View allAll Photos Tagged immutable
Non / Where: Muskildi, (Zuberoa) (Basque Country)
Noiz / When: 2016/01/24
Kamara / Camera: CANON EOS5D MKIII
Objetiboa / Lens: TAMRON SP 24-70mm F/2.8 Di VC USD (70mm)
ISO: 400
Programa / Program: P (Program)
Exposizioa / Exposition time: 1/640"
F zenbakia / number F: 8
Software: Photoshop
MASKARADAK: PROBABLY THE OLDEST CARNIVAL IN EUROPE
The maskarada [mas̺ˈkaɾada] is a popular set of traditional, theatrical performances that take place annually during the time of carnival in the Basque region of Soule, Basque Country (Zuberoa in the Basque language). It is generally referred to in the plural (maskaradak) as it is repeated across the region on the streets of villages (one day per village) over the span of a month or two in late winter through spring. The plays are performed by the villages' (usually younger) inhabitants, and the arrangements for each maskarada are the responsibility of each participating village. Sometimes, when two villages are very small, they will share the duties together.
Though naturally the actors change from year to year, a friendly air of informality, formed of deep familiarity pervades throughout. The Maskaradak follow variations on very traditional themes that make use of time-honoured sets and age-old, immutable characters. A motley parade of musicians (atabal, ttun-ttun and xirula players), traditional dancers and assorted actors, villagers and visitors walk merrily along a route that meanders up and down the village's streets.
At particular points of the parade, the barrikadak take place, where the marchers stop in front of a stall put there by the villagers, and bestow on them a dance, sometimes even a song, this in exchange for snacks (biscuits, crisps, and the like), and refreshments (wine and liquor), which is then shared with bystanders. The process is repeated over and over, perhaps lasting all day, from early in the morning till afternoon (with a popular lunch somewhere in the middle), until the end of the final performance at the parade terminus - usually the village market place or Basque pelota court.
Maskaradas represent a genuine example of traditional popular carnival theatre struggling to survive, much in step with the modest revival of the Basque language. It's connected to pastoral in many aspects, such as recurrent fixed characters, a marked distinction in the group (e.g. the reds stand for the good, while the blacks represent the evil) or a rigid structuring and development. The language used by the actors remains bilingual Zuberoan Basque, for the most part, and Bearnais, despite some difficulties to hand either language over to new generations.
Gulangyu, Xiamen, China
Here's a doorway with handles showing the 8 symbols of the I Ching, China's ancient Book of Changes, which may be the oldest book in the world. Here's a basic definition of the I Ching (pronounced yee jing): 'In Chinese, "ching" means book. "I" means change, or changes. Thus the name may be translated as The Book of Changes. But "I" means not only change. Strangely enough, it also means permanence, or the unchangeable. The Book of Changes views all of the changes that we and the world go through as an unfolding of the immutable laws and principles of existence. By explaining our present situation in terms of the natural laws that have given rise to it, we can know where we are headed and what the future is likely to be.' That quote and much more on it is found here www.wholarts.com/psychic/iching.html
© david morris dtmphotography.co.uk
Llandrindod Wells is an amalgam of two very different settlements. Early Llandrindod in the
form of the old parish church and Llandrindod Hall occupies a spur sandwiched between
valleys that drop down towards the Ithon from the high ground to the east. One kilometre to
the north-west on lower ground which has been ridged and hollowed by several streams is the
Victorian and modern creation of Llandrindod Wells.
This brief report examines Llandrindod’s emergence and development up to 1750. For the
more recent history of the settlement, it will be necessary to look at other sources of
information and particularly at the origins and nature of the buildings within it.
The accompanying map is offered as an indicative guide to the historic settlement. The
continuous line defining the historic core offers a visual interpretation of the area within
which the settlement developed, based on our interpretation of the evidence currently to hand.
It is not an immutable boundary line, and may need to be modified as new discoveries are
made. The map does not show those areas or buildings that are statutorily designated, nor
does it pick out those sites or features that are specifically mentioned in the text.
We have not referenced the sources that have been examined to produce this report, but that
information will be available in the Historic Environment Record (HER) maintained by the
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust. Numbers in brackets are primary record numbers used in
the HER to provide information that is specific to individual sites and features. These can be
accessed on-line through the Archwilio website (www.archwilio.org.uk).
History of development
The name refers to the 'Church of the Trinity', but the former name of the church and its
parish was Llandow in 1283 and Lando in 1291 meaning ‘church of God’. Llandynddod
appears only in 1535, but the change to the Trinity is one that can be recognised in several
other churches in Wales.
The earlier focus occupies a spur overlooking this area. Whether the church represents an
early medieval foundation is unclear. The 'llan' prefix might suggest this but there is no
corroborative evidence. Its later history, too, is uncharted. The occurrence of platforms
opposite the church hints at more than just an isolated church, but the evidence as yet is not
compelling.
Llandrindod Hall by the old church was converted into a large hotel in about 1749, but it
functioned for less than forty years and was demolished by its proprietor, reportedly because
of its unsavoury clientele. It was replaced in the 19th century by a farmstead.
Reportedly the origins of the spa town go back to the late 17th century. Cae-bach Chapel
(30000; Grade II listing) in Brookland Road was founded in 1715. Saline and sulphur springs
were discovered in the 1730s and these were noted in various publications in the following
twenty years. But the emergence of Llandrindod Wells is essentially a 19th-century
phenomenon and thus falls outside the scope of this report, although in expanding over
Llanerch Common, the town enveloped the Llanerch Inn, which has some 17th-century
features.
The heritage to 1750
The old parish church of Holy Trinity (16027) lies more than 1km south-east of the town and
was sited on the edge of an extensive tract of common upland. It originally had a single
chamber of 13th/14th-century build with a south porch and small west spire. It was completely
rebuilt in 1894, after the archdeacon of Llandrindod had removed the roof in order to
'encourage' townspeople to attend the new church in the town. The old church houses several
18th and 19th-century monuments but its 'sheel-na-gig' (5960) uncovered during building work
in 1894 and presumably of medieval origin, is now in the local museum.
The churchyard (16199) is irregular in design, its shape on the west and south dictated by the
natural topography. The Tithe map depicts a smaller enclosure around the church, a short
distance away from the road and no longer distinguishable at ground level, but may not be an
accurate representation. A holy well (81710) lay close to the churchyard, though the story
attached to it point to a healing well.
The spur on which the old church sits is naturally irregular with rock outcrops protruding.
North of the church on land that was common until the 19th century are several flat terraces
some of which are certainly artificial constructions that probably supported dwellings
(16094); there is at least one authentic platform and perhaps two others, together with
enclosure boundaries and a trackway. Further earthworks (16095), the most obvious a low
curvilinear bank of unknown function, are apparent just to the south-east of Llandrindod Hall
(30020).
Capel Maelog (2055) which was excavated between 1984 and 1987 lay off Cefnllys Lane less
than 1km east of the town centre. Its foundations have now been reconstructed near County
Hall.
Information can be found here
Non / Where: Muskildi, (Zuberoa) (Basque Country)
Noiz / When: 2016/01/24
Kamara / Camera: CANON EOS5D MKIII
Objetiboa / Lens: TAMRON SP 24-70mm F/2.8 Di VC USD (70mm)
ISO: 800
Programa / Program: p (Program)
Exposizioa / Exposition time: 1/800"
F zenbakia / number F: 10
Software: Photoshop
MASKARADAK: PROBABLY THE OLDEST CARNIVAL IN EUROPE
The maskarada [mas̺ˈkaɾada] is a popular set of traditional, theatrical performances that take place annually during the time of carnival in the Basque region of Soule, Basque Country (Zuberoa in the Basque language). It is generally referred to in the plural (maskaradak) as it is repeated across the region on the streets of villages (one day per village) over the span of a month or two in late winter through spring. The plays are performed by the villages' (usually younger) inhabitants, and the arrangements for each maskarada are the responsibility of each participating village. Sometimes, when two villages are very small, they will share the duties together.
Though naturally the actors change from year to year, a friendly air of informality, formed of deep familiarity pervades throughout. The Maskaradak follow variations on very traditional themes that make use of time-honoured sets and age-old, immutable characters. A motley parade of musicians (atabal, ttun-ttun and xirula players), traditional dancers and assorted actors, villagers and visitors walk merrily along a route that meanders up and down the village's streets.
At particular points of the parade, the barrikadak take place, where the marchers stop in front of a stall put there by the villagers, and bestow on them a dance, sometimes even a song, this in exchange for snacks (biscuits, crisps, and the like), and refreshments (wine and liquor), which is then shared with bystanders. The process is repeated over and over, perhaps lasting all day, from early in the morning till afternoon (with a popular lunch somewhere in the middle), until the end of the final performance at the parade terminus - usually the village market place or Basque pelota court.
Maskaradas represent a genuine example of traditional popular carnival theatre struggling to survive, much in step with the modest revival of the Basque language. It's connected to pastoral in many aspects, such as recurrent fixed characters, a marked distinction in the group (e.g. the reds stand for the good, while the blacks represent the evil) or a rigid structuring and development. The language used by the actors remains bilingual Zuberoan Basque, for the most part, and Bearnais, despite some difficulties to hand either language over to new generations.
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
Non / Where: Muskildi, (Zuberoa) (Basque Country)
Noiz / When: 2016/01/24
Kamara / Camera: CANON EOS5D MKIII
Objetiboa / Lens: COSINA 70-300 F[4.5-5.6] (AF) (70mm)
ISO: 400
Programa / Program: Tv (Abiadurari lehentasuna / Speed priority)
Exposizioa / Exposition time: 1/250"
F zenbakia / number F: 9
Software: Photoshop
MASKARADAK: PROBABLY THE OLDEST CARNIVAL IN EUROPE
The maskarada [mas̺ˈkaɾada] is a popular set of traditional, theatrical performances that take place annually during the time of carnival in the Basque region of Soule, Basque Country (Zuberoa in the Basque language). It is generally referred to in the plural (maskaradak) as it is repeated across the region on the streets of villages (one day per village) over the span of a month or two in late winter through spring. The plays are performed by the villages' (usually younger) inhabitants, and the arrangements for each maskarada are the responsibility of each participating village. Sometimes, when two villages are very small, they will share the duties together.
Though naturally the actors change from year to year, a friendly air of informality, formed of deep familiarity pervades throughout. The Maskaradak follow variations on very traditional themes that make use of time-honoured sets and age-old, immutable characters. A motley parade of musicians (atabal, ttun-ttun and xirula players), traditional dancers and assorted actors, villagers and visitors walk merrily along a route that meanders up and down the village's streets.
At particular points of the parade, the barrikadak take place, where the marchers stop in front of a stall put there by the villagers, and bestow on them a dance, sometimes even a song, this in exchange for snacks (biscuits, crisps, and the like), and refreshments (wine and liquor), which is then shared with bystanders. The process is repeated over and over, perhaps lasting all day, from early in the morning till afternoon (with a popular lunch somewhere in the middle), until the end of the final performance at the parade terminus - usually the village market place or Basque pelota court.
Maskaradas represent a genuine example of traditional popular carnival theatre struggling to survive, much in step with the modest revival of the Basque language. It's connected to pastoral in many aspects, such as recurrent fixed characters, a marked distinction in the group (e.g. the reds stand for the good, while the blacks represent the evil) or a rigid structuring and development. The language used by the actors remains bilingual Zuberoan Basque, for the most part, and Bearnais, despite some difficulties to hand either language over to new generations.
Slayer
Alcatraz - Milano
19 Giugno 2013
Tom Araya
Kerry King
Jeff Hanneman
Dave Lombardo
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati. L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
From the opening squeals of the guitars of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman and the punishing breakaway attack of Dave Lombardo's drums on "Flesh Storm" it's clear from the first thirty seconds the thrash metal titans have returned to pummel listeners with a raging onslaught of new music guaranteed to lay waste to MP3 players, car stereo speakers and whatever else gets in their way.
Christ Illusion marks the long-awaited return of the legendary Slayer. Its first record in five years and its first record in fifteen years with the original band line-up, Christ Illusion is a cacophony of brutality. A soundtrack for the post-Apocalypse. Steeped in scorching riffs and a litany of menacing tracks/tirades on religion and violence, Slayer forges ahead on its devastating path of aural destruction with ten new songs, each charged with the electric hostility for which Slayer is renowned.
