1. Individuality and the Group-Soul

4 December 1909, Munich

Today we will consider a general theme: the question of the meaning and tasks of anthroposophical spiritual science. Tomorrow we will take up a more specific theme: the destiny and nature of the individual human being. We have often emphasized that anthroposophy has a special task and meaning for human beings in the present age. People who think will not be able to avoid the question what the aims of this spiritual movement are and how they relate to other tasks of our time. Such tasks may be explained from diverse points of view, as we have often done. Today we will try to describe the evolutionary stage of contemporary humanity and attempt to look a little into the future. Then we will consider the task of anthroposophy in reference to our present evolutionary stage.

We know that since the great Atlantean catastrophe, which entirely transformed the earth, there have been five great epochs of civilization. We designate these as the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin, and the epoch we presently live in. The latter was prepared in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries after Christ; we are now actually in the middle of this epoch. Of course, such divisions are not to be understood as indicating that each evolutionary epoch abruptly came to an end and then a new one began. Rather, one epoch gradually and slowly merged into another. Long before one epoch has run its course, the next one is already being prepared.

In our own cultural epoch, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the characteristics of the sixth epoch are already being prepared. Roughly speaking, people in our time can be divided into two groups: those who live blindly for the day, have no idea of, and know nothing about the preparation of the sixth epoch, and those who understand that something new is being prepared. The latter also know that this preparation must basically be accomplished by human beings. We find our place in our time either by passively following the customs of our society and doing what our parents have taught us to do, or by being aware that to be a conscious link in the chain of humanity we must work on ourselves and our environment to contribute, as best we can, to the preparation of what must come, namely, the sixth cultural period.

How it is possible to prepare for the sixth epoch can only be understood when we consider the character of our own period. The best way to do this is to compare it with others. We know these cultural epochs are different from each other, and over the years we have presented their various distinguishing characteristics. We have shown that in the ancient Indian period people had different soul qualities than they did later. At that time, human beings were still endowed with a high degree of clairvoyant consciousness. In later epochs, this clairvoyance was gradually lost, and perception and understanding became limited to the physical world. We have seen that the fourth epoch was slowly prepared; it was in that period that humanity came to live entirely in the physical world. This made it possible for the being whom we call Christ Jesus to incarnate in human form, as a human being on the physical plane. Next we have seen that since that time a certain stream further strengthened human capacities in the physical world. Indeed, the materialistic tendency of our age and the insistence to accept only the physical world as real are connected with humanity's further descent into the physical. However, things must not remain like this. We must ascend again into the spiritual world, bearing with us the attainments and fruits we have acquired in the physical world. It is the task of anthroposophy to offer people the possibility of ascending once again into the spiritual world.

Immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, there were many human beings who knew through direct perception that they were surrounded by, and lived in, a spiritual world. Gradually, however, the number of those who knew this decreased as human perception became more limited to the physical senses. In our time, the capacity to perceive the spiritual world has almost disappeared; yet something so significant is being prepared in our time that a great many people will have quite different faculties in their next incarnation. Human faculties have changed during the past five cultural epochs, and they will change again in the sixth. The capacities of a great number of people living today will change considerably in their next incarnation, as will be clear from the whole nature of their soul. Today we will talk about how different many of these human souls will be already in their next incarnation; of course, for other people, this change will not happen until two incarnations from now.

 

Looking at past epochs of human evolution, we can also see that the closer we come to the ancient clairvoyance, the more the human soul has the character of what we can call “group-soulness.” I have often pointed out that consciousness of this group-soulness existed preeminently among the ancient Hebrews. A person who consciously felt himself to be a member of this people understood, “As an individual human being, I am a transitory phenomenon, but there lives in me something that has an immediate connection with all the soul essence that has streamed down since the days of our progenitor, Abraham.” In esoteric terms, we can describe these feelings of the Hebrew people as a spiritual phenomenon. We will better understand what happened there if we look at the following.

Let us consider a Hebrew initiate of that time. Although initiation was not so frequent among the ancient Hebrews as among other peoples, we can characterize such a real initiate — that is, one initiated not just into theories and the law, but one who really saw into the spiritual worlds — only by taking into consideration the peculiarity of the Hebrew people as a whole. Nowadays, historians, who are concerned only with documents, check the Old Testament against all kinds of external records and find it unsubstantiated. We will have occasion to point out that the Old Testament gives us facts more faithfully than external historical records. In any case, spiritual science shows that the blood relationship of the Hebrews to Abraham can really be proven, and that their claim on Abraham as their original progenitor is fully justified. It was known particularly in the ancient Hebrew Mystery schools that the individuality or psychic essence of Abraham did not incarnate only in him, but is an eternal being existing in the spiritual world.

In fact, all true initiates among the Hebrews were inspired by the same spirit that inspired Abraham; they could call upon that spirit and were permeated by the same soul nature as Abraham. There was a real connection between every initiate and the tribal ancestor Abraham. This connection was expressed also in the feelings of the individuals belonging to the Hebrew people. They felt that what came to expression in Abraham was the group-soul of the people.

Group-souls were also experienced in the same way by other peoples of that time. Humanity in general goes back to group-souls. The farther back we go in human evolution, the less developed we find the individuality. Instead, a whole group belonged together as a unit, as is the case in the animal kingdom. This “groupness” is more and more pronounced the farther back we go into ancient times. Groups of human beings then belonged together, and the group-soul was considerably stronger than the individual soul.

Even today human group-soulness is still not overcome. Those who claim the opposite merely fail to take into account certain subtler phenomena of life, such as the resemblance of certain people not only in their physiognomies but also in their soul qualities. In a sense, people can be divided into categories, and everyone will fit into one of them. Individuals may differ as to this or that quality but a certain group-soulness still makes itself felt and not only because there are still different peoples. The boundaries between the nations continue to disintegrate, but other groupings are still perceptible. Thus certain basic characteristics are combined in individuals in such a way that the last vestiges of group-soulness can still be perceived today.

We are now living in a period of transition. All group-soulness must gradually be stripped off. Just as the differences between nations are gradually disappearing, and the factions within them come to understand each other better, so also will other group-soul qualities have to be shed. Instead, the individual nature of each person will be pushed to the fore. We have here characterized something essential in evolution. From another point of view, we can also say that in the course of evolution the concept of race, by which group-soulness is chiefly expressed, gradually loses its significance.

 

If we go back beyond the Atlantean catastrophe, we see how human races were prepared. In the ancient Atlantean age, human beings were grouped according to external bodily characteristics even more so than in our time. The races we distinguish today are merely vestiges of these significant differences between human beings in ancient Atlantis. The concept of race is only fully applicable to Atlantis. Because we are dealing with the real evolution of humanity, we have therefore never used this concept of race in its original meaning. Thus, we do not speak of an Indian race, a Persian race, and so on, because it is no longer true or proper to do so. Instead, we speak of an Indian, a Persian, and other periods of civilization. And it would make no sense at all to say that in our time a sixth “race” is being prepared. Though remnants of ancient Atlantean differences, of ancient Atlantean group-soulness, still exist and the division into races is still in effect, what is being prepared for the sixth epoch is precisely the stripping away of race. That is essentially what is happening.

Therefore, in its fundamental nature, the anthroposophical movement, which is to prepare the sixth period, must cast aside the division into races. It must seek to unite people of all races and nations, and to bridge the divisions and differences between various groups of people. The old point of view of race has a physical character, but what will prevail in the future will have a more spiritual character.

That is why it is absolutely essential to understand that our anthroposophical movement is a spiritual one. It looks to the spirit and overcomes the effects of physical differences through the force of being a spiritual movement. Of course, any movement has its childhood illnesses, so to speak. Consequently, in the beginning of the theosophical movement the earth was divided into seven periods of time, one for each of the seven root races, and each of these root races was divided into seven sub-races. These seven periods were said to repeat in a cycle so that one could always speak of seven races and seven sub-races. However, we must get beyond the illnesses of childhood and understand clearly that the concept of race has ceased to have any meaning in our time.

Humanity is becoming evermore individual, and this has further implications for human individuality. It is important that this individuality develop in the right way. The anthroposophical movement is to help people become individualities, or personalities, in the right sense. How can it accomplish this? Here we must look to the most striking new quality of the human soul that is being prepared. People often ask why we do not remember our former incarnations. I have often answered this question, which is like saying that because a four-year-old child cannot do arithmetic, human beings cannot do arithmetic. When the child reaches ten, he or she will be able to multiply with ease. It is the same with the soul. If it cannot remember our former incarnations today, the time will come when it will be able to do so. Then it will possess the same capacity initiates have.

This new development is happening today. There are numerous souls nowadays who are so far advanced that they are close to the moment of remembering their former incarnations, or at least the last one. A number of people are at the threshold of comprehensive memory, embracing life between birth and death as well as previous incarnations. Many people will remember their present incarnation when they are reborn in their next life. It is simply a question of how they remember. The anthroposophical movement is to help and guide people to remember in the right way.

In light of this, we can describe this anthroposophical movement as leading a person to grasp correctly what is called the I, the innermost member of the human being. I have often pointed out that Fichte rightly said most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava on the moon than as an I. 1 To think how many people in our time have any idea at all of the I — that is, of what they are — leads to a dismal conclusion.

 

In this connection I am always reminded of a friend I had more than thirty years ago and who, as a young student, was completely steeped in the materialistic outlook. Today it is more modern to call it the “monistic” outlook. He always laughed when he heard someone say that within each human being there was something that could be called a spiritual being. My friend thought that what lives as thought in us is produced by mechanical or chemical processes in the brain. I often said to him, “Look, if you seriously believe this, why are you lying all the time?” For, in fact, he really was lying continually because he never said, “My brain feels, my brain thinks,” but, “I think, I feel, I know this or that.” Thus, he contradicted his own theory with his every word — as everyone does, for it is impossible to adhere fully to a materialistic theory one has imagined. It is impossible to remain truthful if one thinks materialistically. If one wanted to say, “My brain loves you,” then one should not say “you,” but “My brain loves your brain.” People are not aware of the consequences of their theories. This may be humorous, but it also shows the deep foundation of unconscious untruthfulness that underlies our present spiritual condition.

Now, most people really would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava on the moon, that is as a piece of matter, than as an I. The I can be understood least of all through science with its materialistic methods and way of thinking. How can we understand the I? How can we arrive at an idea or concept of what we feel instinctively when we say, “I think”? We can do so only through knowing on the basis of the anthroposophical world view how the human being is constituted and structured — that the physical body is related to Saturn, the etheric body to the sun, the astral body to the moon, and the I to the earth. When we keep in mind the ideas we can gather from the cosmos, we understand that the I, as the real master, works on the other members. Then we gradually come to understand what we mean by the word “I.”

As we learn to understand this word, we slowly approach the highest concept of this I. We begin to feel ourselves as spiritual beings not only when we feel ourselves to be within an I, but also when we can say that something lives in our individuality that was already there before Abraham. Then we can say not only, “I and father Abraham are one,” but also “I and the Father, that is, the spiritual element weaving through and living in the world, are one.” What lives in the I is the same spiritual substance that lives and weaves in the world as spirit. Thus we gradually come to understand the I, the bearer of human individuality that goes from incarnation to incarnation.

How do we understand the I and the world in general through the anthroposophical world view? The anthroposophical view of the world develops in the most individual way, but at the same time it is the most un-individual thing you can imagine. It arises in the most individual way when the secrets of the cosmos are revealed in a human soul, when the great spiritual beings of the world stream into this soul. The content of the world must be experienced in the human individuality in the most individual way, but at the same time it must also be experienced completely impersonally. Concerning the true character of cosmic mysteries, we have to say that as long as we still value our personal opinion, we cannot arrive at the truth.

Indeed, it is the peculiar nature of anthroposophical truth that the observer must not hold any opinion of his or her own about it and must not have any preference for this or that theory. The observer must not like this or that view more than any other because of his or her individual peculiarities. As long as we have our own opinions, it is impossible for the true secrets of the world to be revealed to us. We must pursue knowledge quite individually, but our individuality must be so developed that it no longer retains anything personal; it must be free of sympathies and antipathies. This must be taken very seriously. Those who still prefer personal ideas and views and are inclined to this or that because of their education and temperament will never know objective truth.

 

This summer, we have tried to understand eastern wisdom from the standpoint of western teaching. 2 We have tried to do justice to eastern wisdom and to present it truly. It must be emphasized that if we have independent spiritual knowledge in our time, it is impossible to decide for either the oriental or the occidental views of the world on the basis of personal preference. Those who say that because of their temperament they prefer the oriental or the occidental world view and its laws do not understand what is essential here. We should not decide that Christ, let us say, is more significant than what is to be found in eastern teaching because we happen to incline toward him through our western education or temperament. We cannot answer the question how Christ is related to the orient until, from a personal standpoint, we can accept Christian and oriental teachings equally. As long as we have a preference, we are unable to make a decision. We begin to be objective only when we let the facts speak for themselves and disregard our personal opinions.

The anthroposophical world view in its true form is closely interwoven with human individuality, for this world view must spring from the I-force of the individuality and yet be independent of it. The individuality as such does not matter. The person in whom anthroposophical wisdom appears must be completely unimportant compared to this wisdom; the person as such does not matter at all. It is only essential that this person has developed so far that his or her personal likes, dislikes, and opinions do not taint the anthroposophical wisdom. Then this wisdom will indeed be individual, because the spiritual cannot appear in the light of the moon or the stars but only in the individuality, in the human soul. This individuality, however, must be developed to the point of being able to disengage from the development of the wisdom of the world.

What is entering humanity through the anthroposophical movement concerns every human being regardless of race or nationality. This movement speaks only to the new humanity, the new human being — not to an abstract concept “human being,” but to every individual. This is the essential point. Anthroposophy proceeds from the individuality, the innermost core of the human being, and it speaks to and touches this core of a person's being. We usually speak to each other only as one surface to another and mostly about things not connected to our innermost being. Full understanding between individuals is hardly possible today, except when what is to be communicated comes from the center of one individual's being and speaks to and is understood rightly by the center of another. Thus, in a certain way, anthroposophy speaks a new language. Even if we are still obliged to speak in the various national languages, the content of what is said forms a new language.

What is said in the outer world is really only valid for a very limited sphere. In the past, when people still looked into the spiritual world through ancient, dreamy clairvoyance, words indicated something that existed in the spiritual world. Even in ancient Greece such things were different from what they are today. The word “idea” as used by Plato signified something different from “idea” as used by our modern philosophers, who no longer understand Plato. They have no perception of what he called “Idea,” mistaking it for an abstract concept. Plato still meant something spiritual that he could perceive. Even if already rarefied, it was nevertheless something quite real. Words still contained, if I may say so, the juice of the spiritual.

The spiritual can still be traced in words. When people today use the word “wind” or “air,” they mean something external, physical. However, the ancient Hebrew word for this, “Ruach,” did not only refer to something physical but also to something spiritual permeating the universe. Modern materialistic science tells us that when we inhale, we simply breathe in physical air. In ancient times, however, people did not believe they inhaled only physical air; they were aware that they inhaled something spiritual, or at least something psychic.

In fact, in ancient times, words designated something spiritual and psychic. That is no longer true today; language has become limited to the external world at least people who want to be fully up to date culturally are busy finding materialistic meanings behind terms that are obviously derived from the realm of soul and spirit. Physicists, for example, speak of an “impact” of bodies. They have forgotten that “impact” is derived from what a living being performs in its inner nature when it pushes another being. The original meaning of words is forgotten in these simple things. Thus, our language, particularly our scientific language, can no longer express anything but the material. What is in our soul while we speak can therefore be understood only by those soul faculties that are bound to the physical brain as their instrument. As a result, when the soul is disembodied, it understands nothing of all that has been said with these words. When the soul has gone through the gate of death and can no longer use the brain, all scientific discussions are quite incomprehensible to it. It does not hear or perceive what one expresses in contemporary language, which has no meaning for a disembodied soul. Our language has meaning only in the physical world.

We must consider this in relation to our way of thinking and outlook on the world because this fact is much more important than a theory. After all, what matters is life, not theory. Characteristically, one can see in the theosophical movement how materialism has crept in. Materialism sneaked even into theosophy and prevails even there, for example, in the descriptions of the etheric or life body. Rather than making an effort to understand the spiritual, people often describe the etheric body as if it were a kind of finer matter, and they do the same with the astral body. They usually begin with the physical body, proceed to the etheric or life body and say it is constructed on the same pattern as the physical body, only finer. And they continue this way until they reach nirvana. Such descriptions take their images only from the physical world.

 

I have even heard people say that there are fine vibrations in a room when they wanted to describe the good feeling present in the room. They do not notice that they are reducing something spiritual to matter when they think of a room as filled with vibrations as with a thin fog.

This is the most materialistic thinking possible. Materialism has taken hold even of those who want to think spiritually. This is typical of our times, and it is important that we are conscious of it. We must be especially aware that language is always a kind of tyrant over our thinking and has implanted in our souls a tendency to materialism. Many people today who claim to be idealists express themselves in an entirely materialistic way because they have been seduced, as it were, by the tyranny of language. This materialistic language cannot be understood by the soul when it is no longer bound to the brain.

There is yet more to it than this. The method of presentation often employed in scientific-theosophical writings causes real pain to those who know occult contemplation, true spiritual perception. For this way of presentation does not make sense to people who have begun to think not with their brain but with their soul, now freed from the brain — people who really live in the spiritual world. It is all well and good to describe the world materialistically as long as we still think with the physical brain, but as soon as we begin to develop spiritual perception, speaking in this way ceases to have any meaning. Indeed, then it even causes pain to hear people say that “there are good vibrations in this room,” rather than “a good feeling prevails.” Because thoughts are realities, such utterances cause pain in those who can really see things spiritually. For them the room becomes filled with a dark fog when somebody expresses the thought “there are good vibrations in this room.”

It is the task of our anthroposophical way of thinking, which is decidedly more important than all theories, to learn to speak a language that is understood by the soul not only while it is still in a physical body but also when it is no longer bound to the physical brain. In other words, this language must be understood by a soul still in the body and able to perceive spiritually as well as by a soul that has gone through the gate of death. That is what is important. When we use anthroposophical concepts that explain the world and the human being, we are speaking a language that can be understood here in the physical world and also by those who are no longer incarnated in physical bodies but are living between death and a new birth. Yes, what is spoken in anthroposophy is heard and understood by the so-called dead. They are fully at one with us when we speak the same language. With this language we speak to all human beings. After all, in a sense, it is mere chance whether a soul is in a body or in the condition between death and a new birth. Through anthroposophy we learn a language that is comprehensible to all human beings, living or dead. Thus, in anthroposophy we speak a language that is also spoken for the dead.

We really touch the innermost core of a person through what we cultivate in anthroposophical discussions, even if what we say appears to be abstract. We penetrate right into the human soul, and because of that, we can free people from group-soulness. Because we penetrate into their souls, they become increasingly able to really understand themselves as an I.

Interestingly, the difference between those who come to anthroposophy and really embrace it and those who do not is that the I of the former is as if crystallized into a spiritual being through anthroposophical thinking, a spiritual being that is then carried along through the gate of death. The others, who do not practice anthroposophical thinking, have a hollow space, a nothingness in the place where the I is now in physical life and after death. Any other concepts we can take in nowadays will gradually become more and more immaterial for the true core of the human soul. The central essence of the human being will be touched and understood only by the anthroposophical thoughts we take in. These crystallize a spiritual substance in us that we can take with us after death and that enables us to perceive in the spiritual world, to see and hear, and to penetrate the darkness that would otherwise exist there for us. Thus, it becomes possible that we can take the I we have developed through the anthroposophical outlook and concepts — the I that is connected to all the wisdom in the world we can receive — with us into the next incarnation. Then we will be reborn in the next incarnation with this developed I, and we will be able to remember it.

 

It is the deeper task of the anthroposophical movement to enable a number of human beings to enter their next incarnation with an I each remembers as his or her own, individual I. These people will then form the nucleus of the next period of civilization. Then these individuals who have been well prepared through the anthroposophical spiritual movement to remember their individual I will be spread over the earth. For the essential characteristic of the next period of civilization is that it will not be limited to particular localities, but will be spread over the whole earth. These individuals will be scattered over the earth, and thus everywhere on earth there will be a core group of people who will be crucial for the sixth epoch of civilization. These people will recognize each other as those who in their previous incarnation strove together to develop the individual I. That is the proper cultivation of that soul faculty we have spoken of

This soul faculty will be so developed that more and more people who have not developed their I will also be able to remember their former incarnations. However, they will not remember an individual I, but only the group-I in which they had remained. In summary, people who are working in this incarnation to develop their individual I will be able to remember themselves as this or that independent individuality; they will be able to look back at the individuality they were. People who have not developed their individuality will be unable to remember any individuality.

