formal geometry on a piece of level ground, a pattern derived from Arab and central Asian tent encampments. In its entirety, the monuments at Fatehpur Sikri thus reflect the genius of Akbar in assimilating diverse regional architectural influences within a holistic style that was uniquely his own.

The Imperial complex was abandoned in 1585, shortly after its completion, due to paucity of water and its proximity with the Rajputana areas in the North-West, which were increasingly in turmoil. Thus the capital was shifted to Lahore so that Akbar could have a base in the less stable part of the empire, before moving back to Agra in 1598, where he had begun his reign as he shifted his focus to Deccan. In fact, he never returned to the city except for a brief period in 1601. In later Mughal history it was occupied for a short while by Mughal emperor, Muhammad Shah (r. 1719 -1748), and his regent, Sayyid Hussain Ali Khan Barha, one of the Syed Brothers, was murdered here in 1720. Today much of the imperial complex which spread over nearly two mile long and one mile wide area is largely intact and resembles a ghost town. It is still surrounded by a five mile long wall built during its original construction, on three sides. However apart from the imperial buildings complex few other buildings stand in the area, which is mostly barren, except of ruins of the bazaars of the old city near the Naubat Khana, the 'drum-house' entrance at Agra Road. The modern town lies at the western end of the complex, which was a municipality from 1865 to 1904, and later made a "notified area", and in 1901 had a population of 7,147. For a long time it was still known for its masons and stone carvers, though in Akbar time it was known and 'fabrics of hair' and 'silk-spinning'. The village of Sikri still exists nearby.

ARCHITECTURE OF FATEHPUR SIKRI

Fatehpur Sikri sits on rocky ridge, 3 kilometres in length and 1 km wide, and palace city is surrounded by a 6 km wall on three side with the fourth being a lake at the time. Its architect was Tuhir Das and Dhruv Chawla and was constructed using Indian principles. The buildings of Fatehpur Sikri show a synthesis of various regional schools of architectural craftsmanship such as Gujarat and Bengal. This was because indigenous craftsmen were used for the construction of the buildings. Influences from Hindu and Jain architecture are seen hand in hand with Islamic elements. The building material used in all the buildings at Fatehpur Sikri, palace-city complex, is the locally quarried red sandstone, known as 'Sikri sandstone'. It is accessed through gates along the five-mile long fort wall, namely, Delhi Gate, the Lal Gate, the Agra Gate, Birbal's Gate, Chandanpal Gate, The Gwalior Gate, the Tehra Gate, the Chor Gate and the Ajmere Gate.

Some of the important buildings in this city, both religious and secular are:

IMPORTANT BUILDINGS

Buland Darwaza: Set into the south wall of congregational mosque, the Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri, this stupendous piece of architecture is 55 metre high, from the outside, gradually making a transition to a human scale in the inside. The gate was added some five years later after the completion of the mosque ca. 1576-1577 as an 'victory arch', to commemorate the Akbar's successful Gujarat campaign. It carries two inscriptions in the archway, one of which reads: "Isa, Son of Mariam said: The world is a bridge, pass over it, but build no houses on it. He who hopes for an hour may hope for eternity. The world endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen".

The central portico comprises three arched entrances, with the largest one, in the centre, is known locally as the Horseshoe Gate, after the custom of nailing horseshoes to its large wooden doors for luck. Outside the giant steps of the Buland Darwaza to left is deep well.

Jama Masjid: It is a Jama Mosque meaning the congregational mosque, and was perhaps one of the first buildings to come up in the complex, as its epigraph gives AH 979 (AD 1571-72) as the date of its completion, with a massive entrance to the courtyard, the Buland-Darwaza added some five years later. It was built in the manner of Indian mosques, with iwans around a central courtyard. A distinguishing feature is the row of chhatri over the sanctuary. There are three mihrabs in each of the seven bays, while the large central mihrab is covered by a dome, it is decorated with white marble inlay, in geometric patterns.

Tomb of Salim Chishti: A white marble encased tomb of the Sufi saint, Salim Chisti (1478–1572), within the Jama Masjid's sahn, courtyard. The single-storey structure is built around a central square chamber, within which is the grave of the saint, under an ornate wooden canopy encrusted with mother-of-pearl mosaic. Surrounding it is a covered passageway for circumambulation, with carved Jalis, stone pierced screens all around with intricate geometric design, and an entrance to the south. The tomb is influenced by earlier mausolea of the early 15th century Gujarat Sultanate period. Other striking features of the tomb are white marble serpentine brackets, which support sloping eaves around the parapet.