Of the record Kerry King is ecstatic: "I love it. I really like God Hates Us All and I think that's the best record we've done in my opinion since Seasons In The Abyss, and I like this better than that one. I think it's a more complete record, I think sonically it better: all the performances are awesome. I think this one is more intense not because we're trying to do 'Reign In Blood: The Sequel,' it's just that's where our writing is taking us now."
Songs like the "Flesh Storm," "Eyes of the Insane," "Skeleton Christ," "Jihad" and the first single, "Cult" showcase the band at its most blazing intensity. The sonic excitement of speed, propelled by King, Hanneman and Lombardo and lead by the immutable roar of Tom Araya provoke the listener with Slayer's trademark fascination with terror, violence and religion.
For as long as Slayer has been making records it has been surrounded by controversy.
Since the band recorded its first album, "Show No Mercy," Slayer has been plagued with accusations of Satanism, fascism, racism and so on. Christ Illusion gives no quarter to critics who would mindlessly attack the band for, what the Germans call, "der Reiz des Unbekannten" (meaning "the attraction of the unknown"). A lyric fascination with violence and terror which guitarist King enthusiastically describes this way: "When I was I kid I would see a horror movie over a love story. Being shocked, being in an environment that's not reality might be frightening but is cool nonetheless. With a lot of our songs we put people in that place. It doesn't bother me because I enjoy it. It could easily be programming from all the fucking news channels."
Slayer is often assailed for its subject matter, though the band is unrepentant. " According to Araya, "Violence, darkness... So much of my inspiration comes from news articles or pictures and just start describing the images. Television- A&E, the History Channel, Court TV, Documentaries."
The singer continues, "With this record, as far as a theme: there is none. That's just our favorite subject matter. The common thread is death. I think that's just a common thread in general: we all share death, and we all share it at different times in different ways, but it's the one thing that we all have in common. We all die. It's how we live that makes us different."
Beyond being controversial Slayer is an exceptional force in music, highly praised for its trailblazing style of fast, heavy and aggressive music yet bristling with melody. The much-heralded return of Dave Lombardo to the drummer's throne will leave fans gasping for breath as he clobbers the listener on song after song.
Commenting on Lombardo's return to the fold, King notes, "Not to say the shine's worn off, but it's old news to us. I think the thing the kids are going to get into, besides just being the first Slayer album in five years, is that Dave's on it. When he came back he wasn't a member, he just came back to do a couple of tours and people started asking back then 'Is he gonna hang around?' And I would tell them that was up to Dave. But I could tell that Dave was having a killer time." King confided. "So it was just a matter of time before he said, 'Yeah, let's do it!' But it's great. And now that he's got a new Slayer album that he's played on, I think he's going to get some more enjoyment out of playing. He takes pride in everything he does and it's awesome to have him back with us."
Having the original members record their first album together in fifteen years is certainly newsworthy but the lasting might of the band and its continued popularity is an achievement few can boast. For each of the members, the band is resolute. There is no other band like Slayer.
"The staying power behind Slayer is that we've stuck to our guns," Says Araya. "Integrity... that would be number one. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we've stuck to what we do best. And the fact that we've been together as a band for so long. Ten years with Dave; another ten without Dave; and now Dave's back. It has a lot to do with compromise, that's just the way it has to be. You have to be able to compromise and give and take and that has a lot to do with why we're still together and a force to be reckoned with. I've learned that without each other, Slayer wouldn't exist, and that the whole is greater than its parts."
Kerry King is far more succinct. "Slayer to me is the coolest band on the planet. There is a timeless quality to Slayer. It's cool, but I can't explain it. It's our life."
Slayer has created one mesmerizing record after the next, has influenced many of today's most successful bands, including Slipknot, Sepultura, Killswitch Engage, and continues to earn new generations of fans, while staying true to its ceaselessly devoted followers. Slayer's legacy is cemented in music forever and the band remains undaunted in its directive to make punishing, aggressive and exciting music. With Christ Illusion the band marks its territory. Slayer has exceeded itself far beyond thrash metal to become an unstoppable juggernaut without equal.
Tom Araya sums it up: "I think the best thing is the band's longevity and the fact that we haven't bowed to anyone. That we were able to make a record like Reign In Blood, which, to us, was just another record, but to others, was something very special, it's had such an impact. People will remember it for a long time, and it's all because we did things our way, we didn't bow down to anyone. We didn't compromise. We stuck to being who we are."
All existence is impermanent, and for the Balinese, a funeral is the time to ponder this immutable fact. However, it is also a celebration of the deceased's transition to another reincarnation. The fiery end to the body inside the Nandi bull cuts his ties to this world.
A Balinese royal cremation is one of the most exotic, colorful and heart pounding ceremonies on earth. It is a reminder that all is impermanent, except for the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
Fourth century Roman glassmakers stumbled into the creation of dichroic ruby glass by mistakenly adding silver and gold dust to a glass batch. This coveted “gold-ruby” glass did not become reliably reproducible until the late 17rth century, when Johann Kunckel developed the first recipe.
Glass in the Baroque tradition was equal parts alchemy, mysticism, and philosophy. The transformation of gold into ruby glass was nothing short of alchemy in its truest form. Purple of Cassius, a gold solution used in the preparation of ruby glass, was produced by dissolving gold and aqua regia (“royal water”). This process was referred to by contemporaries as sol sine vesta “--unclothing gold” or “undressing the sun”—as it allowed the seemingly immutable nature of gold to be further purified.
By 1883, Arthur J. Nash had written a recipe for gold and ruby glass, safeguarded in a locked diary. His formulas followed those of the precious stone itself with the richest shade being “pigeon’s blood.” The highest quality of ruby in the ancient Burmese system of classification.
While you remain as this Presence, this Truth, this immutable Reality, everything that you see through the thought, in this idea of being a thinker thinking about what happens, it is pure imagination, an imaginary story, fragmented, full of fragments, under this division. ~Master Gualberto ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Enquanto você permanece como sendo essa Presença, essa Verdade, essa Realidade imutável, tudo o que você vir através do pensamento, nessa ideia de ser um pensador pensando sobre o que acontece, é pura imaginação, uma história imaginária, fragmentada. ~Mestre Gualberto ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #ramanashramgualberto #mestregualberto #satsang #ramana #ramanamaharshi #bhagavan #presentmoment #selfawareness #openness #instagood #transcend #innerself #rumi #felizvida #hooponopono #meditacion #ravishankar #bestill #innerpeace #mindful #awakening #inspirationalquotes #stillness #mooji #osho #calmness #deus #consciencia #taonismo #kundalini
By Ryan Gander
Four life-size sentinels – based on armatures used by artists to model the human form – are positioned in dramatic poses, each evoking a different emotion, despite their featureless faces. Two characters recreate the scene of the Pietà (meaning pity in Italian) in which Mary cradles the limp body of Jesus; one reaches down into a glowing portal and another contemplates his brethren, as well as a draped mirror and a stairway to heaven. Collectively titled Dramaturgical frameworks for structure and stability, in reference to Erving Goffman’s sociological approach that uses theatre to portray and evaluate social interaction, these figures also play on the notion of spectatorship, shifting the relationship between spectator and spectacle.
[everythingatonce.com]
Part of Everything at Once
Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand
October-December 2017
Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.
As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.
In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...
[Lisson Gallery]
Standing among the trilithons of Stonehenge one thing struck me: we mark ourselves to be so clever. The proof was there in those stones. We are so clever because our ancestors built this monument.
Generations are quick to reject old wisdom. Aren't the "socials" and "influencers" the new way? Too simple, too old? The world has moved on. Elemental forces disagree. This post bears witness.
As a small child the parable of "fire is a good servant but a bad master" was drummed into me. I would learn the truth of this as fire consumed the world around me, and as I would learn, extinguished totally the nearby remnant koala colony. Just a few years later I was called to arms again, staring oblivion in the eye, to slow and direct the beast around a friend's property. Time and again through my time every small spark has been doused lest I be mastered.
This post, I'm sure, was scarred by the wisdom ignored in 2003. Three small fires were ignited by lightning in the ranges to the southwest of here. "Managers" too clever, too modern, chose to let them burn rather than snuff them out when they could.
It had happened before: in 1939 and 1952. Small fires, expanding ahead of prevailing weather, guided and directed by terrain impinged on the boundaries of a nascent city. In those years the parable was recalled and the fires suppressed. In 2003 the city was made real, expanding towards that fire-directing terrain; fuel for its burning. The parable was ignored. The ideologues knew best. They knew nothing. Hundreds of houses burnt, lives were lost, this post was burnt.
Now the city has pushed into the forests destroyed in 2003; a land grab by developers, enabled by governments greedy for the revenue. The urban fringe moves closer and closer to the beast. Of course we are smarter now. Surprisingly to them, perhaps, terrain which guides the wind and the fires which run with it remains immutable on their timescale. The river crossed by the fire of 2003 to burn here along the thin urban edge formed no barrier then. What's different now? What's different is that urban edge is no longer thin. It's creeping into that river's corridor; fuel to be mastered in the next conflagration of wisdom suppressed.
Non / Where: Muskildi, (Zuberoa) (Basque Country)
Noiz / When: 2016/01/24
Kamara / Camera: CANON EOS5D MKIII
Objetiboa / Lens: TAMRON SP 24-70mm F/2.8 Di VC USD (70mm)
ISO: 800
Programa / Program: P (Program)
Exposizioa / Exposition time: 1/800"
F zenbakia / number F: 10
Software: Photoshop
MASKARADAK: PROBABLY THE OLDEST CARNIVAL IN EUROPE
The maskarada [mas̺ˈkaɾada] is a popular set of traditional, theatrical performances that take place annually during the time of carnival in the Basque region of Soule, Basque Country (Zuberoa in the Basque language). It is generally referred to in the plural (maskaradak) as it is repeated across the region on the streets of villages (one day per village) over the span of a month or two in late winter through spring. The plays are performed by the villages' (usually younger) inhabitants, and the arrangements for each maskarada are the responsibility of each participating village. Sometimes, when two villages are very small, they will share the duties together.
Though naturally the actors change from year to year, a friendly air of informality, formed of deep familiarity pervades throughout. The Maskaradak follow variations on very traditional themes that make use of time-honoured sets and age-old, immutable characters. A motley parade of musicians (atabal, ttun-ttun and xirula players), traditional dancers and assorted actors, villagers and visitors walk merrily along a route that meanders up and down the village's streets.
At particular points of the parade, the barrikadak take place, where the marchers stop in front of a stall put there by the villagers, and bestow on them a dance, sometimes even a song, this in exchange for snacks (biscuits, crisps, and the like), and refreshments (wine and liquor), which is then shared with bystanders. The process is repeated over and over, perhaps lasting all day, from early in the morning till afternoon (with a popular lunch somewhere in the middle), until the end of the final performance at the parade terminus - usually the village market place or Basque pelota court.
Maskaradas represent a genuine example of traditional popular carnival theatre struggling to survive, much in step with the modest revival of the Basque language. It's connected to pastoral in many aspects, such as recurrent fixed characters, a marked distinction in the group (e.g. the reds stand for the good, while the blacks represent the evil) or a rigid structuring and development. The language used by the actors remains bilingual Zuberoan Basque, for the most part, and Bearnais, despite some difficulties to hand either language over to new generations.
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"There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself."
Blaise Pascal
Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, published in 1877, is a book of esoteric philosophy and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's first major self-published major work text and a key doctrine in her self-founded Theosophical movement.It is nineteen centuries since, as we are told, the night of Heathenism and Paganism was first dispelled by the divine light of Christianity; and two-and-a-half centuries since the bright lamp of Modern Science began to shine on the darkness of the ignorance of the ages. Within these respective epochs, we are required to believe, the true moral and intellectual progress of the race has occurred. The ancient philosophers were well enough for their respective generations, but they were illiterate as compared with modern men of science. The ethics of Paganism perhaps met the wants of the uncultivated people of antiquity, but not until the advent of the luminous “Star of Bethlehem,” was the true road to moral perfection and the way to salvation made plain. Of old, brutishness was the rule, virtue and spirituality the exception. Now, the dullest may read the will of God in His revealed word; men have every incentive to be good, and are constantly becoming better.