Do not think that mere visionary clairvoyance will enable you to remember your previous I. Humanity was once clairvoyant, and if that in itself sufficed, then everyone would have remembered because all were clairvoyant. Thus, what matters is not clairvoyance; people will indeed be clairvoyant in the future. Rather, what matters is whether we have cultivated our I in this incarnation or not. If we have not cultivated it, the I will not be there as the innermost human essence, and we will remember only a group-I, only what we had in common with others. In that case we will have to look back and admit that we did not free ourselves from the group-I in this incarnation. People to whom this happens will experience it as though it were a new Fall, a second Fall of humanity, a falling back into a conscious connection with the group-soul. Not to remember oneself as an individuality and to be hemmed in by one's inability to transcend group-soulness will be something terrible in the sixth epoch. To put it bluntly, we can say that the earth and all it can yield will belong to those who now cultivate their individualities. Those, however, who do not develop their individual I will be dependent on joining a group that will instruct them in what they should think, feel, will, and do. In the future development of humanity this will be felt as a regression, a second Fall. Therefore, we should not regard the anthroposophical movement and spiritual life as mere theory but rather as something that is given to us now to prepare what is necessary for the future of humanity.

When we understand our present condition correctly — understand where we have come from and where we are going — then we must realize that humanity is now beginning to develop the ability to remember beyond the limits of the present incarnation. What matters now is that we develop it in the right way, that is, by developing our individual I. For we can remember only what we have created in our soul. If we have not created it, we are left only with the fettering memory of a group I, and we will feel this as a falling back into a group-soul of higher animality, as it were. Even if human group-souls are more refined than those of the animals, they are still group-souls. People of an earlier age would not have considered this a regression because they were just in the process of developing from group-soulness to the individual soul. However, if group-soulness is retained today, people will consciously experience this falling back into group-soulness. In the future, this will create an oppressive feeling in those who cannot catch up with the development of the individual I either in the present incarnation or a later one; they will feel their falling back into group-soulness.

Anthroposophy must help people keep pace with this development of the I; that is how we have to see anthroposophy and its place in human life. When we keep in mind that the sixth period is that of the first complete overcoming of the concept of race, we have to realize that it would be sheer fantasy to think that a sixth “race” will also start in a particular place on earth and develop like the earlier races. After all, that is what progress is all about: ever new ways of evolution appear, and concepts that were valid for earlier times will no longer apply in the future. If we do not realize this, the idea of progress will remain unclear for us. And we will again and again fall back into the error of speaking about so and so many cycles, worlds, races of evolution, and so on. It is unclear why this wheel of cycles, worlds, and races should keep turning. We must realize that the word “race” is a term that was valid only for a particular time. As we approach the sixth epoch, this term loses its meaning.

 

In future, what speaks to the depths of the human soul will be expressed increasingly in people's outer appearance. What people have acquired as individuals and yet experienced non-individually will be expressed in their countenance. Thus, the individuality of a person — not the group-soulness — will be inscribed on his or her countenance, and that is what will account for human diversity. Everything will be acquired individually, although it will only be gained through overcoming the individuality. Those who are in the process of developing the I will not form groups, but their individuality will be expressed in their external appearance. That is what will create differences between human beings.

There will be people who have acquired I-hood; they will be scattered over the earth, and their countenances will be very diverse. Yet, in this diversity the individual I is expressing itself even in the person's gestures. However, those who have not developed their individuality will bear the imprint of group-soulness in their countenances; that is, they can be grouped in categories that will resemble each other. That will be the outer physiognomy of our earth: the possibility will be prepared to bear one's individuality as an outer sign or to bear the outer sign of group-soulness. It is the meaning of earthly evolution for human beings to develop more and more the ability to express their inner being in their outer appearance. That is why the highest ideal of the evolution of the I, Christ Jesus, is described as follows in an ancient document: “When two become one, when the outer becomes like the inner, then human beings have attained Christ nature in themselves.” That is the meaning of a certain passage in the so-called Egyptian Gospel. 3 One can understand such passages on the basis of anthroposophical wisdom.

Today we have attempted to understand the task of anthroposophy out of the depth of our insight. Next time we will consider a spiritual problem that is of special concern to the individual and that can lead us to understand our destiny and our true nature.

  

rsarchive.org/Lectures/UniHuman/19091204p02.html

Edgar Degas French, 1834 -1917

Frieze of Dancers ( Danseuses attachant leurs sandales) , ca. 1895

Oil on canvas

The Cleveland Museum of Art. Gift of the Hanna Fund.

This work encapsulates Dega’s interest in repetition and variation—lessons learned from his monotypes. One of the artist’s largest paintings, it shows four ballerinas in nearly identical poses, tying their toe shoes, depicted from different angles. But are we seeing four dancers? The two figures at left look like mirror images, recalling the reversals of printmaking. Or are we circling around a single dancer, following Degas as he carries out an instruction found in one of his own notebooks, to “study from all perspectives a figure or an object, it doesn’t matter which”? With that in mind, the painting may relate to contemporaneous time-motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, who tried to document action through successive still photographs. The filmstrip-like composition may also allude to cinema, newly emerging in Degas’s day. The ambiguous background, rendered in earthy tones, derives from his experiments with monotype.

From the placard Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

 

Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).

 

Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions

 

"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".

 

The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.

 

The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.

 

Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.

 

Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:

 

Wet with cool dew drops

fragrant with perfume from the flowers

came the gentle breeze

jasmine and water lily

dance in the spring sunshine

side-long glances

of the golden-hued ladies

stab into my thoughts

heaven itself cannot take my mind

as it has been captivated by one lass

among the five hundred I have seen here.

 

Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.

 

Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.

 

There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.

 

Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.

 

The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.

 

In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:

 

During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".

 

Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.

 

While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’

 

Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.

 

An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.

 

Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983

 

Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture

Main article: Commercial graffiti

With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.

 

In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".

 

Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.

 

Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.

 

Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.

 

Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.

 

There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.

 

The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.

 

Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.

 

Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis

 

Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.

 

Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.

 

Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"

 

Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal

 

In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.

 

Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.

 

Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.

 

Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.

 

With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.

 

Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.

 

Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.

 

Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.

 

Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.

 

Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.

 

Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.

 

Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.

 

The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.

 

I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.

 

The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.

 

Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.

 

Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.

 

In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".

 

There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.

 

Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.

 

A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.

By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.

 

Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.

 

In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.

 

A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.

 

From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

 

In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.

 

Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.

 

Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.

 

Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.

  

In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.

 

Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.

 

In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.

 

In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."

 

In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.

 

In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.

 

In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.

 

In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.

 

In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.

 

The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.

 

To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."

 

In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.

 

In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.

 

Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".

 

Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)

In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.

 

Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.

 

Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.

 

In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

 

Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.

 

Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.

 

To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.

 

When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.

This text is spread over three Gobate II images, and is a complement to the 'Peña Hueca' text (see below, for those reading from a computer). The texts look at issues relating to a potential local architectural response to amber deposits. I propose that these early architectures have the potential to be early human examples of building structures outside of functions such as habitat or issues such as ancestors and the dead. They would sit in a chronology aside a second early speciality late Neolithic structure I call the 'Boat Haven' and indeed in keeping, I name this class of Upper Ebro troglodytic structures 'Amber Havens'.

 

A scattered line of sites can be seen from the north east within the Basque region's piedmont, through the amber deposits aside Las Yurdinas 2, the Peñacerrada and other Urizaharra deposits, and down to the feathered edges of the great River Ebro's valley. The distance between Gobate and the Chalcolithic villages associated with the physical extraction of the amber mineral deposits is as low as five straight kilometres. Gobat is at an altitude of 650m and a sharp rise to around 1000m provides a qualitative ridge for the amber deposits to hide behind. Whilst the ridge climbs just 300m, it is steep enough to take the zest from hasty gaits - a natural pause for thought.

 

Along this scattered 'line', and towards its southern end, are the close-by Gobate and La Llana sites in addition to occasional dolmen and necropolis of monolithic sarcophagi in a range of styles including of those witnessed in and around the Gobate and La Llana sites. [I will later argue that these sarcophagi can be reappropriated, and that their origins need to be stretched back in chronology].

 

Carved stone spaces are cleaned and swept and the archaeological record may not be as laminated as it is for non-ritual family fed rock abris. Ploughing has also occurred up to the edges of many sites.

 

This diagonal of artificial caves runs out from the plane of the upper Ebro and is a potential subset of the Upper Ebro group of troglodytic ritual sites. Understanding this subset is a task that will require hypothesis, and the hypothesis I use for Gobate and La Llana is one that develops from ideas I presented for Peña Hueca up on the plateau and equally buffered on the other side of the amber deposits.

 

Before looking at the line of artificial caves and late prehistoric sites, it is important to see that there are striking similarities between the La Llana sites and the potentially slightly older Gobate sites. Each loci may consist of two separated elements, the first element a 'hubub' around at least three different 'warm water forms' and the second, a 'quiet' site with little space for more than a handful of people. For each site, the 'warm water form' clusters are within shouting distance (drum distance) but not within sight (111m and 250m apart respectively). Were it not for the artificial cave under the 'warm water forms' of the 'Gobate I' site, the similar 'footprint' of the adjacent sites would be blatant and indubitable. Accepting that the La Llana sight is slightly younger, It may seem that La Llana was either an improved and newer version of an aged Gobate cluster, or that La Llana was a second example of a function, i.e. there was an activity that required a combination of 'quietness' and 'hubub' that was locally successful, and thus could sustain a second example (a town with one big biscuit factory attracts a second...). For either scenario, it is worth trying to imagine what sort of activity could thrive and sustain over time from a duality between calm and hubub.

 

Exposed rock surfaces melt away with weathering and any forms added by man are today shrunk by the constant tick of ablation's clock. If Gobate was the first version, then its carved 'warm water forms' should be less edgy and worn out, and indeed this is the case.

 

Happenstance can cause the most wonderful links, but here we have two sites between the River Ebro 'highway' and a low mountain zone rich in amber and I think that before the face of happenstance is called upon to reply, an attempt should be made to see how the exact configuration might have helped man key into landscape from an optic of 5000 years before present.

 

'Warm water forms' might be used for many procedures from detanning acorns to softening fibres before weave, and from vegetal dying and cleaning to perfume production. A group of visitors who arrive from the River Ebro highway - keen to trade for stones of amber - might be taken to the 'warm water forms' to relax and chat in friendly states of semi nudity. Each 'warm water form' would have had a deeper shallow pool, and stretching out in a warm 'paddling pool' of perfumed water would occupy, as would plunging into the deeper 'collection pool'. It is safe to say that a visiting trade party from between 12 people and 24 people might here be soothed after days of walking, welcomed by the 'warm water form' facilities of La Llana and Gobate. All tools that might double for weapons have thus been pacified by this memorable moment and even rite. Once an ambience of mutual trust and common heath is assured, then a 'bigman' might ask the visiting group's 'leader/negotiator' to come aside for 'talks' and barters over amber. Walking 1 or 2 hundred metres to the smaller artificial cave, be it La Llana or Gobat I, and the pacified party has been 'diffused' as a potential threat to amber resources via Epicurian pleasure, goodwill and trust. Implicit with this visualisation is the cultural detail that the water in the 'warm water forms' must have been kept to a standard of cleanliness for it to keep its status and allure. If the water is a perfume of, lets imagine, local lavender and rosemary, then giving the water a symbolic status, and asking that people leave for a change of perfumed waters, would be a cultural detail and imply roles for specific individuals. The implication of location specific protocols and roles associated with a category of monument being a potentially interesting aside.

 

Amber as a mineral was highly desired and traded throughout the Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Here our group leader must leave behind his travelling companions - and we will imagine a self contained group with selected people from crofts and villages associated with a far-off valley cluster. Our visiting negotiator is 300m below a protective ridge that hides the actual deposits, and is told that were his group to venture to try to see the actual quarries, the worst would be guaranteed !(and indeed skeletons with arrow damage from the Chalcolithic period have been discovered in this upper amber quarry zone). Here the amber quarries are sites protected by cultural design.

 

Any transformed or raw amber held down in La Llana or Gobat II, on its approximative level with the Ebro plane, is also relatively secure and disassociated from the dynamic potential power of the visiting group. Tucked onto their 'warm water forms' and inside the rare musky fragrances, the rest of the visiting group cannot see the place or even direction of the place of negotiation and exchange. They are in a perfect hubub.

 

One representative man steps inside a small man-made cave on a cusp of a slight ridge, sits down on a stone chair (above left?) in a corner shade, and waits to see the mythical amber stones they have all travelled so far to acquire. The different sizes of stone will be taken to him and an exchange will be negotiated. He is alone fixed to a stone or carved chair, and representatives from the La Llana site or the Gobat site are slipping in and out of the low doorway. Stones of amber appear in hands and leather wraps as if from nowhere.

 

The goods the group carried to be exchanged are with the main party aside the 'warm water forms' - perhaps pots of grain, textiles, early metal tools, bags of nuts, wooden tools and other ways that might help the local region escape some elements of the domesticated Neolithic revolution. The goods are held in the artificial cave of the 'Gobate II' site, or in a temporary building long gone that was central in a waiting space in the 'warm water form' cluster of La Llana.

 

Today the 'warm water forms' of La Llana are disassociated from the La Llana 'amber haven' by a small road. The impact of modern roads on prehistoric landscapes can deeply effect the reading and 'living' of a vista, and I think that hiding roads in tunnels may seem expensive or even destructive, but is a vital way to return man's deeper appreciations to landscape. The La Llana road is quiet with infrequent traffic, and landscaping and ochre coloured surfacing and even a short section of cobble strip may be enough - elsewhere, where traffic noise, colour and pollution is ever present, deeper tunnels must be welcomed and 'pseudo' pseudo-druids challenged.

 

On the above image it is possible to see examples of modern petroglyphs next to a space apt for taking a negotiator to wait between amber stone samples.

 

As with the Gobate I site, the monolithic sarcophagi do not systematically respect E/W orientations common with dolmen openings and early Christian burial.

 

AJM 28.01.21

A stunning new addition to the photographic record of Pu'er's resident Limacodid caterpillar population.

 

In my tradition of allocating relatable nicknames to the Limacodid caterpillars in lieu of specific IDs, the first thing that sprang to mind on seeing this one (clearly I have my priorities in order) was the leader of the Transformers, Optimus Prime.

 

I "get" adaptive evolution. I comprehend aposematism (warning colouration). Yet it is still mind boggling from a simplistic viewpoint how biological, environmental and genetic factors can arrive at such precise geometry, colour combinations, even absurdity in a creature that can't itself appreciate the way it looks…..

 

Globally, the connection between adult cup moths and their caterpillars remains sketchy. Although many, and increasingly more, of the moths are being identified, their life cycles have not been studied or recorded. This is particularly apparent regionally. As fascinating as these caterpillars are, few can be linked to their night-flying mature forms. Hence, should you be browsing my Flickr set of Limacodid Caterpillars, the majority are generically named and only tentatively identified.

 

Pu'er, Yunnan, China

Did you know that the "Marseille tarot" is associated with the city? Why do you ask? It was brought by Mary Magdalene, the hidden wife of Jesus. She came to Provence, not Marseille. Aren't you wondering why the decks contain 78 cards if only 22 are used? And has anyone ever told you that the Tarot was never designed to predict the future? This includes the Tarot's history and the rich symbolic significance of the Magdalene heresy that is embedded into its images. This hidden heresy relates to the recognition of Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus Christ. This sheds light on the need for the balance of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine in our World today.

The gypsy clairvoyants recovered the Tarot for its particularly effective system for understanding all the unconscious mechanisms, for better orienting oneself towards the right choices, and ultimately for healing.Mary Magdalene (Mary of Magdala), the woman with the jars in Christian symbolism, could well in this case be represented in the star chart. But their hypotheses stopped there. No one had ever imagined that the Tarot itself represented the teaching and life of Mary Magdalene in its entirety, let alone that the Tarot had been created by Mary Magdalene herself in the first century.It changes the dating of the Tarot from the 14th century to the 1st century AD with Mary Magdalene, the Tarot de Marseille thus becoming the ancestor of all Western tarot cards, i.e. "the Tarot".

Historians and experts say that the Tarot originated in Italy during the Renaissance, towards the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th. On the other hand, nobody thought that the Tarot de Marseille itself came from Marseille.Mary Magdalene is the Saint who was the first witness to Christ's resurrection. In other words, she sees the Resurrection. Now, in the Tarot, if you look again at the Judgement and the World side by side, you will see that the Saint in the World card is looking in the direction of the light blue Christ who is rising from his tomb. So here we have a major Tarot code which explains that the naked Saint in the World card is the one who witnesses Christ's resurrection.

fr.camoin.com/tarot/Tarot-Marie-Madeleine-Magdala.html

This tradition begins with the MAT, the traveller who sets off in search of the Grail, but also the people of the MAT, the gypsies. The tradition was reborn with esotericism around 1880. That's when Wirth arrived at Guaita's. How did they send this to Waite? He's still waiting for the piece of the jigsaw to be put together into a clearer system. We're sticking to the stuff available in the web stock.

Oswald Wirth is known for his occult and esoteric work on the Tarot de Marseille. He produced his own version of the 22 Major Arcana cards, and also worked on representing the Minor Arcana with the help of Gérard Encausse, known as Papus, who also studied the Tarot for occult and esoteric purposes, and Arthur Edward Waite, who also produced his own tarot with the popular success we all know. The links between Wirth and Waite are still a secret, but the agility at the heart of esoteric houses and the porosity that may have existed before the 1914 war. Today it's remains like a mirage and that's hard to imagine an other mind. So I've tried to compile some information about these great men, these great initiates, because today everything has been reduced and simplified.

 

The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot is a deck of tarot cards traditionally used for divination and spiritual practice. It was designed by English illustrator Arthur Edward Waite and American designer Pamela Colman Smith, and first published in 1909. It uses the codes and symbols of the Tarot de Stanislas de la Guaita illustrated by Oswald Wirth. Oswald Wirth was Stanislas de Guaita's secretary, and in collaboration with him drew a Tarot, which has since been republished as the Wirth Tarot. It is also known for its occult symbols and its references to the Hermetic tradition and the Kabbalah. The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot is one of the most popular and widely used tarot decks in the world. It has inspired many interpreters, authors and practitioners of divination, as well as artists and writers.

 

Wrapping it All Up…

 

To summarize, the Nine of Cups is a card of actualization, accomplishment and indulgence. It can also mean the reverse depending on its orientation. It holds significance in many areas of your life, from success and riches, to love and loss. Spiritually, it speaks to a feeling of fulfillment, and materially, it calls to plenty. That was everything you might need to know about the Nine of Cups and the meanings associated with drawing the card. We feel the need to clarify that despite the orientation you may draw the card in, not to fret or become too complacent. The tarot cards do not control or enforce their readings in any aspect of your life. They tell a possible story, based on divination and your own vibrations that attract their energies. Because of this, you can play into the reading or shatter expectations completely.There is not much to say about the booklet because there are only 5 translated pages per language. A brief summary of Oswald Wirth's life precedes the presentation of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. Each card has an explanation in 3 or 4 sentences. The publisher guarantees that the meanings are as faithful as possible to Wirth's vision.

en.tarotquest.fr/review-en-007-golden-wirth-tarot.html

 

Remember that even drawing the card upright does not mean you can sit back and good things will come to you. The card calls you to action to go after what you want, appreciate what you have, and indulge in the rewards. Conversely, drawing the Nine of Cups in reverse calls you to exercise caution, reflection, and self-discovery. This is because whether it’s the stars, a roll of the dice, or the draw of the card doesn’t matter. The Universe guides us, not shackles us to our fate, and ultimately you alone are in control of your life.

Wirth is best known as the author of Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge (1927), translated and published in English as The Tarot of the Magicians. Joseph Paul Oswald Wirth (5 August 1860, Brienz, Canton of Bern – 9 March 1943) was a Swiss occultist, artist and author. He studied esotericism and symbolism with Stanislas de Guaita and in 1889 he created, under the guidance of de Guaita, a cartomantic Tarot consisting only of the twenty-two Major Arcana. Known as "Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot Kabbalistique", it followed the designs of the Tarot de Marseille closely but introduced several alterations, incorporating extant occult symbolism into the cards. The Wirth/de Guaita deck is significant in the history of the tarot for being the first in a long line of occult, cartomantic, and initiatory decks.

 

The occult in life: Stanislas de Guaita - memories of his secretary Oswald Wirth

 

They recruited Gérard Encausse to help rebuild the tradition of alchemists. Encausse, who went by the pseudonym “Papus”, was a Spanish-born French physician and occultist who had written books on magic, Cabalah and the Tarot. From the end of the 19th century until his death, Oswald Wirth (1860-1943) exercised a veritable moral magisterium over French alchemy. Through his works and the magazine Le Symbolisme, which he founded and edited, he made a major contribution to restoring to alchemy its spiritualist and symbolic dimension, largely abandoned during the 19th century in favor of political battles. His personality and aura inspired Jules Romain to create the character of Alchemist Lengnau in Recherche d'une Eglise (volume 7 of Les Hommes de bonne Volonté). Initiated in January 1884 in a Châlons-sur-Marne laboratory during his military service, he left the alchemists of France to join the Great Work shortly after settling in Paris. Secretary to Stanislas de Guaïta (1861-1897), a writer and poet whom his friend Maurice Barrès described as "the renovator of occultism", he owed it to him, by his own admission, to "write legibly". Although he denounced what he called "low occultism", Wirth (who was a magnetizer) nourished part of his symbolic reflection with Hermetic contributions.

 

Oswald Wirth's symbolic tarot is one of the few tarot cards to reveal the key to the knowledge of the ancient initiates, secretly conveyed for millennia.