On the left of the tomb, to the east, stands a red sandstone tomb of Islam Khan I, son of Shaikh Badruddin Chisti and grandson of Shaikh Salim Chishti, who became a general in the Mughal army in the reign of Jahangir. The tomb is topped by a dome and thirty-six small domed chattris, and contains a number of graves, some unnamed, all male descendants of Shaikh Salim Chisti.

Diwan-i-Aam : Diwan-i-Am or Hall of Public Audience, is a building typology found in many cities where the ruler meets the general public. In this case, it is a pavilion-like multi-bayed rectangular structure fronting a large open space. South west of the Diwan-i-Am and next to the Turkic Sultana's House stand Turkic Baths.

Diwan-i-Khas: the Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Private Audience, is a plain square building with four chhatris on the roof. However it is famous for its central pillar, which has a square base and an octagonal shaft, both carved with bands of geometric and floral designs, further its thirty-six serpentine brackets support a circular platform for Akbar, which is connected to each corner of the building on the first floor, by four stone walkways. It is here that Akbar had representatives of different religions discuss their faiths and gave private audience.

Ibadat Khana: (House of Worship) was a meeting house built in 1575 CE by the Mughal Emperor Akbar, where the foundations of a new Syncretistic faith, Din-e-Ilahi were laid by Akbar.

Anup Talao: A ornamental pool with a central platform and four bridges leading up to it. Some of the important buildings of the royal enclave are surround by it including, Khwabgah (House of Dreams) Akbar's residence, Panch Mahal, a five-storey palace, Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audience), Ankh Michauli and the Astrologer's Seat, in the south-west corner of the Pachisi Court.

Hujra-i-Anup Talao: Said to be the residence of Akbar's Muslim wife, although this is disputed due to its small size.

Mariam-uz-Zamani's Palace: The building of Akbar's Rajput wives, including Mariam-uz-Zamani, shows Gujarati influence and is built around a courtyard, with special care being taken to ensure privacy.

Naubat Khana: Also known as Naqqar Khana meaning a drum house, where musician used drums to announce the arrival of the Emperor. It is situated ahead of the Hathi Pol Gate or the Elephant Gate, the south entrance to the complex, suggesting that it was the imperial entrance.

Pachisi Court: A square marked out as a large board game, the precursor to modern day Ludo game where people served as the playing pieces.

Panch Mahal: A five-storied palatial structure, with the tiers gradually diminishing in size, till the final one, which is a single large-domed chhatri. Originally pierced stone screens faced the façade, and probably sub-divided the interior as well, suggesting it was built for the ladies of the court. The floors are supported by intricately carved columns on each level, totalling to 176 columns in all.

Birbal's House: The house of Akbar's favorite minister, who was a Hindu. Notable features of the building are the horizontal sloping sunshades or chajjas and the brackets which support them.

Recent excavation done by ASI in 2000 led to unearthing of an ancient jain city very near to the fort complex.

Other buildings included Taksal (mint), 'Daftar Khana (Records Office), Karkhanas (royal workshop), Khazana (treasury), Turkic styled Baths, Darogha's Quarters, stables, Caravan sarai, Hakim's quarters etc.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Fatehpur Sikri has a population of 28,757. Males constitute 53% of the population and females 47%. Fatehpur Sikri has an average literacy rate of 46%, lower than the national average of 74%: male literacy is 57%, and female literacy is 34%. In Fatehpur Sikri, 59% of the population is under 6 years of age.

ADMINISTRATIVE ESTABLISHMENT

Fatehpur Sikri is one of the fifteen Block headquarters in the Agra district it has 52 Gram panchayats (Village Panchayat) under it.

The Fatehpur Sikri, is a constituency of the Lok Sabha, Lower house of the Indian Parliament, and further comprises five Vidhan Sabha (legislative assembly) segments:

Agra Rural

Fatehpur Sikri

Kheragarh

Fatehabad

Bah

In all there are 12 villages of Sisodia Rajputs near Fatehpur Sikri fort in Agra district. These are Daultabad, Nayavas, Satha, korai, Behrawati, Byara, Undera, Kachora, Singarpur, Vidyapur, Onera, Arrua.

TRANSPORT

Fatehpur Sikri is about 39 km. from Agra. The nearest Airport is the Agra Airport (also known as Kheria Airport), 40 km from Fatehpur Sikri. The nearest railway station is the Fatehpur Sikri Railway Station, about one km. from the city centre . It is suitably connected to Agra and neighbouring centres by road, where regular bus services of UPSRTC ply, apart from Tourist buses and taxies.

WIKIPEDIA