This is the assumption; what are the facts? On the one hand an unspiritual, dogmatic, too often debauched clergy; a host of sects, and three warring great religions; discord instead of union, dogmas without proofs, sensation-loving preachers, and wealth and pleasure-seeking parishioners’ hypocrisy and bigotry, begotten by the tyrannical exigencies of respectability, the rule of the day, sincerity and real piety exceptional. On the other hand, scientific hypotheses built on sand; no accord upon a single question; rancorous quarrels and jealousy; a general drift into materialism. A death-grapple of Science with Theology for infallibility—“a conflict of ages.”
At Rome, the self-styled seat of Christianity, the putative successor to the chair of Peter is undermining social order with his invisible but omnipresent net-work of bigoted agents, and incites them to revolutionize Europe for his temporal as well as spiritual supremacy. We see him who calls himself the “Vicar of Christ,” fraternizing with the anti-Christian Moslem against another Christian nation, publicly invoking the blessing of God upon the arms of those who have for centuries withstood, with[Pg x] fire and sword, the pretensions of his Christ to Godhood! At Berlin—one of the great seats of learning—professors of modern exact sciences, turning their backs on the boasted results of enlightenment of the post-Galileonian period, are quietly snuffing out the candle of the great Florentine; seeking, in short, to prove the heliocentric system, and even the earth’s rotation, but the dreams of deluded scientists, Newton a visionary, and all past and present astronomers but clever calculators of unverifiable problems.[4]
Between these two conflicting Titans—Science and Theology—is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of a mere animal existence. Such is the picture of the hour, illumined by the bright noon-day sun of this Christian and scientific era!
Would it be strict justice to condemn to critical lapidation the most humble and modest of authors for entirely rejecting the authority of both these combatants? Are we not bound rather to take as the true aphorism of this century, the declaration of Horace Greeley: “I accept unreservedly the views of no man, living or dead”?[5] Such, at all events, will be our motto, and we mean that principle to be our constant guide throughout this work.
Among the many phenomenal outgrowths of our century, the strange creed of the so-called Spiritualists has arisen amid the tottering ruins of self-styled revealed religions and materialistic philosophies; and yet it alone offers a possible last refuge of compromise between the two. That this unexpected ghost of pre-Christian days finds poor welcome from our sober and positive century, is not surprising. Times have strangely changed; and it is but recently that a well-known Brooklyn preacher pointedly remarked in a sermon, that could Jesus come back and behave in the streets of New York, as he did in those of Jerusalem, he would find himself confined in the prison of the Tombs.[6] What sort of welcome, then, could Spiritualism ever expect? True enough, the weird stranger seems neither attractive nor promising at first sight. Shapeless and uncouth, like an infant attended by seven nurses, it is coming out of its teens lame and mutilated. The name of its enemies is legion; its friends and protectors are a handful. But what of that? When was ever truth accepted à priori? Because the champions of Spiritualism have in their fanaticism magnified its qualities, and remained blind to its imperfections, that gives no excuse to doubt its reality. A forgery is impossible when we have no model to forge after. The fanaticism of Spiritualists is itself[Pg xi] a proof of the genuineness and possibility of their phenomena. They give us facts that we may investigate, not assertions that we must believe without proof. Millions of reasonable men and women do not so easily succumb to collective hallucination. And so, while the clergy, following their own interpretations of the Bible, and science its self-made Codex of possibilities in nature, refuse it a fair hearing, real science and true religion are silent, and gravely wait further developments.
The whole question of phenomena rests on the correct comprehension of old philosophies. Whither, then, should we turn, in our perplexity, but to the ancient sages, since, on the pretext of superstition, we are refused an explanation by the modern? Let us ask them what they know of genuine science and religion; not in the matter of mere details, but in all the broad conception of these twin truths—so strong in their unity, so weak when divided. Besides, we may find our profit in comparing this boasted modern science with ancient ignorance; this improved modern theology with the “Secret doctrines” of the ancient universal religion. Perhaps we may thus discover a neutral ground whence we can reach and profit by both.
It is the Platonic philosophy, the most elaborate compend of the abstruse systems of old India, that can alone afford us this middle ground. Although twenty-two and a quarter centuries have elapsed since the death of Plato, the great minds of the world are still occupied with his writings. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, the world’s interpreter. And the greatest philosopher of the pre-Christian era mirrored faithfully in his works the spiritualism of the Vedic philosophers who lived thousands of years before himself, and its metaphysical expression. Vyasa, Djeminy, Kapila, Vrihaspati, Sumati, and so many others, will be found to have transmitted their indelible imprint through the intervening centuries upon Plato and his school. Thus is warranted the inference that to Plato and the ancient Hindu sages was alike revealed the same wisdom. So surviving the shock of time, what can this wisdom be but divine and eternal?
Plato taught justice as subsisting in the soul of its possessor and his greatest good. “Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims.” Yet his commentators, almost with one consent, shrink from every passage which implies that his metaphysics are based on a solid foundation, and not on ideal conceptions.
But Plato could not accept a philosophy destitute of spiritual aspirations; the two were at one with him. For the old Grecian sage there was a single object of attainment: REAL KNOWLEDGE. He considered those only to be genuine philosophers, or students of truth, who possess the knowledge of the really-existing, in opposition to the mere seeing; of[Pg xii] the always-existing, in opposition to the transitory; and of that which exists permanently, in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately. “Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas, and principles, there is an INTELLIGENCE or MIND [νοῦς, nous, the spirit], the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded; the Monarch and Lawgiver of the universe; the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the first and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty, and excellency, and goodness, which pervades the universe—who is called, by way of preëminence and excellence, the Supreme Good, the God (ὁ θεός) ‘the God over all’ (ὁ επι πασι θεός).”[7] He is not the truth nor the intelligence, but “the father of it.” Though this eternal essence of things may not be perceptible by our physical senses, it may be apprehended by the mind of those who are not wilfully obtuse. “To you,” said Jesus to his elect disciples, “it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to them [the πολλοὶ] it is not given; ... therefore speak I to them in parables [or allegories]; because they seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand.”[8]
The philosophy of Plato, we are assured by Porphyry, of the Neo-platonic School was taught and illustrated in the MYSTERIES. Many have questioned and even denied this; and Lobeck, in his Aglaophomus, has gone to the extreme of representing the sacred orgies as little more than an empty show to captivate the imagination. As though Athens and Greece would for twenty centuries and more have repaired every fifth year to Eleusis to witness a solemn religious farce! Augustine, the papa-bishop of Hippo, has resolved such assertions. He declares that the doctrines of the Alexandrian Platonists were the original esoteric doctrines of the first followers of Plato, and describes Plotinus as a Plato resuscitated. He also explains the motives of the great philosopher for veiling the interior sense of what he taught.[9]
[Pg xiii]
As to the myths, Plato declares in the Gorgias and the Phædon that they were the vehicles of great truths well worth the seeking. But commentators are so little en rapport with the great philosopher as to be compelled to acknowledge that they are ignorant where “the doctrinal ends, and the mythical begins.” Plato put to flight the popular superstition concerning magic and dæmons, and developed the exaggerated notions of the time into rational theories and metaphysical conceptions. Perhaps these would not quite stand the inductive method of reasoning established by Aristotle; nevertheless they are satisfactory in the highest degree to those who apprehend the existence of that higher faculty of insight or intuition, as affording a criterion for ascertaining truth.
Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind, Plato taught that the nous, spirit, or rational soul of man, being “generated by the Divine Father,” possessed a nature kindred, or even homogeneous, with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities. This faculty of contemplating reality in a direct and immediate manner belongs to God alone; the aspiration for this knowledge constitutes what is really meant by philosophy—the love of wisdom. The love of truth is inherently the love of good; and so predominating over every desire of the soul, purifying it and assimilating it to the divine, thus governing every act of the individual, it raises man to a participation and communion with Divinity, and restores him to the likeness of God. “This flight,” says Plato in the Theætetus, “consists in becoming like God, and this assimilation is the becoming just and holy with wisdom.”
The basis of this assimilation is always asserted to be the preëxistence of the spirit or nous. In the allegory of the chariot and winged steeds, given in the Phædrus, he represents the psychical nature as composite and two-fold; the thumos, or epithumetic part, formed from the substances of the world of phenomena; and the θυμοειδές, thumoeides, the essence of which is linked to the eternal world. The present earth-life is a fall and punishment. The soul dwells in “the grave which we call the body,” and in its incorporate state, and previous to the discipline of education, the noëtic or spiritual element is “asleep.” Life is thus a dream, rather than a reality. Like the captives in the subterranean cave, described in The Republic, the back is turned to the light, we perceive only the shadows of objects, and think them the actual realities. Is not this[Pg xiv] the idea of Maya, or the illusion of the senses in physical life, which is so marked a feature in Buddhistical philosophy? But these shadows, if we have not given ourselves up absolutely to the sensuous nature, arouse in us the reminiscence of that higher world that we once inhabited. “The interior spirit has some dim and shadowy recollection of its antenatal state of bliss, and some instinctive and proleptic yearnings for its return.” It is the province of the discipline of philosophy to disinthrall it from the bondage of sense, and raise it into the empyrean of pure thought, to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty. “The soul,” says Plato, in the Theætetus, “cannot come into the form of a man if it has never seen the truth. This is a recollection of those things which our soul formerly saw when journeying with Deity, despising the things which we now say are, and looking up to that which REALLY IS. Wherefore the nous, or spirit, of the philosopher (or student of the higher truth) alone is furnished with wings; because he, to the best of his ability, keeps these things in mind, of which the contemplation renders even Deity itself divine. By making the right use of these things remembered from the former life, by constantly perfecting himself in the perfect mysteries, a man becomes truly perfect—an initiate into the diviner wisdom.”
Hence we may understand why the sublimer scenes in the Mysteries were always in the night. The life of the interior spirit is the death of the external nature; and the night of the physical world denotes the day of the spiritual. Dionysus, the night-sun, is, therefore, worshipped rather than Helios, orb of day. In the Mysteries were symbolized the preëxistent condition of the spirit and soul, and the lapse of the latter into earth-life and Hades, the miseries of that life, the purification of the soul, and its restoration to divine bliss, or reünion with spirit. Theon, of Smyrna, aptly compares the philosophical discipline to the mystic rites: “Philosophy,” says he, “may be called the initiation into the true arcana, and the instruction in the genuine Mysteries. There are five parts of this initiation: I., the previous purification; II., the admission to participation in the arcane rites; III., the epoptic revelation; IV., the investiture or enthroning; V.—the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God, and the enjoyment of that felicity which arises from intimate converse with divine beings.... Plato denominates the epopteia, or personal view, the perfect contemplation of things which are apprehended intuitively, absolute truths and ideas. He also considers the binding of the head and crowning as analogous to the authority which any one receives from his instructors, of leading others into the same contemplation. The fifth gradation is the most perfect felicity arising from hence, and, according[Pg xv] to Plato, an assimilation to divinity as far as is possible to human beings.”[10]
Such is Platonism. “Out of Plato,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson, “come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.” He absorbed the learning of his times—of Greece from Philolaus to Socrates; then of Pythagoras in Italy; then what he could procure from Egypt and the East. He was so broad that all philosophy, European and Asiatic, was in his doctrines; and to culture and contemplation he added the nature and qualities of the poet.
The followers of Plato generally adhered strictly to his psychological theories. Several, however, like Xenocrates, ventured into bolder speculations. Speusippus, the nephew and successor of the great philosopher, was the author of the Numerical Analysis, a treatise on the Pythagorean numbers. Some of his speculations are not found in the written Dialogues; but as he was a listener to the unwritten lectures of Plato, the judgment of Enfield is doubtless correct, that he did not differ from his master. He was evidently, though not named, the antagonist whom Aristotle criticised, when professing to cite the argument of Plato against the doctrine of Pythagoras, that all things were in themselves numbers, or rather, inseparable from the idea of numbers. He especially endeavored to show that the Platonic doctrine of ideas differed essentially from the Pythagorean, in that it presupposed numbers and magnitudes to exist apart from things. He also asserted that Plato taught that there could be no real knowledge, if the object of that knowledge was not carried beyond or above the sensible.