 

The theosophical reductions (what can be learned from the experience we live) and the tetrads (the experience itself, its origin and its possible development), enable everyone to interpret the messages of the 78 beautifully illustrated cards with accuracy and precision. The historical tarot deck, created in the Marseilles style, is based upon the original designs by famous Swiss kabbalist and occultist Oswald Wirth. The 22 Major Arcana first appeared in 1889 in a hand-colored limit edition deck. The 22 Major cards have French titles and the Hebrew letters attributed to each card by Eliphas Levi, and popularized by Oswald Wirth. This authorized full 78-card deck is printed with vivid colors on gold background. The 56 Minor Arcana cards present the four traditional suits of Swords, Batons, Cups and Coins. The pack includes a booklet of commentary by Stuart R.

 

www.usgamesinc.com/oswald-wirth-tarot.html

 

Stanislas de Guaita (6 April 1861, Tarquimpol, Moselle – 19 December 1897, Tarquimpol) was a French poet based in Paris, an expert on esotericism and European mysticism, and an active member of the Rosicrucian Order. He was very celebrated and successful in his time. He had many disputes with other people who were involved with occultism and magic. Occultism and magic were part of his novels. De Guaita came from a noble Italian family who had relocated to France, and as such his title was 'Marquis', or Marquess. He was born in the castle of Alteville in the commune of Tarquimpol, Moselle, and went to school at the lyceum in Nancy, where he studied chemistry, metaphysics and Cabala. As a young man, he moved to Paris, and his luxurious apartment became a meeting place for poets, artists, and writers who were interested in esotericism and mysticism. In the 1880s, Guaita published two collections of poetry The Dark Muse (1883) and The Mystic Rose (1885), which became popular. De Guaita was influenced by the writings of l'Abbé Alphonse-Louis Constant, alias Eliphas Lévi, a prominent French occultist who was initiated in London to rosicrucianism by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1854. Eliphas Lévi was also initiated as a Freemason on 14 March 1861 in the Grand Orient de France Lodge La Rose du Parfait Silence at the Orient of Paris. De Guaita became further interested in occultism after reading a novel by Joséphin Péladan which was interwoven with Rosicrucian and occult themes. In Paris, de Guaita and Péladan became acquainted, and in 1884, the two decided to try to rebuild the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. They recruited Gérard Encausse to help rebuild the brotherhood. Encausse, who went by the pseudonym “Papus”, was a Spanish-born French physician and occultist who had written books on magic, Cabalah and the Tarot.

 

In 1888, De Guaita founded the Ordre kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix, or the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross. Rosicrucianism is an esoteric movement which first began with the publication of the three Rosicrucian Manifestos in the early 17th century. Guaita's Rosicrucian Order provided training in the Cabala, an esoteric form of Jewish and Christian mysticism, which attempts to reveal hidden mystical insights in the Bible and divine nature. The order also conducted examinations and provided university degrees on Cabala topics. Guaita had a large private library of books on metaphysical issues, magic, and the "hidden sciences." He was nicknamed the "Prince of the Rosicrucians" by his contemporaries for his broad learning on Rosicrucian issues. Papus, Peladan, and Antoine de La Rochefoucauld were prominent members. Maurice Barrès was a close friend of De Guaita.

 

In the late 1880s, the Abbé Boullan, a defrocked Catholic Priest and the head of a schismatic branch called the “Church of the Carmel” led a “magical war” against de Guaita. French-Belgian novelist Joris K. Huysmans, a supporter of Boullan, portrayed De Guaita as a Satanic sorcerer in the novel La Bas. Another of Boullan’s supporters, the writer Jules Bois, challenged De Guaita to a pistol duel. De Guaita agreed and took part in the duel, but as both men missed, no one was hurt.

 

By the 1890s, De Guaita's, Papus' and Péladan’s collaboration became increasingly strained by disagreements over strategy and doctrines. Guaita and Papus lost the support of Péladan, who left to start a competing order. De Guaita died in 1897 at the age of 36.

 

His original drawing of an inverted pentagram with a goat's head appeared in La Clef de la Magie Noire (The Key to Black Magic), published the year he died. It later became conflated with Baphomet, or the Sabbatic Goat. In 1888, De Guaita founded the Ordre kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix, or the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross. Rosicrucianism is an esoteric movement which first began with the publication of the three Rosicrucian Manifestos in the early 17th century. Guaita's Rosicrucian Order provided training in the Cabala, an esoteric form of Jewish and Christian mysticism, which attempts to reveal hidden mystical insights in the Bible and divine nature. The order also conducted examinations and provided university degrees on Cabala topics. Guaita had a large private library of books on metaphysical issues, magic, and the "hidden sciences." He was nicknamed the "Prince of the Rosicrucians" by his contemporaries for his broad learning on Rosicrucian issues. Papus, Peladan, and Antoine de La Rochefoucauld were prominent members. Maurice Barrès was a close friend of De Guaita. In the late 1880s, the Abbé Boullan, a defrocked Catholic Priest and the head of a schismatic branch called the “Church of the Carmel” led a “magical war” against de Guaita. French-Belgian novelist Joris K. Huysmans, a supporter of Boullan, portrayed De Guaita as a Satanic sorcerer in the novel La Bas. Another of Boullan’s supporters, the writer Jules Bois, challenged De Guaita to a pistol duel. De Guaita agreed and took part in the duel, but as both men missed, no one was hurt. By the 1890s, De Guaita's, Papus' and Péladan’s collaboration became increasingly strained by disagreements over strategy and doctrines. Guaita and Papus lost the support of Péladan, who left to start a competing order. De Guaita died in 1897 at the age of 36. His original drawing of an inverted pentagram with a goat's head appeared in La Clef de la Magie Noire (The Key to Black Magic), published the year he died. It later became conflated with Baphomet, or the Sabbatic Goat.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislas_de_Guaita

 

Lévi and Wirth interests also included Freemasonry and Astrology. He wrote many books in French regarding Freemasonry, most importantly a set of three volumes explaining Freemasonry's first three degrees. On January 28, 1884, Wirth was initiated in the regular Scottish Rite Masonic Lodge La Bienfaisance Châlonnaise affiliated to the Grand Orient of France. In 1889, he joined the Scottish Rite Travail et les Vrais Amis Fidèles where he became Grand Master . In 1898, the latter lodge was admitted to the Grand Lodge of France.

 

Works[edit]

Le Livre de Thot comprenant les 22 arcanes du Tarot (1889).

L'Imposition des mains et la médecine philosophale (1897), Paris.

La Franc-maçonnerie rendue intelligible à ses adeptes, sa philosophie, son objet, sa méthode, ses moyens, three volumes:

Vol. I: Le livre de l'Apprenti : manuel d'instruction rédigé à l'usage des FF. du 1er degré (1893, 2nd revised edition 1908), Paris.

Vol. II: Le livre du Compagnon : manuel d'instruction rédigé à l'usage des FF. du 2° degré (1912), Paris.

Vol. III: Le livre du Maître : manuel d'instruction rédigé à l'usage des FF. du 3° degré (1922), Paris.

Le Symbolisme hermétique dans ses rapports avec l'alchimie et la franc-maçonnerie (1910), Paris.

Les Signes du zodiaque, leur symbolisme initiatique (1921), Paris.

Le Serpent vert (1922) (translation and analysis of Das Märchen by Goethe), Paris.

L'Idéal initiatique (1924), Paris.

Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge (1927), Paris.

Introduction à l’étude du tarot (1931), Paris.

Les Mystères de l'art royal - Rituel de l'adepte (1932), Paris.

Stanislas de Guaïta, souvenirs de son secrétaire (1935), Paris.

Le Symbolisme astrologique : planètes, signes du zodiaque, maisons de l'horoscope, aspects, étoiles fixes (1938), Paris.

Qui est régulier ? Le pur maçonnisme sous le Régime des Grandes Loges inauguré en 1717 (1938), Paris.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Wirth

 

Interpretation of this Cards

Ace of Cups's Meaning

The Ace of Cups signifies the beginning of period of strong emotional health for you. Expect copious joy, happiness, and love to surround you during this time. Existing personal relationships may strengthen, meaningful new ones are likely to form. If marriage is in your future, you are likely to lay the foundations for it during this time.The Ace of Cups represents overall satisfaction throughout all different areas of your life. It predicts success and abundance through use of good intuition and creativity. New relationships or possibly a birth or pregnancy could be associated with these positive outlooks.

www.trustedtarot.com/cards/ace-of-cups/

The Wheel of Fortune's Meaning

Symbolic of life's cycles, the Wheel of Fortune speaks to good beginnings. Most likely, you will find the events foretold to be positive, but, being aspects of luck, they may also be beyond your control and influence. Tend those things you can control with care, and learn not to agonize over the ones you cannot.

www.trustedtarot.com/cards/wheel-of-fortune/

The Star's Meaning

The Star's presence signifies a period of respite and renewal for you. This renewal may be spiritual, physical, or both. It is a particularly positive sign if you or someone close is recovering from illness or injury. It is a light in the darkness, illuminating your future and your past.

www.trustedtarot.com/cards/the-star/

Eight of Wands's Meaning

Prepare yourself for an abrupt increase in the pace of your life. Things are about to get very busy. They good news is that any projects you begin will progress quickly, you will experience few delays, and the conclusion is likely to be successful. This card is also good news for relationships, although it raises the possibility of needing to travel for relationships. All things considered, this is a good card to find in your spread, as long as you are willing to buckle down and get to work.

www.trustedtarot.com/cards/eight-of-wands/

Drawing on Success: Nine of Cups Tarot Card Meaning

 

What else is there to glean from the card? It represents the fulfillment of a goal or some deep, unfulfilled desire. But tarot cards are tricky business. Their meaning is usually tied to the context of a situation, and in fact many diviners will read more than one card during a fortune telling. The meaning of Nine of Cups then, can change depending on its adjacent cards.

 

Its meaning can also change depending on where you are in life. What you’re struggling with, or where you’ve been or are going also changes the card’s meaning. Our tarot aficionados reading this article will also acutely point out that tarot cards have two different meanings, depending on the orientation that the card is facing when drawn. The Nine of Cups upright meaning is different from the Nine of Cups reversed meaning!

 

We’ll go over as many of these as we can in this article, to prepare you for everything you’d need to expect after drawing this card. Maybe you’re a tarot card enthusiast brushing up on knowledge or maybe you’ve recently had or thought about getting a divination. Perhaps you’re simply curious and want to find out more. Whatever the case, we hope you find this article educational, enlightening, and most importantly, fun! Without further ado, everything you need to know about the Nine of Cups:

 

Upright: Everything You Need to Know(That We can Think of!)

 

After a long trial in your life, the Nine of Cups represents a positive, fruitful conclusion. The nine cups are sometimes interpreted to mean different ups and downs, or different challenges you’ve faced before now. Now is important, because the Nine of Cups encourages you to ‘drink up.’ That you should happily partake in the success you have worked and endured for. The tarot card is a wake-up call that you have entered a positive chapter in your life, and should enjoy it. The Nine of Cups can also refer to something in the future in a different context. If you are yearning for something, and draw the Nine of Cups, there’s a good chance it will come true! Indeed, this tarot card is sometimes referred to as the wish card. Because of its association with fulfillment and plenty, the tarot card also has positive meanings in health, love, career and finances. We’ll go over each below: Career-wise, the Nine of Cups focuses more on the confident, successful man more than the cups of blessings themselves. You will find yourself taking in the admiration of your peers and workmates. It’s likely that tasks you found challenging or difficult before are becoming easier or even menial to accomplish. This is the time to look towards possible advancement in your position. Maybe move to a different job that holds better opportunities. This is also a prime time to ask for a raise. Move confidently. Though arrogance is a fool’s errand, don’t shy away from the rewards waiting for you. Your superiors are likely more receptive towards such moves in light of your increase in skill. Most importantly, at the end of the journey symbolized by the nine cups, you’ve likely earned this.ust as in your career, financially the Nine of Cups signifies blessings and comfort. This is the time to relax, to treat yourself a little. From tiny things like the raise you’re likely to score to a bonus on performance here and there, things will add up. While thrift is a virtue in itself, it can’t hurt to celebrate your success a little. You’ll likely need it.Remember that the good times won’t last forever. Fear of what is to come often takes away from the now. Remember that you’ve earned the success and subsequent rewards that come to you. In fact, what we’re going over next has a lot to do with the opposite of everything you’ve read so far. The reversed meaning of this card in particular is a sign of the bad times to come.To summarize, the Nine of Cups is a card of actualization, accomplishment and indulgence. It can also mean the reverse depending on its orientation. It holds significance in many areas of your life, from success and riches, to love and loss. Spiritually, it speaks to a feeling of fulfillment, and materially, it calls to plenty.

 

That was everything you might need to know about the Nine of Cups and the meanings associated with drawing the card. We feel the need to clarify that despite the orientation you may draw the card in, not to fret or become too complacent. The tarot cards do not control or enforce their readings in any aspect of your life. They tell a possible story, based on divination and your own vibrations that attract their energies. Because of this, you can play into the reading or shatter expectations completely.

 

Remember that even drawing the card upright does not mean you can sit back and good things will come to you. The card calls you to action to go after what you want, appreciate what you have, and indulge in the rewards. Conversely, drawing the Nine of Cups in reverse calls you to exercise caution, reflection, and self-discovery. This is because whether it’s the stars, a roll of the dice, or the draw of the card doesn’t matter. The Universe guides us, not shackles us to our fate, and ultimately you alone are in control of your life.

trusted-astrology.com/nine-of-cups-meaning/

Originally from German-speaking Switzerland, Oswald Wirth (1860-1943) arrived in Paris at the age of twenty. Here he became acquainted with various enthusiasts of the occult sciences, in particular the members of the Société Magnétique de France, among whom he soon became known for his abilities as a "curative magnetiser". After a short stay in London, in 1884 he joined the Grand Orient de France, an event that kindled his interest in Masonic symbolism.Early in 1887 he met Stanislas de Guaita, with whom he formed a deep and indissoluble friendship. The Marquis introduced the young man to the study of the Cabala and the Tarot, and after the necessary period of apprenticeship welcomed him as a member of the OKCR, the Kabbalistic Order of the Rosicrucians. Having noticed his drawing skills, he suggested that Wirth design a new deck, with the aim of restoring the cards to their "hieroglyphic purity", as Eliphas Lévi had wished in his day.En partant de la base de deux jeux, le Tarot de Marseille (un Tarot de Besançon précisément) et un jeu italien, Wirth fit une élaboration importante, surtout en ce qui concernait (selon sa vision) la correction des erreurs présentes, la juste attribution des couleurs et les détails singuliers des figures. Ainsi virent le jour, après à peine un an, Les XXII Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique, restitués à leur pureté hiéroglyphique sous les indications de Stanislas de Guaita (Paris, 1889).Early in 1887 he met Stanislas de Guaita, with whom he formed a deep and indissoluble friendship. The Marquis introduced the young man to the study of the Cabala and the Tarot, and after the necessary period of apprenticeship welcomed him as a member of the OKCR, the Kabbalistic Order of the Rosicrucians. Having noticed his drawing skills, he suggested that Wirth design a new deck, with the aim of restoring the cards to their "hieroglyphic purity", as Eliphas Lévi had wished in his day.The reference to Guaita was accurate because, although the Marquis left no writings on the Tarot, it is correct to think that Wirth's Arcana were an expression of his teachings. Wirth himself acknowledged that he had been introduced to the mysteries of esotericism by his spiritual father."Guaita, knowing me to be a draughtsman, advised me from our first meeting in the spring of 1887, to restore the 22 Arcana of the Tarot to their hieroglyphic purity, and immediately documented this by entrusting me with two tarots, one French and the other Italian, as well as the Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, the capital work of Eliphas Levi, in which the Tarot is the subject of copious commentaries. This was the starting point for the present work, whose spiritual authorship is attributable to Stanislas de Guaita. Having submitted to him a first Tarot redesigned according to the rough decks compared, this learned occultist offered me his criticisms, which were taken into account when the Kabbalistic Tarot was published in 1889. (...) With the help of Stanislas de Guaita, I set to work to acquire the science of symbolism that would allow me to reconstitute the Tarot. (...) As soon as one succeeds in making the symbols speak, they surpass all speeches in eloquence, for they enable one to rediscover the lost Word, that is to say the eternal living thought of which they are the enigmatic expression. Decipher the hieroglyphs of the profound silent wisdom common to thinkers of all ages and religions, of myths and poetic fictions, and you will come up with concordant notions relating to the problems that have always preoccupied the human mind". (Oswald Wirth, The 22 Arcana of the Kabbalistic Tarot restored to their hieroglyphic purity under the guidance of Stanislas de Guaita). Each major arcana is marked with a Hebrew letter, according to the scheme devised by Eliphas Levi. According to many, Wirth had the merit of knowing how to accept and summarise the thought and principles of the most important Masonic initiatory currents. He used them to interpret the secrets of the Great Work, devoting himself to the study of alchemy, the Cabala and the Tarot. For Wirth, symbolism was a universal value, and he tried to bring the teachings of the various esoteric schools down to a common matrix through the use of a common symbology, derived directly from the archetypal concepts of Masonic thought. He wrote texts on the Tarot in which he defined the art of divination as a kind of priesthood, and numerous texts on Freemasonry, in which he tried to make the institution comprehensible to laymen and adepts alike in a simple yet transcendent way:

 

"Such a definition is realistic if we consider that the person exercising divination must feel himself to be a 'mediator', a 'means', an 'intermediary' and an 'instrument' of such capacity. A priest is: the moment he performs a ritual, the power of that ritual captivates and involves him to the point where it almost cancels out his very personality."

www.franck-durand.fr/lhistoire-oswald-wirth-tarot-du-moye...

 

1929 Knapp-Hall

Published in Los Angeles using the chromo lithography process, this deck of seventy-eight cards is the oldest tarot deck inspired by Wirth's that we have been able to find. It was created by the artist J. Augustus Knapp (1853-1938) in collaboration with Manly P. Hall, director of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. In addition to the many features of the Wirth tarot on each illustration, the yellow cartouche is as it appeared on Oswald Wirth's first tarot: with the title in capitals (and the World with the double numbering 21 and 22). The fifty-six minor arcana are freely created. The backs of the cards also feature the word TARO (without the T). This deck was republished in 1985 by the USGS under the name Knapp-Hall Tarot.

www.tarot-artisanal.fr/enquete-des-tarots-dits-de-oswald-...

This heartwarming image beautifully captures the innocence and joy of childhood. The two children—presumably siblings—are engrossed in their shared moment, taking a selfie together. The girl's beaming smile contrasts with her brother’s focused expression, creating a perfect balance of emotion capturing the pure, unfiltered bond between a brother and sister in an everyday setting. It’s a candid moment of connection, made universal through its relatability.

At the exhibition of US artist Mark Bradford at the GEM The Hague.

I like that one little thing was misplaced. Standing out and in a different direction. Still connected but doing its own thing. Something I can relate to.

Returning from a long absence, I can now relate more stories from the Imperial Council as my sources in the feline community have granted me access to several more copies of "Das Katze", the official publication of the Imperial Council of Cats. Today I am providing excerpts from an interview of Maximilian Skonderberg-Hagenau, the director of the Ministry of Information some decades ago.

Interviewer- The Empire calls itself an egalitarian state yet most senior positions are limited to males. How is this equality?

Maximilian- Our female cats have the sacred honor of birthing kittens for the continuation of the Empire. No greater honor or position can be imagined than bearing the responsibility of the future of the Empire. Besides, all cats of the Empire are expected to live and die for the Empire. What could be more egalitarian?

Interviewer-What are the actual geographical limits of the Empire?

Maximilian- The Empire ends beyond the shadow of the Grand Protector (leader of the Imperial Council), or as is sometimes said, the end of the tip of his sword.

Interviewer- What is the position of the Imperial Council on cats living with their human servants?

Maximilian- The Imperial Quartering Act of 1367 requires humans to shelter and provide provisions for a minimum of two cats in each human household. However, humans are impossibly stupid with few being able to speak or read cat so most are unaware of this requirement even though the edict has been in effect almost seven hundred years. As a result, we allow humans to serve as many cats as their limited abilities allow. Most humans understand that they are deeply flawed creatures and derive some small meaning to their existence by serving cats. Those humans that have no cats are flawed beyond any hope and live a meaningless existence.

End of Interview.

 

The thorns relating to the variety of ('Crown of Thorns") Euphorbia can be seen clearly on the stems.

Uses: Anything relating to insurance.

 

Free Creative Commons Finance Images... I created these images in my studio and have made them all available for personal or commercial use. Hope you like them and find them useful.

 

To see more of our CC by 2.0 finance images click here... see profile for attribution.

Blog relating to this story .... peterjemmett.blogspot.com/2019/10/heart-attack-to-10k-par...

And much more! See the notes in the photo. :-)

 

"The Landscape of Rio reveals the exceptional way in which man and nature

should relate in a big city."

 

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Have a great weekend ahead. :-D

 

To direct contact me / Para me contactar diretamente: lmsmartinsx@yahoo.com.br

I can relate photography to very good experiences in my life.

It has given me so much!! It´s been an escape to problems, it´s been a source of great peace. It´s been creativity and a reason to conect myself with the land, but the main reason is that has allowed me to share.

It´s been kind of difficult to find people who i can share a time of photography. I normally go out alone to take photos because i loose my mind and the sense of time when i´m doing it, People who is not into this would not understand.