But Aristotle was no trustworthy witness. He misrepresented Plato, and he almost caricatured the doctrines of Pythagoras. There is a canon of interpretation, which should guide us in our examinations of every philosophical opinion: “The human mind has, under the necessary operation of its own laws, been compelled to entertain the same fundamental ideas, and the human heart to cherish the same feelings in all ages.” It is certain that Pythagoras awakened the deepest intellectual sympathy of his age, and that his doctrines exerted a powerful influence upon the mind of Plato. His cardinal idea was that there existed a permanent principle of unity beneath the forms, changes, and other phenomena of the universe. Aristotle asserted that he taught that “numbers are the first principles of all entities.” Ritter has expressed the opinion that the formula of Pythagoras should be taken symbolically, which is doubtless correct. Aristotle goes on to associate these numbers with the “forms” and “ideas” of Plato. He even declares that Plato said:[Pg xvi] “forms are numbers,” and that “ideas are substantial existences—real beings.” Yet Plato did not so teach. He declared that the final cause was the Supreme Goodness—το ἀγαθόν. “Ideas are objects of pure conception for the human reason, and they are attributes of the Divine Reason.”[11] Nor did he ever say that “forms are numbers.” What he did say may be found in the Timæus: “God formed things as they first arose according to forms and numbers.”
It is recognized by modern science that all the higher laws of nature assume the form of quantitative statement. This is perhaps a fuller elaboration or more explicit affirmation of the Pythagorean doctrine. Numbers were regarded as the best representations of the laws of harmony which pervade the cosmos. We know too that in chemistry the doctrine of atoms and the laws of combination are actually and, as it were, arbitrarily defined by numbers. As Mr. W. Archer Butler has expressed it: “The world is, then, through all its departments, a living arithmetic in its development, a realized geometry in its repose.”
The key to the Pythagorean dogmas is the general formula of unity in multiplicity, the one evolving the many and pervading the many. This is the ancient doctrine of emanation in few words. Even the apostle Paul accepted it as true. “Εξ αυτοὺ, και δι᾽ αυτοῦ, και εις αυτὸν τὰ πάντα”—Out of him and through him and in him all things are. This, as we can see by the following quotation, is purely Hindu and Brahmanical:
“When the dissolution—Pralaya—had arrived at its term, the great Being—Para-Atma or Para-Purusha—the Lord existing through himself, out of whom and through whom all things were, and are and will be ... resolved to emanate from his own substance the various creatures” (Manava-Dharma-Sastra, book i., slokas 6 and 7).
The mystic Decad 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 is a way of expressing this idea. The One is God, the Two, matter; the Three, combining Monad and Duad, and partaking of the nature of both, is the phenomenal world; the Tetrad, or form of perfection, expresses the emptiness of all; and the Decad, or sum of all, involves the entire cosmos. The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit—a chaos to the sense, a cosmos to the reason.
The whole of this combination of the progression of numbers in the idea of creation is Hindu. The Being existing through himself, Swayambhu or Swayambhuva, as he is called by some, is one. He emanates from himself the creative faculty, Brahma or Purusha (the divine male), and the one becomes Two; out of this Duad, union of the purely[Pg xvii] intellectual principle with the principle of matter, evolves a third, which is Viradj, the phenomenal world. It is out of this invisible and incomprehensible trinity, the Brahmanic Trimurty, that evolves the second triad which represents the three faculties—the creative, the conservative, and the transforming. These are typified by Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, but are again and ever blended into one. Unity, Brahma, or as the Vedas called him, Tridandi, is the god triply manifested, which gave rise to the symbolical Aum or the abbreviated Trimurty. It is but under this trinity, ever active and tangible to all our senses, that the invisible and unknown Monas can manifest itself to the world of mortals. When he becomes Sarira, or he who puts on a visible form, he typifies all the principles of matter, all the germs of life, he is Purusha, the god of the three visages, or triple power, the essence of the Vedic triad. “Let the Brahmas know the sacred Syllable (Aum), the three words of the Savitri, and read the Vedas daily” (Manu, book iv., sloka 125).
“After having produced the universe, He whose power is incomprehensible vanished again, absorbed in the Supreme Soul.... Having retired into the primitive darkness, the great Soul remains within the unknown, and is void of all form....
“When having again reünited the subtile elementary principles, it introduces itself into either a vegetable or animal seed, it assumes at each a new form.”
“It is thus that, by an alternative waking and rest, the Immutable Being causes to revive and die eternally all the existing creatures, active and inert” (Manu, book i., sloka 50, and others).
He who has studied Pythagoras and his speculations on the Monad, which, after having emanated the Duad retires into silence and darkness, and thus creates the Triad can realize whence came the philosophy of the great Samian Sage, and after him that of Socrates and Plato.
Speusippus seems to have taught that the psychical or thumetic soul was immortal as well as the spirit or rational soul, and further on we will show his reasons. He also—like Philolaus and Aristotle, in his disquisitions upon the soul—makes of æther an element; so that there were five principal elements to correspond with the five regular figures in Geometry. This became also a doctrine of the Alexandrian school.[12] Indeed, there was much in the doctrines of the Philaletheans which did not appear in the works of the older Platonists, but was doubtless taught in substance by the philosopher himself, but with his usual reticence was not committed to writing as being too arcane for promiscuous publication. Speusippus and Xenocrates after him, held, like their great master, that the[Pg xviii] anima mundi, or world-soul, was not the Deity, but a manifestation. Those philosophers never conceived of the One as an animate nature.[13] The original One did not exist, as we understand the term. Not till he had united with the many—emanated existence (the monad and duad) was a being produced. The τίμιον, honored—the something manifested, dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity—the World-Soul.[14] In this doctrine we find the spirit of esoteric Buddhism.
A man’s idea of God, is that image of blinding light that he sees reflected in the concave mirror of his own soul, and yet this is not, in very truth, God, but only His reflection. His glory is there, but, it is the light of his own Spirit that the man sees, and it is all he can bear to look upon. The clearer the mirror, the brighter will be the divine image. But the external world cannot be witnessed in it at the same moment. In the ecstatic Yogin, in the illuminated Seer, the spirit will shine like the noon-day sun; in the debased victim of earthly attraction, the radiance has disappeared, for the mirror is obscured with the stains of matter. Such men deny their God, and would willingly deprive humanity of soul at one blow.
Professor Max Müller sees in this Mandala “at last, something like a theogony, though full of contradictions.”[36] The alchemists, kabalists, and students of mystic philosophy will find therein a perfectly defined system of Evolution in the Cosmogony of a people who lived a score of thousands of years before our era. They will find in it, moreover, a perfect identity of thought and even doctrine with the Hermetic philosophy, and also that of Pythagoras and Plato.
In Evolution, as it is now beginning to be understood, there is supposed to be in all matter an impulse to take on a higher form—a supposition clearly expressed by Manu and other Hindu philosophers of the highest antiquity. The philosopher’s tree illustrates it in the case of the zinc solution. The controversy between the followers of this school and the Emanationists may be briefly stated thus: The Evolutionist stops all inquiry at the borders of “the Unknowable;” the Emanationist believes that nothing can be evolved—or, as the word means, unwombed or born—except it has first been involved, thus indicating that life is from a spiritual potency above the whole.
Fakirs.—Religious devotees in East India. They are generally attached to Brahmanical pagodas and follow the laws of Manu. A strictly religious fakir will go absolutely naked, with the exception of a small piece of linen called dhoti, around his loins. They wear their hair long, and it serves them as a pocket, as they stick in it various objects—such as a pipe, a small flute called vagudah, the sounds of which throw the serpents into a cataleptic torpor, and sometimes their bamboo-stick (about one foot long) with the seven mystical knots on it. This magical stick, or rather rod, the fakir receives from his guru on the day of his initiation, together with the three mantrams, which are communicated to him “mouth to ear.” No fakir will be seen without this powerful adjunct of his calling. It is, as they all claim, the divining rod, the cause of every occult phenomenon produced by them.[37] The Brahmanical fakir is entirely[Pg xxxiii] distinct from the Mussulman mendicant of India, also called fakirs in some parts of the British territory.
Hermetist.—From Hermes, the god of Wisdom, known in Egypt, Syria, and Phœnicia as Thoth, Tat, Adad, Seth, and Sat-an (the latter not to be taken in the sense applied to it by Moslems and Christians), and in Greece as Kadmus. The kabalists identify him with Adam Kadmon, the first manifestation of the Divine Power, and with Enoch. There were two Hermes: the elder was the Trismegistus, and the second an emanation, or “permutation” of himself; the friend and instructor of Isis and Osiris. Hermes is the god of the priestly wisdom, like Mazeus.
Hierophant.—Discloser of sacred learning. The Old Man, the Chief of the Adepts at the initiations, who explained the arcane knowledge to the neophytes, bore this title. In Hebrew and Chaldaic the term was Peter, or opener, discloser; hence, the Pope, as the successor of the hierophant of the ancient Mysteries, sits in the Pagan chair of “St. Peter.” The vindictiveness of the Catholic Church toward the alchemists, and to arcane and astronomical science, is explained by the fact that such knowledge was the ancient prerogative of the hierophant, or representative of Peter, who kept the mysteries of life and death. Men like Bruno, Galileo, and Kepler, therefore, and even Cagliostro, trespassed on the preserves of the Church, and were accordingly murdered.
www.gutenberg.org/files/68705/68705-h/68705-h.htm
The work has often been criticized as a plagiarized occult work, with scholars noting how Blavatsky extensively copied from many sources popular among occultists at the time.[1] Isis Unveiled is nevertheless also understood by modern scholars to be a milestone in the history of Western esotericism.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
Overview
The work was originally entitled The Veil of Isis, a title which remains on the heading of each page, but had to be renamed once Blavatsky discovered that this title had already been used for an 1861 Rosicrucian work by W. W. Reade. Isis Unveiled is divided into two volumes. Volume I, The "Infallibility" of Modern Science, discusses occult science and the hidden and unknown forces of nature, exploring such subjects as forces, elementals, psychic phenomena, and the Inner and Outer Man. Volume II, Theology, discusses the similarity of Christian scripture to Eastern religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, the Vedas, and Zoroastrianism. It follows the Renaissance notion of prisca theologia, in that all these religions purportedly descend from a common source; the ancient "Wisdom-Religion".[7] Blavatsky writes in the preface that Isis Unveiled is "a plea for the recognition of the Hermetic philosophy, the anciently universal Wisdom-Religion, as the only possible key to the Absolute in science and theology."[8]
Isis Unveiled is argued by many modern scholars such as Bruce F. Campbell and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke to be a milestone in the history of Western Esotericism.[2] Blavatsky gathered a number of themes central to the occult tradition—perennial philosophy, a Neo-Platonic emanationist cosmology, adepts, esoteric Christianity—and reinterpreted them in relation to current developments in science and new knowledge of non-Western faiths. In doing so, Isis Unveiled reflected many contemporary controversies—such as Darwin's theories on evolution and their impact on religion—and engaged in a discussion that appealed to intelligent individuals interested in religion but alienated from conventional Western forms.[3] Blavatsky's combination of original insights, backed by scholarly and scientific sources, accomplished a major statement of modern occultism's defiance of materialist science.
In later theosophical works some of the doctrines originally stated in Isis Unveiled appeared in a significantly altered form,[note 1] drawing out confusion among readers and even causing some to perceive contradiction. Specifically, the few and—according to many—ambiguous statements on reincarnation as well as the threefold conception of man as body, soul and spirit of Isis Unveiled stand in contrast to the elaborate and definite conception of reincarnation as well as the sevenfold conception of man in The Secret Doctrine (1888). Blavatsky later asserted the correctness of her statements on reincarnation and the constitution of man in Isis Unveiled, attributing the resulting confusion and alleged contradictions to the more superficial or simplified conceptions of the ideas in Isis Unveiled compared to those of later works.[note 2][note 3]
Modern Theosophists hold the book as a revealed work dictated to Blavatsky by Theosophy's Masters.[12]
Cybele (/ˈsɪbəliː/ SIB-ə-lee;[1] Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubileya/Kubeleya Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother";[2] Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Κυβέλη Kybélē, Κυβήβη Kybēbē, Κύβελις Kybelis) is an Anatolian mother goddess; she may have a possible forerunner in the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük. She is Phrygia's only known goddess, and was probably its national deity. Greek colonists in Asia Minor adopted and adapted her Phrygian cult and spread it to mainland Greece and to the more distant western Greek colonies around the 6th century BC.