 

In the last months i´ve been lucky to find friends who enjoy this as much as i do so i´m very grateful for this. Sharing with people and see their experiences through photography is something that i love. Thanks to photography, here on flickr, i have found very valuable friends and this is the main reason for me to be here. I´m not much interested in getting views and awards for my photos. I find my satisfaction when i learn new techniques, and thanks to that i feel myself satisfied with my work and in addition i find friends to share this whole process.

 

This is a collague i did of my last travel to the andes. I was able to camp in the middle of the mountains with some very nice friends that love photography as much as i do. A fabulous moment that will last in my mind, i hope forever.

 

PS: Most of this photos belong to my friends, so the credits also go to Karla Ramos, Luis Perez and John Pictures.

I teach history to show what was, relate it to what is and to hopefully prevent what could be. I am a language arts teacher who teaches compassion and empathy. I show what is possible when we hate and when we love. I encourage my students to love.

My model this morning is Miss Cecily in a bright red bold patterned dress and a matching red scarf.... Nothing beats photographing a beautiful model who loves posing for the camera, and who the camera loves!

 

I see a lot in this portrait that pleases me. The real question is, what does Miss Cecily, the consummate ballet performer, and now beloved ballet teacher seem to be saying or revealing to you, on one of her rare days off from teaching?

 

What is a portrait? Richard Avedon says a portrait is not a likeness. Avedon feels that a likeness is a capture of the look at the moment. A likeness reveals nothing about the person, while a portrait does so much more...

 

To me, a portrait reveals the subject's inner story. A person's story is made up of emotion, character, her history, and even her plans for the future. It may reveal how the subject sees the world and the purpose of life. Is she regal or emotional? Does she desire to give and receive understanding and affection? Does she radiate strong emotional and/or physical hunger? Compassion and understanding? Does she command our attention with her skills and knowledge? Does her portrait reveal her inner strengths or fears? Does her portrait show contentment or regrets? There are so many examples I want to cite, such as Dorothea Lange's work during the Depression and dustbowl years. It has become embedded in my soul, and resonates in me, without even needing to see the physical portraits again...

 

The same questions can and need to be asked about painted portraits... Without these questions and our understanding of the answers, we miss too much about the people we see and relate to, both in the present and in the past.

 

On a different topic, this portrait is a demonstration to me of the superiority of the camera on her iPhone 5, as compared to my iPhone 4S, which is three generations old. I skipped the model 5, and the 5S. Now, I have decided to upgrade to an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus.

 

IMG_0104 - Version 3

Only Greats Relate & SAVKrew

I don't often relate what went into taking a photo that I've posted but this time I feel inclined to give you a bit of background.

 

Back on July 25th of this year Sharon and I headed up to the Bonnyville (Alberta) area to look for some of the more remote Ukrainian churches NE of Edmonton. I had packed the Yashica TLR loaded with infrared film in hopes that I would come across a good tract of boreal forest. I had yet to photograph that type of terrain but had a hunch that it would make for a fascinating infrared subject. It's not a short drive up to that area, plus if you toss in all the stops we made it was fairly late in the afternoon before we hit the northern edges of the parkland zone. The heavy late afternoon clouds were forming and the sun was not in the best part of the sky for shooting so I had pretty much given up thinking of shooting infrared………….until we were starting to cross the Beaver River that is……..POW!……there it was and it was beyond my wildest expectations.

 

I hit the binders and pulled over halfway into the ditch. Sharon and Jack waited patiently while I grabbed my IR gear and ran (I don't run well) back to the bridge. I just got the point on the bridge that I wanted to shoot from when a huge cloud drifted across the sun suppressing the effects the infrared spectrum that would have highlighted the foliage of the surrounding forest…..damn! As any dedicated photographer would do I waited out the cloud, but this one was big……and slow moving.

 

The bridge I was on was thankfully paved, but unfortunately it was a heavily used by logging trucks. Now if anyone has been subjected to the debris peeling off of a logging truck when it's doing 100+ kph you'll have a pretty good idea what I experienced. There I was on this two lane bridge sucked up to the guardrail waiting for the sun to make an appearance when these 18-wheeled monsters would roar past spitting out small bits of bark at me. Not only was I in a self-induced precarious position catching all sorts of tree debris, BUT every time one of those monsters hit the bridge it would shake like it was being subjected to an earthquake that would easily register 7.8 on the Richter Scale.

 

That was almost 5 months ago and I'm still traumatized……but I stuck it out and I did manage to get some decent photos. On this particular shot I waited until the cloud was only partway out of the view so I could catch the different intensities of light on the leaves of the trees.

 

Yashica Mat 124G

Efke IR820 Infrared Film

Hoya RM72 Infrared filter

Ganesha, also spelled Ganesh, and also known as Ganapati and Vinayaka, is a widely worshipped deity in the Hindu pantheon. His image is found throughout India and Nepal. Hindu sects worship him regardless of affiliations. Devotion to Ganesha is widely diffused and extends to Jains, Buddhists, and beyond India.

 

Although he is known by many attributes, Ganesha's elephant head makes him easy to identify. Ganesha is widely revered as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom. As the god of beginnings, he is honoured at the start of rituals and ceremonies. Ganesha is also invoked as patron of letters and learning during writing sessions. Several texts relate mythological anecdotes associated with his birth and exploits and explain his distinct iconography.

 

Ganesha emerged as a distinct deity in the 4th and 5th centuries CE, during the Gupta Period, although he inherited traits from Vedic and pre-Vedic precursors. He was formally included among the five primary deities of Smartism (a Hindu denomination) in the 9th century. A sect of devotees called the Ganapatya arose, who identified Ganesha as the supreme deity. The principal scriptures dedicated to Ganesha are the Ganesha Purana, the Mudgala Purana, and the Ganapati Atharvashirsa.

 

ETYMOLOGY AND OTHER NAMES

Ganesha has been ascribed many other titles and epithets, including Ganapati and Vighneshvara. The Hindu title of respect Shri is often added before his name. One popular way Ganesha is worshipped is by chanting a Ganesha Sahasranama, a litany of "a thousand names of Ganesha". Each name in the sahasranama conveys a different meaning and symbolises a different aspect of Ganesha. At least two different versions of the Ganesha Sahasranama exist; one version is drawn from the Ganesha Purana, a Hindu scripture venerating Ganesha.

 

The name Ganesha is a Sanskrit compound, joining the words gana, meaning a group, multitude, or categorical system and isha, meaning lord or master. The word gaņa when associated with Ganesha is often taken to refer to the gaņas, a troop of semi-divine beings that form part of the retinue of Shiva. The term more generally means a category, class, community, association, or corporation. Some commentators interpret the name "Lord of the Gaņas" to mean "Lord of Hosts" or "Lord of created categories", such as the elements. Ganapati, a synonym for Ganesha, is a compound composed of gaṇa, meaning "group", and pati, meaning "ruler" or "lord". The Amarakosha, an early Sanskrit lexicon, lists eight synonyms of Ganesha : Vinayaka, Vighnarāja (equivalent to Vighnesha), Dvaimātura (one who has two mothers), Gaṇādhipa (equivalent to Ganapati and Ganesha), Ekadanta (one who has one tusk), Heramba, Lambodara (one who has a pot belly, or, literally, one who has a hanging belly), and Gajanana; having the face of an elephant).

 

Vinayaka is a common name for Ganesha that appears in the Purāṇas and in Buddhist Tantras. This name is reflected in the naming of the eight famous Ganesha temples in Maharashtra known as the Ashtavinayak (aṣṭavināyaka). The names Vighnesha and Vighneshvara (Lord of Obstacles) refers to his primary function in Hindu theology as the master and remover of obstacles (vighna).

 

A prominent name for Ganesha in the Tamil language is Pillai. A. K. Narain differentiates these terms by saying that pillai means a "child" while pillaiyar means a "noble child". He adds that the words pallu, pella, and pell in the Dravidian family of languages signify "tooth or tusk", also "elephant tooth or tusk". Anita Raina Thapan notes that the root word pille in the name Pillaiyar might have originally meant "the young of the elephant", because the Pali word pillaka means "a young elephant".

 

In the Burmese language, Ganesha is known as Maha Peinne, derived from Pali Mahā Wināyaka. The widespread name of Ganesha in Thailand is Phra Phikhanet or Phra Phikhanesuan, both of which are derived from Vara Vighnesha and Vara Vighneshvara respectively, whereas the name Khanet (from Ganesha) is rather rare.

 

In Sri Lanka, in the North-Central and North Western areas with predominantly Buddhist population, Ganesha is known as Aiyanayaka Deviyo, while in other Singhala Buddhist areas he is known as Gana deviyo.

 

ICONOGRAPHY

Ganesha is a popular figure in Indian art. Unlike those of some deities, representations of Ganesha show wide variations and distinct patterns changing over time. He may be portrayed standing, dancing, heroically taking action against demons, playing with his family as a boy, sitting down or on an elevated seat, or engaging in a range of contemporary situations.

 

Ganesha images were prevalent in many parts of India by the 6th century. The 13th century statue pictured is typical of Ganesha statuary from 900–1200, after Ganesha had been well-established as an independent deity with his own sect. This example features some of Ganesha's common iconographic elements. A virtually identical statue has been dated between 973–1200 by Paul Martin-Dubost, and another similar statue is dated c. 12th century by Pratapaditya Pal. Ganesha has the head of an elephant and a big belly. This statue has four arms, which is common in depictions of Ganesha. He holds his own broken tusk in his lower-right hand and holds a delicacy, which he samples with his trunk, in his lower-left hand. The motif of Ganesha turning his trunk sharply to his left to taste a sweet in his lower-left hand is a particularly archaic feature. A more primitive statue in one of the Ellora Caves with this general form has been dated to the 7th century. Details of the other hands are difficult to make out on the statue shown. In the standard configuration, Ganesha typically holds an axe or a goad in one upper arm and a pasha (noose) in the other upper arm.

 

The influence of this old constellation of iconographic elements can still be seen in contemporary representations of Ganesha. In one modern form, the only variation from these old elements is that the lower-right hand does not hold the broken tusk but is turned towards the viewer in a gesture of protection or fearlessness (abhaya mudra). The same combination of four arms and attributes occurs in statues of Ganesha dancing, which is a very popular theme.

 

COMMON ATTRIBUTES

Ganesha has been represented with the head of an elephant since the early stages of his appearance in Indian art. Puranic myths provide many explanations for how he got his elephant head. One of his popular forms, Heramba-Ganapati, has five elephant heads, and other less-common variations in the number of heads are known. While some texts say that Ganesha was born with an elephant head, he acquires the head later in most stories. The most recurrent motif in these stories is that Ganesha was created by Parvati using clay to protect her and Shiva beheaded him when Ganesha came between Shiva and Parvati. Shiva then replaced Ganesha's original head with that of an elephant. Details of the battle and where the replacement head came from vary from source to source. Another story says that Ganesha was created directly by Shiva's laughter. Because Shiva considered Ganesha too alluring, he gave him the head of an elephant and a protruding belly.

 

Ganesha's earliest name was Ekadanta (One Tusked), referring to his single whole tusk, the other being broken. Some of the earliest images of Ganesha show him holding his broken tusk. The importance of this distinctive feature is reflected in the Mudgala Purana, which states that the name of Ganesha's second incarnation is Ekadanta. Ganesha's protruding belly appears as a distinctive attribute in his earliest statuary, which dates to the Gupta period (4th to 6th centuries). This feature is so important that, according to the Mudgala Purana, two different incarnations of Ganesha use names based on it: Lambodara (Pot Belly, or, literally, Hanging Belly) and Mahodara (Great Belly). Both names are Sanskrit compounds describing his belly. The Brahmanda Purana says that Ganesha has the name Lambodara because all the universes (i.e., cosmic eggs) of the past, present, and future are present in him. The number of Ganesha's arms varies; his best-known forms have between two and sixteen arms. Many depictions of Ganesha feature four arms, which is mentioned in Puranic sources and codified as a standard form in some iconographic texts. His earliest images had two arms. Forms with 14 and 20 arms appeared in Central India during the 9th and the 10th centuries. The serpent is a common feature in Ganesha iconography and appears in many forms. According to the Ganesha Purana, Ganesha wrapped the serpent Vasuki around his neck. Other depictions of snakes include use as a sacred thread wrapped around the stomach as a belt, held in a hand, coiled at the ankles, or as a throne. Upon Ganesha's forehead may be a third eye or the Shaivite sectarian mark , which consists of three horizontal lines. The Ganesha Purana prescribes a tilaka mark as well as a crescent moon on the forehead. A distinct form of Ganesha called Bhalachandra includes that iconographic element. Ganesha is often described as red in color. Specific colors are associated with certain forms. Many examples of color associations with specific meditation forms are prescribed in the Sritattvanidhi, a treatise on Hindu iconography. For example, white is associated with his representations as Heramba-Ganapati and Rina-Mochana-Ganapati (Ganapati Who Releases from Bondage). Ekadanta-Ganapati is visualized as blue during meditation in that form.

 

VAHANAS

The earliest Ganesha images are without a vahana (mount/vehicle). Of the eight incarnations of Ganesha described in the Mudgala Purana, Ganesha uses a mouse (shrew) in five of them, a lion in his incarnation as Vakratunda, a peacock in his incarnation as Vikata, and Shesha, the divine serpent, in his incarnation as Vighnaraja. Mohotkata uses a lion, Mayūreśvara uses a peacock, Dhumraketu uses a horse, and Gajanana uses a mouse, in the four incarnations of Ganesha listed in the Ganesha Purana. Jain depictions of Ganesha show his vahana variously as a mouse, elephant, tortoise, ram, or peacock.

 

Ganesha is often shown riding on or attended by a mouse, shrew or rat. Martin-Dubost says that the rat began to appear as the principal vehicle in sculptures of Ganesha in central and western India during the 7th century; the rat was always placed close to his feet. The mouse as a mount first appears in written sources in the Matsya Purana and later in the Brahmananda Purana and Ganesha Purana, where Ganesha uses it as his vehicle in his last incarnation. The Ganapati Atharvashirsa includes a meditation verse on Ganesha that describes the mouse appearing on his flag. The names Mūṣakavāhana (mouse-mount) and Ākhuketana (rat-banner) appear in the Ganesha Sahasranama.

 

The mouse is interpreted in several ways. According to Grimes, "Many, if not most of those who interpret Gaṇapati's mouse, do so negatively; it symbolizes tamoguṇa as well as desire". Along these lines, Michael Wilcockson says it symbolizes those who wish to overcome desires and be less selfish. Krishan notes that the rat is destructive and a menace to crops. The Sanskrit word mūṣaka (mouse) is derived from the root mūṣ (stealing, robbing). It was essential to subdue the rat as a destructive pest, a type of vighna (impediment) that needed to be overcome. According to this theory, showing Ganesha as master of the rat demonstrates his function as Vigneshvara (Lord of Obstacles) and gives evidence of his possible role as a folk grāma-devatā (village deity) who later rose to greater prominence. Martin-Dubost notes a view that the rat is a symbol suggesting that Ganesha, like the rat, penetrates even the most secret places.

 

ASSOCIATIONS

 

OBSTACLES

Ganesha is Vighneshvara or Vighnaraja or Vighnaharta (Marathi), the Lord of Obstacles, both of a material and spiritual order. He is popularly worshipped as a remover of obstacles, though traditionally he also places obstacles in the path of those who need to be checked. Paul Courtright says that "his task in the divine scheme of things, his dharma, is to place and remove obstacles. It is his particular territory, the reason for his creation."

 

Krishan notes that some of Ganesha's names reflect shadings of multiple roles that have evolved over time. Dhavalikar ascribes the quick ascension of Ganesha in the Hindu pantheon, and the emergence of the Ganapatyas, to this shift in emphasis from vighnakartā (obstacle-creator) to vighnahartā (obstacle-averter). However, both functions continue to be vital to his character.

 

BUDDHI (KNOWLEDGE)

Ganesha is considered to be the Lord of letters and learning. In Sanskrit, the word buddhi is a feminine noun that is variously translated as intelligence, wisdom, or intellect. The concept of buddhi is closely associated with the personality of Ganesha, especially in the Puranic period, when many stories stress his cleverness and love of intelligence. One of Ganesha's names in the Ganesha Purana and the Ganesha Sahasranama is Buddhipriya. This name also appears in a list of 21 names at the end of the Ganesha Sahasranama that Ganesha says are especially important. The word priya can mean "fond of", and in a marital context it can mean "lover" or "husband", so the name may mean either "Fond of Intelligence" or "Buddhi's Husband".

 

AUM

Ganesha is identified with the Hindu mantra Aum, also spelled Om. The term oṃkārasvarūpa (Aum is his form), when identified with Ganesha, refers to the notion that he personifies the primal sound. The Ganapati Atharvashirsa attests to this association. Chinmayananda translates the relevant passage as follows:

 

(O Lord Ganapati!) You are (the Trinity) Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa. You are Indra. You are fire [Agni] and air [Vāyu]. You are the sun [Sūrya] and the moon [Chandrama]. You are Brahman. You are (the three worlds) Bhuloka [earth], Antariksha-loka [space], and Swargaloka [heaven]. You are Om. (That is to say, You are all this).

 

Some devotees see similarities between the shape of Ganesha's body in iconography and the shape of Aum in the Devanāgarī and Tamil scripts.

 

FIRST CHAKRA

According to Kundalini yoga, Ganesha resides in the first chakra, called Muladhara (mūlādhāra). Mula means "original, main"; adhara means "base, foundation". The muladhara chakra is the principle on which the manifestation or outward expansion of primordial Divine Force rests. This association is also attested to in the Ganapati Atharvashirsa. Courtright translates this passage as follows: "[O Ganesha,] You continually dwell in the sacral plexus at the base of the spine [mūlādhāra cakra]." Thus, Ganesha has a permanent abode in every being at the Muladhara. Ganesha holds, supports and guides all other chakras, thereby "governing the forces that propel the wheel of life".

 

FAMILY AND CONSORTS

Though Ganesha is popularly held to be the son of Shiva and Parvati, the Puranic myths give different versions about his birth. In some he was created by Parvati, in another he was created by Shiva and Parvati, in another he appeared mysteriously and was discovered by Shiva and Parvati or he was born from the elephant headed goddess Malini after she drank Parvati's bath water that had been thrown in the river.

 

The family includes his brother the war god Kartikeya, who is also called Subramanya, Skanda, Murugan and other names. Regional differences dictate the order of their births. In northern India, Skanda is generally said to be the elder, while in the south, Ganesha is considered the first born. In northern India, Skanda was an important martial deity from about 500 BCE to about 600 CE, when worship of him declined significantly in northern India. As Skanda fell, Ganesha rose. Several stories tell of sibling rivalry between the brothers and may reflect sectarian tensions.

 

Ganesha's marital status, the subject of considerable scholarly review, varies widely in mythological stories. One pattern of myths identifies Ganesha as an unmarried brahmacari. This view is common in southern India and parts of northern India. Another pattern associates him with the concepts of Buddhi (intellect), Siddhi (spiritual power), and Riddhi (prosperity); these qualities are sometimes personified as goddesses, said to be Ganesha's wives. He also may be shown with a single consort or a nameless servant (Sanskrit: daşi). Another pattern connects Ganesha with the goddess of culture and the arts, Sarasvati or Śarda (particularly in Maharashtra). He is also associated with the goddess of luck and prosperity, Lakshmi. Another pattern, mainly prevalent in the Bengal region, links Ganesha with the banana tree, Kala Bo.

 

The Shiva Purana says that Ganesha had begotten two sons: Kşema (prosperity) and Lābha (profit). In northern Indian variants of this story, the sons are often said to be Śubha (auspiciouness) and Lābha. The 1975 Hindi film Jai Santoshi Maa shows Ganesha married to Riddhi and Siddhi and having a daughter named Santoshi Ma, the goddess of satisfaction. This story has no Puranic basis, but Anita Raina Thapan and Lawrence Cohen cite Santoshi Ma's cult as evidence of Ganesha's continuing evolution as a popular deity.

 

WOSHIP AND FESTIVALS

Ganesha is worshipped on many religious and secular occasions; especially at the beginning of ventures such as buying a vehicle or starting a business. K.N. Somayaji says, "there can hardly be a [Hindu] home [in India] which does not house an idol of Ganapati. [..] Ganapati, being the most popular deity in India, is worshipped by almost all castes and in all parts of the country". Devotees believe that if Ganesha is propitiated, he grants success, prosperity and protection against adversity.

 

Ganesha is a non-sectarian deity, and Hindus of all denominations invoke him at the beginning of prayers, important undertakings, and religious ceremonies. Dancers and musicians, particularly in southern India, begin performances of arts such as the Bharatnatyam dance with a prayer to Ganesha. Mantras such as Om Shri Gaṇeshāya Namah (Om, salutation to the Illustrious Ganesha) are often used. One of the most famous mantras associated with Ganesha is Om Gaṃ Ganapataye Namah (Om, Gaṃ, Salutation to the Lord of Hosts).

 

Devotees offer Ganesha sweets such as modaka and small sweet balls (laddus). He is often shown carrying a bowl of sweets, called a modakapātra. Because of his identification with the color red, he is often worshipped with red sandalwood paste (raktacandana) or red flowers. Dūrvā grass (Cynodon dactylon) and other materials are also used in his worship.