In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She became partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, of her possibly Minoan equivalent Rhea, and of the harvest–mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a eunuch mendicant priesthood.[3] Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele became associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.
In Rome, Cybele became known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle in 205 BC recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage (218 to 201 BC). Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. As Rome eventually established hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout Rome's empire. Greek and Roman writers debated and disputed the meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods, which remain controversial subjects in modern scholarship.
Anatolia
Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük, flanked by large felines as arm-rests, c. 6,000 BC
No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Cybele's Phrygian cult. She may have evolved from a statuary type found at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, of a "corpulent and fertile" female figure accompanied by large felines, dated to the 6th millennium BC and identified by some as a mother goddess.[4] In Phrygian art of the 8th century BC, the cult attributes of the Phrygian mother-goddess include attendant lions, a bird of prey, and a small vase for her libations or other offerings.[5]
The inscription Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya[2] at a Phrygian rock-cut shrine, dated to the first half of the 6th century BC, is usually read as "Mother of the mountain", a reading supported by ancient classical sources,[2][6] and consistent with Cybele as any of several similar tutelary goddesses, each known as "mother" and associated with specific Anatolian mountains or other localities:[7] a goddess thus "born from stone".[8] She is ancient Phrygia's only known goddess,[9] the divine companion or consort of its mortal rulers, and was probably the highest deity of the Phrygian state. Her name, and the development of religious practices associated with her, may have been influenced by the Kubaba cult of the deified Sumerian queen Kubaba.[10]
In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Pausanias attests to a Magnesian (Lydian) cult to "the mother of the gods", whose image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus. This was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess, and was attributed to the legendary Broteas.[11] At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess—identified by the Greeks as Cybele—took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,[12] and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.[13][14] This was the aniconic stone that was removed to Rome in 204 BC.
Images and iconography in funerary contexts, and the ubiquity of her Phrygian name Matar ("Mother"), suggest that she was a mediator between the "boundaries of the known and unknown": the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead.[15] Her association with hawks, lions, and the stone of the mountainous landscape of the Anatolian wilderness, seem to characterize her as mother of the land in its untrammeled natural state, with power to rule, moderate or soften its latent ferocity, and to control its potential threats to a settled, civilized life. Anatolian elites sought to harness her protective power to forms of ruler-cult; in Phrygia, the Midas monument connects her with king Midas, as her sponsor, consort, or co-divinity.[16] As protector of cities, or city states, she was sometimes shown wearing a mural crown, representing the city walls.[17] At the same time, her power "transcended any purely political usage and spoke directly to the goddess' followers from all walks of life".[18]
Some Phrygian shaft monuments are thought to have been used for libations and blood offerings to Cybele, perhaps anticipating by several centuries the pit used in her taurobolium and criobolium sacrifices during the Roman imperial era.[19] Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed, and eventually subsumed, by the influences and interpretations of her foreign devotees, at first Greek and later Roman.
Greek Cybele
From around the 6th century BC, cults to the Anatolian mother-goddess were introduced from Phrygia into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of Magna Graecia. The Greeks called her Mātēr or Mētēr ("Mother"), or from the early 5th century Kubélē; in Pindar, she is "Mistress Cybele the Mother".[20] In Homeric Hymn 14 she is "the Mother of all gods and all human beings." Cybele was readily assimilated with several Greek goddesses, especially Rhea, as Mētēr theōn ("Mother of the gods"), whose raucous, ecstatic rites she may have acquired. As an exemplar of devoted motherhood, she was partly assimilated to the grain-goddess Demeter, whose torchlight procession recalled her search for her lost daughter, Persephone; but she also continued to be identified as a foreign deity, with many of her traits reflecting Greek ideas about barbarians and the wilderness, as Mētēr oreia ("Mother of the Mountains").[21] She is depicted as a Potnia Theron ("Mistress of animals"),[22] with her mastery of the natural world expressed by the lions that flank her, sit in her lap, or draw her chariot.[23] This schema may derive from a goddess figure from Minoan religion.[24] Walter Burkert places her among the "foreign gods" of Greek religion, a complex figure combining a putative Minoan-Mycenaean tradition with the Phrygian cult imported directly from Asia Minor.[25]
Seated Cybele within a naiskos (4th century BC, Ancient Agora Museum, Athens)
Cybele's early Greek images are small votive representations of her monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands. She stands alone within a naiskos, which represents her temple or its doorway, and is crowned with a polos, a high, cylindrical hat. A long, flowing chiton covers her shoulders and back. She is sometimes shown with lions in attendance. Around the 5th century BC, Agoracritos created a fully Hellenised and influential image of Cybele that was set up in the Metroon in the Athenian agora. It showed her enthroned, with a lion attendant, holding a phiale (a dish for making libations to the gods) and a tympanon (a hand drum). Both were Greek innovations to her iconography and reflect key features of her ritual worship introduced by the Greeks which would be salient in the cult's later development.[26][27]
For the Greeks, the tympanon was a marker of foreign cults, suitable for rites to Cybele, her close equivalent Rhea, and Dionysus; of these, only Cybele holds the tympanon. She appears with Dionysus, as a secondary deity in Euripides' Bacchae, 64 – 186, and Pindar's Dithyramb II.6 – 9. In the Bibliotheca formerly attributed to Apollodorus, Cybele is said to have cured Dionysus of his madness.[28]
Cybele in a chariot driven by Nike and drawn by lions toward a votive sacrifice (right); above are heavenly symbols including a solar deity, Plaque from Ai Khanoum, Bactria (Afghanistan), 2nd century BC; Gilded silver, ⌀ 25 cm
Their cults shared several characteristics: the foreigner-deity arrived in a chariot, drawn by exotic big cats (Dionysus by tigers or panthers, Cybele by lions), accompanied by wild music and an ecstatic entourage of exotic foreigners and people from the lower classes. At the end of the 1st century BC Strabo notes that Rhea-Cybele's popular rites in Athens were sometimes held in conjunction with Dionysus' procession.[29] Both were regarded with caution by the Greeks, as being foreign,[30] to be simultaneously embraced and "held at arm's length".[31]
Cybele was also the focus of mystery cult, private rites with a chthonic aspect connected to hero cult and exclusive to those who had undergone initiation, although it is unclear who Cybele's initiates were.[32] Reliefs show her alongside young female and male attendants with torches, and with vessels for purification. Literary sources describe joyous abandonment to the loud, percussive music of tympanon, castanets, clashing cymbals, and flutes, and to the frenzied "Phrygian dancing", perhaps a form of circle-dancing by women, to the roar of "wise and healing music of the gods".[33]
In literary sources, the spread of Cybele's cult is presented as a source of conflict and crisis. Herodotus says that when Anacharsis returned to Scythia after traveling and acquiring knowledge among the Greeks in the 6th century BC, his brother, the Scythian king, put him to death for celebrating Cybele's mysteries.[34] The historicity of this account and that of Anacharsis himself are widely questioned.[35] In Athenian tradition, the city's Metroon was founded to placate Cybele, who had visited a plague on Athens when one of her wandering priests was killed for his attempt to introduce her cult. The earliest source is the Hymn to the Mother of the Gods (362 AD) by the Roman emperor Julian, but references to it appear in scholia from an earlier date. The account may reflect real resistance to Cybele's cult, but Lynne Roller sees it as a story intended to demonstrate Cybele's power, similar to myth of Dionysus' arrival in Thebes recounted in The Bacchae.[36][37][38] Many of Cybele's cults were funded privately, rather than by the polis,[25][39] but she also had publicly established temples in many Greek cities, including Athens and Olympia.[40] Her "vivid and forceful character" and association with the wild, set her apart from the Olympian deities.[41] Her association with Phrygia led to particular unease in Greece after the Persian Wars, as Phrygian symbols and costumes were increasingly associated with the Achaemenid empire.[42]
Conflation with Rhea led to Cybele's association with various male demigods who served Rhea as attendants, or as guardians of her son, the infant Zeus, as he lay in the cave of his birth. In cult terms, they seem to have functioned as intercessors or intermediaries between goddess and mortal devotees, through dreams, waking trance, or ecstatic dance and song. They include the armed Curetes, who danced around Zeus and clashed their shields to amuse him; their supposedly Phrygian equivalents, the youthful Corybantes, who provided similarly wild and martial music, dance and song; and the dactyls and Telchines, magicians associated with metalworking.[43]
Cybele and Attis
Main article: Attis
Roman Imperial Attis wearing a Phrygian cap and performing a cult dance
Cybele's major mythographic narratives attach to her relationship with Attis, who is described by ancient Greek and Roman sources and cults as her youthful consort, and as a Phrygian deity. In Phrygia, "Attis" was not a deity, but both a commonplace and priestly name, found alike in casual graffiti, the dedications of personal monuments, as well as at several of Cybele's Phrygian shrines and monuments. His divinity may therefore have begun as a Greek invention based on what was known of Cybele's Phrygian cult.[44] His earliest certain image as deity appears on a 4th-century BC Greek stele from Piraeus, near Athens. It shows him as the Hellenised stereotype of a rustic, eastern barbarian; he sits at ease, sporting the Phrygian cap and shepherd's crook of his later Greek and Roman cults. Before him stands a Phrygian goddess (identified by the inscription as Agdistis) who carries a tympanon in her left hand. With her right, she hands him a jug, as if to welcome him into her cult with a share of her own libation.[45] Later images of Attis show him as a shepherd, in similar relaxed attitudes, holding or playing the syrinx (panpipes).[46] In Demosthenes' On the Crown (330 BC), attes is "a ritual cry shouted by followers of mystic rites".[47]
Attis seems to have accompanied the diffusion of Cybele's cult through Magna Graecia; there is evidence of their joint cult at the Greek colonies of Marseilles (Gaul) and Lokroi (southern Italy) from the 6th and 7th centuries BC. After Alexander the Great's conquests, "wandering devotees of the goddess became an increasingly common presence in Greek literature and social life; depictions of Attis have been found at numerous Greek sites".[37] When shown with Cybele, he is always the younger, lesser deity, or perhaps her priestly attendant. In the mid 2nd century, letters from the king of Pergamum to Cybele's shrine at Pessinos consistently address its chief priest as "Attis".[48][49]
Roman Cybele
Republican era
Votive altar inscribed to Mater Deum, the Mother of the Gods, from southern Gaul[50]
Romans knew Cybele as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"), or as Magna Mater deorum Idaea ("great Idaean mother of the gods"), equivalent to the Greek title Meter Theon Idaia ("Mother of the Gods, from Mount Ida"). Rome officially adopted her cult during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), after dire prodigies, including a meteor shower, a failed harvest, and famine, seemed to warn of Rome's imminent defeat. The Roman Senate and its religious advisers consulted the Sibylline oracle and decided that Carthage might be defeated if Rome imported the Magna Mater ("Great Mother") of Phrygian Pessinos.[51] As this cult object belonged to a Roman ally, the Kingdom of Pergamum, the Roman Senate sent ambassadors to seek the king's consent; en route, a consultation with the Greek oracle at Delphi confirmed that the goddess should be brought to Rome.[52] The goddess arrived in Rome in the form of Pessinos' black meteoric stone. Roman legend connects this voyage, or its end, to the matron Claudia Quinta, who was accused of unchastity but proved her innocence with a miraculous feat on behalf of the goddess. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, supposedly the "best man" in Rome, was chosen to meet the goddess at Ostia; and Rome's most virtuous matrons (including Claudia Quinta) conducted her to the temple of Victoria, to await the completion of her temple on the Palatine Hill. Pessinos' stone was later used as the face of the statue of the goddess.[53] In due course, the famine ended and Hannibal was defeated.
Silver tetradrachm of Smyrna
Most modern scholarship agrees that Cybele's consort, Attis, and her eunuch Phrygian priests (Galli) would have arrived with the goddess, along with at least some of the wild, ecstatic features of her Greek and Phrygian cults. The histories of her arrival deal with the piety, purity, and status of the Romans involved, the success of their religious stratagem, and power of the goddess herself; she has no consort or priesthood, and seems fully Romanised from the first.[54] Some modern scholars assume that Attis must have followed much later; or that the Galli, described in later sources as shockingly effeminate and flamboyantly "un-Roman", must have been an unexpected consequence of bringing the goddess in blind obedience to the Sibyl; a case of "biting off more than one can chew".[55] Others note that Rome was well versed in the adoption (or sometimes, the "calling forth", or seizure) of foreign deities,[56] and the diplomats who negotiated Cybele's move to Rome would have been well-educated, and well-informed.[57]
Romans believed that Cybele, considered a Phrygian outsider even within her Greek cults, was the mother-goddess of ancient Troy (Ilium). Some of Rome's leading patrician families claimed Trojan ancestry; so the "return" of the Mother of all Gods to her once-exiled people would have been particularly welcome, even if her spouse and priesthood were not; its accomplishment would have reflected well on the principals involved and, in turn, on their descendants.[58] The upper classes who sponsored the Magna Mater's festivals delegated their organisation to the plebeian aediles, and honoured her and each other with lavish, private festival banquets from which her Galli would have been conspicuously absent.[59] Whereas in most of her Greek cults she dwelt outside the polis, in Rome she was the city's protector, contained within her Palatine precinct, along with her priesthood, at the geographical heart of Rome's most ancient religious traditions.[60] She was promoted as patrician property; a Roman matron – albeit a strange one, "with a stone for a face" – who acted for the clear benefit of the Roman state.[61][62]
1st century BC marble statue of Cybele from Formia, Lazio
Imperial era
Augustan ideology identified Magna Mater with Imperial order and Rome's religious authority throughout the empire. Augustus claimed a Trojan ancestry through his adoption by Julius Caesar and the divine favour of Venus; in the iconography of Imperial cult, the empress Livia was Magna Mater's earthly equivalent, Rome's protector and symbolic "Great Mother"; the goddess is portrayed with Livia's face on cameos[63] and statuary.[64] By this time, Rome had absorbed the goddess's Greek and Phrygian homelands, and the Roman version of Cybele as Imperial Rome's protector was introduced there.[65]
Imperial Magna Mater protected the empire's cities and agriculture — Ovid "stresses the barrenness of the earth before the Mother's arrival.[66] Virgil's Aeneid (written between 29 and 19 BC) embellishes her "Trojan" features; she is Berecyntian Cybele, mother of Jupiter himself, and protector of the Trojan prince Aeneas in his flight from the destruction of Troy. She gives the Trojans her sacred tree for shipbuilding, and begs Jupiter to make the ships indestructible. These ships become the means of escape for Aeneas and his men, guided toward Italy and a destiny as ancestors of the Roman people by Venus Genetrix. Once arrived in Italy, these ships have served their purpose and are transformed into sea nymphs.[67]
Stories of Magna Mater's arrival were used to promote the fame of its principals, and thus their descendants. Claudia Quinta's role as Rome's castissima femina (purest or most virtuous woman) became "increasingly glorified and fantastic"; she was shown in the costume of a Vestal Virgin, and Augustan ideology represented her as the ideal of virtuous Roman womanhood. The emperor Claudius claimed her among his ancestors.[68] Claudius promoted Attis to the Roman pantheon and placed his cult under the supervision of the quindecimviri (one of Rome's priestly colleges).[69]
Critical reception
William Emmette Coleman
Detractors often accuse the book of extensive plagiarism, a view first seriously put forth by William Emmette Coleman shortly after publication and still expressed by modern scholars such as Mark Sedgwick.[13] Similarly, historian Geoffrey Ashe noted that Isis Unveiled combines "comparative religion, occultism, pseudoscience, and fantasy in a mélange that shows genuine if superficial research but is not free from unacknowledged borrowing and downright plagiarism."[14] Indeed, Isis Unveiled makes use of many sources popular among occultists at the time, often directly copying significant amounts of text. Historian Bruce Campbell concluded that the large number of borrowed lines suggested plagiarism "on a large scale."[15] Modern copies of Isis Unveiled are often annotated, fully delineating Blavatsky's sources and influences.
Historian Ronald H. Fritze considers Isis Unveiled to be a work of pseudohistory.[16] Likewise, Henry R. Evans, a contemporaneous journalist and magician, described the book as a "hodge-podge of absurdities, pseudo-science, mythology and folk-lore, arranged in helter-skelter fashion, with an utter disregard of logical sequence."[17]
One of Blavatsky's original goals in writing Isis Unveiled and founding the Theosophical Society was to reconcile contemporary advances in science with occultism, and this synthesis was one of the main appeals of Blavatsky's work for individuals interested in religion but alienated from conventional Western forms at the time.[2][18][19]
K. Paul Johnson has suggested that many of the more mythical elements of Blavatsky's works, like her later Masters, rather than being outright inventions, were reformulations of preexisting esoteric ideas and the casting of a large group of individuals—who helped, encouraged, or collaborated with her—under a mythological context; all driven by Blavatsky's search for spiritual truth.[4][12]
Sten Bodvar Liljegren notes that in addition to contemporaneous occult sources and the prevailing orientalism of the period, the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton heavily influenced Blavatsky's Theosophical ideas.[20]
These are 1:1 corner crops of the first copy of Tokina AT-X 116 Pro DX (serial 8211669) that I have used.
These shots were taken at 11mm and f/8 and 1/200, focused manually at infinity, before returning the lens. Each picture was composed to place the yellow building into each corner, approx. 700px from the edge.
Since the difference in corner sharpness was so significant even when stopped to f/8, I have decided to return the lens under warranty after less than 2 weeks of use. Then I had to wait for almost 10 weeks to get another copy...
Make sure you check the full size picture for the highest level of detail.
© david morris dtmphotography.co.uk
Llandrindod Wells is an amalgam of two very different settlements. Early Llandrindod in the
form of the old parish church and Llandrindod Hall occupies a spur sandwiched between
valleys that drop down towards the Ithon from the high ground to the east. One kilometre to
the north-west on lower ground which has been ridged and hollowed by several streams is the
Victorian and modern creation of Llandrindod Wells.
This brief report examines Llandrindod’s emergence and development up to 1750. For the
more recent history of the settlement, it will be necessary to look at other sources of
information and particularly at the origins and nature of the buildings within it.
The accompanying map is offered as an indicative guide to the historic settlement. The
continuous line defining the historic core offers a visual interpretation of the area within
which the settlement developed, based on our interpretation of the evidence currently to hand.
It is not an immutable boundary line, and may need to be modified as new discoveries are
made. The map does not show those areas or buildings that are statutorily designated, nor
does it pick out those sites or features that are specifically mentioned in the text.
We have not referenced the sources that have been examined to produce this report, but that
information will be available in the Historic Environment Record (HER) maintained by the
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust. Numbers in brackets are primary record numbers used in
the HER to provide information that is specific to individual sites and features. These can be
accessed on-line through the Archwilio website (www.archwilio.org.uk).
History of development
The name refers to the 'Church of the Trinity', but the former name of the church and its
parish was Llandow in 1283 and Lando in 1291 meaning ‘church of God’. Llandynddod
appears only in 1535, but the change to the Trinity is one that can be recognised in several
other churches in Wales.
The earlier focus occupies a spur overlooking this area. Whether the church represents an
early medieval foundation is unclear. The 'llan' prefix might suggest this but there is no
corroborative evidence. Its later history, too, is uncharted. The occurrence of platforms
opposite the church hints at more than just an isolated church, but the evidence as yet is not
compelling.
Llandrindod Hall by the old church was converted into a large hotel in about 1749, but it
functioned for less than forty years and was demolished by its proprietor, reportedly because
of its unsavoury clientele. It was replaced in the 19th century by a farmstead.
Reportedly the origins of the spa town go back to the late 17th century. Cae-bach Chapel
(30000; Grade II listing) in Brookland Road was founded in 1715. Saline and sulphur springs
were discovered in the 1730s and these were noted in various publications in the following
twenty years. But the emergence of Llandrindod Wells is essentially a 19th-century
phenomenon and thus falls outside the scope of this report, although in expanding over
Llanerch Common, the town enveloped the Llanerch Inn, which has some 17th-century
features.
The heritage to 1750
The old parish church of Holy Trinity (16027) lies more than 1km south-east of the town and
was sited on the edge of an extensive tract of common upland. It originally had a single
chamber of 13th/14th-century build with a south porch and small west spire. It was completely
rebuilt in 1894, after the archdeacon of Llandrindod had removed the roof in order to
'encourage' townspeople to attend the new church in the town. The old church houses several
18th and 19th-century monuments but its 'sheel-na-gig' (5960) uncovered during building work
in 1894 and presumably of medieval origin, is now in the local museum.
The churchyard (16199) is irregular in design, its shape on the west and south dictated by the
natural topography. The Tithe map depicts a smaller enclosure around the church, a short
distance away from the road and no longer distinguishable at ground level, but may not be an
accurate representation. A holy well (81710) lay close to the churchyard, though the story
attached to it point to a healing well.
The spur on which the old church sits is naturally irregular with rock outcrops protruding.
North of the church on land that was common until the 19th century are several flat terraces
some of which are certainly artificial constructions that probably supported dwellings
(16094); there is at least one authentic platform and perhaps two others, together with
enclosure boundaries and a trackway. Further earthworks (16095), the most obvious a low
curvilinear bank of unknown function, are apparent just to the south-east of Llandrindod Hall
(30020).
Capel Maelog (2055) which was excavated between 1984 and 1987 lay off Cefnllys Lane less
than 1km east of the town centre. Its foundations have now been reconstructed near County
Hall.
Information can be found here
In Spring 2018 the Slanted editors took a close-up look at the contemporary design scene of Dubai. A city—when described by many people—that is all sickening shine and has no soul. But Dubai and the whole region, originally a piece of desert sparsely populated by Bedouins, is now transforming itself rapidly into a center, if not the world’s greatest center, of trade, finance, and tourism—and moreover, something important happened in the last few years: Culture! Today, a new Arab world is being plotted and planned. The entire Gulf is teeming with initiatives—from the most public to the most private—to change and reinvent seemingly immutable rules, regimes, edicts, and assumptions, culminating, perhaps, in the stated intention to work more closely together. The Gulf states have a past, and they will have a future. The contours of that future are legible in this Slanted issue!
Slanted met some of the most amazing creatives such as Möbius Studio, Wissam Shawkat, and Fikra Design Studio. Not only can you find their brilliant works in the new issue, Slanted also provides a deeper look at their opinions and views through video interviews that can be watched online on our video platform for free: www.slanted.de/dubai.
**Hoover Dam** - National Register of Historic Places Ref # 81000382, date listed 4/8/1981
E of Las Vegas on U.S. 93
Boulder City, NV (Clark County)
A National Historic Landmark (www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalhistoriclandmarks/list-of-nh...
Much of the sculpture is the work of Norwegian-born, naturalized American Oskar J.W. Hansen. Hansen's principal work at Hoover Dam is the monument of dedication on the Nevada side of the dam. Here, rising from a black, polished base, is a 142-foot flagpole flanked by two winged figures, which Hansen calls the Winged Figures of the Republic. They express "the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment."
The winged figures are 30 feet high. Their shells are 5/8-inch thick, and contain more than 4 tons of statuary bronze. The figures were formed from sand molds weighing 492 tons. The bronze that forms the shells was heated to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and poured into the molds in one continuous, molten stream.
The figures rest on a base of black diorite, an igneous rock. In order to place the blocks without marring their highly polished finish, they were centered on blocks of ice, and guided precisely into place as the ice melted. After the blocks were in place, the flagpole was dropped through a hole in the center block into a predrilled hole in the mountain.
Surrounding the base is a terrazzo floor, inlaid with a star chart, or celestial map. The chart preserves for future generations the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam, September 30, 1935. (1)
References (1) Bureau of Reclamation www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/artwork.html
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
Great Food and Music Highly Recommended
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
Great Food and Music Highly Recommended
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
The odds of something like this happening to your vehicle increase by a factor of 5 for each bumper sticker that is placed on it.
And a factor of 100 if you LEAVE THE WINDOW DOWN.
The stickers, from the lower left moving clockwise:
1. "Sorry I missed church; I've been busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian."
2. "It's Better To Be Hated For Who You Are Than Loved For Who You Are Not."