 

Festivals associated with Ganesh are Ganesh Chaturthi or Vināyaka chaturthī in the śuklapakṣa (the fourth day of the waxing moon) in the month of bhādrapada (August/September) and the Gaṇeśa jayanti (Gaṇeśa's birthday) celebrated on the cathurthī of the śuklapakṣa (fourth day of the waxing moon) in the month of māgha (January/February)."

 

GANESH CHATURTI

An annual festival honours Ganesha for ten days, starting on Ganesha Chaturthi, which typically falls in late August or early September. The festival begins with people bringing in clay idols of Ganesha, symbolising Ganesha's visit. The festival culminates on the day of Ananta Chaturdashi, when idols (murtis) of Ganesha are immersed in the most convenient body of water. Some families have a tradition of immersion on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, or 7th day. In 1893, Lokmanya Tilak transformed this annual Ganesha festival from private family celebrations into a grand public event. He did so "to bridge the gap between the Brahmins and the non-Brahmins and find an appropriate context in which to build a new grassroots unity between them" in his nationalistic strivings against the British in Maharashtra. Because of Ganesha's wide appeal as "the god for Everyman", Tilak chose him as a rallying point for Indian protest against British rule. Tilak was the first to install large public images of Ganesha in pavilions, and he established the practice of submerging all the public images on the tenth day. Today, Hindus across India celebrate the Ganapati festival with great fervour, though it is most popular in the state of Maharashtra. The festival also assumes huge proportions in Mumbai, Pune, and in the surrounding belt of Ashtavinayaka temples.

 

TEMPLES

In Hindu temples, Ganesha is depicted in various ways: as an acolyte or subordinate deity (pãrśva-devatã); as a deity related to the principal deity (parivāra-devatã); or as the principal deity of the temple (pradhāna), treated similarly as the highest gods of the Hindu pantheon. As the god of transitions, he is placed at the doorway of many Hindu temples to keep out the unworthy, which is analogous to his role as Parvati’s doorkeeper. In addition, several shrines are dedicated to Ganesha himself, of which the Ashtavinayak (lit. "eight Ganesha (shrines)") in Maharashtra are particularly well known. Located within a 100-kilometer radius of the city of Pune, each of these eight shrines celebrates a particular form of Ganapati, complete with its own lore and legend. The eight shrines are: Morgaon, Siddhatek, Pali, Mahad, Theur, Lenyadri, Ozar and Ranjangaon.

 

There are many other important Ganesha temples at the following locations: Wai in Maharashtra; Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh; Jodhpur, Nagaur and Raipur (Pali) in Rajasthan; Baidyanath in Bihar; Baroda, Dholaka, and Valsad in Gujarat and Dhundiraj Temple in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Prominent Ganesha temples in southern India include the following: Kanipakam in Chittoor; the Jambukeśvara Temple at Tiruchirapalli; at Rameshvaram and Suchindram in Tamil Nadu; at Malliyur, Kottarakara, Pazhavangadi, Kasargod in Kerala, Hampi, and Idagunji in Karnataka; and Bhadrachalam in Andhra Pradesh.

 

T. A. Gopinatha notes, "Every village however small has its own image of Vighneśvara (Vigneshvara) with or without a temple to house it in. At entrances of villages and forts, below pīpaḹa (Sacred fig) trees [...], in a niche [...] in temples of Viṣṇu (Vishnu) as well as Śiva (Shiva) and also in separate shrines specially constructed in Śiva temples [...]; the figure of Vighneśvara is invariably seen." Ganesha temples have also been built outside of India, including southeast Asia, Nepal (including the four Vinayaka shrines in the Kathmandu valley), and in several western countries.

 

RISE TO PROMINENCE

 

FIRST APEARANCE

Ganesha appeared in his classic form as a clearly recognizable deity with well-defined iconographic attributes in the early 4th to 5th centuries. Shanti Lal Nagar says that the earliest known iconic image of Ganesha is in the niche of the Shiva temple at Bhumra, which has been dated to the Gupta period. His independent cult appeared by about the 10th century. Narain summarizes the controversy between devotees and academics regarding the development of Ganesha as follows:

 

What is inscrutable is the somewhat dramatic appearance of Gaņeśa on the historical scene. His antecedents are not clear. His wide acceptance and popularity, which transcend sectarian and territorial limits, are indeed amazing. On the one hand there is the pious belief of the orthodox devotees in Gaņeśa's Vedic origins and in the Purāṇic explanations contained in the confusing, but nonetheless interesting, mythology. On the other hand there are doubts about the existence of the idea and the icon of this deity" before the fourth to fifth century A.D. ... [I]n my opinion, indeed there is no convincing evidence of the existence of this divinity prior to the fifth century.

 

POSSIBLE INFLUENCES

Courtright reviews various speculative theories about the early history of Ganesha, including supposed tribal traditions and animal cults, and dismisses all of them in this way:

 

In the post 600 BC period there is evidence of people and places named after the animal. The motif appears on coins and sculptures.

 

Thapan's book on the development of Ganesha devotes a chapter to speculations about the role elephants had in early India but concludes that, "although by the second century CE the elephant-headed yakṣa form exists it cannot be presumed to represent Gaṇapati-Vināyaka. There is no evidence of a deity by this name having an elephant or elephant-headed form at this early stage. Gaṇapati-Vināyaka had yet to make his debut."

 

One theory of the origin of Ganesha is that he gradually came to prominence in connection with the four Vinayakas (Vināyakas). In Hindu mythology, the Vināyakas were a group of four troublesome demons who created obstacles and difficulties but who were easily propitiated. The name Vināyaka is a common name for Ganesha both in the Purāṇas and in Buddhist Tantras. Krishan is one of the academics who accepts this view, stating flatly of Ganesha, "He is a non-vedic god. His origin is to be traced to the four Vināyakas, evil spirits, of the Mānavagŗhyasūtra (7th–4th century BCE) who cause various types of evil and suffering". Depictions of elephant-headed human figures, which some identify with Ganesha, appear in Indian art and coinage as early as the 2nd century. According to Ellawala, the elephant-headed Ganesha as lord of the Ganas was known to the people of Sri Lanka in the early pre-Christian era.

 

A metal plate depiction of Ganesha had been discovered in 1993, in Iran, it dated back to 1,200 BCE. Another one was discovered much before, in Lorestan Province of Iran.

 

First Ganesha's terracotta images are from 1st century CE found in Ter, Pal, Verrapuram and Chandraketugarh. These figures are small, with elephant head, two arms, and chubby physique. The earliest Ganesha icons in stone were carved in Mathura during Kushan times (2nd-3rd centuries CE).

 

VEDIC AND EPIC LITERATURE

The title "Leader of the group" (Sanskrit: gaṇapati) occurs twice in the Rig Veda, but in neither case does it refer to the modern Ganesha. The term appears in RV 2.23.1 as a title for Brahmanaspati, according to commentators. While this verse doubtless refers to Brahmanaspati, it was later adopted for worship of Ganesha and is still used today. In rejecting any claim that this passage is evidence of Ganesha in the Rig Veda, Ludo Rocher says that it "clearly refers to Bṛhaspati—who is the deity of the hymn—and Bṛhaspati only". Equally clearly, the second passage (RV 10.112.9) refers to Indra, who is given the epithet 'gaṇapati', translated "Lord of the companies (of the Maruts)." However, Rocher notes that the more recent Ganapatya literature often quotes the Rigvedic verses to give Vedic respectability to Ganesha .

 

Two verses in texts belonging to Black Yajurveda, Maitrāyaṇīya Saṃhitā (2.9.1) and Taittirīya Āraṇyaka (10.1), appeal to a deity as "the tusked one" (Dantiḥ), "elephant-faced" (Hastimukha), and "with a curved trunk" (Vakratuņḍa). These names are suggestive of Ganesha, and the 14th century commentator Sayana explicitly establishes this identification. The description of Dantin, possessing a twisted trunk (vakratuṇḍa) and holding a corn-sheaf, a sugar cane, and a club, is so characteristic of the Puranic Ganapati that Heras says "we cannot resist to accept his full identification with this Vedic Dantin". However, Krishan considers these hymns to be post-Vedic additions. Thapan reports that these passages are "generally considered to have been interpolated". Dhavalikar says, "the references to the elephant-headed deity in the Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā have been proven to be very late interpolations, and thus are not very helpful for determining the early formation of the deity".

 

Ganesha does not appear in Indian epic literature that is dated to the Vedic period. A late interpolation to the epic poem Mahabharata says that the sage Vyasa (Vyāsa) asked Ganesha to serve as his scribe to transcribe the poem as he dictated it to him. Ganesha agreed but only on condition that Vyasa recite the poem uninterrupted, that is, without pausing. The sage agreed, but found that to get any rest he needed to recite very complex passages so Ganesha would have to ask for clarifications. The story is not accepted as part of the original text by the editors of the critical edition of the Mahabharata, in which the twenty-line story is relegated to a footnote in an appendix. The story of Ganesha acting as the scribe occurs in 37 of the 59 manuscripts consulted during preparation of the critical edition. Ganesha's association with mental agility and learning is one reason he is shown as scribe for Vyāsa's dictation of the Mahabharata in this interpolation. Richard L. Brown dates the story to the 8th century, and Moriz Winternitz concludes that it was known as early as c. 900, but it was not added to the Mahabharata some 150 years later. Winternitz also notes that a distinctive feature in South Indian manuscripts of the Mahabharata is their omission of this Ganesha legend. The term vināyaka is found in some recensions of the Śāntiparva and Anuśāsanaparva that are regarded as interpolations. A reference to Vighnakartṛīṇām ("Creator of Obstacles") in Vanaparva is also believed to be an interpolation and does not appear in the critical edition.

 

PURANIC PERIOD

Stories about Ganesha often occur in the Puranic corpus. Brown notes while the Puranas "defy precise chronological ordering", the more detailed narratives of Ganesha's life are in the late texts, c. 600–1300. Yuvraj Krishan says that the Puranic myths about the birth of Ganesha and how he acquired an elephant's head are in the later Puranas, which were composed from c. 600 onwards. He elaborates on the matter to say that references to Ganesha in the earlier Puranas, such as the Vayu and Brahmanda Puranas, are later interpolations made during the 7th to 10th centuries.

 

In his survey of Ganesha's rise to prominence in Sanskrit literature, Ludo Rocher notes that:

 

Above all, one cannot help being struck by the fact that the numerous stories surrounding Gaṇeśa concentrate on an unexpectedly limited number of incidents. These incidents are mainly three: his birth and parenthood, his elephant head, and his single tusk. Other incidents are touched on in the texts, but to a far lesser extent.

 

Ganesha's rise to prominence was codified in the 9th century, when he was formally included as one of the five primary deities of Smartism. The 9th-century philosopher Adi Shankara popularized the "worship of the five forms" (Panchayatana puja) system among orthodox Brahmins of the Smarta tradition. This worship practice invokes the five deities Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, and Surya. Adi Shankara instituted the tradition primarily to unite the principal deities of these five major sects on an equal status. This formalized the role of Ganesha as a complementary deity.

 

SCRIPTURES

Once Ganesha was accepted as one of the five principal deities of Brahmanism, some Brahmins (brāhmaṇas) chose to worship Ganesha as their principal deity. They developed the Ganapatya tradition, as seen in the Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana.

 

The date of composition for the Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana - and their dating relative to one another - has sparked academic debate. Both works were developed over time and contain age-layered strata. Anita Thapan reviews comments about dating and provides her own judgement. "It seems likely that the core of the Ganesha Purana appeared around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries", she says, "but was later interpolated." Lawrence W. Preston considers the most reasonable date for the Ganesha Purana to be between 1100 and 1400, which coincides with the apparent age of the sacred sites mentioned by the text.

 

R.C. Hazra suggests that the Mudgala Purana is older than the Ganesha Purana, which he dates between 1100 and 1400. However, Phyllis Granoff finds problems with this relative dating and concludes that the Mudgala Purana was the last of the philosophical texts concerned with Ganesha. She bases her reasoning on the fact that, among other internal evidence, the Mudgala Purana specifically mentions the Ganesha Purana as one of the four Puranas (the Brahma, the Brahmanda, the Ganesha, and the Mudgala Puranas) which deal at length with Ganesha. While the kernel of the text must be old, it was interpolated until the 17th and 18th centuries as the worship of Ganapati became more important in certain regions. Another highly regarded scripture, the Ganapati Atharvashirsa, was probably composed during the 16th or 17th centuries.

 

BEYOND INDIA AND HINDUISM

Commercial and cultural contacts extended India's influence in western and southeast Asia. Ganesha is one of a number of Hindu deities who reached foreign lands as a result.

 

Ganesha was particularly worshipped by traders and merchants, who went out of India for commercial ventures. From approximately the 10th century onwards, new networks of exchange developed including the formation of trade guilds and a resurgence of money circulation. During this time, Ganesha became the principal deity associated with traders. The earliest inscription invoking Ganesha before any other deity is associated with the merchant community.

 

Hindus migrated to Maritime Southeast Asia and took their culture, including Ganesha, with them. Statues of Ganesha are found throughout the region, often beside Shiva sanctuaries. The forms of Ganesha found in Hindu art of Java, Bali, and Borneo show specific regional influences. The spread of Hindu culture to southeast Asia established Ganesha in modified forms in Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand. In Indochina, Hinduism and Buddhism were practiced side by side, and mutual influences can be seen in the iconography of Ganesha in the region. In Thailand, Cambodia, and among the Hindu classes of the Chams in Vietnam, Ganesha was mainly thought of as a remover of obstacles. Today in Buddhist Thailand, Ganesha is regarded as a remover of obstacles, the god of success.

 

Before the arrival of Islam, Afghanistan had close cultural ties with India, and the adoration of both Hindu and Buddhist deities was practiced. Examples of sculptures from the 5th to the 7th centuries have survived, suggesting that the worship of Ganesha was then in vogue in the region.

 

Ganesha appears in Mahayana Buddhism, not only in the form of the Buddhist god Vināyaka, but also as a Hindu demon form with the same name. His image appears in Buddhist sculptures during the late Gupta period. As the Buddhist god Vināyaka, he is often shown dancing. This form, called Nṛtta Ganapati, was popular in northern India, later adopted in Nepal, and then in Tibet. In Nepal, the Hindu form of Ganesha, known as Heramba, is popular; he has five heads and rides a lion. Tibetan representations of Ganesha show ambivalent views of him. A Tibetan rendering of Ganapati is tshogs bdag. In one Tibetan form, he is shown being trodden under foot by Mahākāla, (Shiva) a popular Tibetan deity. Other depictions show him as the Destroyer of Obstacles, and sometimes dancing. Ganesha appears in China and Japan in forms that show distinct regional character. In northern China, the earliest known stone statue of Ganesha carries an inscription dated to 531. In Japan, where Ganesha is known as Kangiten, the Ganesha cult was first mentioned in 806.

 

The canonical literature of Jainism does not mention the worship of Ganesha. However, Ganesha is worshipped by most Jains, for whom he appears to have taken over certain functions of Kubera. Jain connections with the trading community support the idea that Jainism took up Ganesha worship as a result of commercial connections. The earliest known Jain Ganesha statue dates to about the 9th century. A 15th-century Jain text lists procedures for the installation of Ganapati images. Images of Ganesha appear in the Jain temples of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

 

WIKIPEDIA

A route restriction relating to the class 50 on 'The Wolf Hall Thunderer' railtour prevented the train from using the normal 'Up' line to return from Hampton Court, instead leaving 37403 'Isle of Mull' to take the Hampton Court Reversible back over the viaduct to reach Surbiton where it's tour, running as 1Z48 would reverse to then head back under the flyover towards Guildford, taking the alternative branch at Hampton Court Junction to travel via Cobham.

In the distance is Sandown Park Racecourse which has a grandstand view (sorry!) over the SWML near Esher.

"relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith"

 

A creative outing with my photo club - Inland Empire Photo Club - where we played with light and motion and long exposures to create kinetic art. It was a wonderful, creative evening.

Relates to Macro Mondays' "matchstick" theme. The matchbook is approximately 2" square.

 

All rights reserved. Please do not use or reproduce this image on websites, blogs or any other media without my permission.

24/7 live-in maid sissy barbie in the servant's quarters wearing an oh so sissy baby pink satin uniform trimmed with white satin and lace. The details of the uniform were designed by Mistress Lady Penelope who sissy barbie is proud to serve.

 

She fantasised about being a maid for years before 2011 when she submitted to Mistress Lady Penelope for maid training. Mistress had been expertly training sissy maids for many years before that. Mistress expertly moulded her and graciously gave her the name Sissy Barbie for which Barbie is truly grateful. She feels it is a huge honour to be named after Mistress' favourite doll and for Mistress to choose what she is to wear just as Mistress did as a girl for her plastic dolly.

 

At the very first maid training session, Barbie learned to love humiliation much to her surprise. Barbie also learned to love her Mistress and it to make pleasing her Mistress her highest priority, to put serving her Mistress at the centre of her existence, the thing which gives her life meaning.

 

The devotion of a maid to her Mistress is a one way thing, the maid expects nothing in return, her only pleasure is vicarious, either for the pleasure Mistress gets from Barbie's service or when Mistress chooses to relate her successes and pleasure she has felt when away from Barbie.

 

Barbie knows she has been manipulated into feeling the way she does, she adores being controlled, her submissive feelings are wonderful to her, she is truly humble, respectful and obedient and when she does wrong she accepts her punishment in the knowledge that it is given to make her a better maid.

 

sissy barbie feels it was a great honour to be allowed to become Mistress Lady Penelope's 24/7 live-in maid. It is her dream come true.

 

sissy barbie adores being controlled, everything she wears was designed or chosen by Mistress Lady Penelope, she was taught how to apply her make-up by Mistress Lady Penelope, she stands the way she has been trained to, she smiles as she has been trained to, she dust the way she has been trained to, the lamp she dusts was chosen by her Mistress. Where she lives belongs to Mistress Lady Penelope. There is almost nothing left of the person who submitted to Mistress Lady Penelope all those years ago and that is wonderful.

 

sissy barbie hates punishment but accepts it is Mistress Lady Penelope's right to discipline her whenever Mistress decides to do so. Being dressed as a female, especially as a lowly maid, does affect her thinking, making her feel more submissive. Being locked in a maid uniform and a chastity belt makes her humble, totally lacking masculinity. Her enforced feminity is governed by Mistress Lady Penelope who's authority lies in the custody of the keys to the locks.

 

If you are interested in maid training, look at Mistress Lady Penelope's excellent free web site

mistressladypenelope.com

You can make an appointment with Mistress Lady Penelope by calling 07970183024

Seen here in London

Hey guys, just wanted to share another one of my free video tutorials with your guys!

This time its relating to Quickbooks (fun fun fun!!). If you are starting a new business or have to start getting up to speed with your accounting and don't know how, check this video out:

 

www.vimeo.com/13489933

 

The video is intended for beginners and its free!! so feel free to share it with friends and family... I am sure you know of someone that really needs a push.

 

Have a great week guys! Have a bunch of tax courses this week so will not be posting as much..

talk show: an oil painting by jaisini by yustas kotz-gottlieb

Talk Show is a painting that proves the idea that we live in a post-modern world with the apparent loss of any reasonable hope for alternative to the present. In Talk Show, immediacy unites with immortality, trivial with profound. In our days the long myth of immortality is replaced by the myth of immediacy. The substitution of the trivial for the profound for many was a loss, rather than a gain, although, the will to be immediate speaks more directly to our lives. Jaisini unites the two principles, searching for unique ways that can create this double effect of a physical lowland, united with the philosophical purity of mind. Talk Show has the significance of biblical wisdom based on a street scene. In Talk Show, Jaisini pictures not the dark side’ of people, but the substantial one, when sex became ‘the lyricism of the masses’. The picture shows that we live in a more cynical, realistic time by means of parody. The new cynicism is the old one. The work is timeless and can relate to anyone. Talk Show has the analogous environment as in the work called Show Time; the crowd representatives and the image that centers the crowd’s attention. In Talk Show, it is the two dogs in an intercourse that attracts the attention of different people of the crowd. In the painting we can clearly see the interlocked line of composition. This line flows freely as an unconscious line. The absence of an ‘end’ in Jaisini’s composition may be the artist’s revolt against the end of ideology and the general failures of social theory, obsessed with ‘ends’, with visions of finished worlds and finalities. Modern society was once based on a principle of expansion, but having reached a certain ‘critical mass’ it has begun to recoil. Is this why Jaisini creates his secluded line composition? What we are witnessing in the domain of the social is a kind of inverse explosion. The artist avoids breaking the line because any attempt to save the principle of expansion is not ‘archaic’ and regressive. The principle of enclosure is the radical inquiry for continuance. Jaisini has found his way to avoid the end-state. His closed circle of composition creates a new visual code that guarantees the ‘addressee,’ a recognizable meaning. The Talk Show mockery reflects the contemporary condition of Byzantizm. It could be mentioned here that evenin Cicero’s time, the ancient world was becoming stupid. Talk Show may symbolize the mass communication as an enclosing circle connecting mass culture and its audiences of ‘mass conformist,’ the picture’s title can be attributed to the fact that consequently television, along with the rest of mass culture, has become an undreamed-of medium of psychological control. We become part of mass communication circuits, part of a realm and era of connection, contact, feedback, an era that is ‘obscene,’ yet lunar cold. The reason why the artist prescribes the emerald color to his painting may be to symbolize the coldness of the contemporary world of communications which contacts penetrate without resistance. In the picture, we see the dogs’ intercourse as the critique of the talk show. Copyright © 2014 Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb All Rights Reserved

Talk Show on Spark website, circa 1999

 

Tel-Aviv At war

The first in a series of changes relating to Crossrail took place today in the south-east regions of London. We start with the 472 which used to run Scanias and run along Nathan Way before completing the full Thamesmead loop up to the terminus. Now it's up Western Way/Central Way, past the Belmarsh prison and turning left from Crossway onto Carlyle Road heading down to the new station.

 

A couple of diesels from Plumstead (PD) remain but they're E400s while the Scanias have stayed on the 96. This is now a mainly hybrid route with a sizeable frequency reduction. You do get a good turn of speed along the smaller Thamesmead roads but on my run, it got busy really fast and I could tell there were confused passengers having to ask the driver what was going on with the changes.

 

SN64OGM (12339) is at North Greenwich Station awaiting a new journey to Abbey Wood via Charlton and Woolwich.

This photo relates to the 292 service that used to be operated by Selwyn Motors of Westgate. See previous posts relating to Selwyn's and Metrobus F810YLV.

 

Looking along Sandtoft Road towards Sandtoft, with F810YLV heading into Westgate to make its first pick up on its journey to Doncaster. This was the start of the 292 Saturday only service.

 

When the bus departed Selwyn's Saxon Lane premises, it turned left onto Westgate Road heading towards Sandtoft, and not right towards Belton.

 

The bus ran empty as far as Sandtoft airfield, were it turned around and from where it could be said, the service started. It's first actual pick up was just opposite to Saxon Lane in Westgate, although it could technically pick up before this point.

 

Saturday 01st October 2016

This photo dates back to July, and it's October now! This is the alternate, 'blind visible' view that relates to a photo I've previously uploaded, showing Stagecoach Gainsborough depot's Plaxton President 18038 on the (normally E400 MMC worked) InterConnect 100 from Lincoln to Scunthorpe.

 

MX53 FMA 18038 departs Lincoln bus station, onto Norman Street, on 27.7.23

 

USC vs Kentucky

Columbia, SC

10.04.2007

 

i can relate, sister.

Recently I noticed the following planning application which relates to my photograph]

 

Full Development Description

 

The development will consist of:- Demolition of all existing structures on the site including 18 no. light industrial units (1,330 sq.m) and the construction of a student residence complex with associated ancillary accommodation and a café/ restaurant. The overall building will comprise a gross floor area of 16,994 sq.m incorporating a 7 storey building (6 storey plus setback level) all within a perimeter block around a central landscaped courtyard over a part basement. The following accommodation is proposed: - Basement level accommodating 11 no. car parking spaces, 286 no. bicycle parking spaces, ancillary store, plant and waste management areas with access for vehicles via a ramp from Gloucester Place Upper and for bicycles via a ramp linking to an internal courtyard within the development and accessed from Gardiner Street Lower Ground floor level accommodating a management suite ( 36 sq.m), reception (70 sq.m), gym (106 sq.m), storage (122 sq.m), laundry ( 36 sq.m), ancillary circulation areas (270 sq.m) and student accommodation ( 4 no. 1 bed accessible studios, 4 no. 4 bed accessible units, 3 no. 4 bed units, 6 no. 5 bed units). The ground floor level also accommodates a café/ restaurant (51 sq.m) fronting onto Gardiner Street Lower; Levels 1-6 comprises student accommodation (28 no. 1 bed accessible studios, 4 no. 3 bed units, 25 no. 4 bed units, 62 no. 5 bed units and 1 no. 8 bed unit) with associated ancillary circulation areas and communal areas at 6th floor level including screening/ presentation room (38 sq.m), seminar room (33 sq.m), study room ( 42 sq.m), communal living room/ kitchen (176 sq.m), toilets ( 9 sq.m), storage (3 sq.m), and an external balcony/ terrace. Permission is also sought for hard and soft landscaping, solar panels at roof level, boundary treatments, signage and all ancillary site and development works.

 

Other recent examples:

 

Planning permission has been granted for a €41 million 400-bedroom student housing complex near St Patrick’s Cathedral. The development, which also includes shops, restaurants, cafes and a gym, is to be built on a 2.5 acre site on Mill Street in Newmarket in the southwest inner city.

 

A planning application for Dublin’s largest off-campus student accommodation has been lodged with Dublin City Council. Designed to cater for up to 970 third-level students, the proposed development is beside the 3 Arena, within the Dublin Docklands strategic development zone. Envisaged are two blocks of six and eight storeys with “student clusters” of between five- and eight-bed spaces, as well as twin and single study units.

 

Mortar Developments is hoping to secure permission to build at Church Street, which is adjacent to Smithfield.

The accommodation will include 232 bedrooms, as well as a number of ancillary facilities such as a gym, pool room, cafe and a takeaway. The scheme will involve the construction of a property varying in height between five and seven floors.

Aircraft movements relating to the end of the State Visit to the UK by the President of the United States, bringing Trump back from Chequers prior to boarding Air Force One.

 

The formation consisted of three US Army Chinook helicopters, US Marine Corps VH-3 Sea King (Marine One) and the National Police Air Service H-145 helicopter.

 

Air Force One and two C-32 jets departed Stansted.

 

Photos taken off Belmer Road, Stansted Airport.

I relate to this little guy #california #joshuatree #cactus #film #adventures

 

11 Likes on Instagram

  

To view more of my images of aircraft and space craft, click "here" !

 

Very sad news, relating to a fatal crash of this beautiful aircraft, please read "here" ! ............ More "here" !

 

The North American Aviation P-51 Mustang was an American long-range, single-seat fighter and fighter-bomber used during World War II, the Korean War and other conflicts. The Mustang was conceived, designed and built by North American Aviation (NAA) in response to a specification issued directly to NAA by the British Purchasing Commission. The prototype NA-73X airframe was rolled out on 9 September 1940, 102 days after the contract was signed and, with an engine installed, first flew on 26 October. The Mustang was originally designed to use the Allison V-1710 engine, which had limited high-altitude performance. It was first flown operationally by the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a tactical-reconnaissance aircraft and fighter-bomber (Mustang Mk I). The addition of the Rolls-Royce Merlin to the P-51B/C model transformed the Mustang's performance at altitudes above 15,000 ft, matching or bettering that of the Luftwaffe's fighters. The definitive version, the P-51D, was powered by the Packard V-1650-7, a license-built version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin 60 series two-stage two-speed supercharged engine, and armed with six .50 caliber (12.7 mm) M2 Browning machine guns. From late 1943, P-51Bs (supplemented by P-51Ds from mid-1944) were used by the USAAF's Eighth Air Force to escort bombers in raids over Germany, while the RAF's 2 TAF and the USAAF's Ninth Air Force used the Merlin-powered Mustangs as fighter-bombers, roles in which the Mustang helped ensure Allied air superiority in 1944. The P-51 was also in service with Allied air forces in the North African, Mediterranean and Italian theaters, and saw limited service against the Japanese in the Pacific War. During World War II, Mustang pilots claimed 4,950 enemy aircraft shot down. At the start of the Korean War, the Mustang was the main fighter of the United Nations until jet fighters such as the F-86 took over this role; the Mustang then became a specialized fighter-bomber. Despite the advent of jet fighters, the Mustang remained in service with some air forces until the early 1980s. After World War II and the Korean War, many Mustangs were converted for civilian use, especially air racing, and increasingly, preserved and flown as historic warbird aircraft at airshows. In April 1938, shortly after the German Anschluss of Austria, the British government established a purchasing commission in the United States, headed by Sir Henry Self. Self was given overall responsibility for Royal Air Force (RAF) production and research and development, and also served with Sir Wilfrid Freeman, the "Air Member for Development and Production". Self also sat on the British Air Council Sub-committee on Supply (or "Supply Committee") and one of his tasks was to organize the manufacturing and supply of American fighter aircraft for the RAF. At the time, the choice was very limited, as no U.S. aircraft then in production or flying met European standards, with only the Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk coming close. The Curtiss-Wright plant was running at capacity, so P-40s were in short supply. North American Aviation (NAA) was already supplying its Harvard trainer to the RAF, but was otherwise underutilized. NAA President "Dutch" Kindelberger approached Self to sell a new medium bomber, the B-25 Mitchell. Instead, Self asked if NAA could manufacture the Tomahawk under license from Curtiss. Kindelberger said NAA could have a better aircraft with the same engine in the air sooner than establishing a production line for the P-40. The Commission stipulated armament of four .303 in (7.7 mm) machine guns, the Allison V-1710 liquid-cooled engine, a unit cost of no more than $40,000, and delivery of the first production aircraft by January 1941. In March 1940, 320 aircraft were ordered by Sir Wilfred Freeman who had become the executive head of Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP), and the contract was promulgated on 24 April. The NA-73X, which was designed by a team led by lead engineer Edgar Schmued, followed the best conventional practice of the era, but included several new features. One was a wing designed using laminar flow airfoils which were developed co-operatively by North American Aviation and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). These airfoils generated very low drag at high speeds. During the development of the NA-73X, a wind tunnel test of two wings, one using NACA 5-digit airfoils and the other using the new NAA/NACA 45–100 airfoils, was performed in the University of Washington Kirsten Wind Tunnel. The results of this test showed the superiority of the wing designed with the NAA/NACA 45–100 airfoils. The other feature was a new radiator design that exploited the "Meredith Effect", in which heated air exited the radiator as a slight amount of jet thrust. Because NAA lacked a suitable wind tunnel to test this feature, it used the GALCIT 10 ft (3.0 m) wind tunnel at Caltech. This led to some controversy over whether the Mustang's cooling system aerodynamics were developed by NAA's engineer Edgar Schmued or by Curtiss, although NAA had purchased the complete set of P-40 and XP-46 wind tunnel data and flight test reports for US$56,000. The NA-73X was also one of the first aircraft to have a fuselage lofted mathematically using conic sections; this resulted in the aircraft's fuselage having smooth, low drag surfaces. To aid production, the airframe was divided into five main sections—forward, center, rear fuselage and two wing halves — all of which were fitted with wiring and piping before being joined. The prototype NA-73X was rolled out in September 1940 and first flew on 26 October 1940, respectively 102 and 149 days after the order had been placed, an uncommonly short gestation period. The prototype handled well and accommodated an impressive fuel load. The aircraft's two-section, semi-monocoque fuselage was constructed entirely of aluminum to save weight. It was armed with four .30 in (7.62 mm) M1919 Browning machine guns, two in the wings and two mounted under the engine and firing through the propeller arc using gun synchronizing gear. While the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) could block any sales it considered detrimental to the interests of the US, the NA-73 was considered to be a special case because it had been designed at the behest of the British. In September 1940. a further 300 NA-73s were ordered by MAP. To ensure uninterrupted delivery Colonel Oliver P. Echols arranged with the Anglo-French Purchasing Commission to deliver the aircraft, and NAA gave two examples (41-038 and 41-039) to the USAAC for evaluation.

 

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" !

 

The English language contains many expressions relating to astronomical events, which is not all that strange, when you realise that before humans had clocks, radar, satellites, and so on, people were completely reliant on their own observations in order to keep time and predict seasonal changes.

 

The term ‘blue moon’ is one of many ‘full moon’-expressions. You may have also heard of ‘wolf moon’ or ‘harvest moon’, for example. Many of these terms come from ancient cultures where celestial observations guided local timekeeping.

 

A blue moon does not actually tell you anything about the colour of the Moon. The expression is commonly used when two full moons happen in one calendar month.

 

Our calendar months are based on the lunar cycle. The Moon takes 29.5 days to go through a full cycle. Our calendar months range from 28 to 31 days. As you can tell, the two cycles don’t match up completely. As a consequence, some months will have an extra full moon. The second moon in the same calendar month is often referred to as a ‘blue moon’.

 

This is a relatively rare event, only happening about once every two or three years. Hence the connection to the expression: something that seldomly happens.

 

So, if the Moon doesn’t actually change colour, where did the word ‘blue’ come from? It’s believed this word may have come from the Old English word ‘belewe’, which means ‘betray’. The moon ‘tricked’ people to believe a new calendar month had started, when in fact, it was still the same month.

 

Incidentally, there have been moments when the moon has taken on a slightly more blueish hue than what we’re used to. This sometimes happens as a result of increased ash or smoke particles in the atmosphere after a volcanic eruption, like when Krakatoa erupted in 1883. But such events only occur once in a … blue moon.

 

Credits: ESA

Damascus

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

For other uses, see Damascus (disambiguation).

Damascus

دمشق Dimashq

 

View of Damascus from a bank of Barada river.

Nickname(s): (Al-Fayhaa) The Fragrant City

 

Damascus

 

Coordinates: 33°30′47″N 36°17′31″E / 33.51306°N 36.29194°E / 33.51306; 36.29194

Country Syria

Governorates Damascus Governorate, Capital City

Government

- Governor Bishr Al Sabban

Area

- City 573 km2 (221.2 sq mi)

- Metro 1,200 km2 (463.3 sq mi)

Elevation 600 m (1,969 ft)

Population (2007)[citation needed]

- City over 4 million

- Metro 6,500,000

Time zone EET (UTC+2)

- Summer (DST) EEST (UTC+3)

Area code(s) Country code: 963, City code: 11

Demonym Damascene

Damascus (Arabic: دمشق‎, transliteration: Dimashq, also commonly known as الشام ash-Shām) is the capital and largest city of Syria. It is one of the the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and its current population is estimated at about 4,000,000[citation needed]. The city is a governorate by itself, and the capital of the governorate of Rif Dimashq ("Rural Damascus").

   

Etymology

In Arabic, the city is called دمشق الشام (Dimashq ash-Shām), although this is often shortened to either Dimashq or ash-Shām by the citizens of Damascus, of Syria and other Arab neighbors. Ash-Shām is an Arabic term for north and for Syria (Syria—particularly historical Greater Syria—is called Bilād ash-Shām—بلاد الشام, "land of the north"—in Arabic.) The etymology of the ancient name "Damascus" is uncertain, but it is suspected to be pre-Semitic. It is attested as Dimašqa in Akkadian, T-ms-ḳw in Egyptian, Dammaśq (דמשק) in Old Aramaic and Dammeśeq (דמשק) in Biblical Hebrew. The Akkadian spelling is the earliest attestation, found in the Amarna letters, from the 14th century BCE. Later Aramaic spellings of the name often include an intrusive resh (letter r), perhaps influenced by the root dr, meaning "dwelling". Thus, the Qumranic Darmeśeq (דרמשק), and Darmsûq (ܕܪܡܣܘܩ) in Syriac.[1][2]

  

History

Ancient City of Damascus*

UNESCO World Heritage Site

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

State Party Syria

Type Cultural

Criteria i, ii, iii, iv, vi

Reference 20

Region** Arab States

Inscription history

Inscription 1979 (3rd Session)

* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List.

** Region as classified by UNESCO.

 

Ancient history

Excavations at Tell Ramad on the outskirts of the city have demonstrated that Damascus has been inhabited as early as 8,000 to 10,000 BC. It is due to this that Damascus is considered to be among the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. However, Damascus is not documented as an important city until the coming of the Aramaeans, Semitic nomads who arrived from Mesopotamia. It is known that it was the Aramaeans who first established the water distribution system of Damascus by constructing canals and tunnels which maximized the efficiency of the Barada river. The same network was later improved by the Romans and the Umayyads, and still forms the basis of the water system of the old part of Damascus today. It was mentioned in Genesis 14 as existing at the time of the War of the Kings.

 

According to the 1st century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his twenty-one volume Antiquities of the Jews, Damascus (along with Trachonitis), was founded by Uz, the son of Aram. Elsewhere, he stated:

 

Nicolaus of Damascus, in the fourth book of his History, says thus: "Abraham reigned at Damascus, being a foreigner, who came with an army out of the land above Babylon, called the land of the Chaldeans: but, after a long time, he got him up, and removed from that country also, with his people, and went into the land then called the land of Canaan, but now the land of Judea, and this when his posterity were become a multitude; as to which posterity of his, we relate their history in another work. Now the name of Abraham is even still famous in the country of Damascus; and there is shown a village named from him, The Habitation of Abraham.

 

Damascus is designated as having been part of the ancient province of Amurru in the Hyksos Kingdom, from 1720 to 1570 BC. (MacMillan, pp. 30–31). Some of the earliest Egyptian records are from the 1350 BC Amarna letters, when Damascus-(called Dimasqu) was ruled by king Biryawaza. In 1100 BC, the city became the center of a powerful Aramaean state called Aram Damascus. The Kings of Aram Damascus were involved in many wars in the area against the Assyrians and the Israelites. One of the Kings, Ben-Hadad II, fought Shalmaneser III at the Battle of Qarqar. The ruins of the Aramean town most probably lie under the eastern part of the old walled city. After Tiglath-Pileser III captured and destroyed the city in 732 BC, it lost its independence for hundreds of years, and it fell to the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar starting in 572 BC. The Babylonian rule of the city came to an end in 538 BC when the Persians under Cyrus captured the city and made it the capital of the Persian province of Syria.

  

Greco-Roman

Damascus first came under western control with the giant campaign of Alexander the Great that swept through the near east. After the death of Alexander in 323 BC, Damascus became the site of a struggle between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. The control of the city passed frequently from one empire to the other. Seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander's generals, had made Antioch the capital of his vast empire, a decision that led Damascus' importance to decline compared with the newly founded Seleucid cities such as Latakia in the north.

 

In 64 BC, the Roman general Pompey annexed the western part of Syria. The Romans occupied Damascus and subsequently incorporated it into the league of ten cities known as the Decapolis because it was considered such an important center of Greco-Roman culture. According to the New Testament, St. Paul was on the road to Damascus when he received a vision, was struck blind and as a result converted to Christianity. In the year 37, Roman Emperor Caligula transferred Damascus into Nabataean control by decree.[citation needed] The Nabataean king Aretas IV Philopatris ruled Damascus from his capital Petra. However, around the year 106, Nabataea was conquered by the Romans, and Damascus returned to Roman control.

 

Damascus became a metropolis by the beginning of the second century and in 222 it was upgraded to a colonia by the Emperor Septimius Severus. During the Pax Romana, Damascus and the Roman province of Syria in general began to prosper. Damascus's importance as a caravan city was evident with the trade routes from southern Arabia, Palmyra, Petra, and the silk routes from China all converging on it. The city satisfied the Roman demands for eastern luxuries.

 

Little remains of the architecture of the Romans, but the town planning of the old city did have a lasting effect. The Roman architects brought together the Greek and Aramaean foundations of the city and fused them into a new layout measuring approximately 1,500 metres (4,900 ft) by 750 metres (2,500 ft), surrounded by a city wall. The city wall contained seven gates, but only the eastern gate (Bab Sharqi) remains from the Roman period. Roman Damascus lies mostly at depths of up to five meters (16.4 ft) below the modern city.

 

The old borough of Bab Tuma was developed at the end of the Roman/Byzantine era by the local Eastern Orthodox community. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul and Saint Thomas both lived in that neighborhood. Roman Catholic historians also consider Bab Tuma to be the birthplace of several Popes such as John V and Gregory III.

  

Islamic Arab period

 

The Umayyad Mosque

Alsayyida Zaynab shrine domeDamascus was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate during the reign of Umar by forces under Khaled ibn al-Walid in 634 CE. Immediately thereafter, the city's power and prestige reached its peak when it became the capital of the Umayyad Empire, which extended from Spain to India from 661 to 750. In 744, the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, moved the capital to Harran in the Jazira,[3] and Damascus was never to regain the political prominence it had held in that period.

 

After the fall of the Umayyads and the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate in 750, Damascus was ruled from Baghdad, although in 858 al-Mutawakkil briefly established his residence there with the intention of transferring his capital there from Samarra. However, he soon abandoned the idea. As the Abbasid caliphate declined, Damascus suffered from the prevailing instability, and came under the control of local dynasties.

 

In 970, the Fatimid Caliphs in Cairo gained control of Damascus. This was to usher in a turbulent period in the city's history, as the Berber troops who formed the backbone of the Fatimid forces became deeply unpopular among its citizens. The presence in Syria of the Qaramita and occasionally of Turkish military bands added to the constant pressure from the Bedouin. For a brief period from 978, Damascus was self-governing, under the leadership of a certain Qassam and protected by a citizen militia. However, the Ghouta was ravaged by the Bedouin and after a Turkish-led campaign the city once again surrendered to Fatimid rule. From 1029 to 1041 the Turkish military leader Anushtakin was governor of Damascus under the Fatimid caliph Al-Zahir, and did much to restore the city's prosperity.

 

It appears that during this period the slow transformation of Damascus from a Graeco-Roman city layout - characterised by blocks of insulae — to a more familiar Islamic pattern took place: the grid of straight streets changed to a pattern of narrow streets, with most residents living inside harat closed off at night by heavy wooden gates to protect against criminals and the exactions of the soldiery.

  

Seljuks and Crusader rule

 

The statue of Saladin in front of Damascus citadel.

Azem Palace.