3. "the little men who live behind my eyes... and scream directly at my brain... told me to tell you Hello"
: )
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
May 17-30, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday May 17 from 6-8:00 pm
The clock’s influence is inseparable from contemporary life – not only does it synchronize individual circadian rhythms but it also produces the stable temporal foundation for both scientific tradition and capitalism to flourish. However, there is a significant gap between what is measured by clocks and what is perceived by the individual. The perceived acceleration of time in contemporary life leaves us with a feeling of being continually deprived of this precious resource. While many technologies promise to help us get-time-back, they only entangle us further in their construction. Scientific time, duration measured by clocks, is regarded as immutable, indefatigable, and infallible – the opposite of the humans it ostensibly serves. Slower Than Time Itself uses the syncopated rhythms and unquantifiable output of mechanical clocks to suggest a slowing and plurality to the current monoculture of time, more sympathetic to the human condition and timescapes outside of human perception. Trueman’s sculptural and video works explore the idea of slowness as a gateway to multiplicity and ponders whether it is possible to use a clock to escape time itself.
Artist Biography
After studying mechanical engineering at Fanshawe, Trueman completed his undergraduate degree in fine arts at Western University where he is currently a Master of Fine Art candidate. He will be completing a clock installation at I-Park Residency (East Haddam, Connecticut) this summer, and will be exhibiting at PLUS Art Fair 2018 (Toronto). His first publication So Long South Street, a photographic series showing the demolition of famed South Street Hospital, was launched earlier in 2018. His work has been shown at Museum London, McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton), Thames Art Gallery (Chatham), and DNA Art Space (London).
Artlab Gallery
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
Department of Visual Arts
Western University
London, ON
© 2018; Department of Visual Arts; Western University
Some things are immutable fixtures in Coney Island. The Wonder Wheel is landmarked, and will survive all the changes that are being planned for Coney Island. We can only hope that Deno's Wonder Wheel Park will also be able to profitably continue when it is surrounded by high-rise hotel and condominium towers.
There are hundreds of platforms for social interaction and introducing a brand new platform might be risky, but a platform with a new dimension sounds interesting even in this high competitive marketplace, Howdoo is a messaging application which handovers the power to the users. It knows the importance of one’s time and value of data.
Almost all existing platform have been stealing the data without even notice to the owner (like Facebook and YouTube, unlike them Howdoo not even protect the data but also incentivized them the crypto token (uDoo) for their participation and sharing data after Proof of Contribution for fair and transparent reward. Say no totrust breeching social networks and join hands with the Howdoo, the trustworthy media.
This blockchain based social interaction forum is decentralized, encrypted, fair, transparent, and immutable. The Howdoo will have worldwide access with international money transfer availability with insignificant fees. Howdoo will reduce the risks of cyberbullying, misuse of data, offensiveness and harmful data. So this would be the media that everyone desires.
What’s more? Then let me tell you that you actually get paid for sharing the data and viewing the advertisements in the news feed. The token sale is ending on June 12, 2018.
ETH address: 0x895F650c7CDA6930600f34343f409b103893C403
Grania, the daughter of an Irish king. Grania is intended to be the bride of Finn. She is young, beautiful, self-controlled, and initially calm about her impending marriage. She nurses a childhood memory of a great warrior whom she once saw in her father’s courtyard. This half-fanciful attachment is in contrast to her cool, well-mannered demeanor. The knowledge that this warrior is one of Finn’s men provokes her decision to desert Finn. Her sense of dignity remains constant even in poverty and sorrow and supports her when she is, in turn, deserted by Diarmuid.
Finn, a king of Ireland and leader of the Fenian warriors. He is in late middle age, and he plans to take a young wife for the sake of happiness and comfort. Like Grania, he at first seems reasonable and prudent in his affections, yet when he is faced with Grania’s passion for Diarmuid, Finn is overwhelmed by jealousy and hounds the fleeing couple for years, devoting all of his energy to the possession of Grania. Despite his rage, Finn shows an astute understanding of the conflicts within himself and within Diarmuid and Grania, and he proves capable of not only cruelty but also compassion.
Diarmuid, one of the chief warriors of the Fenians, known both for his bravery in battle and for his success with women. Perhaps his most prized quality is his loyalty to Finn, which he swears is immutable. It is his sense of honor that causes Diarmuid to leave with Grania; he feels obliged to protect her from the unjust wrath of the jealous Finn. Love and honor are in perpetual conflict within him, however, even after he gives in to his desire for Grania. On his deathbed, he has no memory of her but thinks only of his friendship with Finn.
Niki's Oasis Restaurant & Jazz Bar 138 Bree Street Newtown Cultural Precinct Johannesburg South Africa with Simnikiwe Sondlo and Bushy Dubazana Jazz Band with the Immutable Themba Fassie
Molto spesso non ci facciamo caso, le nostre attenzioni viaggiano in velocità e in divenire, per noi osservare diventa sempre più difficile. Ma le cose comuni che spesso riteniamo immutabili, immobili da anni nel loro ambiente, meritano una visione ravvicinata e consapevole. Ogni volta che tutto ciò accade ci stupisce inesorabilmente.
Particolari usurati dal tempo e dal ambiente.
----------------------------------------
Very often we do not pay attention, our attention traveling speed and become, for us it becomes increasingly difficult to observe. But the common things that we often immutable properties for years in their environment, they deserve a closer look and aware. Whenever this happens amazes us inexorably.
Worn out by time and environment.
Building a responsive design is easy. Making it performant takes more time and care. The biggest performance challenges lie with media. For many organizations, these challenges will force them to retool the way they handle images and video. In this session, we’ll look at the options for how to handle responsive image and video. We’ll talk about guidelines for implementing responsive media in your organization as well as the one immutable rule for responsive images.
The Akamai Edge Conference is an annual gathering of the industry revolutionaries who are committed to creating leading edge experiences, realizing the full potential of what is possible in a Faster Forward World.
Learn more at www.akamai.com/edge
Frozen Records :
www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G2scukRSM
Amazing sounds from ice records !
Artist Claudia Märzendorfer DJ delicate records made of ice on specially prepared turntables for her act “VLUN/Much ado about nothing”. In stark contrast to the immutability of contemporary methods of sound storage – the digital world of mp3s, wavs and AIFFs – the artist has chosen a storage medium that disintegrates almost immediately.
After the first few grooves the sound begins to degrade as the stylus digs deeper through the deteriorating groovestructures. Each disc lasts an average of only ten minutes, and most can be played only once. The medium melts, the grooves disintegrate into puddles. Metaphors abound in the art of freezing sounds and melting records : the impermanence and fragility of art and life.
Nik Hummer est membre du groupe autrichien Thilges, dans lequel il joue notamment du Trautonium.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trautonium
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trautonium
Le CD "La double absence" de Thilges est disponible à la Médiathèque (Bruxelles-Passage 44) :
Slayer
Alcatraz - Milano
19 Giugno 2013
Tom Araya
Kerry King
Jeff Hanneman
Dave Lombardo
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati. L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
From the opening squeals of the guitars of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman and the punishing breakaway attack of Dave Lombardo's drums on "Flesh Storm" it's clear from the first thirty seconds the thrash metal titans have returned to pummel listeners with a raging onslaught of new music guaranteed to lay waste to MP3 players, car stereo speakers and whatever else gets in their way.
Christ Illusion marks the long-awaited return of the legendary Slayer. Its first record in five years and its first record in fifteen years with the original band line-up, Christ Illusion is a cacophony of brutality. A soundtrack for the post-Apocalypse. Steeped in scorching riffs and a litany of menacing tracks/tirades on religion and violence, Slayer forges ahead on its devastating path of aural destruction with ten new songs, each charged with the electric hostility for which Slayer is renowned.
Of the record Kerry King is ecstatic: "I love it. I really like God Hates Us All and I think that's the best record we've done in my opinion since Seasons In The Abyss, and I like this better than that one. I think it's a more complete record, I think sonically it better: all the performances are awesome. I think this one is more intense not because we're trying to do 'Reign In Blood: The Sequel,' it's just that's where our writing is taking us now."
Songs like the "Flesh Storm," "Eyes of the Insane," "Skeleton Christ," "Jihad" and the first single, "Cult" showcase the band at its most blazing intensity. The sonic excitement of speed, propelled by King, Hanneman and Lombardo and lead by the immutable roar of Tom Araya provoke the listener with Slayer's trademark fascination with terror, violence and religion.
For as long as Slayer has been making records it has been surrounded by controversy.
Since the band recorded its first album, "Show No Mercy," Slayer has been plagued with accusations of Satanism, fascism, racism and so on. Christ Illusion gives no quarter to critics who would mindlessly attack the band for, what the Germans call, "der Reiz des Unbekannten" (meaning "the attraction of the unknown"). A lyric fascination with violence and terror which guitarist King enthusiastically describes this way: "When I was I kid I would see a horror movie over a love story. Being shocked, being in an environment that's not reality might be frightening but is cool nonetheless. With a lot of our songs we put people in that place. It doesn't bother me because I enjoy it. It could easily be programming from all the fucking news channels."
Slayer is often assailed for its subject matter, though the band is unrepentant. " According to Araya, "Violence, darkness... So much of my inspiration comes from news articles or pictures and just start describing the images. Television- A&E, the History Channel, Court TV, Documentaries."
The singer continues, "With this record, as far as a theme: there is none. That's just our favorite subject matter. The common thread is death. I think that's just a common thread in general: we all share death, and we all share it at different times in different ways, but it's the one thing that we all have in common. We all die. It's how we live that makes us different."
Beyond being controversial Slayer is an exceptional force in music, highly praised for its trailblazing style of fast, heavy and aggressive music yet bristling with melody. The much-heralded return of Dave Lombardo to the drummer's throne will leave fans gasping for breath as he clobbers the listener on song after song.
Commenting on Lombardo's return to the fold, King notes, "Not to say the shine's worn off, but it's old news to us. I think the thing the kids are going to get into, besides just being the first Slayer album in five years, is that Dave's on it. When he came back he wasn't a member, he just came back to do a couple of tours and people started asking back then 'Is he gonna hang around?' And I would tell them that was up to Dave. But I could tell that Dave was having a killer time." King confided. "So it was just a matter of time before he said, 'Yeah, let's do it!' But it's great. And now that he's got a new Slayer album that he's played on, I think he's going to get some more enjoyment out of playing. He takes pride in everything he does and it's awesome to have him back with us."
Having the original members record their first album together in fifteen years is certainly newsworthy but the lasting might of the band and its continued popularity is an achievement few can boast. For each of the members, the band is resolute. There is no other band like Slayer.
"The staying power behind Slayer is that we've stuck to our guns," Says Araya. "Integrity... that would be number one. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we've stuck to what we do best. And the fact that we've been together as a band for so long. Ten years with Dave; another ten without Dave; and now Dave's back. It has a lot to do with compromise, that's just the way it has to be. You have to be able to compromise and give and take and that has a lot to do with why we're still together and a force to be reckoned with. I've learned that without each other, Slayer wouldn't exist, and that the whole is greater than its parts."
Kerry King is far more succinct. "Slayer to me is the coolest band on the planet. There is a timeless quality to Slayer. It's cool, but I can't explain it. It's our life."
Slayer has created one mesmerizing record after the next, has influenced many of today's most successful bands, including Slipknot, Sepultura, Killswitch Engage, and continues to earn new generations of fans, while staying true to its ceaselessly devoted followers. Slayer's legacy is cemented in music forever and the band remains undaunted in its directive to make punishing, aggressive and exciting music. With Christ Illusion the band marks its territory. Slayer has exceeded itself far beyond thrash metal to become an unstoppable juggernaut without equal.
Tom Araya sums it up: "I think the best thing is the band's longevity and the fact that we haven't bowed to anyone. That we were able to make a record like Reign In Blood, which, to us, was just another record, but to others, was something very special, it's had such an impact. People will remember it for a long time, and it's all because we did things our way, we didn't bow down to anyone. We didn't compromise. We stuck to being who we are."
"I had a finer and a grander sight, however, where I was. This was the mighty dome of the Jungfrau softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by the starlight. There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages, upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million more--and still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation." -- Mark Twain, "A Tramp Abroad" (seen from Interlaken Switzerland)
LITTLE COFFEE SHOP OF HORRORS - Notes
by Matt Ward
This was a commissioned piece for the Fall 2011 issue of CRAM Magazine.