Damascus WallsWith the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the late 11th century, Damascus again became the capital of independent states. It was ruled by a Seljuk dynasty from 1079 to 1104, and then by another Turkish dynasty - the Burid Emirs, who withstood a siege of the city during the Second Crusade in 1148 . In 1154 Damascus was conquered from the Burids by the famous Zengid Atabeg Nur ad-Din of Aleppo, the great foe of the Crusaders. He made it his capital, and following his death, it was acquired by Saladin, the ruler of Egypt, who also made it his capital. Saladin rebuilt the citadel, and it is reported that under his rule the suburbs were as extensive as the city itself. It is reported by Ibn Jubayr that during the time of Saladin, Damascus welcomed seekers of knowledge and industrious youth from around the world, who arrived for the sake of "undistracted study and seclusion" in Damascus' many colleges.

 

In the years following Saladin's death in 1193, there were frequent conflicts between different Ayyubid sultans ruling in Damascus and Cairo. Damascus was the capital of independent Ayyubid rulers between 1193 and 1201, from 1218 to 1238, from 1239 to 1245, and from 1250 to 1260. At other times it was ruled by the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt. Damascus steel gained a legendary reputation among the Crusaders, and patterned steel is still "damascened". The patterned Byzantine and Chinese silks available through Damascus, one of the Western termini of the Silk Road, gave the English language "damask".

  

Mamluk rule

Ayyubid rule (and independence) came to an end with the Mongol invasion of Syria in 1260, and following the Mongol defeat at Ain Jalut in the same year, Damascus became a provincial capital of the Mamluk Empire, ruled from Egypt, following the Mongol withdrawal.

  

Timurlane

In 1400 Timur, the Turco-Mongol conqueror, besieged Damascus. The Mamluk sultan dispatched a deputation from Cairo, including Ibn Khaldun, who negotiated with him, but after their withdrawal he put the city to sack. The Umayyad Mosque was burnt and men and women taken into slavery. A huge number of the city's artisans were taken to Timur's capital at Samarkand. These were the luckier citizens: many were slaughtered and their heads piled up in a field outside the north-east corner of the walls, where a city square still bears the name burj al-ru'us, originally "the tower of heads".

 

Rebuilt, Damascus continued to serve as a Mamluk provincial capital until 1516.

  

The Ottoman conquest

 

Khan As'ad Pasha was built in 1752In early 1516, the Ottoman Turks, wary of the danger of an alliance between the Mamluks and the Persian Safavids, started a campaign of conquest against the Mamluk sultanate. On 21 September, the Mamluk governor of Damascus fled the city, and on 2 October the khutba in the Umayyad mosque was pronounced in the name of Selim I. The day after, the victorious sultan entered the city, staying for three months. On 15 December, he left Damascus by Bab al-Jabiya, intent on the conquest of Egypt. Little appeared to have changed in the city: one army had simply replaced another. However, on his return in October 1517, the sultan ordered the construction of a mosque, taqiyya and mausoleum at the shrine of Shaikh Muhi al-Din ibn Arabi in al-Salihiyah. This was to be the first of Damascus' great Ottoman monuments.

 

The Ottomans remained for the next 400 years, except for a brief occupation by Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt from 1832 to 1840 . Because of its importance as the point of departure for one of the two great Hajj caravans to Mecca, Damascus was treated with more attention by the Porte than its size might have warranted — for most of this period, Aleppo was more populous and commercially more important. In 1560 the Taqiyya al-Sulaimaniyya, a mosque and khan for pilgrims on the road to Mecca, was completed to a design by the famous Ottoman architect Sinan, and soon afterwards a madrasa was built adjoining it.

  

The destroyed Christian quarter of Damascus, 1860.Perhaps the most notorious incident of these centuries was the massacre of Christians in 1860, when fighting between Druze (most probably supported by foreign countries to weaken the economical power) and Maronites in Mount Lebanon spilled over into the city. Several thousand Christians were killed, with many more being saved through the intervention of the Algerian exile Abd al-Qadir and his soldiers (three days after the massacre started), who brought them to safety in Abd al-Qadir's residence and the citadel. The Christian quarter of the old city (mostly inhabited by Catholics), including a number of churches, was burnt down. The Christian inhabitants of the notoriously poor and refractory Midan district outside the walls (mostly Orthodox) were, however, protected by their Muslim neighbours.

 

American Missionary E.C. Miller records that in 1867 the population of the city was 'about' 140,000, of whom 30,000 where Christians, 10,000 Jews and 100,000 'Mohammedans' with less than 100 Protestant Christians.[4]

  

Rise of Arab nationalism

In the early years of the twentieth century, nationalist sentiment in Damascus, initially cultural in its interest, began to take a political colouring, largely in reaction to the turkicisation programme of the Committee of Union and Progress government established in Istanbul in 1908. The hanging of a number of patriotic intellectuals by Jamal Pasha, governor of Damascus, in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and 1916 further stoked nationalist feeling, and in 1918, as the forces of the Arab Revolt and the British army approached, residents fired on the retreating Turkish troops.

  

Modern

 

The Turkish Hospital in Damascus on 1 October 1918, shortly after the entry of the 4th Australian Light Horse Regiment.

Damascus in flames as the result of the French air raid on October 18, 1925.On 1 October 1918, the forces of the Arab revolt led by Nuri as-Said entered Damascus. The same day, Australian soldiers from the 4th and 10th Light Horse Regiments reinforced with detachments from the British Yeomanry Mounted Division entered the city and accepted its surrender from the Turkish appointed Governor Emir Said (installed as Governor the previous afternoon by the retreating Turkish Commander)[1][2]. A military government under Shukri Pasha was named. Other British forces including T. E. Lawrence followed later that day, and Faisal ibn Hussein was proclaimed king of Syria. Political tension rose in November 1917, when the new Bolshevik government in Russia revealed the Sykes-Picot Agreement whereby Britain and France had arranged to partition the Arab east between them. A new Franco-British proclamation on 17 November promised the "complete and definitive freeing of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks." The Syrian Congress in March adopted a democratic constitution. However, the Versailles Conference had granted France a mandate over Syria, and in 1920 a French army commanded by the General Mariano Goybet crossed the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, defeated a small Syrian defensive expedition at the Battle of Maysalun and entered Damascus. The French made Damascus capital of their League of Nations Mandate of Syria.

 

When in 1925 the Druze revolt in the Hauran spread to Damascus, the French suppressed it brutally, bombing and shelling the city. The area of the old city between Al-Hamidiyah Souq and Medhat Pasha Souq was burned to the ground, with many deaths, and has since then been known as al-Hariqa ("the fire"). The old city was surrounded with barbed wire to prevent rebels infiltrating from the Ghouta, and a new road was built outside the northern ramparts to facilitate the movement of armored cars.

 

On 21 June 1941, Damascus was captured from the Vichy French forces by the Allies during the Syria-Lebanon campaign.

 

In 1945 the French once more bombed Damascus, but on this occasion British forces intervened and the French agreed to withdraw, thus leading to the full independence of Syria in 1946 . Damascus remained the capital. With the influx of Iraqi refugees beginning in 2003, and funds from the Persian Gulf, Damascus has been going through an economic boom ever since.

  

Geography

 

Damascus in spring seen from Spot satelliteDamascus lies about 80 km (50 mi) inland from the Mediterranean Sea, sheltered by the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. It lies on a plateau 680 metres (2,200 ft) above sea-level.

 

The old city of Damascus, enclosed by the city walls, lies on the south bank of the river Barada which is almost dry(3 cm left). To the south-east, north and north-east it is surrounded by suburban areas whose history stretches back to the Middle Ages: Midan in the south-west, Sarouja and Imara in the north and north-west. These districts originally arose on roads leading out of the city, near the tombs of religious figures. In the nineteenth century outlying villages developed on the slopes of Jabal Qasioun, overlooking the city, already the site of the al-Salihiyah district centred around the important shrine of Sheikh Muhi al-Din ibn Arabi. These new districts were initially settled by Kurdish soldiery and Muslim refugees from the European regions of the Ottoman Empire which had fallen under Christian rule. Thus they were known as al-Akrad (the Kurds) and al-Muhajirin (the migrants). They lay two to three kilometres (2 mi) north of the old city.

 

From the late nineteenth century on, a modern administrative and commercial centre began to spring up to the west of the old city, around the Barada, centred on the area known as al-Marjeh or the meadow. Al-Marjeh soon became the name of what was initially the central square of modern Damascus, with the city hall on it. The courts of justice, post office and railway station stood on higher ground slightly to the south. A Europeanised residential quarter soon began to be built on the road leading between al-Marjeh and al-Salihiyah. The commercial and administrative centre of the new city gradually shifted northwards slightly towards this area.

 

In the twentieth century, newer suburbs developed north of the Barada, and to some extent to the south, invading the Ghouta oasis. From 1955 the new district of Yarmouk became a second home to thousands of Palestinian refugees. City planners preferred to preserve the Ghouta as far as possible, and in the later twentieth century some of the main areas of development were to the north, in the western Mezzeh district and most recently along the Barada valley in Dummar in the northwest and on the slopes of the mountains at Berze in the north-east. Poorer areas, often built without official approval, have mostly developed south of the main city.

 

Damascus used to be surrounded by an oasis, the Ghouta region (الغوطة al-ġūṭä), watered by the Barada river. The Fijeh spring, west along the Barada valley, used to provides the city with drinking water. The Ghouta oasis has been decreasing in size with the rapid expansion of housing and industry in the city and it is almost dry. It has also become polluted due to the city's traffic, industry, and sewage.

  

Climate

Damascus' climate is semi arid, due to rain shadow effect of Anti-Lebanon mountain. Summers are hot with less humidity. Winters are cool and rainy or snowy. January Maximum & Minimum Temperatures are 11 °C (52 °F) and 0 °C (32 °F), lowest ever recorded are −13.5 °C (8 °F), The summer August Maximum & Minimum Temperature are 35 °C (95 °F) and 17 °C (63 °F), Highest ever recorded are 45.5 °C (113.9 °F), Annual rainfall around 20 cm (8 in), occur from November to March.[5]

 

Weather averages for Damascus

Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year

Average high °C (°F) 11

(53) 13

(57) 17

(64) 23

(74) 28

(84) 33

(92) 36

(96) 36

(96) 33

(91) 27

(81) 19

(67) 13

(56) 24

(76)

Average low °C (°F) 0

(33) 2

(36) 4

(40) 7

(46) 11

(52) 14

(58) 16

(62) 17

(63) 13

(57) 9

(49) 4

(40) 1

(35) 8

(48)

Precipitation cm (inches) 3

(1.5) 3

(1.3) 2

(0.9) 1

(0.5) 0

(0.2) 0

(0) 0

(0) 0

(0) 0

(0) 1

(0.4) 2

(1) 4

(1.7) 19

(7.6)

Source: Weatherbase[5] 2008

  

Demographics

 

People

 

Three Damascene women; lady wearing qabqabs, a Druze, and a peasant, 1873.The majority of the population in Damascus came as a result of rural-urban migration. It is believed that the local people of Damascus, called Damascene, are about 1.5 million. Damascus is considered by most people to be a very safe city. Haggling is common, especially in the traditional souks. Corruption is widespread, but in the past few years there have been aims at combating it, by both the government and non-governmental organizations. Tea, Mate (popular caffeinated beverage made from Yerba mate), and Turkish Coffee are the most common beverages in Damascus.

 

Religion

The majority of the inhabitants of Damascus—about 75%—are Sunni Muslims. It is believed that there are more than 2,000 mosques in Damascus, the most well-known being the Umayyad Mosque. Christians represent the remaining 15% and there a number of Christian districts, such as Bab Tuma, Kassaa, and Ghassani, with many churches, most notably the ancient Chapel of Saint Paul.

  

Historical sites

 

House of Saint AnaniasDamascus has a wealth of historical sites dating back to many different periods of the city's history. Since the city has been built up with every passing occupation, it has become almost impossible to excavate all the ruins of Damascus that lie up to 8 feet (2.4 m) below the modern level. The Citadel of Damascus is located in the northwest corner of the Old City. The Street Called Straight (referred to in the conversion of St. Paul in Acts 9:11), also known as the Via Recta, was the decumanus (East-West main street) of Roman Damascus, and extended for over 1,500 metres (4,900 ft). Today, it consists of the street of Bab Sharqi and the Souk Medhat Pasha, a covered market. The Bab Sharqi street is filled with small shops and leads to the old Christian quarter of Bab Tuma (St. Thomas's Gate). Souk Medhat Pasha is also a main market in Damascus and was named after Medhat Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Syria who renovated the Souk. At the end of the Bab Sharqi street, one reaches the House of Ananias, an underground chapel that was the cellar of Ananias's house. The Umayyad Mosque, also known as the Grand Mosque of Damascus, is one of the largest mosques in the world, and one of the oldest sites of continuous prayer since the rise of Islam. A shrine in the mosque is said to contain the head of Husayn ibn Ali and the body of St. John the Baptist. The mausoleum where Saladin was buried is located in the gardens just outside the mosque. Sayyidah Ruqayya Mosque, the shrine of the yongest daughter of Husayn ibn Ali, can also be found near the Umayyad Mosque. Another heavily visited site is Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque, which is the tomb of Zaynab bint Ali.

  

The walls and gates of Damascus

v • d • eOld City of Damascus

 

Azm PalaceDamascus

CitadelUmayyad Mosque

Gates

al-Jabiya · al-Saghir · Kisan · Sharqi · Tuma · al-Salam · Faradis

The Old City of Damascus is surrounded by ramparts on the northern and eastern sides and part of the southern side. There are seven extant city gates, the oldest of which dates back to the Roman period. These are, clockwise from the north of the citadel:

 

Bab al-Saghir (The Small Gate)

Bab al-Faradis ("the gate of the orchards", or "of the paradise")

Bab al-Salam ("the gate of peace"), all on the north boundary of the Old City

Bab Tuma ("Touma" or "Thomas's Gate") in the north-east corner, leading into the Christian quarter of the same name,

Bab Sharqi ("eastern gate") in the east wall, the only one to retain its Roman plan

Bab Kisan in the south-east, from which tradition holds that Saint Paul made his escape from Damascus, lowered from the ramparts in a basket; this gate is now closed and a chapel marking the event has been built into the structure,

Bab al-Jabiya at the entrance to Souk Midhat Pasha, in the south-west.

Other areas outside the walled city also bear the name "gate": Bab al-Faraj, Bab Mousalla and Bab Sreija, both to the south-west of the walled city.

  

Churches in the old city

 

The Minaret of the Bride, Umayyad Mosque in old Damascus.

Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque

Sayyidah Ruqayya MosqueCathedral of Damascus.

Virgin Mary's Cathedral.

House of Saint Ananias.

Chapel of Saint Paul.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral in Zaitoon (Olive) Alley.

The Damascene Saint Johan church.

Saint Paul's Laura.

Saint Georgeus's sanctuary.

 

Islamic sites in the old city

Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque

Sayyidah Ruqayya Mosque

Bab Saghir cemetery

Umayyad Mosque

Saladin Shrine.

 

Madrasas

Al-Adiliyah Madrasa.

Az-Zahiriyah Library.

Nur al-Din Madrasa.

 

Old Damascene houses

Azm Palace

Bayt al-Aqqad (Danish Institute in Damascus)

Maktab Anbar

Beit al-Mamlouka (Boutique Hotel)

 

Khans

Khan Jaqmaq

Khan As'ad Pasha

Khan Sulayman Pasha

 

Threats to the future of the old City

Due to the rapid decline of the population of Old Damascus (between 1995-2005 more than 20,000 people moved out of the old city for more modern accommodation), a growing number of buildings are being abandoned or are falling into disrepair. In March 2007, the local government announced that it would be demolishing Old City buildings along a 1,400-metre (4,600 ft) stretch of rampart walls as part of a redevelopment scheme. These factors resulted in the Old City being placed by the World Monuments Fund on its 2008 Watch List of the 100 Most Endangered Sites in the world. It is hoped that its inclusion on the list will draw more public awareness to these significant threats to the future of the historic Old City of Damascus.

  

Current state of old Damascus

In spite of the recommendations of the UNESCO World Heritage Center:[3]

 

Souk El Atik, a protected buffer zone, was destroyed in three days in November 2006;

King Faysal Street, a traditional hand-craft region in a protected buffer zone near the walls of Old Damascus between the Citadel and Bab Touma, is threatened by a proposed motorway.

In 2007, the Old City of Damascus and notably the district of Bab Tuma have been recognized by The World Monument Fund as one of the most endangered sites in the world.[4]

 

Subdivisions

 

The ancient city of Damascus around the Omayyad Mosque

Azmeh Square in downtown DamascusDamascus is divided into many districts. Among them there are:

 

Abbasiyyin

Abou Rummaneh

Amara

Bahsa

Baramkah

Barzeh

Dummar

Jobar

Kafar Souseh

Malki

Mazraa

Mezzeh

Midan

Muhajreen

Qanawat

Rukn Eddeen

Al-Salihiyah

Sarouja

Sha'alan

Shaghoor

Tijara

 

ducation

Damascus is the main center of education in Syria. It is home to Damascus University, which is the oldest and by far the largest university in Syria. After the enactment of legislation allowing private secondary institutions, several new universities were established in the city and in the surrounding area.

  

Universities

 

Damascus National Museum.Damascus University

Syrian Virtual University

International University for Science and Technology

Higher Institute of Business Administration (HIBA)

Higher Institute for Applied Science and Technology (HIAST)

University of Kalamoon

Arab European University

National Institute of Administration

 

Transportation

 

Al-Hijaz StationThe main airport is Damascus International Airport, approximately 20 km (12 mi) away from the city center, with connections to many Asian, Europe, African, and recently, South American cities. Streets in Damascus are often narrow, mostly in the older parts of the city, and speed bumps are widely used to limit the speed.

 

Public transport in Damascus depends extensively on minibuses. There are about one hundred lines that operate inside the city and some of them extend from the city center to nearby suburbs. There is no schedule for the lines, and due to the limited number of official bus stops, buses will usually stop wherever a passenger needs to get on or off. The number of buses serving the same line is relatively high, which minimizes the waiting time. Lines are not numbered, rather they are given captions mostly indicating the two end points and possibly an important station along the line.

 

Al-Hijaz railway station, lies in the city center. Currently this station is closed, and railway connections with other cities take place in a suburb.

 

In 2008, the government announced a plan to construct an underground system in Damascus with opening time for the green line scheduled for 2015 Damascus Metro

  

Culture

Damascus was the 2008 Arab Capital of Culture.

  

Museums

National Museum of Damascus

Azem Palace

Military Museum

Museum of Arabic Calligraphy

 

Leisure activities

 

Damascus by night, pictured from Jabal Qasioun; the green spots are minarets

Parks and gardens

Tishreen Park is by far the largest park in Damascus. It is home to the yearly held Damascus Flower Show. Other parks include Aljahiz, Al sibbki, Altijara and Alwahda. Damascus' Ghouta (Oasis) is also a popular destination for recreation.

  

Cafe culture

Cafes are popular meeting spots for Damascene, where Arghilehs (water pipes) and popular beverages are served. Card games, Tables (backgammon variants), and chess are common in these cafes.

  

Sports

Popular sports include football, basketball, swimming and table tennis. Damascus is home to many sports clubs, such as:

 

Al Jaish

Al Wahda

Al Majd

Barada

 

Nearby attractions

Madaya

Bloudan

Zabadani

Maaloula

Saidnaya

 

Born in Damascus

Hadadezer King of Aram Damascus and leader of the coalition the 12 kings coalition that fought against Shalmaneser III

Nicolaus of Damascus (historian and philosopher)

John of Damascus (676-749) Christian saint

Ananias (Christian disciple involved in healing and preaching to Paul the Apostle)

Sophronius (Patriarch of Jerusalem)

Abd ar-Rahman I, Founder of Omayyad dynasty in Cordoba.

Izzat Husrieh, A renowned journalist and founder of the Syrian labor unions.

Khalid al-Azm, Former prime minister of Syria.

Shukri al-Quwatli, Former Syrian president and co-founder of the United Arab Republic.

Muna Wassef ( A Movie Star, and a United Nations Goodwill ambassador.)

Damascius (Byzantine philosopher)

Yasser Seirawan (chess player)

Ahmed Kuftaro (former grand mufti of Syria)

Ikram Antaki (Mexican writer)

Ghada al-Samman (novelist)

Nizar Qabbani (poet)

Michel Aflaq (political thinker and co-founder of the Baath Party)

Salah al-Din al-Bitar (political thinker and co-founder of the Baath Party)

Constantin Zureiq (academic and Arab nationalist intellectual)

Zakaria Tamer (writer)

Professor Aziz Al-Azmeh (academic, PhD in Oriental Studies)

Nazir Ismail (Artist)

Sheik Bashir Al Bani (Grand Sheik in Syria)

Mehdi Mourtada (Famous journalist and founder of WAS News Agency.