MEANING:
I was working as a hobby shop clerk, and a dock worker at Macy’s, and sustaining my daily momentum on a steady diet of job application rejections and debt collection calls, and the math at the end of the day looked bleak, okay? In retrospect, it could’ve been worse, but as far as I was concerned at the time, my situation was immutably fucked.
Copic Markers, Prismacolor Markers & Colored Pencils on Strathmore medium-tooth drawing paper.
10.7.2011 ©Matthew E. Ward
© david morris dtmphotography.co.uk
Llandrindod Wells is an amalgam of two very different settlements. Early Llandrindod in the
form of the old parish church and Llandrindod Hall occupies a spur sandwiched between
valleys that drop down towards the Ithon from the high ground to the east. One kilometre to
the north-west on lower ground which has been ridged and hollowed by several streams is the
Victorian and modern creation of Llandrindod Wells.
This brief report examines Llandrindod’s emergence and development up to 1750. For the
more recent history of the settlement, it will be necessary to look at other sources of
information and particularly at the origins and nature of the buildings within it.
The accompanying map is offered as an indicative guide to the historic settlement. The
continuous line defining the historic core offers a visual interpretation of the area within
which the settlement developed, based on our interpretation of the evidence currently to hand.
It is not an immutable boundary line, and may need to be modified as new discoveries are
made. The map does not show those areas or buildings that are statutorily designated, nor
does it pick out those sites or features that are specifically mentioned in the text.
We have not referenced the sources that have been examined to produce this report, but that
information will be available in the Historic Environment Record (HER) maintained by the
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust. Numbers in brackets are primary record numbers used in
the HER to provide information that is specific to individual sites and features. These can be
accessed on-line through the Archwilio website (www.archwilio.org.uk).
History of development
The name refers to the 'Church of the Trinity', but the former name of the church and its
parish was Llandow in 1283 and Lando in 1291 meaning ‘church of God’. Llandynddod
appears only in 1535, but the change to the Trinity is one that can be recognised in several
other churches in Wales.
The earlier focus occupies a spur overlooking this area. Whether the church represents an
early medieval foundation is unclear. The 'llan' prefix might suggest this but there is no
corroborative evidence. Its later history, too, is uncharted. The occurrence of platforms
opposite the church hints at more than just an isolated church, but the evidence as yet is not
compelling.
Llandrindod Hall by the old church was converted into a large hotel in about 1749, but it
functioned for less than forty years and was demolished by its proprietor, reportedly because
of its unsavoury clientele. It was replaced in the 19th century by a farmstead.
Reportedly the origins of the spa town go back to the late 17th century. Cae-bach Chapel
(30000; Grade II listing) in Brookland Road was founded in 1715. Saline and sulphur springs
were discovered in the 1730s and these were noted in various publications in the following
twenty years. But the emergence of Llandrindod Wells is essentially a 19th-century
phenomenon and thus falls outside the scope of this report, although in expanding over
Llanerch Common, the town enveloped the Llanerch Inn, which has some 17th-century
features.
The heritage to 1750
The old parish church of Holy Trinity (16027) lies more than 1km south-east of the town and
was sited on the edge of an extensive tract of common upland. It originally had a single
chamber of 13th/14th-century build with a south porch and small west spire. It was completely
rebuilt in 1894, after the archdeacon of Llandrindod had removed the roof in order to
'encourage' townspeople to attend the new church in the town. The old church houses several
18th and 19th-century monuments but its 'sheel-na-gig' (5960) uncovered during building work
in 1894 and presumably of medieval origin, is now in the local museum.
The churchyard (16199) is irregular in design, its shape on the west and south dictated by the
natural topography. The Tithe map depicts a smaller enclosure around the church, a short
distance away from the road and no longer distinguishable at ground level, but may not be an
accurate representation. A holy well (81710) lay close to the churchyard, though the story
attached to it point to a healing well.
The spur on which the old church sits is naturally irregular with rock outcrops protruding.
North of the church on land that was common until the 19th century are several flat terraces
some of which are certainly artificial constructions that probably supported dwellings
(16094); there is at least one authentic platform and perhaps two others, together with
enclosure boundaries and a trackway. Further earthworks (16095), the most obvious a low
curvilinear bank of unknown function, are apparent just to the south-east of Llandrindod Hall
(30020).
Capel Maelog (2055) which was excavated between 1984 and 1987 lay off Cefnllys Lane less
than 1km east of the town centre. Its foundations have now been reconstructed near County
Hall.
Information can be found here
Slayer
Alcatraz - Milano
19 Giugno 2013
Tom Araya
Kerry King
Jeff Hanneman
Dave Lombardo
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati. L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
From the opening squeals of the guitars of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman and the punishing breakaway attack of Dave Lombardo's drums on "Flesh Storm" it's clear from the first thirty seconds the thrash metal titans have returned to pummel listeners with a raging onslaught of new music guaranteed to lay waste to MP3 players, car stereo speakers and whatever else gets in their way.
Christ Illusion marks the long-awaited return of the legendary Slayer. Its first record in five years and its first record in fifteen years with the original band line-up, Christ Illusion is a cacophony of brutality. A soundtrack for the post-Apocalypse. Steeped in scorching riffs and a litany of menacing tracks/tirades on religion and violence, Slayer forges ahead on its devastating path of aural destruction with ten new songs, each charged with the electric hostility for which Slayer is renowned.
Of the record Kerry King is ecstatic: "I love it. I really like God Hates Us All and I think that's the best record we've done in my opinion since Seasons In The Abyss, and I like this better than that one. I think it's a more complete record, I think sonically it better: all the performances are awesome. I think this one is more intense not because we're trying to do 'Reign In Blood: The Sequel,' it's just that's where our writing is taking us now."
Songs like the "Flesh Storm," "Eyes of the Insane," "Skeleton Christ," "Jihad" and the first single, "Cult" showcase the band at its most blazing intensity. The sonic excitement of speed, propelled by King, Hanneman and Lombardo and lead by the immutable roar of Tom Araya provoke the listener with Slayer's trademark fascination with terror, violence and religion.
For as long as Slayer has been making records it has been surrounded by controversy.
Since the band recorded its first album, "Show No Mercy," Slayer has been plagued with accusations of Satanism, fascism, racism and so on. Christ Illusion gives no quarter to critics who would mindlessly attack the band for, what the Germans call, "der Reiz des Unbekannten" (meaning "the attraction of the unknown"). A lyric fascination with violence and terror which guitarist King enthusiastically describes this way: "When I was I kid I would see a horror movie over a love story. Being shocked, being in an environment that's not reality might be frightening but is cool nonetheless. With a lot of our songs we put people in that place. It doesn't bother me because I enjoy it. It could easily be programming from all the fucking news channels."
Slayer is often assailed for its subject matter, though the band is unrepentant. " According to Araya, "Violence, darkness... So much of my inspiration comes from news articles or pictures and just start describing the images. Television- A&E, the History Channel, Court TV, Documentaries."
The singer continues, "With this record, as far as a theme: there is none. That's just our favorite subject matter. The common thread is death. I think that's just a common thread in general: we all share death, and we all share it at different times in different ways, but it's the one thing that we all have in common. We all die. It's how we live that makes us different."
Beyond being controversial Slayer is an exceptional force in music, highly praised for its trailblazing style of fast, heavy and aggressive music yet bristling with melody. The much-heralded return of Dave Lombardo to the drummer's throne will leave fans gasping for breath as he clobbers the listener on song after song.
Commenting on Lombardo's return to the fold, King notes, "Not to say the shine's worn off, but it's old news to us. I think the thing the kids are going to get into, besides just being the first Slayer album in five years, is that Dave's on it. When he came back he wasn't a member, he just came back to do a couple of tours and people started asking back then 'Is he gonna hang around?' And I would tell them that was up to Dave. But I could tell that Dave was having a killer time." King confided. "So it was just a matter of time before he said, 'Yeah, let's do it!' But it's great. And now that he's got a new Slayer album that he's played on, I think he's going to get some more enjoyment out of playing. He takes pride in everything he does and it's awesome to have him back with us."
Having the original members record their first album together in fifteen years is certainly newsworthy but the lasting might of the band and its continued popularity is an achievement few can boast. For each of the members, the band is resolute. There is no other band like Slayer.
"The staying power behind Slayer is that we've stuck to our guns," Says Araya. "Integrity... that would be number one. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we've stuck to what we do best. And the fact that we've been together as a band for so long. Ten years with Dave; another ten without Dave; and now Dave's back. It has a lot to do with compromise, that's just the way it has to be. You have to be able to compromise and give and take and that has a lot to do with why we're still together and a force to be reckoned with. I've learned that without each other, Slayer wouldn't exist, and that the whole is greater than its parts."
Kerry King is far more succinct. "Slayer to me is the coolest band on the planet. There is a timeless quality to Slayer. It's cool, but I can't explain it. It's our life."
Slayer has created one mesmerizing record after the next, has influenced many of today's most successful bands, including Slipknot, Sepultura, Killswitch Engage, and continues to earn new generations of fans, while staying true to its ceaselessly devoted followers. Slayer's legacy is cemented in music forever and the band remains undaunted in its directive to make punishing, aggressive and exciting music. With Christ Illusion the band marks its territory. Slayer has exceeded itself far beyond thrash metal to become an unstoppable juggernaut without equal.
Tom Araya sums it up: "I think the best thing is the band's longevity and the fact that we haven't bowed to anyone. That we were able to make a record like Reign In Blood, which, to us, was just another record, but to others, was something very special, it's had such an impact. People will remember it for a long time, and it's all because we did things our way, we didn't bow down to anyone. We didn't compromise. We stuck to being who we are."
Friday we decide to stick close to home and prep for the cookout.
We get pastries downtown and walk up to the hospital to pick up my paycheck. Several of my co-workers are out and about—the census is at a record low and people are actually taking lunch breaks. We take Mike over to Fort Casey and are completely unable to answer any questions about local history or the purpose of a lot of the things we see there. We clamber around on the old gun batteries and watch the shipping lanes. (Eep! What is Harbin Hualong bringing us? Their feed's melanine content was just implicated in the poisoning a bunch of Chinese dogs bred for their raccoon-like fur.) We find the remains of a rabbit—just creepily intact teeth and gums and an unidentifiable organ.
We go home and meet with our hippy dippy cat sitter, Kestrel, and chop peppers and onions for the cookout.
Due to horrible planning on our part (long ferry lines because it’s Friday night and the sun going down earlier than we feel it should because of the immutable laws of physics), the Seattle folks (Reuben, Angela, Grant, Hannah) arrive for the cookout at Deception Pass at dusk. Janine’s crew has all been sidelined with some kind of plague, but Pamela and her kids have decided to attend after all. Hannah has a date set for her wedding. She is probably radiant, but it’s too dark to tell. Because of general inability to see anything and fear that we are undercooking our invisible chicken, we go back to our house. Steve and Pamela’s kids play Rock Band and we finish cooking everything in the oven.
At first, we don’t take pictures because it is dark; at home we don’t take pictures because Pamela's daughter is singing and we don’t want to make her self-conscious.
As far as I know, no one was food-poisoned.
**Hoover Dam** - National Register of Historic Places Ref # 81000382, date listed 4/8/1981
E of Las Vegas on U.S. 93
Boulder City, NV (Clark County)
A National Historic Landmark (www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalhistoriclandmarks/list-of-nh...
Much of the sculpture is the work of Norwegian-born, naturalized American Oskar J.W. Hansen. Hansen's principal work at Hoover Dam is the monument of dedication on the Nevada side of the dam. Here, rising from a black, polished base, is a 142-foot flagpole flanked by two winged figures, which Hansen calls the Winged Figures of the Republic. They express "the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment."
The winged figures are 30 feet high. Their shells are 5/8-inch thick, and contain more than 4 tons of statuary bronze. The figures were formed from sand molds weighing 492 tons. The bronze that forms the shells was heated to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and poured into the molds in one continuous, molten stream.
The figures rest on a base of black diorite, an igneous rock. In order to place the blocks without marring their highly polished finish, they were centered on blocks of ice, and guided precisely into place as the ice melted. After the blocks were in place, the flagpole was dropped through a hole in the center block into a predrilled hole in the mountain.
Surrounding the base is a terrazzo floor, inlaid with a star chart, or celestial map. The chart preserves for future generations the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam, September 30, 1935. (1)
References (1) Bureau of Reclamation www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/history/essays/artwork.html