 

Cervine: of or relating to deer

 

The ending of an unfinished 52 week

You may have noticed I have not posted in a few weeks and you may also be thinking doesnt a 52 week mean you post once a week for a year? Well I regret to inform you that I am retiring my 52 week. I dont want to say quitting or giving up because, while I am stopping it, I dont feel like those are the right words. It ran its course and looking back I did improve and had some amazing times and did some crazy things that I may have not gotten to do if I had not been doing my 52 week. But at the same time it wasn't the 52 week I wanted to lead. I wanted to accomplish a successful 52 week where you could see steady and great growth in my photography skills, understanding of lighting, photoshop skills and creativity. I wanted a 52 week where very few, if any, weeks were skipped. I wanted a 52 week that I coud devote a good amount of time to. But I wasnt always growing, I definitely missed many weeks and I neglected my project tremendously. Often times I would wait until the last day to think of an idea, shoot it, and then edit it. But the main reason I am stopping this first attempt (there will definitely be future ones that will be more successful!) at a 52 week is because this is it. This is my final year of high school. Throughout this year I will experience my last year as an editor, my last year as a designer for the yearbook, my first and last year as a designer for the paper, my last year as a photog for NW, my last year with my journalism family in that room I began to call home. And the truth is Im running out of time. There isnt enough hours in the day or days in the week. So in order to hopefully have more quality concept photos Im going to put more focus in each one rather than worrying that I get one posted before I go to bed Sunday night. And in order to put my full effort into becoming the best editor I can be and taking the best journalistic photos I can take and creating the most beautiful spreads I can design, I need to put in the time. Because I am not satisfied enough with all my work that I have done here, because I want to end this precious time here by blowing everyone away with something amazing. for once I want to do something great. And I want to give my time to being a better editor, because I feel like I have been a pretty awful one so far. And it hurts, I hate thinking im a bad editor...but the truth is that I have been. So I had to create new priorities. I had to put journalism first. concept photography second. and money, well I have to cut that out for now. my 52 week isnt the only thing Im cutting out. Despite how I said I hated my job that first week I got it, I forgot to mention that I kind of ended up loving it. It was a stellar job and i got to work with some great people and it really was a lot of fun. Being a griller at Mongolian BBQ was most definitely the best job a high school student could ever even hope for. However I recently turned in my 2 weeks notice which made me a lot more upset than I thought it would. I will hopefully be back their in the summer but for now, I have to prioritize. I should have appreciated what a great job I had more, but I didnt. So I will these last couple of weeks and then I will continue on focusing on trying to become better. and will hopefully still be posting good things here relatively frequently.

 

in other news...Ill be 18 on the 18th, which is pretty soon! My golden birthday, so hopefully that means itll be a good year! Trying to think of what photo I want to do for my birthday....

The following is an excerpt of a blog written by Tim Dees who relates his experiences working for Silva's in the mid 1970's.

 

Link: timdees.com/blog/?p=375

 

The ambulances were pink, because that was the owner’s wife’s favorite color. Pink bed linen, and when I got there, they were just moving away from pink shirts, as they were too difficult to find. Bob Silva never bought a new ambulance. They were all used Cadillacs, as he believed a used Cadillac was much classier than a new van-type that actually ran. I was taking a woman in labor to a hospital in San Francisco when the tranny gave up the ghost in Hunter’s Point. I’d told Bob the day before that it was on its last legs, and he advised that I should shut up and drive what I was given to drive. We were dead in the water, and just barely within radio range to call for another rig to take our patient.

 

The county came out with some new regs for gear that had to be on the rig, and one requirement was an obstetrics kit. Pre-packaged OB kits from Dyna-Med were $7.50 each. Silva bought one. He put it on a rig, sent it to be inspected, then brought that one back and put the same kit on the next rig to be inspected. When it was finally left in the rig he usually drove, he wrapped it in strapping tape to discourage anyone from actually using it. It wasn’t like we didn’t need OB kits. I delivered three babies while I worked there.

 

The electronic sirens we’re so used to now were just coming into widespread use in the 1970s. Most of our ambulances were equipped with mechanical sirens that wound up slowly when activated. They had brakes on them, and if you forgot to brake the siren before you left the rig, it would take a minute or more to wind down, growling the whole time. The big daddy of these mechanical sirens was the Federal Q2. Some of these are still in use on fire engines. The Q2 is a massive thing, and drew so much power that the engine would knock when you leaned on the button too long—the spark plugs didn’t get enough voltage. Few man-made things are as loud as a Q2. One day, while en route back to the station with a new attendant, I stopped at a Safeway for some groceries. I left the attendant in the rig, telling him to tap the siren if we got a call. When the call came in, he didn’t tap on the horn ring that activated the siren—he held it down. The ambulance was parked facing the store and its large plate glass windows. I heard the siren, then heard the window start to reverberate in its frame as it resonated with the blast of sonic waves—“whap-whap-whap-whapwhapWhapWhapWHAPWHAPWHAP.” I made it back to the rig, screaming ineffectively, before the window shattered.

 

Between the mechanical siren, separate heater for the rear compartment, more blinking lights than a Vegas casino, etc., the ambulances needed a lot of electrical power. A single battery would be dead before you got to the hospital, so most ambulances had two car batteries, cross-connected via a big rotary Cole-Hersee switch. The switch, which looked a little like the access cover to your house’s sewer cleanout pipe, had four positions: Battery One, Battery Two, Both, and Off. “Both” was the usual setting, but when the rig was parked, it was common to switch it to “Off,” so the batteries wouldn’t be drained if you had forgotten to turn something off. This effectively disconnected the batteries from the rest of the rig. If you wanted to have some fun with another crew, you could turn everything in their rig on, but leave the Cole-Hersee switch off. When they turned it back on, hilarity would ensue.

 

The gear we had in these ambulances was very basic, and most of us purchased and brought our own equipment to work, rather than provide inferior care for our patients. I bought my own stethoscope and sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff), chemical cold packs, wire ladder splints, ammonia “wake up gizmo” ampules, etc. Consumable supplies, such as self-adhering Kerlix bandages and waterproof tape, were stolen from the hospitals. The bandages we had on board, furnished by the company, were made of crumbling linen material from the Korean War era. Oropharyngeal airways were supposed to be either used once and discarded, or autoclaved between patients, but we had neither replacement airways or an autoclave, so we wiped them clean with alcohol and hoped for the best.

 

Our suction apparatus was powered through the engine’s vacuum manifold. Suction power went to zero when the engine was accelerating. If you were trying to clear gunk from a patient’s airway while your driver was flooring it, you’d tell him to coast until you had made some progress.

 

We weren’t allowed to say someone was dead, even if the flesh was falling from their bones. Law enforcement officers could make that determination, but doing so meant they would have to remain at the scene until the coroner arrived, which could take hours. This being the case, many officers chose to see some glimmer of life in corpses long past resurrection. We responded to an “11-80” (traffic accident with serious injuries) attended by a member of the California Highway Patrol to find a pickup truck that had rolled over with an unfortunate passenger in the back. The passenger had not quite been decapitated, as his head was hanging by a few strips of flesh. This was one of the more obvious dead people I had encountered, but the Chippie ordered us to run him in. Getting the body onto the gurney had the same effect achieved in kosher slaughterhouses, where the neck veins are severed and the blood is allowed to drain from the carcass. By the time we got to the hospital, the floor of the rear compartment was literally awash in blood, with it sloshing over my boots. I called the office and told them we would be out of service for a while.

 

This pre-dated the AIDS scare, and even though hepatitis and other bloodborne pathogens were just as nasty then as now (and there was no vaccine), we had no latex gloves to wear. Back then, gloves were worn by medical people to protect the patient from infection. There wasn’t a lot of thought given to protecting the caregivers. I remember cleaning up after an especially gruesome call and thinking that I wasn’t just cleaning something, but rather someone, out from under my fingernails.

 

One case where we didn’t have to transport was at the home of an older gentleman. I never knew the circumstances that prompted the call, but we arrived a few minutes after the fire department and before the cops. As we walked up to the house, the firemen were walking out, chuckling to one another. “He’s dead!” they said with some amusement. We entered the bedroom to find an older man lying supine on top of his bed, naked. Rigor had set in, so he had been gone for some time. What the firefighters found so funny was that the man had expired while engaged in an act of self-pleasure, and still had the weapon in hand. My partner and I looked at each other and registered much the same expression the firemen had. As we walked out, the cops were just arriving. “He’s dead!” we told them. I suppose there are worse ways to go, but that’s not how I want to be found.

 

I ran a lot of calls at Silva’s. The shifts were 120 hours long–yes, five days straight. You got paid straight time ($2.00/hour in 1974) for the first eight hours, a guaranteed time-and-a-half for five more hours, and were unpaid for three hours of meals, whether you actually got to eat them or not. Between midnight and eight in the morning, you got overtime for the time you were actually in service on the call. If you rolled and were cancelled two minutes out–which was common–you got two minutes of overtime. I swear some of those rigs could find their own way home, because there were many nights I have no memory of having driven them there. When my days off finally arrived, I would usually sleep through at least one of them.

 

The full Silva’s uniform was a sartorial delight. Each time they would give me a new uniform article, it would fall to a mysteriously tragic end, so I wore a white shirt, navy blue knit slacks, and a nylon bomber jacket. If you wanted to show you were management material, the required outfit consisted of a white (formerly pink) shirt with royal blue trousers and Ike jacket. The trousers had white piping down each leg, as did the cuffs of the jacket. On each shoulder of the Ike jacket was a huge purple and gold patch, proclaiming the wearer to be employed by Silva’s Ambulance Service, the words spelled out in metallic script. One was also obliged to wear a royal blue CHP clip-on neck tie. Mandatory accessories to the ensemble included a gold metal nametag, white belt, and white leather shoes. Worn on the shirt or jacket was a shield-type gold badge, about the size of a soup plate. All the badges identified the wearers as “Technician,” except for Bob Silva’s. His said, “Owner.” There was a $20 deposit on the badge. Those who were really in with the in crowd had huge custom Western-style belt buckles with their first names spelled out diagonally, and the corners adorned with red crosses, stars of life, or tiny ambulances. However, the crowning glory accessory–and I only saw one of these–was a gold tie bar, wider than the tie itself, with a fine gold chain attached to either end of the bar. Dangling from the chain was a pink Cadillac ambulance. Its wearer was extremely proud of this, and wouldn’t tell anyone where he got it, lest someone steal his thunder.

 

Employee turnover was around 200% annually, and I was a prized employee because I always showed up on time and sober. I was able to work full time on school vacations and summer, and from Friday evening to early Monday morning, when I’d leave to make it to my first class at San Jose State. It wasn’t uncommon to have an employee go AWOL, and have the cops show up a day or so later, looking for them. You had to be fingerprinted to get an ambulance driver’s license, but all you needed to work as an attendant was a first aid card, which management would procure for you for a small fee.

 

Bob Curry, in almost the full Silva's uniform (no badge), posing with a "new" ambulance, formerly used by Allied Ambulance in Oakland.

Bob Curry, in almost the full Silva’s uniform (no badge), posing with a “new” ambulance, formerly used by Allied Ambulance in Oakland.

 

There was one very senior employee whose name was also Bob. Bob thought he was the manager, and would tell you he was if asked, despite advice to the contrary if one of the Silvas was listening. Bob was very possessive of “his” ambulance, which was always the newest one (given that they were all used, “new” was a relative term). One night, I had just come in to work, and a call came in. The dispatcher told me to take it, so I grabbed an attendant and got in the first rig I saw. It was Bob’s, of course. When I returned, Bob screamed my face, lest I forget that that particular rig was HIS ambulance, and I had better stay the hell out of it if I knew what was good for me. Bob had an apartment near the main station, so he didn’t have to sleep at the station when he was on duty. If you were Bob’s attendant (Bob never worked in the back unless there was some real hero stuff going on), you were allowed to drive Bob’s ambulance to his place, where you switched seats. That night, a co-conspirator and I did a little customizing to Bob’s rig. When he got in the next morning, he found the handle on the driver’s door adorned with some adhesive tape, reading “Bob’s Door Handle.” Inside, more tape indicated Bob’s Steering Wheel, Bob’s Cigarette Lighter, Bob’s Gearshift, Bob’s Turn Indicator, Bob’s Accelerator, Bob’s Radio, Bob’s Other Radio, and so on. Tucked under Bob’s Sun Visor was a card on a little string, trimmed to drop to eye level: “Hi, Bob.”

 

Silva’s didn’t have the market cornered on odd employees. A rival company employed a guy we called Captain Action. Captain Action worked for a company that had more traditional uniforms, but still included a badge. The issued badge wasn’t up to Captain Action’s high standards. He had his own badge made up. It was a thing of beauty. It was a gold seven-point star (the most common style of police badge in those parts), but much larger than most police badges. It put the Silva’s badge to shame on size alone. I remember it had a big California State Seal in the middle, and a lot of text on the banners and inner ring. There was so much lettering on the badge that I never got to finish reading it, although I saw it often. Captain Action also wore a police-style Sam Browne belt with various snaps and cases, including a cuff case, handcuffs, and a baton ring. I never saw a baton, but I’m sure he had it around somewhere.

 

Captain Action loved to talk on the radio. Each ambulance had two radios, one on the company channel, and one that broadcasted on a shared, county-wide channel, called County Control. There was no direct channel to the hospitals, so one was obliged to tell County Control what you had and where you were bringing it, so the dispatcher could give the appropriate ER the heads up. An appropriate message might be something like, “County Control, Ambulance 3335, en route Code 3 to Peninsula Medical with an unconscious head injury.” Captain Action preferred to be somewhat more detailed, and made liberal use of the phonetic alphabet. “County Control, Ambulance 3330, en route Peninsula Medical Center with a 33-year-old white male with a history of cardiac myopathy, I spell CHARLES-ADAM-ROBERT-DAVID-IDA-ADAM-CHARLES-BREAK-MARY-YELLOW-OCEAN-PAUL-ADAM-TOM-HENRY-YELLOW…”

 

After one of these lengthy naratives (keep in mind that there were ten or twelve other ambulances in the county that used the same channel), the dispatcher was oddly silent. Captain Action made another try to ensure his message made it through. “County Control, Ambulance 3330, did you copy?”

 

“Ambulance 3330, County Control, TOM-EDWARD-NORA-BREAK-FRANK-OCEAN-UNION-ROBERT.”

 

Ah, the good old days.

 

Written by Tim Dees on January 1st, 2015

Sorry for my absence!

 

This title relates to last night. I went to the top of the tallest hill in my town, and in the distance you could see one of the nine fires in San Diego approaching over the hill into my town. It looked exactly like this picture, with the flames barely peaking over the mountain, with the orange glow in the sky. Luckily, the fire is out i think?

Uses: Anything relating to finance and money.

 

Free Creative Commons Finance Images... I created these images in my studio and have made them all available for personal or commercial use. Hope you like them and find them useful.

 

To see more of our CC by 2.0 finance images click here... see profile for attribution.

 

Inspiration: looking deeply into money, currency, finance, savings, investing, stocks, bonds, etc.

 

Photographer: P H Jauncey. PAColl-1296-2-07. Lucy Taylor photographs relating to Wellington Girls’ College, Alexander Turnbull Library

 

An expanded version was published in FishHead magazine, January 2014.

 

Here we are at the Wellington Girls’ College in Thorndon. It is Parents’ Day, 1927, and the girls are giving a demonstration of Swedish drill. This particular move was called the halfway side falling position and was designed to strengthen the side muscles. An instruction booklet of the time stresses that it should be done without bending the knees or letting the hips sink. The girls seem very proficient.

 

By the 1920s Swedish drill was seen as the state-of-the-art in girls’ physical education. The flexing, lunging and balancing movements are not dissimilar to some exercise programmes today, and the loose tunics worn here were certainly an improvement on the restrictive clothing these girls’ mothers would have had to wear for any outdoor activity.

 

Less modern was the strict regimentation. In the years between the wars such military-like manoeuvrings were a popular part of organised activity for the young. In the same year as this photograph was taken, the outdoor highlight for many Wellington school children was a tightly choreographed welcome to the Duke of York at Newtown Park. Theyformed themselves into a living union jack. Other examples of uniformed mass choreography for young people included the uniquely New Zealand phenomenon of marching girls that emerged in the 1930s.

 

Mrs Taylor, the head of the College’s physical training programme, was an innovator, though. In particular she ignored some of her how-to-do-drill textbooks and enjoyed mixing her Swedish drill instruction with music and dance.

 

The girls in this photograph no doubt also took part in one of the highlights of the school year – Mrs Taylor’s annual “gymnastic display.” In 1927 it was at the Opera House. In addition to Swedish drill, the newspaper advertisements promised “Lantern marching, Cymbals, Wands, Poi Dances, Spanish Dances, Thunder, Rain and Frost,” all of which were ambitiously worked into a “Fairy Folk Tales of the Maori” theme, based on James Cowan’s recently published children’s book of the same name.

 

Go to this image's record

 

Read a review of the Opera House gymnastic display

 

Wellingtonians: From the Turnbull Collections contains a selection of the entries from this Flickr set, and some new ones too. This high-quality publication costs just $29.99. You can pick it up at good bookshops or from the publisher, Steele Roberts.

Uses: Anything relating to finance and money.

 

Free Creative Commons Finance Images... I created these images in my studio and have made them all available for personal or commercial use. Hope you like them and find them useful.

 

To see more of our CC by 2.0 finance images click here... see profile for attribution.

 

Inspiration: Receiving money. Earning money. Investing. Cost of living. Saving money... etc.

 

Maths in neon at Autonomy in Cambridge. This is Bayes's Theorem, relating the probability of A given B to B given A.

 

This image is used on the Philosopher, Psychologist, Plasterer blog paul-david-robinson.com/post/5129596878/the-philosophy-of... in an article "The Philosophy of Physics". It was also used on the Wikipedia article for Bayes Theorem.

 

It was further used on a Spanish blog profeblog.es/blog/luismiglesias/2010/01/02/fotografia-mat...

 

It was later used in a father's blog post about having twin girls - www.bigdansramblings.com/2012/03/30/phases-finding-twin-g... - congratulations mate.

 

It is also used on a blog article about Stanford offering a statistics in medicine course - scopeblog.stanford.edu/2013/05/28/stanford-offers-free-st...

 

And an article "Signal, Noise and Clinical Trials" - lacertabio.com/2013/04/signal-noise-and-clinical-trial-re...

 

And a review of an elementary statistics course. moocnewsandreviews.com/course-review-elementary-statistic...

 

And the front page of a wiki about Probabilistic Programming for Advancing Machine Learning (whatever that is) - ppaml.galois.com/wiki/

 

And an LSE blog post about citations: "A Bayesian approach to the REF: finding the right data on journal articles and citations to inform decision-making." blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/02/journal...

 

And an Italian site "Rebel Fitness". Not sure why, I assume it just looked mathematical. www.fitnessribelle.it/alimentazione/calcolo-calorie/

 

And a blog about the emotional state of being an entrepreneur - www.ecosystemsandentrepreneurs.com/blog/2015/4/3/the-emot...

 

And a Strangeloop presentation about probability. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiiWzJE0fEA

 

An article about Bayesian logic in Python. machinelearningmastery.com/naive-bayes-classifier-scratch...

 

"

Bayes’s Theorem & Naïve Bayes Classifiers " dem1995.github.io/machine-learning/extra_pages/naive_baye...

Here is another scan and retouch that relates some history... and needs help from Edna to stand up. It was snapped of Katherine at Alice's Wild Basin cabin at the Copeland Lake area, the south end of Rocky Mtn. National Park. Grandmother, Alice, spent every summer at her cabin right near the Wild Basin Lodge. The one-year-old and mother is at the porch steps on the south side of the cabin. The pine is the balsam by the steps in the background that Granny watered regularly. Down the hill, the North St.Vrain River scrambled down the canyon. It was filled with all those trout. Alice kept her fly rod on nails on the porch above. It was quick to grab on her way down to the river. The cabin was ever a mellow place to stay in 1943 and anytime later.

 

Talk about a mellow place to stay, the entire world would like to pack in here this summer as Global Warming ramps up. It snowed on me at Wild Basin one July. Now, at Longmont, the nights are seldom dropping to 60 and below so far. So much for T-Rump's Tirade against the Environment (his TTE - Trade the Environment for cash policy); it's starting to really pay off with rain in the Arctic and state sized bergs calving in the Antarctic.

 

The water supply for the uninsulated cabin was pumped directly from the river when there was no thought about the quality of the water supply. Do I remember something about tumbling streams oxygenating themselves in a 1/4 mile? Nobody ever gave a thought about drinking from the stream that fed Longmont's water supply.

 

As usual, dust on the negative and contact printing left untold flecks, white and black, and garbage across the image. In close, it looks like a shotgun blast. As always, it provides plenty of practice whether needed or not. I used the same two techniques, the Stamp and Brush to work on the image. Unfortunately, the scanner usually features all the defects on old snaps like this. I suppose that it will always be possible that this family will exchange the digital retouching and spread them far enough that my labor won't be entirely wasted.

 

I gang output these to high resolution PDFs that can be printed at home of taken to Fed-X Kinkos for their color printing. I have enough to output another sheet. Their output never seems to waver from the quality of the PDF. Trimming them with scissors, especially the deckle edges, will be a challenge.

  

The title relates to the influence on me by the late Bill Brandt who famously shot this scene originally.

 

This is not what he shot (or published at least) but I have replicated that shot also, see 'Homage' in this album.

 

Although my shot is different to Brandt's famous image, I have tried to produce it in his style - heavy shadows with contrasting light. Although my Canon 5D2 is not the best for dynamic range it still managed to record a lot of detail in the shadows and mid tones which I've darkened. I also shot this image at ISO6400 for a maximum grainy effect as I was only ever going to convert the original RAW colour file into B&W.

 

It's probably my favourite shot of the day.